perfidy

Patton has accused me of being overly concerned about wasting a scarce natural resource. The category tag. In this, of course, he is completely wrong. Naturally, I could have argued that over-categorizing a post dilutes the utility of tags. And I would have been right. But that wasn't the point. I was attacking him on aesthetic grounds, and just to stick a stick in his eye.

Just to prove that I am not some sort of homo-tree-hugging-enviro-commie, this post, which really is about everything, is tagged with every category we have. And, when I have a free moment, I'll add some new categories, and add them to this post.

So there.

This advice comes too late for me, but maybe some pour soul can be saved from the fires of perdition.

When, in the course of human events, a blogger becomes so sclerotically enclotted with oversized ideas, high dudgeon, and essays that have metastisized beyond reason or control that he cannot face the prospect of one more minute of research nor one more hour teasing nuance from a dependent clause of a dependent clause, there is only one thing to do:

Linkfest!!!!

-- From Slate: "In just two short years, [The Department of Homeland Security] has clearly found its core mission – reorganization."

-- From Winds of Change's Armed Liberal: A contrarian look at what drives terrorism, from University of Chicago's Robert Pape

[Robert Pape:]The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

TAC: That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush’s policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don't have to fight them here.

RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.

-- From James Taranto: a piece from OpinionJournal's Best of the Web that contrasts nicely with the foregoing:

Why Do They Hate Us?
That's the question we've all grown sick and tired of hearing since Sept. 11, 2001. It's not that the query is inherently objectionable; understanding what motivates the enemy is obviously helpful in wartime. But the people who ask this question almost never genuinely seek to understand; rather, they have their own axes to grind against the U.S. or the West, and seek to use the prospect of terror attacks to scare the rest of us into supporting their views. This we have dubbed vicarious terrorism.

Now and then a terrorist actually takes the trouble to explain his motives. London's Daily Telegraph reports on the trial of the man who allegedly (and now confessedly) murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh:

Mohammed Bouyeri, a baby-faced 27-year-old with dual Dutch-Moroccan nationality, broke his vow not to co-operate with the Amsterdam court by admitting shooting and stabbing his victim last November.

"I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion," he told its three-strong panel of judges.

"I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do the same, exactly the same." . . .

Bouyeri then turned to the victim's mother, Anneke, in the public gallery, and told her he felt nothing for her. Mrs van Gogh watched as he read out from what appeared to be a statement: "I don't feel your pain. I have to admit that I don't have any sympathy for you. I can't feel for you because you're a non-believer."

This had nothing to do with Israeli "occupation" of "Palestinian lands," America's "unilateral invasion" of Iraq, "torture" of prisoners at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, the widening "income gap," or any of the other litany of complaints that the terror apologists trot out. Islamist terrorism arises from religious fanaticism and hatred, plain and simple.

-- From Balloon Juice: John Cole is doing yeoman's work on the Plame affair, starting with the premise,

" Valerie Plame worked for the CIA, was stationed in Washington at the time of her outing, and previously had been a covert agent.' If you agree with that statement, say "Yes" and nothing more. If you disagree, state "No" and why you disagree (with reputable links to back it up)."

He moves forward from there. We are currently debating whether step 7 can be generally accepted as fact:

7.) Shortly after the State of the Union Address, Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, addressed the UN Security Council, presenting the administration's case regarding Saddam Hussein.

The Security Council did not provide the authorization the United States had sought, yet Coalition forces proceeded to initiate Operation Iraqi Freedom on 20 March 2003. In the aftermath of the invasion, no WMD stockpiles were found.

This, and other developments we will discuss in other points, led to renewed focus on the intelligence used to advocate for the invasion.

[Yes, or no?]

-- From Boing Boing: The story of pyrotechnics experts who get together every year to have a - no kidding - fireworks war. And not in the sky, either. [wik]: Link fixed!!

-- From EDog's Everything Page: Loyal Reader #0017(EDog) handicaps our chances in our current war based on past performance. Although any prospectus will tell you that past returns are no guarantee of future performance, I still think our chances are pretty darn good. No permalinks; scroll down to July 7.

-- From Yahoo! News via Loyal Reader #0017(EDog): A chilling story of rampant falsified research among our medical research community, including several instances of falsified data and entirely fabricated studies making their way into peer-reviewed journals. Yeeesh. Make sure to have a private dick check out your PCP before your next checkup!

-- From Obsidian Wings: A treatise on the incredible silliness of Fox News' favorite new term, "homicide bomber" and its various extractions, including the gobsmackingly tacky phrase, "...the first homicide attacks in Western Europe."

-- ... and finally, from Slate once again: A defense of the smoking hot but irritatingly perky (tweeked? caffeinated?) Food Network host Rachel Ray. There's nothing wrong with cooking with what you can find at the local Stop 'n' Shop (Safeway, Ralph's, Giant Eagle, what-have-you).

And a big round of applause for David, my sister's first kid, who joined us just after midnight, July 13 2005. Three weeks late, and if he's anything like his mother I'm sure it was out of sheer bullheadedness... "the hell I'm getting out of here!"

[wik] For a moment I pondered being the jerkwad dinglebrat I am and posting this under the category "Darwin Award Contender," but then I thought to myself, "why not give the kid a fighting chance?"

The Venerable Bede: FUCK YEAH!

Yesterday I left work early so the grunting men could move my office, came home, and got savagely depressed on half a glass of cheap wine and a private screening of The Big Lebowski.

A man's home is his castle, and yesterday the Supreme Court named them all Ruby Ridge. The Truth Laid Bear (linked) has aggregated a number of reactions to the Kelo case. Here's mine: The very notion that anyone's home - anyone's - is now up for grabs as long as a state or muncipal government thinks there might possibly be some potential gain in tax earnings to be had by tearing that home down, makes me want to puke. This session of the Supreme Court has really beefed a couple in a row here; between Raich and Kelo, I figure my best bet is to buy my own island and build a house there. That, or come up with a few billion dollars and move to a kleptocracy.

Eugene Volokh has argued (presumably rightly, he's a smart dude) that Kelo merely articulates or sums up recent trends in property law and therefore isn't anything new. True. But as Glenn Reynolds has observed, sometimes it takes an incident like this to open people's eyes to how deranged a situation has become. Take the aforementioned Ruby Ridge - before that awful standoff and Waco not long after, Americans who weren't already survivalist types had no idea that the US government could operate that way. Now every American above a certain age remembers what happened and knows somewhere deep inside in that place where you get nervous at traffic stops not to trust the guys in bad suits and aviator shades.

How can Kelo end well for anyone? The Republicans need to work pretty hard to distance themselves from this opinEyion, in which three out of five Justices in the majority were appointed by Republican presidents. Anyone that Bush nominates for the Court will (hopefully) have to distance themselves from the body's recent statist excesses. In the short term, it's possible that the housing market might come in for a shock as people realize that the deed to their house no longer counts for much. In the long term, I think we will probably see a few emboldened and outraged neighborhoods in standoffs with authorities. Either way, not good to say the least. Our liberty is a shockingly fragile thing when you stop to think about it, and days like yesterday make it seem like we're close to the edge.

Come for my house, and they'll have to call the 5 o'clock news and the National Guard. That's a g-d d-mn promise. All the dude ever wanted was his rug back, and all most people ever want is to be left the hell alone. In their house.

Murdoc tagged me with this meme over the weekend. Why the hell not?

1. Total Number of Books I Own: Somewhere north of 2500. In my life, I have probably owned another 1000 or more books that I either lost, sold, or gave away. I imagine I have read all but a few of those books.

2. The Last Book I Bought: I bought David Reynold’s new biography of John Brown (he of “nits make lice” fame) because neither Borders nor Barnes and Noble had Bennett’s Anglosphere Challenge. Haven’t started it yet, because I’m reading a free online book.

3. The Last Book I Read: Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban. I’m rereading the series, backwards, in preparation for the release of book six sometime next month. I liked it better than the first time. (I liked book five a lot better the second time. First time I read it, I was rather disappointed.)

4. Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me: These aren’t in any particular order. While any number of non-fiction books have greatly increased my knowledge, or even changed my opinions dramatically; none have had the effect that fiction has had. Fiction, at its best, really gets me where I live.

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. I read this when I was young, maybe eleven years old. Tolkien created such an extraordinarily dense mythology, it was easy to get lost (in a good way) in the story. Heroism, good v. evil, magical landscapes and creatures, and the feel of ancient wonder. The books felt old in a way that no other thing I have read ever have, even stories written hundreds of years earlier.
2. The Illuminatus Trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson. This book meant a quite a lot to me fifteen years ago. Blew my mind when I read it. I tried to reread it a few months ago and couldn’t get more than thirty pages in. This book, and the Shroedinger’s Cat trilogy, made a huge impact on my habits of thinking. Wilson would no doubt be disappointed that his books did not arrest my slide into conservatism, but they certainly affected the kind of conservative I became. The thing that stuck with me most from this book was not that reality is relative, but that everyone does have their own perception of it. And everyone is the hero in their own personal narrative.
3. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein. I think this is Heinlein’s greatest novel. Where the politics of Illuminatus didn’t quite take hold, it was probably because this book had already made firm claim to essential mindshare. (And to a lesser extent, Starship Troopers and most of the juveniles.) Rationalism, liberty, guns. It’s all there, plus a computer throwing rocks.
4. Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner. The first book I ever read that made future shock real, and then went on to show how it could be a good thing. Science fiction is in large an antidote to future shock – my typical response to innovation is, “About frickin’ time!” The horizon for “worrying” technological development is, for me, very far in the future.
5. The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester; and The Dosadi Experiment, by Frank Herbert. Okay, so I’m cheating a little. These two books, read just after I gradumatated from high school, reaffirmed my sense of wonder. In completely different ways, they had a similar effect on my consciousness. The idea that you can improve your consciousness, your self in ways vastly different and better than the pabulum offered by mindless self-help books lingered a long time… Science fiction here less concerened with spaceships and rayguns, but with the mind.

Maybe it’s the way my mind is wired, but non-sf fiction doesn’t grab me the way sf does. It doesn’t effect me in any deep sense. I have read a fair amount of the canonical literature, and enjoyed it. Been amazed, in fact, at its quality, its insight into the human condition. None of it hit me like these books, though. Maybe if the list was ten or fifteen, we’d start seeing Shakespeare and other writers that a literature professor would recognize. In a world so profoundly altered by technology, a literature that explores more than mere alienation is the only thing that can explain our world to ourselves.

At this point, I’m supposed to invite others to join in the madness. In the interest of being incestuous, I tag all my cobloggers. But in keeping with the precedents set before me, I nominate: The Maximum Leader, if he reads; Ken The Oldsmoblogger, ‘cause he’s from Cleveland; Phil Dennison, ‘cause he’s from Cleveland; John Hudock of Commonsense and Wonder ‘cause he should be from Cleveland and I feel real bad about not linking him in ages; and finally Dave at Garfield Ridge, ‘cause he’s new to the blogroll. Like Murdoc said, “If you don't want to, let me know so that I can badger you about it. If you've already played this game, let me know so I can badger someone else.”

I was shopping for ideas for a 4th anniversary present and came across this entirely unhelpful one.

If you want to avoid the hassle of shopping for a 5th anniversary present, consider $60 worth of pears for your 4th. Not only is it a stupid gift, it's a cheap one too; I don't know which tack would embarrass me more.

Nothing says, "I Love You" better than a hamper full of pears and cheese. Except, maybe, every other thing you could think of.

In a Monday morning Telegraph opinion piece, Dr. Bjørn Lomborg opines that environmental scientists might be going 'round the bend:

Last Tuesday, 11 of the world's leading academies of science, including the Royal Society, told us that we must take global warming seriously.

Their argument is that global warming is due to mankind's use of fossil fuels, that the consequences 100 years from now will be serious, and that we therefore should do something dramatic. We should make substantial and long-term reductions of greenhouse gases along the lines of the Kyoto Protocol.

This is perhaps the strongest indication that well-meaning scientists have gone beyond their area of expertise and are conducting unsubstantiated politicking ahead of next month's meeting of the G8.

Now, granted, he's a political scientist, not an environmental scientist, but he's got a reputation for clear thought, and I'd assert that clear thought might be more enlightening than the howling of doom-mongers.

Here's the thing - part of his current exposition of clear thought, embodied in the article linked above, revolves not around debating the correctness of the views of Kyoto Treaty proponents. He points out that, even if you accept them all at face value, they're missing something important. The pro-Kyoto arguments go into great detail about what "will" happen if Kyoto's not put in place, with facts, figures, pictures, and for all I know, hand-puppets. So they're clearly hip to using data to make their case for projections of a dire future.

The same scientific facility and diligence could be applied to a post-Kyoto world, too, wouldn't you think? Lomborg does. And he uses their own projections to reveal that which they "know" but don't share with us, namely that if Kyoto is put into force, the bad effects it's supposed to delay will only be delayed by six years. 6 - not 60 or 600, six.

Color me unimpressed.

He goes on to point out:

Moreover, they should also tell what they expect the cost of the Kyoto Protocol to be. That may not come easy to natural scientists, but there is plenty of literature on the subject, and the best guess is that the cost of doing a very little good for the third world 100 years from now would be $150 billion per year for the rest of this century.

Never mind - color me actively opposed. Unless they cease the pretense that this is anything but a way to hobble the developed world so that the third world can catch up, disdain for Kyoto proponents is all I can muster. Not for nothing did the US Senate vote unanimously in favor of a resolution calling the Kyoto Treaty a "bad thing" or words to that effect.

[wik] See also Robert Novak's latest, in which he reports:

"In reality, Kyoto was never about environmental policy," a White House aide told me. "It was designed as an elaborate, predatory trade strategy to level the American and European economies." The problem for Europeans has been that Bush refused to go along, ruining the desired leveling effect. The EU's industries have been devastated, while the U.S. has prospered.

Europeans' desire to bring U.S. prosperity down to their level is no conspiracy theory of American conservatives. Margot Wallstrom, the Swedish vice president of the European Commission, in 2001 (when she was commissioner for the environment) said the Kyoto Protocol was "not a simple environmental issue . . . this is about international relations, this is about economy -- about trying to create a level playing field."

They should be encouraged to intercourse themselves, sez me.
[/wik]

No wallflower, Lomborg, he finishes by pointing out what we perhaps might ought to be worrying about, including AIDS, malaria, malnutrition, free trade and clean drinking water; all things that perhaps we might be able to positively affect.

And, unspoken in Lomborg's article - the comparison between those challenges and the alleged challenge of global warming. Those maladies are inarguably bad, but global warming, and the shifts in global climate, have been occurring since the Earth initially cooled from whatever flaming rock it used to be, and I find it hard to credit arguments that there's some static configuration the climate on Earth is supposed to have. It certainly wasn't static before mankind and his evil SUVs started tooling around, and I question how reasonable it is to expect it to be so in the future.

(If you can get past the bad plot and the breathlessly overdone drama, I'd recommend Crichton's State of Fear for a decent bibliography of the failings of global warming activists' critical thought processes)

... and I'm out. See you in a week and a half, suckers. I'm off to drink heavily, eat pulled pork, party with family, and run on the beach until my knees pop out of my body.

By way of Rocket Jones, we learn of a modest proposal from a California state representative. State Senator Tom McClintock has some ideas for California schools:

Across California, children are bringing home notes warning of dire consequences if Gov. Schwarzenegger’s scorched earth budget is approved – a budget that slashes Proposition 98 public school spending from $42.2 billion this year all the way down to $44.7 billion next year. That should be proof enough that our math programs are suffering.

As a public school parent, I have given this crisis a great deal of thought and have a modest suggestion to help weather these dark days.

Maybe – as a temporary measure only – we should spend our school dollars on our schools. I realize that this is a radical departure from current practice, but desperate times require desperate measures.

The Governor proposed spending $10,084 per student from all sources. Devoting all of this money to the classroom would require turning tens of thousands of school bureaucrats, consultants, advisors and specialists onto the streets with no means of support or marketable job skills, something that no enlightened social democracy should allow.

So I will begin by excluding from this discussion the entire budget of the State Department of Education, as well as the pension system, debt service, special education, child care, nutrition programs and adult education. I also propose setting aside $3 billion to pay an additional 30,000 school bureaucrats $100,000-per-year (roughly the population of Monterey) with the proviso that they stay away from the classroom and pay their own hotel bills at conferences.

This leaves a mere $6,937 per student, which, for the duration of the funding crisis, I propose devoting to the classroom.

That's pretty snarky for a legislator. I hope that someone with a sense of humor can both stay in government and retain that humor. But that is just the prologue. Senator Tom has some interesting ideas for how exactly to spend that $6,937:

To illustrate how we might scrape by at this subsistence level, let’s use a hypothetical school of 180 students with only $1.2 million to get through the year.

We have all seen the pictures of filthy bathrooms, leaky roofs, peeling paint and crumbling plaster to which our children have been condemned. I propose that we rescue them from this squalor by leasing out luxury commercial office space. Our school will need 4,800 square feet for five classrooms (the sixth class is gym). At $33 per foot, an annual lease will cost $158,400.

This will provide executive washrooms, around-the-clock janitorial service, wall-to-wall carpeting, utilities and music in the elevators. We’ll also need new desks to preserve the professional ambiance.

Next, we’ll need to hire five teachers – but not just any teachers. I propose hiring only associate professors from the California State University at their level of pay. Since university professors generally assign more reading, we’ll need 12 of the latest edition, hardcover books for each student at an average $75 per book, plus an extra $5 to have the student’s name engraved in gold leaf on the cover.

Since our conventional gym classes haven’t stemmed the childhood obesity epidemic, I propose replacing them with an annual membership at a private health club for $39.95 per month. This would provide our children with a trained and courteous staff of nutrition and fitness counselors, aerobics classes and the latest in cardiovascular training technology.

Finally, we’ll hire an $80,000 administrator with a $40,000 secretary because – well, I don’t know exactly why, but we always have.

What's the damage for this profligate expense for luxurious digs and overqualified teachers? Just over a million dollars.

This budget leaves a razor-thin reserve of just $216,703 or $1,204 per pupil, which can pay for necessities like paper, pencils, personal computers and extra-curricular travel. After all, what’s the point of taking four years of French if you can’t see Paris in the spring?

The school I have just described is the school we’re paying for. Maybe it’s time to ask why it’s not the school we’re getting.

It's this kind of thinking that exposes the problems with equating money spent with performance. The educational bureaucracy eats away at the resources supposedly intended for students. And strangely enough, we have become so used to the problem that something like this seems radical, strange and wild-eyed.

Just pretend that the previous school infrastructure was eliminated in a series of freak accidents. Strangely selective tornados demolished all of the school buildings. The teachers all got on Survivor X, Sierra Leone. The superintendent was run over by a gas truck. The principals were all convicted of barratry and loitering. Nothing survived, and in two weeks, the dear little kiddies have to have a new school system. Think about it - if you were in charge with creating from scratch a school system, wouldn't you do something similar? You wouldn't even have to worry about providing sinecures for superfluous educrats. Just provide a safe and confortable place where learning could take place.

This is another situation where the existing system is so out of whack that pouring money on the problem won't accomplish a damn thing. Even structural reform is unlikely to be successful given the entrenched interests. And that is why so many people are home schooling - in the millions, now. And why inner city families want vouchers to send their kids to private schools. And why the teacher's unions are so desperate to prevent it.

[wik]And another thing. Last night, Mrs. Buckethead and I rented a movie. At the front of the movie was a preview for a new Samuel L. Jackson flick, where he plays a basketball coach in a troubled, inner-city school. From the preview, it looked like the movie is following the standard script for this type of feature: grizzled, curmudgeonly but wise teacher enters scary high school; wins respect from students through a combination of discipline, nicely judged and appropriate punishments and an unwavering demand that slacker youth meet his (seemingly impossibly) high standards of competence, achievement and excellence; said slacker students discover untapped reservoirs of decency, smarts, and hard work, and achieve their goal of winning the tournament/big game/learning to read/not killing people/not having children out of wedlock.

That this has become a standardized, almost rote exercise in film-making says something. To me it says, why the @#!?% don't we institute that sort of thing for all public schools?

In a puzzling display of hubris, the "good" "Christians" of the American Family Association have announced a boycott of the Ford Motor Corporation because of that company's policy of offering domestic partner benefits and donating money to gay rights causes.

"From redefining family to include homosexual marriage, to giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to support homosexual groups and their agenda, to forcing managers to attend diversity training on how to promote the acceptance of homosexuality...to sponsoring Gay Pride Parades, Ford leads the way," said a notice on the group's Web site.

Ford vice president of human resources Joe Laymon told the Detroit News that the company "values all people, regardless of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and cultural or physical differences."

Tupelo, Miss.-based AFA told the News it e-mailed an announcement about the Ford boycott to 2.2 million supporters.

The group said last month that it was ending its boycott of Disney because of some signs of change at the media conglomerate and because, "We feel after nine years of boycotting Disney we have made our point."

Yeah... made your point.

The AFA recently ended a nine-year boycott of The Walt Disney Co. over Disney's decision to extend benefits to same-sex couples and promote gay-related events at its theme parks. The boycott appeared to have little effect, since Disney reported higher earnings and increased theme park attendance during that time.

Yep. I suppose they did in fact make a point. Point well taken, gentlemen.

I hereby declare awkward, vaguely shameful missionary-style sex between married parners as "driving a Ford."

Hat tip: John Cole. Be sure to read his original post for a juicy punchline at the expense of another AFA boycott.