Glowing Fish's New Writeups

Ayn Rand on Native Americans (essay)

2009-12-30T22:07:21Z

One of the most obvious ripostes to the doctrines of unfettered capitalism is that all private property was at one time granted to people by some type of governing entity. Depending on where you live, this was probably done either informally and long before records of such a transaction exist (if you are living in Scotland, for example), or relatively recently, and in an organized manner (in America, many people still live on property homesteaded by their grandparents). Even people who think that their current system of politics and society are fair and beneficial may come up with some qualms or confusion when confronting this issue. This is especially a question in the United States, where the removal of the native peoples was done almost within some people's living memory. This is tremendously complicated issue, both from the theoretical point of government legitimacy and property rights, and because of the emotional and moral issues of the forced removal of peoples. This question of conquest…

Nez Percé Trail (place)

2009-12-30T15:25:59Z

In 1877, a group of Nez Percé Indians, under the leadership of Chief Joseph, fled out of the Wallowa Valley of Oregon, hoping to make it either to their Crow Indian allies in Eastern Montana, or else to Canada. The Indians were living on a reservation that they had been confined to in Oregon after an earlier treaty, but because of gold prospectors, the government wished to move them to another part of their reservation, a high plateau in Idaho that was on the fringe of their traditional homeland, and could not easily support their way of life. Although many of the tribe moved to the reservation, many refused to accept it, and the United States military quickly took objection to this. Although Chief Joseph refused to either fight or move, some in his band started the war on their own by attacking and killing white settlers, and he knew he had to flee. A somewhat contradictory series of events, since the Nez Percé, refusing to move to Idaho, were ready to flee further.

What…

The Wytheville Post Office Incident (event)

2009-12-26T02:16:39Z

On December 23rd, 2009, Warren "Gator" Taylor, walked into a post office in Wytheville, Virginia, a town in the rural Appalachian region of Virginia, fired some shots with a pistol, and announced that he was taking hostages of two customers and one postal employee. He also claimed to have some explosives. There followed a nine hour stand-off between Warren Taylor and several police agencies, both local and federal. Taylor, who was in bad health and chose the Wytheville Post Office seemingly on a whim, gave up to authorities, and is currently undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

Taylor had a criminal record prior to this incident, and seemed to be predisposed to violent and irrational behavior, although his most major crime, the intentionally non-fatal shooting of his ex-wife, seemed to suggest that he didn't really have the desire to do anything quite as violent as indiscriminately kill three strangers. His stated motive for the crime was anger at the…

Suicide in Scandinavia (essay)

2009-12-23T18:40:15Z

A few days ago, the journal "Science" published a report claiming to make an objective list of the United States by happiness. Actually, what the report did was claim that objective criteria of happiness would match up with people's subjective self-reporting of happiness. The actual paper might have gone into more detail than this, but once a Top Ten list of happy states was released, the national press had a field day with it. I myself was less impressed with it, and by doing a scatterplot of the list of happy states, and suicide rates, I found out that the "unhappiest" states have the lowest suicide rates.

I read a New York Times article about the study, which was of course relevant to the Times, since New York State was, allegedly, the unhappiest state. I mentioned to the author that it seems like a curious conclusion that the "Unhappiest" state would also have the lowest suicide rate. He agreed with me mostly, but also pointed out that some very happy…

Timequake (review)

2009-12-22T07:54:40Z

I suppose if I had to review TimeQuake as succinctly as possible, it would be to say that if this manuscript showed up unheralded in the mailbox of some editor, there is not much chance that it would get published. There is not much chance it would get read past the first few pages.

This book is a memoir, randomly summing up the life of Kurt Vonnegut and his friends and families, in a series of rambling anecdotes. Mixed in with that is a novel following a science fiction plot about a ten year suspension in free will and its aftermath, the eponymous "timequake". The timequake is never explained in much details, and the characters in the novel are never fully explained, because the action of this novel is broken up by Kurt Vonnegut's memoir. Vonnegut admits as much in his introduction, saying that the original novel "Timequake" was never finished, so he produced this instead.

All of this could be seen as daringly post-modern, and for the most part, Vonnegut's style pulls…

Anti-Ballistic Missile (thing)

2009-12-20T03:19:37Z

An Anti-Ballistic Missile is a missile used to intercept and destroy a ballistic missile. Perhaps in full it should be described as an "Anti-Ballistic-Missile Missile", but such an unwieldy name never really caught on.

Anti-Ballistic Missile systems come in two main varieties: tactical and strategic. This usually refers to the type of missile they are meant to intercept, with "tactical" and "strategic" being code words for "conventional" and "nuclear". ABM systems can also have warheads that are either conventional or nuclear, and that would usually coincide with whether they are used in a tactical or strategic role.

An Anti-Ballistic Missile system is really not different in concept from any other Surface to Air Missile system, since it is meant to fly from the ground and hit a moving target. However, the execution is much different, because ballistic missiles are usually flying much faster than even a fighter…