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[wik] Yeah, it's petty. 

[alsø wik] And a little late to the party, but hey, perfidy didn't exist last fall.

I am sure that all perfidy readers are upstanding, law-abiding and courteous citizens of whatever community, state or nation in which they reside. Therefore, they would never feel the need to use BitTorrent technology to download movies, music or other information over the internet, and therefore would never have any desire to use the sort of anonymizing technologies and services that could protect them from the unwelcome attention of noble and selfless industry associations and their enforcement arms, the bandwidth throttling of internet providers, or indeed the various tentacles of federal, state and local governments.

I have a stupid reason for why I don't post more often. I hope you are now asking yourself, "How stupid?" and not muttering, "And this is surprising how?" And that reason is this: I do not have the luxury of pursuing lengthy trains of thought. While individually, my wife, son, three daughters, dog, cat, work, natural catastrophes, neighbor kids and Global Warming may only interrupt me only occasionally; collectively they are derailing my lengthy trains o' thought on average about every three milliseconds.

So the Grand Thoughts that I wish to think remain unthunk. Which pisses me off a little.

Because I feel that a lot of the stuff I think about is just this close to congealing into something more than a pile of unordered ramblings. I sense the outlines of order and coherence, but can't get it down on paper, or pixels.

So, I am making a conscious decision to: a) stop leaving things in my feed reader in the now obviously futile hope that I will get back to them and write something about them; b) prune the feed reader so that I have less to obsessively read; c) read more books; and finally, d) post smaller bits as they occur to me.

In aid of d), there's this: Aretae talks about immigration. Some of this has now been addressed in his comments, and he's updated his post a little from when I read it this morning.

To lay it out Aretae-style, my thoughts went roughly like this:

• Anti-Immigration summary: fair.  If something is hurting us, well, maybe stopping is a good idea.
• That's a good argument for letting that one Haitian dude in.  When you're confronted with one guy, you could even say, hey, I'll personally take a haircut of $2 a day (a substantive, if not crushing loss of almost $500 a year) to help Jean-Paul or whoever get a real life in the home of the free and the land of the brave.  That's charity.
• Wait a minute, where's Hati, where these Hatians are coming from?
• But, in the world of freely-entered contracts and libertarian (left- or otherwise-) why does Jean Paul get to come here and unilaterally cut my income and take $500 out of the mouths of my Children?  Do I get a say in this?
• Put another way, am I really morally obligated to give up my income and so reduce the prosperity of my family to help others?  More to the point, if I decide that I don't want to, is it right for others, like Jean-Paul, to force me to lose that income?
• Stalin said that quantity has a quality of its own, or something like that.  One Jean Paul - hard working, thrifty and pious - he's okay.  But what about five million of his less upright, smelly compatriots who have made a wonderland of their homeland in the 200 years of their independence?  Does their collective presence in this country make it less likely that immigrant n will get the same benefit from moving here?  Does it make it more likely that subsequent income loss to American workers will be more than $2/day?
• Aretae talks monkeybrains™ about everything except left-libertarian issues.  There is no tribe of all humanity.  As commenter Lurking Apple put it, "You seem to be assuming a spherical immigrant on a frictionless border..."  People are different.  Different tribes have different abilities, beliefs, and attitudes.  If we allow too many in, we cease to be what we were.  That may be good, but most mutations are not beneficial.  What we are - or at the very least, were - was very good at creating staggering amounts of prosperity from the nothing but hard work, ingenuity and the occasional tariff.  Add tens of millions of (to pick just two) notably prospering Mexicans, notably peaceful Muslims  - we might just end up with a shit sandwich on rye.
• It seems to me that while we should assiduously and strenuously hope that other places - backward, poor, disease infested, Global Warming-afflicted, trounced by Colonialism and the Man (you know where they are) - might adopt our miraculously effective package of property rights, innovation, and win! to rework their lives in a way that seems best to them, but in any event a richer version than what they have now.  We might even offer classes or something.  But it is probably not our job, as a nation or a people, to provide that life for them there, and it certainly isn't our job to provide that life for them here.

Anywho, that's my small thought for today.

[wik] And here is this amusing, if harsh, take on Libertarianism.

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.

The color-coded terror alert level system has gone away. For years, perfidy proudly placed the current terror alert level prominently on the front page as a public service. Then we realized that it was all a crock of shit and canned it.

One last time, though, for old time's sake:

Every week, I wait and wait and wait, pining for the next installment of Badass of the Week.  It's sad, perhaps.  But nothing gets me going like tales of ball-destroying, face-ripping bloody carnage.  Every one hopes in their heart of hearts to be a badass.  And the Badass of the Week is quite the archive of inspirational badassitude.  But how, we ask, do we become badasses our own selves?

We now have the answer:

[wik] I think we here at perfidy should get some credit just for having a category entitled "Lead Pipe Cruelty."

Admittedly, not a scientific study.

Well, not really a study at all.

More of an exposition.

One can imagine many threats that might require the use of armed force to contain.  A crazed gunman.  Terrorist plotters with bombs.  Criminals about their evil business.  What you normally wouldn't include on that list is hippy organic dairy farmers catering to those with a hankering for raw milk.

But you wouldn't be the federal government, would you?

With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.

Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

"I still can't believe they took our yogurt," said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. "There's a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they're raiding us because we're selling raw dairy products?"

The government, of course, insists that it is acting to protect consumers and ensure a level playing field.

"This is not about restricting the public's rights," said Nicole Neeser, program manager for dairy, meat and poultry inspection at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. "This is about making sure people are safe."

If it's not about restricting people's rights, then why are people's rights being, ah, restricted?  The raw food movement has been growing, but apparently only one particular type of raw food is being singled out for armed raids.  Can we guess the reason?

But raw milk in particular has drawn a lot of regulatory scrutiny, largely because the politically powerful dairy industry has pressed the government to act.

That's all from this LA Times article.  This article offers more details.

When the 20 agents arrived bearing a search warrant at her Ventura County farmhouse door at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday a couple weeks back, Sharon Palmer didn't know what to say. This was the third time she was being raided in 18 months, and she had thought she was on her way to resolving the problem over labeling of her goat cheese that prompted the other two raids. (In addition to producing goat's milk, she raises cattle, pigs, and chickens, and makes the meat available via a CSA.)

But her 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine, wasn't the least bit tongue-tied. "She started back-talking to them," recalls Palmer. "She said, 'If you take my computer again, I can't do my homework.' This would be the third computer we will have lost. I still haven't gotten the computers back that they took in the previous two raids."

The tactics of the war on drugs meets rent seeking industry lobbyists.  Radley Balko has documented ad nauseum (often literally) the abuses that local and federal law enforcement inflict on us daily.  150 Swat raids every 24 hours, on average.  The average joe thinks, well, they're all drug dealers and criminals.  Except when highly trained expert law enforcement personnel get the wrong address, or guy, and while they're there, they shoot the dog.  Using these tactics to enforce a milk cartel that already makes us all pay more for milk seems yet wronger.

If any sufficiently connected lobby or influence group can get the right laws passed, they have highly aggressive and none-to-smart police to enforce them, and who don't seem particularly concerned about their fellow-citizen's rights.  Frankly, it's a miracle that the dozens of raids these articles have talked about haven't resulted in injuries or puppycide.

Sounds like a great album title.  What it is, is the conclusions of a study on the recent accusations of sudden acceleration syndrome against Toyota.

The findings are consistent with a 1989 government-sponsored study that blamed similar driver mistakes for a rash of sudden-acceleration reports involving Audi 5000 sedans.

You think?  I'm surprised anyone took this seriously at all.

The hundred greatest movie insults of all time.

I've mentioned a couple times that I think modern cosmology is a little addlepated.  Here is a classic example of why I think this:

IT'S the ultimate sleeper agent. An energy field lurking inactive since the big bang might now be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

In the late 1990s, observations of supernovae revealed that the universe has started expanding faster and faster over the past few billion years. Einstein's equations of general relativity provide a mechanism for this phenomenon, in the form of the cosmological constant, also known as the inherent "dark energy" of space-time. If this constant has a small positive value, then it causes space-time to expand at an ever-increasing rate. However, theoretical calculations of the constant and the observed value are out of whack by about 120 orders of magnitude.

To overcome this daunting discrepancy, physicists have resorted to other explanations for the recent cosmic acceleration. One explanation is the idea that space-time is suffused with a field called quintessence. This field is scalar, meaning that at any given point in space-time it has a value, but no direction. Einstein's equations show that in the presence of a scalar field that changes very slowly, space-time will expand at an ever-increasing rate.

120 orders of magnitude is indeed a daunting discrepancy.  Like how they almost slipped that by you?  Now, if your predicted and observed values are in the ballpark - say, within a standard deviation - you might think you've got it nailed.  If your predictions are on the close order of your observed results, well, you might be on to something, but the theory might need some work.

If you're off by a factor of 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.  There's another word for the relation between your predictions and the real world.  Nonewhatsofuckingever.  You're wrong, start over.  Don't try and wedgie your theory to overcome that sort of gap.  If you were aiming at a man-sized target at a range of fifty yards with that sort of accuracy you'd hit the fucking Andromeda galaxy, and I think I'm underestimating the effect of that many zeroes.

Seriously.

[wik] I hope that the journo who wrote that got the number wrong, or was picking his nose when all this was explained to him.  'Cause 120 orders of magnitude is huge.  Huge.

By way of Boing Boing, we find this absolutely delightful post: Couch Cushion Architecture; A Critical Analysis.

This example, from the middle of the second page, most closely resembles the typical couch cushion fort assembled in Festung Buckethead on a weekly basis:

Drawing from the saw-tooth roof structures of industrial Europe, the orthogonal volume cleverly employs a swing hinge access door, popularized by the mid-century modern masters. Grade: B+

Given the materials at hand, that's usually the best that gets built. Not that the boy (now 7) doesn't occasionally get more ambitious. However, hubris has the same tragic end in our house as it did in ancient Greece - the boy's younger sisters are every ready to follow the the poet:

Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius

By subtly undermining his efforts, first through work slow-downs and general intransigence, later through competing projects requiring the same materials he needs for his fort (and requiring parental adjudication of resource allocation) the boy becomes increasingly frustrated.  Still, he perseveres.  Over time, and by overcoming great obstacles, the fort is completed.  He has attained to a fragile, precarious sort of satisfaction.

And that's when his sisters really go after him hammer and tongs.  They demand equal use of the fort.  Once in the fort, they refuse him entry.  If he makes a secondary entrance, they'll destroy the first.  Fixing that, he'll start to notice problems with the roof.  Lifting up a roof cushion to readjust its fit and finish, the girls will kick out the support.  They'll steal the blanket that acts as  a sort of glue to keep the cushions in place.  They fill the interior with stuffed animals.  And then, they've dashed it all to pieces.

He comes to me, and presents his litany of fully justified complaints.

And then I tell the boy to stop whining.  Because whining is for pussies.

h/t Aretae

Actually, it's a pretty old story, but just hit my inbox today, for reasons unknown.

I used to fashion myself as some form of entrepreneur, but clearly, I need to rethink that.

Screenshots from google, offered with next to no comment:

This is what people want to know:

Mild enough, but getting worse:

Let's run with this:

Interesting. What about...

Hmmnm.  Let's go further afield:

And...

By the loss of not one, but two beautiful white female celebrities today.

Technical recruiters who cannot speakie de English are annoying. They are also tragically ubiquitous. But that can be dealt with. Speak slowly and clearly, and pray for a good connection so you can hope to puzzle out what they are saying.

But a large subset of the non-English speaking technical recruiter community has absofuckinglutely no social savvy whatsoever, when they're not flat out rude. This drives me bugfuck.

"Hi, Samir, I was calling to follow up on the position we discussed last week..."

"Yes."

"So could you tell me what sort of timeframe we're looking at?"

"I have not received any feedback from the hiring manager."

"Do you have any idea when that might be?"

"Next Monday."

"Thank you."

It's like pulling teeth, and that's a mild example, with all the mispronounced words edited out.

Talking with someone who has no concept of how to use the phone as a communicatio device makes my hair hurt. What little I have left, anyway. This behavior seems confined to a certain ethnic group that I will not mention (Indian) and I am begining to dislike them as much as I hate bicyclists on the GW Parkway, or the damn herring eating Norwegians.

I would think that a company wanting to attract quality personnel would put socially adept employees who speak the language in these positions. But then, I thought that McDonald's would at least put English speakers on the drive through, and look how wrong I was about that.

Heh.

Too, too funny. This election, I'm feeling like the GM.

I meant to share this one earlier. Yes, I'm pimping my strip here but this one is pretty perfidious in its nature.

Read the entire strip from infancy to present day right here. The Adventures of the S-Team...bringing teh funnay every weekday for like two and a half years 'nshit!