I haven't done a lick of research, but I find it hard to believe that any past US Presidents were continually hounded to produce their birth certificates.

The only thing political about this post is the underlying nature of the strange world we live in. The backdrop is a web server that sends out unique URLs that are tied to the IP requesting them. A recent request for just such a thing showed up in my error logs today:

[Mon Jul 13 04:34:25 2009] [error] [client 221.178.181.196]

For those who can't be bothered to whois that IP, it belongs to China Mobile Communications Corporation. Not particularly suspicious, all things considered. What gets interesting is when a request comes immediately afterwards, to the same URL that only the 221.178.181.196 client should have had:

[Mon Jul 13 04:34:30 2009] [error] [client 195.229.62.157]

Again, whois will tell you that IP belongs to Emirates Telecommunications Corporation. So someone in the Dubai area has a close network tie with someone in the Beijing area. The geek in me thinks it's just a botnet looking for new hosts to spam with, but the paranoid jingoist in me thinks the pattern is troubling.

xkcd is usually a pretty good comic, but not today:

I hope you see by my title why this is impossibly stupid. It's not a question of the orders of magnitude difference between million and billion. It's a question about the vector of the value. Since these jackasses weren't getting negative bonuses when they were making money, they shouldn't be getting positive bonuses when they're losing money. That would be the honest comparison.

Another way governments tend to only grow is over space. The story of history has often been of a country claiming a new territory for itself, often times even when a native people already lived there. And when new territories were harder to come by, governments actually convinced people of their country to kill people of another country so that the government could take some old territories.

Indeed, governments will even enlist their citizens to kill each other so that it can keep all the land for itself. The USA had a nice little Civil War of its own because it seemingly forgot the words and intent of the Declaration of Independence. Things have definitely gotten better as we've learned to live on an increasingly crowded world, but you still don't commonly see governments shed territory without a fight.

But what is really impossibly stupid about all this is how that space is managed. There are many modern principles that the Founding Father simply did not have in their time, so lets examine a couple ways in which a government could better be structured in order to control a territory. In the interest of full disclosure and/or self-promotion, I happen to work developing a territory game called Subsume which is built on these (and other) observations.

Your border is your country

A simplification of the holographic principle is roughly that everything happening within an area is seen at the boundary of that area. While it is generally applied to physical divisions, it should be easy to see that it has analogies in political, financial, social, and other borders that conceptually get drawn.

A government that continually seeks to expand its power results in borders that are increasingly complex. We see this in the physical form in the USA with two non-contenental States and a number of disconnected territories, including widely spread smaller areas like embassies and military bases. We see this in the political form by showing public support of foreign governments while at the same time providing private support to opposing factions (or vice versa).

That idea of the difference between private and public, though, is a fiction at the border. It is pointless, for example, to say there is a serious embargo against Cuba when cigar-smoking celebrity governors can seemingly buy what they please. The sum influence of the information is simply projected for all the world to see, even if every detail isn't seen by every person.

It makes more sense to reduce the government's complexity by projecting a unified message that is reasonable instead of multiplying entities that are all over the spectrum. It is definitely a form a transparency that governments seem hesitant to adopt, but there is every reason to think that, even treated as a black box, the system is fundamentally defined by its inputs and outputs.

Fractals are your friend

Here's a nifty thought experiment. Follow this progression for me:

1. A person lives in a house
2. A house is on a block
3. A block is in a neighborhood
4. A neighborhood is in a city
5. A city is in a county
6. A county is in a state
7. A state is in a nation

My question to you is: what should be the immediate concerns of a nation's federal government? If you answered "A person" then you've probably never heard of fractals. The idea behind fractals is that complex things can be more easily expressed when they are built from simple things that reflect the complex thing.

The United States of America is a very complex thing, but nothing has been done to simplify it in a fractal manner. Even the name itself implies that it should be a composition of States based on some common unifying principle. Some might say that is the Constitution, but too often the federal government sees fit to dictate to the States instead of simply allowing itself to be composed by those States.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the USA shouldn't care about the rights of individual citizens or that it should hold no sway over how a State acts. But what I am saying is that if there is some concept that applies to an entity at one level, it is only sensible to see if there is some underlying principle that can be applied at all scales. In doing so, you get closer to the heart of what it means to be part of a greater whole.

Don't consume what you can subsume

In summary, and hopefully in conclusion of political content for a while, governments in the real world will never be built up as nicely as a game of Subsume. There will be no crisp, linear borders. No simple means of conflict resolution. No easy definition for levels of control at all scales. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better by looking at how things have changed since 1776, and how they might be used to better run governments that are established to secure the rights of We The People.

Would it surprise you to hear that, since 1836, it has been illegal in North Carolina to wear a peacock feather facing forwards in your hat after dusk? Even though I completely made that up, it probably wouldn't surprise you if it had been true; for all I know, it may even be true! We've all heard of similarly crazy-sounding laws that remain on the books, and that is why time should receive more attention than it has by government.

Historical Context

It didn't start this way. The Declaration of Independence recognizes both the necessity of replacing a poorly functioning government and the general unwillingness of a populous to do so. It is somewhat incongruous, then, that the Constitution makes little provision to stem the growth of government over time. Even the President had no term limit until the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951.

Clearly it was thought that the checks and balances would suffice to limit excessive political influence. Clearly that was a mistake. Rather than reversing or removing statutes that previously elected officials put into place, too often is the case that a newly elected individual seeks to actually further that abuse of power for their own ends.

A particularly heated example of this in the USA is the topic of abortion. People somehow continually treat it like a political issue despite a long history of politicians never actually doing anything about it once they are elected. Indeed, keeping abortion legal actually benefits those politicians who say they're against it, because it locks up a segment of the voting public in their favor without them being reasonably held to account for their inaction despite a professed anti-abortion stance.

Future Context

All sorts of similar laws, good or not, keep piling up and keep fostering an increasingly divisive government. The result is a body politic that is attacking itself and, rather than looking for a cure, the system seems to be feeding the disease. So if we can agree that permanent laws are a cancer on a free society, let's look at a few impossibly stupid ways to get things back in check.

Fix the number of laws

When the number of laws restricting an individual's freedom is unbounded it is impossible for even the most decent of citizens to know whether or not they're doing something wrong. The old adage is that "ignorance of the law is no excuse", but it is becoming increasingly difficult to be anything but ignorant of the complex maze of statutes that apply to a person at any given time.

A fixed number of laws, whether it's 10, 100, or 1000, not only allows people to get a proper handle on what it means to be a respectable citizen in a proper society, but also limits the extent to which corruption can influence the government. In order to prevent a freedom, then, a politician would have to necessarily remove a prohibition of some other freedom.

Limit the time of laws

Ideally, laws should only be passed to address some specific, solvable problem that can only be handled by a government. It is then only reasonable that the power be granted for the amount of time necessary to deal with the problem. If more time is necessary, it seems fitting that regular renewal be a requirement.

While it may seem unnecessary for intractable social ills, like murder, to be revisited for legality, the argument from the flip side is that there is no harm in reexamining something so cut-and-dried compared to the inestimable harm in never reconsidering why many lesser laws are in place (e.g., where the line is drawn for legal and illegal drugs).

Expire unenforced laws

Perhaps the more reasonable approach is a bit of a hybrid: laws themselves should have a statute of limitations. Even a well-meaning law put on the books, for example, in 1836 should not exist as a potential for abuse if it has not otherwise resulted in arrests or prosecutions after 100 or 50 or even 10 years. It's hard to see the value in bothering to outlaw something that doesn't happen.

Limitations necessitate limitations

In summary, no government has unlimited resources at their disposal to pursue every little perceived injustice that occurs. The more you criminalize, the more criminals you have to detain and the fewer (willing) taxpayers you have to cover the bill, and a larger bill for each to cover. It is a runaway effect that has doomed many governments in the past, and steps need to be taken to ensure that the USA does not fail as a result of such petty political buffoonery.

The USA is an impossibly stupid country. It is a government founded by people who, with good reason, didn't much like governments. It started out fine, with a declaration that a government that doesn't represent the people has got to go. That was followed by a system of checks and balances that was intended to limit abuse of power, but that lead to the unfortunate problem of politicians who would aim to make a career out of collusion rather than briefly serve as a citizen.

Political power is the lowest form of power. It properly forms, like all executive positions, the bottom of an inverted hierarchy, with the President nowhere near being the most powerful person in the country, let alone being referred to as "leader of the free world". You might not think so if you're watching celebrity cheerleaders or endless pundits spouting on about it these days, but let's instead take those hacks for the partisan morons that they are and look at what political power can't do.

• When you're getting mugged on the street, a politician isn't likely to stop it.
• When a corporate head walks away with your life savings, you won't get it back by relying on a politician.
• If your city is flooding, no politician is going to rescue you.
• If rockets are raining down on you from a nearby enemy, you can be pretty certain that no politician is nearby to help.
• If you're a politician, it won't save you if you're caught selling influence, buying whores, or staging petty break-ins.

It is their very impotence that makes them grab at whatever power they can get, and that seldom means they are doing it in your best interest. Instead, things have progressively corrupted to the point where Real Americans, those whose spirit of government mistrust is inspired by the Founding Fathers, are marginalized and called unpatriotic. Push a two party system as a mandatory false dichotomy and let mob mentality take care of the rest.

But enough borderline-nutter bellyaching about the problems; let's talk impossibly stupid solutions. These proposed solutions will cover the two shortcomings I see with the way things currently are, tackling them one on the dimension of time and the other on the dimension of space. Sounds like more Unibomber-esque looniness? Stay tuned to see how the inmates would run the asylum.

Coincidental to the November 2008 Presidential Election, I started doing a stretch of work that was mostly telecommute. That got me motivated enough to not shave for not just a little while, but not until Inauguration Day. It was hard work, and I was thinking of throwing in the towel on New Year's Day, but I stuck with it until the incredibly bushy conclusion. I can proudly say it was an impossibly stupid thing to do.

It presents a stranger with a nicely ambiguous pseudo-statement about the political process. I might be a Republican growing it in protest of the loss of potency. I might be a Democrat mockingly growing it to show newfound virility. I might be neither, and growing it simply marks the period of anticipated change. I might also just be some unemployed bum that can't afford a razor.

Growing a beard is not unheard of for notable events in sports (playoff beard) or entertainment (strike beard), so why not politics? I didn't think much about it when I started, but this practice should be more common and, to that end, it needs a name. You have at least a four year wait before you can next participate, so take a minute of the intervening time to vote on what you'll be calling it.