In my 35+ years of programming computers of all kinds, using many different computer languages, and developing many different kinds of applications, I have noticed a recurring phenomenon that, I believe, is a universal principle of the human psyche, which is to say, of reality.

When I’ve finished the code for a particular feature in a program, I always run the program to test it and make sure it works like it should. But something is wrong. Some error occurs. So I go back and pore over the code until I discover the error in logic that is obviously causing the problem. Then I run it again, and, lo and behold, the exact same error occurs. How can this be? I know for a certainty that the thing I fixed would cause this error, and I have fixed it, and the error continues to happen. Same error, different source of error. So I perform the same process over again. This happens so frequently, I have come to expect it. There is almost always another, completely unrelated, glitch in the logic of the program, that causes the exact same error. Often there will even be one or two more such completely unrelated bugs, all causing the same result.

This same circumstance arises in our lives. We have some recurring problem that keeps coming up. So, we get therapy or read a self-help book, or just engage in self examination, and Eureka! We discover what it is we are doing that is making this happen over and over. We change, we fix it, and we feel better. And it doesn’t make any difference. The problem, whatever it is, doesn’t go away. It continues to plague us. When this happens, it means there is some other, completely unrelated, twist in our soul that must also be untangled.

The universe is constructed of bits that can be either zero or one. At least that’s what Marvin Minsky believes. But it is an idea as old as the hills, that runs through all science and religion. Positive and negative, good and evil, male and female, yin and yang. The universe is composed of a duality of opposites, no matter what you call them. This means that the process of programming a computer, which is ultimately a manipulation of bits of information that can be either 1 or 0, is a mini version of the process of Creation itself. That’s why geeks find it so addictive. There is a God-like feeling to it.

Unfortunately, the lessons learned from programming computers don’t seem to make computer programmers any better at solving their own problems than anyone else. This is either because they don’t apply their skills to other aspects of their life, or because they do, but that only fixes one cause. There is something else being overlooked.

Posted by Harcamone

A few days ago in a Goodwill store I saw an old LP, in good condition, of “The First Family,” the perfect-pitch satire of JFK & Co. by a comic named Vaughn Meader. Meader’s act was good; he was hugely popular and successful, and made a great living. And then Kennedy was shot, and that was it for Vaughn Meader. His career was over, and he went into obscurity, never to emerge again into the public light. I almost bought that LP. It was only a buck or so.

When I got home I googled, and found the entire album on streaming audio. It had me laughing out loud. I was not expecting that; I thought its funniness might have faded over so many years. But what moved me even more than Meader’s excellent humor and perfect delivery was the belly-laughing audience, who were in stiches, having such a good time, laughing about a president they loved!!!!

This was the sound of the laughter of our people at one time.

This is very funny: Blue State Blues as Coastal Parents Battle Invasion of Dollywood Values

Posted by Harcamone

This site is so cool that it contains no information.
If you need to know what it’s about, you are not cool.

Posted by Harcamone

Arianna Huffington doesn’t delude herself that Bush won on homo-hating. She has very interesting things to say about the election.

And take a look at her blog-page, where she lays out some useful stepping stones to guide people on reasoned, critical, introspective conversations … instead of becoming hysterical.

****

Le Monde Diplomatique’s man on the ground in West Virginia tries to understand America …. and succeeds rather well, I think. Better than Jane Smiley, Ted Rall, Michael Moore, Barbara Streisand, Frank Rich, Tom Friedman, John le Carre, Madonna, Greg Palast, Katrina van den Heuvel, David Corn, Pauls Krugman and Begala, Maureen Dowd … and a lot of the other raging, hateful flapping assholes making fucking fools of themselves.

The Le Monde piece demonstrates the difference between serious, mature, respectful political observation and the kind of theatrics, bullshit and venting the American Left has been permitting itself to be satisfied with.

I can’t stop thinking about the issues raised by the Archbishop of Australia in his article. I have always been of the opinion, that, yes, we do have to put up with having a billion dollar porn industry and an abortion rate in the tens of millions, etc., etc., as the price of freedom and democracy. When real freedom is granted to a species that has been without it for millenia, for, in fact, its entire recorded history, with minor, criminal exceptions, then one must expect a lot of unfortunate choices. My hope has been that, as Miles Davis once said about kicking his heroin habit, you can get tired of anything. And, I have believed, there is no real alternative to letting free people work through their bad choices.

At the same time, as the father of four children (now grown, thank the Lord), two boys and two girls, I am not at all sanguine about having my kids raised by gansta rap, video games, internet porn, and other nefarious influences which are more or less completely beyond my control. I don’t think one has to be a crazed, fanatic, religious fundamentalist to be uncomfortable with the modern American environment in which one is forced to live and raise one’s children. So it doesn’t surprise or alarm me that perhaps many voters were influenced by “moral values” in their election choices. Good luck to them, although I doubt that there will be any perceptible changes in our society just because George Bush is president.

Unfortunately, the good Archbishop does not really go into detail about how we are to achieve “democratic personalism”. He calls it “a work of persuasion and evangelisation, more than political activism.” Fine, but that’s what we have now.

I can easily blame Osama Bin Laden, Al Quaeda, and their ilk for their tyrannical death cult, but I can not easily blame the many Muslims who are reluctant to adopt Western-style value-neutral democracy. Is there some middle way that I am missing?

Posted by Andy

I’m of two minds about secession of the blue states, but on balance (pace Nick’s buddy Lincoln) I’m inclined to let the erring sisters go in peace. We might want to start a naming contest here on the Just Opinions blog. Off the top of my head, I suggest “Leftcoastia” on the west, presided over of course by General Secretary Streisand, and in the northeast “Kerristan,” with twin capitals, like Bolivia, in Boston and New York. Along the Great Lakes a string of Free Cities–Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland et al loosely confederated in a Hanseatic-style Democratic League. Some population exchanges would of course be necessary, but they could be supervised by the United Nations, with observers from the progressive European press, and with any luck at all we could avoid unpleasantness like the communal slaughter that marred the partition of British India.

Here is a very insightful article by, of all people, the Archbishop of Australia, that cuts through the cartoonish stand-off between the caricatures of hedonistic, valueless, selfish blue-staters and ignorant, slow-witted, fundamentalist red-staters.

The Archbishop says that the current concept of secular democracy is “a failure of imagination”, to wit, “Democracy can only be what it is now: a constant series of ‘breakthroughs’ against social taboo in pursuit of the individual’s absolute autonomy.” He envisions an alternative form of democracy which he calls “democratic personalism”, which means “nothing more than democracy founded on the transcendent dignity of the human person. Transcendence directs us to our dependence on others and our dependence on God. And dependence is how we know the reality of transcendence. There is nothing undemocratic about bringing this truth into our reflections about our political arrangements. Placing democracy on this basis does not mean theocracy.”

He notes the growing number of converts to Islam in the western democracies, comparing it to the attraction that communism has had, and suggests that this is a result of “how the emptiness within secular democracy can be filled with darkness by political substitutes for religion.”

Like they say, read the whole thing. (hat tip Belmont Club)

I signed up for a free trial of msn awhile ago, because I needed to test something about hotmail for my MailSteward program. Then I forgot about it until I saw a $9.95 charge on my credit card. Oops, need to cancel my msn membership. So I launched the msn application and began looking for how to cancel my account. Half an hour later I finally found the information buried ten levels deep. Of course you can’t cancel online, you have to call an 800 number, and they tell you the info to have ready. So I called, and went through a lengthy, very annoying voice mail process, and finally got to a live human being, who asked me for a completely different set of information than I had been told I would need. So I hung up, went and got all the info again, called again, went through the whole process again, got to a live human again, who took all my info, and then told me I was at the wrong place, and he would have to transfer me. So I waited, finally got transferred, got asked for all the info again, and told them to cancel my account. “Oh, sorry to hear that, may I ask why?”, the girl sweetly asked. “I’ve spent a f***ing hour trying to figure out how to cancel this account! Just cancel it!”, I replied. After another long wait, she came back and told me my account was canceled. There are no lengths to which Microsoft will not go to steal your money.

This is a great post from John Perry Barlow. I don’t agree with him about almost anything, but this is an expression of the American spirit, and the losers (and the winners) need to hear this. Hat tip instapundit.

He’s pissed off about a lot of things, and that’s FINE. But, here is the money quote, for me:

I have a terrible admission to make. I’ve been so fanatically opposed to this administration that I have taken dark satisfaction in their failures, even though they were American failures as well. I welcomed growing indications that the situation in Iraq was deteriorating into a sump-hole of back-alley insurgency. Good economic news was bad economic news as far as I was concerned, and vice versa. I was tickled to death with Al Qaqaa and its terrorist-purloined WMDs, and not just because the name was so great. Surely all these bad tidings would eventually add up to an indictment that would convict Bush in the eyes of the American people and they would rouse themselves from Fox-hypnosis and ‘possum sleep and vote for change.

But it didn’t turn out that way. While I still believe that half of America is hallucinating on hot religion and bad TV, I can’t say I have been any too sane, having been delivered into a condition where I took comfort in the successes of our enemies and frowned at news of economic recovery. Despite my own financial anxieties, and those of all around me, I have been so zealous that my own well-being was secondary in importance to the political damage bad times might do the Bush administration. Now that’s hallucination. And I’m sorry.