Category: politics
Democracy is based on people casting a vote. Making the act to vote more complicated than it needs to be is a simply a criminal act against the spirit of Democracy. In developed Democracies you vote by taking a thick pencil and making a cross inside of a circle. That’s it. Since decades. Works always and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s the best way of doing this. In 2000 there was a bit of a stir up in the USA around punch cards, butterfly ballots and hanging chads. The remedy was not to abandon complicated things. It was to add more layers of technology. Which defies logic and furhter dilutes the act of voting. This kind of story is to be expected. Actually the whole vote fraud idea deters people from voting, instead of motivating them. Which means that democracy looses it’s foundation.
If you have any doubts about mal intend around the voting process just look up “Gerrymandering”. But sure the US has all the rights to wage war on the other side of the planet to find WMD, retaliate 911 spread Democracy. I wonder if those painted index fingers were collored diebold. Probably not, since the color would dissapear within seconds in that case.
Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory:
1. He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
2. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.
3. He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.
4. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
5. He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.
Sun Tzu aprox 600 BC (copy pasted from wikisource)
looks like we are fucked.
According to wikipedia it was the first World War that brought the wrist watch into wide use. Only sixty years later people tought that it would be a brilliant idea to have a calculator in your wrist watch. As brilliant as having a PDA or a camera in your cell phone I suppose.
Before the were pocket calculators there were slide rules. I did like them. Thinking about it, I should get one. Or even better: create one with megabytes, megabit etc scales. Having the common technologies like USB2 etc marked. OK, neat, but obsolete in about a year. Still, it would be fun to wip out a slide scale in a meeting when asked how long xyz would take. Actually I am pretty convinced now that I want a slide scale. Good thing my dad tought me how to use one.
In 1962 the DoD came up with a slide scale to compute the impact of nuclear bombs. Somehow I could see Kennedy operating one of these after a brief introduction. Now imagine your job would be to teach George W. Bush to operate and use this device.
The scary part about this is, that both people have the power to push the same button. People then were fast to say that Mr B. had so many great advisors. Those that gave him that darn good intelligence.
The Republicans assured that the US had the worst possible start into the century. Unfortunately people like Kerry and Kennedy are not exactly inspiring. But now Barack Obama considers to run . Perfect. I only heard him speak once. But he can talk. The next thing I could wish for is a campaign that would cut through all that mess. If only 5% of the people wake up and become active for what they care for that would already be enough to get some leadership back in the Whitehouse.
Bush claiming he never has ‘been stay the course’
The only question is why such a person was able run the largest power on this planet for eight years.
Seriously.
"What a mighty man he turns out to be! He raped 10 women - I would never have expected this from him. He surprised us all - we all envy him!"
Vladimir Puttin about the President of Israel. According to the BBC
That men can talk pretty outragous bulshit is not really news. What does bother me is the attitude of Putin (According Ze Frank ‘Putin’ is the approiate word for a baby fart) and alikes that run around and try to represent moral values. While they actually are just as bad as your common average guy.
of course I had to watch another TED video while I was at Google Video. Since it’s such a long way there.
Barry Schwartz talks about choice
I agree with him that the choice is by no means linear to happyness. But I dissagree on his remedy. It’s not a decrease of choice that would be the ideal solution. It’s the management of it. People are not in a situation to make decent and educated descissions. Like mine how to spell certain words for instance. But when people are looking into the options and only choose what makes sense, then all the rubbish will disappear. If you buy crap, or equally worse, let your friends buy crap then you inititate the production of more of it. If you only choose things that are good, then you will steer things in the right direction. The choices will follow.
There are so many junk things around us, since people can survive their wrong choices. So they keep making bad ones.
And finally:
Dan Gilbert about happiness and choice
Can we please make sure that the next President and Administration at least have some basic understanding of something like this?
Please imagine GW Bush looking at a website like the one above. How long could he look at it? How would he describe what he saw to somebody else?
This is the guy supposed to run stuff for 300 Million people in all the things where there needs to be somebody running things. Like war and peace and the financial future of the government.
It seems that America has issues with interlect and clarity, as some links might illustrate:
A democrat activist site has an analytical look a CNNs front page in 2000 and 2006.
The GOP is doing the old Terror trick. They were in power for five years after 9/11. Spent billions on war, yet were unable to get OBL. That’s why you NEED TO VOTE for THEM. Amazing that there seems to be an audience going for that.
Politics, always have been messy and partizan. Let’s switch to technology. There never have been any Mac Viruses. I know of a couple of hundret Apple users, or know the people that are responsible for them. The users are a very mixed crowd. Nobody had ever a Virus or malware issue. You get spam email on a Mac too, your google search results are at times full of spam, but that’s where the malware drama ends for you. It is as simple and as clear cut as that.
Still people write articles like this. There are no factual obvious blunders in this. Except that this blurry mixed bag of facts, statements and quotes seem to hover around this bogus theory of market share. This article exists so that people that benefit from it can point to it and say “Look, Mac’s have viruses too”.
If there is an obvious outbreak of stupidity it causes sometimes a clear response.
But generally it seems to cheap and easy to generate messages and ‘news’ that everybody does it. And most people have an agenda to push. The average american is surrounded by communication that is all meant to pull him in one direction or another. People simply give up on having an opinion that is based on facts. They just swim in a pile of soundbytes and pick whatever seems approiate in the current moment. That’s probably why politicians get away with all the crap that they are coming up with.
It was not always like that: In the age of reason there was an attempt to know things. There were discussions, and a quest to find the best solution based on as much objective findings as people would get a handle on. I am sure there were snake oil merchants back in the day as well. I want to believe though, that it was clear and simple that these people were peddling there goods and had no part on a serious discussions about serious matters. OK, maybe I have a slitghly idealized perspective on a world in that the American Constitution has been created.
It really is old news
And nothing special. Just a guy. That got shot. 68 times.
But hey he allegdly had shot a police officer and a police dog.
Movies and realities blend into one for some people. Which is an academic excersice. As long you have the right skin color and social contacts and drug habits. Once you cross that line things don’t look pretty. Not at all.