Mrs. Buckethead is stubbornly refusing to give birth.  This is frustrating, because I arranged for a week off from work to commence when the baby arrives.  I bought a copy of Civ V so I’d be ready.  We’re already three days past the due date, now, and I’m getting impatient.

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.

The hundred greatest movie insults of all time.

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

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.

Heh.