Never frighten a little man. He’ll kill you.

—Lazarus Long


Archive for October, 2004

John Kerry — Communist agent of influence

Tuesday, October 26th, 2004

Read this:

John Kerry and the VVAW: Hanoi’s American Puppets?.
They don’t mention that while John Kerry was operating as an agent
of influence for the Vietnamese Communists, he was still an officer in
the U.S. Naval Reserve.
There is a word for what a serving military officer does when he acts
as an agent for a hostile power during wartime.
That [...]

Predictability, Computability, and Free Will

Tuesday, October 19th, 2004

I’ve been reading some philosophical discussion of the free-will/determism question recently. Quite a number of years ago I discovered a resolution of this question, but never did anything with it because I assumed I had simply reinvented a well-known position and could not really contribute anything to the debate. However, the research I’ve [...]

The Far Side of Irony

Monday, October 18th, 2004

Having seen Team America: World Police last Friday on its
opening night, I’m amused by the mainstream-media spin that this movie
is an anti-right-wing satire too subtle for the yokels to get. In
fact, I think it’s it’s something much more peculiar and interesting
— a movie that hides a strong fundamental patriotism and appeal
to traditional values under [...]

Software vs. Art

Sunday, October 17th, 2004

Jamie Richards asks an intelligent question in response to my essay on
deadly genius in the arts:

I’m not programming-savvy at all, so maybe this is crap… what do you
think about the idea that computer programming is a cultural area
operating under the same conditions that set up the “Modernist
disruption”?
As I understand it, in the proprietary model [...]

The Terror War Comes Home

Tuesday, October 5th, 2004

For the first time in my life, I find that I am seriously considering
voting Republican in a presidential election. What has pushed me to it
is this report
of shots being fired into a Bush-Cheney campaign HQ in Knoxville. TN.
It’s not the first shot
fired at the Republicans. And it comes on top of a frenzy [...]