White powder on Wall Street?

Gee, that's a shock.

DISSENT NO LONGER PATRIOTIC

Make a note of it.

Happy Ascension Day

Jeff Cooper:

Have you noticed that adulation is not dependant upon the adulated? People need to worship heroes regardless of whether they can find heroes or not. Just place anybody up on a pedestal where he can be seen and you will find thousands of people who will scream and yell and beg for his autograph. Thus we have "mass movements."

Unmutual! Unmutual!

Not just any roller rink, nor even just any disco roller rink. A HUGE disco roller rink.

Some people, some silly, unimportant, flyover-country kind of people, don't understand why they need people from Hollywood like Cameron Diaz and Tim Robbins to tell them what to think. "Why should I figure them fellers in Hollywood is so much smarter than we are, anyhow?" they ask. Well, here's why. Here's why, when our betters out there in the land of the silver screen have something to say to us, we just might want to shut our drooling yaps, open up our empty little minds, and listen:

The Greek muses incarnate themselves on Earth to inspire men to achieve. One of them, incarnated as a girl named Kira¹, encounters an artist named Sonny Malone. With the help of Danny McGuire, a man Kira had inspired forty years earlier, Sonny builds a huge disco roller rink.

When you can come up with a story like that, maybe you'll be qualified to run this country. Until then, shut up and pay your taxes, OK, Gomer?

 

¹ Played by Olivia Newton-John

"The Black Legend"

Huh: To what degree is our perception of the Spanish mentality a product of Protestant propaganda during the Reformation and in succeeding centuries? Probably not less than zero, and quite likely not more than some value greater than zero. In round numbers.

I recall reading recently, somewhere, that the Spanish Inquisition, while it really was pretty darn bad, was less maximally horrible than people seem to assume. Or so this source claimed, whoeverthehell it was. Hm. So, OK, for whatever that's worth.

Intent

Huffman has a programming funny. Which reminds me of a good one about Pascal that I thought of, only a decade or so after Pascal had become too irrelevant to bother making fun of:

Programming languages are tools programmers use to make computers do arbitrary things. Pascal is a tool Nick Werth used to make programmers do arbitrary things.

UPDATE

Maybe you had to be there.

OK, I figured it out

The purpose of our endless rising tide of petty laws and regulations is to prevent the individual from doing any harm, and so make life better for everybody except the individual. Since there's only one of him, that's a pretty good deal for, statistically speaking, everybody. Except the rest of us, obviously.

Church and State

Jeff Cooper says,

We may not wish to be taught how to think by clergymen, but to me it seems much worse to be taught how to think by politicians.

Heh.

...and annoyed.

Jeff Cooper quotes E.V. Howe, via somebody named Bill O'Connor:

"The government is mainly an expensive organization to regulate evil doers, and tax those who behave. Government does little for fairly respectable people, except annoy them."

That's actually wrong. The government doesn't regulate evildoers; it merely tries to. That is to say, it annoys them.

All government really does to anybody is annoy them. And invoice the fairly respectable ones for the service.

Now I feel stimulated, too!

All news is old by the time it reaches me, but anyhow I like "voting Democrat" as a euphemism for "dead".

Caroline Kennedy

It's not all adoration for poor Caroline.

The New York Times said "she seemed less like a candidate than an idea of one: eloquent but vague, largely undefined and seemingly determined to remain that way."

Duh. Last time the Democrats ran one of those, he won the presidency.

But the NYT thought vague-and-undefined looked good on that one, so, yeah, I guess it's different.

STFU, Gun Dude

Just recently took to operating one of those little L-shaped black things that turn money into a loud BANG. So I'm reading up on this and that, and I got to wondering what a "two-stage trigger" is. You figure Google is the place to start with a thing like that, but maybe not:

So let's understand [sic] the differences between "take-up" and "creep." Take-up is a wonderfully replicated feeling/action, found in 2 stage triggers, in preparation of firing, and creep is when you think you are trying to fire, but you just seem to keep pulling the trigger & it does not break cleanly. Creep is found in both single & double stage triggers.

Well, there it is: A two-stage trigger is one that has a "wonderfully replicated feeling/action", except that some of them have the other thing, which is something else, and you don't want that. Whatever it is. But so I took my pistol out and tried dry-firing it, and while for all I know the feeling/action may have been "replicated", I don't beleve it was wonderfully so. Therefore, I may have a two-stage trigger, or I may not. Which is a comfort.

There are some subjects I do know something about: Electric guitars and amplifiers, and programming computers, within certain limits. When I see somebody wasting a novice's time with non-information or anti-information about tube amps or intonation or operator overloading in C++, or JavaScript in general¹, I can see the humor in it.

So it's fairly weird to find myself, well on in adulthood, being the one whose time is arbitrarily wasted by fools.

 

¹ Last I checked, pretty much 99% of what there was to be read about JavaScript online was clueless bullshit. They returned tuples in arrays. They didn't know what closures were. Sad stuff. The people who write about it are not programmers. I don't know what the hell they are.

UPDATE

But look at it this way: If pain is the sensation of weakness leaving the body, this kind of frustration is the sensation of knowledge entering it. If it's unfamiliar, it must have been too long since you learned anything new.

Fun Facts About Grizzly Bears

THEY WILL EAT YOU.

And if you're stupid, they'll eat you even more.

Compulsory Biodegradable Euro Committee

Mick Hartley informs us that the Oxford University Press is helping acclimate the youth of Britain to their new habitat, by updating their Junior Dictionary. They're sweeping out silly old words like "vicar" and "blackberry" to make room for "compulsory", "biodegradable", "Euro", "committee", and others.

Imagine the sadness of balanced meals, stepping on a human face, forever.

UPDATE

Wait, they're getting rid of "Blackberry"?!

Well, that's the way it goes with folks like that: Up to the minute, always, but the minute they're up to had its day a decade back.

If it weren't for that darn Constitution...

Tamara K says:

A contentious theory I've often heard advanced is that if you told the police in any major metropolis "One hundred people. You know who they are. Go round them up," and they actually went out and got The Usual Suspects off the street at the same time, that crime in the burg in question would virtually dry up overnight

...and wonders what readers think about that notion. She's asking for input from law enforcement, not from random assholes with excessive self-esteem, so I won't leave a mess of my own in her comments.

But it sounds like a common species of wishful thinking: "The government could trivially fix this problem if only they had arbitrary powers."

Look at it that way, and ask yourself when any government with arbitrary powers ever fixed anything. Or more specifically, when any police force with arbitrary powers ever put a stop to anything.

Some law enforcement types may believe they could do it. Personally, I think they're mistaken.

50mm?

You can't hide the facts from The Associated Press:

In this image made available in London, Thursday Feb. 28, 2008, Britain's Prince Harry mans a 50mm machinegun, at an observation post close to Forward Operating Base Delhi, in Afghanistan, on Wednesday Jan. 2, 2008. ...

Fifty millimeters? That's two inches. .50 maybe? Bit small for that isn't it? A .50 BMG cartridge is almost six inches long. Betcha somebody at the AP either saw "7.62x51 NATO" on the press handout and helpfully "corrected" it, or saw "machine gun" and threw in "50" just because he vaguely remembered the number "50" has something to do with machine guns, and then "mm" because he vaguely remembered millimeters have something to do with guns in general.

Best and fondest wishes to Prince H, by the way, and to all who serve with him. Finest traditions and all that. Makes a man proud to have, through no virtue of his own, been born in a country where people speak English. Whatever's wrong with his dad, I guess it's not inheritable. I hope they don't make him go home now the story's leaked.

Tetris? Fuck off.

WTF?

They're going to make you pay for Tetris

To paraphrase Slate's Justin Peters, "Why give you free Tetris when they can sell you $7 Tetris?" Seriously, screw those guys!

No, they are not going to make you pay for Tetris. Don't want it? Don't buy it. I don't want it. I didn't buy it. Did they make me pay for it? No.

STFU, retard.

P.S. Dennis Kucinich? Retard. STFU.

"We all need to heal"

Mike Nifong, former District Attorney for Durham County, NC, now says there was "no credible evidence" that the Duke lacrosse players he went after were guilty.

Well, ain't that gracious. But he goes on:

"We all need to heal," Nifong said. "It is my hope we can start this process today."

"We all need to heal"? You carried on a publicly-funded vendetta against three innocent men for a year, you "committed more than two dozen violations of the state's rules of professional conduct during the case", you stopped only because you got caught, and now you want to talk about how you need to heal? You want to move on from this, is that it?

STFU, retard.

Friedrich Hayek

A trivially obvious observation from the old kraut, one that nevertheless seems to escape most people:

...the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.

It's not just that commissars of whatever variety haven't the capacity to a) absorb the data, or b) process it usefully; they cannot, in principle, even get their hands on enough of it to fail properly at a) and b).

Memo to John Maynard Keynes:

STFU, retard.

Oh, and more on Keynes via Oliver Kamm (whence I got the Hayek talk above; hey, I thought Kamm was a "man of the left" or something?):

Keynes essentially thought that if he and other old Etonians were put in charge, everything would be fine.

Pwnxored!

STFU, Altman

After the Sept. 11 attacks, [Robart Altman] said Hollywood served as a source of inspiration for the terrorists by making violent action movies that amounted to training films for such attacks.

"Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie," Altman said.

What?! STFU, retard.

On the other hand, when I saw "Sept. 11" there, I figured he was about to admire the attacks, or jabber childish leftoplatitudes about American foreign policy, or some other idiotic thing. So the above was actually a pleasant surprise, for 0.72 seconds before I started thinking about how dumb it was.

Also on yet another hand, Short Cuts and Gosford Park were pretty good. And "Altman was a bomber pilot in World War II", sez Fox News. Which is a very fine thing to have done.

UPDATE: The one I'm thinking of as Short Cuts may have been The Player; it was the one with a multi-minute unbroken tracking shot at the beginning. Or do they all have those?

Via Blowing Smoke.