Ministers

Ardent conservative and peerless obscurantist

Chicks want to be with him; soldiers want to be him

Collar popped and ready to fight

The Cliche that walks like a man

In a word, MAPTASTIC!

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

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Just So You Know

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Bloomberg for President?

Dang. I can’t find the best quote by Michael Bloomberg on his chances of being elected President of the United States. The gist of it is that he’s a short, Jewish, divorced New Yorker. Words which he has used to describe himself. He’s got the goods and the gumption to stir up the pot. Virtual biscuit to anyone who can find the original citation. Wikipedia doesn’t have it anymore.

Personally, I’ve met him, talked to him about non-trivial issues, and he’s a jackass. But a very smart and competent jackass. I’d vote for him. He’s exactly the centrist-Republican that kept me registered as one in Pennsylvania through all my years of college. (Being a Democrat was political suicide where I came from, closed primaries and old-money Republican domination.)

Hat tip to Kingsland Report for the Washington Times article. (However, I think Rev Moon is crazy, so take their reporting with a grain of salt.)

Posted by Mapgirl on 05/15/07 at 12:35 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Ill effects

Bad things can happen when you treat “An Inconvenient Truth” as an authoritative documentary.

And no, of course the link has nothing to do with Algore’s movie.

I hope this doesn’t become commonplace, because it’s already been done, to a tee, by Johnny Knoxville.

Posted by Patton on 05/13/07 at 12:51 AM
Darwin Award Contender • Just So You Know • Permalink

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Having let this age for a while on my desktop

I’ll just ask the question:

When you see a story like this one:

Deadly insurance fraud case nears trial

By TOM HAYS, Associated Press Writer
Mon May 7, 2:24 PM ET

NEW YORK - When Basdeo Somaipersaud’s body was found in his favorite park in 1998, his family assumed he cracked his head during one of his drinking binges. But an autopsy detected small puncture wounds on his torso, and a sedative sometimes used to treat schizophrenia in his system.

Authorities now say Somaipersaud was injected with lethal doses of the sedative chlorpormazine while he was in a defenseless, drunken stupor â€” and then his killers tried to cash in on his life insurance policy.

...(blah, blah, blah - not to steal the fun out of the story, turns out the insurance guy named James who wrote the policies was likely the guy who set up the murder. Condolences to the family, murder diminishes us all, and so on and so forth - none of that’s my point, because, really, my reaction would have been the same if the story had been written about puppies, or hemorrhoids, or any number of other things)

...and the picture next to the story is this one:

...am I the only one whose mind immediately goes to a skit from Dave Chappelle’s show, the one with the punchline:

I’m Rick James, bitch!

Never mind, it’s probably just me. But at least I can drag that AP story to the trash now.

Posted by Patton on 05/10/07 at 12:58 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Why not laugh? It was funny.

Reuters has a story today, ”North Korean general cracks George W. Bush joke“.

SEOUL (Reuters) - In North Korea, where cracking a joke about the country’s leader could see you, well, die laughing, poking fun at the U.S. president is obviously not as serious.

As military chiefs from both sides of the Korean peninsula met on Tuesday for talks, a general from the North started proceedings by telling a joke at George W. Bush’s expense.

The South Korean generals appeared befuddled as to what to make of the humour...

Why the reticence to laugh, I don’t know. It can’t be because of a language barrier, right? The lack of laughter shouldn’t be due to the DPRK being, basically, a totally screwed up wasteland, even though that’s precisely what it is. The fact that the same joke couldn’t be made about the Human Chia Pet in Platform Shoes is moot, really - it’s got nothing to do with the story, notwithstanding Reuters’ lead in.

And, if you ask me, it shouldn’t be due to the joke not being funny, because, while not yucktastic, it mildly humorous, not at all offensive, and doesn’t seem wildly far from the truth:

“I recently read a piece of political humour on the Internet called ‘saving the president’,” Lieutenant-General Kim Yong-chol was quoted as saying in pool reports from the talks.

He then retold the old yarn about Bush who goes out jogging one morning and, preoccupied with international affairs, fails to notice that a car is heading straight at him.

A group of schoolchildren pull the president away just in time, saving his life, and a grateful Bush offers them anything they want in the world as a reward.

“We want a place reserved for us at Arlington Memorial Cemetery,” say the children.

“Why is that?” he asks.

“Because our parents will kill us if they find out what we’ve done.”

OK, admittedly, it’s a bit poorly constructed and it’s derivative of other jokes I’ve heard, but so are most jokes, at my age. Apparently, both Reuters and the SoKo generals thought it was a bigger deal than it really was.

Posted by Patton on 05/08/07 at 07:49 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

On information overload

Today’s WSJ (subscription for fulltext), in the Business Technology section, juxtaposes two pieces on the hypergrowth of digital information, discussing its reasons, its effects, and some responses to the growth.

The first piece is a straightforward and informative mini-whitepaper, entitled ”Cutting Files Down to Size“. It mentions the efforts of Chevron and Credit Suisse to control their information, primarily through implementation of new tools, new methods, and new employee work habits. There’s something about an information base that’s presently 1.2 petabytes in size, potentially growing by 57% per year, that can focus the minds of management. Add to that the million email messages per day that the 59,000 employee Chevron claims to process, and you’re talking some serious data. So much data, perhaps, that’s it’s not even possible to glean the information from it. A veritable flood.

More Perfidious Goodness...

The primary solutions discussed are conceptually simple:

Get people to pay attention to the amount by which they’re increasing the deluge
Put systems in place to eliminate redundancy, such as using Microsoft’s well-reviewed SharePoint server, ensuring that even the worst PowerPoint slide decks are only stored once
Admitting, and getting data creators to admit, that not all information is equally valuable

All excellent steps, though both expensive and difficult to implement. Totally aside from the grotesque knock-on effects of continually increasing technology infrastructure to store all new information, the real benefit from such efforts is to remove potential sources of background noise; the unimportant, the duplicative, and the no-longer-operative. “Data” is both easy and not intrinsically valuable - it’s “information” that’s both difficult and valuable, and too much data can obscure the information. Best of luck to the contestants in slaying their particular dragons.

The companion piece, on the same page, in Lee Gomes’ “Talking Tech” column was the more intriguing of the two. Entitled ”Computers Should Be Taught To Let Certain Memories Go“, it contained an interview with Harvard KSG professor Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, and was among the more thought-provoking pieces in the entire day’s paper.

Mr. Mayer-Schoenberger’s thesis is this:

Human beings ... weren’t designed to remember everything we ever learned, and sometimes are better off when we forget. Computers, he adds, should as a result be taught to let some memories go.
...
We are biologically hard-wired to selectively remember. But in moving into a digital age, we are now surrounding ourselves with tools that have inversed (sic) that.
...
How does this make life different?

In the predigital age, we might have called someone who knew a person we were interested in learning about, got them to tell us about the person. And we would get a quick picture—but not a complete and comprehensive picture of each and every piece of communication or behavior that the person did over the past 20 years. I think we have lost something by moving from that sort of short encapsulation toward a complete picture that provides us with all the details, the sort that over time, we as a society, and as human beings, tend to forget.

But what’s the problem with that?

Things that happened 10 or 15 years ago might have happened to a different person. Therefore, we should put less weight on what we did 15 years ago than we would do now. In the past, our brains did this automatically for us by forgetting it. But we haven’t been able to develop another evolutionary method, another method by which we can weigh things that happened further in the past differently from those that happened more recently.

(ellipses mine)

Interesting theory, and one that makes some rational sense. I can’t speak for anyone but myself on the subject, but I’m surely not the same person today as I was 15 years ago, and would want any judgment of me weighted more on the current me than the one from decades ago.

The (mild) shocker in the piece, however, was this, his prescription for a solution:

My proposal is that we have a law that mandates that software coders build into software a better ability for people to let their digital tools forget, if they so wish. Right now, both Windows as well as Mac OS have a huge amount of meta data that they keep track of for each file that we use: “Date Created,” “Owner,” and so on. So I suggest that we add another type of meta data: “Expiration Date.”

Conceptually, he has a point - that would be at least a potential solution to the problem he’s laid out. Why the rush to what I can guarantee would be massively ineffectual legal efforts, I wondered? For starters, I presumed it’s because he’s an associate professor with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, whose faculty, perhaps by definition, thinks more abstractly and less rationally than, say, Harvard Business School’s must. Then I visited his faculty page at KSG:

...He advises businesses, governments, and international organizations on regulatory and policy issues. He holds a bunch of law degrees, including one from Harvard, and an MS (Econ) from the London School of Economics.

That explains it. Ignoring any questions about how many law degrees one can effectively use, the “bunch” he holds appear to have been enough to outweigh any pragmatism learnt at LSE.

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

Posted by Patton on 05/08/07 at 05:44 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Friday, May 04, 2007

Proof, as if any were required

...that Barack Obama was correct when he singled out the most important problem that we, the people of the United States of America, need to deal with:

“The biggest enemy I think we have in this whole process (and why I’m so glad to see a lot of young people here, young in spirit if not young in age)--the reason I think i’ts [sic] so important, is because one of the enemies we have to fight--it’s not just terrorists, it’s not just Hezbollah, it’s not just Hamas--it’s also cynicism,” Barack Obama told a reception after the AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] policy conference last night.

Mr. Obama, I’d like to introduce you, via the May 2, 2007 Star-Ledger, to former NJ Governor Jim McGreevey:

Former Gov. James E. McGreevey has started the process to become a priest in his newly adopted Episcopal faith and has been accepted into a three-year seminary program starting this fall.

[Wik] As an added bonus, one of the very few commenters on that story who actually seemed to be supportive of McGreevey (or McCreepy, as he was referred to a time or two) was able to inject into the conversation some of that delicious truthiness we all crave:

Reader11722 says…

McGreevey has a right to become whatever he wants. We should not censor his free expressions. After all, censorship is becoming America’s favorite past-time. The US gov’t (and their corporate friends), already detain protesters, ban books like “America Deceived” from Amazon and Wikipedia, shut down Imus and fire 21-year tenured, BYU physics professor Steven Jones because he proved explosives, thermite in particular, took down the WTC buildings. Free Speech forever (even for McGreevey).
Last link (before Google Books caves to pressure and drops the title):
America Deceived (book)

Posted on 05/02/07 at 2:22PM

Of course, we live in a fascist dictatorship, which is why “Reader11722” was immediately collected and shipped off to a re-education facility. Free speech forever, indeed! Even for, nay, especially for, utter dipshits.

Posted by Patton on 05/04/07 at 11:44 PM
Holy Shit! • Just So You Know • Permalink

This time, no Kenyan waitresses will lick Blackfive’s ears

Not that any thing like that ever happened last time. Nor did we run up a four hundred dollar bar tab for four people. Nor did I pass out in the metro.

It has arrived! This weekend, as some of you may be aware, is the second annual Milblogging conference. Our friend Murdoc is going to be a panelist this year, kudos to him, and tonight is the mandatory heavy drinking preliminaries. Murdoc, Cat, Rachelle, Blackfive and Steve Schippert of Threatswatch will be joining yours truly for some pre-cocktail hour festivities before heading to the official cocktail hour. If you’re in DC, email me and I’ll give you details on where to meet if you’d like to join in.

My only regret is that my “No one reads your crappy blog” t-shirt did not arrive in time for the festivities.

Posted by Buckethead on 05/04/07 at 06:03 PM
Just So You Know • Perfidy • Permalink

Actual Facts

The Russian tradition of matryoshka nesting dolls is descended from the medieval practice of burying the dead in concentric circles around the corpses of the previously deceased family members.

Posted by Buckethead on 05/04/07 at 03:39 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Some autocrats never learn

It seems that Hugo ChÃ¡vez could take a lesson on the definition of insanity from Ben Franklin. In his defense, it’s not that ChÃ¡vez is repeatedly trying something that’s previously failed for him, just something that’s failed every other time a state actor has attempted to put it into place. Perhaps it’s just insanity by proxy, then.

Of course, I’m talking about his aggressive advancement of the long-vaunted ”Bolivarian Revolution“. From the Mother Jones article linked left:

To his increasingly frustrated political opponents in Venezuela, Chavez, a former army colonel, is a leftist demagogue who stirred up a wave of class and racial resentments and rode it to the presidency, and who, in office, has dealt himself new powers at every chance, on his way to becoming an out-and-out caudillo. And to a certain school of international opinion, exemplified by The Economist magazine, Chavez is an wacky utopian who sooner or later will run the Venezuelan economy into the ground.

That introductory paragraph leads into an October 2005 interview with Richard Gott, a former correspondent for the London Guardian who seems knowledgeable and sympathetic to the fiery populism that sometimes seems the prime illuminating factor for Latin American progressive governments. The interview was done in support of his then-updated book, “Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution”:

...the first account in English to place Chavez in historical and intellectual perspective. In Gottâ€™s sympathetic account, Chavez is a magnetic personality of the Clintonian type, â€œa genuinely original figure in Latin America,â€ a radical left-wing nationalist, to be sure, but a pragmatic improviser, and certainly no dogmatic socialist.

Among his statements during the interview, you’d find:

Okay, it’s true that Chavez, for the first time this year, has used the word “socialism"â€”he talks about a “21st Century Socialism"â€”but he’s given absolutely no indication that he wants to emulate Soviet socialism, Cuban socialism, or indeed the sort of state capitalism that existed in Europe for much of the late 20th century.
{...}
I think he [ChÃ¡vez] still recognizes the significance of the ideas of Bolivar. He’s more interested in culture than in economics. All leftist revolutions in the past have been based on an economic restructuring of society.

Whoops. Looks like Mr. Gott spoke too soon. Because the wacky utopian, contrary to Gott’s expectations, seems to have moved even farther left, embracing something that looks a lot like Soviet/Cuban socialism, and has recently chosen to dispense with even the veneer of normal government.

More Perfidious Goodness...

Last week, as reported in the WSJ, he took steps to nationalize the remaining bits of the Venezuelan oil industry that were still in private hands, handing control of them to PDVSA, the state oil company.

The flamboyant leader set the worker’s holiday as a deadline for the companies involved to transfer the facilities to state firm Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA. This past week, five of the six companies agreed to hand over the keys: Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., BP PLC, Total SA, and Statoil ASA. ConocoPhillips was the only holdout, but in the end will have no choice.

And when they said ConocoPhillips would have no choice, they weren’t kidding. From today’s Houston Business Journal:

Venezuelan officials vowed to boot ConocoPhillips Inc. out of their country Thursday if the Houston-based oil giant doesn’t cooperate in nationalizing its multibillion-dollar assets in the Orinoco reserve.

Of the five companies with major oil investments in Venezuela, ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) has been the only one to refuse to sign an agreement ceding financial control to Venezuela as part of President Hugo ChÃ¡vez’s plan to take back his country’s largest economic driver.
{...}
Alongside the other companies, ConocoPhillips participated in an operational transfer Tuesday ordered by Chavez, but it’s the unsigned agreement that has Venezuelan officials steaming.

Reuters reported that Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez told state television that ConocoPhillips has been knocked to the lowest priority in the negotiations, and went on to say that the OPEC nation would not offer cash concessions or assume debt.

Ramirez also said that if talks break down, Venezuela will assume a 100 percent financial stake.

Conoco has already ceded physical control, mind you; they just haven’t signed the agreement ChÃ¡vez wants indicating that they think it was a great thing to do, and wondering why they hadn’t thought of it earlier, on their own, apparently. The end result could be their expulsion from the country, and the loss of 100% of their assets there. The deal breaker, of course, is that entire “no concessions, no assumption of debt” thing. As it should be.

The six private companies whose assets have been expropriated have stated their intention to stay in the market, for the time being. Why? Because they don’t want to completely lose their business opportunities and investment in a project that, overall, produces something like 600,000 barrels/day of oil, but perhaps more so because they have no expectation that PDVSA will be able to proceed without their help. From the 4/28/2007 WSJ article in which the nationalizations were originally reported:

PDVSA, saddled by Mr. ChÃ¡vez’s social spending demands, is already struggling to keep production from falling in other parts of the country. If it bungles the operations at the Orinoco, that could be bad news for the oil market.

A rational observer might ask what this all has to do with insanity, even though the autocracy referenced in the title of this post seems clearly explained.

ChÃ¡vez, notwithstanding Gott’s complete misreading of his intentions several years ago, isn’t stopping with the oil industry. Having paid off all debts to the World Bank and IMF, he’s pulling out of both organizations, citing his feeling that

...the two organisations are implements of US imperialism, with their lending policies perpetuating poverty across the world.

It’s a symbolic gesture, then, but symbolic of what? He’s chosen the US as his stalking horse, the imperialist yin to his socialist yang, and he needs to use that imaginary relationship as a prop. From the other side of the table, the US ignores him assiduously, not commenting very much on anything he does, partly because Venezuela, while providing 15% of US oil supplies, really doesn’t have the capacity to affect the US in any meaningful way. And partly because I’m sure that the US basically ignoring him must drive him crazy.

And, having already nationalized the telecom and electricity industries and threatened the same in the hospital market, he’s not stopping with the oil industry asset-thievery, or the withdrawal from the IMF and World Bank and a mandated 20% rise in the minimum wage. Next on the list? The banks and Sidor, a steel company. What’s driving all this, one might wonder?

“Privately owned banks must prioritize low-cost financing for Venezuela’s industry. If they don’t want to do this they can leave, they can give us the banks, we can nationalize them.”

and this, about Sidor:

“If the company Sidor ... does not immediately agree to change this process, they will obligate me to nationalize it,” Chavez said.

“I prefer not to,” Chavez added, as he ordered Mining Minister Jose Khan to immediately head over to Sidor’s headquarters and come back with a recommendation with 24 hours.

“Sidor has to produce and give priority to our national industries ... and at low cost,” he said.

Reminiscent of the old Mafia stereotype, “Nice store you’ve got here - a shame if something were to, uh happen to it”? Quite a bit. Command economy? Unquestionably. That’s been tried before, of course, and has never led to sustainable success. Its aftermath is poverty, and without regard to Venezuela’s supposedly massive oil reserves, it will do the same in Venezuela. And it’s already started - see the article “Venezuela â€” Inflation -> Price Controls -> Shortages” at The Liberty Papers, or this Reuters story pegging inflation through April at nearly 20% per annum. Huge inflation in Venezuela’s not unprecedented, as seen in a 1989 NYTimes piece pegging inflation that year between 65% and 70%. But the country’s exit from the international government lending system seems ill-timed, because they’re going to need help eventually, and perhaps sooner rather than later, with the trajectory they’re on.

The odd thing about this is that ChÃ¡vez gives every impression of meaning well for his people, and has been rewarded by ultimately credible, if perhaps a bit inflated, majorities in the last several elections (recall and re-election). Meaning well and doing well are of course two completely separate things, and he also gives every impression of taking his country down a road which from he won’t be able to navigate back as it all falls down around his ears.

He’s not implementing one of those fuzzy-soft socialist systems commonly found in Europe - this isn’t socialism, it’s communism. It’s got socialism at its core, but add in the enforced state control and the mandated indoctrination, and the only difference between Venezuela and the USSR is the gulags. Well, the gulags and the oil. And the language. But it will fail, and that will happen without overt involvement from what he presumes to be his greatest enemy, the United States. ChÃ¡vez’s actual greatest enemies are economic reality and a willful ignorance of history in pursuit of the utopia he seeks.

Utopia is as unattainable as is perpetual motion, and for similar reasons. Notwithstanding the breathless reporting, low-rent activism, and opinionating in the years since ChÃ¡vez came to power, history won’t be kind to this attempt, either.

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

Posted by Patton on 05/04/07 at 01:31 AM
Filthy Lucre • Holy Shit! • Just So You Know • Permalink

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Quote of the day

From H. L. Mencken:

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Posted by Buckethead on 05/02/07 at 09:55 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Utah welcomes you and your 50 wives!

Utah, the home of the 2002 Olympics and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Utah, which once fought an almost war with the United States, and which once claimed to own Southern California. Utah, home of Utahns.

Utah welcomes you and your 50 wives!
Like Georgia, Only Mormon
Coffee, a forty, a pack of Newports and Utah
Now open 7 days a week
Killer, Polygamous, Bees
Birthplace of TV and the BMG
Michael Jackson is now almost white enough to live here
Putting the “white” in “red, white, and blue”
The Salt Lick State
Our Jesus Is Better Than Your Jesus
Utah: 62.4% Mormon, 100% Sexy
If you ain’t Mormon, get the fuck out!
Want Sheep?
Utah is Utahded
At least weâ€™re not Montana
Just think how spastic weâ€™d be if we drank coffee
Into Weird Religions Way Before It Was Hip
The Righteous Hammer of the Central Rockies
We know we didnâ€™t deserve the Olympics
Thereâ€™s a stripper hiding behind every tree
Life, Multiplied
The LDS is not part of the Illuminati
The Hive
Five alimony payments is not even funny
Iâ€™m not retarded, Iâ€™m Mormon
Utah, we love thee and thee and thee
With OUR God, all things are possible
Whereâ€™s the chicks?
Land of the Saints. And we donâ€™t mean the lamer football team.
It really sucked giving up multiple wives
Bicycling and ties, two great tastes that taste great together
Gateway to lifeless desolation
Utah: Mormons As Far As The Eye Can See
Industry macht frei

Posted by Buckethead on 05/01/07 at 06:36 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

On Spring Cleaning. Um, I Mean, On Helping Save Ourselves From the Assault Weapon Menace

Last weekend my suburbic municipality offered a gun buy-back.

And I jumped on it.

I had a Chicom SKS for 14 years. I bought it at a gun shop in Killeen, TX for about $100. I was really in the market for an AK, but they were going for $225-ish and I just couldn’t swing that kind of bread as a young enlisted soldier. I mean, what the hell was I supposed to drink with if I blew all my dough on an effing rifle? My company commander bought one soon after, and we even went to the range together once.

After I got out, I shot it mmmmmaybe four times, and not at all since about 1995. Just had little time for the range, and once the gun laws changed in my state I was ass-out anyway; I couldn’t shoot it legally. Well in the intervening decade or so I moved a half-dozen times, took a few college degrees, got married, and did all the other stuff one is supposed to do to exhibit maturity and adulthood. And in all those years, that rifle quietly sat locked up in this or that closet. In time, surface rust slowly appeared and spread, and I noticed a hairline crack in the face of the bolt. Even less incentive to put my face near it and pull the trigger.

About a year ago I asked my local PD how I could get rid of it; I thought they might could use it for training purposes. But they didn’t want it, and said that if I really wanted to get rid of it, I could arrange to leave it with the State Police, who would destroy it. But I held out. I just knew that a buy back would be coming along sooner or later. It was later, but it finally came. And I got that weapon out of my life for good.

Now the local PDs here are- with some exception, I grant you- blatantly anti-2nd Amendment, anti-gun-in-private-hands, and as firm in their belief that they know what’s best for everybody as they are in their conviction that they know weapons better than any mere citizen. Call it the arrogance of the badge if you like, every adult has seen it at some time. So it was not without mild amusement that the first guys I spoke with, who were not in uniform so I don’t know that they were cops or not, didn’t know what the weapon even was. Since they asked, I explained the weapon’s history (call it a paragraph’s worth of info), and showed them how the action worked (as best I could with a cable lock in it). Then the uniformed cop I turned the rifle in to couldn’t manage the cable lock (which I had minutes before made sure was functional), so to avoid doing it for him in front of everybody just quietly told him he could cut it if he had to. Oh, and that was after he exclaimed it was an “assault rifle” which, in my state, it is, but in the real world you could do alot better than “assaulting” with a 10 round internal magazine rifle with a design that harkens back to an era of Sherman tanks and propeller-driven fighter planes. But I found his excitement over netting both an “assault rifle” and, after a quick going-over, determining that it was “yup, a semi-automatic!”, humorous.

So after a filled out an anonymous questionaire about my gun-related habits ("Do you feel safer now that you have turned your gun in?"- type stuff) I got $75 in Wal Mart gift cards. Now, I didn’t even know how much or in what form I would be getting my reward. But I was very happy with what I got. Don’t laugh. With a toddler in the house, I can blaze through $75 at Wal Mart easily- a box of diapers (up to level 5 containment now), some juice, maybe a new book, and some jammies or something’ll wipe that out quick. Oh, and I took 2 new cable locks too on the way out.

And in the end everybody wins. Do illegal weapons get turned in at these things? I don’t know. Do old pieces of crap get turned in at these things, which people just don’t want anymore? Definitely. But in the end it probably doesn’t matter much. I got rid of a piece of junk for about $75 more than it might be worth (especially considering that brand new packed-in-grease models of Balkan manufacture are still under $200), which was far more preferable to giving it to the Staties for free; and the day after the buy-back the cops get to say they snapped up howevermany assault rifles off our streets. Here “our streets” means rusting quietly in my closet, but ok. The public says “great job” all ‘round, and we all sleep snugly at night.

On the way home, Lady Lethal asked me if I was thinking about turning in either of my other guns. “Fuck no!” I exclaimed, “They’re worth money!”

Although, thinking about it now, if the constabulary cares to come up with, say, an even grand, I might consider it.

Posted by GeekLethal on 05/01/07 at 01:45 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Monday, April 30, 2007

Found among this morning’s email joke deliveries

Subject: Tragedy vs Accident

Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, while visiting a primary school class. They suddenly found themselves in the middle of a discussion related to words and their meanings.

The teacher asked both men if they would like to lead the discussion of The word “tragedy”.

So the illustrious Rev Jackson asks the class for an example of a “tragedy”.

One little boy stood up and offered: “If my best friend, who lives on a farm, is playing in the field and a runaway tractor comes along and kills him, that would be a tragedy.”

No,” says the Great Jesse Jackson, “that would be an accident.”

A little girl raised her hand: “If a school bus carrying 50 children drove over a cliff, killing everyone inside, that would be a tragedy.”

I’m afraid not,” explains the exalted Reverend Al. “That’s what we would call a great loss.” The room goes silent.

No other children would volunteer.

Reverend Al searches the room. “Isn’t there someone here who can give me an example of a tragedy?”

Finally at the back of the room little Johnny raises his hand. In a stern voice he says: “If a plane carrying the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton was struck by a missile and blown to smithereens that would be a tragedy.”

Fantastic!” exclaims Jackson and Sharpton, “That’s right. And can you tell me why that would be a tragedy?”

Well,” says little Johnny, “because it sure as hell wouldn’t be a great loss, and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.

(h/t Kiwi)

Posted by Patton on 04/30/07 at 03:00 PM
Just So You Know • Lead Pipe Cruelty • Permalink

Back from a short vacationâ€¦

...and once again, I find myself astounded by the institutionalized idiocy of the Transportation Security Administration.

Thanks to Richard Reid, for instance, I still get to experience the silly waste of time inherent in removing my shoes and running them through the scanning equipment. Thanks to the efforts of the 21 alleged terrorists in the UK during the summer of 2006, passenger screening personnel still get to inflict the silly waste of time inherent in depriving passengers of any liquid or gel not contained in a properly sized receptacle, or that receptacle itself not contained in the proper 1-quart see through bag. (See also this item on the Department of Homeland Security’s designation of an entire state of matter as a national security risk)

More Perfidious Goodness...

A screener told me yesterday, with no small hint of pride, that, Yes! We still check all passengers’ shoes! This, in sleepy little Myrtle Beach, SC, where many, though not most, of the flights are turbo-prop or 57 seat commuter jets with presumably low value as flying projectiles, and even lower value as targets for suicide bombings.

The experience reminded me of the many instances in which Bruce Schneier has had occasion to comment on the misguided nature of our government’s reaction to events, including its apparent fetish for adding every new terrorist’s trick to the permanent list of reasons for inconveniencing the traveling public, while adding no safety to the equation at all. Zero. I would direct the curious reader to this list of articles on Mr. Schneier’s site for a thorough review of all that’s wrong with the manner in which our bureaucratic overlords maintain their ridiculous pretense to be adding to our security. He’s rightly called it “Security Theater”, among other things.

At the time of this writing, the link just above produces a list of 244 such articles. They cover the failures of security, the knee-jerk TSA reactions to events, the useless political correctness and abuses of power inherent in current process, and the arguably unconstitutional restrictions on rights to redress for incorrect blacklisting or commentary about the process as you’re having it inflicted on your person. Add to this the gaping productivity hole (estimated at $10 billion/year and up) left by the process, the passengers’ costs for security (you didn’t think the airlines were absorbing that, of course), and factor in a rational cost/benefit analysis (even under the assumption we wanted to guarantee that no person ever died except from natural causes) and it seems clear that security is not just irksome - it’s poorly and stupidly implemented.

Luckily, it’s not yet illegal to parody the process while away from airports.

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

Posted by Patton on 04/30/07 at 01:10 PM
Just So You Know • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Just noticed my dictionary is a relic of a bygone age

Call me anachronistic, but I use a real dictionary to look up words.

I like the internets as much as the next guy, but still prefer, more often than not, the look and feel of a solid dense bit of bookery in my hands. It means authority, and presence, and presents language in a more permanent and, I daresay, reassuring way than do bits and pixels.

Mostly. I just noticed that my dictionary is a relic of a bygone age. Not the age of print and type, but the age when terrorism had to do with Them, not Us.

I was looking for a word and happened upon a small picture in the margin that caught my eye: a tiny black and white photo of Manhattan, including the Twin Towers, associated with the definition of “skyline”. About three inches down is another pic, a little larger, of just the towers and labeled “skyscraper”. Also in the same corner of the page: skyjack. And sky marshall.

Posted by GeekLethal on 04/30/07 at 10:18 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink

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Back from a short vacationâ€¦

Just noticed my dictionary is a relic of a bygone age

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