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.

My son, having become cognizant of the existence of this blog, has offered to participate. If anyone has any questions – about anything whatsoever – ask and he will make up an answer for you. Just leave a question in the comments and I’ll pass it on to him.

Here’s a small one to get you started:

Q: Son of Buckethead, who killed President Kennedy?

A: It was the butterflies. Butterflies ate Oswald’s brain, enraging him. Enraged, he went to the Book Depository building and shot the president.

Q: Son of Buckethead, why did the butterflies hate Kennedy? And were they responsible for Oswald’s death as well?

A: Butterflies hate everybody. Usually, they just flutter around and stuff. But sometimes, they get mean. The ninja butterflies ate Jack Ruby’s brain to cover up the eating of Oswald’s brain. Butterflies are pretty sneaky.

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:

While looking for some links for the last post, I ran across this interesting bit:

Much has been written of late about the nature of denialism. New Scientist a couple of issues back produced a special report on the subject, for example, and the New Humanist explores the idea of “unreasonable doubt.”

There’s plenty more out there. The most provocative I’ve come across (thanks to Joss Garman via DeSmog Blog’s Brendan DeMelle) is a 2009 paper in the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics by Jeroen van Dongen of the Institute for History and Foundations of Science at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His thesis is ideologically based denialism of science has a long pedigree, and he begins his paper with this quote from Albert Einstein:

This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.

The parallels between the political opposition to relatively in certain early 20th-century circles and today’s pseudoskeptical approach to anthropogenic global warming are striking.

Indeed,the actions of many of Einstein’s opponents resemble those of the thinkers now often referred to as, in perhaps an all too derisive manner, ”crackpots”. It thus appears that this phenomenon is at least as old as the existence of institutionalized science, which arbitrates authoritatively what is, and what is not, sound scientific practice and established truth; crackpots, with their own unshakable beliefs, in the end rather deny that authority than give up their ideas.It has long been clear that dismissing the anti-relativists’ objections as those of an assortment of dimwits who simply did not get it, as physicists intuitively have tended to do, does not suffice.

“On Einstein’s opponents, and other crackpots ” is not a long paper, nor particularly dense. Check it out.

Just because a million people believe something to be true, doesn’t mean it is. I refer you to Aretae’s many posts on how sure you should be on things – but especially Logarithmically Right.  Another factor is that the specialization of science leads scientists in field A to accept as true without examination the consensus of field B without examining them.  And then use those conclusions in their own theorizing. Which are then used as inputs by the scientists in field B.  Positive feedback loop.  Cosmology and particle physics are particularly guilty of this.

And if James Hrynyshyn, communications consultant and freelance science journalist based in Western North Carolina, is especially vigilant in following things that link to his site, I suggest that he look at Aretae’s post on climate, which is what I would have posted had he not written that first, and better.

[wik] Just to get snarky – follow the link.  Dude who wrote that is a little creepy looking.  The intense stare of the zealot.

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.

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.

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.

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.