It’s not easy being a conservative movement in a modern liberal democracy. It’s not easy to rally a comfortable and commercial people to assume the responsibilities of a great power. It’s not easy to defend excellence in an egalitarian age. It’s not easy to encourage self-reliance in the era of the welfare state. It’s not easy to make the case for the traditional virtues in the face of the seductions of liberation, or to speak of duties in a world of rights and of honor in a nation pursuing pleasure.

As a moderately-conservative libertarian who’s supporting Barack Obama for president, I have a few questions for him:

1. What real conservative can say, with a straight face, that our “comfortable and commercial people” have the “responsibilities of a great power”? First, a true pro-capitalist conservative would tell you that comfort and commerce are things worth fighting for, not deriding. Second, the same would deride not our comfort but any tyrannical delusion that we have any duty but to our own happiness. This is what makes you a “neo-conservative”, Kristol. You’re not a conservative at all. You’re a wannabe tyrant. We’ve seen what happens when a true neocon gets power and decides he has a responsibility to spread democracy.
2. Where is this excellence you’re defending? Neoconservatism put Bush in office. Or are you talking about the growing divide between the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor and progressives’ fight to end special access to legislation by fat cats who are hell-bent on delivering us straight to corporatist fascism? While character and achievement varies from person to person, our representation in Congress and our treatment under the law must always be equal, or do you really want the fascist oligarchy that would result from ignoring that?
3. Have you ever lived on welfare? I’m not one to defend handouts, but do you, Mr. Kristol, have any idea how few people actually want to be on welfare? Do you know how little money is available to the poor?
4. If liberation is so seductive, perhaps you would care to enlighten us as to what is so deadly about it? Are your “traditional virtues” better simply because they’re older? And why must these virtues be foisted upon others?
5. Have you read the Constitution? Do you have a firm mental grasp on the concept of rights? Don’t answer; I already know you don’t. To speak of duties in a world of rights is to speak of nothing but tyranny, Mr. Kristol. No one, especially the government, has the right to demand any positive action from anyone. To say that I have a duty—a responsibility without consent—to anyone or anything is the height of the slave-driving, divine-rights world our ancestors dug themselves out of to make this country a free one.
6. Lastly, you betray your ultimate failure as a human being by decrying the pursuit of pleasure. For those of us who know better, lasting happiness is the highest goal in life. What else is freedom for except the right to pursue happiness in the best way we know how? To insinuate otherwise is to relegate us to the role of fodder for the state.

But no, really, the story about the Good Samaritan is actually racist.

This may be the best response to people challenging my anger response.

Theory 1: The so-called Founding Fathers were some of the intellectuals of their day. They were much more highly-educated than the populace-at-large, and assembled the Constitution in such a way as only to need to appease other intellectuals/politicians of similar leanings. The populace itself was simply expected to react, knee-jerk style, to the tyranny of an absolute monarchy, and approve of said Fathers’ founding laws. The ideals and reasoning behind the ideals of capitalism, limited government, and separation of church and state had not reached the level of zeitgeist in the populace but had many followers in levels of politics and academia.

Theory 2: Classical liberalism was the zeitgeist of the day. The populace, while perhaps not interested in all its reasons, embraced these principles on a common sense level. The politicians and other intellectuals simply led the charge to formalize what the people already wanted.

If the former is the case, I doubt whether such a thing could happen again. For the better, I think, we have shed ourselves of the need for unquestioned leadership from an intellectual class. However, no small group of intellectuals could, again, lead an entire fledgling nation into either rebellion or novel and radical directions.

On the other hand (theory 3?), perhaps history is full of events that spur the zeitgeist on to new things. It’s not gradual evolution of ideas (though that does happen) but punctuated, dramatic cataclysms of popular thought that cause events like this to happen. For instance, perhaps while the ideas of Voltaire and Montesquieu were brewing and trickling from the intellectuals to the commoners, the colonies’ rebellion against Britain was what crystallized those ideas in the masses. It took such a dramatic turn of events for the masses to embrace new and radical ideas.

If that’s the case, I wonder what leaf we’ve turned since 9/11. Will history show that the masses embraced a new kind of imperialistic xenophobia? Will it tell how we abandoned long-held principles like the sanctity of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and human rights in general? Or will those merely be tittles in the text, after which the populace awoke from its deliberate slumber, realized that the cost of absolute security is tyranny, and demanded justice—not vengeance—for the accused and liberty for the law-abiding?

The least likely possibility is, I think, that history will say we went about our merry ways while nothing changed.

The president of the United States is a liar, a coward, a would-be tyrant, and a douchebag. Who knew?

John Cornwell’s mouthpiece is a likeable seraph, who follows the dictum of G. K. Chesterton that angels fly “because they take themselves lightly”. Cornwell clearly believes, as I do, that angels are not wispy, winged beings in ethereal nightgowns, but something far more subtle and profound: archetypal images that dramatise the invisible realities. As such, they can act as symbols for the formless elements of physics; but also for the creative imagination.

It takes some serious chutzpah to write pseudo-intellectual garbage like that, but at least it sounds like Ms. Vickers may be writing about Cornwell’s book, not Dawkins’s.

The seraph begins by politely nailing Dawkins’s first sleight of hand which, as loads of people have now pointed out, dishonestly bundles all religious belief and practice into one crude bag that supposedly equals fanaticism. … It is child’s play to denounce a subject by pointing to the myriad ways in which it may be misapplied; misuse and misapplication are rife in all areas of human understanding: politics, science, education, medicine, religion. But it is faulty logic to conclude that this is necessarily the fault of the set of ideas being traduced.

This is like shooting fish in a barrel. First, in what way is religion like any of the other “areas of human understanding” Ms. Vickers mentions? Religion is, fundamentally, the creation, analysis, and application of made-up ideas that are not verifiable, falsifiable, or provable. Since it is nothing more than pulling assertions out of one’s ass, it can literally be used to assert that anything is true, even contradictions. Despite Vickers’s assertion to the contrary, Dawkins’s makes a point to distinguish moderated religion from religious fanaticism—and then to point out why moderated religion is just as, if not more dangerous than its fanatical blood brother: Moderated religion, in its moral muddiness and slipshod approach to truth, is the ultimate launching pad for religious fanaticism. And in any case, there is really no difference between a “moderated” adoption of asinine, unprovable bullshit and a fanatical adoption of the same. I can claim that it’s okay to believe that Poseidon is responsible for the world’s troubles, and that we must pray to him for forgiveness, but since I have abandoned reason with this claim, why is it any more unreasonable for someone else to claim that we should kill all coastal dwellers because they anger Poseidon’s dominance of the seas?

His account of the Bible is equally undiscriminating. For a start, only religious nutcases take the Creation story literally[.]

Really? By what standard does Vickers judge these people to be “nutcases”? Their assertion that the earth is 6,000 years old is no more unreasonable or illogical than the idea that God exists at all. There is absolutely no evidence for either.

[I]t is perfectly respectable to “pick and choose” when reading the Bible, something that Dawkins takes Christians to task for.

Really? By what standard does Vickers pick and choose between arbitrary, unprovable, untestable assertions? By her own sense of morality, I would guess. It’s certainly not from any sense of morality that religion teaches—or from any sense of reason and logic that science teaches. These are points that Dawkins makes time and again in The God Delusion. They are directed at the “moderately” religious, as Vickers appears to be, and I can only guess that she is a bit defensive at the light he shines on the illogic of her and her “moderate” ilk.

Those who think that not knowing is safer and more attractive than its opposite should treat themselves to this elegant little book.

Ah, the politically correct retreat into agnosticism. How noble of Vickers to treat with equal intellectual hospitality those who claim that there is no evidence that God exists and point out the glaringly obvious harm that all religion does … and those who believe assertions pulled out of the ass of some ancient witch doctor that fly in the face of the reality we know by science and are based on nothing verifiable, testable, or falsifiable.

But I digress. Vickers really should be directing this criticism at me and my ilk. Dawkins never once makes the assertion that he is 100% sure that God does not exist. (I do, but again, I digress.) Dawkins is all about the probability of God’s existence, and concludes that it is next-to-nothing but not nothing itself—though near enough to be reasonably disregarded.

I have no idea who Vickers is, but I can tell you that she’s an idiot.

Dean could threaten the United States by Wednesday, forecasters said, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s office suggested people get ready.

(from Yahoo! News)

Texas is finally coming to realize the major threat that I pose to the United States, especially Texas. What, with my wit, charm, good looks, and anti-theist/libertarian views. Who wouldn’t be threatened? Well, forecasters seem to think I won’t make any threats until next Wednesday, so I guess we’ll see.

On Yucatan, Mexican authorities broadcast radio alerts, including in the Yucatec Maya language, warning people to “be prepared.”

I don’t have any particular beef with the Yucatan peninsula, especially with the Mayans, but preparation is always the key, as no one knows where my wrathful eye may gaze next.

At Ross University School of Medicine on Dominica, about 80 medical students, mostly from the U.S., and 20 staff and faculty members spent Thursday night watching movies, playing games or sleeping on the floor between desks in a concrete building that was converted into a shelter.

Other students had left the island the previous night on regular airline flights or chartered planes. The campus was not damaged….

Hey, no worries, institutions of higher learning. I have a soft spot for science and education. I know college is a great place to watch movies, play games, and sleep on the floor of your classrooms, but you best start some learnin’, or else.

At 5 p.m. EDT, Dean was centered about 840 miles east-southeast of Kingston, Jamaica, and was moving west at 21 mph.

Wow, they’ve got it wrong there. But I’m so confident in my ultimate power, that I’ll let you all know where I am: At my desk in Astoria, writing this blog post. Geez. Big Brother isn’t keeping a very close eye on me.

Energy futures rose Friday on the news that Dean could move into the Gulf of Mexico, which produces roughly 25 percent of the United States’ oil and 15 percent of its natural gas.

Okay, you got me here. I do have a problem with fossil fuels. But I have no plans to rent out a two-bedroom flat in the Gulf. I’ve got a job here in NYC, thanks.

Stay tuned for further news coverage of … me.

My friend, Rene, got me Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. The so-called New Atheism is definitely my cup of tea: People who are unabashed and uncompromising atheists who refuse to tow the politically correct “whatever you believe is okay” party line. Religion is harmful, and while I may tolerate it politically (as in, you certainly have the right to believe what you wish without fear of violence or any sort of coercion) without hesitation, I do not tolerate it as a morally or rationally acceptable choice. My other current read, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, is the perfect complement to The God Delusion, and I wholeheartedly look forward to reading it. It was fun watching Rene worry that I already owned it while I was unwrapping.

Thanks a ton, you guys! Those were my only gifts; 31 is such an odd year, isn’t it?

I bought an iPhone. You’re surprised? Seriously? You don’t know me at all.

Friday morning, the line in front of the Astoria AT&T store was five people long. In Times Square, the line was only around 30 people at the AT&T store there. At about 3:30, I was probably #40 in line in at the Astoria store. No one knew how many phones any store would get, though rumors abounded that every store, even Apple Stores, would sell out fast. I had no desire to participate in the inevitable melee at the 5th Avenue Apple Store.

After an excruciating wait after the doors opened, three people were served, and the computers went down for a half-hour, the security guard announced that they were out of 8GB phones. “That’s impossible,” we all said. The line had barely moved, and we estimated maybe five people had actually gone in the store by then. I was wondering whether I should have taken the offer of the 12-year-old who was selling his place in line for $200. About a half-hour later, they announced that they were out of phones. The security guard said they had only received a shipment of 20. I was livid but determined.

I called the 5th Avenue Apple store and asked straight out if they still had iPhones and expected to meet demand—and how long the line was. The employee was very nice. She said they had plenty, though she didn’t know a precise number, and the line was around the block last time she looked. I decided to take a chance, and I hopped on the train.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I arrived at the famous cube and couldn’t find the line. A large crowd was standing on the sidewalk, and though there were barriers for a line to form, it was only about ten people long. Thinking someone would soon tell me that they were sold out or that the end of the line was really down at St. Patrick’s, I got in that line. Two minutes later, I was ignoring the you’re-paying-our-salaries hoops and hollers of the Apple employees at the entrance and walking down the stairs. The store was packed, and more employees ushered us into another line, a bit longer but moving quickly, to buy an iPhone. Five minutes later, I was standing in front of the Genius Bar facing a credit-card-only employee. After a very strange conversation where said employee asked me if I was excited and gave a dramatic pause before reading my total amount due, I walked out of the store with an iPhone. Total time: 20 minutes. I kicked myself swiftly in the ass for waiting at the AT&T store at all.

When the iPhone was announced earlier this year, why was I ecstatic? Why did I buy an iPhone? What’s the big deal?

1. Every mobile phone I’ve ever used has sucked. I’ve usually had either a free phone or a $200-after-subsidies phone, but I’ve also had a Windows Mobile HTC phone and a Blackberry Pearl for work, and they all sucked. Non-intuitive UIs, horrible menus, bugs, crashes, stupid behavior, ugliness, and a host of other problems have always plagued any phone I’ve ever owned. I thought Apple could do it right. The iPod does a few things, and it does it very, very well. The menus make sense, the UI is terrific and simple, and though I’ve been the victim of a few bugs, I’ve always been very satisfied with it. It doesn’t hurt either that I gave up Windows four years ago and switched from Linux to Mac 20 months ago.
2. I’m a geek, and while I demand functionality out of my toys, I also love the technology for its own sake. Apple (at least Steve Job’s Apple) makes beautiful, elegant toys for people like me. In the case of my Apple toys, I rarely hack them. While I require the ability to hack, break, and fix things, the fact that I can enjoy Apple products right out of the box and rarely want to change anything is very satisfying.
3. It’s an Apple product. Using anything remotely like a smart phone with a Mac is almost always torture and usually requires one of a small pool third-party apps resulting from reverse-engineering. I wanted something native—something that knew what Mac’s Address Book, iCal, and Mail applications were and treated them as well or better than Outlook. I wanted a hand-held that wasn’t just Mac-compatible but Mac itself.

After playing with the iPhone over the weekend, I’m more than satisfied with it. At risk of sounding just like the Apple-friendly reviews before the release, it’s not perfect, but it’s amazing nonetheless.

• Multi-Touch is not perfect. I have small but pudgy digits, and while the built-in guessing usually works very well (It even learned the word “deanpence” and auto-fixed when I mistyped.), there is no guessing for passwords or URLs. Thankfully, when typing a password whose characters are rendered as asterisks, the key you press is enlarged over and above your finger so you can see what you typed and make corrections accordingly. When typing normal text, though, it’s amazingly accurate and very fun to use.
• SMS messages show up in bubbles as a conversation reminiscent of iChat’s interface. It’s a subtle touch and a welcome one that makes SMS behave more like instant messaging. I still have yet to hear why iChat itself isn’t on the iPhone, though, and I do notice its absence.
• Calendar has a “List” view instead of a “Week” view, but it may be an even better way to view my calendar.
• More on Photos and Camera when I play with them more. [Update, 2007/07/09:] I finally attempted to synchronize my photos, and while I synchronized about 1,000 photos, it went off without a hitch. iTunes “optimized” (i.e., shrunk the fuck out of) them for viewing on the iPhone, though I thought that could possibly be presumptuous. I may want to send full-quality photos by mail, no? In any case, they only take up about 300MB, which is next to nothing compared to the size of my music/podcast library. Viewing them seems to be very consistent to the look and feel of the other apps.
• YouTube is a fun addition that I wasn’t expecting until Apple announced it last week. It’s a standalone application, though, not the website. I didn’t have any problem searching for and watching “Robot Chicken” clips, so it appears that there is more than a small number of videos available. (There were concerns that since the videos are H.264 and not YouTube’s usual Flash videos, YouTube would limit the number of videos available on the iPhone. It still may be true.)
• Stocks is pretty useless for me. It would be nice if Apple had a larger number of native (or even local AJAX) apps that I could put on the home screen instead of apps like this that I’ll never use.
• Maps and Weather behave as expected. I put a friend on speaker on Friday while I searched for a bar in the Village without a hitch, and the weather forecast populates very quickly (faster on EDGE even than my Weatherbug Desktop widgets on my Mac).
• Clock is only really useful if you need to keep track of the time in another time zone—probably one further away than an hour. I never use it: Local time shows on the top menu bar almost all the time.
• Calculator … haven’t used it.
• Notes is really the big exception here. I’m sure it works fine, but next to the consistent look and feel of the other apps, Notes is fucking ugly. Everything on the iPhone appears to be in Helvetica, and white is the typical background color for text. Notes, however, is rendered in “Marker Felt” (or so John Gruber tells me) with a yellow background, and there’s no way to change this. Ugh.
• The Phone app is very straightforward and intuitive, even with the multiple ways of browsing contacts and recent calls. The phone senses when you’re holding it up to your face to talk, and it disables the screen; likewise, when you take it off of your face, the screen turns back on. Brilliant. Visual voicemail is a fucking lifesaver. I don’t know how I ever lived without it.
• Mail behaves mostly as expected, though I have a few quibbles. Having multiple accounts may be more trouble than it’s worth. For POP accounts at least, it appears that there’s no way to add folders and filter mail, and there’s no local spam filter. Thankfully GMail has good server-side spam filters, though my server-side filters that keep high-traffic lists archived and not cluttering the inbox are useless on the iPhone. On a side note: I was expecting to have trouble with GMail. When I had tried to use multiple POP clients (Mail at home, Thunderbird at work, for instance), GMail had always failed miserably in the past. Mail downloaded in one place never made it to the other, and I always used the website at work. However, though I panicked when iTunes imported my mail settings, and the iPhone started checking my GMail, I haven’t had that same problem. All email shows up both on the iPhone and on Mail. Did GMail fix this?
• Safari is definitely a full-featured browser (minus plugins). On double-tapping a section, it seems to zoom to the width of the text block you tapped on, though the font size may still be too small to read. Luckily, you can pinch and zoom anywhere you want, though sliding the page back and forth to read off the visible page can get annoying. Safari also seems to cache sparingly, and pages reload when you switch between open Safari windows. Also, I’ve encountered a lot of Javascript (clickable images on this site, for example) that simply doesn’t work as expected on the iPhone. The obvious omission of a Flash plugin is also very noticeable. The ubiquity of embedded Flash videos assures that all iPhone users will notice and probably become annoyed with the little green cube placeholders.
• iPod works mostly as expected too. Turning the iPhone on its side renders a CoverFlow view, though when I’m viewing only podcasts, CoverFlow shows all music, not just podcasts. The clickable button on the headphones is brilliant too; it lets me pause the current track (one click) or advance to the next one (two clicks); so easy.

Using EDGE, the GSM network’s 2/2.5-generation data network, isn’t horribly slow for my expectations, though it is definitely slow. I’ve been consistently testing the connection at about 150kbps, which is only three times as fast as dial-up. WiFi works mostly flawlessly, though I’m disappointed (despite the probable impracticality of it) that Apple didn’t include 802.11n support. I had previously bought an AirPort base station, and I had to enable 802.11g for the iPhone. [Update, 2007/07/09:] Also, while it auto-connects to access points that are either open or use standard authentication, it doesn’t seem to have any way to auto-login to hotpots (like T-Mobile) that use web-based logins, so while I’m in Starbucks, it thinks it’s connected to their WiFi hotspot, but in actuality has no DNS resolution (everything resolves to the T-Mobile hotspot sign-in page)—so basically nothing that requires internet access works in Starbucks until I manually login. Bummer. I’ll have to remove that hotspot from my list. To be fair, I don’t know of any phone that has a solution for this problem.

This week will be a good test for battery life, as I listen to a lot of podcasts and music. Anecdotally and without any real testing, the battery seemed to go low faster than I expected this weekend. [Update, 2007/07/09:] The battery life so far has been phenomenal. I listen to podcasts, use the phone, SMS, check email, and browse the web without hesitating and have yet to see a low battery. I bet that might change if I watched a lot of videos, though.

Finally, my major complaint about the iPhone is this: 8GB is pitiful. While flash memory is more expensive than hard drives, and more than 8GB would probably have made the iPhone prohibitively expensive, I can’t help but be annoyed that I had to be incredibly selective about what media I allowed to sync to my brand new toy. I have no lossless tracks in my library any more, I didn’t sync any video or photos, and I’m almost capped out on disk usage. Pitiful, though I’m sure my 60GB iPod gave me some wildly impractical expectations.

Overall: 5 out of 5 stars

First, an explanation:

Global warming is real, folks. As an Objectivist, this is practically heresy. Humans have the right to use nature (without coercing other people) as they see fit, and I totally agree with that. Natural resources have no rights—no value except what we people assign to them. The earth is not valuable in and of itself, but it is valuable as a resource for people. However, Rand was right to invoke Francis Bacon: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Reason (and thus Objectivism) tells us that we must be responsible for the consequences of our actions. Technology is not currently in a place where we can use natural resources without contributing to and causing a veritable collapse of the climate as we know it. And the science is conclusive: Our carbon emissions are causing an eventually traumatic rise in global temperatures. It’s just a fact. It’s not a moral judgment on industry or human consumption or the desire for humans to be happy. We just have to live with what happens when we run that industry, consume those goods, and pursue happiness—and pursue less harmful ways to achieve those ends.

And for those of you not persuaded by the eventual catastrophe of higher temperatures, or those who are easily persuaded by more immediate gains (like me), there’s another good reason to use CFLs: Money. You can get almost the same lighting out of an 14-watt CFL that you can with a 60-watt incandescent (what you probably use right now). I admit that all that wonderful first-semester physics knowledge is failing me to some degree these days, but I can tell you that the electric company charges you by kilowatt-hour, and the fewer watts you use, the cheaper your bill will be.

If the word “fluorescent” brings back bleak memories of hospital hallways and school cafeterias, never fear. These days, CFLs can produce the same temperature (or color) of light as CFLs. My rule of thumb (after a botched purchase of CFLs that do make my apartment look like a hospital room) is always to buy CFLs with a light temperature rating under 3000 K. And “light temperature” doesn’t mean the heat the bulb produces in this case; roughly, it means the temperature at which a heated black body would shine a certain color.

CFLs are rated to last up to ten times as long as equivalent incandescent bulbs, and while that lifetime is reduced by heat (e.g., non-ventilated light fixtures) and frequent turning on and off, I’m personally willing to live with the few hours of life shaved off in those circumstances.

The big concern about CFLs, though, is mercury. They contain anywhere from, in the best case, 2 mg and more of mercury. However, if your electricity comes from a coal plant, the output of mercury at that plant to power an incandescent far surpasses the amount of mercury in the bulb. And if you can manage to properly recycle your CFLs, you make the mercury issue (somewhat) moot.

So why not head over to your local drug store or to your favorite online shop and pick up a few?

In celebration of hatred of superstition and in solidarity with all those who call out the irrational bullshit that is god-worship, here are some of my favorite clips of him from our blessed YouTube:

In reference to ecumenism: “We need to have inoculation against plague, not the spread of a more gentle version of it.”

When Sean Hannity asks if he’s angry at God, Hitchens responds: “Not at God, of course. That would be absurd.”

When asked why a “religious nation” (the US) had to save his “secular nation” (the UK) from the Nazis in WW2, he politely reminds the questioner that America is a secular nation by law and the UK is a religious nation by law.

“Religion ends where philosophy begins just like alchemy ends where chemistry begins just like astrology ends where astronomy begins.”

In many cases, this guy says on a national stage what I believe, and with conviction and eloquence. Now, Mr. Hitchens, please do something with your hair … like not boozing it up in DC all the time.

Now finally, my favorite short clip:

“I think [religion should be] treated with ridicule and hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.” I could kiss him.

My only question: Why hasn’t somebody fucking done this already?

See it at flickr.

Ayn Rand Institute Press Release

Abortion Ban Should Have Been Overturned April 18, 2007

Irvine, CA—The Supreme Court has upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which outlaws a particular method of late-term abortion. Speaking for the majority, Justice Kennedy declared that “the law need not give abortion doctors unfettered choice in the course of their medical practice.”

“But it is not a proper function of government to dictate medical practices,” said Dr. Keith Lockitch, a resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. “If a woman chooses to have an abortion, it is for her and her doctor—not Congress or the judiciary—to decide which medical procedure is most appropriate.

“Is the ‘Partial-Birth Abortion’ ban constitutional? Not if the Constitution is meant to guarantee a woman’s right to her life, liberty and the pursuit of her happiness.”

A-fucking-men.

It would be easier to think that you’re just waiting, whoever you are, singular or plural, now or then. It would be easier to think that some fate will bring me to you. But we’re both floating in a tremendous, blind sea. It goes and has no care.

You don’t really exist; only hope and dread do, creating the image of you and your finding and your loss as if you were the other half of my puzzle piece, eternally fit. I can’t even try to care about the rest of my life when all I see is my own present desire—no, just pain, grief as if it were inevitable, fear that I’m too weak and ashamed even to look—disgust that only that fear cripples, and only that fear motivates.

It would be a mistake to think that I am strong or rich or smart or even relieved. I honestly don’t understand how some people are happy alone. I don’t need the drama any more; reality is enough of excitement and boredom, ambition and fear, joy and despair.

I’ll just keep going. Who knows if I’ll be brave enough?

All values fall on a hierarchy. In Objectivism, the self is the highest of all values, and all other values derive from the value of the self. Moral judgments can be made, then, by judging an act’s consistency with those values—and in a passive sense with those same values in others. That is, that which favors my own life (and what follows from it) and does not coerce another is good. That which is detrimental to my own life (and what follows from it) or which coerces another is bad. Seems simple. But what happens to the hierarchy?

The hierarchy of values adds weight to the morality of acts. Those acts which affect my values to the greatest degree have greater moral weight than those that affect my values to a lesser degree. You might say that the thief threatening my life with a gun is committing a more evil action than the guy threatening to punch me on my blog. Conversely, you might also say that working my ass off on a project that will land me my dream job is a better action than washing my hands after going to the bathroom. You would never say that if the thief is doing something evil, then the threatener is not—or that if working hard is good, then washing my hands is not. It’s a simple matter of weight. To what degree does some action affect my values?

This is where most people get confused, I think. They think that if two good actions are not both equally good—and that’s our show—that there must be some moral mixture. Quite the contrary. Both working hard and washing my hands are beneficial, but in this example, working hard affects my livelihood, my happiness, my productiveness to a much greater degree than that one single time I’m in the bathroom washing my hands. One is more moral than the other. Conversely, being threatened with a gun at my face and with words from afar are both wrong, but the gun at my face affects my greatest value—my life—to the greatest extent. One is more evil than the other.

Where this has really come to play in my own mind, recently, is in resolving the seeming plethora of equally evil things being done by my government. For example, it taxes and thus enslaves me (since my only other moral option is deliberate destitution), but it also erodes our basic freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism. Losing my freedom from unjustified search and seizure, my right to a fair trial, and even my right to speak in opposition to the government affect my values to a much greater degree than having some money withheld from my paycheck. Both are wrong, but one is more wrong.

An even more difficult scale on which to judge, though, is the scale that weighs the derivative values against the basic ones. For instance, is my mere life more important than my political rights to property, trial, free speech, free association, etc.? Or do the loss of those derivative values outweight—or even make impossible—a proper retainment of my life. Does losing my individual rights really make an actual life that is worth living impossible? I think so, and though it seems to contradict a straight measurement of the placement of a value on the hierarchy, I don’t think it does, and I’ve lots more thinking to do before I resolve this apparent conundrum.

My initial thought is that the hierarchy is interdependent and goal-oriented. Life is the fundamental value, but a happy life is the ultimate goal, and many other values must be accomplished to achieve the final goal. If too many of those intermediate values are threatened, the goal becomes impossible, and life becomes mere animal existence.

What are your thoughts on this? How do you weigh one evil against another?

The artists in my “100 Most Played” playlist:

• Ben Folds
• Coldplay
• Eisley (mostly chick band with a lead vocalist whose vowels make me wonder whether I’m getting a blowjob; supposedly a Christian band, but they ain’t singin’ no batshit stuff)
• Ben Folds Five
• The Little Willies (Willie cover band with Norah Jones)
• Cake
• Willie Nelson
• Las Rubias del Norte (very original group from Brooklyn that does South American covers)
• Guster (excellent, original pop)
• Rufus Wainwright (too gay to be pop; unique stuff)

Maybe you can see why I need some music recommendations. I rarely buy new CDs or digital tracks. That’s 10 artists in 100 tracks. Not a huge variety. I never shuffle. I listen in album order. Just to give me some credit, there are more than ten albums in that playlist.

I did recently discover the new Norah Jones, which I bought, an indie guy named Darren Smith, which I bought, and the year-old Guster album, of which I have never heard one single track, despite the fact that it’s one of my favorite bands. I need help. Maybe last.fm help. We’ll see.

Incidentally, I just ran into what may be my favorite track on Coldplay’s “X&Y”, “Fix You”. I love it, love it, love it. The build-up groove rocks my world, and that chorus (or whatever it is) is what a bold pop-rock climax should be.

Artists last.fm is recommending so far on very little data:

• Nick Drake (who?)
• Death Cab for Cutie (know the name)
• Johnny Cash (I’m a big fan of his old stuff; I just don’t own any of it.)
• Paul Simon (Who doesn’t know Paul Simon?)
• Rufus Wainwright (already got it)
• Radiohead (cult-fad band in the ’90s?)
• Wilco (heard them; quite good)
• Sufjan Stevens (who?)
• Iron & Wine (who?)
• Ben Folds Five (already got it)
• Modest Mouse (maybe heard the name)
• Weezer (thought they were an alt-punk band)
• The Beatles (they’ve got a moderately respectable catalog—heh)
• The Postal Service (never heard of them)
• Bob Dylan (Matthew says he sucks llama clitoris.)
• Neil Young (Didn’t he convert to Christo-batshit-ism?)
• Beck (abandoned him when he put out his acoustic album)
• The Shins (who?)
• Van Morrison (Matthew has equally bad words for him.)

I mentally prepare myself for the insults and typographical arrows that are to ensue because I do not spend a high enough proportion of minutes per day obsessing over musical nuance, every credit on every CD, and the entire catalog of popular music since 1900.

I took this from a pier right off the Embarcadero. Conditions were not so conducive to good photography.

See it at flickr.

Just a little shop on the way from the East Bay back to the hotel.

See it at flickr.

GIMP is a free software/open source alternative to a program like Adobe Photoshop, and serving as a you-pay-for-what-you-get replacement, it’s done fine for me. I’ve used it a lot, though I’d never touch one of my photos with it (I use Photoshop Lightroom for that), I’ve made many a Second Life texture with it, but here’s the number one reason I’m going to buy Photoshop: kerning. GIMP doesn’t have it. GIMP can do diddly-shit with text. And no, I’m not going to spend an afternoon building some legacy version from source on my Mac and hope to get the Freetype plugin working. Do you want to know how much I want this (and other things) to work out of the box? I’m going to spend $700 (or whatever it costs when it comes out) for Photoshop CS3. It doesn’t help, either, that while trying to make a minute markers on a clock face texture for SL, GIMP crashes 90% of the time while rotating a layer. Fuck that.