perfidy

Holy shit, the Cleveland Frigging Cavaliers are in the NBA Finals for the first time ever.

Holy frigging shit.

With my first kid's arrival growing ever more imminent, I have like any responsible father been looking forward to the day when my young son (for a son it is) gets his first chemistry set. More even then that, I have been looking forward to the day when the boy successfully blows something up using ingredients found in said chemistry set.

But apparently, that makes me a terrorist. Wired has a spectacular and detailed article about the difficulties facing home science enthusiasts these days - to buy a couple Erlenmeyer flasks is to be flagged as a producer of crystal meth, and to go so far as to purchase sulfur, potassium perchlorate, and powdered aluminum in one go is to presumptively contravene the Federal Hazardous Substances Act. We are living in strange days if the Feds are raiding private homes and carting off science stuff in the name of national security, but it's undeniably happening. As a consequence, the chilling effects are making it harder and harder (in this age where the drumbeat goes "America is losing its edge in science!") to do nifty stuff at home that kids can take with them to MIT, CalTech, or, hell, even little Hiram College, the Harvard of the Midwest.

American society in general has taken some great steps forward in ensuring the safety of young children. Many of the laws enacted to protect kids more or less do that job. But for my dollar, just as I oughta be able to smoke a fat doob in the comfort of my own living room and watch Blazing Saddles, and just as I oughta be able to procure Vioxx for myself if that's what takes care of the chronic pain that keeps me from any kind of rewarding life and I'm fully aware of the risks of heart attack that I am taking on, I oughta be able to spend some time with my kid making stinks, crystals, and small scale bangs in the garage.

Glenn Reynolds has been posting recently about a few books that I'm surely going to keep around the house: the recently published The Dangerous Book for Boys and 211 Things a Bright Boy Can Do, and The American Boy's Handy Book, originally published in 1888 and featuring all manner of entertainingly dated knowledge like how to make a blowgun, and the rudiments of home taxidermy.

I can't in good conscience raise children who can't use a screwdriver, can't light a fire with two matches, have never made a home volcano, and have never had the oh-shit thrill of packing a D size rocket engine inside a B-rated model rocket and watching that sonofabitch fly high and drift at least a half-mile off course into the housing development three treelines away. It wouldn't be American.

We are in the home stretch now for the interminable Perfidy continuing educational series, "new mottoes for boring states." To be frank, I don't know what I'm going to do when it's all over. What will I post on? Countries? Continents? Well, while I ponder that, you can peruse our suggestions for the sappy state of Washington:

• Come See Why Cobain Committed Suicide
• Not just Evergreen, SuperGreen
• Where even the Tear Gas is environmentally friendly
• Look Good in Flannel
• Don’t screw with us, or we’ll sic the Killer Whales on your ass
• With Gates, all things are possible
• Help! We're Overrun By Nerds and Slackers!
• Al-ki is not short for “Alcoholic”
• Nirvana, it ain't
• No, the Capitol has "DC" after its name
• Where Californians go to die
• Home of Frasier
• Come for the Retarded Protesters -- Stay for the Over-roasted Coffee!
• The Old Boeing State
• We hate that pretentious Eddie Vedder fuck, too
• We are a state, not the a craphole Federal District
• We are the first, and likely the last, state to be named after a president
• A wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft-Starbucks GmbH.
• Not The Cool Washington, The Other One
• Keep Washington Green, Grow Even More Hemp
• Getting there is all the fun
• Our heroes are Injuns we kilt a hundred years ago
• The New Jersey of the Great Northwest
• We like our state, so STAY THE FUCK OUT!
• Our state tree is the Hemlock for a reason
• All the grim raininess of England, without the history
• Gateway to Alaska
• Experience Washington, no, Experience Washington
• Bigfoot’s gonna git ya
• 54-40 or Fight!
• If it’s not ecologically sound, it’s crap
• Proud home of D.B. Cooper
• SayWAtf
• The People’s Republic of Ecotopia
• Geeks, Freaks, and Treehuggers welcome!
• Grunge wannabes will be interned in our re-education camps

What do these two suits have in common?

"Couple sue Wal-Mart over slip in vomit" 
(AP/Nashville Tennessean)

and 

"ACLU: Boeing offshoot helped CIA" 
(AP/Houston Chronicle) Simple:

• They each have a distinct odor associated with them
• They're both based on slippery circumstances
• They're both as baseless as the day is long

Only one of them, however, appears to have been categorized by the Associated Press as an "Odd Story". So let's look at that one first:

Couple sue Wal-Mart over slip in vomit DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) -- A woman's fall in a puddle of vomit has resulted in a lawsuit against Wal-Mart. June Medema, slipped in the vomit at a Davenport Wal-Mart on June 13, 2005, according to the lawsuit, filed by Medema and her husband, James, in Scott County District Court earlier this month.

Medema claims that she was seriously injured in the fall.

The lawsuit alleges that Wal-Mart's negligence led to Medema's fall, but it does not specifically say how the store was negligent.

John Simley, a Wal-Mart spokesman, decline comment saying he hadn't seen the lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims that Medema suffered serious neck and upper back injuries in the fall and has undergone several surgeries and is unable to work.

It's a mercifully short story, so it's included here in its entirety. All you need to know is in that third paragraph - "...but it does not specifically say how the store was negligent." In order to prove negligence, of course, the Medemas will have to prove that Wal-Mart knew the vomit was puddled on the floor. Which will be rather difficult - if they didn't see it, why should Wal-Mart have done so?

As to the second story, I can completely understand the ACLU going after a Boeing subsidiary - They can't sue the US government or the CIA on a classified matter, so they simply picked someone else in the transaction chain to sue.

NEW YORK — A Boeing Co. subsidiary that may have provided secret CIA flight services was sued Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three terrorism suspects who claim they were tortured by the U.S. government. The lawsuit charges that flight services provided by Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. enabled the clandestine transportation of the suspects to secret overseas locations, where they were tortured and subjected to other "forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."

The ACLU, of course, has been known to provide valuable legal services. They've also been known to tilt at windmills in pursuit of an agenda that tends to be decidedly leftist. Not "liberal" - leftist. As I said, I can understand their grasping at straws to find someone to sue, because money-grubbers have to go where the money is, even if they expect to get no money out of the matter.

I just can't understand why they think their suit will survive a summary judgment request. Jeppesen Dataplan didn't man the flight, didn't own the plane, and didn't load or unload alleged passengers from the alleged extraordinary alleged rendition alleged mission. Jeppesen provides flight planning services. Logistics.

Undaunted by this bit of reality, the ACLU soldiers on:

The ACLU said the company "either knew or reasonably should have known" that they were facilitating the torture of terrorism suspects by providing flight services for the CIA.

That's one of the ten most absurd things I've read in the last 48 hours. Having been on flights which used the services of flight planning companies like Jeppesen, and having occasionally been with the pilot when he was planning the flight, I'm comfortable asserting that in no case did a flight services vendor demand to know, let alone show even the slightest interest in, what the purpose of the flight was. Which is just as well - it would have been none of their business, and they'd have been told as much.

It occurs to me that there are two other things these two suits have in common - they're both weakly disguised fundraising attempts, and neither one will be successful at anything other than garnering publicity for its plaintiff.

Also posted at issuesblog.com

A recent visit to my personal abode and culture bunker by Clan Johno included a soundtrack provided by Band of Gypsys.

In subsequent discussion, I explained that someone who hears "Machine Gun" and is not moved has no soul. And I didn't mean "soul" in the James Brown, real supabad sense. I'm not saying you have to like it- you could be moved to loathe it. OK. But the energy and the wailing and the wah wah wah weeeoooooDRAAAAAANNNNNNNN ah wa wa wa wa wa awaw provokes all who hear.

Which days later got me to thinking about dying in a horrible plane crash.

Assuming I had it with me, and I had the time to listen, and I was together enough to make my player work at that moment, and not flipping the fuck out at the prospect of my imminent demise, I decided I would like "Machine Gun" to be my terminal music. The last music I heard before impact and non-existence.

Yeah.

So. All the assumptions listed above apply to you. What is your terminal music?

Competition in the medical system is a Republican plank -- the theory being that normal business competition takes place in the medical sector, yielding market forces that optimize across the board. I don't think that medicine operates the same way as other areas -- normal competitive forces require that the buyer have choices and knowledge of those choices, so better decisions can be made.

I recently had some blood tests done as part of a normal checkup -- right down at the end of the hall, sir! Weeks later some handy information systems that my insurance company provides give insight into the costing side of the medical equation that I haven't really had before. I was stunned to see the lab charges.

I wasn't stunned by the amount that the insurance company had paid on my behalf, which was around $22. I was stunned by the "normal" fee for the service -- over $125! In other words, if someone was stupid enough to go to the doctor and pay fee-for-service, they'd get hijacked (or medi-jacked, if you like) for $100 more!

There's a trend right now for companies to offer their employees medical savings accounts; employees get a pool of money they can use to pay their medical expenses, with some assistance from the company. Leftover money can be rolled over into the next year, and some of it can be kept. The idea is to encourage employees to be smart buyers when it comes to medical expenses, but how can this work if there's such a huge disparity between what's charged to the insurance company and what a normal person must pay? With a medical savings account are those deep discounts still available? And for how long?

The biggest problem Republicans have with the current medical system is that there isn't a liberal in sight they can blame its deficiencies and cruelties on. Republicans continue their efforts to raise simple fear amongst citizens -- fear of drug tampering on medicines from other countries, like…oooo…Canada, with its notoriously dangerous drug supply chain. It's not like medicines in America can be sold to pharmacies by drug distributors dealing from the trunks of their cars. Oh wait…they can and do. Or it's the scary ghost of medical futures that might involve the public sector! My god, its full of stars, and they're falling…

There is exactly one reason why Republicans (and Democrats not worthy of their offices) have been so protective of the current dysfunctional medical system in America. They have contributors who benefit enormously from the current system, and that applecart isn't going to be overturned any time soon.

So smile, citizen, as you pay over twice as much for medical care that doesn't even get you into the top ten outcomes, world-wide. You bought into it, and now you're paying for it. And get ready to pay more -- much more -- if you continue to keep your heads in the sand. I can see the drug companies "researching" a miracle cure now: A drug that will let you keep your head in the sand! Miracles never cease.

Period Suppression Pill OK'd

The FDA approved Lyrel, a birth control pill that stops the monthly menstrual cycle altogether. What do you think?

Or not, as it turns out.

[wik] My mother would have totally missed the humor in that last lady's comment.

The Fred is doing very well in the online GOP straw poll run by, uh, GOP Straw Polls. As you can see if you follow the link, The Fred has been chosen as first choice by over fifty percent of all respondents. Romney and Guiliani are trailing significantly behind, both in the teens, and the ragged rabble of other GOP candidates languish in the single digits. Naturally, this is a self-selected group, and not a scientific poll like those run by the major news organizations. Nevertheless, that's a hell of a lot of support from at least one group of people - and a group of people, moreover, that will have a large effect on the campaign if what we saw in 2004 is any indication of the growing importance of blogging on elections.

Off of slashdot, I think, an article about how some dude makes $70 million a year buying expired domain names. Damn, damn, damn.

Virginia has been my home for most of a decade now, and while Virginia has its charms (among them being a hell of a lot more jobs than my home state of Ohio) there is still much to ridicule in my state of domicile. I could speak of the starkly horrific traffic, but that problem is really more of a DC metro issue than one for the state as a whole. But hey, there's still just tons to make fun of:

• Virginia is for Lepers
• Sort of the South, but with fewer guns
• South Carolina may have bolted first, but we made the Confederacy
• Fireworks! Cigarettes! Ham!
• Don’t tell any one, but Queen Betsy got around a bit
• Who Says Government Stiffs and Slackjaw Yokels Don't Mix?
• My Virginia is Itchy
• Please don't confuse us with West Virginia!
• Birthplace of the Slave-Ownin' Presidents
• Tobacco Is Only a Hobby
• Not so much Virginia as Virginesque
• East Virginia
• Home of the CIA. Aaah, damn, now we have to kill you
• Virginia is for lovers. No, really.
• Like West Virginia, but without the confusing “West”
• We're Better Than Maryland, Damn It!
• Objects in Virginia are closer than they appear
• I can stop growing tobacco whenever I want
• Vagina, Virgin, Virginia
• Everything historical happened here. Don't even front.
• Most famous speaker of our state motto: John Wilkes Booth
• Yeah, it sounds kinda like 'vagina' ha ha we get it
• Every Minister has been here, yet most managed to make it out
• Actually it's more like Fairfax County, and everyplace else
• OMG I can't believe I moved to this hell hole! Oh wait, I was just in Maryland for a minute ... whew
• Virginia ... where time serving bureaucratic hacks go to get retired in place
• Home of the NRA ... now git off my lawn!
• Lick my Virginia
• Gateway to Montana
• We would have won the Civil War if wasn't for you meddling kids
• Birthplace of Liberty, just like Montgomery, AL is the birthplace of the civil rights movement
• Home of the Gold Mining Interpretive Center of Goldvein, Virginia
• Home for the illegals ambitious enough to leave the Carolinas, but still too lazy to make New York
• Colder than you think, and not half as friendly
• The Real South. If you're from Connecticut
• Four centuries of slavery, rebellion, and willful ignorance
• Don't touch my Virginia
• My Virginia smells funny
• It’s really more of a middle-aged dominion
• At least we’re not New Jersey
• Do you smell fish?
• Give me Liberty, or Give me Death. But not for negroes
• You've got a friend in the CIA
• Gateway to the Confederacy, as Grant proved
• Virginia ... birth place of the striped shirt ... LOOK AT IT!
• Home to losers of two civil wars
• The South will rise again! And, no doubt, be ground down to dust once more
• Home of the Virginia big-eared bat, and other women
• Sic semper leperi