This is from a speech Robert Heinlein gave in 1973 to the United States Naval Academy.  I’ve picked it up where he gets to the heart of the subject he wanted to impress upon the midshipmen; the fundamentals of morality and why patriotism is a practical matter of survival.

…why would anyone want to become a naval officer?

In the present dismal state of our culture there is little prestige attached to serving your country; recent public opinion polls place military service far down the list.

It can’t be the pay. No one gets rich on the pay. Even a 4-star admiral is paid much less than top executives in other lines. As for lower ranks the typical naval officer finds himself throughout his career just catching up from the unexpected expenses connected with the last change of duty when another change of duty causes a new financial crisis. Then, when he is about fifty, he is passed over and retires. . .but he can’t really retire because he has two kids in college and one still to go. So he has to find a job. . .and discovers that jobs for men his age are scarce and usually don’t pay well.

Working conditions? You’ll spend half your life away from your family. Your working hours? “Six days shalt thou work and do all thou art able; the seventh day the same, and pound the cable.” A forty-hour week is standard for civilians — but not for naval officers. You’ll work that forty-hour week but that’s just a starter. You’ll stand a night watch as well, and duty weekends. Then with every increase in grade your hours get longer — until at last you get a ship of your own and no longer stand watches. Instead you are on duty twenty-four hours a day. . .and you’ll sign your night order book with: “In case of doubt, do not hesitate to call me.”

I don’t know the average week’s work for a naval officer but it’s closer to sixty than to forty. I’m speaking of peacetime, of course. Under war conditions it is whatever hours are necessary — and sleep you grab when you can. Read the rest of this entry »

Random thought/dime-store epiphany:

It occurs to me that, above all else – economic, military, ideological, or other forms of control over a society; that the most effective means of controlling large groups of people is to manipulate their expectations for their lives.

If the state, religion, or a private entity, can convince enough people that 2.5 kids, home ownership, a white picket fence, and retirement in Florida, for example is “a life well-lived”; then people who hold this belief are effectively fenced within said white pickets. The same went for the founders of ancient Sparta, the Samurai, or the Viking thanes; they shaped the expectation of thousands of lives within a frame that dictated that glory was to be sought, and on the battlefield.

Imagine if instead, someone managed to shape the expectations of enough people, that the point of all human life was to spread out into the universe; to discover everything there was to know about existence itself. Think about what we could accomplish if even a small percentage of people went from birth to death within this framework, with this definition of “a life well-lived”.

I’d been meaning to use this blog as a repository of comments I’ve made in discussions on various sites, blogs, social media, etc, for a while now. This one’s from Facebook.

In response to the idea that the Department of Defense, and the Department of Education should switch budgets:

Schools need to be a lot harder. Not everyone should graduate from high school, let alone go to college. It’s the dumbing down of the standards that’s hurting the country, not the lack of money.

The main problem with education in the US is the notion that everyone has an equal chance of being a lawyer or a surgeon, while the gas station attendant is just there because he failed to apply himself, or the system “left him behind”.

To revamp the education system, the first thing that needs to happen is extensive intelligence/ability testing starting every year from kindergarten, that is objective, thorough, and free of any possible cultural bias (to eliminate advantage of children born to highly educated parents).

This should be followed immediately by placing students on tracks that leverage their individual strengths while helping address their weaknesses and bring them up to a minimal level to function in all areas of their life as a competent adult.

We need more Shop classes, more Ag classes, more Vocational classes in general, for those who are better suited to manual labor. There is no shame in this, nor should there be any applied to a child who has the potential to help feed the rest of the country, but doesn’t have the potential to engineer the tractor he’ll be driving.

My great-grandparents were farmers; their farm, well at least their land, a hundred miles or so north of Kansas City,  is still in use today.  Of course, at one point after they passed on, it was apparently being used to grow marijuana.  But I guess there’s worse things that could be done with it.

We should take a lesson from the Japanese about how it’s not so important what you’re doing for a living, as long as you’re doing it to the best of your ability; that’s where the honor and status in your life should come from.

Of course, you can’t buy the latest baubles, sports car, or McMasion to impress people, with status and honor. Our cultural values are, indeed, fucked up.

Guess it’s not a surprise on some issues; I might actually have to pick up this book.

In other news Jon Stewart is uncharacteristically out of his depth and does a crappy job with this interview.

The reason I say “we think alike” is because it was just the other day that I made a post on the JREF’s forums saying a similar thing. We need to come to a consensus on what constitutes a workable sense of morality that’s stripped of all vestiges of religious nonsense. For example: if you strip the religion out of the Ten Commandments, you get:

Read the rest of this entry »

This one, in response to the ever popular “women drivers suck” status post on a friend’s wall.

Although it’s also been demonstrated that, due to thousands of years of males being predominately hunters, we’re better at spacial recognition, judgement of distance, and anticipating others’ course corrections; all skills which are essential to good driving.

Women, however, are superior at distinguishing colors and patterns, which were skills that allowed them to discern which fruits and berries were good and which were deadly. Apparently women are able to perceive more shades of red than men as well.

So while men may actually be, as a gender, statistically better at driving, ultimately we’re still buying red sports cars to impress women; which tells you who really has the power in the situation.

…for some people, is both disturbing and depressing.

Stumbling around the net this morning, I came across this:

UNCW prof vows to destroy atheist student groups: “I seek power over the godless heathen dissident”
Cory Doctorow at 10:07 PM Sun

A Supreme Court decision forced a California state university Christian society to accept gays as members as a condition of receiving support from the school (“Other groups may exclude or mistreat Jews, blacks, and women — or those who do not share their contempt for Jews, blacks, and women. A free society must tolerate such groups. It need not subsidize them, give them its official imprimatur, or grant them equal access to law school facilities.”).

This ruling has upset Mike Adams, a prof at UNC Wilmington. He’s vowed to disrupt atheist student societies by filling their rosters with Christian evangelical students, “to use my young fundamentalist Christian warriors to undermine the mission of every group that disagrees with me on the existence of God.”

As PZ Myers points out, if the situation were reversed, Adams and his fellow travelers would doubtless be even more apoplectic: “I can just imagine what would happen if I tried to turn freethinkers on campus into militant disruptors of other organizations: their faculty advisors would descend on me in fury.”

But Mike Adams isn’t looking for debate. As he says, “I do not seek robust debate. I seek power over the godless heathen dissident.”

The reason I’m sharing this is simple. For a long time I’ve pointed out to people on my various websites, social media outlets, or in person, that as the members of a group with a shared world view or belief system dwindle, those that are left grow progressively more rabid and more radical. And this is something we’re seeing right now with fundamentalist Christianity.

As we (hopefully) continue the march of progress towards a society that would make Carl Sagan happy, this problem will grow in direct, inverse proportion to said progress. The further we shrink the gaps in which the conventional notions of “God” hides, the more violently will his believers defend their faith. In the next few decades, I’m sincerely expecting to see an increase in Fundamentalist Christian violence, including domestic terrorism. Don’t believe me? Ask George Tiller.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not that I have anything specific against the guy, hell, I don’t know him any more than most people know any “celebrities”. And I fully realize how stupid it is to spend any brain cycles thinking about the guy in the first place. But it’s obvious by his antics that he’s a spoiled manchild**.

The twit acts like a full-grown toddler; “infantile megalomania”, I believe is the appropriate term. Kanye West is the spoiled brat running through the grocery store intentionally knocking things off the shelves because they were out of Super Sugar Fruity Crack Flakes. And just like how I find myself shoving my hands into my pockets to be extra double sure that they don’t fly out on their own and give a brat like that a righteous spanking, I get a similar precautionary twitch when it comes to grown-ups who act like spoiled children.

Hopefully Will-I-Am’s recent punching of Perez Hilton is a trend that will continue. As I’ve always said, the world would be a better place if everyone, on occasion, got punched in the face.

*That’s awesome; “douchegoggles” is apparently an actual word according to my spell checker by way of it not triggering an ugly red underline denoting a misspelling.

**What the hell? The spell checker flagged that, and I know goddamn well that it’s a word. Curse you Google Chrome!

It is incredibly difficult to sit down and compose a coherent post on little more than half a cup of coffee and sheer willpower. And the latter seems to be much more effective than the former.

“Social justice” is a phrase that I’ve seen popping up a lot in the past few days, usually related to left/liberalism and especially within the context of health care. Come to think of it, the guy in my last blog post used the phrase as a part of his denunciation of liberal politics.

So whenever I see a trend like that, whether it’s a genuine emerging phenomenon or just a random fractal blip on the cultural canvas, I do what I can to get my head around it. I mean, it’s not like as grownups we get a vocabulary hand-out to study every week for the test on Friday.

The problem with the term “Social Justice” is that the concept of “Justice” is mostly subjective. And given that the term originates from Liberalism (which is generally anything but, these days), anything with the word “Social” appended to it in that context tends to mean “Government-run and supported by heavy taxation” in my experience.

So if I were to draw a picture of “Social Justice” as espoused by those most likely to use the term, it would probably involve Robin Hood in a cheap suit sodomizing an entrepreneur through his back pocket in a public square in front of a crowd of hippies, celebrities, and slackers. He’d have a briefcase in one hand, and his other would be a fist triumphantly raised in the air.

But being as it’s still early in the morning I’m not even going to pretend I’d attempt to construct an actual image for this. Anyway, feel free to let me know if my picture of “Social Justice” is incorrect.

Oozies This comes from Chicago Gun Rights Examiner, Don Gwinn, via a blog entitled The Breda Fallacy.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – The crime curbing effort has collected over 1,600 guns over the past 2 years and city leaders said this is another successful year.

Mayor Byron Brown said, “We will get anything from long guns rifles, AK-47’s, oozies, so we have gotten those assault weapons.”

And all those weapons are good for a pre-paid credit card, with assault weapons collecting 100 bucks.

I’m not even going to deal with the ridiculous notion of how law-abiding citizens turning in legally owned firearms somehow curbs crime, or the idiocy of the term “buyback” given how the guns never belonged to the government in the first place. But really? Are you that goddamn ignorant that you think “Oozie” is perhaps a slang term for a type of firearm, or worse, the actual spelling of one?

It took me three seconds to do a Google search on the word “Oozie”, and two of those were spent sipping luke-warm coffee. The first 4 results included an Urban Dictionary definition of a Burmese elephant rider and a jazz club or something. Right below those, Google helpfully asks “Did you mean UZI?“.

There’s no excuse for this level of ignorance and lack of fact-checking if you consider yourself a journalist, or even an intern hoping to become a journalist. But it’s symptomatic of the same ignorance when it comes to firearms reporting, and why there’s such a decidedly hostile slant against the amendment that bumps up right next to the one that allows journalism to exist in the first place.

From now on I’m going to refer to journalists who incorrectly report on firearms issues as “Oozies”.

One of the things I prefer about Facebook over MySpace has always been the low signal-to-noise ratio (also the completely lack of glitter, spam, and profiles so wide they’d require a Jumbotron to display without a scroll bar).

The reason for this is simple: people are more selective about who they befriend. Granted, everyone has those friends that they’ve added simply because 20 of their other friends have and they keep showing up as “People you may know”. If you don’t add them, you’re pretty much an asshole, even if you only have a shaky connection to the person at best.

But I’m not talking about these people; the socially expedience of adding acquaintances from work and school is a given. I’m talking about the “social drift” that would, apparently, eventually culminate in everyone directly networked with everyone else.

Here’s an example:

I recently “befriended” MMA and San Shou fighter Cung Le, and a few other notable personalities in the MMA industry. That’s not so bad, I’m a (D-List, at best) personality in MMA myself by virtue of running a huge MMA site, being a Judge, and occasional columnist/reporter/etc. Le popped up in the column on the right where it notifies you about mutual friends and very subtly mocks you for not being friends with so-and-such. An incidental mouse-click and the “situation” is rectified, pending approval. (If for some reason you’re rejected I’d imagine you wouldn’t get bothered with it again anyway).

So shortly after the request was accepted, I wander over to Mr. Le’s profile and notice he’s got around 4k friends. Deep within my itty-bitty heart, my inner child shed a tear; I guess I wasn’t so special after all. If I took anything on the Internet seriously, I probably would have been genuinely bummed to an appropriately minor extent for one simple fact: I hadn’t actually “networked” with Cung Le, I’d just added another point to his eCred (everyone knows at 5000 friends you level up and get new abilities). The guy obviously hasn’t been introduced to Facebook’s fan pages which allow notable persons to create page that can be more “public facing”. In my estimation, Fan Pages were created as a hedge against the kind of drift that’s effectively neutered MySpace as a viable networking platform: having umpteen-billion “friends”, 99% of which you’ve never actually met or share genuine connections with. But note to Facebook: it’s not working.

Like most reasonable people, I’ve never conflated my friend count with any statement on my individual worth, but it’s apparent that entirely too many denizens of the tubes actually do, and that this mindset is here to stay. It’s already effectively neutered MySpace as a viable medium for anything other than getting the word out about your crappy band or awesome t-shirts. And if Facebook doesn’t watch it, it’ll decimate them as well.

The true take-away from this is that as social drift occurs, people inevitably migrate towards progressively smaller and more “intimate” niche networks with a lower signal-to-noise ratio. An excellent example of this is LinkedIn.com. You could use Facebook to network for jobs, with colleagues, or to reach out to possible mentors and leaders in your industry. But do you really want to have your CEO sharing a data stream with the teenage friends that convinced you to get drunk and vandalize a railroad crossing? Or take my own “social network”, Bullshido, for example. The entire site’s centered around people getting together and beating the piss out of each other, in mutual celebration of everyone’s love for MMA and the Martial Arts. As such, the interactions there would generally not be appropriate in “Cube Land” or with your church’s youth group (especially since most people who participate there lean towards unrepentant skepticism).

Social drift is a boon to niche networks because the upside of networking is also its downside; the ease of information sharing can often unintended consequences (such as getting fired). The “you” you are with your drinking buddies isn’t appropriate or appreciated in the 10 AM Sales Meeting. In real life it’s easy to draw clear lines of separation between private, professional, and public life; on the internet: not so much. And it’s especially hard if you’re only networking on the conventional sites.

So I’d like to personally thank the attention whores who feel compelled to befriend anyone remotely connected to them. You folks are driving more and more people to niche networks like mine where people generally don’t have to worry about the social consequences of turning down a friend request from their boss, since he probably doesn’t train in MMA anyway.