“The Man creates - the parasite says ‘Where’s my share?’ ” - Bioshock

In cities all over America, state and local governments are continually demanding that working, home-owning citizens shoulder an ever increasing tax burden.  These taxes come in the form of state income taxes, gasoline taxes, sales taxes, and more.  No single burden is as heavy as the property taxes levied on home owners.  These taxes are ostensibly to provide services such as waste removal, public schools, and the like.  Beneath the seemingly benign veneer of Public Service is a rotten core of income redistribution, rights violation, and political pull for sale.  The offenses are particularly grievous in the theory and practice of Not for Profit Organizations (NPOs) in America.

NPOs are able to apply for tax exempt status, which tends to be universal in nature once granted.  Revenues generated in excess of operating expenses are not taxed, sales tax is not paid, and property tax on land and buildings owned by the entity is not collected.  Given the relatively large amounts of money, we will focus on property taxes here.

The first problem with this arrangement is that there is no solid rational or moral foundation for giving favorable tax status to one type of organization over another.  The fact that many NPOs operate charitable ventures as their primary activity does not change this.  The activities undertaken by an organization are the concern of the business, their clients, and owners as long as the business is not breaking any laws or violating anyone’s individual rights.  It cannot be rationally supported that it is “in the public interest” to redistribute income from for-profit businesses to NPOs so that they can run public-funded charities.  As Ayn Rand stated in The Virtue of Selfishness:

“…there is no such entity as “the public,” since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of “the public interest” with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others.”

The income redistribution happening in favor of NPOs is obvious.  No taxes of any kind are paid, and yet taxpayer funded services are still consumed by these entities.  Consider the example of a church in a small town.  Does the garbage still get picked up?  Will the fire department show up if the church is on fire?  Do the police answer 911 calls from the church?  Is there running water?  Is waste water treated?  All of these things are funded by property taxes and various extra fees on service bills presented to normal citizens who lack the political pull and legal knowhow to create a special status for themselves.  If a small city of 10,000 people containing various private residences as well as churches spends $100,000 per year on waste pickup services, the citizens who pay taxes are directly paying for the NPOs.  Citizens who belong to the churches likely don’t mind, but what about everyone else?  In the same example town, should the hindu(1)  family really be subsidizing the services consumed by the evangelical christian (1) church?  Should the atheist family be subsidizing either?  Of course not, except for the threat of force, no one would choose to pay.

In a true free market society, one would be able to opt out of any service provided by the government and also no pay for it, or ideally these services (fire, waste, etc.) would be provided by competing private enterprises who had to convince me to use their service with a solid value proposition. This is not the case in any municipality I know of, and it gets worse. As in every case where the government tampers with the market and takes away freedoms, there are unintended side effects that distort the original intention of the laws that had no moral foundation to begin with. Wealthy retirees in Milwaukee with legal and financial pull are forming communities within the city (2) in order to avoid property taxes.  If a resident having a heart attack calls 911, the costs associated for this necessary and life saving service will be passed on in the form of ever-increasing property tax burdens.  Because the tax exempt status is near universal and practically unconditional, it is not restricted to the core aims of the organization.  In the same example town of 10,000 and countless other municipalities across America, religious organizations are using excess donations to purchase large tracts of land for speculation.  A private citizen doing so would be saddled with a hefty property tax bill, thereby forcing them to carefully consider the risk and reward possibly by buying land.  The market is therefore severely distorted because the rules are not the same for all participants.  It is impossible for this situation to continue, as Ayn Rand put it:

“In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”

In the ever-escalating practice of making a smaller group of people support the lives of others, only evil can win and the process cannot go on forever.  Eventually, those who produce and pay will either opt-out of participating in this civilization or die as they are unable to sustain their own lives.  Where will the parasites get their free lunch then?  In the mean time, the happiness, goals, and values of some people are sacrificed to further the happiness, goals, and values of others.  This is a morally bankrupt practice and indefensible state of affairs.

The example town of 10,000 is in fact where I live and not a theoretical example at all.  In 2008 the property taxes for a 2,500 square foot home in this country town 35 miles from Milwaukee will work out to be around $600 per month.  There are no services to opt out of and no special status that most citizens could qualify for – the sacrificers must outnumber and out produce those collecting the sacrifices as a simple matter of mathematics.  The picture for retirement is particularly bleak and puts modern American life into perspective: a retiree could responsibly save for retirement over the course of their career, pay off their home mortgage, and still be forced to pay $600/month in today’s dollars for the privilege of having property that is already rightfully theirs.  Of course, the value of their home will adjust upwards for inflation every year, the actual tax rate can go up any time for any reason, and their hard earned savings can be eroded by the fiat currency policies of the Federal Reserve at any time by any amount.

One cannot help but feel that in America in the 21^st century, one does not actually own property, but rather one can lease it from the government for a non-negotiable and never ending extortion amount.

The root cause of these issues is the government’s ability to tax any group for any reason and for any amount.  Besides expanding government power far beyond protecting individual rights it creates an environment where some citizens gain a protected and elevated status and all other citizens are the losers who must pay the price for the lifestyles of others.  Citizens are free to use their time and money to support any cause they favor, in other words to work to gain and keep that which they value.  Waste removal services are free to give away services to a charitable institution favored by the ownership, and even though religious claims are not rationally supportable one must support the right of private citizens to donate to these institutions if they choose to do so.

Organizations with ideas that have merit will be able to succeed on their own, and those that do not will rightfully fail.  Stop using government force to make citizens subsidize protected organizations.

Footnotes

(1)    A note on grammar:  I have decided to refuse to capitalize names of religious bodies, etc.  Such habits only serve to reinforce the notion that religions are somehow special entities deserving elevated status and beyond rational criticism.  I do not share this opinion.

(2)    Please see this Milwaukee Magazine article for information on these communities: http://www.milwaukeemagazine.com/currentIssue/full_feature_story.asp?NewMessageID=11063

In an article on Ars Technica, a lobbyist for the cable industry is quoted as saying that deregulation allows vendors to innovate faster and is a pro-consumer move.  The article’s author, however, cries that past evidence shows that deregulation has always brought higher prices to customers.  In addition, the absolutely abysmal customer service record of every major cable provider is pointed to as a need for government interference. 

I can personally provide a number of anecdotes to speak to the utterly shameful service and support I get from my own cable provider, but as is almost always the case when deregulation (free markets) is blamed for a supposedly undesirable effect, the ostensible deregulation is incomplete or tainted and therefore does not accomplish its aim. 

In the case of cable, consider the history.  Buried wire cable TV and Internet providers have had to deal with censorship and invasive oversight from the FCC and have been granted exclusive contracts by local and state governments.  These contracts usually take the form of the provider promising to build out the service to a high percentage of homes even if running wire there is not profitable and kick backs to the municipality in question in exchange for a guarantee that no competitors will be allowed to offer a comparable service in the same geographic area.  When Kyle McSlarrow says he wants deregulation, it would seem he wants to be free from any oversight, but of course keep the government’s barrier to any competition.

Removing any threat of competition, as well as allowing the cable provider to set their own prices, provides no incentive to offer good services at good rates and no incentive to help customers who are having trouble.  Right now, if I want better cable service, my only option is to move to someplace where a better provider is operating with their government-blessed monopoly.  Despite intense marketing spin to the contrary, Satellite is not an equivalent option in terms of bitrates, latency, and weather resiliency. Services such as Verizon’s FIOS and AT&T UVerse face an uphill regulatory battle at the State, Local, and Federal level as they seek permission to run fiber-optic wires into cities to compete with cable.

As usual the proponents of a Paternalistic State are quick to decry free markets as the cause of the issues that were in fact created with regulations.  If any company who wished to provide content was free to go out and negotiate with landowners to bury a transmission medium all the way up to individual homes, then we would see real deregulation.  Companies like Time Warner, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon would have to compete for the business of discerning consumers instead of competing for the favor of a small number of bureaucrats. Complete deregulation is the only sure way to drive innovation, bring down prices, and improve customer service.

Only complete and unconditional deregulation will set consumers free from high cable prices and bad service.

I couldn't leave this one alone:

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/world039s-oldest-living-tree-discovered-sweden-15937.html

The first thing I thought of when I saw this, sadly, was not "wow, what an awesome discovery!" but "Wait, isn't the world only 6,000 years old?".  As much as it would be a tragedy to harm these trees, I think we ought to take a core sample and count the rings on the trees.  What would surely follow is the sound of one thousand "thuds" as the creationists trip over themselves to refute the fact that the age of trees can be determined by counting rings.  Or, as my friend put it "The devil planted that tree to confuse us and test our faith."

Johnny Appleseed was the antichrist.

A friend of mine sent me this link today, which was also waiting in my RSS reader for me: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080331-creative-irate-after-modder-spruces-up-vista-x-fi-drivers.html

Let me reproduce some of the most relevant parts here:

"We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards... by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards." writes O'Shaughnessy. "In principle, we don't have a problem with you helping users in this way.. .Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended."

He continues, "By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own... If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make."

According to Creative's own FAQ, sound cards from the X-Fi and Audigy families are incapable of decoding Dolby Digital or DTS, due to the fact that "these functions are not supported at driver level in Windows Vista." This isn't true.  When two of the driver files from a standard X-Fi card are replaced with two driver files drawn from a Dell-specific driver available at the company's support web site, DTS and DD decoding immediately reappear as options and function correctly. Creative might be able to get away with saying that DTS and DD decoding aren't enabled at the driver level for X-Fi and Audigy cards, but the functionality is clearly baked into the driver and is thus supported. Creative may never come straight out and say "It's Microsoft's fault that your cards doesn't work," but the Vista support pages are loaded with descriptions of how Vista's audio system broke Creative products. 

This, presumably, is the feature that ticked Creative off, though Daniel_K has enabled other features Creative didn't plan to support in Vista, including DVD-Audio. Anecdotal forum evidence implies that his drivers are of much higher quality and are more stable than those Creative officially provides, but Ars has not verified this. "

So, this is my opinion based on my understanding of US Law and what I believe to be Ethical behavior.  First of all, I don't believe it is legal for the programmer in question to do this.  When you purchase the Creative product, you are agreeing to their license terms by using the product.  This alone should be enough to allow free markets to satisfy any need that could possibly arise in this situation:

• If computer users do not wish to agree to any terms they feel are overly restrictive (not being able to hack drivers), they should not buy the product.  If companies lose sales because of this, products will arise to meet this demand.  The term "open source hardware" has been thrown around, where the platform itself is out there for people to implement their own software on top of.
• If consumers do not purchase sound cards because they can't understand the EULA and yet they understand they'll be bound by the EULA, the market can respond by providing simpler EULA.
• Taking this one step furthur, buying a pre-built machine from Alienware, for example, would implicitly require agreeing to the EULA of every single piece of the PC.  Again, if people do not buy as many computers because of this, the market can respond with PCs that are Easier to Own.

This is my logic concerning the compay's rights:

1. Few people would argue with the fact that a compay (like Creative) might want to offer different products, with different levels of Capabilities, at different price points.
2. The market self-organizes, with people who want the extra capabilities able to get them if they are able to pay for them.
3. Most people would have no issue deciding for themselves whether or not to buy the V6 Mustang or the V8 Mustang based on their own resources and how important more horespower was to them personally.  In the case of less-tangible Products such as software, it seems that people lose their ability recognize Property as Property, theft as theft, which I've written about before.
4. A company may determine at some point in it's product development lifecycle that it is cheaper for them to include the same hardware in both the less featured and the fully featured versions of the final product.  When R&D and Testing costs are taken into account this can have some surprising manifestations.  At some point many years ago I bought an Aragon Stage One preprocessor (made by Klipsch) for my home theater, this product retailed for $4,000 at the time.  Shortly thereafter I bought the Klipsch Promedia Ultra 5.1 computer speakers for perhaps $299 or so.  I found out later that the SAME processing chip was in each one, the good, expensive surround processing chip.  Klipsch had determined it would be cheaper to use the chip from the Stage One even though the Silicon was very expensive: it was already proven and could be implemented with almost no engineering work.
5. Creative should be allowed to turn on or off features in its Products via hardware or software as it sees fit.  The fact that the chip could do this but is "artificially" held back by drivers is an aspect of the agreement between the customer and Creative Labs, and is not a chance for people who disregard Intellectual Property rights to get something for nothing.  Whatever features are purposely crippled in this or that product are value-add features that Creative Labs intended to sell for money.

http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/03/19/yaron-campaign-finance-oped-cx_ybr_0321yaron.html

I encourage you to leave comments on Forbes as well.

I found this "atheist prayer" via Friendly Atheist.  I enjoy Friendly Atheist, but I wanted to point out an issue with this post.

"Our brains, which art in our heads, treasured be thy names. Thy reasoning come. The best you can do be done on earth as it is. Give us this day new insight to resolve conflicts and ease pain. And lead us not into supernatural explanations, deliver us from denial of logic. For thine is the kingdom of reason, and even though thy powers are limited, and you’re not always glorious, you are the best evolutionary adaptation we have for helping this earth now and forever and ever. So be it. "

I suppose this is meant as harmless humor, and I probably wouldn't flip out if it had been entitled the Atheist Credo or something similar.  Let's not kid ourselves though.  Equivocation is one of the main ways the un-religious are attacked today.  Sam Harris absolutely called this one right.  To call the extreme skepticism of the possibility of the existance of a god on the same plane as faith is one of the more popular parlor tricks of the faithful today.  To call acceptance of empirical evidence a "kind of faith" turns my FlipOut dial up to 11.  The faithful are having enough of a hayday with ridiculous equivocation arguments as it is.  Do we really need to add ammunition by creating secular versions of old catechisms?  I think not.

¹prayer

Via slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/28/2342211&from=rss

Of course the states are going to say that MSFT needs to be monitored.  The politicians gain tremendous power by punishing businesses and restricting free trade.  As Google and other companies come testify for the states against Microsoft  I'm reminded of several quotes, and a little company called "Standard Oil"

First, the quotes:

"Maybe I did well and maybe I led the battle but nobody ever said we were going to win this thing at any point in time. Eternal vigilance is required and there have to be people who step up to the plate, who believe in liberty, and who are willing to fight for it." -- Milton Friedman

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

It behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
--Thomas Jefferson

Companies seeking to use government force to succeed where their own efforts in the marketplace have failed should be aware that what goes around, comes around.

Standard Oil:

I don't have the exact historical dates and percentages in front of me, but Standard Oil went something like this: Standard Oil had over 90% of the market for Oil in the United States at one time.  As the politicians and the public got behind the idea of Trust Busting, competitors to Standard Oil were slowly gaining market share, and the competition forced the price of oil down.  At the time the Standard Oil "evil monopoly" was broken up it had roughly 60% market share and the inflation adjusted price of oil was lower than it had ever been.  Politicians treated this as a great victory and it was sold to the public as a great victory.  The free market had already done what the goverment sought to do, and justice, property rights, and freedom were compromised to punish an "unpopular" company.

Thanksgiving has come and gone and I had an absolutely smashing time with my family, especially my dad.  The apple (me) fell perhaps a bit further from the tree (dad) than he would sometimes prefer: I'm a college guy and mostly a software nerd, he got electronics training in the Navy and is more of a hard core electronics nerd.  I write software and he fixes GE's MRIs.  MRI is just insane to read about: Magnets who's strength is measured in Teslas, titanium/niobium coils, and superconductive circuits that lose less than .001% of a charge in 1000 years.  Dad and I completely rebuilt my center channel since I had just ordered a new sqauker (mid-range horn) diaphragm, and he was very disappointed in my soldering job so all the solder points were re-done and the internal wiring was cleaned up with zip ties and such.  If I ever sell the thing I'll take a picture of the internals to show what a top-notch job was done.  As part of this whole effort, he diagnosed some possible issues with a free osciliscope I inherited: someone smart enough to fix insane superconductive electronics is pretty handy to have around.

Another place where the apple was flung far is metaphysics: I'm an atheist and my father was raised (and raised us) in variants of the Babtist religion.  A lot of red wine into the second night of the visit we had covered:

• Religion and why it has no bearing on my life and why that doesn't make me a bad human being
• Technology
• Wealth
• Relativity (space time, the train and some of Einstein's gedenken experiments)
• Health care: dad had a great (if depressingly Orwellian) observation about health care.  As the goverment gets more involved in our health care decisions, how long will it be before a helecopter flies through my neighborhood with a diffration horn  screaming "Time to wake up and exercise!!  Keep health care costs low, citizens!"   My solution: health insurance does not "work" using the current popular definitions of "work" without an army of healthy people bearing the costs for those who are not healthy.  Get the goverment out of the health care industry alltogether and you won't find yourself doing pushups at the point of a gun.

"You're not as far into la-la land as I thought" was my father's final judgement on my night of philosophy and politics.  I meet incredibly few Objectivists in day-to-day life, but the more scientific and rational someone's job is the more I find them coming around to my way of thinking.  The world is not populated by John Galts, we wouldn't recognize it if it were.  There are great masses of "Eddie Willers" who can be reached.  Recall Eddie Willers from Atlas Shrugged: 3rd in command, not a Prime Mover, always playing the supporting role to Dangy Taggart.  Eddie is rightfully counted by Rand as one of the heros of the book though.  He rides on the rails made of Rearden metal and he could never have created the metal, the bridge design, or the engines propelling the train, but he also does not seek to enslave the minds who did create these things.  My dad perhaps could not have invented the superconductor system in one of GE's MRIs, but he's smart enough to know what it took to make the thing and can fix the thing when it goes down.  He's smarter than 99.999% of the people out picketing for "universal healthcare." 

Inside a piece of technology like an MRI is a glimpse of the astounding effort, resources, and intelligence that it takes to make our standard of living possible.  I hope the scientists and engineers who work on them gain astounding wealth, and I hope GE makes hundreds of millions of dollars on MRI technology: it's the only reason this life-saving technology exists.

This story on CNN is a fun read if nothing else.

So these guys are going to meet to determine if the satirical Flying Spaghetti Monster is in fact a real religion.  What makes a "real" religion and how people who think there's more to our interaction with reality than rational epistemology are going to make this determination is anyone's guess.  Oh to be a fly on the wall...

On the surface this is a joke, but there may be something more sinister going on.  One of the favorite weapons of religious apologists these days is Equivocation.  I have observed and participated in debates where the apologist all too quickly abandons any attempt to defend the actual veracity of their supernatural beliefs but instead takes one of two approaches: one is to instead focus on all the good that has come from the faith of believers, the other is to claim that rejecting religion is just another form of faith, being an atheist is just a different cult, that aruing for religion to be kept out of our schools and goverment makes one "just another kind of fundamentalist.  In a small way, the religious declaring the following of the FSM to be a "real" religion seems to me an under the radar attempt at equivocation yet again, an attempt to rob the Flying Spaghetti Monster of it's satirical value.  An attempt, in other words, to furthur the view that there is no difference between believers and non believers.

The idea that being an atheist or rejecting specific religious claims makes one "just another kind of fundamentalist" seems absurd to me.  What dogma have we all embraced to assume that lightning in the night sky is not Thor throwing his hammer at Giants?  To quote Sam Harris "What dogma have we all embraced to not take the wishes of Zeus into account during our daily affairs?"  Usully, when arguing semantics, I start with the Dictionary. So, when consulting Merriam-Webster I learn the following:

fundamentalism

One entry found.

fundamentalism

So, looking at #2 put me into a conumdrum.  I am indeed a strict adherant to the basic principles that indicte if I try to walk out of the 3rd story window of my office here, I will accellerate towards the ground due to the force of attraction between my body and the earth.  Does this make me a "gravity fundamentalist", and my views on gravity deserve no more or less consideration than those of the "Intelligent Falling" movement?  Am I by denfinition a "Science Fundamentalist" or "Rational Fundamentalist"?  Religious fundamentalists make the claim that the words in their sacred texts are true in the most literal sense; these words do not change with the times, they are not metaphors to be interpreted and they are unchanging.    I make the claim that through rational observation of reality we can predict and describe the behaviors of the natural universe.  That, to me, is a difficult claim to argue with, and it it turns out to be incorrect, what are the alternatives? 

We may some day discover some "Unified Theory" that ties together relativity and quantum mechanics.  Rational people will welcome this as another leap in human knowledge.  Sure, there will be some people who cling to their old pet theories.  I don't see the words of the old testament being re-written to include equal rights for women, or the words of Isaiah prescribing the murder of children "toned down" to be better aligned with what we now know about morality.  That's why I don't like being called a fundamentalist.

{Edit: I should have gotten the rest of the way through my RSS reader this morning.  The same topic on Richard Dawkins's site: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1881,n,n}

I just received my copy of "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a new world" by Alan Greenspan.  In college I didn't follow politics with the interest that I do now, but one of my best friends was studying finance and is now a major analyst for Bank One (or whoever bought them) in Chicago.  Despite having a bit of a bleeding heart sometimes, he always spoke highly of Mr. Greenspan, commenting on his clarity of analysis and his cold, appropriate focus on facts combined with his incredible vision.  When I learned that Greenspan had become a member of Ayn Rand's inner circle many years ago, I thought it likely that solid moral principles (as well as a great mind) had been guiding his intelligent decisions throughout his career.  I consider Greenspan a rare example in today's political climate, and he may be one of the most well known confirmed Objectivists still alive.  I wonder if the anti-life religoius zealots in the then-growing Republican Right knew what principles Greenspan really stood for; despite being callled a "Republican lacky" for many years, I don't think Greenspan thinks much of the current neocon nonsense.  Read the book to see.

Via FriendlyAtheist:

There's a good chance that people's notion of "human solidarity" will triumph in the end, slowly but surely.

Milton Friedman, not strictly an objectivist, has some great quotes in Capitalism and Freedom.  Today, musing over my issues with UPS (didn't deliver my projector), Dell, Subaru (the local dealer not the car company that I still admire), and others, one idea from his book came back to me.  I'm going to slightly mis-quote this admirable thinker rather than dig through his book for the exact words of this quote, forgive my laziness:

"You can coerce people to be at a certain place at a certain time, and to perform a task in that place for a certain number of hours, but you cannot coerce people to do their best."

You cannot use force on people to get them to give up the best products of their minds. 

Priceless:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070506-science-may-be-the-new-political-litmus-test-for-rationality.html

The potential GOP presidential nominees debate their stance on evolution.  What is the role Rational Thought should play in our lives?  I find it entertaining (and sad) that several candidates had to re-issue statements clarifying their positions.  It seems one ought to know what one's convictions are.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070420/ap_on_go_co/congress_executive_pay

From the article:

 "The House voted Friday to give shareholders at public corporations a voice in executive pay packages that typically equal 500 times the salaries of workers at those companies. "

Last I heard, shareholders already have a Voice in what goes on in public corporations in the form of the various voting for corporate officials that is mandated by the SEC.  You elect board members and such that you feel represent your interests.  Oddly enough this is also our system of goverment.  I do think both executive pay and our public servants' performance and subsequent patterns of perpetual  re-election are disconnected from reality.  We keep putting people in public office who sell us down the river and we manage to forget this and put the same Senator/Governor/House Rep back in office the next time we have a chance.  Many executives pay are out of touch with their company performance: when an airline is going under and people's pensions are tossed overboard I don't see any reason to authorize "emergency bonuses" for key executives.  I understand the notion that you don't want these high level powerplayers who drove the company into the ground to suddenly quit but something about this doesn't sit right.  Many executives absolutely deserve what they have and I often point out Bill Gates or Warren Buffet as examples of leaders who are, well, leading.

The specifics of the bill are not in the AP article, but I wonder what this is actually going to accomplish?  Will I be forced to stop signing Proxy documents and go to shareholder meetings or cast remote ballots?  Direct Democracy, anyone?  The government is already placing a number of insane and costly requirements on public companies, we don't need any more nonsense.

We have all the tools we need to improve our nation: freely available information, access to our own bank accounts, and the right to vote are some of the more important ones.  We just repeatedly choose not to use these tools.

I dislike quoting actors and directors and the like because I generally consider them too out of touch with reality to have much to say that bears on my life or the life of anyone who doesn't live in a meticulously constructed fantasy world.  This NPR interview with Frank Miller (wrote the graphic novel the recent film "300" is based on) shows surprising clarity for "one of those hollywood people".  I'll post the same extract here as I read on The Atlasphere.  I am specifically talking about the notion of cultural equality:

From the interview:

NPR: […] Frank, what’s the state of the union?

FM: Well, I don’t really find myself worrying about the state of the union as I do the state of the home-front. It seems to me quite obvious that our country and the entire Western World is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants … and we’re behaving like a collapsing empire. Mighty cultures are almost never conquered, they crumble from within. And frankly, I think that a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats because of everything that isn’t working out perfectly every time.

NPR: Um, and when you say we don’t know what we want, what’s the cause of that do you think?

FM: Well, I think part of that is how we’re educated. We’re constantly told all cultures are equal, and every belief system is as good as the next. And generally that America was to be known for its flaws rather than its virtues. When you think about what Americans accomplished, building these amazing cities, and all the good its done in the world, it’s kind of disheartening to hear so much hatred of America, not just from abroad, but internally.

NPR: A lot of people would say what America has done abroad has led to the doubts and even the hatred of its own citizens.

FM: Well, okay, then let’s finally talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.

NPR: As you look at people around you, though, why do you think they’re so, as you would put it, self-absorbed, even whiny?

FM: Well, I’d say it’s for the same reason the Athenians and Romans were. We’ve got it a little good right now. Where I would fault President Bush the most, was that in the wake of 9/11, he motivated our military, but he didn’t call the nation into a state of war. He didn’t explain that this would take a communal effort against a common foe. So we’ve been kind of fighting a war on the side, and sitting off like a bunch of Romans complaining about it. Also, I think that George Bush has an uncanny knack of being someone people hate. I thought Clinton inspired more hatred than any President I had ever seen, but I’ve never seen anything like Bush-hatred. It’s completely mad.

NPR: And as you talk to people in the streets, the people you meet at work, socially, how do you explain this to them?

FM: Mainly in historical terms, mainly saying that the country that fought Okinawa and Iwo Jima is now spilling precious blood, but so little by comparison, it’s almost ridiculous. And the stakes are as high as they were then. Mostly I hear people say, ‘Why did we attack Iraq?’ for instance. Well, we’re taking on an idea. Nobody questions why after Pearl Harbor we attacked Nazi Germany. It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism, we’re doing the same thing now.

NPR: Well, they did declare war on us, but…

FM: Well, so did Iraq.

I'm not a big GWB supporter these days but I agree with what Frank Miller is saying about culture.  The notion that we can't condemn people for holding onto barbaric practices like enslaving women and mutilating little girls because "that's their culture and no one's ideas are any better than anyone else's ideas" quite frankly has gotten old and will be the downfall of western civilization if not checked.  What's funny is that a nation like Iran or the various African nations engaging in what most of the civilized world regards as insane human rights violations can take the stage at the UN and condemn the United States for our various questionable practices.  Iran can blast the US for not sending enough troops to Darfur or something, meanwhile the world should turn a blind eye to its Barbarism.  This is why the UN is a joke in my opinion.  The international community has done a poor job of working out Standards for Participation.  You want to be in our club? (where our club is trade, assistance, etc)  You have to follow our rules, and our rules must include some fundamental standards for human rights within member nations.  The US is absolutely not without its flaws, but Murderers and dictators should not be able to take the stage at the UN to crticize civilized nations.

I'm sure I'll get blasted for this, flame on.

Note the strange silence after yesterday's elections.

Where are the broken voting machines and screams of foul play?
Where are the people turned away from the voting booth by scary people?
Where are the misleading ballots that trick you into voting for the wrong candidate?
The hanging chads?
The hacked-into diebold machines?
I guess those only happen when the republicans win the day.  How did we get through yesterday with only a single recount?  I guess those things only happen when the republicans win the day.  A republican victory, we should believe, is a sham, a proof of foul play, an abomination impossible to conceive.  A democratic victory is an affirmation, a proof of the righteous mandate of the people.

Oh well, back to writing code.

In Wisconsin here, we re-elected our Governor, and across the nation democrats are exhalted in their wins in House and Senate.  Somehow, I don't expect much to change.  The democrats have gotten more conservative and the republicans have started spending more money and thumping the bible.  They both serve the same corporate masters anyway.  Politics has turned into a footbal game beneath a 3-ring big top where team loyalty drives most discussion.  For my part, I don't vote for the DemoPublicans/Republocrats anymore.  I voted for 3rd party or independent candidates across the board yesterday.

My perspective on the democrat wins: I'm glad that flying cars, global happiness, unprecedented prosperity, meals in pill form, and universal harmony are just around the corner now!  I don't know which I shoud do first: go ahead and go out to spend $$ against the increased prosperity that is undoubtedly a few months away now, or maybe book my honeymoon in Iraq since it is probably about to be super-peaceful and friendly to westerners in a few weeks, or hell, I think I'll just go lick some doorknobs since the price of health care will be plummeting in a few hours, those doorknobs will be in Grand Central Station since the 85-cent-per-gallon-gas that's about to go on sale will make my roadtrip very affordable!