Washington State is out of booze

I can't wait until these people are in charge of health care. Y'know, in some respects, competition is wasteful. Economies of scale exist, and one provider for a market is the largest scale possible. That's why even in a free market you see consolidation.

But what you make up in efficiency you lose in fault-tolerance. It's worth it to pay a little bit more to have a backup.

I can hardly believe it's only been a day, and I haven't even technically used any time off yet.

• Got through security ok, even with checked handguns. Didn't expect problems, but that's always nice.
• My flight was not full. I had the whole back row to myself. Only got one chapter into John Updike's The Coup and woke up just in time for the landing.
• lds and zophine met me at the airport. They didn't have to - I had a rental car - but they did. So right away I feel all loved.
• Then Hertz gives me a Subaru Outback for the week. I love the sound of a boxer engine. It'll be great for hauling the girls around too.
• Blue cheese burger for lunch.
• Stopped by a used record store to get some CDs to load the car's changer with. Reverend Horton Heat, Against Me, Bad Religion.
• Found Flor de Caña rum at their liquor store. It's the first time I've seen that for sale anywhere. Also some little local bourbon with hand written notes on each bottle. I had to get the one that said, "Listening to Reverend Horton Heat".
• It wasn't 2 minutes until I had a fluffy white cat in my lap. Everyone in this house is freakin' friendly.
• Rock Band!
• Steak! zophine's roasted asparagus is something else.
• More Rock Band!
• Showed zophine The Wall for the first time in her life. I haven't watched it in many years myself.
• Started watching Delicatessen on Netflix. My Eee PC is a year old, but it streams Netflix movies just fine, and the VGA and audio out work just fine driving a flat screen. It really is an amazing little toy.

Today I'm tagging along to a cookout. Happy Independence Day everyone!

The producer from hell

The North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il has a passion for cinema. But he could never find a director to realise his vision. So he kidnapped one from the South, jailed him and fed him grass, then forced him to shoot a socialist Godzilla. Now, for the first time, Shin Sang-ok tells the full story of his bizarre dealings with - and eventual flight from - the world's most dangerous dictator. By John Gorenfeld

She was always talking about her pussy, but I'll always remember her for introducing me to the line, "Oh, the things you see when you haven't got your gun!"

Actress Mollie Sugden dies at 86.

Today's just a good day. Arizona isn't perfect, but I love the fact that the legislature did its level best to help the guy, in the process making it easier for all of us to claim self-defense. I also love that the appellate court also recognized that three dogs and a 20-year difference in age represents a disparity of force. It's too bad that Fish had to go through all this, but between those two things, it sets a hell of a precedent that will reverberate for many years to come.

We can do it!

Quick! Ship that manufacturing job to China so that poor girl can become a Countrywide mortgage broker!

"Isn't a debt already an IOU?"

If I go into the same white-collar career as my grandfather, with the LSAT and the bar exam as a barrier to entry, tests that blacks fail in disproportionate numbers, that's just fine.

If you go into the same blue-collar career as your grandfather, with civil service exams as a barrier to entry, tests that blacks fail in disproportionate numbers, why, that's racism.

More evidence that charges of racism are a form of status signaling. A way of asserting that one is a member of the privileged classes.

But here's the real irony...

One area in which [Guy] Russo believes the book [Supermob] breaks new ground is in "understanding the movement of money from the Midwest out to the West," he says. Korshak and many of his attorney cronies-most practiced out of a building at 134 N. LaSalle St., Russo says-"ended up in Beverly Hills at the same time, because that was where the gold was. They all moved there and took care of each other."

There, using money from organized crime, they began buying land throughout Southern California, tipped to the best deals by Chicago tax attorney David Bazelon, who was serving as director of the Office of Alien Property in the Truman administration. From that office, he oversaw the disbursement of land seized from Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II.

"It was the real 'Chinatown' scenario," Russo says, referring to the 1974 Roman Polanski film that had a similar theme. "This was where the Chicago Outfit's money really went. For years people were asking, where did it go? How did people from Chicago get such instant power (in California)? They owned the land; they got it from the Japanese."
http://nalert.blogspot.com/2006/08/chicago-mobs-mystery-man-sidney.html

I'll bet that little bit of family history goes over really well at parties. Think maybe Emily Bazelon is trying to compensate for granddaddy's sins?

Time it takes Obama to strongly denounce a fixed election followed by the beating and murder of protesters: 12 days.

Time it takes Obama to strongly denounce the removal of a chief executive who was seeking a lengthened term in defiance of the nation's congress and supreme court? 1 day.

Gee, I wonder who he sympathizes with more?

X-posted from Facebook, with the following addition for LJ: Anyone who believes this is a actually case of reverse psychology is a unmitigated dumbass. But we knew that.

That flu? Not gone. Things are getting bad in Argentina. Unusual numbers of young people dying, parents keeping their kids home, government doesn't have enough money for treatment. (Another example of compression.) I'm seeing identical reports about the seriousness of this thing from other sources as well.

Critics say 'mild' a misleading term for H1N1
Updated Sun. Jun. 28 2009 2:45 PM ET

"When we're told that swine flu is mild, we don't think, `It will infect a half to a third of the world population and kill a few million people, mostly young people, before it's over,"' says Sandman. "We think, `It's like having a bad cold."'

Well, swine flu isn't over. And it's not like a bad cold sweeping the globe.

But officials and experts are having a hard time striking the balance in messages to the public, unclear what they are dealing with now and what it might become.

"I think the problem is we don't know how to paint this picture properly," says Dr. Allison McGeer, a flu expert at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital.

"Because it's perfectly true that most cases are mild. But it doesn't mean that you shouldn't worry about it."

Regular flu, as anyone who has had it know, is no walk in the park.

And with this new flu, a small subset of people gets very, very sick. Their lungs are overwhelmed by an aggressive viral pneumonia one doctor described as looking like a "white out" on an X-ray. A number of hospitals are struggling to keep these people alive.

Generally much younger than the typical hospitalized flu patient, many of these people have been on ventilators for weeks. And every day, officials in some part of the globe announce that a 15-year-old boy, a 24-year-old woman or an otherwise healthy pregnant woman in her third trimester has lost the battle.

"When you look at those things then you begin to say `Well, is it really accurate, is it really fair to say that this is a mild phenomenon?"' says Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the World Health Organization's top flu expert.

Fukuda and his team have been warning for some time that the unusual age pattern of severe cases, the odd out-of-season spread and the fact that the virus is killing some previously healthy young adults makes the term moderate a more appropriate severity assessment.

That pattern, seen in previous pandemics, makes flu watchers sit up and take notice. "What it really leads you to conclude is that boy, we'd better watch this pretty carefully," Fukuda says.

...

Several centres in North America are already struggling under the load of critically ill patients -- and this is summer, the season when flu viruses don't transmit as efficiently as they do during the cold winter months.

"If this is as bad as it's going to get, this is still not going to be a cakewalk," says Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

"We still have relatively few people in the population getting sick. We don't know -- 10 per cent? Five per cent? We don't know yet."

"But if in fact we're stretching medical resources, particularly in the pediatric community now in many communities, people will start to die with higher frequency with the same disease spectrum if care is compromised and we can't get every kid on a pediatric vent(ilator)," Osterholm warns.

"Even if the disease severity doesn't change but this fall we see more people get sick at the same time, we're in trouble. Now, add in the potential for this virus to obviously change and cause more severe illness -- I mean none of this is good. I don't know how we can sit here and say `Oh, this is mild."'

I saw a lot of stuff last week about the effects of carbon cap & trade on the U.S. by 2050. 2050? That's like someone trying to predict today from 1970. In 1970 we still had a gold standard, color TV was a luxury, AT&T was still a monopoly, we hadn't yet hit the downslope of Hubbert's Peak in America, the Soviet Union was still a going concern, we had a war in Viet Nam, and voters could still be shocked by a mildly corrupt President.

And things are moving faster now.

I liken it to musical compression. We have more and more stuff happening in less and less space, and the resulting noise is deafening. Cap & trade taxes will merely add to the pressure that's squeezing events into a shorter time span.

It's not the only thing that's adding pressure. Probably not even the most important thing. The Baby Boomers are aging rapidly. (By the way, expect to see a lot more celebrities dying in short periods, just because there was a celebrity boom as well.) That's adding pressure to Medicare and Social Security. The bills from a lot of other poorly-thought-out government welfare programs are coming due as well. The housing bubble is one of those, and we've got quite a way to go before that's completely deflated. We're starting to pay for other bad decisions too, like immigration, or California's sloppy service to its unions. We're coming to the end of a massive corporate shell game. The world has hit its version of Hubbert's Peak, and the law of diminishing returns means the slope on the other side will be a lot steeper.

Never mind the next 40 years, the next 4 years will be full of so many world-changing events that it makes no sense to even try to plan or worry that far ahead. The good news is, some of those events might be changes for the better. There's no way to know. Just don't bother making long term plans. It's unlikely the assumptions you used to make them will still be relevant more than a few years from now.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether the would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I couldn't help but think of that quote while reading Iran: Night Raids Terrorize Civilians, by way of daddygod. And when I watch this video linked from that article, I can't help but notice a few other things.

Just look at all those black-garbed Basiji thugs out in the open down on the empty, well-lit street. From the angle it looks like the footage is being taken from a 3rd or 4th story rooftop right next to the street. You can catch a glimpse of the concrete parapet for scale at exactly 0:30. The house they're filming at that point can't be much more than 30-40 yards away, and everyone in front of it, even closer.

I'm sure it's terrifying to watch it in person with a cell phone in your hand. But replace that cell phone with a Persian Mauser...

I spent the entire afternoon at the range today. Shot my CZ-75 SP01. Shot my M1A. Works just as well as ever, and got a lot of attention. (Range master notices us loading up a 20 rounder, says, "Shooting the .308? I think I'll... wander over to the other side of the range.") Convinced another guy to buy a SIG 556 Classic. That's two in two days. Helped both of them get their red dots zeroed, then zeroed my ACOG. Bought a fresh big bottle of MPro-7, and a Beta C Mag since it was on sale. They're exceedingly silly, but what the hell. I still remember how "naughty" a 100 round magazine was during the ban period. Forbidden fruit is always the sweetest. And you never really lose the taste, even once it's allowed. You still appreciate it.

The range was packed too. Lots of people having a good time. Sort of an "eat, drink, and be merry" feel about it. Which I hopefully contributed to. Maybe I'll write up the post I have in mind on that topic later tonight or tomorrow.

The trailer for Inglorious Basterds reminds me of a story in a 1990 book called One Shot, One Kill.

It was slow going through Italy. Cold settled in, the type of wet, bone-chilling cold that comes with drizzling rain. Hitler's troops bogged down, and we bogged down at their throats. The dogfaces huddled miserably underneath their ponchos or whatever shelter they could find and cursed the war and the weather and each other. The snipers didn't have that kind of luxury. We were always out ahead, our job to keep the jerries nervous worrying about which of them we'd get next.

I made sergeant and that moved me up to sniper squad leader. ( Read more... )

There is a point to this gory tale. It's interesting because this is also the first book I know of to recount Carlos Hathcock's shot through the scope of an NVA sniper, versions of which have appeared in several movies. Google books doesn't show any with an earlier publication date, although I'm sure the story must have shown up in a magazine sometime between the end of Viet Nam and 1990. I also don't know of any other WWII movies that involve scalping as a plot point. IMDB only shows four war movies with the tag 'scalping', and none of them are WWII movies.

I wonder if Tarantino read this book too, either by chance when it was first published, or after watching Sniper (1993), the first movie to feature the scope stunt. Of course, it's possible that he came up with the idea of a band of merry scalp hunters all on his own, but that's not how Tarantino works. Consider the rest of the movie is a blatant ripoff of Dirty Dozen and Devil's Brigade.

That doesn't mean I won't see it. I like both those movies, they're about due for a remake, and the idea of scalping Nazis as a psyop adds a little something to the genre. Actually, it's fiendishly clever, both in real life and fiction. See, Germans idolized American Indians due to the wildly popular novels of Karl May. Hitler himself was a fan. Any German soldier would have known the significance of scalping. It was a nightmare right out of their most beloved childhood mythology.

I will give the movie an extra star if it references the Winnetou stories even a little bit. And dock it two stars if the Germans seem perplexed by it.

Not just a great movie with James Spader & Rob Lowe.

I went to lunch with a guy today, told him about my SIG 556. He just messaged me. He bought one this evening, and order 2000 rounds of 5.56 and a batch of Lancer magazines. He didn't quite spring for the ACOG, but was thinking about it. And he was expressing an interest in the M1A, so I'll let him shoot that tomorrow when we hit the range.

The gun drought is definitely over. Never mind the deep discount online sources, my local shop now has AR-15 receivers for under $100, complete rifles of all kinds, AR magazines for $10 ($14 for the L5s), and plenty of rifle ammo. Granted, prices on the last are still high, but that's coming down too.

Got a bunch of clothes today. Exciting stuff.

• Merino wool. 150g/m² shirts. Extremely light weight. Supposedly great for summer because of the wicking. Also with anti-stank properties. We shall see. Seem ok so far. And definitely nicely cut. Not rough either. A wash with Charlie's Soap should make them even softer. Unlike the wicking synthetics, they're not supposed to melt if I get hit with an IED either. Not that that's a feature I want to test.
• Adidas! Orange Adidas. So 1982.
• A new Wilderness belt. The old one no longer had room to wear IWB. I should probably just take that as a challenge to get back into shape, but I'm still going to have to have something to carry on in the meantime.

Because I am so smart and clever, I chose a most excellent brother, and that is one less thing that I will ever have to worry about.

By way of Arts & Letters Daily.

Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius

Too many people have chosen to believe in what they wish to be true rather than in what is true. In the main, the motive is a pure one: to see every child as having equal potential, or at the very least some potential. Intelligence is a fundamentally meritocratic construct. There are winners and there are losers. A relative doofus may live a comfortable life so long as his or her parents are wealthy. However, clawing one's own way out of abject poverty is best achieved with a healthy dose of both motivation and "g."

Naturally, we must be careful to avoid the fallacy that some people deserve to live in poverty, or that entire groups of people are inherently inferior in regard to intelligence. In the past, those arguments have been used to support oppression, racism, and slavery, and we must not repeat those mistakes.

Yet the belief that intelligence does not exist as a single, reliable, important, genetically determined construct is an equal fallacy. Unfortunately, some children and adults are just unintelligent. It's not fair, it's not politically correct, but reality is under no obligation to be either of those.

stachybotrys and I were just discussing the practical use of metals as money this weekend. And here's this video by way of Surviving in Argentina on the very topic. Chinese dude with a convenience store has a sideline trading gold and silver and will be happy to sell you some SpaghettiO's and toilet paper for your pre-'64 quarters and dimes. Unlike the guy in the video, I don't think it's a sign of the times. Not yet. But it is an interesting look at the possibilities. And at history. For thousands of years people would go to the market and put their coins down on a scale. It's the same thing. He just uses a digital scale and a pocket calculator instead of a balance beam and an abacus.

We'll probably never get completely back to that, but I'm enjoying this glimpse.

Even if metals never become currency again, and you have to go to a money changer to get legal tender to take to the grocery store, I think there's value in having metals. In a case of hyperinflation, you're going to have to stand in line regardless. In Zimbabwe, people stand in line all day to make the maximum allowed withdrawal from their bank accounts. They use it to buy something to eat, then they go back and do it again the next day. Meanwhile, their remaining savings loses value every day. Standing in line at the money changer is no worse, and possibly better, since far fewer people will have silver and gold to trade than have frozen bank accounts. And while their savings loses value day after day, your savings becomes worth more every day. Hopefully enough to buy the same amount of SpaghettiO's.

Reporting that the streets of Tehran are quiet. Protesters have left because they're afraid of getting beaten by the men roaming around with "substantial" wooden clubs.

Think about all the human ingenuity that goes into cell phones and the supporting infrastructure. Oil pumped out of the sands of the mideast and refined into plastics. An international shipping industry. Electricity going all the way back to Franklin. Undersea cables and satellites guided by the insights of none less than Einstein. Nuclear power plants. Billion dollar chip fabrication plants designed by thousands of the world's most brilliant engineers, miniaturizing electronics to a degree undreamed of within my lifetime.

All of that defeated by... a hunk of tree.

I watched videos of the protesters this weekend, walking down the streets in jeans and t-shirts, women handing them stones to throw. This is what it comes down to in the 21st Century: Sticks and stones.

"People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work."

- L. Neil Smith