Frak

In a Dilbert comic, I used the expletive "frak." As fans of the excellent TV drama
Battlestar Galactica know, the crew of Galactica yell "frak" several times per episode as a
substitute for the
other f-word.
Galactica is a military ship under continuous threat of annihilation by Cylons. If you were on
that ship, you'd be cursing, too. For example, you might be tempted to yell "frak!" when you
discover that the hot chick who frakked your brains out is actually a frakin' Cylon who is now
pregnant with your frakin' baby that is half human and half frakin' toaster.
When I first heard the battle-toughened military crew of Galactica yelling "frak," it was like
listening to Christian-themed hip-hop. It was just wrong. But over time, I grew to embrace it as a
clever way to make viewers think of the real f-word without actually saying it. It's a good safety measure
because, as you know, real curse words damage children.
One thing that has always puzzled me is why we don't see special treatment facilities to help the
children who are victims of cursing. We have special hospitals for all sorts of other diseases and
afflictions, but no money goes into helping the children who accidentally watch HBO.
You might wonder how dangerous it is to expose children to curse words. I have never seen a
scientific study on this topic but it's easy to calculate the danger. For example, parents let children
ride bicycles. But parents do not ever allow children to hear vulgar words if they can help it.
Therefore, we can deduce that cursing is more dangerous than maybe being hit by a car.
You might argue that the real issue with cursing is teaching children how to behave properly.
But realistically, every kid is going to eventually hear every bad word, and use most of them at one
time or another. That's why I advocate teaching proper cursing in school.
We already do a similar thing with driver's education and sex education. That's because
cars and genitalia are dangerous if used improperly, especially at the same time. There's
nothing inherently dangerous about cars and genitalia. It's all about training.
Cursing is the same way. An inappropriately used curse is both shocking and revolting. For
example, an infant who is unschooled in the proper use of profanity might make this sort of
misstep in conversation with a nun:
NUN: Good morning, child. How are you today? CHILD: Fuck you, penguin.
See? That's wrong. But a properly formed and executed profanity can be a thing of breathtaking
beauty. It can have great utility, too. For example, if a properly schooled infant is threatened by a bully,
he can disarm the situation with defensive profanity:
BULLY: I'm gonna flatten you!
CHILD: Go ahead, you sock-humping, turd-scented, poultry whore.
BULLY: Ha ha! Good one. How did you know about the sock? Let's be friends!
The Stuff in My Head
I remember one day in sixth grade, our teacher asked us to go to the blackboard, one at a
time, and write down something we would be willing to die for. The first few kids wrote down
answers such as "cancer" and "hit by car." Our teacher informed us that this was not what he was
looking for. When my turn came, I wrote "my country" and apparently this was the right answer.
He praised me in front of the class. He also would have accepted freedom and democracy.
So how did a twelve-year-old know he should die for his country? That stuff gets in your head
early, way before your critical reasoning capacity is in place. And it stays there. Maybe some of it is
caused by evolution, but I doubt it. I think the environment puts it there, thanks to nine hundred
recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance and whatnot. Evolution might have favored those who protect
their family or their tribe, but I doubt it had time to work on "and the people who you don't
know, from all ethnicities, who live on a patch of land recently called the United States." If I had
been born in North Korea I would be making images of the Dear Leader out of rice husks. And
I'd he pretty sure he was a living god.
I'm not complaining. I'm glad that kids are being brainwashed to die for me. But it has become
a hobby of mine to identify the ideas that got into our heads before our critical reasoning came
together. Obviously, if you have the same religion or political preferences as your parents, that's an
automatic warning flag. Or, as you might say, "I agree with my parents because they were right." But
my favorite example is the people who argue, in essense, "No matter how ignorant you are, you
have a responsibility to vote," and its dumber cousin, "If you don't vote, you don't have a right to
complain."
It doesn't take much critical reasoning to dismantle those ideas. I'm fairly certain we have the
right to complain anytime we want. It's called freedom of speech. And we certainly have the right to
not vote, for any reason we want. Being ignorant has to be on the short list of good reasons for not
voting. But this flies in the face of whatever you were brainwashed into believing when you were a
kid.
Again I remind you that I'm in favor of this sort of brainwashing for the sake of society. I'm
happy that lots of people vote. The system would break down otherwise, and short of me being
the dictator, I can't think of a better system than imaginary democracy masking the naked
ambitions of greedy capitalists. It sounds bad when I say it, but frankly I don't have a better idea.

Untitled

In debates about one thing or another, people often argue that we shouldn't abandon the ideals
of the Founding Fathers of the United States. So I started wondering what those ideals were. Before
I go on, let me say that I'm highly patriotic, despite what you read here. Please don't ask me to
move to Venezuela.
As you know, the Founding Fathers had a lot of time to write things down because they didn't
have television, and there are only so many hours that you can spend whittling new teeth. But I
don't believe they ever got together and created a document called the Bill of Ideals. To understand
their ideals we must look to their actions. Here are a few of the ideals they apparently shared:
1. Slaveryexcellent source of poontang
2. Women voting? That's crazy talk!
3. People who don't own land suck.
4. A good way to change tax policy is through violence.
5. It's not really cross-dressing as long as you also wear manly boots.
6. Treason is okay if you have a good reason.
7. It is fine to be fat if you are also witty and invent things.
Moments ago, as I was searching the Internet for some Founding Father tidbits upon which I
could wittily comment, I came across this historical fact about the Louisiana Purchase:
Though the transaction was quickly sealed, there were those who objected to the purchase on the
grounds that the Constitution did not provide for purchasing territory. However, Jefferson temporarily
set aside his idealism to tell his supporters in Congress that "what is practicable must often control
what is pure theory." The majority agreed.
Jefferson later admitted that he had stretched his power "till it cracked" in order to buy
Louisiana, the largest single land purchase in American history. As a result, generations of Americans
for nearly two hundred years have been the beneficiaries of Jefferson's noble vision of America
and his efforts at expanding the continent.
I found it at this website in case you want to check for yourself:
http://earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/louisiana/
As I suspected, the Founding Fathers were a practical bunch of dudes. That's an ideal I can
get behind.

More on Those Darned Voting Machines
After thinking about it long and hard, I've decided not to worry about voting machines getting
hacked. As long as there are voter opinion polls, we'll notice any outrageous manipulation of the
voting machines. For example, if the computer programmer in the cubicle behind you becomes your
next senator, and he wasn't even in the race, that's a red flag. Any big fraud will be noticed and
corrected.
The other possibility is that the manipulation is subtle and you can't be sure from the opinion
polls that something is truly wrong. Say the guy that would have legitimately received 48 percent of
the votes ends up with 51 percent instead. You might never catch that fraud. But so what?
If a candidate is able to get 48 percent of the popular vote legitimately, there's no way to know
he'll be worse than the candidate who got 52 percent. Voters simply aren't that good at predicting
the future. Every bad president we've ever had managed to get a majority of the votes. Sometimes
twice.
I've been involved in a number of job interviews for managers and chefs at my restaurants. I
consider myself a reasonably good judge of character with lots of experience interviewing people.
But when I compare the actual job performance of a person compared to what I predicted, there's
almost no correlation. Voting is the same way. We're judging how a candidate will handle a
nuclear crisis by how well his staff creates campaign ads. It's a completely nonsensical process.
And realistically, most elections are won by fraud in the form of misleading ad campaigns,
intentionally distorted statistics, and outright lies. Just because lying to the voters is totally legal doesn't
make it less bad than voting machine hacking. The intent and the result are identical. We live with
one and we can live with the other. And there's a nonzero chance that voting machine fraud might
sometimes cancel out the campaign lying fraud. The net effect could be positive at least some of
the time.
We should do all we can to ensure that voting machines are secure. But I'm moving it off my list
of things to worry about. That list is already long enough.