Immigration vs. National Identity

I received an email the other day with a picture attached and this text:

Theodore Roosevelt's ideas on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907.

'In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.'

Theodore Roosevelt 1907

Every American citizen needs to read this!

You know, it's funny that these emails are often wrong in subtle ways. I know it makes me look pedantic, but the mistake in this one is almost comical because it's such a silly mistake: this letter was written in 1919, not 1907.

Granted, it hardly matters since this does accurately represent what he had to say on the subject (the Snopes article quotes other speeches and letters and has good context at http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/troosevelt.asp).

I will say, however, that this just demonstrates that this subject has been long debated. I feel no reason to agree with this attitude just because it is Roosevelt or because it is old. I come away from reading things like this with two main thoughts. For one, I think the debate about illegal immigration often gets sidetracked into racially prejudiced tirades about the attitudes and actions of legal citizens that happen to have Mexican heritage. Secondly, people seem to forget that the freedoms we hold so dear in our country also mean that people must be given the freedom to act as they choose in regards to their country or origin. Being an American means, in part, that I have the freedom to fly any flag I want, that I can say anything I want about the government and that I give assistance to anyone I want. No person or government agency can tell me how I live my life in these regards.

I think the confederate flags that many southerners fly are a great example of this. Do you think that the practice of displaying a confederate flag should be illegal? Do you think that my Asian friends in high school shouldn't have been allowed to go to Chinese School? Should I be restricted from wearing a kilt and taking my daughters to a highland dance class?

Are you ready to arrest or fine people for celebrating Cinco de Mayo? What about St. Patrick's Day? The Chinese New Year? Octoberfest? Do we need to disband the Highland Games? Should the Scottish Clan organizations be disbanded?

I self identify as German, English, Scottish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Jewish. At no point in my life have I ever thought of myself as not being an American.

These quotes are used as a sort of rallying cry, but how many people consider the logical implications of them if we take them literally? It's all great fun when it's the rights of someone else that we infringe upon, but it never feels so good when those same laws restrict our own rights. I'm not opposed to laws like this because I don't want more people to identify as American (on the contrary, I think that would be great), I'm opposed to them because I want to retain the personal liberties that I believe are the foundation of out great country.

Home at Last

So Bryana came home last week all excited about the marvelous time she had at Girl Scout camp and ready to do it all over again. Other than a few bug bites, she came home intact - no bear bites or claw marks anywhere. A bear was known to live on the other side of the lake, but it had waaaay too much sense to wander near a bunch of 7 and 8 year old girls - I should have realized that bears would have the sense to be terrified of a camp full of young girls and stay far, far away. Bryana was very excited to see us and couldn't stop talking for the next hour. I wish I had an audio recording of it because she kept interrupting her own stories in order to relate another story or sing a song or tell us about about the meals, the swimming, the skit, what Tara did, what Try-its she earned, etc, etc, etc. So all my worry was for naught. Bryana was not lunch for a bear, she was not particularly homesick and she had a fantastic time.

Fiscal Conservatism vs. History

A short while ago, someone sent me an email with a number of politically motivated images. One of them was simply a list:

So now we know…

"CHANGE" =

MORE Debt

MORE Taxes

MORE Welfare

MORE Regulation

MORE Government

MORE Wasteful spending

MORE CORRUPTION

Thanks Mr. President

I've put the original "claims" of the sign in the forwarded email in block quotes, in between those are my comments.

So now we know…

"CHANGE" =

MORE Debt

In the last 40+ years in this country, the only president that has run with a balanced budget (or a surplus!) was Clinton. Now, normally I would say that the congress has as much, or more, control over the budget of the country however I will point out a few things that have happened that - to me - seem to point at the Republicans as the source of the debt, not the Democrats (I'm using OMB numbers for Gross Federal Debt, some people use the public held debt instead):

1) I've heard it said that Carter started our modern deficit spending. I'm not sure the why's of that statement, since we've had a federal debt since before Carter. I think it has to do with the techniques behind the budget tricks used to fund programs in the absence of actual funds. Still, Carter's administration overall contributed very little to our modern debt comparatively. (It went from about $0.5 trillion to $0.9 trillion.)

2) Reagan's administration saw a huge amount (historically speaking at the time) of deficit spending. By 1988 the federal debt was approximately $2.6 trillion. Reagan nearly quadrupled the national debt. The blame for this I feel rests entirely on Republican shoulders due to the increase in military spending. Regardless of the justification here, the fact is that it started us on our way to a massive debt.

3) Bush Sr. didn't do too much as a president with regards to the debt one way or another. Status quo you could say... with a rather amusing foot-in-mouth moment with the "No new taxes" speech. We all say silly things at times, I suppose. At the end of the Bush Presidency the national debt was over $4 trillion.

4) During Clinton's administration he spent a lot of work trying to balance the budget. At the end of 8 years the debt was at $5.6 trillion. In other words, Clinton added about as much in 8 years that Bush Sr. added in 4. In fact, when you look at the publicly held debt (as opposed to the Gross Federal Debt) the last 3 years of the Clinton presidency saw a drop in the total debt. The surplus that Clinton successfully maintained was passed in part during a Republican held congress by Clinton vetoing the budget multiple times until spending was finally cut enough to erase the yearly deficit.

5) One of the first things Bush W. did during his presidency was to eliminate many taxes that were supporting the national budget. This started deficit spending again. Then, by starting a war or two, Bush W. managed to vastly increase the debt. Like Reagan's administration, it doesn't matter much what the justification was, this is what happened. At the end of Bush W's presidency, the federal debt was just below $10 trillion. In the last few years, the debt has grown on average nearly $1 trillion per year. Remember, this was after Clinton handed him a balanced budget. At any point the Democrats tried

6) Now with Obama in office the Tea Part starts and accuses Obama of socialism and freaks out over Democrats being bad for the debt.

If you're read this far... can someone please explain to me how you can - with any reasonable historical accuracy - blame the Democrats for the National Debt?

I know... the classic joke is that Democrats are "Tax & Spend". Unfortunately, the Republicans cut the taxes that are supporting the government programs and then keep spending!

MORE Taxes

Taxes support government spending. You can't logically complain about the debt and complain about taxes unless you have a realistic plan to cut spending. Political pundits like to talk about cutting spending but they never actually do anything about it.

Unfortunately, you only have a few things you can cut.

1) Welfare programs (medicare, medicaid, etc) that many Americans rely on. Even the Republicans have recently shied away from making realistic cuts into these programs. Time and time again public polls have showed that "real" Americans are not interested in making cuts here.

2) Military spending that our military is... well... using. This might work if we weren't in a war currently (or two) and even then, it is also not supported by public opinion polls.

3) Pork barrel projects, earmarks, whatever you want to call them could be cut... which accounts for around 1-2% of the budget. We'd lose lots of cool programs and basically get nothing from it.

By the way... a number of people screamed socialism when Obama talked about raising taxes from 36% to 39%. I like Jon Stewart's question to a guest... "At what point in that 3% did it become socialism?" Also, it's worth noting that this the same tax rate that existed during Reagan's administration. Why was Reagan not considered a socialist at the time?

Why is it that the Tea Party and the Republicans complain about Democratic tax policies when in 2009 Americans paid the lowest effective tax rate that they've paid since 1955?

The email you sent a little while ago about the tax hike set for Jan 1st, 2011 is another interesting subject. I won't dwell on it other than to say that the Democrats are between a rock and a hard place on this one. The tax cuts that Republicans put in when they eliminated Clinton's balanced budget are set to expire (as they should) and now Democrats will be blamed for either allowing them to expire or - if they renew them - be blamed for increasing the national debt. Not an enviable position.

MORE Welfare

Um... what? While this may be true, I don't follow it much. Frankly, I don't think it's changed much. it was also amusing to see - during the health care debates - Republicans attacking health care because it might hurt welfare. That was funny.

MORE Regulation

Less regulation of the Financial industry tanked our economy. During that tanking nearly every analyst and senator agreed that we haven't regulated enough. When things started looking better, suddenly the pundits were against regulation again. Let's hear it for consistency.

The banks have proven that they need to be regulated. If not, the basic human greed takes over and too few people with too much power hurt too many innocent bystanders.

MORE Government

When the Department of Homeland Security was setup, they were put in charge of some new stuff (such as the TSA), but also given purview over some existing departments, like Border Security. The congressional committees that had already controlled those departments refused to relinquish control. When the 9/11 Commission gave their report, they pointed out that a since Homeland Security briefing would potentially need to be repeated to 86 committees and sub-committees.

Now, after a number of years of Republican control, the number of committees and sub-committees is over 110. That's not reigning in government.

MORE Wasteful spending

Wasteful is, I suppose, in the eye on the beholder. At any rate, I'm not sure it's any worse now than it has been. Of course, many Republicans have complained about Obama wanting to spend money on public works projects. We have a failing infrastructure in this country... roads, bridges, dams, and causeways that are old and crumbling. Don't they think it's about time to fix some of this before more people die? Apparently not, since they can appear to be hard on spending by opposing those projects while we're hemorrhaging money in a war in a country that didn't even attack us. At least Obama is following through with those plans... even those they aren't as aggressive as I'd like.

MORE CORRUPTION

Whatever. I've heard this multiple times. I haven't seen a comparison, but I'll fall back on the "power corrupts" line of thinking. It doesn't justify it, but it does explain it. Corruption is, unfortunately, bipartisan.

Of course, some will bring up Acorn... which has a sordid history, it seems. But most of that scandal is tiny by comparison to other things that have happened in Washington. It's just a fun organization to pick on, I suppose, so that story has legs of it's own.

In conclusion

I've written a lot here and I don't expect to get a reply per se on any of this, of course... but if you should happen to, please address some of what I bring up. Believe it or not, I'm curious what other people think on these subjects. Unfortunately, merely forwarding on an email that someone else sent you doesn't tell me what you're really thinking. Nearly every email of that sort contains factual and logical errors to go along with the grammatical and design principle errors that are contained therein.

If my facts are wrong, challenge them or give me better data. If you can't validate them yourself, ask me and I'll provide links (I normally do, but other than the OMB numbers most of this was done from memory). At this point in our country's history I see people holding up "facts" in arguments that don't stand up to any sort of scrutiny at all. Claims of border violence are the new ones cropping up now... I expect to see emails about that soon as well, since I already know them to be false.

I can't reconcile the rhetoric I read in these emails with the facts that I'm able to research. That suggests that the authors don't actually care about facts, or public discourse, they only care about shouting down the other side. I frankly don't see what that accomplishes.

A Mother's Guilt

In the meantime, I will comment on my excitement for tomorrow. We get to go pick up Bryana from her first overnight-away-from-mom-and-dad-camp and I can't wait. I've been worrying about her since we dropped her off. I almost changed my mind that she could go. It was my "What was I thinking? She's just a baby. I'm a terrible mother, sending her off alone in the woods to be eaten by bears!" moment.I recovered, sort of, but I will be very glad to go pick her up tomorrow and find out that her unbearable homesickness was all in my imagination, that she didn't miss us at all and is ready to go to college, thank you very much!

On the other hand, we think that we have found the cure for Allison's temper fits. Only-childhood. Yup. It has been two days since we dropped Bryana off at camp and we haven't had a single melt down or temper fit since. Allison has become the epitome of a reasonable, sweet, temper-free child. We figure this is either related to not having to compete for attention or fear of us dropping HER off alone in the woods to be eaten by bears. Either way, we figure we only have 18 hours or so left before a relapse - as soon as we pick Bryana up tomorrow. :)

So I have one daughter who away at camp, homesick, crying for her parents in between being snacked on by a bear and the other perfectly happy now that she has experienced the life of an only-child. A mother's guilt never ends....

Percy Jackson annoyances

Note: there are some spoilers here (only sort of), but the movie has been out for awhile, so I don't feel bad.

Overall, I really like the movie. Obviously, when you have a story that takes place in modern times, but has all the greek mythological characters in it, it is quite likely that you'll have to change small bits of the story line. There were two that annoyed me to some degree, however.

The first was Medusa. She was killed in the myths, which means that it seems somewhat unlikely that she would be alive in modern times to be killed again. Not a big deal, I suppose, since she's a well known monster that they could put in there. However, I think they could have simply made the character another of her species. I guess that would lose the Hollywood name dropping of the villain. While it's fun to complain, I won't dwell on it.

The one that annoyed me more was the depiction of Hades. In most of the mythology I've read, Hades is described as the underworld, sure, but it is *not* Hell. Hell is specifically a modern, monotheistic notion. The idea of fire and brimstone, torture and pain is modern and doesn't show up in the old myths. (To be clear, there are some that are tortured, but only a handful of - mostly demigods - who have annoyed the gods.)

Hades is simply an afterworld. It is Heaven and Hell put together. It is where you go when you die, but not necessarily a bad place to be. In many depictions, it isn't played up to be a particularly fun place, either, but the movie implies it sucks for everyone.

This seems unnecessary to me. Most of the rest of the references weren't too far off, why was this one? Were the producers so steeped in Western mythology that they couldn't let go of the "underworld-as-hell" idea? Did they have a low expectation of viewers? Either was, I felt it was kind of a downer.

Origins of Life - Double Standard

Origins of Life - Double Standard

When looking at the creation/evolution debate (well, intelligent design these days is what they like to call it instead of creationism) one of the arguments that frequently comes up is what the origin of life was. To summarize: the anti-evolutionist argues that either evolution can't explain the origin of life or that even the most basic forms of life are so complex that they could not have arisen purely by chance.

At this point there are a couple of directions I could take this essay. I could mention that any time someone starts talking about "chance" they probably don't know what they are talking about with respect to evolution. That alone is a subject ripe for discussion, of course, since it amazes me how someone could be so far off base that they can't even summarize the opposing position reliably. Instead i want to talk about hippocracy... But first, the other side of the coin.

A common argument from the scientist about why an intelligent design explanation of the origin of life isn't workable is that it only explains the first step... There is always the question of who designed the designer. Of course, there is a lot more to this argument if you flesh it out. One of the major assumptions is that science won't tolerate a supernatural explanation. (I won't go into that assumption much here, but suffice to say that if something out there is allowed to break the rues, then it makes researching what the rules are somewhat difficult... Well, impossible, really.) The only reason this comes up is that many of the people in the ID movement insist that it isn't about religion and that the designer doesn't have to be god. (Ironically, in the Expelled movie, Richard Dawkins was trying to concede this exact point, which Ben Stein mocked.)

However, we're told by the ID crew that we're not allowed to ask who designed the designer. They say that this is outside the scope of intelligent design. We're told that the techniques of "design detection" can only tell us if design was employed, but cannot reveal anything of the designer. Convenient, when yiu need to hide a religious motive in a secular argument.

The hippocracy, then (and the simple complaint at the end of this lengthy steep) is: Why can't they understand that Origin of Life research is outside the scope of evolution? Attacking evolution because we're not sure how the first genes came about is tantamount to asking an ID supporter questions about the designer. Of course, in e grand scheme of human learning, we went to know how life originated... But it wasn't related to evolution, it was the precursor to it.

I think it would be fair that scientists ignore the question until all the ID suppoeters fess up to their religious motivation.

Eric

PowerShell isn't perfect

Linux: du -s *

PowerShell: dir | foreach { $item = $_; dir $item -Recurse | Measure-Object length -sum | select -Property @{n="Item";e={$item}}, count, sum }

Would you like to have more readable output (ie: in MBs)?

Linux: du -sh *

PowerShell: dir | foreach { $item = $_; dir $item -Recurse | Measure-Object length -sum | select -Property @{n="Item";e={$item}}, count, @{n="MB";e="{0:N2}" -f ($_.sum/1MB)} }

Visual Studio regions in XCode

One of the few features that I've liked in Visual Studio that XCode doesn't have is the ability to define regions for code folding. It's nice to have regions of code that are logically grouped that you can collapse when you're working on other parts of the same method. (Of course, regions also work across methods, but this hint won't address that.)

Fortunately, XCode allows for block folding (which the versions of Visual Studio I've used don't have), which allows you do to something like this:

//region I want to fold

{

...code...

}

This defines a statement block that you can fold. When folded it ends up looking like this:

//region I want to fold

{...}

One caveat here... don't define any variables in that block that you'll need elsewhere. The statement block defines a local scope for any variables declared. This might be want you want, but it may also cause scoping issues. The compiler will probably warn you about this, however.

PowerShell Training

I've finished a training that I did at work around PowerShell... a great shell language from Microsoft.

Yes, I said it in public, I like something Microsoft did. :-)

Really, the designers of PowerShell did something revolutionary with the traditional command line, they made it object-oriented. The biggest leap forward was allowing objects to be pipelined throughout the shell. This makes the language feel very similar to ruby in the way that I use it.

Anyway, with little other comment, here's a link to my presentation, if you're curious:

PowerShell - Shell Environment

Vampires and the Anthropic Principle - a response

I read a number of Intelligent Design blogs, just to see what they have to say. I find it interesting to read what "the other side" thinks and how their arguments are structured. Over the years, the biggest frustration of mine is that they often use straw man arguments as they fail to grasp what evolutionary biologists are trying to say. Furthermore, they seem to misunderstand science in general and how it progresses. Anyway, this post isn't about that complain specifically, but I wanted to write about a post at a new blog I've been introduced to that brings Vampires into the Anthropic Principle to strengthen the argument... he says.

Go ahead and read what he has to say...

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/02/10/vampires-and-the-anthropic-principle/#more-12597

This is going to be somewhat random, so here goes...

1) Claim: If Vampires existed, then their feeding patterns would overrun the human race within a few years.

The base of this claim is that a vampire converts a human into a new vampire each time it feeds, which means that there will be an exponential increase in the number of vampires and a corresponding decrease in the humber of humans. While I don't have any issues with the mathematics of this (even though he leaves out the possibility that some humans are killed without being turned and some vampires are going to be killed as well), the main problem is that - being a legend - there are great variations in the stores around vampires. In fact, in literature such as Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the base assumption isn't valid. It's annoying when I disagree with the base assumptions, but what can you do.

At any rate, for the sake of making things sound formal, he continues with calling Vampires "V-class objects" in recognition that there could be other destructive agents in the universe.

Moving along, he states the Anthropic Principal in a negative way (so he says).

2) Claim: In order for humans to exist, there must be no V-class objects in existence.

To restate this, he's simply saying that in order for humans to exist, there must be nothing in existence that would kill off all the humans. When you state it this way, it almost sounds silly. It is, in fact, a tautology when stated like this. In my opinion, this shows that he lends no additional argument to what the anthropic principle already says, which is that the universe must be amicable to our existence simply because we exist.

He is trying to argue that the probabilities that the universe would be able to support life is calculated separately from the probability that the universe does not contain things that would kill off all life. Since these are logical inverses of each other, separating their meaning into two probability calculations seems unjustified.

Besides, the anthropic principle's purpose in life is to show that the probabilities are next to meaningless. To state it in my own way, it says that the fact we exist means that the necessary elements must have been in place. Anecdotally, to the person who won, the chances of winning the lottery are irrelevant... because they already won. Once an even occurs, we now have a given and no longer a chance calculation. It might be interesting to tell a millionaire that there was only a 0.0001% chance of him winning, but that won't change the fact that he won after only playing 14 times.

3) Claim: the likelihood of existence of a V-class object exists as an independent probability.

This claim is not directly in the post, but rather a base assumption that I see in the text. In order for any probability calculation like this to make sense we basically have to have independent events. As soon as there is causation between elements of the calculation, using a raw probability does not make sense.

As an aside, this seems to be the major issue with the tornado in the junkyard producing the 747 argument. Yes, the probability of that happening is low... so low as to assume it can't happen by chance. But biologists do not claim that random chance is responsible for the development of life on this planet. So, to use an analogy of a tornado is not a valid comparison. Period.

In the case of V-class objects, there is the implicit assumption that the development of such objects is independent of the development of humans. This isn't the case, however. Humans have, along with all other life on this planet, become successful while competing for the resources of the environment in which we life. This competition implies a couple of things.

First, there have been things that otherwise might have been V-class objects that died off due to some other reason. Maybe there was a superbug that would kill off humans, but it was isolated in a small town. Maybe there was a species of saber tooth cat that might have wiped out humans, but it failed in other ways. (Remember, just because something can kill us doesn't mean that it isn't vulnerable to other organisms. Maybe our V-class objects have been killed off by W-class objects.)

Secondly, and a bit of a continuation of the last point, maybe we are the V-class object. In the course of our evolution we have killed off numerous other species. Some incidentally, some directly... but the recurring theme is that we are still here and those aren't. Of course, it would be arrogant to assume that we are somehow more successful than other animals. The sharks and alligators seem to have done far better than us when it comes to staying power. Maybe we can play piano, but if success is measured by years in existence, we're just getting started. Maybe we just haven't met any V-class objects yet.