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.

Loyal reader John Veit emails us with news of US Patent 6023874.  Why is this important?  Well, for John, it's important because he's the patent holder.  For us, it's important because when the zombies come, we will want an instinctive, automatic aiming system so that we can rapidly engage and de-brain our undead assailants.  And that's what John has come up with:

This looks like an exceedingly simple mod for a handgun. And though I haven't tried it, it looks like the sort of thing that would work. I imagine the grip would feel weird at first, but I'm sure I could cope with that if the benefits were there.

The video mentions that this method isn't recommended for the M1911 handgun. My personal sidearm is a Kimber custom classic, modeled closely on the 1911. Perhaps John can chime in in the comments on whether this prohibition is just for actual 1911 models, or pretty much any .45 on that model. I'd certainly like to try this system out.

Related: Isegoria a while back on the half triangle Opti-Sight technology. More information on Aimed Point Shooting here.

What if the Singularity already happened?

Damn, you stop paying attention for one second.  One second.

... he can perhaps assuage his hunger with this nifty Zombie putter-downer recommended by Rocket Jones:

Rocket Jones' description is apt:

"If you'll notice, besides the space saving bullpup design, there are two magazine tubes sitting side by side under the 18.5" long barrel. There's a selector lever that you use to set to feed from either magazine. Can you say "seven rounds of double ought *and* seven more of slugs?" I knew you could. That's fifteen rounds (one in the chamber) of sweet zombie brain perforating power right there."

But really, it was almost spoiled when he pussies out on the bore:

"My only reservation is that this puppy is 12 guage. I like 12 guage, but if I'm going to be shooting enough to warrant this kind of weapon, I'd rather see it in something a tad more benign to the shoulder like 20 gauge or even .410. That would probably also add a couple more rounds to the magazine capacity too."

Shame on you, Jones.

The World's Most Perfect Zombie Killing Weapon?  Until we get plasma rifles, this is certainly a contender.

Sorry for that title.  But, as you'll see, it is appropriate.

I've accumulated far too many open tabs in my browser.  So, I will offload them to you.  Some you've probably already seen, some are kinda stale.  But they all were important to me, and I cherish them.

• Several from Zero Hedge, which is your one stop shop for economic sturm und drang.  Prepare for the Hyperinflationary Great Depression - this tickles my disaster funny bone.  I've been reading a lot of Vox Day over the last few months, and this article is more or less in line.  And here are two possible responses to that problem: leave, or mooch.
• Grerp talks about the fourth turning. Parts 1, 3 and 4 are certainly worth reading.  But part 2 hit me.
  

  I read Strauss and Howe's 5-page description of the built-in craziness of childhood in the 1960s and 70s nodding the whole time. Someone is finally saying it: Gen X had a shortened, unsettled, unstable childhood and it permanently affected the way we see the world. Permanently. Affected. Permanently. Latchkey kids were left unsupervised daily and many of the rest of us were allowed to do adult things far too early. Illegitimacy got a good running start, and

  "n the middle 1970s, the distinction of occupying America's most poverty-prone age bracket passed directly from the (elder) Lost to the (child) 13th without ever touching the three generations in between. By the late 1970s, the child suicide rate broke the Lost's previous turn-of-the-century record. Through the Awakening, the homicide rate for infants and small children rose by half, and the number of reported cases of child abuse jumped four-fold."

  Does anyone remember this? You'd think, from the coverage in the media, that teen suicide was just discovered in youth. Oh, no. Gen Xers broke the record back there, but it's all just lost in the ether. Reading all of this I realized for perhaps the first time that other generations hadn't had this experience. I mean, I knew that divorce and illegitimacy climbed and climbed through the 60s, 70s and 80s and that families fragmented and got poorer in general. What I never considered was that for the first time in history, that fragmentation was largely an optional choice that the generations before us could and did make.

  Families have always broken up. Death was an ever present companion in human society, and it was not at all uncommon for one or the other parent to die and then remarry to keep the family solvent and functional. These arrangements sometimes worked and sometimes didn't, people being people. There have always been kids who were raised by their grandparents or aunts and uncles. Because their parents died. As in, keeled over, went 10 toes up. But with the advent of modern medicine and especially drugs like penicillin, the incidence of parental death was drastically reduced. Boomer kids feared polio, not smallpox or typhoid or tuberculosis. The kids in Gen X experienced family breakdown, then, because their parents flaked, because they put themselves first, because the kids in our generation weren't "worth the parental sacrifice of prolonging an unhappy marriage."

  Wow. Thanks. The adults around us preferred to deal with the divorce epidemic by producing after-school specials and writing stuff like It's Not the End of the World rather than pressure Silent and Boomer parents to stick it out for the kids.

  ... Gen X is made up of kids who were told by word and action that the happiness and well-being of the adults in their lives was more important than their happiness or well-being.  And many of us are tired of the unhappy housewife meme.  We are tired of being told to be grateful for the freedom, to be glad we didn't grow up in the oppressive climate of the 1950s.  Plenty of Gen Xers (and Gen Ys) would have traded the "liberation" given them for Mom and Dad living in the same house and dinner being on the table regularly at 6 PM.  We can't appreciate rebellion against security and authority because security and authority were scarce resources in our childhood.

  I'll continue this series with other thoughts gleaned from The Fourth Turning, but just for the above, the explanation for Gen X's anger, apathy and cynicism, I am grateful to the authors.  We don't feel the way the Boomers feel because we didn't grow up the way the Boomers did.  Even those of us growing up in stable homes could feel society splintering all around us, and we wondered if and when our parents would decide to chuck it and go find themselves.

  Growing up in the 70s, for me and most of my friends, that's what it was.

• Government policies may have had something to do with the recent unpleasantness. I try not to be overly conspiratorial. If you look at it one way, an incompetent or clueless government merely enabled certain elements in the financial sector to run hog wild and break shit. But if you look at it another way, those elements probably had a large effect on how those regulations were written and enforced in the first place. Which means they got the laws they wanted, and then ran hog wild.
• Alt Right on Monarchism, and on Monarchism.
• A few good Whiskeys.  I've added him to my feed.
• Taleb excerpt - AntiFragility.
• Naught for Your Comfort.  I had never read Ballad of the White Horse before.
• The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.  Interesting.
• Karl Rove is by no means my hero.  Scott at powerline sums it up: "Rove explains the vicious strategy at the heart of Obamacare: pass terrible legislation, and then collect a toll by exempting your friends--those who pay you lots of money--from that legislation, while your enemies have to live with it. We have had various forms of corruption over the years, but I don't believe we have had, within memory, anything quite this disgusting. The worst malefactor here, besides President Obama himself, is AARP."  It is disgusting.  And not at all surprising that the cold, deathlike hand of the AARP is involved.  Reference the link on boomers and the fourth turning, above.

I started this post yesterday, but was sidetracked by a sudden shopping emergency.  So much for that resolution.  But the key is to jump right back on the wagon, right?  So I will do, for my conscience and your edification, two (2!) posts in penance.

Instapundit linked this item - Compact Fusion Experiment Demonstrates Confinement of 100 keV (Billion-Degree) Ions in Dense Plasma which is indeed cool news:

In a breakthrough in the effort to achieve controlled fusion energy, a research team at Lawrenceville PlasmaPhysics, Inc. (LPP) in Middlesex, NJ, announced that they have demonstrated the confinement of ions with energies in excess of 100 keV (the equivalent of a temperature of over 1 billion degrees C) in a dense plasma. They achieved this using a compact fusion device called a dense plasma focus (DPF), which fits into a small room and confines the plasma with powerful magnetic fields produced by the currents in the plasma itself. Reaching energies over 100 keV is important in achieving a long-sought goal of fusion research—to burn hydrogen-boron fuel. Hydrogen-boron, (also known by its technical abbreviation, pB11) is considered the ideal fusion fuel, since it produces energy in the form of charged particles that can be directly converted to electricity. This could dramatically cut the cost of electricity generation and eliminate all production of radioactive waste.

The dense plasma focus has been studied for over 40 years. However, LPP has been able to make great strides since its ―Focus-Fusion-1 experimental device started producing data in October, 2009, due to its unique, patented design. Most importantly, its electrodes, which produce the self-pinching action that concentrates the plasma and current, are much smaller than those of other DPF devices with similar peak currents. The electrode assembly is only 4 inches across and less than 6 inches in length.

The fusion energy yields achieved in these experiments are still far less than the energy used to run the machines. However, LPP hopes to make rapid progress in the coming year when the machine will be running with hydrogen–boron fuel for the first time.

They've made more progress in fusion in the last couple years than billion dollar efforts achieved in decades.  What may not be apparent at first sight, though, is that the lead researcher behind all this progress - Eric Lerner of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics - is the author of The Big Bang Never Happened, and his proposed ideas regarding plasma cosmology - quasars and the like.

Robert Bussard of Bussard Ramjet fame had another line of investigation that was similar in some respects - the Polywell - but funding ran out and then he died from multiple myeloma.  Research does continue though.

I'm thinking I'm going to something slightly different. I'm going to do resolutions this year on a month by month basis, and report on my progress before issuing the next set of resolutions. Obviously, some of these will be repeating month to month, but I want to be a little more granular - and keep more records of my progress.

So, here are January resolutions:

• Follow the 4-hour body diet plan for the month.  This diet is in large part identical to the paleo diet that I followed from July through Thanksgiving.  I lost just shy of 40 pounds.  I want to lose another 20 pounds.  The main difference with the new plan is that it actually encourages cheating, one day a week.  I'll throw a post up later with some more information on the diet, and other stuff from the book.
• Post on Perfidy at least once a day.  And I don't mean average at least one post a day, I mean post at least once every day.  Hopefully more, and get this habit locked in.
• Start a new, time-consuming hobby.  I've always teased my wife that I need a hobby that sucks time as much as her band, just to even things out.  I've decided to start studying physics.  I was a physics major, once, and I'd like to sharpen my math and science skills.  The early part will be just catch up - elementary physics refresher courses from a variety of sources, and math as well.  There'll be a post forthcoming on this, too.
• Read one thinky book a week.  SF doesn't count.  For January, I will read the 10,000 Year Explosion, The Mystery of Capital, The Long Summer (How Climate Changed Civilization) by Brian Fagan, and Keegan's First World War.  (Having unpacked my books for the first time in four years, I've found lots of books that I want to read that I never got around to.)
• Read Volume I of the Harvard Great Books.  This one will be easy, I'm already half done.  There's fifty volumes, so that's over four years at that pace.  But, I hope to increase the pace.
• Catalog my books, and start getting digital copies of them.
• Get passports for the family.
• Get a budget in place, and automate as much as my bill paying and finances as I can manage, to reduce craziness.  The last few years have been difficult, what with layoffs, uncertainty, etc.  But now that I've relocated, cut my housing expenses in half, and have a small measure of job security, it's time to get off the paycheck to paycheck life I was kinda forced into by the necessity of juggling payments and such.
• Become a better person and take over the world.

And I think that's enough for one month.