bornlivelovedie

Welfare for the white middle class

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 10:57:55 -0400

This article is about how Lockheed is sucking money out of the government in the form of defense contracts. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/jeremiah-goulka/48479/lockheed-martins-herculean-efforts-to-profit-from-defense-spending-the-epic-story-of-the-c-130

Must be seen to be believed

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 11:25:17 -0500

Must be seen to be believed

mittandrob: .@mittromney what is ur favorite musical about...

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 15:02:19 -0500

mittandrob:

.@mittromney what is ur favorite musical about cats
— rob delaney (@robdelaney) June 11, 2012

mittandrob: “My favorite guitar player? Why, I’d have to say...

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:04:13 -0500

mittandrob:

“My favorite guitar player? Why, I’d have to say it’s Jimmy Hendricks. Sure!” - Mitt Romney, somehow pronouncing it spelled that way
— rob delaney (@robdelaney) October 31, 2012

Josh Whedon on the Zomney

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 09:00:04 -0400

Josh Whedon on the Zomney

You might have #Romnesia

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 16:00:22 -0400

You might have #Romnesia

Robin WIlliams

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 11:23:20 -0400

Robin WIlliams

Conservatives want to strengthen families?

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 10:27:36 -0400

If conservatives really wanted to strengthen families, they would push for classes in high school that would focus on relationships. Families are in deed fragmenting and kids are growing up without learning how to keep an argument from becoming a spite-forming vow.

Conservatives shouldn’t be pushing abstinence education. They should be pushing counseling.

ihatepeacocks: Cats with lightsabers

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 10:04:14 -0400

ihatepeacocks:

Cats with lightsabers

Ayn Rand

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 09:57:37 -0400

To the beautiful young woman sitting next to me last night in the sports bar:

You and your handsome boyfriend make a lovely couple and I hope you are happily married and make some beautiful children. You said you watch the first “Atlas Shrugged” and had read the book. In the spirit of conviviality and bonhomie, I didn’t respond in the most candid way. I said “I’m not a fan of Ayn Rand” and let it go at that. Here’s what I really think.

I said that I didn’t think she was a good writer. I read Atlas Shrugged and other Rand books when I was in high school. I thought then that she was a good writer, but I realized soon after that she was a fabulist of the worst sort. Rand was a failed screenwriter, where being accurate is less important than creating a feeling in your audience. After I learned some math, I realized how preposterous it was that one of her characters had independently discovered infinitesimal calculus by the age of 12 (if I remember correctly.) This is the sort of thing you can put in a movie and it won’t really register. This doesn’t work so well in a novel. The screenwriter’s conceit is that you can just make up preposterous stuff and nobody will notice.

With regard to her highly vaunted philosophy of Objectivism, call it what it is. It is an attempt to elevate greed, selfishness, to a moral imperative. Instinctive behavior in humans operates on two orthogonal vectors of altruism and self-interest. The high degree of altruism is found only in humans. Rand would have us disavow that and act only in self-interest. In reality, she wants to reap the benefits of others who don’t give up that altruism. The individual cannot exist only in altruist or self-interest mode, but must decide on a daily, a momentary basis, which path to take in a particular instance.

Our means for that making that decision is the ethics balance. The ethics balance has two sides, rights and responsibilities. We must evaluate our rights versus our responsibilities and no let the balance slip. People who espouse Objectivism almost always approach everything in terms of rights. They seem to act as if they have no responsibilities. This is the language of a three year old. The toddler rules of ownership are well known.

If I like it, it’s mine.
If it’s in my hand, it’s mine.
If I can take it from you, it’s mine.
If I had it a little while ago, it’s mine.
If it’s mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
If I’m doing or building something, all the pieces are mine.
If it looks just like mine, it is mine.
If I saw it first, it’s mine.
If you are playing with something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine.
If it’s broken, it’s yours.
If it’s broken, but you are having fun playing with the pieces, it’s mine again.
If there is ANY doubt, it’s mine.

The novel ends with the best and the brightest sequestering themselves and depriving the rest of the world of their brilliance. This is narcissism on the grandest scale. Narcissistic Personality Disorder was almost voted out of the latest edition of the DSM. See if any of these fit Rand or her protagonists.

Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
Requires excessive admiration
Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
Is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him or her
Shows arrogant, haughty behavior or attitudes.

Narrative, in the Western tradition, is about exploring, about learning the one thing that will be the knowledge leading to happiness or success. Hollywood movies have crystalized this so there is often a single “lacking life lesson” the protagonist must learn. This may not map directly into our daily lives, but think of narrative as a plane tangential to the curved three dimensional surface that is our lives.

Good luck.

The \"The masses are in the fields, laboring\" joke

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 11:00:00 -0400

This joke was in Hedrick Smith’s “The Russians”. It is told as a joke by Russian men to describe how they see Russian women.

A sociologist wants to see how different ethnic groups react to the same situation. He takes two men and one woman from different ethnicities and puts them on islands, dropping each off in separate locations. The ethnic groups he picked were English, Spanish, French and Russian. He returned after six months to see what transpired.

The first island he went to was the French island. He found one man tending a well kept garden by himself. There was a nice, well built hut. He asked the man where the other man and the woman were. The man said, “We got together and decided that the best thing to do, since there were two men and one woman, was to share the woman. So I went off with the woman for six months and had an amazing time. The other guy built this and now I will tend it for six months while he has his turn.”

The sociologist was amazed at this practical solution to the problem. He visited the English island next. He found each person where he had left them. They each had made a modest living space, nowhere nearly as nice as the one on the French island. When he asked each of the English people why they hadn’t joined together with the others, the response he go was “We haven’t yet been properly introduced.”

He went to the Spanish island next and found just the woman alive. She had a hovel and was very sad and depressed. He asked her what happened. She said that the two men had fought a duel over her and killed each other. She had to bury them.

When the sociologist got to the Russian island, he found the two men seated at a table, drinking shots of vodka, making long boring political speeches at each other. He asked where the woman was, and one of the Russian men turned to him with a scornful look and said, “The masses are in the fields, laboring.”

The joys of H.264 conforming H.222 streams

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 18:56:06 -0400

The specification is more of a hint than a rule:

To provide display specific information such as aspect_ratio, it is strongly recommended that each AVC video stream carries VUI parameters with sufficient information to ensure that the decoded AVC video stream can be displayed correctly by receivers.

Isn’t the correct display the whole point?

West Wing, redux

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 22:01:57 -0400

West Wing, redux

ineedtothinkofatitle: from The Christian Left

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:35:20 -0400

ineedtothinkofatitle:

from The Christian Left

mittandrob: .@mittromney Sir, I know I poke fun at you, but I...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:47:54 -0400

mittandrob:

.@mittromney Sir, I know I poke fun at you, but I will offer you sanctuary when the GOP tries to draw & quarter you after you lose.
— rob delaney (@robdelaney) September 6, 2012

Rob Delaney: Thing I thought today:

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 11:35:10 -0400

Rob Delaney: Thing I thought today::

robdelaney:

I tried unsuccessfully to quit drinking many times before I finally did it for good in 2002. There were a bunch of reasons; chief being that I knew what I was doing was dangerous to myself and others. When I finally wound up in a Los Angeles emergency room surrounded by cops and doctors, strapped…

The great(est) Dane (Cook)

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:53:36 -0400

shitmystudentswrite:

William Shakespeare was perhaps the greatest Dane Cook to spawn out of his era, and his ability to create comic verse should not go unlooked.

Your basic Lego based supercomputer More.

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 11:02:00 -0400

Your basic Lego based supercomputer

More.

Torque 3D game engine on GitHub

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:17:27 -0400

GarageGames to Release T3D as Open Source

Why are we doing this?Nine months ago, we realigned the goals of GarageGames; making Torque 3D available via a permissive open source license is a strategic move towards fulfilling the company vision. Our first goal was to use iTorque to build a new product we call 3 Step Studio. We envisioned a game development tool that requires no programming at all and began to build it. This product is available today for free, but it’s very, very, early in development and we expect to iterate many times before it is a commercially viable product. Our second goal was to build a service division

Mark Cuban explains the stock market

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:26:23 -0400

Mark Cuban says it explicitly:

I bought and sold FB shares as a TRADE, not an investment. I lost money. When the stock didn’t bounce as I thought/hoped it would, I realized I was wrong and got out. It wasn’t the fault of the FB CFO that I lost money. It was my fault. I know that no one sells me shares of stock because they expect the price of the stock to go up. So someone saw me coming and they sold me the stock. That is the way the stock market works. When you sit at the trading terminal you look for the sucker. When you don’t see one, it’s you. In this case it was me.

When you are looking for a sucker don’t see one, it is you.