I'm going to step into a debate that no one has asked me to join, concerning the implications of a belief system that I reject.

In Matthew 12:31, Jesus declares that there is exactly and only one unforgiveable sin, and that is to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. (It would here be tangential to discuss why he declared such a thing; the relevant point is that he said it.) Every other sin is declared to be forgiveable.

So let's apply that proposition to an issue about which the 'Net has been stupidly buzzing — suicide. A clergyman's son has killed himself, and some are insisting that this son is necessarily going to Hell, or at least that Christianity must hold as much. But how, exactly, can the act of suicide, if indeed a sin, be both forgiveable and at the same time ensure that one goes to Hell?

If, between every suicidal act and actual death, there were opportunity to regret and to repent, then perhaps this would be the way to forgiveness; which would of course imply that suicide weren't unforgiveable. But it seems that, in some cases, there just isn't enough time. Yet, somehow, if the act is a sin, it has to be forgiveable, even without the possibility of post factum repentance in this life. We must therefore conclude that, within Christian doctrine, either suicide is not a sin at all (which appears doubtful, in that the prohibition against homicide doesn't seem to make an exception for killing oneself), or that it is a forgiveable sin — that a person who'd otherwise been saved would not be lost for having deliberately killed him- or herself — which sin doesn't even require specific repentance in this life.

(I'm acutely aware that there are those who will claim that to commit suicide is, really, to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. In other contexts, I've heard some people go so far as to claim that any sin is, really, every sin. But, if this sort of logic holds, then the claim of Jesus that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit were an exception wouldn't. There would be nothing operational to the rule but that exception, and everyone would be going to Hell, regardless of works and of faith. The notion that people somehow more greatly insult the Holy Spirit by killing themselves than by other homicides or by other sins more generally is in sore need of more than hand-waving accompanied by beatific smiles or by stern looks.)

The mainstream Christian doctrine that suicide is a sure route to Hell just isn't supported by their Holy Scriptures. It arose because the existence of the Church here on Earth was threatened by the possibility of believers attempting a short-cut to Paradise. The Earthy flock would be reduced in number, and questions would be asked about the sincerity of those who lingered.

Yester-day evening, I was using a publicly accessible WLAN to connect with the Internet. I found my access to this 'blog blocked by a Norton-branded product, which declared the 'blog to be pornographic.

Erotica really hasn't figured large in this 'blog. You can find the relevant entries with the tag erotica. I think that the two or three entries that caused Norton to damn this thing are specifically my entry of 2 July 2009, my entry of 26 March 2010, and perhaps my entry of 30 June 2010; the entry of 30 January 2011 may have weighed against me as well.

Of these, the entry of 2 July 2009 is the one that most likely set-off alarms. It contains an overtly erotic image (by Carolyn Weltman), and has a key-word of cunnilinctus.[1] Do a Google image-search using that key-word, and a link to that entry is currently the second returned. And, because of a couple of the other key-words in that entry, other images are also found, including one by Karel Šimůnek than many would regard as pornographic.

In the '50s, the drawings by Joe Shuster in the entry of 30 June 2011 would have been regarded as pornographic, though now the word pornography would typically be regarded as too strong. (Actually, a hundred years ago, many would have insisted that the picture in my entry of 2 February 2011 were pornographic, while now-a-days it could appear in a children's book without fuss.) Still, the text in that entry contains the term sado-masochistic and there are pictures, and Norton's classification was probably mediated with weak AI; indeed, once other flags were thrown, the appearance of the word dominatrix in a follow-up entry may have been seen as further PoP.

Most WLANs that filter do so by way of a DNS table. When a browser seeks content located in terms of a URI or of a URL, and that specification includes a domain name, the domain name is converted to an IP number by way of a DNS table. By censoring the table that is used, the WLAN can block domains.

Some people subvert this censorship by way of a proxy server, which is no more than some site that will act as an intermediary; fetching content from the blocked domain. The obvious problem here is that the proxy may be identified and blocked as well.

A better subversion is to use a different table than whatever is being supplied by the WLAN. In particular, one may configure one's system to use DNS tables provided by Google, or perhaps by some other third party. But be alert that using an alternative DNS table may not be a good idea in other contexts. (For example, when using a subscription ISP that places quotas on content for most sites, but with exceptions.)

[1]The words cunnilinctus and cunnilingus are synonymous in English and in some other languages; but in Latin cunnilinctus referred to the act, while cunnilingus referred to a performer of that act. The latter word acquired its more recent meaning as a result of incompetent posturing (something that has figured more than once in attempts to borrow foreign terms and phrases). Efforts to clean-up this particular mess have repeatedly failed, but I avoid participating in it, by using the word that is both proper English and proper Latin. Hence my use of the less common term.

The term ambiguity is often applied to matters that are in fact not at all ambiguous. Sometimes the mis-application is simple carelessness, but in one application it is hard not to see a more active perversion.

Characters (fictional or actual) who are called morally ambiguous almost never are. Instead, the label is most often applied to characters of two sorts.

One sort is morally compromised. Those characters are not all bad; they may even be mostly good; but they are discernibly not all good. The person labelling them as morally ambiguous typically very much seems to be trying for special pleading if a sort on behalf of the character or of the moral short-comings exhibited by the character.

The other sort exhibits a combination of characteristics, some of which the audience will find attractive but some of which the person applying the label finds disagreeable, without his or her being able to make a sound case (or seemingly sound case) against those traits. By labelling the character as morally ambiguous, the labeller is insinuating doubt without reasoned foundation. Challenged, he or she will likely deny having issued a condemnation of the characteristics against which he is directing that doubt.

In application to situations, the term moral ambiguity is more likely to be legitimately applied than in application to characters. But calling a situation morally ambiguous is also often an attempt to introduce by back door a special plea for bad behavior.

(One of the papers on which I am presently working, and the paper of that lot that is likely to end-up the least mathematical, compares and contrasts some decision-theoretic states that are often mistaken one for another. One sort of these states entails ambiguity. So I have been thinking about real and specious ambiguity more generally.)

When I went for dinner, I encountered someone slipping into madness. He was polite and pleasant, but going mad.

He was fixated upon improving the world globally. I don't know whether he were going mad because he wanted somehow to improve the world globally, or were obsessively focussed upon improving the world globally because he was going mad; my guess would be that the aspiration and the madness were each feeding upon the other. In any case, he was writing and drawing chaotically with bright marker on loose sheets of paper, and trying to engage random people in his efforts to figure-out How to Save the World. I was a random person.

I sometimes talk to madmen. No less or more comes out of my conversations with them than those with most other people. In this case, I wasn't much occupied at the time with anything else but eating.

He found talking with me to be discouraging. It's not that I don't think that the world might be saved, or that I might do something towards that end. It's that I think that most people, mad or otherwise and including him, fundamentally misconceive the nature of the problem and the potential methods of solution. The Good isn't subject to arithmetic; concern for others is no guarantee against actions that produce horrific outcomes; the meek are capable of over-estimating what can typically be done and thence what they can do; and any attempt to call a convention of the best-and-brightest in each field would attract a different sort (or none at all).

He took his madness to a different table.

The day after my previous entry, Hugo Chávez returned to Venezuela. And the question that I'd like to ask is that of what he is doing there. I don't mean merely to ask why he is there, but indeed to ask in what action he is engaged.

By accounts, Chávez is not faring well; amongst other things, he's having trouble breathing. It doesn't seem that this move was for his health. And so there is speculation as to its purpose.

One suggestion is that he has simply gone home to die. But Chávez, in particular, has not been one to become resigned to the thought of personal death. Such thoughts in 2002 rather unhinged the man. And the official presentation has continued to play-down his medical problems. Whatever apparatus is used to assist him in breathing is removed from his person and from the view-frame when photographs are taken. I think that Chávez is indeed home to die, but not simply.

Another suggestion is that Chávez is home to stabilize the political situation. Under his administration, the institutional framework has been largely hollowed-out; his absence, even when living, creates a vacuum. His physical presence seems to reduce the immediacy of concern about what the nation is to do without Chávez. But the vacuum is far from filled by an inert Chávez, and the stabilizing effect of his mere presence can last only so long as he lives.

If Venezeula is to be stable in the wake of his death, there must be someone or something that can take his place. But only Chávez has the power to position that someone or something. Chávez would have to do something to put it in place. And I think that, in one sense, such preparation is why he is back in Venezuela; but that returning to Venezuela at this time was not Chávez's own idea.

I think that the Cuban regime, expecting him to die soon, encouraged him to go home, and that they did so in the hope that he would anoint a successor, who would keep the petroleum flowing to Cuba. Of course, Chávez was not quite told any of this. I think that the Cubans quietly pray for Chávez to be transformed by the process of dying, and conceivably by the urgings of the Venezuelans around him, into the sort of fellow who will say ¡Ay! ¡Me voy a morir! Guess that I'd better pick-out my Joshua. But, so far, that's not happening. Chávez cannot bring himself to plan for his own death (perhaps especially as the Holy Land is nowhere in sight). Chávez is trying to live.

When a charismatic leader dies aburptly while still in power, his or her supporters quickly begin building a mythology of what would have been accomplished had he or she lived. That is why, for example, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was and largely is so highly regarded; in the minds of his admirers, he would have accomplished wonderful things in the last five years of a two-term Presidential Administration, regardless of what one otherwise makes of its first thousand days.

The mythological episode of such leadership is treated as having the same standing for purposes of comparison as does historical fact. When an opponent tries to construct an argument founded on logic and general fact against policies associated with that leader, supporters treat the mythology as if it is a disproof by counter-example. What's really happening then is that Faith is being mistaken for empirical data.

Even before the dire physical ailments of Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías became apparent, his base of supporters had discernibly eroded as the consequences of substituting administration for markets became harder not to see in the specific experience of Venezuela and as, yet again, a socialist regime increasingly moved to forceably silence critics rather than to meet their criticism in open debate. But, if Chávez were to die, then those concerns would be played-down; and, no matter what happened in Venezuela after his death, a mythology would be constructed about how Chávez would, after all, have brought-about a Golden Age for Venezuela, for large parts of Latin America, perhaps for the Third World more generally. In effect, the Hugo Chávez Who Would Have Lived would be treated as-if an empirical disproof of any argument against sorts of socialism that would come to be associated with Chávez.

The world would be better-off without belief in that mythological Chávez. For the long-run sake of the world, I've been hoping that Chávez would bounce-back, retake the helm, and continue to run Venezuela into the ground. (I'd agree that having Venezuela run into the ground even once would be awful, but having it and other nations run into the ground repeatedly by a string of imitators seems worse. And, if Chávez were to die, one imagines that his successors would run Venezuela into the ground anyway.)

Well, it seems that Chávez is not going to bounce-back; perhaps he's going to die. But, if so, he's taking a rather long time about it. And, at least, pretty much anything short of suddenly dying undermines the effectiveness of mythologizing. That's not how it would work if this mythologizing were rational — the Leader Who Would Have Been would have moved across the stage every bit as heroically if not for senile dementia or if not for a crippling stroke as he or she would have if not for an assassin's bullet. But the matter is in the first place very much one of irrational fantasizing. Making matters worse for mythologizers of Chávez, his lieutenants, jockeying for as much power as they might have in any case, insist that Chávez is still calling the important shots; his departure would thus be less sharply defined.

Even if Chávez bounces-back rather completely, we'll still get some mythologizing — just as there will be a mythology of what President Obama Would Have Done had he had an deferential majority in Congress for eight years — but the world may be spared the sort of mythology that would have developed had Chávez died on the operating table on 11 December.

In 1980, I had two or three brief encounters with David Koch.

Yes, that David Koch — David Hamilton Koch, younger of the much maligned Koch brothers.

Koch was on the Libertarian Party ticket as the Vice-Presidential candidate. He was there because his candidacy precluded any statutory limit on how much he might donate to the campaign.[1]

One of these encounters was at a meet-and-greet sort of event for Candidate Koch, in Columbus, Ohio. The last was on the main campus of the Ohio State University, where he delivered a speech and then took questions from the audience. There might have been one other encounter that I've forgot. In any case, at the last encounter, he and his entourage got rather angry with me.

In 1980, the brothers Koch were not the bogey-men of the political left that they have become to-day. Their father, Fred C. Koch had been on the radar of those who lay awake at night in the '50s and in the '60s, fearful of what was then called the radical right. Fred Chase Koch, a founding member of the John Birch Society, was a wealthy and vociferous advocate of a view that United States policy, domestic and foreign, was largely driven by a Communist conspiracy, and he very much tended to reaction against change, rather than to seeing any of the social and political developments of the 20th Century as genuine advances. But Fred C. Koch, and people like him, were largely forgotten by 1980. Moreover, Charles and David had gone down a libertarian path, making them seem less threatening. Those in the libertarian movement were aware of the Kochs largely because they supplied much of the funding for the Cato Institute.[2] The business world was aware of the Kochs because the company that their father had founded was amongst the world's largest of those whose stock was not offered to the public. And that was about it.

At the meet-and-greet event, David Koch came across both as quite likable and, well, as a bit of a dork — somewhat socially awkwardly. And, no, I didn't get him angry by later calling him a dork. He and others got angry in response to a different assertion, framed as a question.

During the question-and-answer part of Mr Koch's appearance at Ohio State, someone asked him if he'd be up for another run in 1984. His reply was to the effect that he was really enjoying the present effort, and would be positively inclined to being on the ticket again. This response, which I took to be perfectly sincere, made me cringe. And so I raised my hand. I don't remember my exact words — it has, after all, been more than 32 years — but they were to this effect:

It was incredibly generous of you to agree to be on the ticket for this election, and to give as much of your money as you have; but don't you fear that, if you run again in 1984, you will be seen as having bought the party?

Koch, who gave some sort of dismissal (again, I don't remember exactly what), was visibly angry. There were grumblings from other parts of the room. Later, I was told that people (who never confronted me) had expressed their dismay at what I'd said, as if I'd insulted Koch. Which is, of course, not what I'd done. What I'd done was to warn him of how his efforts would be construed.

Well, David Koch didn't run again in 1984. Not because he took my warning to heart, but because the Libertarian Party Presidential campaign of 1980 was largely a waste of the money and effort that he and others had expended; it received far fewer votes than promised.[3] But he and Charles didn't stop contributing to political causes. And the claim has been made that they have bought those organizations and individuals to whom the Koch's have provided funding. The Kochs have been demonized, and the demonization has been used to depict those causes as villainous devices. Any rational calculation of the results of a contribution by the Kochs must account for this effect. And so, in spite of the fact that David Koch didn't run again in 1984, events have illustrated, in specific application to David Koch, the dynamic that underlay the point that I made in 1980.

Except for an episode of crusading against the prostitution of children, I withdrew from political activism in 1981. And, as an economist, I'd rather wrestle with abiding questions of fundamental theory than involve myself in the research of policy think-tanks. So I doubt that I'll ever meet Mr Koch again. And it's unlikely that, after more than 32 years, Mr Koch even remembers that moment. But, if I did talk with him again, I'd be tempted to say I told you so, … you dork!

[1] Campaign finance laws run smack into First Amendment protections of freedom of expression. A right to freedom of expression is no more or less than a right to use one's resources without constraints in response to the expressive content (as such) of the use. Lawyerly distinctions have been drawn amongst the ways that one might use resources to convey the political ideas that one supports, but these are always going to be logically incoherent. And, in the case of the law in 1980 (as still to-day), the absurdity of claiming that there were no infringement in limiting spending of one's own money on one's own campaign was too palpable for such censorship to be imposed.

[2] The Cato Institute is often characterized as itself libertarian, but the word libertarian is best reserved for a more thorough-going (classical) liberalism than that practiced by the Institute.

[3] The mainstream media did what it could to under-mine that campaign, first attempting to displace the LP with Barry Commoner and then, when that didn't take, actively recruiting John Anderson to run as the third candidate. Those who managed the LP campaign had banked pretty much everything on the expectation that the only Presidential candidates on all state ballots would be President Carter, Ronald Reagan, and the Libertarian, Ed Clark. There was no planning for the inevitability that the rules would be waived in order to get Anderson on nearly all state ballots. And the Libertarian message had been muddled to make it more appealing to moderates, and stayed muddled even after Anderson was positioned to take those votes.

The other day, I received a copy of Physics Calculations (1952) by Max Wittman.

This is actually my second copy, as I got one in very nice shape some years ago. Mr Wittman was one of my favorite teachers when I went to high school. We didn't use this book in the class that I took from him; it was long out-of-print. But still I'd wanted a copy as a sort of memento of the man. When another copy became available, for a pittance, it occurred to me that I could use it to buffer my first copy, should anyone want to use it. (It's a nifty little book.)

Anyway, this copy came with some writing on the inside front cover. In the upper left is a sticker on which was written

U. S. Vukcevich
204 E. Oak Street
West Hazelton, Pa.

In the upper right was written 5-21-52. And, in the center was ink-stamped

U. SAMUEL VUKCEVICH
Physical Science Dept.
High school

So I though that I'd find what I could about this U. Samuel Vukcevich.

For the first several seconds, the information was fairly unsurprising. Dr. Ukasin Samuel Vukcevich was born on 25 October 1928, in St. Clair, Pennsylvania, to Savo and Stana (née Punosevich) Vukcevich; Ukasin died on 15 April 2008. He was raised in West Hazelton and was graduated from its high school. He was a decorated veteran of the Marine Corps, serving at the end of World War II in the Pacific Theater. He went on to get a degree from Bloomsburg State College, and also earned degrees from Temple University and Rutgers Universi­ty. He taught high school and became principal of a high school. In the mid '50s, he married Anna Pejakovich (who died on 21 November 2011).

So far, so good; then I see the word warden. Because, at some point, U. Samuel Vukcevich transitioned from high-school principal to, uhm yeah, prison superintendent. In fact, he gets special mention in various news articles and books because, on 24 November 1972, shortly after he became warden of New Jersey's Rahway State Prison, they had a riot, in which he was injured and taken hostage. In any case, it seems that he was an ardent advocate of using prisons to rehabilitate criminals, and that his belief in such efforts was what drew him, by the late '50s, into involvement with the penal system, beginning with juvenile reformatories.

At the end of his career, Dr Vukcevich was working as an adjunct professor at Various New Jersey colleges and universities, and as a labor-relations negotiator.

Assuming that you do much surfing of the WWWeb, you've surely noticed that there are a great many sites that now require one to use an account with an external social-networking service in order to access functionality that previously would have been available without such an account. For example, to comment to some sites which are not themselves hosted on Yahoo! or on Facebook or on Google+, one must none-the-less log into an account with one of these services.

From the perspective of the site-owners, reliance upon such external services can reduce the costs of managing site-access. The external social networks provide this management partly as valued-added to their account-holders, but providing this service is a means of building a behavioral profile of those account-holders.[1] (To this day, most people do not assimilate the fact that most social-networking services exist largely as profiling services.) As you might expect, I feel that efforts to build such profiles should be resisted.

I understand both the problems of the client-sites instead independently managing access, and the difficulties of knowing just where to draw some objective line that would distinguish acceptable and unacceptable external services. (For example, it seems to be perfectly acceptable to require a verified e.mail account, and even to require a verified e.mail account from a service that is not black-listed. But, once one requires a verified e.mail account from a service that is white-listed, one may be pushing visitors into allowing themselves to be profiled (by an e.mail-service provider), if the white-list is overly constrained.)

What seems inexcusable to me is not simply handing access-control over to an external service, but handing it over exclusively to one external service that is a profiling service. The very worse case of such inexcusability is handing control over to the biggest of these services, Facebook, but it remains inexcusable to give exclusivity to any other external service (unless that service has some real guarantee against building profiles).

Which brings me to a policy change that I will be effecting for my own 'blog, not-withstanding that it has never required an external account to access its functionality.

At this and some other sites, a list of implicitly or explicitly recommended links is provided, outside of the body of principal content. (With the present formatting of this 'blog, they are in a right-hand column.)

In the case of my own list, I will be removing (or refraining from providing) links whenever I discover that the only evident way to access those other sites or to comment to them is by using an account with exactly one external social-networking site.

For example, if a 'blog is not hosted on Facebook, but the only readily seen way to comment to it is by using a Facebook account, then I will not wilfully provide a link to it. I will continue to link to Facebook sites; I will continue to link to sites where the only readily seen ways of commenting use social-networking accounts, so long as accounts from more than one social network may be used.

This policy only applies to the sort of generalized recommendations represented by that list. I may continue to link within principal content to such things as news-stories at sites that are enabling such profiling.

[1] I don't know that those handing access-management off to such services receive side-payments for doing so, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Because LiveJournal has again broken its support for OpenID, I am again locked-out of reading Friends-only entries.

This time, instead of struggling to find a work-around (while the LJ support team does nothing but collect information which will be ignored by the LJ programmers, and then eventually expresses regrets at the lack of action), I am simply done with it. I won't be reading LJ entries.

I won't even bother with the more public entries at LiveJournal. If there's something that my LJ Friends want me to read, then it will have to be written elsewhere.

I am presently undecided as to whether I'm willing to enable LiveJournal to the extent of allowing it to continue to access my RSS feed. If you find that entries from this 'blog stop appearing on your Friends pages, then you might check as to whether that's simply because the 'blog has become quiescent, or because I've blocked the LJ server.

[Addendum (2013:02/06): I am informed that LiveJournal's alleged feed of this 'blog hasn't delivered any of the entries from this year anyway, so the question of whether to permit it to do so might perhaps be put aside.]