Broken Promises

Many of you are probably familiar with the White House petition site.  The basic idea is that anyone can start a petition and if that petition gets a certain amount of signatures, the White House promises to answer the question.  You’re not guaranteed to like the answer, but they will answer it nonetheless.

Well, here’s a website that tracks the petitions that the White House HASN’T answered.  Before we get to some of the interesting petitions that have yet to be answered, some interesting statistics.  The White House has answered 87% of the petitions that missed the threshold.  202 in total so far.  It takes the White House an average of 61 days to answer a petition once the threshold has been reached.  Given that this is the first time a White House has ever attempted something like this, the Obama administration deserves some kudos for having this portal to the people.

Some of the petitions that have not been answered are quite interesting.  Many are for supporters of bad science like anti-GMO people and pro-naturopaths and pro-acupuncturists.  A lot of others are for strange fringe international relations issues mostly having to do with the Far East like investigating organ harvesting of Falun Gong by the Chinese and getting rid of a statue recognizing Korean comfort women that the Japanese used in World War II, but the Japanese claim was more propaganda than truth.  There are even a few petitions for cigars and e-cigarettes that have mostly to do with regulation issues.  There is one recent one to allow Tesla Motors to sell their cars directly to consumers which I think is a great idea.  I’ve never understood why car dealerships are so protected at the state level.  One of the more serious ones is about getting the Armed Forces to stop proselytizing and various other tactics that are discriminatory towards atheists in particular and non-Christians in general.

Go check out the web site.  It’s worth reading in full.  It’s a strange mix of the ridiculous, the fringe, and the serious.

Movie Review: Kick-Ass 2

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

“Kick-Ass 2”, like its predecessor, is a hyper-violent romp that looks into the world of ordinary people who dress up like superheros and patrol the streets.  Strip all of that away, though, and you get a mildly depressing glimpse into the psyche of individuals who you believe actually would dress up like superheros and patrol the streets.  Saddest of all is the couple whose son went missing and dress up to make the streets safer for other peoples’ kids.  Their superhero name?  For Tommy.

The second movie picks up a few years after the first one finished.  Dave/Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor Johnson) and Mindy/Hit-Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) are in the same high school together, only Mindy always ditches school to improve her crime fighting skills.  Dave, sick of the banality of high school and wanting to be a real superhero convinces Mindy to train him to be a real Kick-Ass.  Mindy is soon discovered ditching school by hacking the school’s computers to give herself a perfect attendance and then not being there to pick up her award and is forced to give up her role as Hit-Girl.  Dave, feeling abandoned, goes looking for superhero support groups and starts teaming up with other masked crusaders.

Meanwhile, Chris/Red Mist/The Motherfucker (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) plots revenge on Kick-Ass for killing his father with a bazooka in the first movie.  This is where most of the humor in the movie comes from.  The interactions between Chris and his right hand man, Javier (John Leguizamo) are priceless.  Chris acts like the privileged rich white kid that he is and Javier tries to keep Chris at his evilest without coming off as a dick.

The movie does a few things quite well.  The glimpses into the reasons for people becoming superheroes is touching sentiment in an otherwise mindlessly violent movie.  It would have been interesting if they did the same with the villains, but alas, they did not.  There is also a “Bad Girls” type glimpse into the lives of high school girls and how they are pressured into being things that they are not that is effective except for the denouement which is filled with unfunny toilet humor.

All in all, another fun summer movie that won’t really stick with you much past the next movie that you see.  This one is worth seeing, but if you haven’t seen the first one, I’d recommend that over this one.

What This Country Needs Is A Benevolent Dictator

And who better than me to get the job?  Don’t answer that.

Seriously, though, we have so many “third rail” political issues that need to be fixed but never will be because so many politicians are more interested in keeping their jobs than tackling issues that need attention.  So here is what I would do during my benevolent dictatorship.

Corporate taxes would be zero.  No corporate payroll taxes, no hiding money offshore, no benefit write-offs, no armies of international tax accountants finding ways to flaunt the laws by taking advantage of loopholes.  Money can flow smoothly where ever corporations want it and individuals will be free from the corporate binds that often tie them to a specific job.

To balance that, we would scrap the minimum wage and replace it with a living wage law.  The living wage law would be tied to the poverty level originally and would change yearly based on inflation.

Individuals would be taxed on total income from all sources and all income would be treated equally.  There will no longer be any deductions for anything.  People that get paid with stock or other non-cash offerings would pay taxes on the full value of the offerings at the time of the offering.  Any income below the poverty level will have a 0% tax level and the brackets above will be similar to what they are now only with a few extra brackets at the top.  Payroll taxes will be paid on all income.

Copyrights would expire after 50 years. Patent laws would be changed to make patenting thing like software impossible.  Also, patent holders must show that they are putting forth some effort to make the patent into a salable product or mechanism to make a salable product or else the patent will become void.

Voting for Representatives and Senators would cease to exist.  Instead, the entirety of a district or state is eligible and the winner will be chosen by random drawing.  Representatives would have their term extended to three years and one-third of Representatives will be “elected” every year.

Immigration would require just one prerequisite; a company willing to hire you at the average compensation in the U.S. for your position for a term of five years.  The company must pay the whole five years regardless.  At the end of the five year term, the immigrant and his/her immediate family are sworn in as citizens.

As my last effort as Benevolent Dictator of the United States, I would take over Canada.  Because they’re just asking for it…

Book Review: A Princess Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Reading “A Princess of Mars”, one thought popped into my mind over and over again; wow is this racist.  Either Edgar Rice Burroughs was a racist or he wrote the book portraying John Carter as a racist.  I lean heavily towards the former.  Of course, this can be written off as more a sign of the times in which it was written than a condemnation of the man who wrote it.

So, the racism…

The whole book is told narrative style by the protagonist, John Carter.  It starts out almost immediately with descriptions of Native Americans as bloodthirsty and such.  That didn’t bother me so much because it would be a fairly accurate description of how White men thought of Native Americans at the time.  Things then move to Mars where John Carter quickly falls into the hands of the Green Martians who are tall and beastly and distinctly non-human and have a warlike culture with a Klingon-like sense of honor.  They are described as primitive and savage and there are many instances of their culture being disparaged by John Carter.  All of them, that is, except the two he happens to befriend.  They are described in a very positive light and as two who are completely out of place with the culture that they belong to.  Reading the book, I could almost hear John Carter saying, “I can’t be racist, some of my best friends are Green Martians!”

Then there’s the Red Martians.  They are described as humans only with red skin.  They are described as cultured and sophisticated and peace loving.  All this despite the fact that, like their Green inhabitants, they all seem to be at war with everybody.  The few Red Martians that John Carter befriends are, indeed, how he describes Red Martians in general, but the rest of the Red Martians are virtually indistinguishable in savageness from the Green Martians except that the Red Martian’s culture much more closely resembles White Earthling culture and the Green Martian’s culture is the stereotypical conquering White Man’s description of Africans.

I do not say any of this to talk you out of reading the book.  It is quite a fascinating read and very rightly was an inspiration of many modern writers and scientists.  I found the racism fascinating instead of off-putting.  It’s like an anthropological look into the mind of a racist.

The story itself is kind of blah.  Man travels to Mars.  Man falls in love with a captured princess.  Man rescues said princess again and again.  We’ve seen this before.  Where it stands out, though, is in Burroughs’ insights into Mars and the technologies Burroughs creates for Mars, many of which are astoundingly prescient.  For instant, the newly discovered at the time radioactive isotope radium is used to both create abundant power and make bullets much more deadly.  Besides the fact that we now use uranium and plutonium for such, this is very reminiscent of nuclear power plants and depleted uranium ammunition.  There are also world altering atmospheric generators that keep Martians able to breathe which still hold a place of high regard in science fiction.

That isn’t to say that Burroughs was firmly on the science of the possible.  He also had really cool and massive air ships that were able to support their bulk by collecting light and breaking it into components unknown on Earth to create an anti-gravity field.  It’s interesting in the way he describes it, but pretty laughable scientifically now.  Even his description of light, though, sounds like he’s describing infrared and ultraviolet light which I am not sure was actually discovered when he wrote the book.

Despite the fact that the plot is terribly unoriginal, Edgar Rice Burroughs does a great job of throwing a lot of originality into the story that the plot doesn’t matter that much.  The book must certainly be read with one eye on when it was written, but I would definitely recommend it to science fiction fans as an example of what likely inspired some of their favorite authors.  “A Princess of Mars” is actually the first in the “Barsoom” series and I will certainly at least read the next one to see if Burroughs continues his amazingly accurate predictions.

The First Rule Of Obamacare Is You Don’t Talk About Obamacare

I am sure that if I looked back in history, I would find a political party that did everything within their power to make a law they didn’t like fail miserably, but this is the first time in my memory that I have seen this.  Many Republican Congresscritters have decided to not answer even the most basic constituent questions about Obamacare.  Instead, they direct people to the White House or Health and Human Services.  It is a basic function of a Congressional office to answer constituent questions about laws, but some hate Obamacare so much they refuse to perform this service.  Even worse, states like Missouri have implemented a gag rule allowing State employees to be sued if they talk about Obamacare.  You would think that Tea Partiers in the state would be all over this gross infringement of First Amendment rights, but no.  Defeating Obamacare by any means necessary is more important than real unconstitutional activities.

Two Big Wins For Criminal Justice

It’s been a good week for minorities in particular and criminal justice in general so far.  Minorities are being attacked on so many sides these days, it’s good to get a few wins in.

First, a judge has put an end to the abhorrently racist Stop And Frisk laws that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has imposed on the city.  What purports to allow police to frisk anyone they stop unshockingly ended up being a reason to harass mostly law abiding black people.  I’m sure Bloomberg will appeal, but I’m guessing Stop And Frisk is gone for good.  Good riddance!

Second, Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced that they will greatly restrict their pursuit of non-violent Mandatory Minimum drug cases.  This one’s a bit more mealy mouthed, but still important.  Basically, the way I understand it is they will still prosecute offenders (which is bad in many cases) but will not present evidence that would require judges to enact Mandatory Minimum sentences on those convicted.  As with Stop And Frisk, Mandatory Minimum laws are blatantly racist.  They impose harsher minimums for smaller quantities of drugs more likely to be used by minorities while allowing lighter minimums for larger quantities of drugs more likely to be used by non-minorities.  This is more a step in the right direction than a win.  Mandatory sentencing laws are ridiculous and will still be law.  What Holder is proposing is kind of a trap door work around than a solution.  I’ll take it, though.

Hyperloop, Emphasis On Hype

Elon Musk is at it again, inventing futuristic modes of transportation.  The billionaire PayPal creator is most famous for SpaceX, which promises to revolutionize space travel, and Tesla, which promises to revolutionize the electric car.  This time it’s the Hyperloop, a relatively cheap train-like system to shuttle people at hyper-speeds between cities.  The basic idea is that you create a sealed tube and you push a vehicle inside it using the air pressure in the tube or make it a vacuum tube and magnetically push the vehicle through the tube.

It really is a great idea, but it seems to me to be hopelessly impractical.  Elon Musk actually seems to think so to, which is good to hear, but he seems to be coming from a politically impractical standpoint where I’m more of a, yeah, well this is great for rich people, but not really a practical public transportation method.  Of course, that’s what Elon Musk does, create better modes of transportation for rich people, and more power to him, but this is his first foray into public transportation.

I haven’t read the details of the specs, but it worries me that there’s no mention in anything I’ve read about what kind of volume of people the Hyperloop would be able to move in a day.  The cars themselves appear to be much smaller than a normal train so each individual trip would be much smaller than a train’s capacity.  And how many cars can travel in the tube at any given time?  At the speeds they’re talking across the distances they’re talking, I can’t see it being more than six in either direction at optimal conditions.  At 600 mph, since the cars are only supposed to hold 28 people, we’re talking about a 6 billion dollar system that can shuttle less than 200 people per hour.

Since Elon Musk is undoubtedly smarter than me and he says the system should be able to handle 7.4 million passengers per year, I’m assuming there’s something that I’m missing.  Maybe each car holds 28 people but multiple cars can be strung together.  Of course, he also says that this system is incapable of crashing and will need no external power source and will not need to purchase more than 1 billion dollars in land rights so he may be assuming much more than I am.

The world needs billionaire futurists like Elon Musk.  Looking to the future is important and efforts to make our ideas reality should always be at the forefront of our minds.  But where are the billionaire presentists?  Where are the Andrey Carnegies who believed that their riches should be spent now for the common good?  The incredibly solvable problems of today requires more Bill Gateses than Elon Musks.

Do you know what’s creepy? Mosquitoes!

Ever wonder what happens when a mosquito bites you?  Well wonder no further!  The thing that you think of as the mosquito’s needle is actually a sheath and these tiny filaments are hidden inside and they are what go searching for a blood vessel.  It reminds me somewhat of an anteater sticking his tongue down an ant hole.  Something I didn’t know, mosquitoes actually fail to draw blood more often than they succeed.  In the last video, you can actually see a mosquito hitting a blood vessel and sucking blood out.  He sucks so hard you can see the blood vessel contracting!  There is also some talk about how malarial mosquitoes behave differently than non-malarial mosquitoes.  They’re not sure why but they think it may have to do with the parasite actually controlling the mosquito’s actions.  Wild stuff!

Ride The Wave, Baby!

Calculated Risk is one of my favorite blogs.  Why?  Because while economics can be pretty boring, the applications of economics are absolutely fascinating.  Oh, and because of things like this:

PopDist

 

That’s the age distribution of the population of the United States from 1900 to 2060.  Check out that Baby Boomer wave!  Another cool thing is you can witness medical progress in this graph as well.  Notice how it goes from a max of 75+ to 85+ to 100+ as the brackets become statistically significant.  Also, look at how normalized the graph becomes after the wave.  This signifies the mostly flat birth rate in the U.S. that we currently have.

I’m trying to come up with an explanation as to why the Baby Boom wave kind of peters out near the end like a wave getting eaten away by an undertow.  The only thing that I can think of is general mortality slowly eats away at it.  That doesn’t seem like it could be the whole story though.  There has to be some other sort of statistical meaning behind it that I can not fathom.  Anyone care to explain?

Whatever You Do, Don’t Move To Arizona

Or New Mexico.  Or Utah.  Or southern California.  Why?  Water.  Lake Mead and Lake Powell, two of the largest man-made reservoirs of potable water are getting smaller.  These two lakes are basically responsible for the vast tracts of land surrounding them being habitable by humans.

They’re probably overpopulated as it is if you assume that this is just your normal 100 year drought.  If you think man-made climate change is here and happening, the Southwest is in for a world of hurt.

The history of the Colorado River is absolutely fascinating.  If this kind of thing interests you, I highly recommend you follow the link above and the links contained therein.  For instance, did you know that the Colorado River Compact that relegates usage of the river’s waters is 90 years old and is still the basis of law for most other river sharing agreements?

Water management is one of the obvious areas where Federal oversight is mandatory.  It is a limited resource and doesn’t care about arbitrary borders.  This is basic government.  If you don’t understand this, you shouldn’t be in government.  I’m talking about you, Ron and Rand Paul!