Quick McScape

I had an idea for a restaurant design. Particularly useful in high crime areas. If the place were being robbed, one of the staff could hit a 'hostage' button and all of the windows in the place would turn into doors and slide open providing a quick escape. The number of exits in the place would go from two to 20 and the patrons could scatter out the window-doors leaving the criminal with few hostages. Criminals hold hostages by controlling the few exits a place has. It's just a bottleneck. Opening the whole restaurant up would negate this form of control. Crime would be reduced by a simple, extra architectural feature.

I thought it was a good idea.

Thou Shall Not Steal

Place someone in a circle surrounded by people. Then rob that person at gunpoint while the circle watches, condones and even sanctions the illegal act; telling the subject what's being done is ok, it's accepted, it's for a greater good. Do that and the person will concede in a matter of minutes that he is being robbed and he may even agree with the act.

Imagine doing that to someone over his lifetime. Now you understand the nature of taxes.

Emotional Slaves To Our Children

A very emotional moment for me, several months ago, was when I dropped my then 1 year old daughter off at daycare for the first time. It was actually her second or third day, but my first time to be the one to deliver her.

I walked into the one year room with her. Three or four kids around her age, maybe a few months older, were sitting at a little kiddy table slowly eating their breakfast. Although I never saw anyone putting food in their month, one of them opened and closed his mouth, making a smacking noise that seemed to echo in the room. There wasn't a whole lot of movement going on and besides the smacking of the jaws, it was very quiet...too quiet. Imagine four kids sitting around a one foot high table, grapes, pieces of bananas and Cheerios sitting on their styrofoam plates, but just sitting there, kind of looking around. Checking me out, checking out my daughter who I'm seating at the table, completely without reaction. It reminded me of the scene in Hitchcock's The Birds where they're trying to tip toe through the front yard flooded with birds, the birds not doing anything. But you get the feeling they're going to attack at any second!

So I sat my daughter down in one of the available chairs at this table. A plate of fruit was placed in front of her. She got this look on her face that said, "What's this? You are not leaving me here." I tried to talk to her, let her know she was with friends and she can eat all the fruit she wants. I forced excitement into my voice all the while thinking, 'She does not belong here.' But I had to make the best of it.

With my daughter in her seat, I stood up to walk out. I watched her the whole time and I witnessed her expression going from 'You're not leaving me here' to 'Please? Oh please don't leave me here. Why are you doing this to me?' By the time I stepped out of the room, the door was closed, I could see through the glass pane. As if the sound of the door closing was her queue, my daughter exploded into tears thinking that she had been abandoned. The crying voice muffled mainly by the closed door and thick glass, but loud enough to tell me I left her somewhere and it sounded far away. The zombie kids around her, stared at her with that dead look as the tears poured from her eyes, unwilling to lend assistance or comfort.

My daughter never looked to me while she was upset. She didn't turn her head in my direction with pleading eyes to beg me to return. She bowed her a head a little, eyes slammed shut, tears flowing, pain in her voice, believing that she was completely alone. I'll never forget that image.

I'm not sure if it was better or worse to have her not look for me after leaving her behind in that room. To me it seems it was worse that she didn't because it told me that she did not expect me to return; that she was resigned to her fate and begging was a futile action. As a parent, you just die a little inside to see this. It's really the first occasion you have to break your bond with your child, which to her is everything in the world since she entered it. It's what she trusts and feels safe in. Safety actually taken for granted until she is exposed to that separation and it seems at that moment, when they cry, they realize, there is danger in the world and they are mortal and they can not depend on you all of the time. As necessary as it is, you being away from your child, even from a developmental standpoint, a requirement that has to be taught for a sense of independence to develop which ultimately will serve her better than absolute dependence, it doesn't make it any easier or change the fact that as a parent, it is an almost unbearable feeling to experience.

The happy ending is she spent two weeks at this place. After getting very sick with the Rota virus and an overnight stay at the hospital (wait, it's coming), we pulled her out of that daycare that housed scores of children, and found a in-home child care provider, smaller more homey environment, not to mention much cleaner. Only four kids in this house. Kids who were friendly to her, talkative and gentle. My daughter loves daycare now. She looks forward to it and can't wait to get there to start playing.

She likes coming home too.

"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."
--Edward Abbey

Only While It's Useful

Government is not a right, it is a privilege and therefore should be refused when it doesn't suit you.

Broadband Speeds

My DSL at work gets: 384 kbps down, 379 kbps up. sDSL in case you hadn't noticed.

My cable modem at home gets: 4.55 Mbps down, 361 kbps up.

Numbers side by side:

4,559,704 bps up/361,752 bps down - CABLE
 384,496 bps up/379,240 bps down - DSL

DRM = DRSUX!

The DRM is a law to protect analog structured industries in a digital era. The product has evolved without the seller. Good for greedy, impersonal entities that will die off in a hundred years. Bad for the advancement of civilization.

Flag Burning...yes again.

You can tell when it's election year in this country when the dumbest ideas come up for approval for Congress to codify into law. I don't understand why our lawmakers want to add Constitutional amendments restricting rights? Why start that precedent? I actually think they'd be shocked if they got something ridiculous to pass. They just want to appeal to their constituents, not really change anything. It's a dangerous game they play, regardless of their intentions.

So flag burning is up for debate...again. They want to make it a constitutional amendment to ban this practice. I have said this before but it'd be interesting bookends if it passes, the last amendment superseding the first.

Personal view aside, I don't understand why we need law enforcement for this action? Is the practice really that rampant that force is needed to respond? Does our law enforcement not have anything better to do? As I understand, the number of yearly cases of this is virtually 0. It's something like less than 100 cases of flag burning in a country of 300 million people, if you don't count the patriotic groups that are disposing of old flags in some ritual fashion that makes it ok to burn it. And how do you enforce that? How do you write that law in a way that millions of police officers can discern between the proper way a flag is being burned and the improper? It can't be done. Mistakes will be made, assumptions incorrectly created, conclusions improperly drawn. You just can't do it on a national level anyway. Not even on a state level. Maybe you can neighborhood-level...MAYBE.

So a few people want to burn the American flag every year. Why do you care? Because it's offensive to you? If we passed a law for everything that offends people, we'd be living in a police state and no one could do anything! We'd be in a country so full of laws, the Nazi's would say, "That's cold."

You might think public flag burning hurts the country's image, creates disrespect, incites rebellion, etc. I really don't see that happening. Not as long as people like you are committed to protecting that flag and people like me swear allegiance to our country. They will never convince us otherwise. We will stand together, united and not be swayed by these protestors. Not with blackmail, not with torture and certainly not by asking us to bear witness to a burning of a piece of fabric. I know it won't change my mind about my country.

So let them do it. Best case scenario, they burn themselves during the stunt. Why would you want to stop Darwinism?

We don't need the amendment.

Summer Wonderland

Half way to Christmas...

"Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present, controls the past."

--Rage Against The Machine