The Ministry of Minor Perfidy

Ministers

'Captain Insano'

Holder of the St. John the Divine chair for Eschatological studies

Has made hundreds of dollars in the music bidness

He's immanentizing the eschaton as we speak

A girl, yet still the towelboy

Please forward correspondence to: Prisoner #A-01997, Sub-Barracks A, Republican Re-Education Camp I, Capitol Region

Minister Emeritus

Windy City Mike
social democrat, ca. 1930 trade-unionist, and professor of alleged history

Perfidious Advertising

This, too can be yours

Perfidious Merchandise

Perfidious Store Thingy

Most recent entries

Monthly Archives

Syndicate

Join our Mailing List

Calendar Thingy

<<	July 2003					>>
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Hosted by:
Bloghouse, a Home for Wayward Blogs

Powered by Expression Engine

Thursday, July 31, 2003

Economy pissed off, ready to kick ass

Yahoo is showing a report that the economy is surprising the economic powers that be with its health.

US economic growth shot to an annual pace of 2.4 percent in the second quarter, shattering sluggish expectations.

Defying forecasts for growth closer to 1.5 percent, the US economy gave the clearest sign yet it is shaking off Iraq (news - web sites) war-inspired shock and gathering speed, with business investment finally back.

The return in business investment, a 52-year record surge in defense spending, robust consumer spending, and a red-hot housing market powered growth, early Commerce Department (news - web sites) estimates showed.

Other good news included:

Gross domestic product, which had grown at a sickly 1.4-percent pace in the first quarter, appeared to be responding to a double dose of tax cuts and 45-year record low interest rates.

Businesses, long cowed by the Iraq war uncertainties, lifted non-residential fixed investment by 6.9 percent, with spending on structures such as factories up by a 43-year high of 4.8 percent and equipment/software expenditure up 7.5 percent.

“The economy truly does look to be on the mend,” said Naroff Economic Advisors president Joel Naroff, noting that investment in buildings had climbed for the first time since 2001.

Consumers stepped up spending 3.3 percent despite lingering agony in the labor market.

On the jobless front, although the jobless rate is still high, at 6.4% (still far lower than most of Europe) new jobless benefits claims dropped by 5,000.

Good news all around.

Posted by Buckethead on 07/31/03 at 07:15 PM
Filthy Lucre • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Adm. Buster Poindexter to resign

Reuters is reporting that Poindexter, in charge of the DARPA department that brought us the aborted Total Information Awareness Agency and the recently deceased Policy Analysis Market, is on the way out, according to anonymous sources.

Posted by Buckethead on 07/31/03 at 07:10 PM
Lead Pipe Cruelty • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Bizarro Lileks

This over here made me spurt Diet Dr. Pepper (pH 3) out my nose:

Took Mosquito to the Savannah Mall so we could mock the Windows losers obviously out of their league in the Apple Store. Showed her how to get free porn on the game sites. This was my old routine, even though the BC got her ass fired, and that sweet salary went south, along with my easy living. I know the bitch did it on purpose because she’s about to leave me for that Phoenician shithead at her office and wants to glom onto MY salary at the divorce. I told Mosquito not to grow up into a twat like that.

Which reminds me that I haven’t seen SeaLab 2001 or Aqua Teen Hunger Force for months. Months! My second favorite SeaLab episode was the one where the Bizarro crew took over. And a weird creature with the voice of Shake from ATHF kept saying, “Bizarro, bizarro, bizarro, bizarro” for fifteen minutes. Exquisitely painful and hilarious even though I wasn’t high.

(My favorite episode is where the captain and Erik Estrada get locked in the closet, and the Captain punches everyone. Humor pared down its basics. A formula that can’t help but win. I laughed, I cried.)

While I’m babbling, (58 oz of Diet DP and a cup a joe so far today, in case you want to know. Actually, regardless of whether you want to know.) My favorite episode of ATHF was the one where Shake sells meatball to the circus for a buck-two-ninetyfive. The leader of the circus is actually the son of the King of Jupiter, of course, and in a moment of weekness, tells meatball of his original plan to invade the Earth and steal all our women. Meatball’s response after this long soliloquy:

Meatball: “Did you do it?”
Prince of Jupiter: “What?”
Meatball: “You know, invade the Earth.”

Classic.

You may now return to more productive activities.

Posted by Buckethead on 07/31/03 at 06:47 PM
Lead Pipe Cruelty • Permalink

BEER AND LOAFING IN AFGHANISTAN

Instapundit has a quite interesting post from InstaPundit’s Afghanistan correspondent, Boston University Professor John Robert Kelly. It’s a good read, but he had me at Beer and Loafing.

Posted by Buckethead on 07/31/03 at 04:45 PM
Entertainment • Permalink

Scientific study proves Buckethead is funny

Over the last several days, I have conducted a rigorous scientific study of the effects of what I call humor on people I come in contact with. My methodology is brutally effective and simple. Whenever I say something, I closely observe the effects. A smile, and I incise a small cut on the inside of my left forearm. Laughter, a small cut on my left palm. A frown or other show of unhappiness or displeasure, a scratch on my right forearm. No reaction, a nick goes on my right palm.

After three days, my arms were a bloody mess, but I emerged from my trauma clutching close to my breast the dearly won knowledge that I am really, really funny.

More Perfidious Goodness...

In measuring the response of others to various statements of mine, I used the following criteria:

Like with the famous purity test, technicalities count. So, a contemptuous smirk counts as a smile. Similarly, an embarrassed giggle counts as laughter.
I have discounted all responses from my son, because he is not qualified to judge me and would be biased in any event.
Finally, if someone says something like, “Shut the Hell up” while laughing counts as laughter, not displeasure.

The results:

In three days, I interacted personally with 39 people and one retard. In the course of conversation with these 39.5 people, I made 1204 distinct utterances. The breakdown of reactions is as follows:

Laughter: 9.8%
Smile: 47.7%
Displeasure: 4.2%
Stunned silence: 38.4%

(percentages may not add up to 100% due to rounding)

As you can clearly see, significantly more than half of the things that I say cause smiles or laughter. I am doing more than my share in bringing joy to the world. However, one must be careful not to read to much into the results of this study, as it was not designed to measure the mechanisms that cause the humor reaction in others, merely that they reacted.

Some interesting results from deeper analysis of the data:

My interactions with the retard skewed the results somewhat, as he laughed at every thing I said. However, only seven of the 1204 utterances were directed at him.

Male coworkers are significantly more likely to laugh at intentional attempts at humor than others.

Wives are significantly (drastically) less likely to laugh at intentional attempts at humor, but much more likely to laugh at utterances that were not meant to be humorous. Further study will be needed on this topic, because women often report in Cosmo surveys that sense of humor is an important factor in mate selection. This apparent discrepancy cries out for resolution.

Streetbums, though an admittedly small part of the sample, show displeasure at the least provocation, and were responsible for almost a third of the “displeasure” reactions. This may have something to do with monetary factors involved in our interaction, but this supposition is not fully supported by the data at hand.

Conclusions:

I am funny
Retards are easily amused
Bums need to lighten up when I don’t give them a quarter
I need more neosporin Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

Posted by Buckethead on 07/31/03 at 03:48 PM
Unmitigated Gall • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

News Flash: Long Post on Clueless

Steven den Beste has a long post on biological and cultural evolution today. Most of this I have no problem with, as it’s a quite well written summary of the general state of the art. Toward the end though, he gets into talking about evangelistic and xenophilic cultures, and says that they are generally exclusive:

But in general, what you find is that some cultures tend to be dominated by evangelism and they don’t tend to be as open to outside ideas. Others tend to be quite xenophilic and don’t tend to be quite so evangelistic. You can also get some which don’t tend to either, which are smug and self-absorbed and are so contemptuous of outsiders that they feel little need to spread their ideas to anyone else

I would argue that Western culture to a certain extent, and American culture to a much larger extent is both evangelistic and xenophilic. And the reason that we can be both is that we willing embrace new methods, techniques, knowledge (and people) from anywhere, and roll it into the constantly evolving culture that we then evangelize. It is a point of pride in American culture that we absorb any good thing without worrying where it came from - and the rest of the world certainly complains often enough that we are ramming the result down their throats.

[Update:] Got an email from Clueless, who said that the part two of the series already written, “went into exactly that.”

I’m smart. (3300 words, and its only part one. Sheesh.)

Posted by Buckethead on 07/31/03 at 02:47 PM
Perfidy Responds • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

NYT Says It Right

The headline: “A Good Idea With Bad Press”.

That pretty much describes the DARPA futures market proposal. I’ve been thinking about it more and I still think the dead-pool aspects, though a minor part of the overall proposal, make this something the government shouldn’t be doing. In short, I think it’s a fantastic idea except for the part where you can win money when people die. Even though that is not the focus of the program, critics were able to seize on it and their objections were never fully answered.

This is because the pointy-heads at DARPA have a huge PR problem. It’s their job, I realize, to come up with the craziest ideas they can, in the hope they will make the US and world a safer place. The problem is they don’t have anybody on staff who knows how to take out the crazy-talk when speaking to the press. Just check out the nutty charts on the DARPA site. It’s all cutting-edge research and conceptualization, but without a smiling avuncular face to explain it, the improbable aspects dominate.

The good part is, now that DARPA has made the idea current and public, a thousand private nonprofit futures markets like the one Ross is currently programming will come into being. Rather than one government-run system, we could end up with many distributed markets-- quite possibly a better scenario than the one recently retracted by DARPA.

[moreover]: A TechCentralStation column by James Pethokoukis puts to bed my main objections to this program: “Indeed, who cares about a “yuck factor” or terrorists pocketing a few grand if thousands of lives could be saved?”

Fair enough. When I’m wrong, I’m wrong. I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable buying futures in terrorist acts, but I think the benefits clearly outweigh the yuckiness.

Posted by Johno on 07/31/03 at 01:08 PM
Holy Shit! • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink