I See What You Did There

After a brief bit of wikiwandering, I ended up at Aristotle discussing the fallacy now known as “begging the question.”  I was minding my own business polishing my brains and then I tripped over a major reason our country is going down the toilet:  Little children are not reading Aristotle.

That is to say, our children are not being trained in rigorous logical thought, and this enables bad arguments based on fallacious reasoning to prevail – not only in private conversation but also in public discourse and (very unfortunately) in the making of public policy!  I know old dead white men are horribly out of fashion, and so is commentary on what they had to teach us . . . but it is a sad day for me, personally, when reading

“In short, a successful resolution of such a fallacy requires a firm grasp of the correct explanatory powers of things. Without a knowledge of which things are self-explanatory and which are not, the reasoner is liable to find a question-begging argument persuasive.”

. . . makes me realize how the current holder of the most powerful position in the world was able to get his job.

Brimstone: When Missing Is Not an Option

Wow.  If you don’t want to click through and watch the amazing videos, here’s a cliff’s notes version for you:  If someone driving an MQ-9 wants you dead, you are dead.

No Flying Cars Yet, But…

A woman had her skull replaced. With a plastic one. That was 3D printed. Seriously.

Barefoot Running, Because I Looked It Up

One of the FOGs at work was going to play at recess break time, kicking a ball on the front lawn with the guys, and wanted to know how to keep her white shoes clean.  I told her not to wear white shoes to kick the ball around on dirt.  She said she wished she could go barefoot.  I told her she could, if she didn’t mind her feet looking like the pad in a horse’s hoof.  She doesn’t like the idea.

Then I got distracted during break and did a little looking-up.  To summarize: running barefoot with a mid- or forefoot strike with the foot under the body and leg slightly bent, is the way to go.  It is mechanically superior (because it is the design function!) and you can get wicked-fast running like this, plus you can reduce the incidence of runner’s injuries.

IF
YOU
TRAIN
PROPERLY

If you are currently wearing typical thick-heeled running shoes and using a heelstrike, you will break your foot if you go out in some VFFs or barefoot and start pounding out a forefoot strike right away.  You have to learn to run again.  Believe it or not, running is a skill – which requires training to do well.

Some links, if you are interested:
What happens to our foot when we wear traditional running shoes?
Minimalist Shoes And Injuries: Keys To Diagnosis And Patient Education
check out what our feet SHOULD look like: Vibram Five Fingers Shoes: The Barefoot Alternative
Barefoot Running: The Science Behind the Fad
And there’s these (not an endorsement, just a notation of existence)

That’s what they WANT You to Think!

Vaccines don’t cause autism.  No, really. You can still die from complications following a regular vaccination.  You can still get all kinds of horrible syndromes from them.  But autism, not so much.

Navelgazing

Yes it’s been quiet around here lately.  Life happens.  I do write blog posts, but mostly not where I can put them online when they are written.  So here’s a flurry of activity clearing off my scratch pad . . .

Word of the Day: Gleichschaltung

I think our saving grace here is that, instead of a string of foreign policy successes as the Leader had for Germany, Obama’s agenda at home as well as abroad is largely falling apart in obvious ways.  Otherwise, one might have an even greater cause for concern at an official American version of gleichschaltung.  As it is, the university and formerly-mainstream media are already well on their way to establishment of an acceptable (“politically correct”) way to be.

Of course, this is a nation where dissenting opinion is literally part of the fabric of society and some of us don’t give a [deleted] for being politically correct anyway, so there will be a much harder time enforcing some BS way of thinking on the entire nation.

The Very Best of Hands

Do you remember when it used to be a thing, that the US media would decry the evils of no-bid contracts issued by the federal government?  You know, like 6 years ago under a non-D president?

So ‘we’ issued a no-bid contract to an American company to launch our [deleted] into outer space (after we turned our space agency into a muslim outreach organization (no, really)).  There’s a guy here (Elon Musk) who makes badass rockets and is not a dirty commie.  He wanted to bid on the contract to send our [deleted] into space on his rockets.  He sued us over it.

Then the Ukraine blew up.  We started a pissing contest with the commies over it.  They just remembered whose car we’re riding to the space station and told us to try using trampolines instead of the Russian rockets we had been using.  Because they’re not selling us any more rockets, hahaha.  Yes, they said trampoline.

You will please excuse me for feeling amused at the Obama administration’s being hoist by its own pitard.

L

O

L

@

Leftists trying to be cute.

Fail.

May 10, 2014 Travis County Joint Election Voter Guide, Pflugerville Edition

Two issues, and both pretty big ones, are going to be decided by shamefully few of us who live here.  This is how I wish we would vote:

The school bond package:
Against.
Generally, I am against bonds for all the school stuff.  How about we *don’t* charge up the credit card for stuff we arguably don’t need (yet).  Specifically I am AGAINST this quarter-billion dollar bond package for Pflugerville ISD.  You know who needs a new football stadium?  Not us.  I expect to lose on this one because football is one of the local gods and they sacrifice LOTS of money to it around here.

Travis County Emergency Services District No. 2 Proposition 1:
For.
Shockingly I am going to vote myself a tax increase but there is reason in my madness.  Basically they want to double local sales taxes to fund firemen being trained to provide medical care.  MOST of our firemen-pls-help 911 calls are medical emergencies and they have to sit on their thumbs and wait for ambulances because we don’t have money to train a proper set of fireman/EMT types to stick on fire trucks.  The alternative to voting to give the firemen this tax money is to leave it on the table for a future election where the Community Development Corporation will surely try to take it, and blow all our tax dollars on luring other people into town in some amorphous future so they will give town more tax dollars.  I’d rather spend the money on something we can actually use.  You may guess that the slick ad campaign against this tax is funded by local business interests.  Growth is coming to Pflugerville whether or not we advertise and promote the city, like it or not – and we’ll need the ESD’s EMT services when it gets here.

Because We Already Fixed Everything Else?

Patrick is going to be the next Lt. Governor in Texas.  Dewhurst is widely hated for being himself in the state house, and Patrick is a likeable unknown who says lots of the right things.  Sensing his imminent defeat, Dewhurst is spewing as much venom as he can find.  As I predicted.

To recap the attempted attacks against Patrick I’ve heard in the last week on local radio:

• He left his creditors hanging, stiffed them with a zillion-dollar loss!
  • (which, when you can’t repay your debts, is what bankruptcy has been for since before people spoke English here)
• He changed his NAME!!1!  He’s trying to HIDE SOMETHING!!!1
  • (he changed his name before going into politics and his life is an open book)
• HE’S A DIRTY NO-GOOD DRAFT DODGER!!!!!
  • (he was drafted, reported for duty, and was rejected due to disability from old injuries)

The Devil knows he will end in the lake of fire and is trying to do as much damage as he can before he finally loses.  Likewise, Dewhurst is slinging as much mud as he thinks he can, going well beyond the standard of decency in the process, as he loses his last race for Lt. Governor.  It’s enough to make me want to vote AGAINST Dewhurst just for the poop-on-the-other-guy campaign he’s trying to run!

Re: the title of this post: if Dewhurst really was the man for the job, he’d be on the front page for his ideas on how he’s going to fix everything that’s broken in Texas.  What does this attempted smear campaign say about his ideas for what to do for our great State?