perfidy

Gary Taubes, author of the life-changing (for me, at any rate) book Good Calories, Bad Calories now has a blog, and  a new book coming out this month - Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. That would make a nice late Christmas present.

Coming out two weeks before that, in fact, this next Tuesday, is Tim Ferriss' new one, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman. I enjoyed his first book, the 4-hour Workweek, which, while not exactly containing world-shattering new information is useful in providing in one place information and a perspective that would have taken vast effort to compile. It hasn't changed my life - but I hope it will in the new year. At least a little, anyway. I think the new one will be a useful companion piece to the information I've already assembled for the whole diet/exercise program I'm now following.

I'll post a review once I get it.

Just got one of these:

Color me jealous.

The Hawaiian Libertarian drops a big post on the whole smoking is bad for you thing.

I don't know what would piss off Mrs. Buckethead more - me continuing to smoke, or continuing to smoke and justifying on the basis that the government is lying.

There's a few links in the article - ones that Aretae didn't include in his posts on the subject a while back.

I think I will switch to American Spirits or the like, though. I've been smoking cowboy killers for too long. I don't really want to go to the trouble of roll your own, and smoking organic would fit in (a bit, kind of) with my general trend toward healthier stuff.

[wik]: The other posts in the red pill series over at HL are all worth reading, if you haven't already. And you should have. Slacker.

If you pay attention to science news, you may have noticed this sort of headline: "Scientists Shocked" or "Scientists Baffled." The teaser headline leads you to a heroic story of hero scientists heroically unjamming the gears of science.

What you may not have noticed is the pattern. Six or seven times out of ten, the scientist is an astronomer or cosmologist. And if you read even more closely, you'll find that the same sort of shocking results crop up at regular intervals. For example, every time a probe gets near a comet, we see a rash of reports of baffled scientists running around with their heads cut off, shocked at the results reported back by our robotic emissaries. Often, in the second paragraph, or perhaps the last, you'll see a comment along the lines of "It's back to the drawing board."

But two years later when the next probe arrives, the same confusion reigns.

Clearly, someone did not go back to the drawing board, and paradigms were not altered.

Aside from comets, one of the most common sources of bafflement is electromagnetism in space. Keep this in the back of you mind next time you scan the science news. Remember that hot gas is plasma. Plasma is electromagnetic. The easiest way on earth to generate high energy radiation - gamma, x-ray - is with plasma devices, entirely without the need for rapidly spinning gravitational sources. Finally, there's no such thing as magnetic field line reconnection - field lines are as real (though fully as useful) as lines of longitude or latitude. They can't reconnect.

Now read an article like this one. It's typical.

Here's a fun one about ball lightning, with a space connection.

In other science news, climate models are awesome. Borepatch weighed in on that one, too. And sunspots may have had something to do with the little ice age.

When my mom and I moved to Medina, we lived in a duplex on Howard St. Behind our house, facing Jackson St., lived Steve Cepec. His family was a disaster. I don't think I ever saw his dad sober, or not shouting at something. His mother was passive, aggressive, and mean.

Last spring, my mom called me and said, "One of your classmates is accused of murder."

"Is it Cepec?" I asked.

It was.

Steven Aaron Cepec is up for murder charges that could bring him the death penalty. He apparently killed his 73-year-old neighbor over a debt, and was caught fleeing the scene. He attempted to commit suicide in jail by swallowing screws. That failure cost the county a quarter million in medical bills.

He was on parole at the time of the murder. He'd served some years for burglary. And I knew when we graduated that he would come to a bad end. I'm kind of surprised that it took this long.

I always sort of liked Steve. Didn't trust him - my mom caught him stealing from our garage once. He tried to be a bully, but didn't seem to have the heart or the courage to do it right. Once, he hit me in the arm at recess. I wasn't a tough guy, and maybe it wasn't his best effort, but I was stunned that it didn't hurt all that much. I laughed. Steve never hit me again.

Steve was a good guy to have around when the neighborhood started the annual buckeye wars. Buckeyes falling from the trees make good weapons - we never were able to determine whether the small, hard smooth naked buckeyes or the spiky but soft buckeyes still in the husk hurt more. Steve had a good arm and a good eye.

In sixth grade, I sat next to some weird fruit-bearing plant that Mrs. Buckloh had in her room. Its small red berries were bitter and foul smelling. One day, Steve asked me to give him some. I looked at him, silently asking, "What happens to me if I give them to you?" He pointed at the seat behind him, occupied by the sleeping bulk of Richard Martin.

Richard was the living embodiment of every stereotype of West Virginia you've ever heard of, plus a few you haven't. It seemed the only word he knew was, "Quee-it." His lawn was mostly dirt because his dad would pay him $10 every time he mowed it, no matter how often he did, or how little the lawn needed it. When we asked him if he was a homo sapiens, he always replied, "No I never!"

Richard was sleeping in his desk, head slack back, mouth open, a thin weezy sort of snore drifting out. I gave Cepec a handful of berries. Cepec aimed, while teacher droned on in the background. The first berry bounced off Richard's forehead. He stirred, slightly.

The second berry bounced off his chin. Bracketed! The third berry hit the corner of his mouth and rolled off the side. But the fourth berry, nothing but net. I think it went straight down his throat. Richard coughed, explosively. The berry hit some girl in the face. Richard fell off his desk, arms flailing as he screamed, "Cepec, Quee-it!"

It was one of the better days in sixth grade.

At the time, my mom was one of four college graduate women working at the bakery at the local grocery store. Mom told me once that Steve came in one day, back to the bakery in the back. He said hi, grabbed a quarter donut from the sample plate. Mom said he paused, and said - matter of factly, maybe a bit sadly, "Your boy's really smart. Isn't he."

Mom said thank you, and he left.

Shortly after that, mom got a better paying gig working for the state gov, and we got a house in a different neighborhood. I didn't see as much of Steve.

I think Steve was not destined by fate to be a murderer. Some people clearly are. He was weak of will, but so am I a lot of the time. He wasn't terribly bright, but then so are a lot of people. His parents were fucked up, but so are many others. Had he been raised better, he might have done alright.

But that didn't happen. And Frank Munz is dead.

From Zero Hedge:

Like most economists, the Fed and its chairman mistake their manipulation of money for control of the economy. You and I are the economy and it is quite apparent that the Fed has very little "control" over us. If they could control us, then their policies would have worked and they wouldn't keep experimenting on us with radical policies like quantitative easing and ZIRP.

Money, lest we forget, it just a medium of exchange. It does other things as well (store of value, indicator of the relative cost of things), but its primary function and the reason money was invented is to allow us to easily facilitate exchanges of goods and services. The economy is what we do everyday when we work, buy, sell, and save. Money is just a tool we use. When the Fed manipulates our money what is does is upset our ability to plan about the future. We have one set of perceptions about what money is and then the Fed distorts those perceptions and we end up making bad choices and bad plans. It results in the boom-bust business cycles we have and price inflation or price deflation.

My home town

Actually, things aren't so bad. Except for some soreness in the back from giving the Dad a hand with moving, things are verging on decent.

As Foseti mentioned, we had a little reactionary gabfest on Friday. Along with his observations, I'd add that reactionaries seem to be rather tall. It's unusual that I meet people taller than me, and Foseti is just fricken' huge. Wiry, though. Odd that sometimes when you meet for the first time a person you've never seen, they are almost exactly the way you pictured them. Except for the extra 6-8 inches, Foseti is just how I thought he'd look.

It is refreshing to talk to someone who not only doesn't freak out when I say what I think (my friend Christian is very kind, and doesn't freak out) but actually agrees, or even is more hardcore on the point than I am. The reactionary is decidedly outside the mainstream. And the monkeybrains part of your being just shrieks inside you when you are disagreeing with everyone. Seeing that there is someone who actually exists - not just words on the screen - and agrees with you is very calming.