The right to your own name

I always thought it was self-evident that people had a basic human right to their own name. I still do, which makes me think Iceland isn't so cool after all (haha what a stupid pun):

A 15-year-old Icelandic girl has been granted the right to legally use the name given to her by her mother, despite the opposition of authorities and Iceland's strict law on names.

Reykjavik District Court ruled Thursday that the name "Blaer" can be used. It means "light breeze."

The decision overturns an earlier rejection by Icelandic authorities who declared it was not a proper feminine name. Until now, Blaer Bjarkardottir had been identified simply as "Girl" in communications with officials.

"I'm very happy," she said after the ruling. "I'm glad this is over. Now I expect I'll have to get new identity papers. Finally I'll have the name Blaer in my passport."

Like a handful of other countries, including Germany and Denmark, Iceland has official rules about what a baby can be named. Names are supposed to fit Icelandic grammar and pronunciation rules — choices like Carolina and Christa are not allowed because the letter "c'' is not part of Iceland's alphabet.

But seriously, if people can't name their own son or daughter, or even themselves as they see fit, it makes you wonder how these cultures regard free expression. And these are supposedly Western cultures! Are there more examples of Iceland's chilling effects (hurr, pun or not it fits!)?

Well good thing Blaer won. Now excuse me while I change my name to Ꮺ$#^☺æɣ☢.

This made my day

Hahahaha:

Police officers in Seattle, Washington held their first gun buyback program in 20 years this weekend, underneath interstate 5,  and soon found that private gun collectors were working the large crowd as little makeshift gun shows began dotting the parking lot and sidewalks. Some even had “cash for guns” signs prominently displayed.

Robot & Frank

I don't typically do movie reviews, primarily because it feels like writing a lit review for college. So let's just call this a movie suggestion instead.

Frank and Robot casing a joint

Robot & Frank is a wonderful movie with a moderate amount of cleverness, good storytelling, and the whole robot-as-friend gimmick works remarkably well.  In fact, the robot reminded me of GERTY, the robot from Moon. I would go so far as to say Frank's relationship with the robot parrallels in many ways with Sam Bell's and GERTY's relationship.

It is sort of a refreshing movie; it's a sci-fi without being all sci-fi-y. A fun and sad little dramedy without being too sad, nor too funny. Just enough to leave you wanting more. Maybe that's why it's only 85 minutes or so.

I must say it has been one of the better movies I've seen in a while. Thoroughly enjoyable if you care more about characters and story than explosions and boobs. I mean I like explosions and boobs, but without good story it's basically porn.

So yeah, Robot & Frank. I guess I should give you a reason to see it, rather than just my word. Well, here's a taste: Frank is an old guy living alone with Alzheimer's who used to be a professional cat-burglar. Worried about Frank's health, his son gets him a robot to help take care of him. At first, Frank despises the robot and resents his son for getting him a babysitter. But after spending some time with the robot, Frank learns that it has certain advantages in not-so-legal activities.

I would go further but I don't want to spoil how Frank "persuades" his robot to be a partner in crime. That part is done very well. If you have time, go see it.


Edit: I found the trailer. I watched the movie and wrote this review suggestion before watching the trailer. I feel like the trailer gives too much away, so kinda-sorta semi-spoiler alert:

Top 7 reasons to NOT watch a presidential inauguration

Yes you read that right. I'm not saying this because I dislike Obama's politics, or because I heard his inauguration speech was overly political.

I'm saying it because inaugurations are increasingly pompous, gaudy, ritualistic, overdone celebrations of political victory, two and a half months after the original victory speeches. The president is a public servant, not royalty.

So, here are the top 7 reasons why you shouldn't watch, let alone attend a presidential inauguration:

1.  No matter what the newly elected/relected president says, the inauguration speech will be of no consequence to your life. Really.


2.  They are full of mindless platitudes and cliches, or if not, cheap political attacks rhetorically dressed as visionary leadership.


3.  The State of the Union address is only a short time after the inauguration, is slightly more informative, is more relevant to current issues, and is usually much more entertaining.


4.  Does the president really need any more celebratory attention? He (or she) is the most covered person in media throughout the world; watching the inauguration only encourages such royalty-like status.


5.  Despite the sensationalism, it is not that culturally significant. Want to be a part of history? Well try doing something that doesn't happen every 4 years.


6.  If you must, you can read the transcript and/or watch news coverage of the inauguration later, at your convenience, which won't take up half the day.


7.  Unless you just woke up from a deep coma, watching the inauguration will not make you a better citizen, nor will it make you more politically knowledgable. Inauguration speeches tell you virtually nothing about the president's policies, but on the off chance it does, it will be horrendously one-sided (see #2).

So there you have it. Inaugurations are a waste of time, and in my opinion are a disservice to our collective poltical knowledge and heritage. IF you really want to be politically knowlegeable, study the political philosophies of both parties, avoid the speeches aimed at the general population and watch the speeches aimed at the candidate's base: they will tell you much more about a candidate's position.

But most importantly, figure out your own political philosophy. Not just a vague idea of what sounds good to you, but a guiding philosopy that makes sense, that you fundamentally agree with. Once you know that, the rest will follow.

Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism (these two are closely related)

Progressivism

Conservatism

In defense of Video Games & Hollywood

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Played by millions. Surprisingly, pixelated bullets have not caused an epidemic of murderous sociopaths pillaging their way accross rivers of blood.

The blaming of violence on video games (particulary violent, first person shooter games), and violent hollywood films is getting ridiculous.

This is coming from the left and the right, and although it tends to get political, it's actually less about politics and more about ignorance.

Who you ask is pointing the finger at games and film? Old people. Stupid old people who don't know what MMORPG means, are no longer entertained by violent films, and couldn't figure out how to turn on an Xbox to save their life.

If this sounds mind-numbingly familiar to you, it's because we've all had this discussion before. Remember the outrage and controversy over the game Grand Theft Auto? Yeah, it turned out that it was just a video game, not a mass-recruitment for MS13.

There has been an explosion of video games, especially violent video games just in the last decade. And thanks to improving technology, these games are looking more realistic every day.  You would think, even if the violent video games flooding American homes in the last decade had a shred of influence on physical violence, our crime rate would reflect that. After all, millions of kids and adults alike, play these games on a daily basis. But no, violent crime is going down.

There are even benefits from playing video games.



Movies. We all love movies. Except for some (old) people.

Apparently movies, just like video games, are turning our kids' brains to mush, except the part where it turns them into highly efficient killing machines. You would think with such rhetoric being repeated ad nauseam, Hollywood does a better job of training soldiers than our own military. I don't really want to test that theory, but if killing needs to be done, I'm still pretty sure professional soldiers would do a better job of it.

[You are getting sleepy, very sleepy. Now you must go buy lots of guns and indiscriminately shoot people]

I agree violence can be done poorly in movies. Gratuitous, excessive violence is really just poor film-making especially when it doesn't advance the plot. But it can be done well; even disgusting, bloody, horrific violence can be tasteful in the right context.  And it serves a valuable purpose.  There is not only the action to get one's attention, but emotion, suspense, and consequences that tell a part of a larger story; many times without the violence it would make the film a lot less interesting.

Imagine Saving Private Ryan, only nobody gets shot. D-Day happened of course, but it was summarized by narration. Or maybe people get shot, but there's no blood, and nobody gets blown to pieces. Now there's a lot less suspense, and while the consequences are technically the same, they are significantly less dramatic. In the end you get a crappier, less realistic movie.

But there is no real, hard proof that violence in media increases violence in society. I mean, television, film, games, especially violence in media really didn't take off until say, the 80s (that's when it was ubiquitious). And now there's the internet with more free media violence available than ever before.

Yet global violence is down, even warfare.

Unfortunately, stupid old people run the government, and they like to make rules for the rest of us, even if those rules have no scientific basis, or a snowflake's chance in hell of working. But hey, if it makes a few old people feel better, we all should be grateful to suffer for them. Or we can tell them to stop fucking with our freedom.

Sigh.

You think Piers Morgan would have learned something, anything about rifles, or guns in general since he started basking in the anti-2nd Amendment spotlight. Sadly, no.

 Hey Piers, aside from caliber and aesthetics, these two rifles are essentially the same. Neither of them are assault rifles, neither are machine guns, neither is more or less lethal (actually the bottom rifle has a larger caliber, so...). They shoot exactly the same way as each other, at exactly the same rate: 1 pull of the trigger = 1 shot fired and no more.



AR-15:

Remington Auto-loading:

"But, but you can modify those evil black rifles to shoot a zillion rounds per second with just a screw driver" you say? No, you can't.

Obviously, this is already illegal, but I must confess it can be done. Someone with enough determination and wanton disregard for the law can alter just about any semi-auto to become fully auto, if he had the right tools, skills, and knowledge. But a bad guy who does that is not about to be stopped by any gun law you can imagine.

Chart of the day

via Coyoteblog and Mark Perry

Roundup of 'Obama gun memes'

Of the image variety:

And a few others for good measure:

I could post these all day:

Taft High School shooting

I don't want to dance in the blood of the victim(s), and thankfully there reportedly were no deaths. And yet the ignorant will, and already are using Taft as another example why we need more gun control:

Oops, That's Taft High in Taft, CA! False alarm yet still horrid. When is this gonna stop?! GUN CONTROL NOW and plain outlaw assault rifles

— michael john dimkich (@michaeljdimkich) January 10, 2013

Another school shooting? Yes, let's keep doing absolutely nothing about gun control. #Taft

— Alex Wickline (@WicklineAlex) January 10, 2013

Can we talk about gun control yet? Apparently not, since there's been yet another school shooting. #Taft

— Aura Bogado (@aurabogado) January 10, 2013

Reports: the Taft shooter made previous threats. How were guns accessible to him? If you think gun control is a dirty word, please wake up.

— J. Kitch (@MsJenKitch) January 10, 2013

The gunman in this case, used a shotgun. Not a semi-automatic pistol or an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine, but a shotgun.

Now think about that. Even if we all agree to these proposed draconian gun laws banning "assault rifles", high-capacity magazines, semi-auto handguns, ravamping background checks, and outright confiscation of such items; there still is the matter of the tens of millions of shotguns residing in a vast number of American homes.

Not only that, but revolvers, bolt-action rifles, lever-action rifles, not to mention knives and dangerous combinations of household chemicals.

The only way to prevent lunatics intent on acquiring guns, is mass-confiscation. Which not only is blatantly unconstitutional, but let's be honest, would be a cure more deadly than the disease.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't particulary care to hand over any firearms I enjoy and spent good money on, nor am I going to let the police trash my house without good reason.

Heh

"Empty" car scares drive-thru employees.

More gun laws = more stupid

This video goes well with Larry Correia's An Opinion on Gun Control.

These stupid laws aimed at inanimate objects lend themselves to analogy after analogy demonstrating how absurd they are:

How many people die from loose/untied shoelaces? Probably dozens! We should therefore ban or seriously restrict shoelace ownership. No need to consider the benefits of proper shoelace use or the rights of law-abiding shoelace owners, especially when people are dying.

via Kevin and US Citizen

New Lincoln MKZ will drive for you

No this isn't some proto-type Google car that is fully driverless (and consequently kept fully out of the marketplace), but a real car that anyone with a little money can buy and "drive" home.

Click the image to watch, and skip forward to about 2:20 to see this moron finally show us what we want to see:

A forward-looking camera mounted in the windshield mirror assembly reads lane markings and, if it determines you’re about to drift out of your lane, steers the car back toward the center of the lane... You start to drift out of your lane, even going around a corner, and the steering wheel magically cranks over and points you back toward the centerline.

It also has long-range radar-equipped cruise control that can match the speed of the car in front of you; it even works with the Lane Keeper technology.

Amazing how vehicle tech is advancing, but I fear by the time we get fully automated driving, virtually nobody will need to commute anymore.

"Why should we tolerate centrally-planned banks..."

"...when we wouldn't tolerate it in any other commodity?"

An excellent argument from Steve Baker, a British MP:

Libertarians yell at each other, Women's edition, part 4271

So I put this video in my sidebar. It got a few obscure libertarian sites to talking (obscure libertarian, why yes that probably is redundant).

And I just found the whole conversation interesting. I'm a little too under the weather to think too much about it right now, but hey, if philosophy and politics aren't spectator sports, I don't know what is.

I'll start with Julie Borowski's video. It's self-explanatory:


And yes, I can see how many women would be offended by this. Even a libertarian woman:

But the way that Borowski’s video answers the question, “Why aren’t there more female libertarians?” is, sadly, just by being itself. There aren’t more female libertarians because libertarians say things exactly like this. Nearly every female libertarian we know can tell stories about being told, “Women aren’t really equipped to understand libertarianism. It’s a biological thing.” Or “Of course women are statists. They all just want to be taken care of.” Or “Women’s brains just can’t do economics.” Or “Women’s right to vote ruined the country.” Now Borowski has added yet another insult to the pile.

Cue Bryan Caplan, who decides to burst in to this argument with some more nuance. He begins by reciting some findings of his where men are more "thinkers" and women more "feelers", and it's quite a significant difference. He goes on:

To make a long story short: Thinking people tend to have "hard heads" and "hard hearts," while Feeling people have "soft heads" and "soft hearts." Unsurprisingly, then, Feeling people tend to hold more anti-market views. I've similarly found strong evidence that males "think more like economists." This gender belief gap increases with education, consistent with a simple model where male and female students gradually learn more about whatever their personalities incline them to study.

The whole premise "Bleeding Heart Libertarianism," of course, is that we should unbundle the hardness of our heads and the hardness of our hearts. Logically speaking, we can combine hard heads and soft hearts. Empirically, though, this combination is rare. And that's why Bleeding Heart Libertarians have their work cut out for them. If you're trying to sell libertarianism to Feeling people, "hard head, soft heart" ideas are more persuasive than "hard head, hard heart" ideas. But the libertarian remains at an inherent disadvantage against intellectual rivals pedaling "soft head, soft heart" ideas.

Much of the comments are equally interesting.

Oh and there's plenty more of this out there.

AIG winning friends, influencing people

AIG Is Thinking About Suing the Government for Bailing It Out

No that isn't a headline from the Onion, they are really considering filing suit.

The blog posts just write themselves sometimes. But I'll spare you from my horrid writing and quote Warren Meyer, aka Coyote:

This is especially hilarious since it coincides with those miserable commercials celebrating how AIG has successfully paid off all these supposedly too-onerous obligations. And certainly Starr and other AIG investors were perfectly free not to take cash from the government in 2008 and line up some other private source of financing. Oh, you mean no one else wanted to voluntarily put money into AIG in 2008? No kidding.

European sophistication

France Counts 1,193 Cars Torched on New Year's Eve

I was just going to link to that saying something like "Why am I not surprised", or "C'est la vie", but that got me thinking about how many Europeans and Americans want America to be more like Europe, as if Europe is somehow more sophisticated, cultured, and enlightened.

Which then got me thinking about a new BBC comedy I decided to try. I went in expecting something clever, something one might expect from a British comedy, and wow was I so very, very wrong.

Mrs. Brown's Boys is comedy for people who think gratuitous swearing and dirty one-liners are funny.  Maybe there is something inherently funny about an elderly grandmother type spitting out sex jokes and F-words, but that shtick gets old fast. If I had to describe Mrs. Brown's Boys in one word: unsophisticated.

The Euro-fetishists will point to Jersey Shore or Kim Kardashian, and of course, to our "gun-violence". But the truth is Europe has awful crap just like we do, and our crime rate is comparable if not much better than Europe's.