Rand Paul is not a racist

After listening to Sirius radio yesterday and hearing numerous “educated” discussions regarding Rand Paul’s alleged racism I had to make a donation to the man’s Senate campaign. I hope most people understand that the civil rights movement of the 1960′s in the United States would have eventually had the same result without the heavy handed federal intrusion into personal freedoms.

If a business owner wants to run a race based business that is his or her choice in a free society. Every other free human can then choose how they want to react by either patronizing or protesting or ignoring the new establishment. You don’t need people with guns and batons to enforce basic racial harmony in most segments of the United States today. It is pretty well ingrained. Rand Paul isn’t arguing in favor of racism, he’s arguing in favor of allowing people to steer their own ship. If they are dumb enough to steer it into a reef, that’s their issue to deal with. Of course, many people would just be more comfortable pushing racism back under the surface where it hides under our current political climate. Personally, I would rather have it out in the open where it is easy to see and punish. Rand Paul is an advocate of choice, not a racist. He deserves your support just as people in general deserve to be allowed to make bad choices so they can learn from them. The alternative is a society of lemmings dependent on overlords for their food and shelter.

Ketamine and the sense of self

It is fascinating (to me) to ponder the nature of self. I recently came across this article in Scientific American that explores the ease with which we can be separated from reality.

But even this axiomatic foundation of your existence can be called into question under certain circumstances. Your sense of inhabiting your body, it turns out, is just as tenuous an internal construct as any of your other perceptions—and just as vulnerable to illusion and distortion. Even your sense of “owning” your own arm is not fundamentally different—in evolutionary and neurological terms—from owning your car (if you are Californian) or your shotgun (if you are Sarah Palin).

Outlandish as such a notion may seem, what you think of as your self is not the monolithic entity that you—and it—believe it to be. In fact, it is possible to pharmacologically manipulate body ownership with a drug called ketamine, which reliably generates out-of-body experiences in normal people. Patients on ketamine report the sensation of hovering above their body and watching it. If someone gives them a sharp poke, they might say, “My body down below is feeling the pain, but I don’t feel it myself.” Because in such patients the “I” is dissociated from the body it inhabits, they do not experience any agony or emotional distress (for this reason, ketamine is sometimes used as an anesthetic).

At the risk of being judged and found guilty of thinking too independently, I would be very interested in trying some experiments with this product. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be legal. The Office of National Drug Control Policy does acknowledge that some people don’t care about little details like legality. They have published a helpful list of street terminology associated with ketamine.

In any case, the key point is that it is important for humans to explore how the sense of self impacts our existence and the societies we create. Go read, Hey is that me over there?

‘Anonymous’ GPS data reveals speed habits

Based on this data, I tend to drive 9 or so percent faster than the average American. Except when I’m testing engineering limits of the various vehicles I drive, of course.

Based on anonymous driving habit data from customers in 45 states, GPS navigation firmTomTom reckons that Americans tend to drive at about 70 MPH on the freeway, regardless of the posted speed limit. More specifically, most Americans tend to stay within a few miles per hour of the speed limit on interstate freeways. The WSJ [sub] reports that these findings are consistent with efforts to raise freeway speed limits around the country, as Virginia recently became the latest state to raise its freeway speed limit to 70 MPH or above. Naturally, there are still safety advocates still sticking to their “speed kills” talking points, but despite these state-by-state speed limit increases, America’s road fatalities per vehicle mile traveled has been dropping consistently. That Americans rarely drive over 70 MPH, even when limits are as high as 75 MPH, shows that motorists tend to find their natural comfort limit at that speed anyway. And the fact that states with higher freeway speeds tend to be large, sparsely-populated Western states indicates that motorists tend to vary their speed only slightly from the 70 MPH “state of nature” even when faced with longer distances and less traffic. [Hat Tip: ClutchCarGo]

There are a few points worth noting. The only reason the data is currently “anonymous”is because the GPS maker wants it that way. Market forces combined with social mores dictate that anonymity is dead or dying in America. If lawmakers and manufacturers decide we aren’t going to fuss about it, your car and/or GPS will soon track you. Rental companies track your every move. OnStar does as well (read the privacy policy very carefully; there is no expectation of privacy). Eventually, vehicles being driven contrary to acceptable societal norms will auto alert authorities who will come punish you in various nefarious ways to include clumsy attempts at re-education.

I wonder if my 9% deviance from norms will be tolerated when that day arrives.

Finally, a master’s degree

It may be worth mentioning briefly that I have completed my final course in a master’s program at Bellevue University.

The Master of Science in Management Information Systems is a customized degree tailored specifically to prepare students for management positions in the Information Technology profession. It consists of multiple components: the core and concentrations. The core explores the characteristics of information systems with emphasis on critical management issues. After completing the core, students may select one or more of six concentrations to obtain additional depth in business administration, computer information systems, healthcare, information security, project management, or solutions architecture. To satisfy the requirements for degree, students must take 27 semester hours of core courses and at least nine semester hours from one of six concentrations.

For a guy who got started pretty late on college, I feel pretty good about my achievement. I ended the program with a 3.9 GPA while working full time in a civilian job and part time for the National Guard and with a 3-hour a day commute. I’m not quite sure how I kept it together.

I can highly recommend the Bellevue online program. It felt a bit more personal than the similar online program from the University of Phoenix and I would note for the record that the quality of student effort was much higher. In the irony department my final course at Bellevue was Information Technology Ethics and a student in the course was kicked out for plagiarizing.

Information Warfare had to be my favorite course of the bunch. I really enjoyed planning attacks on information infrastructure for some reason. Everything is more fun in theory than in reality. Bellevue was much more reasonably priced than the University of Phoenix. I am planning on starting on doctorate work in a few months in the same field.

Porn, tech and mores

From an article I recently read claiming that pornography might be good for us:

According to the conservative media watchdog group Family Safe Media, the porn industry makes more money than the top technology companies combined, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon.

Without debating the relative merits of porn, if there are any besides temporary satiation of carnal desires, I find it fascinating that moving and still pictures of naked people copulating generate more revenue than the top technology companies combined. I suppose it makes perfect sense. After all, every human being on the planet is pretty much hard wired to enjoy looking at naked people of one or both sexes. All the counter programming that human societies attempt to instantiate (mostly via religion) cannot overpower basic biological programming.

Whether we admit it or not, our genitals and our brains work together to influence our thoughts and actions.

The illegality of prostitution in most U.S. jurisdictions continues to bother me on about the same level as the federal government’s continuing need to pretend that the War on Drugs is somehow making the United States a better place to live. As a society, we are doing a woefully poor job of channeling natural behaviors into more constructive venues. If violent video games are outlawed too, we’ll have an unholy triumvirate of repression and suppression of natural human urges. While I don’t think that will happen, it really makes me wonder how long we’ll continue the juvenile societal attitudes and puritan set of mores we have towards human sexuality in America.

Tech is definitely changing sexual mores in this country. I get the distinct impression from generations younger than mine that ideas like polyamory, open relationships and casual sex with many partners are getting a new look. And when it comes to acceptance of homosexuality, I know attitudes are changing drastically. My feeling is that porn must have played a role in the changing attitudes. Even more important, technology was the delivery vehicle for most of the porn.

Technology and porn aren’t just changing sexual mores in the U.S. Sites like 4chan have worldwide reach, and they affect the way their audiences think. They change the memeset. In two generations, human sexual mores of the technorati will be completely alien to a typical 20th century American.