Political fallacies

I keep seeing these posts on Facebook that are supposed to wake up the reader, but actually just offend people and have nothing to do with rational thinking. I suppose it's an election year, and a hotly contested primary, but some of these posts actually turn the truth upside down.

Example: A cartoon shows Jesus talking to a disciple, with the label "Republican Jesus." He is saying something to the effect of "Feed the poor? Of course not. If they don't want to be poor, let them get jobs like anyone else."

Put aside for now the question of whether the poor want to work, or if they can find jobs. The point of the cartoon is that Republicans don't care about the poor, and that they should, if they are at all Christian. (I should point out here that I am not a Republican; I am a Libertarian).

The truth is that according to surveys and tax forms and so forth, rich Republicans donate far more of their own money than do rich Democrats. I suspect that Libertarians donate even more as a percentage of income, but of course nobody researched that. Besides, there are no rich Libertarians who will admit it.

A more important point is that Jesus never advocated socialism. He did not say "Render unto Caesar so that Caesar can feed the poor." He said "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's." In other words, pay your taxes to Caesar as he demands, but give your tithe to God, to feed widows and orphans (those who cannot help being poor), and to support the church (or synagogue).

When government feeds the poor, they remove any ability to help or encourage the poor to learn  how to feed themselves. It cannot distinguish between those who can't help being poor, and those who are poor because they want free money without anyone telling them how to live their lives. Both are out there in abundance, and anyone who has worked with a charity of any kind knows it from experience.

Further, the more money the government takes from people (rich or not), the less they have to give to charities. So when government increases its expenditures on behalf of the poor, they are not adding to what the poor man can get... they are merely shifting money from the private sector to themselves, and taking a cut off the top while they're at it. In effect they are taking away your right to decide who gets your charity dollars, and telling you whom you may give it to - and it can't be a religious institution because of the 1st amendment. So you have to support their approved charities first, through your taxes, and then you can optionally give a little more if you want to.

So that cartoon is profoundly dishonest and misleading.

Once again, liberty demands that government get the  hell out of the way. Let us keep our own earned money, and let us decide whom, if anyone, we will give it to when supporting causes we believe in.

If you believe in anything, if you are passionate about anything, for the love of God don't pass the responsibility to the evil of government. Do it yourself. Calling for the government to do it for you doesn't count. It's the lazy way.

Win 7 antivirus 2012 removal (EASY)

Win 7 anti-virus is one of those malware things that pretends to be your anti-virus package going off. Most of you, if infected, will immediately realize this, because you know the name of  your own anti-virus software package. If you don't, you should. But even knowing it, the thing has taken over your computer, and it's asking for credit card numbers to get rid of it.

It goes off within minutes of infection, popping up all kinds of warnings, many of which are in poor English ("you want remove this threat?"), which would be bad enough, but the worst thing is that it holds your computer hostage by blocking every application  you try to launch, telling  you that it's infected with something or other, and you can get your computer back by clicking here or here. Don't bother clicking on the buttons, they just take you to a worse place: a convenient input box for your credit card number. The windows that pop up are disguised to look like something from your control panel, but they are not. The X in the upper right corner does close some of the windows, but they pop right back in a minute or so.

You get this virus (which renames itself to match your operating system) by visiting a website infected with their bad javascript in the html, and then works by making a lot of bad entries to your registry. The code can be inserted without the webmaster's permission by a clever hacker if security isn't tight enough at the hosting company, or if the webmaster manages to inadvertently let the code get installed. Security isn't for sissies anymore. But it is often deliberately added to porn sites. Yeah, those nekkid girls aren't so pretty anymore, are they? Bunch of skanks, anyway.

So you go to your other, non-infected computer, and desperately try to find out how to get rid of this thing by Googling the name of the virus. (That's probably how you found this blog - welcome, by the way). You  find all kinds of solutions claimed, most of which tell you to buy this or that removal tool for $24.95. Some will give you a long list of registry entries to remove manually, and other files to look for and remove. You go through all that, you reboot your computer and .... it simply reinstalls itself. Crap! All that work for nothing!

Don't panic. And don't send anybody any money.

The solution is actually simple. Go back to a restore point before you got infected.

That's it. No searching for files, no downloading a $24.95 program, no running a deep scan for over an hour with a removal tool only to find it didn't work.

Restart your computer and tap repeatedly on the F8 key before Windows starts to load. Select the Repair option. Repair it by going to a prior restore point, one before the infection. Be patient, the process takes a while. When you reboot, your virus is gone.

Use the computer for an hour or so, normally,  just to make sure in your own heart of hearts, that it's really and truly gone. Tomorrow, after you are happy with the way it all works, make a  new restore point.

If you don't have any prior restore points? You're screwed. Just reinstall the OS and start replacing the data files from your backups.When you're done, tell the system to do restore points once a month or so. Go to Start, enter "restore point" in the search box, and follow the instructions from there.

You don't have your stuff backed up? Are you kidding me??

Then you have just learned a very valuable, but expensive, lesson. Make regular backups.

Now, to prevent getting such a virus, start using Firefox, and immediately use the add-on "No-Script" - it will block javascript from executing unless you approve the website specifically the first time you visit it. If you don't trust the website, and you can't see what's there without allowing javascript... then their content isn't really all that important, is it?

Don't visit porn sites. Those will usually have bad code. It's put in the site on purpose.That's why they set up the porn site - to infect your computer and maybe fool you into giving them a credit card number to buy phony malware removal tools. If you click on a link from a trusted site to an unknown one, even if it isn't porn, and you don't see what you expected, don't approve javascript for the untrusted site. In fact, it's best if you don't approve javascript for any site that you only visited because of curiosity. Curiosity killed the computer. If you can't stand it, wait a day or so and ask the person who sent you if they got a virus from it.

The really popular sites are usually OK. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube. But be careful about links to external sites. That's where they'll get you.

(Thanks go out to my best buddy Dave, who shares all kinds of cool computer knowledge with me, specifically how to play with restore points, and who has never been wrong about this sort of thing. Thanks, Dave).

Today I am thankful for...

The turkey is out in the garage in a roaster oven, quietly getting ready to be taken to the assisted living facility where GA's parents are expecting us to arrive, bringing Thanksgiving dinner with us.

So this would be a good time to think about what I am thankful for, while waiting for my turn to go in and wash the prep dishes in the kitchen.

These days, it has become fashionable to be "thankful" to each other, rather than God. The purpose of the holiday was clearly to set aside a day for gratitude to the Creator, but the secular segment of American society has succeeded in doing to Thanksgiving what they have done to Christmas, and they take advantage of the holiday to enjoy the fun parts but excise God from it - a most ungrateful attitude to have. But worship is, after all, supposed to be voluntary, or what use is it?

So the first thing I'm grateful for, in no particular order, is the fact that we are still free in America - not as free as the Founders intended, because so many are willing to empower government with duties they don't want to bother with personally. But still free enough to worship as we please, at least in private - we aren't really allowed to be too public about it, lest somebody see it and be made uncomfortable.  They can't really forbid it is the point - we still retain the right of worship and free speech, if we're willing to accept being ridiculed for it. Some places in the world will behead you over it, so a little ridicule can be accepted. Some imply that I'm not a "free thinker." I can deal with that, and I can be perfectly confident that I think freely, other opinions notwithstanding. And I am grateful that they, too, have the same free choice that I do.

I am also thankful for these things...

I was able to retire early, which means I can enjoy not having to go to work every day at an earlier age, when I am able to still enjoy things.

I have a wonderful wife, whom God gave to me at a time when I wondered if I would have no mate.

That same wonderful wife seems to be free of cancer, though we can't be absolutely sure. We have all the assurance we can expect to have in such circumstances, that it is indeed so. I am grateful that God moved us to Houston, against my preference, so that when the cancer was found she was working for the best cancer center in the entire world, and she also had an excellent health plan to pay for it.

I am grateful that my sister has found better health and is enjoying a new hobby, geocaching, which has provided fun and excitement in her own retirement years.

I am grateful that my mother is still around, and of sound mind and body, which is not surprising after a lifetime of walking happily with God.

I am grateful for my daughters, and for the grandchildren they have provided. 

I am grateful for the friends I have. They are fine friends, and numerous, and so enjoyable to be around. Dave and Sumi, Cody and Jena, Beau and Charlotte, Phil and Misti, Chaston and Kristina, Carl and Jane, Justin and Ashley, Maria and Maya, James and Marcus, Lois and family... the list goes on and on.

I am grateful that I can still see well enough to read and drive and go geocaching.

I am grateful for my cousins in Louisville, and my aunts and uncles and other family. I am grateful that I was able to go to the Dominican Republic to help start a fledgling drama ministry, and bring back some coffee.

I am grateful for all the traveling I have been able to do, in Europe, in Mexico, all over the USA.

I am also grateful for things that most of us only appreciate when they don't work: refrigerators, air conditioning, TV, the internet - yeah, we could live without them, but they make life so pleasant. Well, maybe not TV, except for movies. :)

I am grateful for my comfortable home.

And I am grateful for all the turkey sandwiches to come. Oh, yeah, baby!

Robbed Twice

I keep hearing these angry complaints about the corporations.

Mostly, they're accused of being greedy, which they are.

What bothers me most, though, is how most people see this as a failure of capitalism. What they are doing is not capitalism, it's fascism.

Yes, I said fascism. You probably see the word fascism and you think of nazis, kicking down doors and burning jews in a nearby oven. But fascism simply refers to a working relationship between government and business. In the 1930's, fascist governments ran the businesses. It was said of such governments that "they make the trains run on time." But it was also said, correctly, that there was a certain loss of freedom in such an arrangement, and that is the problem.

We need to stop thinking in terms of capitalism allowing the corporations to screw people simply because they don't pay high enough wages. We already have the government setting the minimum wage, and in any case, "unfair" wages aren't really the problem.

Here is the problem. Our government has encouraged all of us to invest our retirement money in IRA's, and similar tax-deferred arrangements. This benefits the corporations in an obvious way - they can more easily attract investment money, and more important, those investments are controlled indirectly, which means the investors who own minor portions of the companies have no real say in how the companies are run. They simply hand over their money and hope for the best.

This allows the CEOs of those companies to collect huge salaries with little or no pressure to actually earn those salaries. The boards who would normally keep that sort of thing in check have no incentive to do so, because most of the investors have no incentive to pay any attention to how the companies are run. For instance, my IRA is spread out over forty or fifty companies. It's a mutual fund. There is no real way for me to influence the policies of the companies I've invested in.

So here's what they do instead of paying me my dividends. They (the corporations) pour money into the campaign funds of politicians who I not only don't want to support, I actually want them out of office. Did you get that? They're taking my money and giving it to politicians I oppose. And it's worth noting that most of those corporations donate to both major parties. You might ask yourself why.

The politicians, in turn, give money back to the companies, in the form of contracts, subsidies, and sometimes out-and-out gifts, only they call them "bail outs" when they just give them the money.

Let's review: the government provides incentives I cannot ignore to invest my money in businesses. The businesses take my money and give it to the politicians I don't even like. Then the politicians use the power of government to take my money by taxation, and give it to the companies. It's a win-win for them, but I get robbed twice.

Now, to make it worse, socialists are camping out at Wall Street and other places where businesses make their homes, and they demand... even more power for government to transfer wealth. I assume that they expect wealth to transfer into their pockets, even though the direction of flow has always been in the other direction. (What was that about the definition of insanity?)

Now, the government has no Constitutional authority to take tax money and give it to private corporations. They just do it, because few of us really care about rule of law and limited government anymore. In fact, the news outlets constantly tell us that such ideas as limited government are "insane." Of course, the news outlets are all owned by... corporations.

The solution here is to make one minor change in election law: make it illegal for corporations to donate any money to a political campaign. Actually, it should be illegal for anybody to donate to a campaign for any candidate he can't actually vote for, and that would include corporations, who aren't really people in any practical sense, and cannot vote.

Yet what we have in our election laws is that citizens, meaning you and I, have a strict limit on how much we can donate to a campaign. We can't even put up a poster or distribute a flyer for our preferred candidate unless we first file paperwork with the FEC. Every time a new law comes out to "take the money out of politics" or "make it more fair," the effect of that law is to further limit the power of the individual and increase the power of the corporations. Millions of dollars go from corporations to the candidates who are in bed with them, but candidates who depend on real people for support can't get news coverage, can't get much money because of contribution limits, and are painted as unelectable because they... um... don't get much money.

With real capitalism, poorly run businesses should be allowed to fail, no matter how big they are. Politicians should never be allowed to give tax money to them for any reason. Corporations shouldn't be allowed to give money to politicians. That would be real election and finance reform, if we could only get it.

What goes around

Back in my youth, I worked for a steel fabrication company. We made things like heat transfer products, and acid storage tanks, and heat transferring acid storage tanks. It wasn't a career to recommend to the kids on Career Day at high school, but it paid the bills.

One of the people I knew there claimed to be a Sikh priest from India. I won't mention his name, because he was a total asshole. It was a firmly held part of his personal belief system that Jews were at the bottom of the ladder of humanity, and that Christians were one rung up. This sometimes made me a little jealous of the Jews, because it seemed to me that he should have held us Christians in greater contempt than the Jews, as contempt by Mr. Patel was, in my mind, confirmation that I was doing something right. Mr. Patel was management level, and had direct authority over scheduling.

My research on Sikh tells me that it requires a belief in the equality of all humans, and rejects the caste system. Or so a website tells me. So I think he was lying about his priesthood in the first place. Assholes do lie sometimes. But he had us convinced at the time.

His asshole-ness was happily balanced by a man named Madhav Cadambi, who was always a gentleman, always kind, and always welcome at the break table. Madhav served as a life's lesson that we shouldn't judge a people by one bad example. Madhav was in the blueprint and design part of the place.

My job at this steel plant was in Quality Control. Most of the time I wandered around the place with a measuring tape and randomly inspected parts along the manufacturing process to make sure they were within tolerance, and to stop the process if they weren't. These pieces didn't require inspection at each step of the way before moving on, because they were rarely out of tolerance. When the odd piece was too  long or too short or the gauge was wrong, it had to start over, but the practice worked well.

But there were some checks that were mandatory. For example, if a piece was supposed to be  made from 316 stainless steel rather than 304 stainless steel, it had to be checked for that quality at a certain point before moving along to the next step. My job was to do that. I had a little kit that I used, where I placed a special piece of paper with a chemical on the piece of metal, and then ran a small current of electricity through it. It would turn either blue or pink on the paper, depending on the presence or absence of molybdenum. If 304 SS, it would have to be rejected, because it would not withstand acid corrosion as long. The wrong grade of steel would result in shorter life for the tank or heat exchanger if acid had to go in it or through it. The grade was to be checked again and again, at various stages of manufacture.  If and when it passed, I signed a little piece of paper verifying the grade of steel.

One day I was summoned to do this "molly check," as we called it, and I whipped out my little molly kit, and ran the test. And it remained the wrong color, which meant that there was no molybdenum present. Which also meant it was 304 SS, not the required 316. Fail.

But for some reason, management, especially Mr. Patel, really wanted that piece to pass inspection. He wanted it so much that he had me come back and do the test again. It failed again. He had me do it yet again, this time with other management types present. We were all gathered around as I applied the chemicals again, put the current to it, and waited for it to change color.

We stood in the sun. "Wait, wait. I think it's changing." It wasn't changing, and in any case, it has to do it within a certain allotted time, but OK, let's stand around some more. It was beginning to dawn on me that these people wanted me to sign off on the piece whether it passed or not. But I also knew that if I did, they would come back to me if the container opened up and spilled acid on somebody passing by the tank where it was installed. I refused to sign it. The entire project had to be delayed, while they waited for a new sheet of the special gauged 316 SS to be ordered and delivered.

Very soon thereafter, management decided that we had too many people in Quality Control, and so I was transferred to the Shipping Department. Everybody knew why. I was to spend the rest of my time at this place building shipping crates and loading them onto trucks.

And it got worse. Scheduling, controlled by Mr. Patel, somehow managed to make all these products almost but not quite finished, so that they stacked up almost in the way... and then got them all completed on two consecutive days. This meant that the Shipping Department was busting its tail to get everything out for those two days, then pretty much hiding for the rest of the week. This was not a good business model for people who didn't want to provide an excuse for getting fired. All mere coincidence, of course.

So we got those crates built, and the products shipped, and the folks getting them finished unofficially looked out for us and warned us when anyone was approaching from the offices, so we could sit around on the three idle days but keep a few crates ready to build when needed. The system worked. And eventually, the 304 SS product that was supposed to be 316? It was completed and shipped "as is," meaning no new steel was ordered or used.  And we in shipping built the crates, as was our job. Out it went.

What was supposed to happen was that the customer would install the product, and use it for years, none the wiser. By the time the darn thing corroded badly enough to be noticed, the warranty would be expired. It wasn't right, but how were they to know? Hey, it's just business.

Shipping that piece was expensive, because it was a wide load and over weight, which meant that it had to have special permits, and move slowly down the highway, with an advance vehicle, and a tail vehicle, and signs that said WIDE LOAD, and sometimes there were police escorts to get it across narrow bridges. You get the picture. Delivery was made, and accepted.

But somebody made a mistake. Somebody in Quality Control, or somebody in Blueprints and Designs - it could have been almost anybody - but certainly not somebody in Shipping. Why, we didn't even have access to the paperwork. Somebody packed the original papers certifying that the piece was made of 304 SS. The papers I had signed, rejecting the product. 

Oh, the poop hit the fan that day. But it didn't hit me. I was just doing my job.

Is karma part of the Sikh belief system? I don't know these things. I suppose I could Google it.

(This is a work of fiction. No resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, is to be assumed. There, that ought to satisfy the lawyers...)

Vacation in the northern states

So we had a couple of airline trips coming on Southwest because of their Rapid Rewards program.

And we have this companion pass thing. And a reward weekend from the Avis people.

And we saw this opportunity to get four more states for our geocaching collection. Put it all together, and we found ourselves in Buffalo Wyoming, at the Occidental Hotel, built in 1880,

with one haunted room that you can't actually stay in because it's the library now.

 See the cool dinosaur skull? I think that may be the ghost.

We ate dinner in a private dining room - OK, maybe semi-private, but that's private - and I had a bison steak. Here's the view:

 It gets better. We stayed on a Thursday night, which happens to be when the musicians meet in the saloon to play blue grass music for a few hours:

See the cool old guy in the middle of the photo? He can play just about any instrument, and play it well. I could have bellied up to the bar except it was crowded, so I saved that for the next day:

Next we made a run to Montana, and got few caches in that state, then hopped over to North Dakota.

There we did some more caching, including some rarely traveled dirt roads. But those caches count, and we had North Dakota. But the real fun was in South Dakota. I really wanted to go there because in Rapid City, where I lived as a mere child a half century ago, there is this magical place called Dinosaur Park. I loved that place, and I wanted to see it again, and incidentally pick up a cache in the shadow of the largest dinosaur.

OK, maybe not in the shadow of it, but within a short stroll. My GPSer was leading me all over the place, since I hadn't bothered to calibrate it after changing batteries, so GA sat on a rock until I could stumble upon GZ (ground zero). While I kept stumbling around, trying not to fall off the cliff, she realized she was sitting within arm's reach of the cache, and logged the find. Brothers.
On the way out, I said goodbye to my favorite dinosaur, the duck bill, which was first found in South Dakota.

From there we went to another site I remembered as a child, the Bad Lands. Here, the erosion has carved fantastic shapes and exposed lots of dino fossils. And of course there are some Earth Caches.

No trip to South Dakota would be complete without a visit to Mt. Rushmore... especially on the weekend of the 4th of  July. We were there for a special ceremony, with an F-15 flying over the faces at 9:11 to thumb our noses at the pigs who brought the towers down.

 

Fathers Day

In 1945, near the end of World War II, the USA developed a new bomber with the capability to deliver heavy bombs directly to Japan. The Japanese were no longer so smug about their ability to enslave other nations, as bombs began to fall on weapons factories and near prison camps. The USA already had some top secret equipment, including RADAR, and including a bombsite device that provided stunning accuracy.

My dad, Jesse Payne, was on a bombing run from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. He was the navigator. They arrived at their target, the bombardier did his job, but the bomb refused to drop. The bomb bay doors were stuck.

This meant that the crew of the B-29 could set down in Japan and become prisoners of war, or they could crash into the sea in an attempt to return home. There was no way they had enough fuel to return with those heavy bombs.

Fortunately for them, one of the crew was a country boy from Texas, my dear old dad. He stomped on the stuck bomb until he forced it through the doors. They made it back alive and healthy, and my dad lived to see his 80's and raise four children with my mom's help.

Dad is in heaven. Happy Father's Day, Dad!