perfidy

For those who thought there was no way that bagpipes could possibly be more irritating: you are wrong.  For those who think the opposite, you also are wrong:

Make sure you watch to the end for the big finish.

Here's some stuff I've managed to read whilst being distracted by, among other things, being swamped at work, dealing with multiple family medical crises, a new(-ish) baby, and ennui.

• Four Words That Make Me Suspicious of Myself When I Say Them I would add "Clearly" because that almost invariably indicates that I haven't really thought something through.  Clearly is academic code for "you're an idiot for thinking the opposite of what I'm about to say."
• "Amish" and "Contraband" aren't two words that normally go together.  But hey, why not.  When the Amish Mafia gets going, "Get Milk" will have an entirely new and sinister meaning.  I posted on the War on Milk™ previously, here.
• The Russian Fox and the Evolution of Intelligence - h/t to my pal Christian, who found this one.  The Russian domesticated foxes I first heard about when I watched a documentary on dogs - fascinating stuff, and Isegoria recently linked to another bit on the topic.
• Deflation or Hyperinflation? This piece goes into detail on an argument that's been bouncing around a lot on Zero Hedge, my new favorite source of economic news.  At this point, I don't think we can dodge econopocalypse.  The exact method of our demise is perhaps up in the air, but that seems to be about all that is in real doubt.
• Devin, Aretae, Foseti, and AnomalyUK have had some fascinating debates on matters Formalist.  I hope someday to have five minutes of uninterrupted time to string together a few thoughts on the matter.  Moldbug also posts on economics - something I've been surprised he hadn't hit sooner, given all the financial shenanigans that have been going on around here lately.
• Annoyed by partial RSS feeds?  I am, or rather, was.  This link provides several solutions.
• Ken, who was once the Oldsmoblogger, has a neato post centered on a quote from Wedgwood's The Thirty Years' War.  Another book I need to read.  And speaking of reading, reading is really hard.  It just isn't worth the effort to try and read anything more involved than a comic book when you can only devote five minutes at a time to reading it.

I took the psychopathy test that Vox linked to the other day, and this is the result:

True Psychopath

You scored 14 on Emotional Detachment and 11 on Chaotic Lifestyle! Congratulations, you are both emotionally detached, and you lead a chaotic lifestyle, which may indicate there's something seriously wrong with you. A combined score of 30 or more on this test supports a diagnosis of psychopathy. You are likely to commit, or already have committed, a crime. Stay away from knives, guns etc. although with your brilliant and versatile mind you will probably think of a dozen other ways of hurting whoever you feel like hurting. If your combined score is 5 or less, you are completely average compared to general population. If your combined score is 20 or more, you have a mind of a true criminal. If your combined score is 30 or more, you have a mind of a psycho.

Your Analysis (Vertical line = Average)

You scored 14% onDetachment, higher than 75% of your peers.

You scored 11% on Chaotism, higher than 53% of your peers.

As gratifying as those results are, I think the test might be a wee bit flawed.  Just a little.

I do have one more resolution, but it's really a part of the diet/health resolution.  At the end of the year, I let my membership at the gym at work lapse because, well, it was a shitty gym.  I am feeling the lack of exercise, and I don't like it.  I don't have any decent weights, gym equipment or even reasonable facsimiles at the homestead here, so I needed to either find a new gym or think of something else.

Seeing as part of the budget is to not spend money, I decided to think of something else.  Which meant google.  I found a book, You Are Your Own Gym, written by ex-SpecOps trainer Mark Lauren.  It's all about using your own body weight as resistance.  I've skimmed it, and it looks like a decent program - I just need to adapt his method to a more super-slow style, and I'll be set, I think.  I've been doing some pushups and sit-ups just to be doing something, so I think I'll be able to segue into this as soon as I have time to adapt his exercise schedules and play around with it a bit.

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

Rather literally:

[wik] another dead youtube link, alas.

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.

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.

What if the Singularity already happened?

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

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.

Just got one of these:

Color me jealous.

The Onion never fails me:

One scroll recounts the demise of Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), who died of exposure and malnutrition within sight of the shores of his beloved island home, while another tells tale of a giant ice floe that carried the entire House Ways and Means Committee into the Arctic night, never to be seen again.

Dangling desperately by a lashing line, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is said to have fallen into a churning maelstrom off the Horn of Africa while raging at the heavens and shouting, "Fools! Fools! There is no Sword! There is no Bipartisanship! It's all a lie, and we all bound for Death!"

"One of the messages, burnt on the edges and smelling of brimstone, tells how they stopped on a remote island for provisions and were imprisoned by a mighty one-eyed monster who bellowed, 'But there's no way to pay for all this!'" Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters from atop the Washington Monument, where she awaits the Congressmen's return, clad in widow's black burlap and gazing out to sea. "They seem to have defeated this Cyclops, but of the coveted saber, there is no word."

"And now I've received news that fishermen in Monterey Bay have found in their nets the bloated remains of Barney Frank," Pelosi added.

Tales sung by bards since time immemorial describe the Sword as a master blade forged at Lexington and Concord, broken during the Civil War, reforged by Abraham Lincoln, wielded by the imp Joe McCarthy until he was driven mad, used briefly at a Cleveland City Council meeting during a unanimous vote on a zoning variance, and then lost somewhere in the misty murk of Indochina.

In discussing the Fred Phelps menagerie of douche-canoes, my friend Uncle Jimbo has this to say about our beloved gubmint:

Government is a blunt and stupid tool run by blunt and stupid tools.

"Science and Mother Nature are in a marriage where Science is always surprised to come home and find Mother Nature blowing the neighbor."

From Shit my dad says

There is a time and place for everything, except possibly your impression of Christopher Reeve as a lifeguard.

From Capitalist Lion Tamer

XKCD

As I catch up from the recent chaos, and prepare for yet more chaos, here's some mildly interesting links I've collected over the last few days:

Cool Tools has compiled a list of the 100 greatest magazine articles.  With links!  You can apparently also suggest new ones and vote articles up or down.  The current top five are:

• David Foster Wallace, "Federer As Religious Experience." The New York Times, Play Magazine, August 20, 2006.
• David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster." Gourmet Magazine, Aug 2004.
• Neal Stephenson, "Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet." Wired, December 1996. On laying trans-oceanic fiber optic cable.
• Gay Talese, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Esquire, April 1966.
• Ron Rosenbaum, "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Esquire, October 1971. The first and best account of telephone hackers, more amazing than you might believe.
• Jon Krakauer, "Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds." Outside Magazine, January 1993. Article that became Into the Wild.

Apparently, they are very good at picking articles, but not so good at counting.  Several of these look to be well worth the effort of reading.  I think I'll check out First Wave at Omaha Beach, and a couple Hunter S. Thompson pieces.

This, I found interesting:

Providence is the idea that God has blessed this country.  That its wealth, power and position in the world was due to God.  Providence is not a reward, because it’s a gift, but it isn’t luck either, which is random (unless you believe in the Lady that should not be named and she is a lady and like many ladies she favors the ones that abuse her).

...If it is only luck, not only do you not appreciate what you have, but you feel guilt for having something you do not deserve.

This is exactly what the world and our leaders, and the people who envy Americans, meant for the people in this country to feel because it is easy to take everything from a person that feels guilty about all the things he has that he does not deserve.

A guilty person does not protest when the government taxes the life out of him, because he does not deserve better.  He does not fight back about injustice, because his life really is an injustice from his perspective.  It isn’t fair that he has more.

It is certain that the idea of providence, or Providence, has entirely dropped out of our common discourse.  Like many things that have disappeared, perhaps it shouldn't have.