Waking up and going about your day should not be drudgery, it should represent the thing you want to do more days than not.  If you find that is not true then, what are you waiting for, figure out why.  There are tons of people out there who will help you learn and cultivate the things you want, then the crucial thing is to make a plan to get there.  And don’t let anything stand in your way.  The only way things will change for you is if you change them.  So what I have to say in response to that sign. That’s god damn right!

This is all stuff that’s been said thousands of times in much better ways than that sign, that movie clip I linked to or this blog post.  But I think it’s helpful to have it pointed out in a variety of ways.  It can be surprisingly easy to go numb to things around you if you don’t remember how wonderful it is to be alive.

I was glad that I was able to identify the cause of the problem and repair it, in only a few hours.  But I was annoyed that my plans for the evening were shot, and I had an ugly and distorted sense that I’m never able to do the things I really want to do, but must always spend my time responding to emergencies that are my duty.  

I know this view is wrong, but over the prior 9 months or so I’d taken on so much more stuff than I ever had before that I had been wavering between resentment against the world at large and anxiety about not being able to achieve my goals.

I think this experience and my response was a big step on my recovery from going crazy. I reminded myself that to accept those thoughts, about never achieving my goals, would bring about a self-fulfilling prophecy.  And I reminded myself to see how the choices I make even in response to the unexpected emergencies are serving the values I want to achieve and keep.

It was at this time that I also realized I’d gotten impatient. And couldn’t remember having that problem since I was a wee tyke when I’d get pissed struggling to untie my shoes.

I think by repeatedly reinforcing a view that I should be getting more done than I was, and actually more than was possible was causing me to have an always present sense of impatience and frustration with myself and others.

I had decided that fulfilling my ambitions should be easy and when I couldn’t do it I’d damn the universe for being impossible and myself for not succeeding anyway.

In the end I had to challenge the bad premises by comparing them with reality, and clear out those thoughts that had been gumming up my life.

Oh and if your interested about the AC. I took it apart cleaned a bunch of nasty sludge that had accumulated in the drip pan under the coil. And then using an old wire as a snake, dislodged sludge from the upper part of the pipe. Finally hooking up a shop vac to the end of the condensate line and sucked out anything that would come. It worked fine the rest of the summer. And if there is a next time. First thing I’ll do is hook up the shop vac.

So, Anyone have recommendations for companies to clean and service HVAC units annually?

So not even digging into real numbers but just a thought experiment. Say there are 1000 people who make $100,000 for every 1 person who makes $1,000,000 a year. Just for dead simple math. If they were all taxed 10% that would be: $100,000 from the rich guy, and $1,000,000 from the non-rich group. This is total tax revenue of $1,100,000 and the rich guy accounted for only 9% of it. Looking at the number that way it seems small, the “working class” paid 91% of the tax burden. Of course individually they each accounted for only 0.09% versus the rich guy who paid as much as 100 of them combined. The real story is exceedingly more complicated than this, but the thought experiment is telling.

Also as a further and the only real argument against increasing taxes on rich. It is a penalty on the good for being the good. In order to be rich, you need to be very good at something. I have often heard there is some percentage of people who achieved wealth through fraud, theft or other less savory means. But I argue if they exist, they are the rare exception. To be a thief and get rich you have much more working against you. So if you are very good at something, does that mean you should be rewarded or punished? Of course rewarded. Should you have your reward taken by force because someone else “needs” your money. As wealth is created, it makes no sense to fairly distribute it as if it were an unowned natural resource. There can be no right to goods or services that need to be created by others. This includes wealth.

The rich guy had to use their mind to get rich. Without him there is no money to steal. I have to use my mind, my skill, my effort to design a communication system. If you “need” a communication system, does that give you the right to send armed thugs to my house and threaten me with imprisonment to force me to build it for you?

As a final interesting twist in my thought on this, I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal: Taxes are about fairness that addresses my point exactly and even brings up the question, that was posed to Senator Obama, and his answer. (which came up in my discussion mentioned above.) > … even after ABC’s Charlie Gibson noted that the record shows increased taxes on capital gains – which would affect 100 million Americans – would likely lead to a decrease in government revenues: “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” > > Translated into ordinary English, what that means is that it doesn’t really matter whether a tax increase actually brings in more revenue. It’s not about robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Robbing from the rich will do, especially if it’s done in the name of fairness.

Reason is man’s means of survival. To see this, open your eyes, look around. You can’t miss it. Government exists to protect each individuals survival, their use of reason, through protecting rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. Infringing on the rights of one man for the benefit of another is always wrong.

A person believes in the 2nd amendment right to own a gun. When it comes time to vote they look myopically at their most important concrete value, the right to gun ownership. They then not only vote for the person or party that is for protecting this right, but speak out in favor of them, defend or ignore their wrong ideas, and drop any contradictions. They actively, and often rightly, attack the other parties candidate all the while ignoring the flaws in their own choice. They latch on to their candidate and argue with others with the zealous devotion an Eagles fan describing all the failings of the Cowboys or Giants to one of their faithful.

This is the thinking behind those political tests which decide where you are on some political chart and then tell you who to vote for. Of course they try and make it slightly more complex not limiting it to one issue but 5 or 15[^3]. But using these tests are like trying to decide your morality with a calculator[^4].

> Murder = -100, Being Honest = +1, Self sacrifice = +5, so if I want to kill 2 people I’ll have to be honest most of the time and give money to charities.[^5]

### Cause ### The cause of the problem was fairly obvious once grasped. It is the assumption that first you need to choose which of these two gangs you are with. And then if you do have some reason to pick one over the other that you should then support that candidate. It was this article “Indeed” Indeed that made this clear to me. The idea is that when you join a group to support them you have now made your ideas, especially those contrary to the group, a non-factor. Your vote is already counted. And on the other side of that coin if you start your own party you are also a non-factor, your vote is already discounted, therefore so are your ideas.

The parties goals are to get elected and to meet that end they will throw out principles for pragmatism. This is evident by the fact that both the Democrats and Republicans are basically indistinguishable at this point. They are all scrabbling for the same votes and are therefore pandering to the same groups. The more success the Republicans have going after the religious vote, and sacrificing the first amendment in the process, the more the Democrats will do the same. And there are numerous other examples where, for all their differences, they are all basically the same. Therefore the people with the power to change ideas are the people who have not blindly committed their vote for one or two baubles, tradition, or other irrational factor.

### So What? ### This is not to advocate catering to pragmatists to get bread and circuses. This is rather a call to moral judgments. It is wrong to give sanction to the evils of one party just for one or two principles that haven’t been wiped out yet.

To further the goals of individual rights you must remain uncommitted to the groups acting to destroy those rights. You must then act to spread these ideas. The only way to fight bad ideas is with good ideas and the way to support good ideas is to show everyone. Man must live through means of reason, he must learn what it is he needs to survive and then act to obtain it. The only way to have a society of man that promotes life is to promote reason and the way to do that is to bar the initiation of force from social relationships.

> The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. –Ayn Rand

So I remain an independent, free to use my mind to chose my values and my government. I will, most likely, vote for someone, but in the time when I am not pushing that button I will devote time to advocating good ideas.

[^1]: Or belongs to a party that had at one point defended this value. [^2]: I originally wrote “defend to the death” and removed for readability of the sentence, but put it down here because it is very apt in this context. [^3]: Gus Van Horn has a nice comment on these tests too, that helped me figure reach this post. [^4]: This of course is how many people actually do it. And probably how the Iraqi war is to be decided. [^5]: Of course even in this contrived example you could leave the murder part out and just rank self sacrifice as a positive virtue and watch the corpses pile up.

Previously Logical Disconnect served as a diary of rants and various diatribes of no particular purpose and with no cohesive theme. Often it had, as most blogs, come off as complaints and sometimes information that was too personal to be of much use to anyone even those who know me. Primarily it was a personal outlet for unformed notions I wanted to share but with no one in particular.

In some sense the personal nature will continue, however, I have recently decided to use the writing here as a means to further my study of Objectivism.

My plan is to use it to write in order to learn. It became explicit to me when listening to Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s lecture series The Philosophy of Education that writing is a tremendously valuable cognitive tool. It forces you to slow down your thought process and make well reasoned arguments. If you don’t want the concrete, the writing, to be utter nonsense then you must understand and mentally organize the subject. And by doing this it requires you to integrate the concepts, you wish to write about, into your own hierarchy of knowledge. To really understand the ideas in order to convey them. This is to be part of my defense against any kind of dogmatism or other irrationality in my study of philosophy.

This is analogous to the “trick” I used in college to give focus to study. When it became generally well known that I was doing well, I was often asked for help by other students in my classes. By agreeing to help others I was required to understand the material well enough to convey it to them. And if you have ever tried to teach, especially someone who is honestly seeking to learn, you can’t fake this understanding. After spending time teaching the concepts to others, my understanding of the material was unshakable. This activity greatly focused my effort and diminished my need for additional independent study.

By making the writing public I could be subject to criticism or counterarguments which may help me refine my ideas. It will provide additional context to those I have been having frequent philosophic discussions with recently. And will also further my wife’s growing understanding that she has chosen a very unique individual to share life with.

I also plan to use the writing here as a tool for introspection and as a secondary value I would like my children to be able to have this as a concrete reference for knowing about their Father. I know reading a copy of a single letter I discovered, which my father wrote years ago at work[1] gave me a different and unexpected perspective and even greater admiration for him.

Yes this is a very selfish motive and personal collection of articles. I intend to derive great value from writing them.

1. Yes letter, not email. I said years ago.

Basically I start trying to plan out some structure that is used to capture the main things I need capturing, which anyone can tell you are a list of your projects. A list of your next actions. And some sort of calendar to capture the hard landscape of what is happening. And finally a reliable reference file. Where to store stuff you may need to reference later, reliably, in a form that is easy to look up.

Well as a guy who builds systems and programs this is a nightmare, I start thinking this is simple enough to build something. Well it isn’t, because all of the sudden I have something way more complex than the 37signals people have built, and it will take me a good 8 or 40 hours to put together. And then I start thinking about backup, because hell if this is my life I better be able to back it up. And of course I don’t have time for this because while I am thinking about this I am shirking all kinds of other responsibilities, and the fires are growing all around me. Then I run around for 3 days putting them out and long for an uninterrupted month where I can construct this super-duper life runner application.

Well I am a father, and I work, and I have hobbies, there is no uninterrupted month coming any time in the forseeable future, which I can’t really see much of anyway because I am so busy running around putting out fires, or planning for the utopia in some distant future. I really need to work on my middle game.

Anyway, starting today, I am going to errect a little bit of scaffolding to try and hold my life together. I am going to spend about 10 minutes thinking about the simplest system that can possibly work.

*I am picturing a calendar and a notebook.*

I think the biggest thing here is consistency of putting everything there, and to get in the habit of looking at it several times a day. Maybe I can trick myself and write “email” or “bloglines” on the cover, since I typically look at both of those several times an hour.

I have to convince my brain that it doesn’t have to be perfect to start using it.

Well as I was listening to this it sounded like there was a lot of pressure to build up this management framework around your depression, which could in turn cause stress as you could wonder why all the hard work you are putting in at controlling your depression isn’t working and how it is possible fail in this mighty quest to control your feelings, and it just seemed like the total wrong direction to go for dealing with depression. I mean why apply the principles of management and work to your problem if applying those very things to other aspects of your life has caused the growth of this problem. It seems to me the solution to many problems in our society is to do something; do anything. And likely that attitude is how the problem came about in the first place.

Now I don’t really know what depression is, or know if I have ever experienced it. But it seems to me that applying the same thinking that caused the condition in the first place is not going to fix it.

I would recommend buying a hammock, and using it.

I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent. The people I’ve met who do great work rarely think that they’re doing great work. They generally feel that they’re stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it’s only a matter of time until they’re found out.

Yeah, I know anyone who reads my blog already saw this somewhere else, or doesn’t really care to read it. Well I want to be able to find it again. And I haven’t found a good way to do bookmark sharing between many different machines. Maybe a good idea for a firefox plugin.

– Mark Twain

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see it’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.Only I will remain.

– The Bene Gesserit Litany of Fear from the novel Dune by Frank Herbert

To all the fear mongers who work for the popular media companies:

I am not scared.

I don’t care who you think has weapons of mass destruction, or what eating a specific food item will do to me, or how bad it’s going to rain tomorrow. At least not to the overhyped levels to which you are pumping these and other popular memes. Specifically when you provide no real news, other than a misinterpretation of a press release from the day before. Do you feel even a little pang of remorse as you prey on fear to sell advertising space?

I am NOT scared.

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.

Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865), (attributed)

Easily accomplished consistent reading of the Quotes of theDay is just one of the many reasons I enjoy using Bloglines

By the way is this similar to how G.W. Bush decided to take our country to war? I am of course referring to the President reportedly quoted as saying: God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam …. Source: here.

“Iam. I think. I will. …”

“What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.”

“I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This—my body and spirit—this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. …”

—Ayn Rand

So be it.