Saturday, July 28, 2012

Going for the True Gold

The Olympics tell us... Be a part of positive things. You need not tear down or destroy in order to compete. No one must be wrong or evil for you to be your best. The spot of highest honor cannot hold all of us, but by trying, you place yourself in the company of champions. Human beings are beautiful.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

A Few Words About Government

Let's get something straight. Government is a pain in the ass.

It's burdensome, it's frequently inefficient, it gets things wrong as often as it gets them right. Decent people are correct to wonder why they have to be saddled with the irritations of being governed. But intelligent people all know the reason for government: not everyone is decent. Some people are unreasonably selfish, some are careless or negligent, and some are just plain evil.

We have government because we have those people.

And if there's something about government that you don't like, your first step in rectifying the matter is to acknowledge that government is the natural solution for the existence of people who refuse to regulate themselves. "Let's get rid of government" ultimately equates to "Let's allow all the bad self-regulators to ruin everything for everyone." Once you acknowledge that some level of regulation is necessary, all interested parties can then make their case for whether particular regulations are useful and proper or intrusive and counterproductive. But if you just go around complaining that the problem is "too much government," what you're really doing is giving those faulty self-regulators cover to clear away regulations they don't like along with the ones that you don't like.

The problem is never "government" -- it is always specific pieces of legislation, specific executive-branch policies, or specific judicial decisions. If you try to deal with the problem of "government" instead of trying to deal with those specifics, you're inviting people with a fondness for abuse of power to walk all over you.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Cover Tweaking

I was looking at my covers today and found they looked really murky. So I tried to see if I could fix them with some contrast tweaks.

Better like this...



Or better like this ... ?


(I'm deliberately not saying which are the newer files.)