The Clark Zone

John Hawkins has a good piece over at Townhall called 25 Reasons You Might Be a Liberal. It is pretty good, and I recommend that everyone go read it. Here are a few of my favorites:

You think Dan Quayle is the dumbest Vice-President we ever had because he believed a flash card that misspelled “potato,” but think Obama is a genius despite the fact he believes we have more than 57 states.

You get infuriated when you hear about the CEO of a Fortune 500 company making tens of millions of dollars, but don’t see a problem with an actor, basketball player, or trial lawyer making the same amount.

You believe the best way to fix the government screwing something up in the market is with…drumroll, please…more government intervention.

You think the first thing we should have done when Russia invaded Georgia was to take the matter to the United Nations, where Russia sits on the UN Security Council.

You have more nice things to say about countries like Cuba and France than you do about your own country.

It has been quite a long and busy week. My parents were out visiting us from Missouri all week, and Sarah’s parents spent last weekend with us too. To finish it all off, my graduation from BYU was this week.

I think the activities were just too much for Camille though. We did, however manage to take this picture:

Elder Richard G. Scott spoke at the commencement on Thursday and gave a wonderful talk (he was also given an honorary doctorate from BYU at the ceremony). He gave some advice to us on how to be happy in life. Here are some of my favorites of his tips: smile, don’t complain, have faith, and trust in the Lord. I think the best part of having him speak there was when President Samuelson was giving his bio. President Samuelson started to talk about Elder Scott’s wife and immediately Elder Scott smiled. I could tell she meant a lot to him.

I found this comic over at Townhall today that was just wonderful.

I know I have blogged about this before, but I just don’t understand why people think the U.S. government is suppose to bail us out of all our mistakes. It reminds me of something Sen. Obama said:

The fact of the matter is, real life comes with real consequences. The best thing a parent can do is teach their children that every decision they make will have consequences. Some decisions lead to desirable consequences; others bring about difficult circumstances. If someone decides to get in on a risky loan and one day can’t make their payments, or if an unwed couple decides to have sexual relations and gets pregnant, or if a person decides to drink and drive and kills a pedestrian, then there are consequences. In the same manner, if someone decides to study hard for a test, or someone decides to go college to further their education, then there are also consequences. It seems to me like the goal of the liberals is to get rid of all consequences. Provide abortions to those who decide to act like adults when they aren’t, and tax those who are successful so they don’t get the rewards of their hard work. It just doesn’t seem right.

One thing that video of Sen. Obama makes wonder is what he is going to do if his daughters make a mistake and get and STD. Some times there just isn’t a cure for an STD. Almost always the only cures for social problems have nothing to do with medicine.

After an interesting experience cooking today, I thought I try and give everyone out there a brief glimpse into the mind of a man. My qualifications for such a topic are: 1. I’m a man; 2. I have a mind. So here goes nothing!

My grandmother invited my family over for some rest and relaxation tomorrow. Included in this invitation was a good grandma-cooked meal. I proceeded to do the polite thing and offer to bring dessert. Sarah and I decided that the “Lemon Chess Pie” recipe from Paula Deen’s “The Lady & Sons: Just Desserts” cookbook would be fun to try. Since Sarah was taking care of Camille (who requires a lot of attention) I manned the kitchen. This is where my glimpse into the mind of a man begins.

All was going well with the lemon pie until I came across the following instructions:

Toss in eggs, beat like mad for a minute or so.

My initial thought was, “This should be fun. It’ll be like playing basketball. I’ll take the eggs and toss them across the room into the bowl.” Luckily Sarah was there to tell me that wasn’t exactly what it meant. But then I got really confused over the second part. How in the world does one “beat like mad?” I put on the most mad face I could muster and began to beat the eggs into the mixture. Sarah just laughed.

After overcoming the previous culinary deficiencies on my part, I ran into the very interesting end of the recipe.

Bake for about 40 minutes. You had better peek after a half hour to be sure all is well and the lovely brown delicate crust that forms on top is tanning to perfection. The center should be just barely firm, so don’t overbake, please.

That was it. That was the end. My question to Sarah was, “Well, what happens if all is not well? What do I do then?” See, in my opinion if she is going to give a warning like that, she better tell you what to do if it doesn’t look like it is suppose to. Sarah, on the other hand, interpreted that line about checking “to be sure all is well” meant something about adjusting the cooking time. I still just don’t know.

So at the end of it all, I have two delicious looking pies. I’ll have to follow up tomorrow after we eat them to let you know how they turned out. Hopefully my mad face was good enough!

My wife and I had our first child about a week and a half ago (on the 9th). Her name is Camille Reagan Clark, and she is just a load of fun. She has learned a bunch of tricks already. She has learned to not wet herself until daddy takes her diaper off. Then she lets it loose. Also, she has gotten great at sleeping for hours during the day, and then keeping us up at night. Her last and final trick is her puppy-dog sad face. When she sticks that bottom lip out, she just knows daddy can’t say “no.” I have posted a few pictures up here.

Thomas Sowell’s article “Are Facts Obsolete?” discusses one of the questions I have pondered a lot during the presidential elections. Where are the facts? Why aren’t the candidates talking about the facts? According to Sowell:

A politician’s problem is how to look like he is for “the poor” and against those who are “exploiting” them. The facts are irrelevant to maintaining that political image.

So let’s look at some of the facts that Sowell brings out.

Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.

The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.

Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent.

Sen. Obama loves to talk about how he is for change and a new kind of politics. Yet the fact is his policies were practiced in the 30s. They didn’t work then and won’t work now. The truth is Reaganomics works. The GDP grew an average of 3.4% a year during Reagan’s time in office. Unemployment and inflation also dropped during this time, and there was a net increase of about 16 million jobs. What Sen. Obama is proposing is the exact opposite of Regan’s policies, and yet so many Americans think it will work. Or are they just being wooed by his rhetoric of change and new politics?

Another type of change and new politics that Sen. Obama is talking about is raising the minimum wage. If I were given a dollar every time raising minimum wage was on a ballot in this country, then I’d probably be a millionaire. Is this the change and new politics we need? Let’s look at the facts. From Sowell’s article we read:

Obama is for higher minimum wage rates. Does anyone care what actually happens in countries with higher minimum wage rates? Of course not.

Economists may point to studies done in countries around the world, showing that higher minimum wage rates usually mean higher unemployment rates among lower skilled and less experienced workers.

Minimum wage is one of my pet-peeves. No one was ever meant to live and support a family off minimum wage. Yet if the Democrats had their way, I bet all Americans would be making minimum wage. I remember a question in the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate in which almost all the candidates said that they would accept minimum wage as payment if they were put in office. That is ridiculous. Minimum wage is just that, the minimum wage that someone can be paid. It was meant for teenagers starting their first job at McDonalds, not Presidents of the United States or to support families.

Go read Sowell’s article. There are many more facts he brings up that just make some of Sen. Obama’s policies seem ridiculous. Then ask your self if this is the kind of change and new politics we need in this great country.

Dan Kaminsky’s new vulnerability in DNS is an excellent proof that completely secure software (or completely secure anything) is, if not completely, almost impossible. There are two reasons for this.

First are implementation flaws. According to Alan Turing’s proof of the halting problem, given a finite input and a computer program, it can not be proven that the program will ever terminate running (sometimes this is what I feel is happening when I use Windows). In terms of security this means that it is next to impossible to completely test a program to verify that it works for any and all inputs.

The second reason is that software can have flaws in the design. The program might be working exactly as it was designed to, but the designers might not have accounted for all possible attack vectors. A lot of cryptography algorithms have this problem. Someone later on will come up with a new technique to crack it.

Kaminsky’s bug was of the second type (according to him at least, no technical details have been released). DNS software was written exactly as the specification said, but the specs were flawed. The scary thing is DNS was first invented in 1983. Who knows how long this bug has been around.

It makes me wonder which type of flaw is worse. The first is probably more prevalent. A hacker (good or bad) finds a new input that was never tested for that compromises the program. It often, however, only takes a few lines of code to fix. The second is less common but likely will take much more work to fix since the flaws in the design might be prevalent in many different parts of the software.

My gut instinct says that even though the first type is more prevalent, the second is worse. In the case of the DNS bug, how many old/unmaintained versions have the bug. Probably all since it is a design flaw, and I’m betting that many of these old/unmaintained systems are still in use. Also, since it is a design flaw, it affects systems across the board. Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, etc have all been working on patches for their systems. If one of them releases the patch before the others, hackers can reverse engineer the patch and attack the other systems. Whereas a flaw in the implementation of DNS in the Cisco IOS requires only a patch from Cisco.