perfidy

Yesterday, Mrs. Buckethead and I went into town to register to vote.  And, as is the case whenever we both leave the house, our passel of youngins came with us.  My oldest, Sir John-my-cup-runneth-over-with-questions, wanted to know what was up.

John: What are we doing?

Me: Registering to vote.

John: Why are registering to vote? 

Me: So we can vote.

John: Can I vote?

Me: No.

John: Why can't I vote.

Me: Because I said so.

[wife hits me in arm]

Me: And because you're not old enough.

John: So you and mommie will vote?

Me: Yes.

John: What is voting?

Me: A magical process whereby criminals become annointed by God.

[wife gives me evil eye.]

John: Dad, are you joking me?

Me: Strangely enough, no.

Happily, we got to the voter registration office before that conversation deteriorated any further.  My response was off the cuff cynicism, which should surprise no one who knows me.  But pondering it further as we drove to the courthouse (John: why are we going to the courthouse? Me: To pay mommie's ticket.  John: what's a ticket? Me: A means by which the government extorts money from the innocent.  John: So the government is going to pay us money?  Me: Not in this lifetime.) it occurred to me that my earlier comment was exactly true, if in a larger sense uninformative.

Why do we feel that divine and inestimable principle, DEMOCRACY, is of such great value?  If 50% + 1 of the population of eligible voters who have bothered to register to vote and make the additional effort to actually, you know, vote, agree on anything, then that thing is not merely agreed to.  It gets more than that.  That thing is divinely sanctioned, and it becomes heresy to argue the result.  Even if it results in something like Hezbollah getting control of the Palestinian government.  Or only slightly less bad, some egregious asshat like, say, any president over the last century or their opponents getting to be leader of the free world.

It has been said, most famously by Winston Churchill, that democracy is the worst system of government devised by man, except for all the others.  We're measuring our system of government on the bad scale, which can't be a good thing.  "Jesus this sucks, but at least we don't live in a Islamic theocracy." 

"Jesus!" we might also say, "this generic spam from the black striped can tastes like ass, but at least we're not eating dog food."

Shouldn't we be thinking about inventing some fine French cuisine, or at least McDonalds?

I think that there is a fundamental disconnect between our notion of freedom and liberty, and the notion of democracy.  Or more to the point, I don't think we mean what we think we mean when we say these words.  We conflate the idea of living in a democracy with living free, with liberty.  The one must naturally lead to the other.  But does being able to select, with a few of your buddies, the town second assistant dogcatcher make you free?  Or the president?

I've commented on this blog, long ago, that I think one of the true wonders of life in America is that so few things are really political, and almost none that matter.  We have removed so many things from the political sphere, and this is good.  Where you live, whether you live; where you work or whether you work are not questions of politics.  Did I support the right candidate?  Oh, shit, the Democrats took power and now I won't be able to get work cause the registered Democratic plumbers will get all the jobs.  Oh, the humanity!

Or, oh shit, the Republicans are in charge, and it's the reeducation camps for all the performance artists, gender studies professors and community organizers. 

Hey, not a bad idea...

Anyway, that's not how it works here, thank god.  Nor does it work that way for most anything.  Politics does not effect most of what we do, except at the edges.  Which is not to say that the government doesn't have a huge effect on our daily lives - but politics, partisanship, that polite and largely gunless civil war, does not.  We should cherish this.  And to extent we do, every time we decry "partisanship" and "the politics of personal destruction" and the like.  We have a sense that that sort of thing is squalid, furtive, and somehow... dirty.  And we feel that way for the very simple reason that it is.  Politics is a zero sum game, and for you to win, I must lose.

So why do we feel that our quadrennial reality show makes us free?  The federal and state bureaucracies are not accountable to our elected officials, let alone ourselves.  Hell, governors and presidents can't even fire people, the way any CEO can.  The civil service is responsible for writing the tens of thousands of pages long federal register, that has only a passing resemblance to the laws passed by Congress, and is itself responsible for enforcing them, and can be fully as selective as it likes.  Just ask Martha Stewart. If we stopped choosing, how would our lives change?

In this country, I can live where I want, work where I want, talk to whomever I choose, write what I want, marry any woman who will put up with my shit, with a level of freedom that compares favorably with the Soviet Union if not the America of a hundred years ago.  I can be somebody!  I can do what I want, so long as I don't run afoul of any line from the five hundred pound federal register, in which case I have paramilitary law enforcement officers doing a no-knock entry on my house and shooting my dog.

They always shoot the dog.

If I build a treehouse and fail to file a environmental impact statement, or pay $500 for a building permit, or or hire a union electrician, or ...

And god forbid that I smuggle nail clippers onto a plane, or joke about bombs in front of a TSA agent.

Voting for Obama or McCain will not improve my life.  The only question is whether one of them might be able to make it worse, which is the only significant power remaining to the Presidency in the 21st Century.

Why do we think that voting makes us free?

I was listening to that new song that all the kids like, "Handlebars." And I dig it. It's groovy. Swell, even. But it also occurred to me that the one line,

I can split the atom of a molecule/of a molecule

That just doesn't play for me. I could go into the chemistry and physics of it all, but that would be pedantic and rude.

So, how about we just fix it, mkay?

I can split an atom of uranium/of uranium

Or, my favorite,

I can fuse atoms at room temperature/at room temperature

That's better, isn't it?

[wik] Another thing, when I first heard that song on the radio in the car I thought it was a parody. Mocking megalomania and whatnot. Saw the video later and was stunned by the disconnect between my perception of the tone of the song and the apparent intent of the artist.

Today is the centenary of the Tunguska event, when something mysterious happened in remotest Siberia, leveling trees over hundreds of square miles, and leaving assorted caribou and bears and such dazed and befuddled.  People were slow to pay attention to this marvelous occurrence.  Perhaps we can forgive them, seeing as it happened so very far from fashionable and comfortable places, and anyway, just as we were getting ready to go, the whole damn World War thing started.  And after that was over, half the world turned commie, and screw that for breakfast, anyway.

So, the Tunguska event.  Something had a hate on for trees.  Comet, asteroid, methane gas, UFOs, or the mother of all lightning strikes.  (See some explanations here, at the fantastically thorough and accurate, all-encompassing and never to be sufficiently praised wikipedia.)

The impact (if it was indeed an impact) was on essentially the same latitude as St. Petersburg.  And several articles have pointed out that back in the sixties, the crack young staff of the Guiness World Records figured out that if the space thingy had been stick in traffic for four hours and forty seven minutes, then it would have been the capital of Imperial Russia and seat of the Tsars that would have been tatered, rather than some bog-soaked, mosquito infested corner of Siberian hell.

Think of the implications of that one.

Three years after the Russo-Japanese War, and the abortive 1905 uprisings.  But, before the rise of the Bolsheviks.  Losing St. Petersburg would have really gutted the centralized Russian Empire.  What effect would that have had on a) WWI, b) world Communism and c) the Moon Race?

Discuss.

George Carlin, dead at 71.  I never looked at my possessions the same way after hearing his bit on "stuff."  Carlin made high-quality, well-appointed and sturdy mental furniture, and never failed being fucking hilarious.

[wik] And here is a quote from Carlin that is, sadly, apropos.

Bumwines, for your drinking pleasure

The Maximum Leader the other day had a post about a proposed royal taxonomy of booze.  He proposed that Scotch is the king of booze, and... well, just go read it.  In reading it, I thought that it was a good idea, but the dear leader was channeling the French and it was poorly implemented.

I believe that there are in fact three warring states of booze.  The three kinds of booze do not generally get along.  Here's how I'd break it out:

The High Test Kingdom of Liquor, The Principate of Wine, and the Republic of Beer.

The High King of Liquor is certainly Scotch.  And many of the roles the Maximum Leader suggests for other distilled spirits are appropriate.  But really, the wines would never submit to the rule of another alcohol.  The Prince of the Wines (after a recent civil war) is the House of Cabernet from California.  They displaced the French Cabernets, who are now plotting in return.  The nobility of the Principate is largely the red wines.  The awkward bourgeoisie - putting on airs, but still with red clay on their feet, is the blush and zinfandels.  The yeomanry is the white wines, though some white wines still cling to noble titles like saxons in Plantagenet England.  The serfs are the box wines. 

The republic of beer is a low place.  The vast majority of the population is low income industrial workers, the proletariat of thin American style lagers.  There is a vibrant entrepreneurial class, though, of independent craft brewers.  Some of these have become successful, and have started aping the manners of the nobility of the Liquors and Wines.  There is also a large corporate managerial class, wholly owned by the large lager magnates, but who aspire to higher quality than they actually possess.  In a curious inversion of life in America, the darker beers are the more respected and wealthy.

In the mountains between Wine and Liquor, there is a barbarous, semi-independent state inhabited by piratical and impoverished fortified wines.  The high sulfate content of the soils there leaves life very hard indeed.

The Vatican has announced that belief in extraterrestrials - even the smart, ravenous and highly lethal kind - does not contradict faith in God.  While I could make any number of snarky remarks about the relative uptodateness of Catholic thought, Galileo, Bruno, the Inquisition, etc., I will simply content myself with noting that Monty Python knew this was going to happen a quarter century ago, and depicted alens coexisting with messiahs in Life of Brian.

The Vatican astronomer noted that denying that there is no life anywhere else in the universe is putting limits on the (presumably unlimited) creativity of God.  Sadly, the article does not go into more interesting territory - I'd like to see what Vatican policy is regarding missionary efforts to aliens, and whether the holy mother Church feels that the anal probing greys have souls.  Cause, if they abduct me, I'm killing them sumsabitches.  But I don't want to commit a sin.

And you euro-weenies better pray we don't have to do it again.  Because, you know, we might not want to.  We're tired, and we'd miss The Soup on E!. 

I never liked the comic strip Garfield. It was smarmy, irritating, and about cats. But I never in a million years would have realized on my own that, hidden behind Garfield's prancing, self involved corpulence, a brilliant comic strip was desperately trying to be heard.

This guy did.

Best headline I've seen in a long time. My personal favorite still remains, though, the Onion's' "Holy Shit! Man Walks on Fucking Moon!" For which there is now a video.

Now, I am hardly hintermost in claiming that Al-Qaida and its affiliates, franchisees and fellow travelers are a pretty sick bunch. Beheadings, anti-semitism, autocombustion, and random terror are just your average islamofascist's way of saying, "Cheerio, old chap!" But this latest development in the praxis of suicide bombing gives new, and really sick meaning to the phrase, "splodeydope."

It seems that Al Qaida has resorted to using mentally retarded women as a crude sort of guided weapons platform. Once the victim gets close to a sufficiently large number of other victims, the Islamic heroes press the button and the poor woman explodes, along with - in two cases in Baghdad - in excess of seventy more innocents.

Depraved. And hopefully, evidence that Al Qaida Iraq is now as close to the end of its logistical and personnel ropes as it has always been to the end of its moral rope.

Yet, and I shudder to think at what this says about me, the very first thing that popped into my head when my mom read me the headline was this.

Alrighty then. Go read this, and then - only then - click the more perfidy button to see the image. And then only if you want to. It's warped, sick, and wrong. I warned you. I also found it highly amusing, but then, I am sick, wrong and warped. If you don't look at the picture, I estimate that you will get at least 85% of the total humor. Your choice.

Thanks to Fist of Blog.

[wik] So 18 years later, I looked for this picture again and couldn't find it. Here's a link to the forum screenshots that are the original bit. I believe based purely on vague memories that there is another sequence of forum posts that have different images, including the one above in my original post. But no idea where those might have gone. In case of even more future bit rot, here's the screenshots I could find:

I discovered this handy webthingy at Daring Fireballs. It's called the Instapaper. Sign up, and put the bookmarklet in your toolbar. Surf the web. If you find something you want to read, but don't have time for, clicky on the bookmarklet, and it saves it for you. Especially useful if, like me, you are hitting the internets from multiple computers. Now, you won't have problems locating that link for an article that you started reading on the other 'puter.

Nifty, clean and simple.

our ethical robot overlords

At worst, “global guerrillas” are like an especially vicious twist on Clevon Little’s Sheriff Bart early in Blazing Saddles, pointing the pistol at his own head and warning his assailants to “Stop! Or the n*gg*r gets it!” except the global guerrillas actually pull the trigger.

For a little bit of context, go here. Link from Megan McArdle, which I ran across while reading this article on the Atlantic, to which I was led by a link at Daring Fireballs. I loves me the internets.

It occurs to me, after reading the articles about the money mules, that you could:

1. Set up a fake paypal account, tied to one of those super-market pay-as-you-go credit cards.
2. Set up a fake email address, and sign up on Monster.com with a fake resume, etc.
3. Sign up for money mule scheme.
4. Wait for them to deposit money in the paypal account.
5. Keep the money.

Seems like it would work better than the average

1. Collect underpants
2. ???
3. Profit!

schemes.

I avoided an email scam! Aren't I clever? Interestingly, though, a day after posting about one, I find several in-depth bits on how the money mule scams actually work. The Washington Post has an article and backgrounder, and here's a website devoted to fighting the scammers. Find out how not to be a chump for organized crime.

And as an added bonus, more info on phishing. Which, curiously, does not involve metal hooks and hippy jam bands.

You would think that, being unemployed, I would have lots of time to devote to blogging. Clearly, you are wrong. Why, you may ask, if I'm not working and not posting, what the Sam Hell am I doing?

Well, scouring the internets for job leads is surprisingly time consuming. So, also, is leaving voicemails for stealth recruiters. And you can spend simply hours and hours trying to find out who the hiring managers are at a large corportation.

And of course, the little Bucketheads demand attention. And need it from me since Mrs. Buckethead is trying to take up the slack, work-wise. And then there's the occasional freelance gig. Throw some seasonal affective disorder into the mix. And best of all, five repeat performances of the most annoying cold I have ever known.

What I'd like to share with you, though, is one of the amusing modern side-effects of conducting a job search. Hidden amidst the emails from Indian recruiters, there was this. Check out the prose stylings:

Dear Buckethead,

You have now received this letter because of the fact that your career profile and personal job-searching information on the recruiting resouces are suitable for our enterprise. Progressive-Escrow Incorporated is looking forward to start the mutually profitable co-operation with an efficient, diligent and reliable figure.

That is why, we would wish to see you a member of our labour collective.

Let us give you some details about PE Inc. Our company is specializing in worldwide escrow performing services. We have been conducting this business for 3 years already, and have achieved great prosperity. Since our activities are international, the clients, we are co-operating with, live in more than 20 countries all over the world (the USA, Canada, Western and Eastern Europe). Progressive-Escrow Incorporated is headquartered in Warsau, but on the US territory, there are a number of subdivisions. As the number of our customers is increasing actively, more prosperous personnel must be hired. If you are interested in apply for a well-paid, secured and fascinating job with the long-term career prospects, flexible schedule and a variety of perks and bonuses, PE Inc. would like you to join the team.

You can find more detailed information about the positions available and read through the company's bio at your earliest convenience. Our support team is ready you to provide you all the nessesary instructions and assistance.

If you want to intiate our business relations immediately or apply for help, please, put in the application mail to us.

The followings are the thorough information to get in contact with us:

- telephone: +1 (845) 704-7542
- fax: +1 (845) 519-1486
- e-mail: douglas.peinc@gmail.com

Our vacant positions are ready to be taken by any resourceful and ambitious person like you.

Best Regards,
PE Inc.

I think I'd feel more comfortable if I knew that aliens wrote that message. Anal probing might be more congenial than being assimilated into the PE Inc labor collective. The gmail account is a sure sign of a prosperous company that I would just die to work for. But, on the plus side, I just resource and ambitious people like me purely love to take vacant positions.

This email hovers right on the edge of self-mockery. It is awkward, but yet comprehensible still. A few changes, and it would be as good as some of the best Nigerian scams. Like perhaps:

Progressive-Escrow Incorporated is being headquartered in Warsau, but on the US territory. There is a great number of subdivisions. As the number of our customers does increasing vigorously, more numinous personnel must in fact hire. If you are interested in apply for a large-paid, secured and fascinating title with the long-term career prospecting, flexible schedule, a variety of perks and bonuses, PE Inc. would like you to join with you.

I think I'll tell them to give me $50 bucks for a complete rewrite.

Good nutrition is just as important for the unliving as the living.