Syria - as an average american layman.

I'm not a foreign policy expert. Or a journalist. Or a government official. I'm just some average, run of the mill guy when it comes to Syrian happenings. All my information comes from secondary sources.

Even so, it's hard to ignore the war there. Long before Boston was hit by a (marginally) domestic terrorist, Syria had been embroiled in years of war. Hundreds of bombs like the ones detonated in Boston have exploded all over the Syrian landscape. I remember a particularly shocking (for me) report I read something like two years ago of a bomb that went off in a coffee shop in a university that killed dozens.

The Internet has a long memory, so I decided today to look for that report - but I couldn't find it. It's not as though it was buried, though: there have just been too many other reports that appear to be far worse than the attack that shocked me so much those two years ago. The list seems endless:

April 8, 2013: Damascus Bombing kills 14 and injures hundreds
February 22, 2013: A series of bombs kill "at least 83 people"
January 15, 2013: (report on the 17th): Aleppo university bombing kills 87
December 12, 2013: "As many as 200" killed in an attack on a minority sect
March 27, 2012: Two terrorist bombs kill 27 police and civilians in Damascus
January 7, 2012: 26 killed in a bombing in Damascus

That's just a few of the bombings. Is it any wonder that the rest of the world seems to scoff when we rage against terrorist bombing that occurred a week and a half ago in Boston? I in no way wish to diminish the suffering of Boston's victims, but I can also understand why our outrage falls on deaf ears. I also see why, after two years of conflict, religious control of opposing factions seems to be the norm, rather than the exception.

What right do we have to control the world for our own ends, America? Why must we force ourselves into other's pies. Why must we try to mold the world into a society that matches our own? Expansion of American ideals, American democracy is a pipe dream that won't come to fruition as long as we try to force the issue. Our presence in the middle east has been little more than a trigger fomenting violence for years. Even after our most direct middle-eastern intervention, violence continues unabated.

Some may call me a pessimist; I prefer the term realist. The deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Persians and Arabs hasn't resulted in a decisively democracy loving, people-controlled, peace loving middle east, now has it?

But maybe I'm wrong. I honestly would like to be. Years of direct evidence has proven at the least that a change in the middle east won't come easily. Even should the change happen, I wonder if the middle-eastern people will see us as liberators or tyrants. My instincts suspect the latter.

Chaos and Order

I've been reading newspapers lately, especially the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (because I've got direct access to the papers). I'm more of a new news media person myself, but I can never really forget the time I spent reading our local paper when I didn't have access to the internet at a younger age. I naively and presumptuously read the newspaper thinking most of what they wrote was likely true, or at least reliable. I hold no more such illusions.

It makes me laugh, though, when I read comments from members of the old news corps drumming a beat against the new media. The new media is chaotic, they say. Unreliable. Disordered. Contradictory. The old way was better, they say: "...I think we were better off as a society when we had fallible but reasonable people sorting out what mattered and what you needed to know about it." 

I wonder if they even see the arrogance of their own position. They act as if they were the only people reasonable enough to sort the news and choose what was important. I do agree with them on one point, though: the new media is disordered, unreliable, and contradictory. Personally, though, I'd rather have contradictory reports that I can sort out myself than ordered sources convinced of their own superiority feeding to me what they've decided is important. At least the new media acts as if their readers are smart enough to analyze things on their own.

Our own prejudices

A statement made in an article I read today got me thinking. The gist of the statement was: "Humans like to think they are rational, but that rationality is an illusion". While I was reading the article, I found myself picking apart it's arguments, finding weakness, prejudice, grandiosity, self aggrandizement, and other self promoting argumentative tactics. (Here's the article, you can decide if I'm correct yourself). There's a kind of arrogance in using logic to prove human beings are illogical, I think.

The thing is, though, I agree with the author on this statement. We are illogical, yet self-delusional beings often incapable of knowing what is best for us. We have our goals, our ideas, or desires, passions, loyalties, and we want those loyalties to be logically infallible. Upon closer inspection, though, each of those loyalties turn out to have holes - logical contradictions, unsupported assumptions, untenable conclusions, the whole lot. We are, in a word, fallible.

But does this mean we need to submit ourselves to laws limiting our freedom of choice? Do we need a micro-managing government to stop us from hurting ourselves? I might say yes if we had some non-human, objective entity with far more data processing ability that we have, but such is not the case. Our lawmakers are human, too, subject to the same prejudices, cognitive biases, and delusions as the rest of the populace. What guarantee do we have that their decisions are truly based upon anything more than prejudice? None.

I'm not privy to the inner workings of the cost-benefit analysis done in the higher echelons of government, but I can't imagine the decisions are any more rational than those made on a more local scale. I'm no economist, though. Take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Gun Control Lunacy

I read an article in the New York Times this morning entitled: Saving Children From Guns. I'm no gun advocate, but neither am I a gun control advocate. Rather, I'm an advocate for data, and unsurprisingly, this article ignores data while attempting to use emotion to manipulate its readership. The article would have us assume accidental gun death represents the majority of accidental child death annually.

This statement is patently false. In 2007, of the 11,778 accidental child deaths in the nation, a mere 138 of them were due to accidental firearm discharge, and this is data for ages 0 to 19. Previous years give similar statistics. Perhaps, if the author wants limit accidental child mortality, he should focus on limiting child car accident deaths (6,638 in 2007) or maybe even accidental poisonings (972).

I surmise the author's real intention is to limit all gun violence, specifically homicide. but if the author really wants such a focus, he shouldn't use accidental child gun death as an emotional lead in for his argument. It's dishonest.

Scary election results

Dear conservative friends who live in my home of Utah county: I have nothing against republicans or conservatives in principle, but the result from your county scares me. 88.3% Romney, 9.8% Obama, 1.2% Gary Johnson. According to Wikipedia, here are the religious demographics of your county: 88.1% Mormon, 10.1% Non Religious 1.8% Other. Maybe you need to use something more than religious beliefs when you decide your political opinions.

Excepting a few other sparsely populated counties (also in Utah) for Romney, and DC for Obama, no other area voted so lopsidedly for a single candidate. Before you decide to say Washington is broken, I believe you need to look at your own county's politics. You might find something broken there, too.

Hiking...

Whenever I come home, and when I have the chance, I like to hike a trail about a quarter mile away from my home, and coming home on memorial day weekend seemed as good a time as ever to take the hike. When the air is clear, at the top of the hike you can see miles through and even all the way across Utah Lake to the lake mountain range on the other side.

But as they always say: a picture is worth a thousand words. With this in mind, here are some photos I took during my hike

The only thing I regret about entering physics is...

I see what things wouldn't work scientifically.

I just saw the Iron man II movie...and liked it, sort of. I mean, it's mindless entertainment...and what are movies for except to let us decompress from every day life for a few minutes. That being said, I can't help but see how ridiculous the physical ideas put forth in the movies are. I won't give anything about the movie away, but how in the world could a particle accelerator create a laser beam?

Oh, well. It'd be nice if it was possible...