Question to keep in mind: "What would Karl Rove do?"

11/18/2018

Thus proclaims the headline to the article reporting Donald Meyer's sentence. But let's see. Reminder: Donald Meyer was in a wheelchair, recovering from an alleged stroke. It's unsure whether his time in a wheelchair is permanent.

Did he really taunt his victims? Or whom does the article say he taunted? "He told the victims they are liars". Whom did he call liars? Whom did he mock? His dead daughter? Certainly not -- no indication in the article, at least. His family? Again, no indication of that. Okay, he cursed and taunted the judge; the judge wasn't a victim. In fact, the judge proclaimed him "not safe to be in society".

He may have taunted Constable Steele, who'd shot and killed his daughter. "On Jan. 11, 2016...I faced evil in the form of Donald Meyer... He's caused a lot of grief for a lot of people." The constable, reportedly, was utterly distressed at what he'd done, and blames Donald Meyer for his distress. Another "victim" whom he taunted was the manager of the apartment complex, who videoed the interaction. Of course, she wasn't a victim.

I once said, "The way to destroy a family: kill all but one, and pin the killing on that one." This is not identical, but similar. Kill the beloved child, and pin it on the father. Personify him as evil. He's the face of evil. Not Adopf Hitler, not Pol Pot. Not even Dick Cheney.

The family was going to be evicted and put out on the streets. The reporters tell us that the rest of the family viewed justice as served, when he was convicted. I don't trust the reporting here.

07/22/2018

Last December, President Trump tweeted about the unsolved mystery of Lori Klausutis's death -- and Newsweek mentioned it!

It was summer 2001. Representative Gary Condit and the disappearance of Chandra Levy were all the rage in the national news media. During the midst, Lori Klausutis's dead body was found in Representative Joe Scarborough's northwest Florida office. It received local coverage, but was blacked out in the news media.

09/01/2017

The latest offense of your government was to fly a missile over Japan. This was an act of war. Your fearless leader has been reckless in both talk and act, and he doesn't give a damn about you, the people of North Korea. Whether it be peaceful such as sanctions, or outright war, you will feel the suffering from the punishment or retaliation. Fortunately, your government has yet to actually attack anyone, so there is hope for peace. Please, dispose of that particular leader, the son and grandson of previous leaders, at the very least.

Beware also, we have Donald Trump as President. President Trump is a loose cannon. You don't want to see what he is capable of. And bear in mind, his fire and fury talk against North Korea is reasonable, given North Korea's own threatening talk. Even if you manage to drag our military into another quagmire or tarpit, you will suffer horribly.

Hopefully, if your side of the war remains non-nuclear, so will our side -- but don't count on it. (I would call it the ultimate crime if we used nuclear weapons first, and call for severe punishment. But given both our current administration and previous administrations, don't count on such restraint.) If you attack with nuclear weapons yourself, the destruction will be purely yours -- non-mutual.

08/24/2017

In 2001, the Bush Administration was heading down the drain. A Republican had gone independent, switching control of the Senate to the Democrats. Leftist loudmouths were screaming at their representatives and Senators to get a spine, and fight the Bush Administration. They were calling for going after the "Felonious Five" of Bush v. Gore -- or at least the three with manifest conflicts for which they should have recused themselves -- and the Democratic establishment was beginning to hear their voices. Many of them were referring to "Resident Bush", as in the current resident of the White House, as opposed to the actual President.

So what to do about it?

The solution turned out to be 9/11.

Now, the Trump Administration is in shreds, with people dropping out like rats abandoning a sinking ship. What's going to save the Trump Administration this time?

Probably something devastating. Maybe something connected with North Korea. Maybe North Korea will launch a missile attack. There are numerous other possibilities.

04/30/2017

If the Illinois law banning recording of police action hadn't been ruled unconstitutional, the passengers who recorded the acts on their cell phones would have been committing a felony. People, please challenge all Illinois legislators who voted for that law, and work to defeat them. This should be expanded to a campaign against ALEC, the secretive organization that has been slipping horrid law into the state legislatures.

01/04/2017

Unix-type directories and also DOS/Windows directories contain the "." directory, which means the directory itself. So directories in general contain themselves. It is hypothetically possible to create a directory that doesn't contain itself (even if the particular filesystem forbids it).

One can create a directory (using links) that contains all directories and only directories that contain themselves: say /dirC. There's an interesting question: does /dirC contain itself or not? The answer is that it's the creator's choice. If /dirC contains itself, then it contains all directories (and only those directories) that contain themselves. Likewise, if /dirC doesn't contain itself, it still contains all directories (and only those directories) that contain themselves. The definition is sufficiently ambiguous that it leaves the creator of /dirC the choice.

Now, one attempts to create a directory, /dirN, that contains all directories (and only those directories) that don't contain themselves. The question is, does /dirN contain itself? If so, then it violates its definition: it contains one directory that contains itself. Now, suppose /dirN doesn't contain itself. Then it violates its definition: it lacks one directory that doesn't contain itself. The conclusion is that it's impossible to create such a directory.

There's no paradox here. It's just impossible to create an actual directory that satisfies the definition of /dirN.

This is an applied version of a paradox that exists in naïve set theory: let set C = {all sets S: S is a member of S}. Does C contain C? Set C will satisfy that definition whether or not C contains C. The set C is ill-defined. Now let set N = {all sets S: S isn't a member of S}. Here we get a paradox. Set N contains N if and only if it doesn't contain N.

What's the difference between the directory situation and the set-theory situation? The difference is that with a directory, one actually has to create a directory. So for /dirC, the creator has a choice, whereas the creator simply can't create /dirN with its definition. No directory he creates will satisfy the definition. One doesn't merely define a directory, one has to create it. Not all directory definitions exist as directories.

With naive set theory, we simply define a set to exist when we define the set: let N = {all sets S: S isn't a member of S}, automatically defines the set and declares the set to exist, just as letting Evens = {2k:k is an integer}; this defines the set of even integers. Easier still: let Evens = {k:k is an even integer}.

The ZF axiomization of set theory was designed early in the 20th Century to avoid the paradox (and the ill-definition). Who knows if it has other paradoxes? It's interesting that (probably without intending to) the creators of Unix designed their filesystems to emulate naive set theory rather than any other form of set theory. The implementation reduced the ill-definition to freedom of choice in creating a directory and the paradox to the impossibility of creating a directory.

01/01/2017

Scientific American has an interesting article, How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail. This blatant falsehood, "The 9/11 truthers focus on minutiae like the melting point of steel in the World Trade Center buildings that caused their collapse because they think the government lies and conducts `false flag' operations to create a New World Order," should lead the reader to carefully consider and evaluate what the article says.

I admit from my own personal experience, that when an assertion flies in the face of someone's world-view, it often creates such a revulsion that someone doesn't even want to look at it. It's very hard to push oneself over the hump and see what they actually say. The problem is that it goes both ways: anti-truthers reject off-hand that our government could have either helped 9/11 or committed 9/11, no matter what kind of evidence is presented. Many anti-creationist are just as ignorant about the science, and reject creationist arguments based on the world-view, rather than on understanding the science. I suspect that that is the case for anti-birthers, climate-change believers, and round-earthers.

Whenever I taught astronomy, or in general discuss the issue, I ask, what kind of personal evidence do you have that the earth is round? (There is plenty, if one can only notice.) (I might mention that at least one flat-earth theory is utterly darn-awful: it predicts literally no sunset and no sunrise; the sun is always above the earth.)

I assume that the author is unaware that United Airlines reported to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics (www.bts.gov) that UA175 took off at 8:23, and UA93 took off at 8:28. The 9/11 Commission and the National Transportation Safety Board claim that the takeoff times were 8:14 and 8:42.

Many anti-creationists are (or perhaps were, two decades earlier) unable to address correctly the argument that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.

I am unfamiliar, myself, with the birther arguments. One thing I know is that the most famous birther is Donald Trump, a con man.

11/23/2016

Michael Moore predicted this in late October. I think that he was only partially right, because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. There's also the question of how much of our election was hacked by voting computers that don't leave a trail of how a vote actually went. There are very good computer hackers (in the best sense) who are hopefully dedicated to detecting and exposing electronic electoral fraud.