I rarely comment on the “news” but the planned execution of Yousef Nadarkhani for the make-believe crime of Islamic apostasy has really pissed me off. Once again the Iranian branch of the “religion of peace” shows its primitive, ass-backwards, subhuman side to a stunned world that finds it hard to believe that changing your mind about fictitious religious nonsense is punishable by death! It’s rubbish like this that turned me into a hardcore atheist. If this is Sharia then Sharia is shit!
Let’s be perfectly clear. I am not condemning Iranians. I am married to an Iranian! I have many lovely Iranian in-laws, and not a single one of them approves of this atavistic assinity. Like civilized people everywhere their feelings alternate between disgust, shame and rage. While I forgive the Iranian people I condemn the Iranian regime. The government courts that imposed this sentence are pathetic throwbacks. They don’t belong in the modern world and one day they won’t.
Savages always assume they can bully and terrorize people forever. At first people are easily cowed but even the most egregious assaults fail to deter in the long run. The next time the Iranian masses take to the streets the regime will fall and with the exception of a few islaminals nobody is going to miss it!
P.S. Before you go all brave fatwa waving kafir killing jihad warrior on me keep in mind that Missouri is a concealed carry state.
Well well it turns out that when John Boehner isn’t crying like a little girl he can deliver a speech. Tonight he smoked Obama like a fine cigar. I tried to flip around Obama’s debt limit rant but ended up watching like a gawker at a hospital fire.
Any dolt with a fifth graders grasp of arithmetic can see the US is completely and irrevocably broke! We’re in such a deep dark debt hole that we haven’t seen sunlight for eons. Financial rickets is setting in; the soft bones of the republic will soon need Viagra.
But don’t worry our elected pets have a plan! They’re going to borrow and print more money so we can wire up our deep dark dept hole with overpriced union-made lamps connected to a green, made in China, energy source. If the government’s math is right the lights should stay on long enough so we can all find our assholes and shove our heads up them!
2011 marks the 42’nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. 42 idiot infested years have passed since that glorious day and nothing that has happened since comes within a nautical league of matching it. My vile boomer generation has downplayed the significance of space exploration for decades. I remember getting a shrill lecture from my left leaning fifth grade teacher about what a waste of money the space program was. Being a self-assured child so I told my teacher he was preening unimaginative Neanderthal. This landed me in detention but I refused to apologize.
Manned space flight has been in a depressing, decades long, holding pattern. The real advances in space exploration have come exclusively from unmanned probes and robots. While astronauts have been going round and round in that orbiting boondoggle known as the International Space Station the Voyagers are on the brink of interstellar space, probes are on their way to Pluto and Mercury, Cassini is orbiting Saturn, a small armada of orbiters and crawlers are exploring Mars, low-budget missions discovered water on the moon, space telescopes like Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer have shown us wonder after wonder and, capping it all off, WMAP determined the age of the entire frigging universe. Compare these awesome achievements to ISS astronauts unplugging zero-G toilets.
Why has so little been accomplished? I can think of two good reasons.
Exclusive government control
The UN Space Treaty
Until recently only governments could afford space programs. In the early days of space exploration government control made sense but that era is coming to an end. In a few decades private entities will be able to mount manned Mars expeditions and send robots anywhere in the solar system and beyond. The technology is coming along nicely but I am afraid the politics will soon be a gigantic millstone around our necks. The millstone takes the form of the absurd UN Space Treaty.
Green: UN Space Treaty nations
The UN space treaty is another sorry artifact of the 1960′s. It reads like a bunch of unwashed socialist hippies got together and decided to ban capitalism in space. There is no other way to explain ridiculous terms like:
The exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind.
Outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
States shall be responsible for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental activities.
States shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects.
States shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.
Suppose some daring entrepreneur decides to mount an asteroid mining expedition. This is not as crazy as it sounds. Asteroids are relatively easy to get to and very easy to get off of. They also contain mountains of valuable rare earths, platinum and gold. Eros alone holds well over 20 trillion dollars of metals. You could pay off the US national debt by mining one dinky asteroid! One day, not very long from now, robot asteroid mining will make a compelling business case. To bad the UN Space Treaty outlaws it.
If you have to pay off all of mankind (#1, #2) your compelling business case evaporates. Environmentalists, (yeah space environmentalists), would complain that mining damages and contaminates a celestial body (#4, #5). Finally, even if the operation was 100% privately funded, various governments could legally ransom our daring entrepreneur or shut him down (#3). These tactics have already been tried. Remember the hysteria that preceded the launch of Cassini. A pack of morons decided that the Plutonium powered RTG on Cassini posed a grave threat to all mankind and started citing the UN Space Treaty in hopes of blocking the launch. Cassini was not a money-making operation so we ignored the loons. Asteroid mining will be another thing all together. Everyone will want their cut. With the UN in charge we’re going to feel like the probed subjects in this Kids in Hall video.
Oh Mohammed in a brothel how much more of this idiocy can we endure? A certain brain-damaged official, (Thomas Perez), in the US Department of Justice apparently thinks allowing Universities to experiment with delivering textbooks via the Kindle violates the civil rights of the blind. This so is mind-boggling stupid that I thought it was a bad joke. Well it is a joke and it’s on us! We are entering the final stages of Pournellian Iron Law paralysis in the United States. Remember a vote for any Democrat anywhere is a vote for submission to morons like Perez.
Last weekend I passed through Toronto. The city was bracing for the over priced and utterly pointless G20 dog and pony show. The G20 circus did not disappoint. On cue the usual crew of recreational anarchists left their parents basements long enough to engage the police, set cars on fire and smash store windows. The police responded by arresting hundreds of protestors and holding them for hours in horrific detention facilities that did not offer vegan food! Hey, it’s Canada, a gluten-free diet is probably enshrined somewhere in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Mirroring the idiocy in the streets the G20 leaders wasted tax dollars in grand style by literally phoning one in for the children. They also muttered something about reducing government debt and doing a better job of pretending to be fiscally sane. Hey G20! I have a suggestion for that debt reduction thing — how about no more G20 meetings! Video conferencing software does a pretty good job; give it a try!
Given the pitiful track record and high costs of the G20 one wonders why any sane country would host such a boondoggle. Nothing of importance is ever achieved at these photo-ops and if something worthwhile accidently emerges it will be ignored or sabotaged. I know it’s good for our rulers to get out and meet with their peers: all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Still it’s hard, in ostensibly democratic countries like Canada, to sell the public on the awesome benefits of hosting the G20. Do you remember how the Canadian public refused to fund the G20 when asked in the pre-conference referendum? Oops sorry, I was thinking of how things should work! Nobody ever asks the public if they want to pay because the answer would be a resounding no.
The G20 is coveted, courted and consummated for exactly the same reason that more expensive boondoggles like the Olympics and the World Cup are: it’s a great opportunity to punt public funds to your friends.
I would like to thank BP for accidently creating a teachable moment for our political class. Prior to the gulf cluster-fuck the most ethical congress in history did not know that fluid dynamics is one of the hardest of the hard sciences. But, after two months of heroic attempts to contain the spill with blame games, bribes, threats, legislative initiatives and golf it’s finally dawning on the powerful minds that rule us that fluids cannot be bought-off, community-organized, press-marginalized or change-the-channel ignored. Reality is such an unfair bitch.
I wish I could say I am disappointed but I wrote this government off a longtime ago. The stark fiscal, technical and rhetorical incompetence they display every day is no more surprising than sunshine. The oil spill is an infuriating accidental disaster but it’s not the biggest spill confronting us. That would be our insane, reckless and entirely man caused deficit spending.
Let’s do some arithmetic. Let’s assume the unhinged moonbats turned reservoir engineers have pulled the correct gulf spill rate of 100,000 barrels/day out of their asses. Let’s also assume an oil price of $80 dollars/barrel. When you multiply everything together you find that
8000000 = 1e5 * 80
eight millions dollars of oil is spilling into the gulf every day. Sounds bad. Let’s compare that to our government’s fiscal spill. The deficit for this fiscal year is expected to approach 1.3 trillion dollars. This works out to
3.56164384e9 = 1.3e12 % 365
roughly 3.6 billion dollars/day or 445 times the gulf spill rate! If I could plug only one damn hole I know which one I’d choose!
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
Regardless of your political or sexual orientation it’s hard to disagree. The current Congress is the largest collection of brain-dead fuckwits since the previous Congress and no doubt the next Congress will be even worse. What’s a bereaved citizen to do?
How about the simple obvious solution: let’s hang everyone in Congress! It’s simple, direct and effective. Left wingers will be delighted because a lot of right wingers will hang. Right wingers will be delighted because even more left wingers will hang. Independents will be thrilled because left and right wingers will hang.
Now I know what you are thinking, “If we hang Congress won’t it be more difficult to find people to run for office?” I have to agree; hanging doesn’t seem like much of an incentive. We have to strike a balance between hanging and the grotesque perks of Congress.
Currently there are 535 members of Congress. Let’s get a big jar of jelly beans and number the beans from 0 to 534.
0, 1, 2, 3, ..., 534
Then every year, instead of listening to boring State of the Union speeches, we hold a public drawing. Some lucky blindfolded child, (because we are doing it for the children), will reach in the jar and grab a bean. If the bean is numbered 0 we hang everyone in Congress. If another number comes up it’s back to the trough for another year.
This lucky Congress critter survived. If we run this experiment ten million times we get:
10000000 %~ +/ 0 e."0 1 ? 10000000 10 $ 535
0.0185448
or a 2% chance of hanging. Considering the prerogatives, pork, perks, and pensions of Congress a measly 2% chance of hanging seems about right. Most of the time it’s business as usual and every now and them the public enjoys the spectacle of terminal term limits.
My doubts about the Nobel Peace Prize started when Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho won during the Vietnam war. In my naive youth I thought a peace prize might have something to do with peace! I was so cute and unsophisticated in those days. As I aged I developed a robust sense of irony but when Yasser Arafat won the peace prize I was again dumbfounded. How could an outright unrepentant murderer qualify for a peace prize? Clearly my sense of the absurd needed work. I labored long and hard and when Jimmy Carter won for not being George Bush I took it in stride. Then Al Gore won for saving the Earth from global warming. Again my cynical detachment required tuning. What did global warming have to do with peace? Did I miss all the brutal carbon dioxide wars? Finally I understood. The Nobel Peace Prize has nothing to do with Peace! Of course I still foolishly harbored some illusions that you had to do stuff. This morning, upon learning that Barak Obama had won, I divested my final illusions about the peace prize. The Nobel Peace Prize is now worth less than a Canadian Idol win. At least some Canadian Idols can sing and dance.
The other day while torturing myself with CNN I heard Henry Waxman, that living argument for congressional term limits, tell us that the new, all singing and dancing, US health care bill would not fund abortions or pick up the tab for illegal immigrants. Maybe Henry is telling the truth, hey it could happen, pigs can fly if they’re dropped high enough, but I suspect Henry is confused about laws and suggestions.
Laws come in many forms and flavors but all laws mathematical, scientific and legal have a common trait: enforcement. Mathematical laws, theorems if you will, are self enforcing. If you accept the fundamentals or axioms of a theory and adhere to clear logical rules of inference you don’t have a choice about accepting valid results or proofs. A sure sign of crankhood is the steadfast refusal to accept mathematical results. To this day we still run into circle squarers. They’re a dying breed and I find their insanity kind of cute. If only was an algebraic number there would be hope but fortunately it’s transcendental and there isn’t. Even the FSM, (Flying Spaghetti Monster — or God for you fundamentalists), cannot square the circle with a straight edge and compass; it’s an absolute impossibility. Mathematical laws are not girly men. They’re tough enough for any neighborhood and won’t back down even for deities.
Scientific laws also police themselves. You aren’t going to build a perpetual motion machine, get colder than absolute zero, force mass faster than the speed of light or convince a stubborn coin that its past has any bearing on the next toss. Nature is a tough cop and she isn’t going to take crap from anyone. Mathematical and scientific laws are called laws because you are forced to obey. Law and enforcement is symmetrical; you don’t get one without the other.
When we enter the legal domain this symmetry breaks down. Legislatures, parliaments and dictators can pass any law they want but unless they enforce it it’s not a law; it’s a suggestion. Have you ever driven down the freeway at the speed limit and watched all the cars, even the ones driven by little old ladies, zip past you? Are all these drivers breaking the law? In some looney legal universe yes; in the real one they are ignoring the suggested speed limit.Without cops there are no speeders!
As a matter of personal policy I ignore all legal suggestions. I only obey enforced laws. Without parking tickets I would always park in the handicapped spots; they’re more convenient. Without the IRS I wouldn’t pay a dime of taxes. Without prisons I would steal with impunity. I’m not a bad person just an honest one. Human legalities only become law when enforced. Now Henry’s health bill may contain verbiage forbidding payments for abortions and illegals but unless they’re is a corresponding, rigorous and funded enforcement regime to insure that Henry’s suggestions become laws he’s just spouting bullshit.
As Mark Twain once rudely noted:
was an 
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