uruloki's lair

Whether any election anywhere is capable of providing lessons on anything to any voter, American or otherwise. While the election of Scott Brown is interesting (and IMHO good overall), neither the GOP nor the DNC will get the right message. Outside of the parties, some will continue to scoff at certain kinds of populism while continuing to endorse other kinds with no sense of irony at all.

Republican Scott Brown has defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, running on a platform driven by populist resentment, with a main plank of “killing” health insurance reform.

I’m not sure how that post wasn’t used last year:

Democrat Barack Obama has defeated Republican John McCain in the Presidential race, running on a platform driven by populist resentment, with a main plank of “killing” Middle Eastern democratic reform.

Tags: Politics by uruloki
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Remember all those horrible things that could happen if you get on a plane with a water bottle? Well, the TSA doesn’t, they just let someone through the scanners with a filled waterbottle. Score another one for bureaucrat security!

Tags: Politics, Stupid people by uruloki
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From Reason, we read this story:

Officials say security screeners at a Bozeman-area airport failed to spot a gun in a passenger’s luggage last month, but the man turned himself in when he realized his error.

As anecdotal evidence, let me offer the story I heard of someone who put a loaded .22 magazine in a bag as part of a move. They managed to fly through 6 different airports before emptying the bag out at home and realizing the magazine was in there. This wasn’t a 6 leg trip, this was 3 separate trips through 4 different airports with loaded ammunition. We’re safe!

Tags: Life, Politics, Stupid people by uruloki
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I talk a whole bunch about information operations. Don’t read unless you want to sleep.

Tags: Politics, Technology by uruloki
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Via /., I found this nifty examination of the whitehouse.gov site

Description. You want to read about the code structure of the new whitehouse.gov website on this historic Inauguration Day of the 44th president of the USA. The site is built on ASP.NET.

What follows is a lot of good discussion about how the site is built, how it could be done better, and even some nifty easter eggs in the form of links hidden in the JavaScript. The really fun part was the last line:

Finally, remember that the administration and President Obama were not the ones who wrote the code here.

Seriously. Either a) you’re not nerdy enough to notice all the stuff that was detailed or b) you’re nerdy enough to know that the Big Cheese never writes that stuff. Why do we need to start making excuses about who is doing what already?

Tags: Politics, Stupid people, Technology by uruloki
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Who cares? All of these people are going on about what a historic day it is but it’s not in the way they think it is. Today is the orderly hand-over of power from one guy* to another for the 43rd time in our history, which is miles better than anyone else on the planet. Everything else is incidental. All the other aspects that people are having religious ecstasies over is just packaging. We have yet to see what is in the (well-wrapped) package, but I have a feeling more than a few people will be disappointed in what they got.

*I’ll use guy on the day the first woman gets elected too.

Tags: Politics by uruloki
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Just off the cuff: Tonight is McCain “I humbly accept your nomination to be the Big Cheese” Night. It’s also the first night of play for the NFL.

I know which one is on my TV right now.

Tags: Politics, Sports, Stupid people by uruloki
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Otter likes to run and watch GMA as the start to her day. The discussion today was on Sarah Palin as a VP pick for McCain and some of the Obama responses to her selection. “Inexperience” and “cynical political ploy” were gist of the discussion from what I heard. This brought up a connection in my mind that I haven’t seen anywhere else that is really relevant since Obama says Bush is really McCain’s running mate:

Obama looks a lot like George Bush right now. In order to overcome a derth of experience at the national level, he selected an old Washington hand (Biden, Cheney) to take care of that. Given how well Cheney has worked out in being too active in the government, isn’t a neophyte in the VP slot a better choice? Hell, Bush at least had some executive experience which is what Palin has as a previous mayor and governor in Alaska. No one else on either ticket can say that.

I think this election season is going to be very interesting.

E: Dang it, other people are smarter than me. Of course, the author also points out a lot more points of congruence between Obama and Bush. Agent of More of the Same, here we come!

Tags: Funny, Politics by uruloki
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Yay for being done. I was good this year and finished in March. Tax Freedom Day this is next week Wednesday, 23 April. After that, everything we earn we will be generously allowed to keep by our overlords in Washington, D.C.

Wishlist for changes:

Tax day moved to election day. Think of the fun that we’d have if everytime we went to pay our taxes, we could decide who got to spend them!

Withholding abolished. Right now, 95% (made up statistic!) of the people who pay taxes in this country never have to cut a check to the Fed. This makes them happy to get a refund back. Along with this, the interest penalty for underestimating taxes needs to go away. The government is not a for-profit endeavor, and therefore has no need of any kind of interest on money.

Slightly more out there, tying taxes to voting. No taxy, no votey. Mmmmmmm, no more old/knocked-up people voting themselves a share of my pocketbook. So nice…

Edit: One day, I will write something funny and long, much like Dave Barry talking about taxes.

Tags: Politics, Stupid people by uruloki
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David Mamet wrote an article a few days ago called Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’. Besides him being a very good writer, the takeaway that I get from it is this:

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.
[...]
What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.
[...]
I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting). (Emphasis added)

He’s getting a crapton of blowback, but that last line is why I am so opposed to idealogues and the extremities of opinion that go along with them. Life is built upon give and take but so often in today’s politics people are elected on the marginal case. What happens after the election? They move to the middle as much as possible so they can stay in power. It’s not worth it to stay in power if you don’t have a lot of it, so then each and every politician works to increase her power through the mechanism of the government. And the Government sucks. I don’t really care about any of the Big Government types in this year’s election because none of them will fix what is wrong about government but instead work to increase it at the expense of you and me. Otter is casting my vote this year.

Tags: Life, Politics by uruloki
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