perfidy

Sure you would. And its only one, anyhow; me, Kasey and baby Anneliese:

The internet movie firearms database is hours of fun. This page I particularly enjoyed.

Rather literally:

[wik] another dead youtube link, alas.

At 2:07 this morning, #3 daughter came into the world, delivered by me.  Granted my wife did most of the work, but I didn't drop the baby, so we'll call that a win.

The midwife arrived about a half hour after the baby, and pronounced everything good.  Funny, through the years I've had a fair bit of emergency training, but baby delivery was really the last thing I expected to have to deal with.

A few notes:

• There are much worse ways to waste time than Goblin War Machine.  The quadcycle main thing, safety hazard wheel things, extra-springy spring things and a quick shooty thing are a good combo.  My son is very frustrated that his biggest king distance is only 75 feet, while I've gotten 108.

• Making fun of the wife not having a baby seems to have sped things up.  I should have thought of that sooner.

[wik] A decade later, I am still pissed that this game died along with Flash.

Mrs. Buckethead is stubbornly refusing to give birth.  This is frustrating, because I arranged for a week off from work to commence when the baby arrives.  I bought a copy of Civ V so I'd be ready.  We're already three days past the due date, now, and I'm getting impatient.

An update to my earlier smoking post - Smoking, it's all good. I went into the local smoke shop to get some American Spirit smokes; explaining that for a while now, my throat has been getting raw from smoking. The smoking nut explained that it was probably the result of the new FSC cigarettes - "Fire Safe Cigarettes," which came into being early last year loaded with an additive that supposedly helps the cigarette extinguish itself if left unattended.

It seems that lots of people have complained about the additives. And my sore throats started pretty much from when the change was made. So, the smoking nut recommended the roll your own path, because the FSC has not extended to hand-rolled papers.

This was just before Christmas, and since then I've been almost entirely smoking hand-rolled smokes. I've seen several benefits:

• My throat feels about a thousand times better.
• I smoke about half as many hand-rolled as regular smokes.  Not because  of the difficulty of making them or anything like that, I just smoke less.
• I've learned a new skill.  A very minor skill, but hey.
• I pay a lot less.

When I first went in, almost exactly a month ago, I bought a variety pack of pouches of tobacco, a box of 200 filter cigarette tubes, and a clever tobaccy-packing thingy.  All that cost about $30.  So I bought a zippo lighter and fluid to bring it up to the cost of a carton of cowboy killers.  (Strangely, in the middle of rural Virginia, one of the five zippos they had in stock had Chief Wahoo on it.  So I had to get it.)  All that lasted until after New Years', when I bought some more tobacco, in bigger more cost-effective tins and another box of tubes.  In the time that I normally would have smoked at least three cartons - $120 - I've spent $100, of which $25 was lighter and tobaccopackythingy and won't have to be bought again; and I still have half a pound of tobacco and almost a full box of tubes left, which should last me another couple weeks at least.

So, in recurring costs, we have $75 for a month and a half, or more, of smoking v. $225 for the five cartons of regular Marlboros I'd have smoked over the same period.  So, I have cut my smoking costs by two thirds and it could go lower if I buy the tobacco in even larger quantities.

Not bad.

A couple fun what if links:

• Hawaiian Libertarian points to an article about how life might be different if the Fed had never existed. I think the the most important item is that the present-day dollar might not be worth 4.5 cents compared to the 1913 dollar. We could get back there, though, if we adopted the Buckethead currency plan.

• Radley Balko aims us in the direction of a list of Eight Crazy Constitutional Scenarios. My favorites:

  5. Two House Members Could Stage a Coup 

  We’ve all seen those late-night C-Span telecasts of the near-empty House chamber where one member is in the chair and the other is on the floor speaking to an empty chamber. Suppose word came during this “session” of the House that the president and vice president had been simultaneously killed. What’s to stop the House member on the floor from moving that he (or theh guy in the chair) be elected speaker of the House and the member in the chair saying, “Without objection, it is so ordered.” I’m not saying this would hold up in court, but technically the new “speaker” would then become president by virtue of presidential succession law. It’s a legal House session unless there’s another member present who suggests the absence of a quorum.

  6. Congress Could Allow the President to be Recalled

  There’s no way short of impeachment to remove a sitting president, right? Wrong. The 25th amendment creates a huge loophole. In order to provide for cases of presidential disability, the amendment allows a majority of the cabinet to declare the president disabled, subject to a congressional override if the president insists he’s fine. But the amendment also permits “such other body as Congress may by law provide” to issue a disability finding. The amendment’s sponsors no doubt intended this to mean a panel of physicians. But they didn’t say that. So what’s to stop Congress from declaring the American public as a whole that “other body” and empowering a majority of them to decide, at any time, the president is unable to discharge his duties? Voila, a backdoor recall provision! (Of course, this would just elevate the vice president to acting president, but still.)

I think we'll see something along these lines in our lifetime.

The Onion, once again, nails it.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—Preoccupied with recovery from a devastating 7.0 earthquake, seasonal floods, a widespread cholera outbreak, and chaos in the wake of disputed presidential elections, the weary Haitian people simply shrugged in resignation Tuesday at the sudden onset of Ragnarök, the end of the cosmos as foretold in Norse mythology. "At first I didn't even notice the writhing serpents spewing poison into the sky, but once I saw Loki demolishing everything in his wake, I was like, 'Of course,'" unemployed barber Jean-Paul Aucoin said as Tyr and the hellhound Garm battled behind him. "It's a little odd, since Haiti has no connection to Scandinavian folklore, yet at the same time it makes perfect sense." Aucoin then went back to loading rubble into a wheelbarrow as Sköll devoured the sun, plunging the island nation of Haiti into complete and total darkness.

Interesting, too, is the contrast with this earlier Onion piece on Haiti:

For most countries, a Category 2 hurricane, a devastating earthquake, and a massive cholera outbreak in the same year would cause its people—and its political leaders—to completely fall apart. But most countries aren't Haiti, and most leaders aren't President René Préval, the quiet mastermind behind the impoverished island nation's secret rise to unprecedented prosperity.

While many observers who can't see the big picture characterize Préval as a typical sycophantic politician who's overwhelmed by, and incapable of responding to, growing humanitarian crises, the president is, in fact, shrewdly devising a plan to turn Haiti's high poverty rate and woeful lack of education to its advantage and remake the country as a global economic superpower.

In a stroke of genius that will someday have the international community applauding, Préval has carefully crafted the persona of a leader who appears to kowtow to the 1 percent of the population controlling half the nation's wealth—and who appears to be leaving millions of homeless earthquake victims to their own devices. But what he's actually doing is setting the stage for a dramatic, albeit confidential, Haitian comeback.

Playing his usual coy self, Préval has been unwilling to speculate when all these carefully laid plans will bear fruit, but we guess it will be 2014, maybe 2015 at the very latest.

Which is the more likely? Foseti has an idea.

I remember back more than a decade ago, discussing this very issue with a friend of mine. I was not yet a reactionary, but looking back, this conversation was a sort of precursor. We were arguing about the source of Haiti's perpetual fuckedupedness. I wondered what would happen if a group like Executive Solutions or Blackwater or the like were to invade and conquer Haiti, and set up an enlightened dictatorship. Could Haiti be fixed? At the time I imagined that with the right policies and a suitably ruthless administration of justice, progress could be made. I mean, look what happened with Hong Kong, or Chili.

Once my friend got over his shock at such a suggestion, he argued against it, saying that 200 years of disfunction had probably left the incapable of benefitting from even the most enlightened rule. He was arguing from cultural effects, but now I think that causation runs the other way. Haitians are likely constitutionally incapable of benefitting from even the most enlightened rule, and that has resulted in 200 years of disfunction.

I think you'd have to elect a new people to make any real changes in Haiti's future. The similarities between the post-independence fortunes of Haiti and, say, Cote d'Ivoire are not coincidence.