Ah, yes, the old argumentum ad utopium. "Your (non-authoritarian) idea must produce utopia, if it falls short, then the default is my (authoritarian) solution, which needs to pass no tests."
Politicians love using this fallacy because people seem to fall for it easily and it funnels power and influence right into their laps. If a little old lady in Cincinatti gets scammed, why, raise the alarums, marshal the forces, create an agency, put bureaucrats to work, find some culprits, put them in jail for a while, pat ourselves on the back, make speeches, get elected again next time.
Never mind that the effort has cost the taxpayers a lot of money and has actually enhanced the playing field for the scammers (as I described earlier). It gave power to the politician, some people with mediocre abilities found new, good paying jobs in a bureaucracy, some cops got pulled off dangerous duty catching armed criminals and got reassigned to work on safe, non-violent cases. It's a win-win-win!
Oh, except for the taxpayer who quietly just took another small hit. And will keep taking more and more small hits as the process continues because the problem keeps getting worse as more and more people become gullible, act stupidly, and ask to be "protected" by their nannies, The Government.
-- quote -- In the 1950's, there were bunco squads, or sections of the police force organized to find common fraud, such as fortune tellers, rigged games, confidence swindles, and the like. I think we could use more of those today - law enforcement devoted to tracking down leads on swindlers for the public interest. -- end quote --
I couldn't disagree more. I believe that the "public interest" is best served when people generally have an attitude of watchful, careful skepticism; enlisting squads of people to go weed out things that challenge people's critical thinking abilities has the effect of favoring a population of gullible dullards -- which is what we are ever more becoming.
With a gullible population, the scammers will have a ripe field from which to reap the profits from ever-newly devised games, and the bunco squads will always be playing catch-up, moving in after the damage is done. With a skeptical population, the field will be barren and the scammers will have to go somewhere else to make a living.
But, then again, as long as we have religion, the mother of all scams, it's going to be impossible to make much progress toward skepticism.
Did I mention that if you'll just send me $5 I'll make an angel come and sit on your shoulder? It's true, and you'll have better orgasms too!
When a writer doesn't appear to know that the past tense of "mislead" is "misled", I tend to take a jaundiced view of the rest of what is said. It may all be terribly astute, but I'll take my chances on ignoring it and waiting to see the opinions echoed by someone I can respect.
They may not listen to or read what you way, but they do pay attention to the gist of what's coming at them. If they start getting deluged with calls pro or con something, or if the messages coming in from their website are similarly tilted, they have staffers who tally this sort of thing, and the message goes back to the senator or rep that the natives are restless and they need to take note.
I highly recommend the system on http://downsizedc.org/ for this. They have all sorts of campaigns ongoing, and this FISA thing is currently one of them. You can pick your campaign, then it takes you to a page describing the issue and setting it up so you can send messages through the websites of your two senators and one representative with just one click. Their system does all the messy work of going to their sites and sending the messages.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of the downsizedc.org system is in their track record. They have several times stopped legislation that was initially thought by beltway insiders to be a slam-dunk. They're making a difference, and the more people that use them, the more difference they'll make.
It's bizarre to live in a world where millions of people go gaga about guys who wear funny hats, paying attention to what they say as if it were important. If everybody would just ignore this Ratzinger fellow, none of this would be happening.
2. A negative result in science can be as important as a positive one. If we're the only intelligent life in this part of the galaxy, it might be crucial to know why. An anthropologist I spoke with a couple of months ago surmised that our current evolutionary adventure with intelligence is likely to demonstrate soon that it is a dead end. We're rapidly approaching a collision between the vestigial brain function requiring religion (apparently a necessary byproduct of the evolution of the intelligence attribute) and the ecological demands that require us to function rationally -- the antithesis of religion. He believes that, despite the best efforts of those who are aware of the problem, there will be no way to disempower the religion impulse in time to head of the catastrophe that is sure to result from its continued existence.
If he's right, then the absence of evidence for other intelligent life is, so to speak, a no-brainer.
That's not to say that it isn't worth striving to avert the catastrophe. After all, what do we have to lose! With that in mind, I've made it my life hobby to constantly look for and implement ways to subvert religion. Sadly, I can't report much success so far, but since I have nothing better to do I'll just keep trying anyway.
I almost never see anyone take note of what I deem to be the only to-date achievement of SETI -- defining a larger and larger region of space where it is known that there are no radio signals indicating intelligent life. Everyone seems to be focused on the expectation -- seemingly bordering on the religious -- that ET life will be found because it just HAS to be there.
I would note that there is no fundamental reason for this axiomatic proposition, and it makes much more sense simply go with the data rather than stubbornly cling to a belief for which there is so far not a shred of evidence -- much as the creationists do with regard to geology and archaelogy, I would note.
Maybe sometimes some evidence will appear for ET life. That will be interesting, if so. In the meantime, we have a rapidly growing contrarian body of evidence, so we should accept as our tentative conclusion that we are, in fact, the only life in the universe.
I don't think the problem lies so much with the adversarial system as with another dynamic you mention -- the link between the political success of the District Attorney's office and its record of successful prosecutions. "Success" is thus not defined in parallel with "justice" but rather with court victories.
I see a further linkage here that has to do with general function of the whole "public safety" establishment. Most people, I would guess the overwhelming majority, believe that the function of the police is to protect them from criminals. They are thus dismayed, indignant and often irate when they are victims of a crime and the police appear not to meet their expectations. It's at that point that they learn the truth -- that the real job of the police and the prosecuting attorney isn't to protect them individually but to protect "the public".
Put another way, the job of the public safety establishment is to do whatever is necessary to create the public perception that it is being protected -- such that when the next election rolls around this will be translated into the votes necessary to assure the re-election of the incumbents. Is Joe Prosecutor going to get re-elected if the public perceives him as ineffective when his opponent starts trotting out some statistics showing how few convictions he's gotten? Probably not! Joe P. knows this, so he does what he has to do, and if one or a dozen or a hundred innocent people go to the slammer on account of tainted evidence, well, that's just collateral damage in his effort. If the appeals courts fix it later on, that's nice because it doesn't count against the statistics for his next election campaign.
A solution to the problem would be if our whole legal system could be transformed from one that emphasizes laws and law enforcement into one that emphasizes torts and restitution. Of course that's not going to any time happen soon because that would imply throwing out all the laws that pertain to actions for which there are no demonstrable victims. Well, unless you want to count as "victims" those who get offended by the actions others take that they disapprove of. Such as ingesting drugs or paying for or receiving payment for sexual services or presenting themselves in public without covering those parts of their bodies demanded by the current religious majority.
It's thus worthwhile to ponder the price we all pay for allowing the politicians to pander in this way. In taxes to support the wasted effort and the prisons to provide room and board for those incarcerated, in lost privacy and freedom, and certainly not least in the loss of personal protection against the actions of those who truly do try to do us harm from time to time.
of why centralized government funding of things is generally a bad idea.
When the Federal government becomes the source of significant funding for education, it also automatically becomes a magnet for those who wish to impose their will on the educational system -- whether related to the educational process or not.
It works everywhere. For example, states have to bow to the Federal government in the design of their roads and driver's licenses and what-have-you because otherwise they risk losing the rebate of tax money that was originally partially collected from their state -- in the form of Federal highway funds.
The collapse of the USSR demonstrated the inherent inability of highly centralized, heavy-handed bureaucracies to cope with the extremely varied and variable conditions of the real world. It's somewhat baffling to see that the US public has apparently not gotten that lesson at all and continues to support the trend toward emulating the Soviet mistakes.
Then again, oh wait, I get it. It's not baffling at all. The US public was mostly "educated" in the system of government-run schools, which feeds children a steady diet of propaganda so that by the time they grow up they're convinced that Big Brother Knows Best and they should Sit Down and Shut Up.
Sad to see how the "land of the free and the home of the brave" has become the "land of the cowardly slaves."
I didn't and don't dispute the point that electing someone outside the network of corporate-approved candidates is technically possible. My point was and is that it is, as a practical matter, highly unlikely -- to the point where the odds of success make it hardly worth the bother of trying.
I do perhaps dispute the point that a system which rigs the electoral process to the point it has now reached in the U.S. can legitimately lay claim to the definition of a "democracy" however.
Of course, nearly all countries call themselves "democracies" inasmuch as it has become something of a mandatory buzzword for global acceptance. Illustrative example: the now-defunct "German Democratic Republic".
While the USA will no doubt go on calling itself a "democracy" for time immemorial (even though it never really was -- it was structured as a constitutional republic, with only some democratic elements thrown in), a careful observer will look beyond the labels and decide independently what is and isn't a "democracy" in fact.
Voting might help too. If enough people do it.... That's of course true -- theoretically. But the practical matter is that with the electoral system rigged as it is, the chances of someone with a vision of America that was outside the canonical one promoted by Corporate America actually being elected are, for all intents and purposes, zero.
Elections rigged? Yes, sorry, they are -- unbeknownst to the vast majority of the sheep who graze only in the pastures provided them by the corporate news giants. A recent, egregious example is the "Bi-partisan Campaign Reform Act", the constitutionality of which has now been ratified by a slim majority of the Supreme Court. Among other things, it provides that if, within 90 days of a Federal election, you go on a forum such as this and write something for or against a candidate, you will be guilty of a Federal felony and, should you be caught, will be jailed and fined.
The "mainstream press", meanwhile, is not subject at all to this law -- surprise, surprise. So they can pour carloads of ink onto paper promoting the Demopublicans who pass laws favoring them without having to worry about being blindsided by us "little people" who might sneak in someone who was not a part of the game. That's why they called it "bi-partisan". Not "tri-partisan" or "multi-partisan". Get it?
They take the position that since the structure for people to enter the political game (elections) is, as you say, totally rigged, there's no point in expending effort in it. Instead, they have set up a system for steadily, incrementally hammering away at the quasi-royalty in power to bring about change.
Interestingly, it seems to be working so far, and the bigger they get the more it's working.
Re:Just so we don't call it "science"
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I agree with your narrowing of the germ theory hypothesis to make it falsifiable, but the same can be done with SETI:
This speaks precisely to my point: While SETI could be made falsifiable, it hasn't been. And, to my knowledge, no one involved in the SETI effort has indicated any interest in doing so.
SETI proponents could establish a hypothesis based on the usual mathematical/statistical projections made famous by Carl Sagan. Into their "billions and billions" number they could then plug in the capabilities of their equipment, its expanding sphere of vision based on the speed of light, and they could then come up with a date or a time when, if no evidence of intelligent life were found, the hypothesis would be declared false and they would either give up the search entirely or scale it back to reflect its poor likelihood of returning a positive result.
I'm touching here on a related idea -- that falsifiability need not necessarily be an all-or-nothing proposition. Many things are possible but unlikely, and it just makes sense to put only small efforts into the less likely things and concentrate our efforts on the more likely. Which is why -- to use my prior example -- we leave the search for Nessie and Yeti to the kooks wearing tin-foil hats.
The fact that SETI proponent show no interest in declaring limits to their quest is what tells me it's religion, not science. No matter how much negative confirmatory data comes in, they will never give up. Just the same as with Creationists and those who believe there is an invisible man living in the sky. They all sing the same song: "Some day you'll see I'm right!"
Meanwhile, the rest of us need to get on with our lives. The longer SETI goes, the more its proponents deserve to be ignored.
Re:Just so we don't call it "science"
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Whether he did or not, I don't know, but a scientific way for Leeuwenhoek to have proceeded would have been to set a limit to his experiment such that after a certain depth or intensity of investigation he would call it quits and declare the hypothesis false.
He might have, for example, recognized the limitations of the microscopes he was working with as compared with the size of organisms his hypothesis called for, and this would have allowed him to propose a falsifiability test: "If microscopes are developed that allow me to see objects of a size such-and-such and I still don't see any micro-organisms after looking at blood (and whatever other organs and tissues he might propose), my hypothesis was false."
Looking at it after the fact, it's easy to justify what might have been a non-falsifiable experiment. But to get a true picture you have to ask, "What if the germ theory had been false? What if it had turned out that disease was really caused by humors, as was the belief at the time? Would it make sense for Leeuwenhoek's successors to still be looking vainly through microscopes in the 21st century trying to find germs?"
That picture begins to resemble some of the pseudo-science nonsense we see being practiced today, such as people still looking for the Loch Ness monster or the Yeti -- despite a complete lack of confirming evidence. It's not science, it's religion. Or fantasy, or whatever you want to call it.
Re:Just so we don't call it "science"
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My hypothesis: There never was a mystical man named "Jesus" who did all the stuff that's claimed in the Bible, and he never will return in the sky as is commonly believed. This is falsifiable simply by having Jesus show up in the sky, so we should spend millions of tax dollars to set up a global network of "Jesus sensors" to make sure we don't miss the event -- you know, in case he happens to make his re-entry in the Amazon jungle or the Gobi Desert or somewhere in Antartica.
Since it meets your definition of "proceeding inductively", we can call this "Jesus Science" then, and we'll all thus be so impressed. We can even teach it in the public schools!
Just so we don't call it "science"
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SETI is one of those things that, because it involves the use of technology, gets mistakenly called "science". It isn't. In science, hypotheses are falsifiable; SETI isn't. If you ask a SETI-ist what the threshold of negative data is that will cause him to give up, he'll tell you there is no threshold. As long as no positive data is achieved, it's a quest without an end.
You can apply exactly the same logic to religion. There is zero evidence to support the hypothesis that there is an invisible man living in the sky who created everything, yet religion marches onward as if "God" or "Allah" or "Jahweh" or whatever existed. No amount of lack of evidence will ever convince them to stop believing there is such a magical person, and the only reason they don't apply technology to look for him is that they've cleverly made it unnecessary by definition.
The construction of silly, unfalsifiable hypotheses like this is really limited only by the imagination. For example, maybe humans are the genetic product of UFO aliens who interbred long ago with chimpanzees while they were here on a visit and got horny. Nobody's ever found any crashed UFOs to support the notion, but, hey, imagine what a splash it would make if one were found! We should be spending millions of dollars running around digging in the dirt looking for crashed UFO relics!
And the best of the fraudsters do note it. They know what I had to find out the hard way, that the US Attorney's office will not prosecute anything less than about $25,000 (the exact amount varies from district to district).
Several years ago, I got stuck with some bogus cashier's checks. I think the amount was around $10k. I went to the FBI, I went to the Secret Service, I went to the Postal Inspector. They all work for the same Federal Prosecutor, and they all broke the same news, that they couldn't afford to waste their time investigating because even if they brought the culprit in he would never be charged. "The AG's office has to allocate its time" was how it was explained to me.
So, as I say, I'm pretty sure the best of the on-line scammers are onto this, and they carefully craft their hits to be less than, say, $20,000. It is, literally, a "get-out-of-jail-free" card!
The Democrats recently elected to Congress have already showed their spinelessness. Just last week they voted to give the President sweeping new powers for warrantless spying on citizens -- just because he asked for it.
The thing is, hoping for representative in Congress with spine is a bit like, well, maybe hoping for a non-Catholic Pope. I don't know how Ron Paul happened, we can call him the exception that proves the rule, I guess, because other than him there isn't a backbone anywhere in the bunch.
But there's a good side to that. Spinelessness implies that they can be influenced. If they start hearing from enough constituents that white needs to be black, you can bet they'll be in there tomorrow introducing a bill to change the names of the colors. So, if you're really fed up and if you really want to change things, the way to do it is to get in there and start making noise. Hand-wringing on forums won't do it, we need deluges of messages landing on the website email handlers of the Congressweasels.
Fortunately, there's an easy way I've found to do that. Over at http://downsizedc.org/> they have a tool you can use to send a personal message about all these worrisome topics. You just put in your zip code, and it will automatically route your messages to the two senators and the one congressman who represents you. And using the tool doesn't automatically line you up for a bunch of spam, either, I can attest to that. Although you can, optionally, sign up for their own email alerts, which I've found to be useful.
I used to think that if I continuously yammered to Congress about stuff, they'd all just put me on their "bothersome twit" list, and everything I sent would be ignored. But that ain't how it works. The squeaky wheels really do get greased! For evidence, you can look down through the list of campaigns they've been pushing and see how many have success stamps on them. It's all on account of the growing group of bothersome twits like me!
It's nice to see a few people getting their underwear in a bundle over this. I only wish more people had done so last year in time to prevent Congress from passing the Mother of All Fascist Laws, S. 3930. This law gave the President -- now and in the future -- the authority to "disappear" and torture anyone at any time for no reason other than that a group of the President's hand-picked friends think it's a good thing to do. Government thugs can slip into your home in the middle of the night, take you away, and no one will ever hear from you or know of your whereabouts again. Remember Argentina in the 1980s? Now you're getting the picture.
Amazingly, the Congressmorons even now will tell you that that isn't what the law says. But then how would they know? They never read the bill before they voted for it. They never read any bills any more before they vote for them.
But, if you have a strong stomach you can go read the law yourself and see. At first glance it does indeed appear to be harmless, but if you wade into the fine print way back at the end you'll find little gotchas that work around the harmless part to make the law, in effect, the complete usurpation of Constitutional government.
So the stuff about spy satellites is just, at this point, same-ol-same-ol. If there's any hope at all to return to the country to what we once had before "the terrorists" manipulated Congress to transform it into what they wanted, it's to hammer at Congress to repeal this bad law. I do this regularly, using the handy-dandy tool they have at http://action.downsizedc.org/wyc.php?cid=58/.
>> The police say they lack discretion because Regal Cinemas chose to prosecute...
So Regal Cinemas has now overtaken the job of Prosecuting Attorney in that jurisdiction? Where I live, it's only the Prosecuting Attorney that has the authority to decide which criminal cases may be taken to trial. You can be victimized up one side and down the other, but if the PA doesn't think there's a winnable case against the alleged perp, it won't go to trial.
Same applies regarding the budget allocation. If money is tight and your case is less politically urgent than some others, your case gets dropped so the others can move forward.
Which leads to what is probably the real story here: Regal Cinemas has political clout.
I agree with your sentiment as it applies to the commenting on this implementation issue. It's strictly window dressing to give people a place to let off steam before they do whatever they want to do.
However, there is another avenue where making your voice heard does make a difference, and that's in Congress. The core of this problem isn't in the implementation of the REAL ID Act, it's in the passage of it. The law needs to be repealed. There is a lot of momentum building for doing this, and if you add your voice to that chorus there's a good chance of getting it done.
This is one of many issues being championed at Downsize DC, and they have a handy, no-fuss web tool you can use to send a message to all of your congressional delegation telling them you want their action on this. They've only been around for a few years, but they've already compiled an impressive track record of getting bad legislation thrown out and good legislation passed. Using their system is not just pissing in the wind, IOW.
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Ah, yes, the old argumentum ad utopium. "Your (non-authoritarian) idea must produce utopia, if it falls short, then the default is my (authoritarian) solution, which needs to pass no tests."
Politicians love using this fallacy because people seem to fall for it easily and it funnels power and influence right into their laps. If a little old lady in Cincinatti gets scammed, why, raise the alarums, marshal the forces, create an agency, put bureaucrats to work, find some culprits, put them in jail for a while, pat ourselves on the back, make speeches, get elected again next time.
Never mind that the effort has cost the taxpayers a lot of money and has actually enhanced the playing field for the scammers (as I described earlier). It gave power to the politician, some people with mediocre abilities found new, good paying jobs in a bureaucracy, some cops got pulled off dangerous duty catching armed criminals and got reassigned to work on safe, non-violent cases. It's a win-win-win!
Oh, except for the taxpayer who quietly just took another small hit. And will keep taking more and more small hits as the process continues because the problem keeps getting worse as more and more people become gullible, act stupidly, and ask to be "protected" by their nannies, The Government.
-- quote -- In the 1950's, there were bunco squads, or sections of the police force organized to find common fraud, such as fortune tellers, rigged games, confidence swindles, and the like. I think we could use more of those today - law enforcement devoted to tracking down leads on swindlers for the public interest. -- end quote --
I couldn't disagree more. I believe that the "public interest" is best served when people generally have an attitude of watchful, careful skepticism; enlisting squads of people to go weed out things that challenge people's critical thinking abilities has the effect of favoring a population of gullible dullards -- which is what we are ever more becoming.
With a gullible population, the scammers will have a ripe field from which to reap the profits from ever-newly devised games, and the bunco squads will always be playing catch-up, moving in after the damage is done. With a skeptical population, the field will be barren and the scammers will have to go somewhere else to make a living.
But, then again, as long as we have religion, the mother of all scams, it's going to be impossible to make much progress toward skepticism.
Did I mention that if you'll just send me $5 I'll make an angel come and sit on your shoulder? It's true, and you'll have better orgasms too!
Fatwa? Nah, the Mormons prefer your basic massacre. Get in there, get the job done, none of this pussyfooting around.
Radar detector reports to GPS reports to cell phone reports to website. All hands-free and completely without driver participation or distraction.
When a writer doesn't appear to know that the past tense of "mislead" is "misled", I tend to take a jaundiced view of the rest of what is said. It may all be terribly astute, but I'll take my chances on ignoring it and waiting to see the opinions echoed by someone I can respect.
They may not listen to or read what you way, but they do pay attention to the gist of what's coming at them. If they start getting deluged with calls pro or con something, or if the messages coming in from their website are similarly tilted, they have staffers who tally this sort of thing, and the message goes back to the senator or rep that the natives are restless and they need to take note.
I highly recommend the system on http://downsizedc.org/ for this. They have all sorts of campaigns ongoing, and this FISA thing is currently one of them. You can pick your campaign, then it takes you to a page describing the issue and setting it up so you can send messages through the websites of your two senators and one representative with just one click. Their system does all the messy work of going to their sites and sending the messages.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of the downsizedc.org system is in their track record. They have several times stopped legislation that was initially thought by beltway insiders to be a slam-dunk. They're making a difference, and the more people that use them, the more difference they'll make.
I loved this! Says it all!
It's bizarre to live in a world where millions of people go gaga about guys who wear funny hats, paying attention to what they say as if it were important. If everybody would just ignore this Ratzinger fellow, none of this would be happening.
An anthropologist I spoke with a couple of months ago surmised that our current evolutionary adventure with intelligence is likely to demonstrate soon that it is a dead end. We're rapidly approaching a collision between the vestigial brain function requiring religion (apparently a necessary byproduct of the evolution of the intelligence attribute) and the ecological demands that require us to function rationally -- the antithesis of religion. He believes that, despite the best efforts of those who are aware of the problem, there will be no way to disempower the religion impulse in time to head of the catastrophe that is sure to result from its continued existence.
If he's right, then the absence of evidence for other intelligent life is, so to speak, a no-brainer.
That's not to say that it isn't worth striving to avert the catastrophe. After all, what do we have to lose! With that in mind, I've made it my life hobby to constantly look for and implement ways to subvert religion. Sadly, I can't report much success so far, but since I have nothing better to do I'll just keep trying anyway.
I almost never see anyone take note of what I deem to be the only to-date achievement of SETI -- defining a larger and larger region of space where it is known that there are no radio signals indicating intelligent life. Everyone seems to be focused on the expectation -- seemingly bordering on the religious -- that ET life will be found because it just HAS to be there.
I would note that there is no fundamental reason for this axiomatic proposition, and it makes much more sense simply go with the data rather than stubbornly cling to a belief for which there is so far not a shred of evidence -- much as the creationists do with regard to geology and archaelogy, I would note.
Maybe sometimes some evidence will appear for ET life. That will be interesting, if so. In the meantime, we have a rapidly growing contrarian body of evidence, so we should accept as our tentative conclusion that we are, in fact, the only life in the universe.
I don't think the problem lies so much with the adversarial system as with another dynamic you mention -- the link between the political success of the District Attorney's office and its record of successful prosecutions. "Success" is thus not defined in parallel with "justice" but rather with court victories.
I see a further linkage here that has to do with general function of the whole "public safety" establishment. Most people, I would guess the overwhelming majority, believe that the function of the police is to protect them from criminals. They are thus dismayed, indignant and often irate when they are victims of a crime and the police appear not to meet their expectations. It's at that point that they learn the truth -- that the real job of the police and the prosecuting attorney isn't to protect them individually but to protect "the public".
Put another way, the job of the public safety establishment is to do whatever is necessary to create the public perception that it is being protected -- such that when the next election rolls around this will be translated into the votes necessary to assure the re-election of the incumbents. Is Joe Prosecutor going to get re-elected if the public perceives him as ineffective when his opponent starts trotting out some statistics showing how few convictions he's gotten? Probably not! Joe P. knows this, so he does what he has to do, and if one or a dozen or a hundred innocent people go to the slammer on account of tainted evidence, well, that's just collateral damage in his effort. If the appeals courts fix it later on, that's nice because it doesn't count against the statistics for his next election campaign.
A solution to the problem would be if our whole legal system could be transformed from one that emphasizes laws and law enforcement into one that emphasizes torts and restitution. Of course that's not going to any time happen soon because that would imply throwing out all the laws that pertain to actions for which there are no demonstrable victims. Well, unless you want to count as "victims" those who get offended by the actions others take that they disapprove of. Such as ingesting drugs or paying for or receiving payment for sexual services or presenting themselves in public without covering those parts of their bodies demanded by the current religious majority.
It's thus worthwhile to ponder the price we all pay for allowing the politicians to pander in this way. In taxes to support the wasted effort and the prisons to provide room and board for those incarcerated, in lost privacy and freedom, and certainly not least in the loss of personal protection against the actions of those who truly do try to do us harm from time to time.
of why centralized government funding of things is generally a bad idea.
When the Federal government becomes the source of significant funding for education, it also automatically becomes a magnet for those who wish to impose their will on the educational system -- whether related to the educational process or not.
It works everywhere. For example, states have to bow to the Federal government in the design of their roads and driver's licenses and what-have-you because otherwise they risk losing the rebate of tax money that was originally partially collected from their state -- in the form of Federal highway funds.
The collapse of the USSR demonstrated the inherent inability of highly centralized, heavy-handed bureaucracies to cope with the extremely varied and variable conditions of the real world. It's somewhat baffling to see that the US public has apparently not gotten that lesson at all and continues to support the trend toward emulating the Soviet mistakes.
Then again, oh wait, I get it. It's not baffling at all. The US public was mostly "educated" in the system of government-run schools, which feeds children a steady diet of propaganda so that by the time they grow up they're convinced that Big Brother Knows Best and they should Sit Down and Shut Up.
Sad to see how the "land of the free and the home of the brave" has become the "land of the cowardly slaves."
I didn't and don't dispute the point that electing someone outside the network of corporate-approved candidates is technically possible. My point was and is that it is, as a practical matter, highly unlikely -- to the point where the odds of success make it hardly worth the bother of trying.
I do perhaps dispute the point that a system which rigs the electoral process to the point it has now reached in the U.S. can legitimately lay claim to the definition of a "democracy" however.
Of course, nearly all countries call themselves "democracies" inasmuch as it has become something of a mandatory buzzword for global acceptance. Illustrative example: the now-defunct "German Democratic Republic".
While the USA will no doubt go on calling itself a "democracy" for time immemorial (even though it never really was -- it was structured as a constitutional republic, with only some democratic elements thrown in), a careful observer will look beyond the labels and decide independently what is and isn't a "democracy" in fact.
Elections rigged? Yes, sorry, they are -- unbeknownst to the vast majority of the sheep who graze only in the pastures provided them by the corporate news giants. A recent, egregious example is the "Bi-partisan Campaign Reform Act", the constitutionality of which has now been ratified by a slim majority of the Supreme Court. Among other things, it provides that if, within 90 days of a Federal election, you go on a forum such as this and write something for or against a candidate, you will be guilty of a Federal felony and, should you be caught, will be jailed and fined.
The "mainstream press", meanwhile, is not subject at all to this law -- surprise, surprise. So they can pour carloads of ink onto paper promoting the Demopublicans who pass laws favoring them without having to worry about being blindsided by us "little people" who might sneak in someone who was not a part of the game. That's why they called it "bi-partisan". Not "tri-partisan" or "multi-partisan". Get it?
They take the position that since the structure for people to enter the political game (elections) is, as you say, totally rigged, there's no point in expending effort in it. Instead, they have set up a system for steadily, incrementally hammering away at the quasi-royalty in power to bring about change.
Interestingly, it seems to be working so far, and the bigger they get the more it's working.
This speaks precisely to my point: While SETI could be made falsifiable, it hasn't been. And, to my knowledge, no one involved in the SETI effort has indicated any interest in doing so.
SETI proponents could establish a hypothesis based on the usual mathematical/statistical projections made famous by Carl Sagan. Into their "billions and billions" number they could then plug in the capabilities of their equipment, its expanding sphere of vision based on the speed of light, and they could then come up with a date or a time when, if no evidence of intelligent life were found, the hypothesis would be declared false and they would either give up the search entirely or scale it back to reflect its poor likelihood of returning a positive result.
I'm touching here on a related idea -- that falsifiability need not necessarily be an all-or-nothing proposition. Many things are possible but unlikely, and it just makes sense to put only small efforts into the less likely things and concentrate our efforts on the more likely. Which is why -- to use my prior example -- we leave the search for Nessie and Yeti to the kooks wearing tin-foil hats.
The fact that SETI proponent show no interest in declaring limits to their quest is what tells me it's religion, not science. No matter how much negative confirmatory data comes in, they will never give up. Just the same as with Creationists and those who believe there is an invisible man living in the sky. They all sing the same song: "Some day you'll see I'm right!"
Meanwhile, the rest of us need to get on with our lives. The longer SETI goes, the more its proponents deserve to be ignored.
Whether he did or not, I don't know, but a scientific way for Leeuwenhoek to have proceeded would have been to set a limit to his experiment such that after a certain depth or intensity of investigation he would call it quits and declare the hypothesis false.
He might have, for example, recognized the limitations of the microscopes he was working with as compared with the size of organisms his hypothesis called for, and this would have allowed him to propose a falsifiability test: "If microscopes are developed that allow me to see objects of a size such-and-such and I still don't see any micro-organisms after looking at blood (and whatever other organs and tissues he might propose), my hypothesis was false."
Looking at it after the fact, it's easy to justify what might have been a non-falsifiable experiment. But to get a true picture you have to ask, "What if the germ theory had been false? What if it had turned out that disease was really caused by humors, as was the belief at the time? Would it make sense for Leeuwenhoek's successors to still be looking vainly through microscopes in the 21st century trying to find germs?"
That picture begins to resemble some of the pseudo-science nonsense we see being practiced today, such as people still looking for the Loch Ness monster or the Yeti -- despite a complete lack of confirming evidence. It's not science, it's religion. Or fantasy, or whatever you want to call it.
My hypothesis: There never was a mystical man named "Jesus" who did all the stuff that's claimed in the Bible, and he never will return in the sky as is commonly believed. This is falsifiable simply by having Jesus show up in the sky, so we should spend millions of tax dollars to set up a global network of "Jesus sensors" to make sure we don't miss the event -- you know, in case he happens to make his re-entry in the Amazon jungle or the Gobi Desert or somewhere in Antartica.
Since it meets your definition of "proceeding inductively", we can call this "Jesus Science" then, and we'll all thus be so impressed. We can even teach it in the public schools!
You can apply exactly the same logic to religion. There is zero evidence to support the hypothesis that there is an invisible man living in the sky who created everything, yet religion marches onward as if "God" or "Allah" or "Jahweh" or whatever existed. No amount of lack of evidence will ever convince them to stop believing there is such a magical person, and the only reason they don't apply technology to look for him is that they've cleverly made it unnecessary by definition.
The construction of silly, unfalsifiable hypotheses like this is really limited only by the imagination. For example, maybe humans are the genetic product of UFO aliens who interbred long ago with chimpanzees while they were here on a visit and got horny. Nobody's ever found any crashed UFOs to support the notion, but, hey, imagine what a splash it would make if one were found! We should be spending millions of dollars running around digging in the dirt looking for crashed UFO relics!
Same difference, get it?
As the bumper sticker says, "An armed society is a polite society."
Several years ago, I got stuck with some bogus cashier's checks. I think the amount was around $10k. I went to the FBI, I went to the Secret Service, I went to the Postal Inspector. They all work for the same Federal Prosecutor, and they all broke the same news, that they couldn't afford to waste their time investigating because even if they brought the culprit in he would never be charged. "The AG's office has to allocate its time" was how it was explained to me.
Apparently the Feds are too busy prosecuting sick and dying invalids for smoking state-legal marijuana after they're brought in by DEA thugs http://www.huffingtonpost.com/reena-szczenpanski/m ultiagency-drug-task-fo_b_62401.html to be bothered with protecting the property stolen from nobodies like me.
So, as I say, I'm pretty sure the best of the on-line scammers are onto this, and they carefully craft their hits to be less than, say, $20,000. It is, literally, a "get-out-of-jail-free" card!
The Democrats recently elected to Congress have already showed their spinelessness. Just last week they voted to give the President sweeping new powers for warrantless spying on citizens -- just because he asked for it.
The thing is, hoping for representative in Congress with spine is a bit like, well, maybe hoping for a non-Catholic Pope. I don't know how Ron Paul happened, we can call him the exception that proves the rule, I guess, because other than him there isn't a backbone anywhere in the bunch.
But there's a good side to that. Spinelessness implies that they can be influenced. If they start hearing from enough constituents that white needs to be black, you can bet they'll be in there tomorrow introducing a bill to change the names of the colors. So, if you're really fed up and if you really want to change things, the way to do it is to get in there and start making noise. Hand-wringing on forums won't do it, we need deluges of messages landing on the website email handlers of the Congressweasels.
Fortunately, there's an easy way I've found to do that. Over at http://downsizedc.org/> they have a tool you can use to send a personal message about all these worrisome topics. You just put in your zip code, and it will automatically route your messages to the two senators and the one congressman who represents you. And using the tool doesn't automatically line you up for a bunch of spam, either, I can attest to that. Although you can, optionally, sign up for their own email alerts, which I've found to be useful.
I used to think that if I continuously yammered to Congress about stuff, they'd all just put me on their "bothersome twit" list, and everything I sent would be ignored. But that ain't how it works. The squeaky wheels really do get greased! For evidence, you can look down through the list of campaigns they've been pushing and see how many have success stamps on them. It's all on account of the growing group of bothersome twits like me!
Amazingly, the Congressmorons even now will tell you that that isn't what the law says. But then how would they know? They never read the bill before they voted for it. They never read any bills any more before they vote for them.
But, if you have a strong stomach you can go read the law yourself and see. At first glance it does indeed appear to be harmless, but if you wade into the fine print way back at the end you'll find little gotchas that work around the harmless part to make the law, in effect, the complete usurpation of Constitutional government.
So the stuff about spy satellites is just, at this point, same-ol-same-ol. If there's any hope at all to return to the country to what we once had before "the terrorists" manipulated Congress to transform it into what they wanted, it's to hammer at Congress to repeal this bad law. I do this regularly, using the handy-dandy tool they have at http://action.downsizedc.org/wyc.php?cid=58/.
>> The police say they lack discretion because Regal Cinemas chose to prosecute ...
So Regal Cinemas has now overtaken the job of Prosecuting Attorney in that jurisdiction? Where I live, it's only the Prosecuting Attorney that has the authority to decide which criminal cases may be taken to trial. You can be victimized up one side and down the other, but if the PA doesn't think there's a winnable case against the alleged perp, it won't go to trial.
Same applies regarding the budget allocation. If money is tight and your case is less politically urgent than some others, your case gets dropped so the others can move forward.
Which leads to what is probably the real story here: Regal Cinemas has political clout.
I agree with your sentiment as it applies to the commenting on this implementation issue. It's strictly window dressing to give people a place to let off steam before they do whatever they want to do.
However, there is another avenue where making your voice heard does make a difference, and that's in Congress. The core of this problem isn't in the implementation of the REAL ID Act, it's in the passage of it. The law needs to be repealed. There is a lot of momentum building for doing this, and if you add your voice to that chorus there's a good chance of getting it done.
This is one of many issues being championed at Downsize DC, and they have a handy, no-fuss web tool you can use to send a message to all of your congressional delegation telling them you want their action on this. They've only been around for a few years, but they've already compiled an impressive track record of getting bad legislation thrown out and good legislation passed. Using their system is not just pissing in the wind, IOW.