Useful Skill?

Maybe when I was in high school, but it's still kind of neat.

California and Florida: Sponsoring Terror

So if materially supporting terrorists, terrorism, and terror in general is enough to lose you your rights and get you "disappeared," who then would go to GITMO for investing nearly $90 billion dollars in part of the Axis of Eeevil?

The move, which mirrors actions by Florida and California, comes after state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced $86 billion of the nearly $150 billion state pension fund has been divested from companies involved in Iran and Sudan. 

Yes, I know what "divested" means.  It means that until they were in danger of having the country holding most of their money blown up, Florida and California were investing in terror.  At least by the definition given by the NDAA.

How much does a nuclear program cost?  More than $90 billion? Apparently the startup of each plant is about $30 billion, give or take.

If we consider that this $90 billion was used to prop up some Iranian government loans, those loans would have been worth about $900 billion*.  More than enough to get a really good head start on nuclear war.

Still think we can win, guys?  Still think it will be easy?

*Inkwell  money lending means that banks can loan at least 10 times what they actually have on hand.  Using derivatives and other complex and vaguely Gordon-Gecko-esque terms it can get to be as much as 100:1, but I doubt anyone is crazy enough to loan 9 trillion dollars to Iran.

Yes, I'm lazy. Deal with it.

Reading Remus ought to be required in schools.

Before DC captured the National Guard, before it became a de facto federal auxiliary and reserve, before it was named the National Guard, they were state militias, a fully realized state-level Second Amendment. A cynic would see today's National Guard as federal garrisons merely, DC's de jure armies of occupation. A cynic would see the National Guard and the newly militarized police forces as an emerging duo, the one trained and equipped for urban and local warfare, the other for home invasions and small scale raids. Throughout history the cynics have seldom been wrong. Perhaps after sixty years of undeclared wars we shall now have undeclared military rule.

You shut your dirty mouth!

At least, that's what I took away from this oddly pretty post about two of the previous century's greatest thinkers: Hesse and Bueller:

Salvation is possible. Reverse the polarity. Become a quiet-aholic. A noise-ophobic. Bind yourself to the mast such that you may hear the Sirens’ song without succumbing to its allure. The Sirens are not without their charms and increased communication is a net good, but the application of that good is often the opposite. Abjure the elites and the shackles they seek to impose, allow your imagination to flourish rather than atrophy, and relish in a bit of boredom. Listen to the crickets in your backyard. Watch a rainstorm instead of a television show. Remember Ferris Bueller’s advice – Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you  could miss it.

Performance enhancement

I will lay very long odds that in the coming years athletes will be drug tested for chocolate.

All my childhood illusions are crumbling...

Dinosaurs have had feathers.  Where is your god now, 8 year old me?  No where, that's where.

Black Death Exonerations

In another example of why I like archaeologists more than most all other social scientists, Archaeologists have now exonerated rats for their alleged part in the spread of the black death.

"The evidence just isn't there to support it," said Barney Sloane, author of The Black Death in London. "We ought to be finding great heaps of dead rats in all the waterfront sites but they just aren't there. And all the evidence I've looked at suggests the plague spread too fast for the traditional explanation of transmission by rats and fleas. It has to be person to person – there just isn't time for the rats to be spreading it."

I'm pleased by this, not because I'm a fan of rats, though they've never done me any wrong.  The reason I'm pleased is that archaeologists are taking new data about something that was thought to be a closed case and using that new data to refine their conclusions, rather than the other way around.  It's the way things are supposed to work in the world of scientific inquiry.

Mortality continued to rise throughout the bitterly cold winter, when fleas could not have survived, and there is no evidence of enough rats.
Black rat skeletons have been found at 14th-century sites, but not in high enough numbers to make them the plague carriers, he said.

To re-iterate my point: scientists found evidence to exonerate two of the most hated pests in history of one of the worst disasters to hit human kind, and changed their conclusions rather than explaining it away.  This is  more amazing than I can say (and how sad is it that rational behavior on the part of scientists is impressive?).

Fear the Future

Borrowing tops 100% of GDP, which is not a good thing at all.

As many have said, the gummint is at the very least complicit in the drug trade, but probably more like "an active participant from beginning to end."

U.S. federal agents allegedly allowed the Sinaloa drug cartel to traffic several tons of cocaine into the United States in exchange for information about rival cartels, according to court documents filed in a U.S. federal court.

One of two things...

Either the size of the debt we're in, or one mediocre weekend tab at the bar for Charlie Section.

Good news? Maybe. Probably not.

China appears to be in at least as much trouble as the rest of us.  Does this signal good news in that they won't be able to buy us out entirely?  To my mind, it says they'll be far more belligerent when we default.

The more you know...

Appropriate Pessimism

Got a book in the mail today, that I've been meaning to get for a year or so now.  We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimmism is by one of my favorite typing heads (a newsie who doesn't have a t.v. show, obviously...), John Derbyshire.  A choice quote from Derb:

That's the core of a proper conservative pessimism: the recognition that there is little hope for improvement in this world; that such small hope as there is should be directed toward the actions of one, or a few; and that most of what governments do is wicked, when not merely pointless and counterproductive.

I've tried making this point to friends and family before, notably to Kay and Greg.  The problem is, I'm pretty much the only conservative in my circle.  Yes, sister and Chad are conservatives, but they're more in Lisa's circle than mine, and Dad's got some libertarian thing cooking last I looked, but he's not really in the circle either.  So, I'm stuck explaining why I have such a dim view of humanity to people who are fundamentally opposed to having a dim view of humanity.

I'd recommend this book to them, but they'd probably make reading it conditional upon my reading something about "hope" or "dreams of [someone's] father."  I'd rather not read for a year than read sappy claptrap. (slaptrap?)

I love my dead gay son.

I don't actually have a dead gay son. Still, it  is an awesome movie line.  Like, a billion hotdogs awesome.

Big Brother's Intrusiveness knows no limit

I expect this sort of thing to become more commonplace as time goes on.

Free info, mostly.

The american preppers network offers a bunch of free downloads and some at cost cds of useful post-TEOTWAWKI info.