A Peek Inside The Chinese Communist Party

The following snippets are from the book The Party. The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (2010) by Richard McGregor:

The Party is like God. He is everywhere. You just can’t see him.  -- A university professor in Beijing.  Most totalitarian systems are like this. Although, the Soviet Union I think wasn’t so invisible.

The word ‘democracy’ is banned in web searches.  This says it all.

The Party has substituted a kind of take-it-or-leave it compact with society.  If you play by the Party’s rules, which means eschewing competitive politics, then you and your family can get on with your lives and maybe get rich. Maybe? Hmmm. Sounds kind of like the American Left.

The more senior an official is, the more difficult it is for the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to gain approval to investigate them.  To investigate a person, the Commission has to get permission from the person’s supervisor. So, if you’re the Chairman you have nothing to worry about. If you are a low level bureaucrat you are SOL unless your boss really likes you. This is the perfect system for corruption. Then again those in power find ways to protect themselves.

The Party could be unusually pro-business, as long as the state got a cut along the way.  Got a cut along the way? Sounds like a shake-down. Something a criminal mob or gang would do.

The Party invited entrepreneurs to join it, while intimidating and jailing business leaders who fall foul of it. Real nice.

Improving The Flat Tax Plan

Opponents of the Flat Tax plan (mainly those who advocate the FairTax) say that it has been done before and that’s how we got the Progressive tax system we have now. That is true but there is a way to keep that from happening again.

What Congress needs to do is once they propose a flat tax--like the one that Steve Forbes proposed--is to state in the bill that it can never ever be progressive. That is you tax everyone at the same rate.  If you raise the tax rate you raise it on everyone equally. I dare Congress to raise the tax rate to 40% on the middle and lower classes and justify it with a straight face. Then again the Progressives would say the taxpayers have to sacrifice. When does Congress ever make sacrifices? Hardly ever.

Using a Complex Systems Approach to Study Educational Policy

ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2010) —

Educational policy is controversial: positions on achievement gaps, troubled schools and class size are emotionally charged, and research studies often come to very different conclusions.

Researchers at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and School of Education and Social Policy argue in an article published Oct. 1 in the journal Science that such an approach can help integrate insights and better inform educational policy. By breaking down policies into simple rules and computationally modeling them under different conditions, professors Uri Wilensky and Luis Amaral have found a promising new way to understand policy issues such as school choice and student tracking.

But to get a complete view of education, researchers must use methods that integrate insights about micro-level processes (the student) with macro-level outcomes (student achievement). To do this, Wilensky and Amaral look at education as a complex system: a system with many interacting parts that only can be understood by examining the interactions of the parts and the networks that connect them. Knowledge of the parts alone doesn't lead to understanding of the whole system. [read more]

Sounds promising. Too bad the article did not have a diagram of the system in study with the article. Oh, well.

What the research group found out was low achievers tend to do better in a group with high achievers.

Computer 'Trained' to Classify Pictures and Videos Basing on Elements They Contain

From ScienceDaily (Oct. 13, 2010):

University of Granada researchers have developed a new computer technique that allows to "train" computers to interpret the visual contents of a video or picture. This advance will allow to classify automatically pictures basing on whether individuals or specific objects are present in such images. Videos can also be classified according to specific poses.

Apart from detecting individuals in TV video/film shots, this new technique allows to estimate the position of upper limbs (head, chest, arms and forearms) and the automatic classification of video scenes where people appear in a specific pose. Human actions such as walking, jumping, bending down, etc. can also be detected in video sequences. [read more]

Interesting. Just to have the pgm recognize images in pictures is hard enough, but have it recognize images in videos is impressive.

Why scientific programming does not compute

From Nature.com (Oct. 13):

Researchers are spending more and more time writing computer software to model biological structures, simulate the early evolution of the Universe and analyze past climate data, among other topics. But programming experts have little faith that most scientists are up to the task.

A quarter of a century ago, most of the computing work done by scientists was relatively straightforward. But as computers and programming tools have grown more complex, scientists have hit a "steep learning curve", says James Hack, director of the US National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. "The level of effort and skills needed to keep up aren't in the wheelhouse of the average scientist."

As a general rule, researchers do not test or document their programs rigorously, and they rarely release their codes, making it almost impossible to reproduce and verify published results generated by scientific software, say computer scientists. At best, poorly written programs cause researchers such as Harry to waste valuable time and energy. But the coding problems can sometimes cause substantial harm, and have forced some scientists to retract papers. [read more]

The moral of this article is that just because you are smart in one area does not mean you are smart in other areas. Even Einstein had trouble figuring out his taxes.

Having a computer science degree I was taught to document any procedure especially document why a routine was written. No programmer likes to do this but it is important if any other programmer after you is going to understand your code. Especially, if he or she is going to update it later on.

Testing the program is really important. You want the pgm to run correctly and not produce erroneous errors. It's too bad that Congress does not think hard about the side effects of the bills they pass. If you think about it legislation or laws in a way are like the program of the country. Wrong laws make the country work ineffectively. But I digress...

A computer scientist in the article did a survey of 1,000 scientists in different fields. He found out that only 47% of scientists have a good understanding of software testing. They should if they are going to write software to test a theory. The theory and the software program are equal to one another. You want the pgm to be solid as possible or it makes your theory look weak.

Mexico to Build Southern Border Fence

From NumbersUSA.com (Oct. 6):

Mexico, which often criticizes the American government for putting up barriers which restrict the flow of illegal immigrants across the U.S. - Mexico border is building a fence of its own along its southern border with Guatemala.

It has been reported that the head of the Mexican Superintendency of Tax Administration, Raul Diaz, confirmed that the Mexican government is building a wall along the Mexican - Guatemalan border. Diaz stated the official reason for building the border wall is to stop illegal drugs from coming into Mexico, but Diaz did admit that it could also prevent the free passage of illegal immigrants. [read more]

I have only one thing to say: The Mexico gov't is racist! Just joking, but whenever someone in America wants a wall or a fence (like me) along the border that's what the open border people say. Some say, the illegals will just go over or under the wall. Nothing will stop them perfectly. But it will slow them down. They won't be able to just walk across the border. They have to bring along a ladder or shovel won't they? Carrying those items in the heat of the desert can wear out a person. Heck, put a fence along the Canadian border too. Fine with me.

Or if Nevada wants police to stop people who are committing a crime and ask them if they are illegal or not. They are racists. (On a side note, if a Hispanic police officer stops someone for a traffic violation and asks if that person if he is illegal or not is the officer a racist? Just wondering, but I digress...)

As Representative Ted Poe from Texas said:

Every country has the right to defend its border. We should stop listening to anything President Calderon says and do what's right for our country.

I completely agree.

Other Separations of State

People talk about the separation of church and state. That's fine although that phrase was never in the Constitution. Basically that means the gov't cannot create a state-owned religion. If that happens then you have the church elders basically endorsing whatever beliefs the gov't has right or wrong. The first amendment does not mean politicians cannot be moral or have religion. That would dangerous and ludicrous. Since power corrupts I would think you would want the most ethical politician you can vote for.
But I think there should be other "separations" like:

• The separation of business and state. Gov't should not be choosing winners and losers by subsidizing businesses it likes and over regulating businesses it doesn't like. That's the free market's job to choose winners and losers. Once you have crony-capitalism then have businesses attempting to influence Congress for their own benefit.
• The separation of science and state. Gov't shouldn't deciding what is good and bad science by funding a specific research program. When does that it shuts down almost all other avenues of research on a particular problem. In dictatorships, science becomes another part of its propaganda machine. It uses science to justify whatever beliefs it has about nature.
• The separation of the fine arts and state. You want gov't deciding what's good and bad art? In dictatorships, the fine arts become just a propaganda tool (think of the statue of Saddam Husein) and whatever art it deems offensive or critical to the state (read: the dictator) it bans. There is no need for the National Endowments for the Arts.
• The separation of education and state. When the state takes over the education system it becomes indoctrination. Education should be controlled at the local level.

There could be other separations but these are the main ones.

‘No Pressure’: New Environmental Campaign Glorifies Eco-Fascism

This is one disturbing advertisement to say the least. It was created by an environmental group called 10:10.

So, what's the message here? Reduce your CO₂ or be killed? This what you get when you worship the earth and don't respect human life. Even as a joke this video is in bad taste.

You can read the The Blaze article for more info. That's where I got the video.

UK Pundit to Shocked TV Host: Suffering Children Should Be Smothered

I first saw this video on the Glenn Beck TV show. I was shocked by what the advice columnist said as were the host. That woman is a borderline (if not a complete) sociopath. She is advocating nothing less than murder.

I wonder if she takes the same attitude toward an elderly person with Alzheimer's or dementia. Would she consider them an inconvenience? I would hate to be under her care if I had any disability or disease.