Only a few more weeks until my upper division bio class. 生物学の授業がもうすぐ始まる。わくわく
(0)Monthly Archive for 7 月, 2009
astyle –indent-brackets –indent=tab –style=stroustrup –recursive *.hpp *.cc
Why haven’t I been using artistic style all along???
My wife told me about a strange nightmare she had when she woke up. I thought it was interesting enough I had her dictate it to me again so I can unleash on the world the melodramatic horror flick that appeared before her rapidly moving eyes (R.E.M.)
She saw the dream from the perspective of a student in a boarding school. She was at a party at a restaurant with all of her friends and everyone else was leaving for downtown LA, perhaps to go to a club or something like that. The girl had to meet her mom so couldn’t go with her friends. She called her mother and then found out, however, that she wasn’t needed, so she called her friend so they could share a cab to downtown to meet their friends. When she went down to meet her friend, she saw her in the taxi alone. When she entered, her friend told her that the taxi driver left and didn’t come back. The girl decided to drive her and her friend in the cab to the police station to let them know that the car was abandoned. The police questioned us about the appearance of the man so they could possibly identify him. Some way or another, the two friends finally arrived in downtown and had fun with their classmates.
Back in the dormitory, something weird and suspicious kept happening to the girl to make her feel that someone was out to get her. Perhaps it was a sound or just a feeling she had in her gut. She had the ominous feeling that somebody was going to do something evil. There was a poster in her dorm room that was left there from the previous inhabitant. The girl never took it down because she liked it, but took it down thinking it might be covering something up and found a hole. Her heart sunk; she realized that somebody has always been watching her. She stormed out of the room and the girl she thought was a good friend of hers (the girl she was in a cab with) was found to be a something such as a ghoul that eats humans and leads a pack of other ghouls who do her bidding. She infects them and turns them into her servants, helping her hunt down people to eat. It was a dramatic scene with all of her friends, including her best friend, turning out to be monsters and in the dorm hallway.
“Hah, you remember that one time that the taxi driver disappeared and we reported it to the police?,” asked the girl’s “friend” who turned out to be the leader of the ghouls, “You know what happened to him? I ate him! That’s why he disappeared!” The girl stormed out from the dorm, running with the ghouls chasing her. Somehow, she ended up in the fashion district. She found a costume store that looked narrow from the outside, but was really deep and two-storied. The third floor was, like many stores in the fashion district, a residential floor for the owners to live in. She arrived at the top floor. Even though she was running away from ghouls, she felt guilty about intruding into the owners’ private space. In the residence, she saw three nice middle-aged women eating dinner together. She told them that she was in danger and they said that she could stay there for as long as she wants, provided she helps with the business.
It was a peaceful period for a while. She would go out, using a different costume each time so the monsters wouldn’t find her. She’s been going out like that so she thought it would be okay to do just live that way indefinitely. Perhaps the ghouls forgot her, she thought. Maybe she could just stay this way. But, one day she saw that they found her and ran back home from the store and went upstairs, finding all three of the nice women who lived above the store, dead. She felt a rush of guilt that they hid her and because of her, died. The ghouls almost found her and almost got into the store. There was nowhere to go. She got to above a beam above the store and they were trying to get up to her, looking up hungrily. She become progressively more and more panicked when suddenly I (Thomas Webb) appeared and unleashed the ultimate weapon – I peed on them. The urine was very painful to them, especially their eyes. The girl (or perhaps by this point in the dream, the girl became my wife, identities do shift around in dreams) jumped off the beam and killed every last one of them. When I killed the leader with a Japanese sword (which the costume store had), the servants started screaming in agony.
It was a mixed victory. While she was thinking that she finally won, she also had this feeling of guilt that that killed somebody and that, though she saved herself, she has to live with the guilt of having murdered the rest of her life.
There has been a belief for long, that sth is wrong bc it’s just… wrong
When I ask this Q, it lapses: Is it worse to make or fuck corpses?
I have an idea. It’s probably not original and, in fact, if others have advanced it, I hope to find if there are any writings on it in case others have already had good ideas how to implement it. If my idea is original then, well, the task falls on me to do so. Here it is:
The government is the one entity in our society that is required by the law to have elections. We can brush aside for now the fact that it is only a representative democracy (or a polyarchy) and that citizens residing in possessions cannot vote because our system allows, and human nature tends to create, other entities that, while not as powerful as the government, exert control of some form or another over members or stakeholders and these entities are not required to hold any sort of election. It is true that even when freedoms are guaranteed, people enslave themselves (religion) and are enslaved by others by their own consent (large corporations, trade unions, churches, etc.) It seems to be much can be done to increase liberty given this with the minimal change in laws (it’s major, but not as major as tearing down the government, for example) and minimal disruption in the economy (again, relatively) by requiring entities that are supposed to represent people to hold elections.
What it is that should be voted on and who can vote are details that requires much thought. Different organizations are organized differently and this would have the side effect of probably requiring organizations to organize in a certain way as mandated by the law to be able to be in compliance with it. It might also have the unfortunate side-effect of organizations becoming more closed (Imagine the [valid!] fear a church might have of people swarming into it from a rival sect to install someone from their own sect into power). I am not sure what the answer is to these issues, but one “negative” consequence I like is that it would discourage larger organizations since part of the plan would have to be a lower threshold in size before the law applies to you. In a sea of laws that benefit big business and hurt small business, it would be nice to give individuals an incentive to have their own businesses and even an incentive for larger businesses to encourage employees to start their own service business and become a supplier. This phenomenon that you see a lot in the silicone valley is very positive and one I hope can happen throughout corporate America. The communist’s dream of people owning their own means of labor is best served w/ capitalism, just not statist capitalism.
I know that under many left-libertarian systems, there would of course be direct democracy in the smaller units of organization (like, anarcho-syndicalism and communism). What I would propose, however, would be a possible compromise between such a system and what we have through the addition of a law to the effect of “entities representing individuals over the size of X members shall be required to hold transparent elections over [who's in power or whatever else would be deemed necessary for the entity in question].” I also must make it clear that I don’t think voters micromanaging a company is good from an economic perspective. When something comes up to a vote or a comittee decision, the result is usually bad. My aim is to lessen the power any entity has over its constituents, be it the government or something else, and let people mostly govern themselves. Voters in a corporation will probably want to vote in a representative who will balance keeping the company afloat with maintaining woker compensation, among other things. CEOs who would want to avoid this scenario would be advised to outsource labor rather than directly hire workers. Think how Toyota makes their parts (they don’t, independent small businesses do), rather than how the assemble the actual cars. Autonomy is better than democracy, but democracy is better than nothing and, again, libertarian capitalism is the shorter route to people owning their own means of production than attempts to “bring down” the power houses of the economy – the rich.
Any thoughts on the mandatory democracy idea?
Strange! Humans Glow in Visible Light – Yahoo! News
Looking at the last few paragraphs – isn’t it so Japanese to look for problems by looking at the light coming from bodies? We Westerners, informed by perverted notions such as Luther’s that the soul and the body are seperate entities, the latter just happening to contain the former, always want to look at the individual parts.
Abortion is latest controversy in health overhaul – Yahoo! News
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again until it sticks – there aren’t enough folks on the left in mainstream politics who are suspicious of big government. Obama is right in seeing the problem as Americans not being able to make ends meet and us having one of the worst systems in the first world (a healthy economy is of instrumental importance), but where money flows, money controls. No legislation should be pursued that can be used for bad in the future. I can’t help but think that a combination of government crowding out the market’s solutions and someone in a cowboy hat then controlling the government could lead to an effective reduction in women’s reproductive rights. If libs aren’t suspicious of big government, just remind them that a spotted owl puncher shall be at the helm again, eventually, and that Afro-JFK will eventually have to step down (unless this bill passes, though let’s face it, presidents get so beat up anyway that he wouldn’t get a 3rd term anyway).
There are plans to strike a compromise, but money has an amazing ability to steer peoples’ decisions. It’s good that the government doesn’t pay for abortions. Those who don’t support abortion should only have to live with it being legal, not endorsing it with dollars, but when such a democratically controlled entity that must stick to these politically mandated restrictions wishes to crowd out a private sector that doesn’t, the result is likely the opposite of what we who value civil liberties want.
</short rant>
After more than a year hiatus, sat down and beat Twilight Princess finally.
(0)Saying “a natural universe must have a supernatural creator” is like saying “you’re a woman.. you must have come out of a man!”
(0)Walter Cronkite dead (I didn’t know he was still alive, but wow)
(0)Heading off for my annual mikoshi carrying. Why do I enjoy making my shoulder hurt so?? The world may never know…
(0)It looks like my “new” idea (http://tinyurl.com/msv9e9) is already quite old (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylozoism). More on this later…
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