Today is short post title day here at Perfidy, apparently.  The M stands for Motorcycle Endorsement, the which I have added to my Driver’s License.  I sold my motorcycle back in ’98, and hadn’t ridden since – but increasing gas prices, and the increasing size of my vehicles, has led me to the point where I can justify returning to the world of motorcycles on a purely economic basis.  I work from home most days, but on the days that I do head in to the office, my commute is murderous – 70 miles each way, and half of that through some of the worst traffic our nation has to offer.  It now costs over $120 to fill up the Suburban, and $70 for the X-Terra.  Filling up the tank on a bike will cost less than $20.

Right now, it costs me about $200 in gas to get to work in a month.  Switching to a bike will reduce that to about $30.  That’s a not-insignificant savings. And if gas prices continue to rise, the savings will only get better!  And, as an added bonus, I’ll be able to use the communist HOV lanes, and cut my commute time by about an hour.

So, that’s how I sold it to the wife.

I’m looking at getting something along this line:

But I wouldn’t be unhappy if Santa gave me one of these:

Or these:

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:

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.

I think I might like to buy this.

The website of the artiste.  The fire-breathing sasquatch is also cool.

The History Channel is not without its critics

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called “World War II”.

Let’s start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check.
Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn’t look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apoplectic rage when he doesn’t get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn’t even mind the lack of originality if they weren’t so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren’t that evil. And that’s not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he’s not only Prime Minister, he’s not only a brilliant military commander, he’s not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he’s also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he’s supposed to be the hero, but it’s not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

The whole thing, here.

This might actually be quote of the month, come to think of it, but it’s early yet.

Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.
– George Carlin

While my wife is away schmoozing with music bidness types for her band, and the boy is in Ohio with Grandma – it’s just me and the girls.  And since they can be distracted with Dora the Explorer, I actually have a moment to think.

I thought I’d clear out a backlog of interesting stuff I’ve seen.

• This article at Wired discusses how the Sense of Touch Shapes Snap Judgments.  The bit about holding a clipboard making one self-important – that kind of struck me, and got me wondering what impact over the centuries things like the rosary, or of kings holding sceptres has had.  Could we design worry stones to improve our thinking?
• This bit from the economist on world debt is mildly troubling.  We’re in a not good place, and about to jump into bad.  But we might get trampled in the rush.
• Interesting piece suggesting that Germany bail on the Euro, rather than the Euro kicking Greece to the curb.  Personally, and for no economic reason whatsoever, I’d like to see the Euro fail.  Just because I don’t like it.  I have a bad feeling, though, that that just might happen, and the economic and political consequences wouldn’t be pretty.  I recall that the last great depression started with a stock/bank crisis, and then worsened into a sovereign debt crisis.
• Ran across this fifteen year old piece from CATO on how excessive government killed the Roman Empire.
• I always thought that granting suffrage to women was at the very least tactically foolish.  It may have been a bad strategic move as well.  From Roissy:

Giving women the right to vote really was a bad move:

Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?

Giving women the right to vote significantly changed American politics from the very beginning. Despite claims to the contrary, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue, and these effects continued growing as more women took advantage of the franchise. Similar changes occurred at the federal level as female suffrage led to more liberal voting records for the state’s U.S. House and Senate delegations. In the Senate, suffrage changed voting behavior by an amount equal to almost 20 percent of the difference between Republican and Democratic senators. Suffrage also coincided with changes in the probability that prohibition would be enacted and changes in divorce laws. We were also able to deal with questions of causality by taking advantage of the fact that while some states voluntarily adopted suffrage, others where compelled to do so by the Nineteenth Amendment. The conclusion was that suffrage dramatically changed government in both cases. Accordingly, the effects of suffrage we estimate are not reflecting some other factor present in only states that adopted suffrage. [...]

More work remains to be done on why women vote so differently, but our initial work provides scant evidence that it is due to self-interest arising from their employment by government. The only evidence that we found indicated that the gender gap in part arises from women’s fear that they are being left to raise children on their own (Lott and Kenny 1997). If this result is true, the continued breakdown of the family and higher divorce rates imply growing political conflicts between the sexes.

Yes, women’s suffrage really did herald the end days of America. The result of giving women the vote has been an ever-increasing nanny state funded on the backs of increasingly sex-dispossessed betas (dispossessed from banging women during their prime years). The elevation of diversity as a moral value and the flooding of the country with incompatible third world immigrants has no doubt been a secondary consequence of suffrage for women, who naturally bring their feminine sensibilities, for better or (more usually) for worse, to the polls. This is why I have argued that the next step in this national devolution toward mindless compassion is the creation of armies of cads. Men want sex, and will do whatever it takes to get it, whether that be good or ill for society.

Hmn.

• and then there’s …  I forgot what the last one was.

I’m also thinking about Formalism but more on that later, after I go have a beer.

Overheard on the Penguins of Madagascar episode my kids were watching a minute ago.  Truer words were never spoken.

Glommed from GraphJam

Speaking of low-brow humor and memes, this, via an email from my ever-precocious daughter: One definition of “meme”, from the always interesting WolframAlpha

Found in a Friday/Saturday op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, this tidbit from Peggy Noonan, while trying to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest:

…I’m speaking of the interview Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report With Bret Baier.” Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns this newspaper, so one should probably take pains to demonstrate that one is attempting to speak with disinterest and impartiality, in pursuit of which let me note that Glenn Beck has long appeared to be insane.

Conflict of interest clearly avoided, and a public service offered.