It was a bad day. A lot of bad stuff happened. And I'd love to forget it all. But I don't. Not ever. Because this is what I do. Every time, every day, every second, this: On five, we're bringing down the government.
Tuesday, July 26
Complaints?
No, that's next door. This is
getting shot in the head lessons:
Heavily armed police swarmed a double-decker bus packed with tourists in Times Square today and later shut down Penn railway station after an irate passenger said he had a bomb.
In a dramatic sign of the city's edginess since the London bombings, police evacuated buildings, shut Midtown Manhattan streets and forced about 60 terrified tourists to march off the double-decker bus, with their hands up, in the heart of Broadway.
Officers in riot gear handcuffed a group of apparently harmless South Asian-looking men with British accents because a jittery tour bus worker thought they were suspicious.
...
A Gray Line dispatcher called police saying the men had backpacks and their pockets "stuffed" - a possible warning sign of suicide bombers, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
Well, that one we can chalk up to nerves following the attacks in London, but the second case is something special:
Later Penn Station was paralysed when a disgruntled passenger walked up to a ticket counter, put his suitcase on the counter and declared he had a bomb, authorities said.
Not too bright, as Best of the Web would say.
Meanwhile, what the hell is this?
By the time the bus neared Times Square, cops carrying heavy weapons decided to cordon off Broadway and stop the vehicle, a decision police officials defended as appropriate.
I know that you try not to repeat particular words too frequently, but I don't think that "cops" has any place in a serious news article outside of a direct quote.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:31 AM
| Comments (1)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 258 words, total size 2 kb.
1
Personally I hate the fact that these double decker buses line up, sometimes 5 or 6 at a time, to load up passengers 8 flights below from my work station.
I still remember a few IRA bombings I narrowly escaped in London, so I'm a bit bomb shy myself.
Posted by: michele at Saturday, July 30 2005 12:13 PM (ht2RK)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Thursday, July 21
On Being The Wrong Size
And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of demoÂÂcracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. The English invention of representative government made a democratic nation possible, and the possibility was first realized in the United States, and later elsewhere. With the development of broadcasting it has once more become possible for every citiÂÂzen to listen to the political views of representative orators, and the future may perhaps see the return of the national state to the Greek form of democracy. Even the referendum has been made possible only by the institution of daily newspapers.
To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.
J. B. S. Haldane,
On Being The Right Size
Haldane was a biologist, and the problem with socialism is really one of information, but nonetheless he nailed it. Socialism suffers dreadfully from scaling problems. It works fine for small, close-knit groups (families), and inevitably collapses into ruin for large heterogenous groups (the Soviet Union).
Haldane - a socialist himself - pointed this out in 1928. It took several more decades for others to realise just how right he was. Some still haven't grasped this fact.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:00 PM
| Comments (4)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 352 words, total size 2 kb.
1
Eh. There's more than a scaling difference between the Ford Motor Company and Luxembourg. A small country is in some senses a closed system - a holistic, total entity with all of its constituent parts intact, but scaled to size. A company, no matter how huge and oversize, on the other hand, is no more than a component of some greater whole. An organ, rather than an animal.
Even Ford's behemoth, which had such cradle-to-grave pretensions of company socialism, wasn't a beast in and of itself, but rather a massively swollen organ in an unbalanced beast called Detroit, which would eventually die of its imbalances. Cities and towns in which one big company owns too much, does too much, almost always come to grief sooner or later. Ask anyone who lives in, or has lived in, a company town.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Friday, July 22 2005 09:58 AM (iTVQj)
2
Well, yes, Haldane glosses over the problems associated with efficiently socialising a country rather too quickly. But the point remains that an efficiently-run socialist Andorra (pop. 70,549) is at least plausible, and probably feasible - if you can find capable and honest administrators. Admittedly, 80% of Andorra's GDP is related to tourism, so it's hardly a closed system. And of course, capable and honest administrators aren't easy to come by.
Scale the population up by a factor of 1000 or so (Britan or the Soviet Union) and you're on the fast track to disaster. It doesn't work
at all, not even on the surface, not even temporarily.
I'm not sure exactly what the scaling factors are for maintaining various forms of social structures are, but it seems clear that capitalism is sub-linear (a large capitalist society is
more efficient than a small one), representative democracy isn't much worse than linear (small representative democracies suffer significant waste and corruption too), and socialism is dramatically worse than liner, possibly geometric.
It's simply impossible to run a country the size of the Soviet Union on a purely socialist system with an efficiency that approaches that of capitalism. The costs involved in the information processing required to achieve that efficiency would be greater than the entire nation's GDP.
Capitalism works by breaking the problem down and seeking local rather than global optimums - and by allowing sub-units of the society to fail without propagating that failure. Corporations often run on socialist principles; they've been called "the last refuge of the command economy". But if a company fails, even one the size of Ford, it doesn't bring down society.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 23 2005 12:09 AM (AIaDY)
3
I didn't mention Andorra because it's a dubious example of a country - for most of its existence it was essentially a smugglers' route with a flag. Luxembourg at least has most of the salient characteristics of an authentic country. But my point about Ford Motor Company and Detroit was that the city died before the company did. Corporations are not governments, because corporations are not altruistic entities. They're profit-making enterprises. Ford saw his interest in a vast sort of convenant with his workers, and so a lot of people confused this economic-social arrangement with government. But his covenant wasn't with the people, but with a significant sub-set of the people, a literal proletariat. The city ended up with the balance of "the people". It was a social distortion that resulted in social violence in the late Sixties.
Eh, I'm mostly talking out of my ass, here. But I still think that there's more than a scaling issue here. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, A is A, but it certainly isn't B. A family is a family, a company is a company, a government is a government, and an army is an army. This is what freaks me out about true anarchist libertarians. Just as governments shouldn't be run as if they're corporations, corporations oughtn't be subcontracted true government functions. Which would follow that corporations oughtn't be subcontracted true military functions, either, I suppose...
Sigh.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Saturday, July 23 2005 09:06 AM (iTVQj)
4
Eh, I'm mostly talking out of my ass, here.
No, you're right. There is more than a scaling issue here. Socialism is fundamentally based on woolly thinking (basically, expecting arbitrary groups of people to act as if they have a common interest). The fact that it
can work for small enough groups doesn't mean it's a good idea.
What's important about Haldane's observation is that even if socialism can be made to work on a small scale, it
inevitably fails on a larger scale. Even with honest and competent leaders (which they weren't) the economic collapse of the Soviet Union was guaranteed.
And yeah, the extreme libertarians are as crazy as the hard-line communists.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 23 2005 12:21 PM (uEuNd)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Friday, July 15
PM Material
These people are opposed to what we believe in and what we stand for, far more than what we do. If you imagine that you can buy immunity from fanatics by curling yourself in a ball, apologising for the world - to the world - for who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in, not only is that morally bankrupt, but it's also ineffective. Because fanatics despise a lot of things and the things they despise most is weakness and timidity. There has been plenty of evidence through history that fanatics attack weakness and retreating people even more savagely than they do defiant people.
John Howard to ABC Flack Maxine McKew
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:19 AM
| Comments (1)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 119 words, total size 1 kb.
1
ya pidoras, pizu chujie doors, zaabuzte moi url - http://greatpharmacies.com/ a suda pishite pisma i spamte - admass@pisem.net
Posted by: ya pidoras at Wednesday, July 26 2006 07:58 PM (8M7ix)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Friday, July 08
7/7/05
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:23 AM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 2 words, total size 1 kb.
1
Red, White and Blue, Baby. Oh, yeah.
Posted by: Jim at Saturday, July 09 2005 04:10 PM (tyQ8y)
Posted by: JohnL at Saturday, July 09 2005 05:37 PM (YVul2)
3
*sigh* 'Fookin terrorists.'
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, July 10 2005 04:54 AM (86QII)
4
You and I have the same instincts. Though I arranged mine a bit differently.
Posted by: Kathy K at Sunday, July 10 2005 03:45 PM (4zPPT)
5
The three amigos. We fight together, we die together. I'm not a praying man, but I made an exception then.
Posted by: pinky at Tuesday, July 12 2005 01:28 AM (MqpvP)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Tuesday, July 05
229 Today!
Happy 4th!
I'd say more, but dammit Jim, I'm dead again.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:41 AM
| Comments (2)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 15 words, total size 1 kb.
1
Thanks, Pixy! Sorry to hear about your death, and I hope the rumors are greatly exaggerated...
Posted by: Susie at Tuesday, July 05 2005 02:06 PM (PWYyH)
2
Yay! I mean, uhh.. What were you saying? Oh right, cheese, yes we have cheese. This IS a cheese shop.
Posted by: Ogre at Wednesday, July 06 2005 01:35 PM (/k+l4)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Sunday, July 03
The Biggest Idiot in the History of the Human Race
I was never that impressed with Jared Diamond's
Guns, Germs and Steel, because it seemed to me that Diamond had come up with the conclusion first, and then carefully sifted through the facts to select those that supported it. It's perfectly reasonable to create the hypothesis first, but what you then have to do is search for facts which
don't support it. Karl Popper and that whole falsification thingy.
What I hadn't realised before now was that Jared Diamond is a complete loony. Andrea Harris has the goods.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:31 AM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 108 words, total size 1 kb.
1
One of the message boards I frequent has recently been invaded by a poster who thinks agriculture was a mistake and wants to revert to hunter-gathering (although this ideology doesn't appear to involve giving up his computer).
I wonder if this may become a new lefty trend, now that all their other ideas have failed?
Posted by: Evil Pundit at Sunday, July 03 2005 06:48 AM (gNnpG)
2
that sounds like something Mascimo Livi-Bacci would espouse.
Posted by: kyer at Monday, July 04 2005 12:52 AM (oY0vI)
3
I'm a voracious reader. Put a book in my wings, and it WILL get finished. It takes a certain something to make me put a book down in disdain. Mr. Diamond's 'Guns Germs and Steel' had just that something.
I've tried three different times to read it, and all three times it made me wonder what others were seeing in it that I wasn't. Then I realized 'it doesn't matter!' and picked up a new Harry Turtledove book.
What I'm trying to say is "Bah, feh."
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, July 04 2005 01:13 AM (G2sf8)
4
I'm in the middle of Guns/Germs/Steel. It's well-written (I suspect Diamond would be a good prof), but I agree that he already had the route planned. Guess I'm back to rereading the neverending Wheel of Time series--got to catch up before book number whatever comes out.
Posted by: Ian at Monday, July 04 2005 06:15 PM (pEXyx)
5
It takes a certain something to make me put a book down in disdain. Mr. Diamond's 'Guns Germs and Steel' had just that something.
I'm stealing that line next time I get nagged to read it.
They say only women can truly nag but oh, the stories I could tell . . . .
Posted by: ilyka at Thursday, July 07 2005 06:44 AM (hhWS2)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
59kb generated in CPU 0.0204, elapsed 0.1311 seconds.
56 queries taking 0.1181 seconds, 246 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.