perfidy

Without putting too fine a point on it, yes.

For reasons that seemed appropriate at the time, my wife's online shopping excursion led her into one of the darker and stranger corners of the interweb. She returned, scarred and weary, bearing this. Mother Earth Shopping is offering for sale, The Scythe Book, 2nd ed. At first, I am intrigued. Scythes, you say? Until I read the blurb:

Instead of trying to find time to workout at the local gym, this book tells how you can get a healthful workout while silently mowing your property using a scythe.

Get in shape while (silently) looking like bathouse, squirrelbait crazy. If I tried to mow my lawn with a scythe, I'd likely be arrested before I finished the front. I wonder, if Mother Jones started to offer books together as packages like Amazon, what they would mate up with this gem? How to make you own very large black cloak from pocket lint? Death and You, Mythology and Holistic Home Gardening? For every one indisputably cool thing that Mother Earth might have, there are a thousand of these boners.

This will make some in the national security apparat have a quiet, secretive coniption fit. Void Communications has designed itself a brand new, totally secure, self erasing communications system - one that will allow any two people to have a secure conversation that leaves no trace whatsoever of its existence.

Key to Void's Web-based VaporStream service is the fact that at no time does the body of the message and the header information appear together, thus leaving no record of the interaction on any computer or server. The message cannot be forwarded, edited, printed or saved, and, once it's been read, it disappears; nothing is cached anywhere. No attachments allowed.

Responding to questions about the service's utility for terrorists and other malcontents, DEMO Executive Producer Chris Shipley said,

"Good guys need confidentiality, too."

While this has geek credibility, is certainly an impressive display of cleverness, and no doubt lots of powerful people with guns will be very pissed off - it's kinda pointless, considering that maintaining any sort of anonymity or privacy in the coming age will be nigh on to impossible without extreme measures that will be indistinguishable from paranoia, or dropping off the grid entirely. Neither course will be conducive to living a normal life, or getting dates, and therefore will be rarely followed.

Another post long delayed is an update to my post on the laws of civilized warfare. Or as Ken McLeod would have it, “Civilised Warfare.” Shortly after writing my piece, I was cruising around my internet neighborhood, and dropped in on the Maximum Leader. He had posted a link to an editorial by one Sam Harris in the LA Times. Mr. Harris is a liberal, and recently the author of a book that slams religion. All of them. (At least he is even-handed in his contempt. Like the saying goes, you’re not a bigot if you hate everyone.) Normally I avoid reading the LA Times, so I would likely have missed this article if not for the intervention of our Dear Leader.

Now, one would expect that a liberal religion hater would also hold a typical package of left-leaning beliefs. You would be wrong. The whole article is worth reading, and you should be reading Naked Villainy on general principles. But one bit bore directly on my post of last week.

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

This summary is, tragically, far better written than my own. But it again hits the point that unless we are to completely discard any sort of moral viewpoint of human action in the world, we have no choice but to view some people, groups, and actions as inherently better than others. (The alternative is to view the world through a lens of expediency, which is what McLeod seems to suggest, despite his claims of compassion.)

Tolerance, compassion and fairness are virtues. What liberals so often fail to realize is that they are far from the only virtues. When we look out at the world we must make judgments, we must discriminate between the good and the bad. If we lack the courage and confidence to look at someone and say, “That’s wrong” we have no compass for guiding our own actions in the world.

I meant to respond to this a while ago, but several factors have delayed my response. (For those who are interested, they are, in order: laziness, work, children, getting ip banned from my own domain, and preparing the Epic New Jersey Post.) But late is often better than never.

So, Ken over at Brickmuppet blog now believes that he'll be buying me dinner soon. We made a bet some time ago that commercial manned spacecraft would be orbiting the Earth before NASA pulled its collective head out of it's many-orificed nether regions. He has changed his tune thanks to the announcement last week that Bigelow Aerospace will be orbiting a full-size habitat before decades' end, and is working to ink three separate deals with Lockmart, Kistler and SpaceX to provide manrated launchers to move passengers to his new orbital hotel. (Do you think it'll have hourly rates?)

As Ken notes, this is big. It does in fact solve the chicken-egg problem of having a destination to which manned, commercial launchers can fly to. I would add that it is ironic that NASA's nearly complete ISS notably did not solve this problem. There is a space station in orbit as we speak, but it isn't a destination. Remember the hissy fit NASA threw when the Russkies were about to launch the first space tourist? They don't want grubby tourists stinking up their pristine space station. No matter how much they may be forced by higher powers to encourage private space, they are at heart against the development of commercial space endeavors.

By spreading out the love on the launch contracts, Bigelow is (hopefully) preventing a commercial launch monopoly. I really didn't consider that to be a problem, considering the sheer numbers of .com billionaires in the game, but still good news.

One of the biggest things that will fall out of space development of this kind is that it levels the playing field to a large degree. "God created man, but Colt made them equal." When space is no longer the domain of the super, or near-super powers, things will change to a very large degree, and quickly.
The national security implications of commercial space are enormous. The fantastic capabilities of the NRO's marvelous spy satellites are, in effect, a kludge, because we couldn't put observers in orbit. Two intelligence specialists in a Bigalow-style inflatable habitat in a low altitude polar orbit would have very nearly all the capabilities of a modern spy satellite.

Further, the iron laws of orbital mechanics mean that if you are in space, you have a signicant energy advantage over those still on the ground. The old rods from god concept takes on a new level of danger when anyone can send a payload up into orbit. It's a lot easier to put together something like that than a nuke. I'm not saying Al Quaida is going to do it, but other nations, using space technology developed here, could.

Another thing that occurred to me while reading Ken's post. Often, space enthusiasts have pointed to other transportation technologies in an effort to explain why space travel hasn't taken off in the way that they hoped. The Wright Brothers first flew in 1903, but it was decades before commercial aviation was big business, for example.

But what if we imagine that Great Britain, locked in a cold war with a newly formed Germany in the late nineteenth century, started an air race? Some German engineer makes an airplane on a government contract (since the German military planners realized that competing with the Royal Navy was nothing but foolhardiness), and it's clearly designed as a weapon. The British race to come up with one of their own. And so on, through the 1880s and 1890s, aviation is developed at great government expense. Airplanes are large, sophisticated devices requiring the most advanced machining and precision manufacture. Mechanical computers are devised to calculate the fluid dynamics needed to optimize the designs.

By the turn of the century, there is in both nations a thriving industry of airplane manufacturers making airplanes to government specifications. What is the future of aviation in this world? Aviation was brought into existence far in advance of it's "natural" time, and its development is forced down odd paths by the requirements of international rivalry and bureaucracy. How long before a commercial aviation industry can take off, when everyone knows that airplanes are huge bombers that can only be built with the resources of one of the great powers?

I think that's some of what happened in our past, with space. Technology was probably ready for reasonable commerical space development by at least 1980, but investors and high tech industry had been conditioned by the exigencies of the space race to feel that it was inherently out of their reach. Also, government agencies jealous of their perogatives both on the civilian and defense sides – actively prevented commercial development.

And Ken, I think I want Indian cuisine.

Aah, New Jersey. The moment you all (and especially Bram) have been waiting for. The Ministry has spared no expense that we wouldn't normally spare to bring you this very special edition of alternate state mottoes. Our tireless and unsleeping servitors have scoured the interweb and the dark and loathsome recesses of their own minds for slogans for your reading enjoyment. New Jersey? Why not:

• Kiss Her Where It Smells
• The Oil and Petrochemical State
• You Want A Motto? I Got Your Fuckin’ Motto Right Here!
• Come for the beaches. Stay for the gambling, crack and hookers.
• What smell?
• Home of Jimmy Hoffa's grave... somewhere.
• Hey, Quit Laughing!!
• All those chemical waste sites and Trump's Taj Mahal, too!
• You have the right to remain silent, You have the right to an attorney...
• Tell 'em Guido sent ya
• Renaming it New Jersey didn’t improve things much
• Not as quaint and charming as Old Jersey
• The Suburb of not one, but two! pestilential urban shitheaps
• The smell that grows on you
• Land-filled with pride
• Aaay! How U Doin'?
• The Cancer Capital of The World
• We'll Show You What Exit
• Where nobody leaves
• The Funtime Family State for Families!
• Frightening Sky Country
• Ad Astra Per Hoboken
• The Hobo State
• I’m tired of living and scared of dying
• The Too-Easy-To-Mock State
• We Are Defensive About Our Faults
• We are a byword for corruption
• A toxic miasmatic wasteland
• We don’t trust you to pump gas
• It's Jersey: "Got a problem with that?"
• The New New Jersey: "Now with 10% less toxic waste!"
• We'll look the other way
• The Hindenburg was just the beginning ...
• All the charm of Detroit. All the culture of Phoenix
• Please lie down with your hands behind your head
• Our police force looks forward to meeting you
• Rated safer than Lebanon
• Come smell for yourself
• Nearly Good Enough
• A Deathtrap, A Suicide Rap - Get Out While You're Young
• The Fist of the Mid-Atlantic
• Sure, our governor may have given his unqualified gay lover a high-salaried position instead of looking out for homeland security, but ... uh, I forgot where I was going with this.
• New Jersey - Bend over and smile
• We’ll take the tollbooths down as soon as the Turnpike and Parkway are paid for
• Come for the taxes, stay for the corruption.
• Our sales tax may be the highest in the country but our property taxes are the highest in the country … wait a minute
• A wholly owned subsidiary of the New Jersey State Employees Union
• 2nd Amendment? Never heard of it.
• Just imagine Massachusetts without referendums or Republican Governors
• At least we aren’t New York
• Our state song, “Born to Run,” is about escaping from the New Jersey
• Pennsylvania – the promised land
• Will the last one out of Jersey please turn off the lights?
• If you try really hard, you can say Garden State without laughing
• So progressive we elected the first gay prostitute governor
• Toll Booth Capital of the United States of America
• The Corruption State.
• The Toll Booth State
• The Aggressively Industrial State
• The Mosquito State
• New Sicily
• The Knobbed Whelk State
• Liberty and Prosperity, so we can give it to the immigrants
• Proud home of our nation’s greatest political thinkers, Aaron Burr and Susan Sarandon
• The Sopranos State
• We are so gay
• Be sure to pick up a complimentary chemical drum on your way out
• Yo, Joisey: "Politicos and wiseguys, bada-bing!"
• New Jersey: " 'cause New York sucks."
• Laugh it up, we got more money than your state
• Shoot squealers, not bears
• New Jersey: Where the Martians Landed
• Most of Our Elected Officials Have Not Been Indicted
• Just Passing Through
• Welcome to New Jersey: Now Get the Hell Out of the Way!
• It Glows In The Dark!
• The 55 Gal. Drum State
• Sure It's Toxic - But We Love It!
• What A Difference A State Makes
• Only The Strong Survive: New Jersey
• Where The Weak are Killed and Eaten
• Edison electrocuted cats here so you could have light, asshole
• Your convenient cheap shot when you can’t think of anything really interesting to say
• New Jersey's Got It, We Just Don't Know What To Do With It!
• New Jersey-Guess Which Lanes Are EZPass Today?
• What The Hell Was I Thinking?
• Where 70% of the women are ugly, and those that aren't are stuck-up
• New Jersey, Not New York
• New Jersey, home of Giants Stadium
• Yeh, I Wanna Move too
• Just another state, really
• Welcome to New Jersey, Where There's a Rainbow in Every Puddle!
• New Jersey: Keeping New Yorkers out of PA since 1776
• Underdog Lady Lives Here
• Our State Capitol is the Most Geographically Centered
• The light at the end of the Tunnel
• Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
• Your friendly neighborhood toxic waste dump
• The Asshole of America
• What the fuck YOU lookin' at?
• Leave All Your "Problems" in New Jersey. My Cousin Knows a Guy.
• Great View of Lady Liberty's Backside
• Come for the Calzones, Stay for the Wutter
• NEW Jersey? What happened to the old one?
• You Could Always Be Somewhere Better Than This
• Jersey - it don't suck
• I love the smell of sewage in the morning!
• Home of the Teamsters!
• We Run the Cement Business in This Town!
• I Love the Smell of the East River in the Morning!
• New Jersey... the origin of "Planet of the Apes"
• New Jersey and You - Who Farted?
• There is no such thing as the Mafia
• Your New York City Trip Bathroom Break
• What Exit?
• Industrial Chemical Processing Capital of the Fuckin’ World
• You'll Never Think Once About it
• Your Philadelphia and New York City Suburb
• Ya, We'll Pump Your Gas. Nudge, Nudge
• What Exit? Nudge, Nudge
• Just hold your nose and keep driving
• Yeah, it always smells like this
• Several of our politicians are not corrupt
• three rights are a left
• The Jug-Handle State
• Jersey. It's not the asshole of the country, but you can see it from here
• No Left Turns
• Abandon hope, all ye who enter here
• Now Entering New Jersey - Consider That Your Last Warning
• No, you suck
• Please do not make any sudden arm movements
• Now with more 73% more hobos
• Bigger and with considerably more attractive cows than Old Jersey
• Smell it again for the first time
• New Jersey - like California, but without the sun, usable beaches, and warmth
• New Jersey is for Dirty Sluts!
• We got rid of our environment years ago, and we've never been happier.
• English is our fifth language
• Be a millionaire and still live like a pauper
• Welcome to Mecca West
• The place to raise a glowing family
• Still better than West Virginia
• Even if you have three nipples, you'll feel normal here
• Please don't associate us with Philly
• Hey You stupid New York fuck get outta the left freakin lane
• Bad voters, good pasta.
• Where it's OK to drive 80 on the Parkway as long as you’re not a minority
• So our governor was a Gay idiot, but at least we wasn’t Hillary Clinton
• Giving Gas-Pumping foreigners the chance to do something other then blowing people up
• Where people live who don't want to pay $1.5 million for a 350 square foot apartment, roaches included
• Only the strong survive
• We'll Fuckin kill you
• New Jersey: We'll Win You Over (ed: That one cost $260,000
• Get Away, Without Going Far Away
• Born to Fun
• Bada Bing! Choose New Jersey
• New Jersey: Come Glow With Us
• Everything is cool, really. Just don't drink the water in Ocean County.
• The authority on government corruption
• The Diner and Mall capital of the world
• A nice place if you have money.
• Less traffic than LA.
• The Statue of Liberty is OURS
• The largest chemical producer in the United States
• Home of the nation’s oldest beer brewery
• We'll make you into a man, or kill you
• Nothing is illegal here as long as you don't get caught
• The home of pork roll
• The opposite of Texas
• The only state with it's own version of the devil
• Where counties are considered metropolitan areas
• Because Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Alan Ginsberg, Alexander Hamilton, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Walt Whitman, Jerry Lewis, Bruce Willis, Caesar Romero, Ice-T, Danny DeVito, Joe Pesci, Joe Piscopo, Paul Simon, John Travolta, Dave Thomas, Ray Liotta, and Frank Sinatra make up for Bon Jovi, Tom Cruise, Robert Blake, Meryl Streep, and Sebastian Bach.
• Better than lots of other states
• Explore our exits, Nudge, Nudge
• We’ll tax the crap out of you
• We’ll crap the tax out of you
• Expect delays
• We’ll look the other way
• Big Hair, Big Fun
• Come develop our open space
• Got traffic?
• At least we’re not Ohio
• Hurry, we’re almost full
• Smell the unexpected
• Slogan? We don't need no stinkin' slogan!
• New Jersey!
• Home Is Where You Spend As Little Time As Possible
• The 4th maybe 5th place I want to be at any one time!
• Yes, you've sunk that low
• You Can't See It While You're Sleeping!
• Thanks to low expectations, you won't be disappointed
• Home of the discount latte
• Inferiority complex ‘r us
• No, you really don't get used to the smell.
• Making the best of it since 1650
• So ashamed our state university is called Rutgers
• uh... i love new jersey?
• If you don’t like it, leave, no one will know
• New Jersey Invented Leaving
• New Jersey Is Where My Mom Lives
• New Jersey Gave Me Acne
• Better than Delaware, at least a little
• So hated. So over populated. Go figure.
• Not Dense, Just Densely Populated
• A 55-Gallon Drum of Fun
• I Can't Believe I'm IN New Jersey
• When You Crave Real Supermarkets, We're The One!
• It was this or Staten Island
• Face It, You Used to Dump Shit On It Too.
• Go Ahead and Slime It, It's Expensive Enough Already
• At least we don't have a view of New Jersey
• What happens in Jersey, stays buried in Jersey.
• Come for the cancer stay for the chemo
• Spineless, soulless, flavorless, limp, disingenuous, castrated, censored, and pureed.
• Edited for television.
• If you can’t make it there, you’ll move over here
• The Big Lemon
• Yes it’s the Fuckin Garden State
• The rest of the country, go fuck yourselves
• There’s a reason the PA border says, “Welcome to America”
• We got Springsteen, uh, and, uh Springsteen
• The weird smell state
• Even NJ’s most famous son sang, New York, New York
• We spent $260,000 on our slogan
• Not as bad as you think
• Where the Rottweilers Run Scared
• We Have an Exit for You
• Pay to Play: Reap the Benefits
• Welcome to New Jersey: Don't Worry, We Hate You, Too
• New Jersey: Hurricane-Free Since 1944
• The Garden of Eden, without all that good stuff.
• Where Kevin Smith used to live.
• Only half the state smells funky!
• The only state named after a kind of cow
• Everywhere you didn't want to be
• Please ignore our plague-infested lab rats
• Vacation in New Jersey: Savor the Irony.
• Visit Newark: Just don't stop
• New Jersey, New Schmersey
• Jeerzy: The Angry Statesman
• New Jersey. It’s not what you expect from New Jersey
• Up Yours! Love, New Jersey
• New Jersey: We're not so good with slogans
• The Lame State Slogan State
• At least we’re not Ne… fuck.

At least not permanently. According to the WSJ, in a story last week, "Soccer Star Zidane May Have Lost His Head, But(t) It Hasn't Hurt Him".

Good for him.

Rash actions in the heat of the moment, particularly during a sporting event, seem easy to forgive. Exceptions, of course, exist - think Woody Hayes' attack on Clemson's Charlie Bauman in the 1978 Gator Bowl. Quite an embarrassment, and one he never really lived down. It differs both because he wasn't a contestant, and because it was clearly a childish hissy-fit, unlike Zinedine Zidane's head butt of Marco Materazzi, who, let's be serious, probably earned it.

Seeing the story, however, reminded me of an idiotic picture that circulated shortly thereafter. Just because it was idiotic doesn't mean it wasn't funny, however, and the WSJ story provided a cheap excuse to post it, so I will:

(Note: That's an animated picture, and I got tired of watching it move on our page, so click to see it in its native, full motion, form. It's far less funny if the animation is disabled in your browser, to the point of "not at all funny")

Speaking only for myself, this comes as a total shock. So much so that I'm not sure I know who I am any more.

(Article text included here simply to avoid risk of link rot)

Paris Hilton: I'm not that smart

By BECI WOOD
September 22, 2006

IN probably the least shocking celebrity statement of the decade, Paris Hilton has admitted that she’s "not like that smart". The confession was made when the star helped police officers with an investigation into a burglary at the house of Hollywood porn baron Joe Francis.

When cops asked her what she knew, the socialite said: "I'm not that smart... I don’t remember... I forget stuff all the time." The man in question, Darnell Riley, admitted the offence earlier this year and was sentenced to nearly 11 years in prison. On the tape Paris also told cops that an anonymous man had called her to try and extort money for the return of 'private tapes' stolen from her house.

"They were trying to sell it to a newspaper or something," she explained. "So if you pay somebody, then you're gonna be paying for the rest of your life."

"My dad always taught me. They'll keep the tape anyway."

From the left sidebar of a Reuters story entitled "Court says $32,000 is too much to fondle bosom", this picture:

Subtitled thusly:

A bra designed by actress Jennifer Aniston is shown at Sotheby's auction house in New York, April 8, 2003. A fee of 25,500 euros ($32,000) is way too much for a woman to charge a man for fondling her bosom, a Finnish district court ruled.

I can see why someone, even at a supposedly serious news organization would think about putting that picture of a Jennifer Aniston-designed bra into the sidebar of a story such as that mentioned above. I remember my high-school days, when such a juxtaposition would be considered not only snidely funny, but mandatory.

However, based on the fact that neither Ms. Aniston nor her objectively ugly creation actually has anything to do with the story, I fail to see why someone at a supposedly serious news organization would actually do so, even in a story section entitled "Oddly Enough".

Discuss.

GeekLethal reminded me to do something with a pic I'd had cluttering up my file system.