What's wrong with kids today? Are you kidding?

While watching the ORielly Factor tonight, I heard Bill and the panel discussing the plight of a teenage beauty queen who had to give up her crown because she had made a porn video months earlier. The discussion turned to how kids today have gotten to the point where they can't seem to recognize the potential consequences of bad decisions. Are you kidding?

We have made celebrity millionaires out of the Kardasians, The Real Housewives of Whatever, the Jersey Shore crowd. Honey Boo Boo's family makes more money in one episode than many people make in a decade. Politicians and their well connected friends make their fortunes in back room deals and lying to and manipulating the rest of the population. Do you think the kids don't see all this? The whole notion of personal responsibility has been demolished. Everyone is a victim of their circumstances and it doesn't take much imagination to spin any set of circumstances into an excuse.

How can kids or anyone else foresee the consequences of bad decisions when there don't seem to be any bad decisions? In reality there is still some reward in being a decent human being. That is that you get to walk around with the knowledge that you're a decent human being. Personally, I think spending our grandchildren's future earnings on Chinese wind turbines is a much more serious moral offense than making a porn video, but in any case, the kids are clearly not the problem. Many may work things out okay on their own. But the fact that they have to work it out on their own is our fault, not theirs.

Sequester madness

About 18 months ago, when Congress and the White House were not able to agree on a plan to deal with the budget deficit and the national debt, they gave themselves a deadline to come up with a plan, or automatic reductions in the proposed rate of increase of about 2% would kick in. The deadline is tomorrow, and no deal is in sight.

Keep in mind, this is not a 2% cut in spending. It's a 2% reduction in the proposed rate of increase in spending. Spending goes up in any case. In typical big government fashion, the first cuts being considered in what's been deemed "the sequester" are those that will cause the most pain and get the most attention. The politicians who make their living doling out increasing amounts of your money want to make sure you never consider hampering them again.

They're not proposing cutting out team building trips to Las Vegas, or Hawaii. They're not proposing eliminating studies of the behavior of fish or ketchup flows. They're not considering selling vacant buildings or unused land. We're still going to send fighter jets to the Muslim Brotherhood. Everyone in D.C. still gets a raise.

No, the cuts that have been promised are more along the lines of letting prisoners out of detention, laying off school teachers, not paving roads, laying off air traffic controllers, moth balling air craft carriers and more. You're going to be severely punished for your insolence. How dare you suggest the government curb spending!

If you ever had any doubts about the government's insatiable appetite for more money and more authority, just turn on the news. No matter how much they have, it's never enough. There is no cut or reduction in the increase that is not "draconian". When you have to give up 2% of your income, as every worker did this year when the "payroll tax holiday" expired, that's no big deal. Suck it up and pay. When government is asked not to increase their spending quite as much as they had planned, that's insanity.

The politician's behavior is not surprising to me. They're just doing what they've always done and will always do until the people say enough, and give them the boot. The more ominous thing is the reaction of the people. If you believe in the pollsters, most people are okay with this. They seem to think that turning over everything to central authority will make their lives better. Can you point to a single example in the history of the universe where that turned out to be the case?

The Computer Universe

A couple years ago I posted a Thank You to Rich Terrell, a NASA scientist who espoused the view that the universe is really a virtual environment. I was happy that someone with some scientific credentials actually came to the same conclusions I did, using the same bits of evidence.

Thank You Rich Terrell

His two most compelling points are the existence of quantums (limits on how small things, energy and time can be) and the fact that humans aren't that far from being able to create a virutal universe. If we can do it, how hard can it be? Here's a bit of a post of mine on a different forum that adds another element.

"He makes a fairly compelling case for the universe being a computer like environment (although he loses me when he gets into the "our future selves" bit) I have a third bit of evidence. Empty space.

The notion of empty space has always baffled me. Space is measured in length, width, depth. But if there's nothing there, what are you measuring? Why would it take any time for a photon to travel from point A to point B if there is nothing between point A and point B? What would it be travelling through. It's like a balloon filled with nothing. It makes no sense. Yet, there it is.

However, in a virtual environment, you don't need to record the space. Space can be empty. Just as with a compressed audio file, you don't have to record the silence, just the dimensions of it. With the old vinyl format, you had to physically represent the silence.

This is the only way I can make sense of empty space. Either there is something there that we cannot detect for whatever reason, and it's not empty, or it is empty, which means it's virtual. It's just an instruction, telling particles or data how long to wait before appearing in the next pixel."

Should Republicans cave on the Fiscal Cliff deal?

The President seems unwilling to budge on Fiscal Cliff negotiations. He has said he will not sign a bill that doesn't include tax hikes on incomes over $250,000/year and has made no proposals for meaningful spending cuts. In fact, he wants to spend more, growing the Federal Budget to over $5.63 Trillion by 2022 (assuming estimates are accurate and everything goes swimmingly over the next 10 years). 

If there is no deal, all the Bush era tax cuts will expire and automatic spending cuts, including huge cuts to the military budget, go into effect. There are calls, even from some Republicans, to just go along with some tax increase for now, and deal with the rest later. But why?

If you believe our debt crisis is for real, why would you sign on to a plan that does nothing to address it, and in fact, perpetuates it? Raising taxes on the rich wont close the gap. I'm sure they'll be just fine in either case, but the tax hike will just be a political stunt. Serious spending cuts have to be made. Government has to get smaller and the Democrats have no interest in making that happen. A politically motivated deal might make it look as though reason prevailed, but it would be an illusion. 

True, Republicans will likely get a lot of bad press if no deal is reached. What are the consequences? You lose the next election? So what? You get to go home with your integrity intact. If America believes the right way to go is to give the left the power to spend at will, so be it. They're either right or they're wrong. If you believe they're wrong, let them be wrong without you. 

Culture of Violence or Culture Sensing the Inevitable?

 Many people, pundits and politicians have blamed recent violent tragedies on the "culture of violence" in our country; movies, games, TV shows that glorify death, destruction and killing. But is it really about violence for violence's sake, or is their something deeper behind it?

Consider some of the biggest block buster movies, year after year. Although Hollywood is generally on the side of the touchy, feely, left, they continue to crank out shoot 'em ups and explosion ridden films. They have to because they produce the money that keeps them in the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed. Why do these movies do so well, even when the directing and acting is often sub-par, to put it nicely?

There is a common theme among these movies, when you look past the gratuitous violence. It's almost always an individual or small group of individuals against an all powerful, authoritarian government or global organization. It's essentially the same in the video game world. The individual is put in a situation where they must overcome a seemingly invincible force. On the conscious level, maybe people think they just get a kick out of the virtual violence and the adrenaline rush. On the subconscious level, maybe they recognize that inevitably, there will be a showdown between the individual and the collective.

It is the nature of human beings to be individuals first, connecting with various collectives when and if it suits them. We oscillate between the role of individual and member of our collectives (family, work, church, town, state, country) on a moment by moment basis. The key is that the default setting is individual and the individual controls the switch. The State, on the other hand, would like to make the default setting be member of the collective. They would like to see a world where one's interests as an individual are irrelevant; where all anyone thinks about is what they can do for society, the state, the collective; like ants or bees.

But we are not ants or bees. As we watch government grow ever larger in size and scope, we must see a day coming when our very individuality will be challenged and perhaps crushed. Maybe this generation, maybe generations from now, but it seems inevitable, as the State's appetite for more power and more resources shows no sign of being satisfied. At some point, our base instincts as human beings to protect ourselves will kick in. We'll pick an issue, like taxes on tea or something, to rally around and the push/pull cycle between collective and individual will have come full circle. Neither side is going to back down lightly, which is why, throughout history, periods of ever expanding government have always ended in violent conflict. Maybe that's why people are drawn to films and games with these underlying themes. It rings true.

God favors limited government

I know, you're not supposed to mix God and politics, but there is one thing that's undeniable. If you believe in God you must believe God could stop bad things from happening to good people. He could stop people from making bad decisions. He could eliminate pain and suffering. God has chosen not to do so. If you believe in God you must believe he has chosen individual human freedom over authoritarian control. With all the negative aspects of individual freedom, He, the all knowing, all wise, all good, has determined that the net benefits of freedom are preferrable to the predictability and security of central control. If you believe in God, do you believe your government knows better? Does God have it wrong? Did God forego interfering with your decisions and behavior only to leave them in the hands of an elite group of humans? Freedom is unpredictable. It can be frustrating, scary, uncertain, risky. Sometimes bad things happening to good people. So why would an all loving omnipotent God subject you to such a thing? Perhaps a better question, if you believe in God is - Why are so many people who claim to believe in God working so hard to negate His model?

Bob Costas, the Second Amendment and the First Amendment

During an NFL broadcast Sunday, sportcaster Bob Costas opined about the tragic murder/suicide perpetrated by a member of the Kansas City Chiefs.

While he didn't call for any specific legislation, the suggestion was that the American  "gun culture" was responsible for the tragedy. Since the perpetrator had no history of violence or criminal activity, the implication is that law abiding citizens should not have guns.

This upset second amendment proponents, some of whom called for Costas to be fired. While I personally believe that the unilateral disarmament of law abiding citizens is not a good solution for combating gun violence, I also believe that a sportcaster, working for a private company, can say whatever he or she wants to say and that his or her continued employment is entirely between them and their employer. Viewers are free to turn the sound off, switch the channel, send an angry letter to the network, even boycott advertisers.

The First Amendment is at least as important as the Second Amendment. I strongly disagree with the sentiments expressed by Costas, but the fact that he said it doesn't keep me up at night. If you want to advocate for a different point of view, do so. If you do it well enough, a few sentences from a sportscaster during a football game wont sway a majority of the country to change the Constituion. Combat bad ideas with good ideas, not with outrage or censorship.