Little, Big

There are several differences between a small law firm and a large corporation. The most important of these is this - while both will give away the job you're scheduled to interview for before you even show up, the corporation will go ahead and thoroughly interview you anyway. It's unclear if this is because they anticipate future near term needs, or simply because they don't have billable hours and like to take a break from productive work. They have their explanation; I have mine.

(The second most important difference is that corporations never take Good Friday off, while some proportion of small law firms in the spring of 2004 were known to employ gatekeeper secretaries who would have a complete fucking fit and presumptively place you on the shit list if you tried to schedule an interview on that day. Surprisingly, this is less generally relevant than you might imagine.)

Please make me a drink of grain alcohol and rainwater

Acktpht.

The Pentagon plan calls for deploying a new nonnuclear warhead atop the submarine-launched Trident II missile that could be used to attack terrorist camps, enemy missile sites, suspected caches of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons and other potentially urgent threats, military officials say.

This is the dumbest idea I've heard in years. This is a thousand times crazier than the proposed development of nuclear bunker busters. Every general supporting this idea should be dismissed immediately.

Gen. James E. Cartwright, the chief of the United States Strategic Command, said the system would enhance the Pentagon's ability to "pre-empt conventionally" and precisely while limiting the "collateral damage."

Well, at least he's not in charge of anything important. Let's hear him out. After all, my visceral hatred of this idea came before I finished reading the article and learned that every single objection and argument put forth by both sides had sprung full formed into my brain like Athena returning to the womb upon reading that top paragraph.

In justifying the program to lawmakers, General Cartwright outlined a number of potential situations. "The argument for doing it is that there are instances, fairly rare, when time is so critical that if you can't strike in an hour or so you are going to miss that opportunity," said Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett, the Maryland Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Projection Forces and who is still weighing whether to support the plan.

Um. Good point. What could go wrong?

But the plan has run into resistance from lawmakers who are concerned that it may increase the risk of an accidental nuclear confrontation. The Trident II missile that would be used for the attacks is a system that has long been equipped with a nuclear payload. Indeed, both nonnuclear and nuclear-tipped variants of the Trident II missile would be loaded on the same submarines under the Pentagon plan.

Hell, no problem. I hope no one else is wasting their time worrying about this.

Reflecting the worry that Russia and other nations might misinterpret the launch of a nonnuclear Trident as the opening salvo in a nuclear barrage, lawmakers have insisted that the Bush administration present a plan to minimize that risk before the new weapon is manufactured and deployed.

I've got a plan - let's tell them when we're going to launch. Then they'll be able to sit with white knucles as they watch that avowedly conventional warhead arcing on what sure looks like a trajectory a couple of hundred miles south of the Russian border. What could go wrong? They can surely get at least ten minutes guaranteed heads up so we can still get our shot off in the desired hour long window. Hell, they'll thank us for giving them the unscheduled training time with a real target to track!

But this isn't as clear to some others. Sigh.

The worry about Russia centers on whether that country could distinguish the launch of a Trident II from a nuclear strike, especially since its early warning network has deteriorated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is also some concern about China, which has a meager capability to detect incoming ballistic missiles.

"For nations like China that have a developing capability and are not totally blind but can see just a little, what would you see?" Mr. Bartlett asked. "We need to be cognizant of the potential for people to misunderstand what they would see."

Bah! Wimpy scaremongering that stands in the way of a vigorous response to "fairly rare" but strategically unique scenarios like:

One possible situation, Mr. Bartlett said, would be "people putting together some terrorist weapon, and while they are putting it together we can take it out, and if we miss that opportunity it may show up on the streets of New York City or Washington, D.C."

Of course! If we have intelligence good enough on such a target to justify the quite small (possibly under 5%!) chance of accidentally starting a nuclear war by taking it out right now, the odds of us having good enough intelligence or surveillance capablilites to track it after it has been put together are pretty much nil.

Still another might involve the need to destroy an enemy missile equipped with a chemical, biological or nuclear warhead before an adversary can launch it at the United States or its allies.

Yes, this is a capability we desperately need. In fact, there was once a proposal for something much like this. I think it was called something like "the submarine launched Trident-II nuclear missile." This is just like that, but less likely to work and indistinguishable from the real thing by nervous third parties who are pretty sure we're not aiming at them. Brilliant! And if the Gulf War Scud hunt taught us anything, it's that accurate targeting information on small ballistic missiles capable of carrying biological and chemical warheads is pretty fucking easy to obtain.

Multiply out all of these percentages for success and catastrophic disaster and you'd be crazy not to deploy this system!

Given the considerable American military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan and South Korea, some critics say the circumstances in which a target may be beyond the reach of American warplanes or armed Predator drones are few indeed. Acquiring the sort of precise intelligence that would give the president enough confidence to order the launch of a ballistic missile within an hour might also be a daunting proposition.

What a bunch of morons. I'd like to see them try to run Strategic Command! Hah. These sorts of people are too caught up in "facts," "opportunity costs," and something they call "risk assessment." I'm pretty sure all of that crap is a waste of time.

Bring it on!

TSA's genocide

It's amazing what some people will come up with just because they don't like airport security:

Billions of dollars of costs incurred, little realized.

It's a lot worse than that, though. We're being murdered, slowly.

The TSA has increased travel time, due to its delays. Some estimates are as high as two hours per flight. We hear the holiday-travel warnings: "Be at the airport at least two hours before your flight!" The TSA didn't cause all the extra waste, but we can assign a lot of that waste to the new system. To be kind to our ruling class, let's call it just one extra hour of wasted time per flight. What's an hour, compared to 9-11?

Let's do a little math.

There were 738 million enplanements (670 million domestic and 68 million international flights by US carriers) in the United States last year, and nearly 70% of those being leisure (voluntary, as opposed to business or bereavement) travel. If the TSA wastes just 1 hour per person per flight, that's 738 million hours. There are 8,766 hours in an average year (365 times 24, plus 6 for leap-year accrual). If a newborn is expected to live another 75 years, we may assume that an "average" airline passenger is 37.5 years old, and has 37.5 years left to live. We can also assume that a typical business traveler, being older than the average traveler, has 25 years left to live.

Turn the crank, and you can calculate the silent carnage.

Those 738 million hours lost are equivalent to the remaining lives of some 2,582 people! Each year, the TSA's one-hour delay, all by itself, kills the equivalent of over 80% of the 9-11 victims. Put another way, roughly every year and a half, the TSA "kills" more travelers than the four flights and all the ground victims of September 11, 2001.

Gosh, what a stupid argument!

Via Taranto.

Isn't that a light chicken gravy?

One of my politely racist college roomates (I had two) quit doing business with Bank of America because their ATM screens offered an option between English and Spanish.

In the years since, I've come to realize this is actually one of the most widespread resentments in America. I noted with some interest when BoA dropped the Spanish option; I would have loved to sit in on that meeting. And if my vague memory doesn't betray me, SNL did a commercial parody that touched on this sometime in the last couple of years. I don't recall the business, but the voice over said, approximately, "we won't ask you if you speak Spanish." Amy Poehler(?) turned to the camera with a smile and said "I hate that!"

And if it has already reached NYC, Bawston must be furiously chasing behind.

Fake nails and women’s shoes were flying as a bloody claw fight erupted at a Dorchester salon after one primping patron allegedly screamed at a woman bantering in Spanish, “Speak English! This is America!”

Just minutes after the melee broke out at Kathy’s Nail Design at 261 Bowdoin St., it escalated to the point of a 911 call.

A cop who arrived to break the fracas up got angry red scratches on his neck and arm for his trouble. They were left by a woman who’d just spent $40 for French manicure nail tips, said the shop’s owner, David Win.

“Ten years in this country, I never seen anything like this. The lady says ‘Speak English, I don’t want to hear Spanish!’ and big fight happens,” Win told the Herald last night. “There was blood in here and everything. There were a lot of customers in here. It (was) crazy.”

Police said one of the suspects, Sonia Pina, 20, was speaking Spanish to her cousin when another lacquered lady, Nakeisha Prichard, 20, attacked her Thursday night. Within minutes, at least four women were fighting inside the salon, police said.

In related news, I had to pass on the opportunity to board a friend's new cat for a month or so until he moves into his new townhome. The provider wants to bring it up from McAllen next weekend before my friend is ready for it. Given my cat's psychopathic hostility to the black cat that sometimes looks at her through my bedroom window, I had to pass.

I'd like to maintain the theory that she either hates all other cats equally or that one in particular. Providing her a chance to beat up on little "Sanchita" from the Valley, however, will ruin that if I later find her getting along with, say, Italian Girl's pure white long hair. (Siamese, with their inherent bat shit craziness deserving a beat down on general principles, would only confuse the issue.)

A third racist roomate I don't need, especially an impolite one who doesn't help with the rent and beats up the guests.

Update: See, also.

[A]s we stood there [on Nantucket] chatting a guy in a beat-up van cruised by, stuck his head out the window, and asked what was going on in the church.

"It's the Spanish-language service," one of my friends said.

"Well, they oughta learn English already," the guy said, and drove off.

Which provides a nice segue to my main point, which is that for the first time in a long while I think that John McCain might not be the Republican nominee in 2008 - and the reason is immigration.

Update II: Even better! The first(?) use of the famous "if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us" phrase is attributed to "Ma" Ferguson, Texas's first female governor.

Claimed to be said as she was holding a bible, about her reason for objecting to the teaching of Spanish in schools.

Update III: In the City of Brotherly Love, some brothers are loved more than others.

How do you say cheesesteak with in Spanish?

Joseph Vento, the owner of Geno's Steaks, doesn't know. And he doesn't care.

Just read the laminated signs, festooned with American eagles, at his South Philadelphia cheesesteak emporium: This is America. When Ordering, Speak English.

Vento's political statement - from a man whose Italian-born grandparents spoke only broken English - captures the anger and discontent felt by many Americans about illegal immigrants.

We don't know what to do. We don't know whether to wind a watch or bark at the moon.

The most bizarre moment at my baby sister's graduation ceremony came after the pledge of allegiance. Some girl who's name I didn't catch strode up to the podium, recited it, said "courage," and walked off. I turned to my non-baby sister and said: "Who the fuck does she think she is, Dan Rather's granddaughter?" I was pissed off and confused about it the rest of the night, especially since no one else in the entire auditorium seemed to give it any notice.

The next morning I ranted to my mother about it. She had no idea what Ratherism I was talking about but did say: "Wasn't that Joe Gazin's daughter who recited the pledge?" Aha! Mr. Gazin was the best known news anchor in Corpus Christi when I was growing up. I can only presume his daughter had to listen to him pour professional scorn on the "courage" line for years and made it her parting shot as a family in-joke.

Well played, miss, well played.

Stop little sister, gettin' carried away

My baby sister graduates from high school today. This is the most horrible blow a woman has inflicted on my view of the universe since, well, nine months ago. But it's still #2 all time.

Update: Alas, while I bought her graduation card last December, I seem to have neglected an appropriate envelope. Perhaps I'll fold a piece of notebook paper around it.

For those of you on the lookout for any kind of card at all, I highly suggest others from the company's "Generally Twisted" category if you're capable of a well chosen handwritten message to supplement what comes with it. The focused category messages leave something to be desired, I feel.

How not to write a demand letter

I haven't played Halo 2 in almost a year, but I do check in at Bungie's site periodically for news and updates. This week's gem is a collection of protest emails by Xbox Live subscribers who were permanently banned for cheating, thereby forfeiting their subscription fees. My favorite:

"LAWYERBALL"

The gamer tag –blam!- is wrongfully accused for cheating. He should not be suspended on a wrong default. To most casualties, this game is taken very seriously. Most just leave feedback over jealously of rank, sense a overwhelming percentage of X-Box Live players cheat for their levels. This person has not done "Modding", "Standbying", or "Bridging" of that kind. If Bungie seriously wanted to suspend someone of doing something along the line of cheating, then look over some stats. If none of these accusation are settle, you may be hearing from a lot of complaints. Some may be said by lawyers.

Inconclusive, I hope you consider to un suspend –blam!- Thank you for your time.

Some may indeed be lawyers. However, I can conclusively say, this is not such a case.

In unrelated news, I'm fairly sure there wasn't a single woman in any of the dozens of online games I played. How this happened I can't imagine.

Work made for free

It has been suggested to me that I'd cheer up if I found someplace to volunteer. While this is harder to do than you'd think, I did finally put in a couple of uplifting hours at the local Holocaust museum this morning.

My task? A research project for...a Big Law partner traveling to Poland this weekend with a surviving family member. I suffered a moment of horror when I realized I couldn't remember how to fully Bluebook standard non-caselaw or statutory sources, but quickly reminded myself he wasn't going to expect it. Sadly, the nagging feeling I needed to record my time and the number of copies I made never quite went away.

Addendum: Incidentally, the diversity of results for this google search are...interesting.

God help me

Michelle Malkin is pushing this "report":

In our brave new schools, Johnny can't say the pledge, but he can recite the Quran. Yup, the same court that found the phrase "under God" unconstitutional now endorses Islamic catechism in public school.

In a recent federal decision that got surprisingly little press, even from conservative talk radio, California's 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it's OK to put public-school kids through Muslim role-playing exercises, including:

Reciting aloud Muslim prayers that begin with "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful . . . ."

Memorizing the Muslim profession of faith: "Allah is the only true God and Muhammad is his messenger."

Chanting "Praise be to Allah" in response to teacher prompts.

Etc. This is all pretty horrifying stuff, if true. Fortunately, it almost certainly isn't. Somehow, in this fairly detailed listing of all the presumed evils these students had to face, the unnamed author of this piece neglected to mention the name of the plaintiffs, the school district, or even the judges involved, beyond stating that the district judge was, naturally, "appointed by President Clinton."

In fact, only one name or specific detail is mentioned in the story:

The ed consultant's name is Susan L. Douglass. No, she's not a Christian scholar. She's a devout Muslim activist on the Saudi government payroll, according to an investigation by Paul Sperry, author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington." He found that for years Douglass taught social studies at the Islamic Saudi Academy just outside Washington, D.C. Her husband still teaches there.

Um...what ed consultant? This paragraph pops up as a complete nonsequitur - no consultant of any sort had been mentioned to this point. Google shows that there is in fact such a person. But what she has to do with this alleged case is a complete mystery. Maybe she's in the news? No, just in this story.

Something very bizarre is going on here. Investor's Business Daily is hardly some gold standard for excellence in reporting, but it boggles me that they would run some unbylined underreported garbage like this. Yet if I can't think of any justification for this sloppy factless "reporting," why someone would make it up is just as much a mystery. Some young underpaid flack desperate to fill his word quota and thinking no one who read it would ask the obvious questions and call him on it?

I leave that to someone else to investigate and explain. Alas, I fear I can explain the gullible swallowing of this story whole by sympathetic segments of the blogosphere all too well.

Update: Let me back off a little by saying that while this does look fishy to me, it could just be awful contentless (but accurate) reporting rather than falsehood.

Using an obvious google news search doesn't pull anything helpful up, just some blogs regurgitating the original story. Interestingly, something called Corruption Chronicles, a Judicial Watch affiliated blog, states:

The case began when a group of parents sued against pro-Islamic lessons in California’s public school curriculum. They argued that the government was promoting Islam, but a Sacramento federal judge, appointed by Bill Clinton, ruled against them saying the state was merely teaching kids about another culture.

No where in the IBD story is the allegedly Clinton appointed judge said to be based in Sacramento. I presume this is inadvertent invention by the blog post author, but maybe she knows something more about it that she isn't citing.

Again, I find the lack of any other sources for this disturbing. Either it didn't happen, it happened and is now being reported in an awfully slipshod manner, or it happened so long ago that it's no longer current on google news. If the latter, it's probably worth making a (more detailed) outcry about it, but you have to wonder why the delay.
Update II: Sloppy, lazy reporting it is. From the comments:

The case is entitled Eklund v. Byron Union School District. U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton (indeed a Clinton appointee) sided with the school and against the parents. Interestingly, the opinion is NOT available on Lexis/Nexis. The Thomas More Center acted as attorneys for the plaintiffs and I am sure you can get a copy from them. The Ninth Circuit affirmed Hamilton's order in a 3 paragraph unpublished opinion in November 2005, the appeal number is 04-15032.

He's a loathesome offensive brute, yet I can't look away

President Bush was widely scorned for his state of the union warning against "human-animal hybrids," but now it appears this is another sign of his hidden genius being ahead of its time.

Indeed, even Al Gore tried to steal his thunder and warn us of a manbearpig hybrid causing havoc among us, but we wouldn't listen. Then Stephen Colbert's worst dreams were made flesh, and we discovered the pizzly among us and all too real. Now I learn that both Swedish and the U.S. governments engage in the lynching of miscegenating falcons and coyotes, respectively. Should they lose this battle, can worse be far behind?

Of course, those in my high school class who ever saw that Joe guy without his shirt on are justified in wondering whether the struggle against human-animal hyrbrids wasn't lost decades ago. Given the exceptionally wiry nature of his back hair and the available species in south Texas, I'm guessing we can blame the javelinas.

Addendum: And as the Saudis continue to warn their children:

The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus.

Phew! I'm safe, at least.

I tried to give it away, but they said the price was too high

Based on some experience acquired over several months, I have identified the most pressing volunteer need at America's various nonprofits - they desperately need people to read and respond to their volunteer applications and inquiries. Apply now.

That's one lazy nagger!

Megan McArdle defends that most pernicious spirit, the nagger.

The central economic insight is that subsidizing bad behavior produces more of it, so if you want to dole out money to those who have made bad decisions, it stands to reason that some non-monetary force would also be useful -- namely nagging.

A Mormon buddy of mine told me about how the Church takes care of those who lose their jobs, giving them monetary assistance etc., but how it also expects them to look for a new job seriously. If the community feels that the person is not working hard enough, they let him know, and may give him odd jobs that he has to do to keep getting his allowance. Essentially, social expectations and nagging work against the bad behavior encouraged by the monetary subsidy.

As usual, this is one of those ideas that's great for others that just doesn't work for me. Fear, as I may have alluded before, rarely can move me to do anything because I'm completely indifferent to most threats that might be carried out against me. Nagging, on the other hand, doesn't work because it creates such a vast rage that I commit myself to self destructive acts just to cause slight discomfort to my assailant.

I gave some thought to this phenomenon over Mother's Day weekend. Is it the abhorrent whining tone, the morally bankrupt/hypocritical source, or the failure to even attempt reasoned argument before going on autopilot that drives me nuts? All three, I think, and each is presumably absent from the described behavior of the Mormon Church, which just sounds like reasonable conditions placed on a gift and enforced through social pressure. True nagging is something far worse and destructive, the mindless repetition of a plea that aims to wear you down out of sheer aggravation, terrorizing you into compliance without offering anything in exchange or trying to persuade.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to send a few potential employers a request, in lieu of a resume, that they go fuck themselves. Thanks, mom.

(With apologies to Dave Chappelle.)

Update: I belatedly note that it was a coblogger, not McArdle herself, that wrote the referenced post.

Conspiracy of drools

I once again failed to find any jeans worthy to hang from my ass, but I did confirm two long standing theories.

First, this site was clearly inspired by the typical Galleria crowd. And, second, babies definitely smile a lot harder at you when they know mom or dad isn't watching. Everyone in the human race but me seems to have learned to delight in deceit and infidelity before they even learned to crawl.

Skunkworks

I have a bag of tricks I use to get various ladies of my acquaintance with bad phone/email etiquette to finally respond. Most are only useful once for any given target, so I'm constantly in an arms race that pits my ingenuity against their heartlessness and apathy. The best ones get not only a quick response but an outraged "DYLAN!"

"Two weeks," she told me
Four weeks ago, but no call
Hope springs eternal

Mission accomplished. This particular weapon is brilliant because its absurdity overcomes any built up guilt or annoyance that may be restraining the target. Additionally, the form can be easily and quickly adapted to the particular circumstance, and you can even send it as a text message or voice mail if need be, although I recommend email. Just be careful not to pollute it with extraneous informaton; I even went with a conservative "Haiku" as the subject line.

No one goes there any more, it's too crowded

Tyler Cowen points to Google trends, which will track how popular a search term is and the top ten cities searching for it. I'm with some of his commentors: the high rankings for Indian/Chinese cities for terms like economics and physics are signs of unsophistication. They're steps up from "stuff," but not as much as you might think. (Stuff is an Aussie/New Zealand/UK axis of stupidity, incidentally. Pay no attention to the city behind the curtain number eight! Or maybe it's the magazine.)

Prurient search terms are fun. Cairo, Ankara, and Istanbul make the top ten for sex, as does Chicago, presumably undergrads attempting to learn about this rumored phenomenon. Why are Indonesians and Latin Americans so curious about the vagina? (Tehran is number one for its crudest synonym, with the Aussies dominating the lower rankings.) Staying with an Islamic theme, you really don't want to drop the soap in a Turkish prison...or even one of their elementary schools. Yikes.

Neither the Frenchmen nor South Americans can find the clitoris; are they better lovers because they care enough to learn, or is it all a sham? Other Europeans take a carpet bombing approach to the problem. Then there's the USA!!! vs. our ignorant cousins. But really, go where the work takes you.

Update: Fixed some bad links. Or I tried. I'm not sure all of the URLs you get after a search are permalinkable. Go to the front page and do your own searches if it doesn't work. But don't do it at work. Incidentally, I found to my surprise that I don't have all that inventive or dirty a mind. Could my betters let me know if Islamic countries continue to dominate the filth end of the spectrum all the way down?

Update II: Sigh. You put aside a blog idea until the next day and discover Andrew Sullivan beat you to it. He did teach me, however, that I should be clicking on the "region" tab and not just looking at cities. Congratulations, Turkey, as a nation you're only second for child pr0n. Way to go.

Update III: Hah, this guy discovers that Nice, France is full of Tom Cruise fans.

Update IV: Playing with the region button, I'm more and more convinced the real story is how sex obsessed Australians are. They're usually dominating the US on raw numbers, let alone on a per capita basis. Third world countries, Islamic or not, at least have the excuses of less sophisticated English skills, repression of "normal" sexuality, less worry about getting caught in a law enforcement sting, and just plain less to do for fun. Either the Australians need a crusading DOJ and out of control NSA or Aussie rules football must suck more than I ever imagined.

Update V: And for my blessedly last comment - much of this is bullshit. The bottom of the page disclaimer states:

Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.

I'll say. Let's take one dirty search that shows all of the top ten cities are in the U.S. But if you click on "regions" it claims that more than twice as many searches came from South Africa as from the U.S. What, they're just broadly distributed among all of those South African internet users in small villages, so they don't show up on the city chart? I think not. Perhaps IP addresses in South Africa can't be tied to a city; perhaps something much worse is going on.

Lazy sociology grad students are strongly advised not to even think about using this to prove any kind of point.

Update VI: A couple of posts at Ace of Spades find some interesting connections, some not quite as dirty as mine, some not dirty at all. More good stuff in his comments.

GMH

My hero:

Despite his 12 years as an undergraduate student, Johnny Lechner realized something was missing from his academic record: he'd never studied abroad.

And so, the 29-year-old perpetual student who was expected to finally graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater withdrew his application for graduation Monday, five days before commencement.

"I realized that if I went one more year, I could study abroad," Lechner said. "That's one thing I haven't done."

Then make a ring about the corse of Luttig

The Miers miasma continues to sicken. Luttig has apparently given up on getting a SCOTUS appointment and resigned from the 4th Circuit to make some money as Boeing's general counsel.

Via SA.

The punk rock will get you if the government don't get you first

There is nothing in spoken word or print with greater ability to draw you in with the horrified fascination of a bloody trainwreck than any attempt to seriously discuss or rank pop music. Matthew Yglesias dabbles on the edge of full blown insanity, substantially endorsing a Blender list of the Top 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born (if that was 1980), but pulls back by admitting:

At the intersection of mixing genres and ordinal lists, however, lies madness.

Well, that's at least a start on the road to recovery.

The most insane comment ever submitted to the old blog was appended to my Fight Songs review, and stated with absolute confidence that while FS was a decent Old 97s album, Too Far to Care was "the greatest rock album of the last 30 years." This is both a completely, ridiculously stupid thing to say and absolutely correct. Well, if were a "rock album," which I'm pretty sure it is not.

For those who like to stare into the face of shrieking mental chaos and dissolution, commentary and debate on the Blender list can be found here, here, or here. Representative quote:

This isnt funny. This makes the holocaust look like a knock knock joke. HOW IS KELIS ON THE LIST!?!?!?!

That's a keeper.

Addendum: Although the third is a close runner up, the second "here" link is really where it's at, including this fair summary of my own views:

The bands you listen to wear makeup. Shut your cock-hole.

He wouldn't need a lawyer if he wasn't guilty

State pro se felony defendants get acquitted as often as those with representation. Misdemeanor defendants have better luck without a lawyer.

Update: Actually, that second point is possibly wrong:

In the study, which is scheduled to be published in the North Carolina Law Review, Hashimoto found that pro se felony defendants in state courts were as likely as defendants with counsel to win complete acquittal. In addition, they were more likely to be convicted of lesser offenses - misdemeanors rather than felonies, according to Hashimoto's review of data.

It's not clear who "they" refers to. If I'd written this sloppy sentence it would refer to pro se defendants, the subject of the overall article and previous sentence, but the normally neutral "in addition" transition is somewhat poorly chosen if that's the case - you expect supporting evidence of the contrarian point in the first sentence, but (apparently) get what you originally expected. But I didn't write this, so perhaps that "they" refers to represented defendants in the last clause of the precending sentence instead. I suppose someone could read the original research, but that would be too easy.

And maybe I'm the only person who consider this ambiguous. Yes, I am still pissed off about that B- in LRW II.

There are none so worthless as these oracles

Showing that I'm not really a video game geek, I had no idea it was E3 week until I saw it on another blog. Of course, it took me a whole three seconds to guess I'd probably missed this and go find it. The worst kept secret is finally official: Halo 3 is coming...eventually.

The one person who (barely) cared can move along now.

Addendum: Happily, that sad excuse for a trailer is going to make it easy not to geek out. The music in H2 was a step down from the first, but this is just awful, barring the extended clip they ported over whole from the original game. I felt like I was listening to the intro of a frat games scene in Revenge of the Nerds. Yikes.

At least the uninspired reveal had graphics sufficiently good on the big high def trailer to make it skip like crazy on my three year oldish computer. That's the same Cortana voice actor. Why do I want to strangle her all of a sudden? And props for ending(?) the game in a blasted dystopia where the Earth has been conquered and largely converted to rubble, but that better be the beginning of the final act after we've gotten to actually fight in the doomed struggle. It's bad enough that Halo 2 wasn't the game I thought it would be. Don't cheat me a second time by skipping over the "good" parts. I want my playable Holocaust before D-Day.

Meh. I'm sure the final thing will be fine, but they might as well just have not bothered with an announcement if this is all they've got.

PopoWhoa

Not having ever watched it will not stop me from feeling glee that Star Jones is getting the boot from The View. I can't help but think, however, that they should replace her with another loud mouthed University of Houston Law graduate who annoys the shit out of the vast majority of humanity.

Oh, some might doubt I lack the star quality to attract mobs of mouth breathers to pump up the ratings, but try this thought experiment: if you gave Kevin Federline a law degree and gave me a trashed out sugar momma, could you really distinguish between us? I submit that you could not.

Update: Disgrace to the almer mater overflowith. Our lame duck dean, recently pressured to resign, is going to inflict Harriet Miers on this year's graduates as the commencement speaker. I'll have to corner her afterwards and deliver a signed and nicely printed copy of my ode to her nomination.

All things to all people

I strongly recommend The Assassin's Gate to anyone interested in a history of the Iraq War so far. I'd avoided this one for a while because I feared it would be boring and politically aggravating. Plus, the title's obvious cheesy attention seeking offended me.

Well, while I greatly underestimated the irrelevance of the title and the cynicism in its selection, I was quite wrong about the former two points. It's an excellent recap of the war and its buildup, with a nice mix of detail, local color, players both big and small, and something for everyone ideologically. Whatever your blind prejudice regarding the Iraqi war, you'll find support for that position here, and only a moderate amount of self delusion is required to overlook the just as numerous parts demonstrating what an immoral moron you were to oppose/support the war. Good stuff.

Addendum: I see that Philip Carter had a comprehensive review of the book a couple of weeks ago. I now feel less embarassed about bringing up a topical book many months after its release date.

Sosumi

Given their history, I've wondered ever since the iPod came out why I hadn't heard anything about something like this.

Apple Computer won its courtroom battle against the Beatles on Monday when a judge ruled the company's iTunes Music Store did not infringe on the trademark of Apple Corps, which represents the band's interests.

A decade ago, when I last paid attention to their periodic pissing matches, I felt Apple Computer had the firmer legal argument but was in minor violation of the spirit of the agreement permitting them to use the name in the first place. But you can always count on a recording company to piss away all goodwill and sympathy. Honestly, has the musical Apple logo or name ever meant anything to anyone? Other than a few 60ish LP hoarders, how many people ever knew or cared the name of the Beatles' label?

Just let it be, guys.

Well, we can do it right later. Let's just do it wrong.

The top American police "drama" on Iraqi TV is...Reno 911! The jokes write themselves, so I won't bother.

Via Allah.

I don't mean to be anal, but would you prefer if I were banal?

Finally getting around to something that has been bothering me for months, I'm pleased to see that my theoretical stance, never that I can recall ever put into practice, is a healthy second most popular choice. I think hers was third, although it might have been first.

Some Panelists admit to being so vexed by the problem that they tend to avoid the word in conversation.

My practice as well.

Incidentally, my friend and former roomate who thinks he's eating at a boofay remains a traitorous chease eating surrender coonass. With a daego name. Go figure.

Like a fox

Matthew Yglesias has a good couple of posts on being crazy. The first wonders whether it's true that crazy people are better in bed. The second suggests that you have to be crazy to really bust your ass and excel at anything; the rational person is capable of marginal analysis and calculating opportunity costs.

By these standards I'm only half crazy, but that half is absolutely insane, ladies! My other half, alas, is too rational by far.

Old yeller

Tyler Cowen goes for the cheap thrills with a post on dog eatin' in China. I may have mentioned this before, but my best day in middle school remains the film we watched in sixth grade social studies about China. I was appropriately horrified when the guy at the outdoor market dropped several dead, skinned puppies into a hot oil frier, but the mass pandemonium and shrieking hysteria from the girls in the room were awesome.

Lyrical lexicon

The American radio industry desperately needs a new pair of neologisms.

The first must describe the phenomenon where a radio station obsessively plays a particular artist that no one else in the same category does. Note that this should not apply to overplaying someone you do sometimes hear elsewhere - the Austin station that prompted this is mildly noteworthy for playing Sarah McLachlan 5000% more often than usual, but is damned weird for its Tori Amos fixation. I would guess I've heard A Sorta Fairytale on 10 of my last 12 trips through their broadcast area in the last five years. None of these listening periods were exclusive to that station or lasted as long as two hours. Bizarre.

The second phenomenon is more common, I think: the inexplicable return of an old song that suddenly gets heavy rotation on the playlist. I suggest "pimpin'" belongs in this new term, as I suspect it can always be attributed to a particular DJ or station manager, and its latest manifestation is my hearing the Sneaker Pimps' 6 Underground half a dozen times in the last two days. I rarely regret these unlikely resurrections, but the recurrent feeling that it's 1997 again is a bit unsettling.

Addendum: Aha! I was discussing my formula for determining the creepy/undatable factor of single men at the wedding a couple of weeks ago. It's primarily based on the number of cats you own (one is unhelpful, two requires a perfect record on everything else, three or more require compensating extraordinary factors like being a Marine with a Medal of Honor, getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or winning the Cy Young award). Owning a Tori Amos CD definitely needs to be incorporated into the seriously negative column. And now that I've said that, one of my so-called friends who reads this will be tempted to give me one, thereby forcing me to dispose of my cat.

Splash

You thought Nappaquiddick was the best joke from the Patrick Kennedy crash. You were wrong.

A body-cavity search of a Kennedy? They might find Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Like a no-legged man in an ass kicking contest

Man With Prosthetic Legs, Deaf Man Brawl

The land of the free and the home of the bossy

Zing!

Americans have long been driven by two deep longings. The first is to be left alone. The second is to tell other people what to do.

We are Japanese if you please

The train of thought that lead to yesterday's depress-o-fest and my becoming verklempt began with Bryan Caplan's Coffee Talkish poser: the Fundamental Attribution Error is neither fundamental nor an error. Discuss.

From Wikipedia:

The fundamental attribution error...is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based, explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior. In other words, people tend to have a default assumption that what a person does is based more on what "kind" of person he is, rather than the social and environmental forces at work on that person. This default assumption leads to people sometimes making erroneous explanations for behavior. This general bias to over-emphasizing dispositional explanations for behavior at the expense of situational explanations is much less likely to occur when people evaluate their own behavior.

Or in simple words: you obviously cut me off in traffic because you're a dickhead. The idea that you didn't see me or might have a legitimate need to do so doesn't occur to me.

Caplan is, I think, rightly skeptical of this. Even if it's true of a tabula rasa human being, the tendency is going to be skewed by accumulated experience or cultural cues. I do agree with his commentors that the more obvious point is the reciprocal: we attribute our own mistakes and bad behavior too much to external forces and not enough to personal (and usually permanent) failings of character. But it's not clear that's part of the psychological theory, which my 30 seconds of research from one source indicates that personal evaluations are simply treated as the unbiased baseline against which to judge our "errors" with respect to others.

Psychologist, analyze thyself.

Anyway, thoughts on the "I'm deluded rather than afflicted by uncaring outside forces" front lead eventually to yesterday's post. And then by happy circumstance I came across a literary quasi-rebuttal of the external FAE theory and support for Caplan's criticism. I started reading Rain Fall, the predecessor to Hard Rain, previously discussed here. (Verdict so far - very good, but not as good as the second book. I gather from reviews of the third and fourth that each is better than the last.)

An excerpt:

"The person who returns from living abroad isn't the same person who left originally."

"How do you mean?"

"Your outlook changes. You don't take things for granted that you used to. For instance, I noticed in New York that when one cab cut off another, the driver who got cut off would always yell at the other driver and do this"--she did a perfect imitation of a New York cabbie flipping somone the bird--"and I realized this was because Americans assume that the other person inteded to do what he did, so they want to teach the person a lesson. But you know, in Japan, people almost never get upset in those situations. Japanese look at other people's mistakes more as something arbitrary, like the weather, I think, not so much as something to get angry about. I hadn't thought about that before I lived in New York."

Precisely. I made a similar transition in thought about traffic myself a few years ago, and now have Zen-like calm while in heavy traffic. But while I previously attributed this to experience, finding myself in a minority with Bryan Caplan makes me thing something weirder is going on. My breakthrough really came from thinking about traffic as a system, some sort of gestalt of my superficial knowledge of logistics, law and economics, chaos theory, etc. If I can't identify the butterfly that caused Katrina, I probably can't fairly blame that dickhead in the Cayenne for making me five minutes late.

Addendum: Well, almost precisely. Obviously a man made system can't at the macro level be entirely arbitrary - the rules of the road do effect total throughput of the system. And people who drive slowly in the left lane are evil sons of bitches well deserving of a drive by.

Not for love or money

I had one of those gut punching epiphanies today that shakes your whole world view and sense of self. It is simply this: my approaches to romance and employment are exactly the same.

Several years ago I told my mother I'd rather spend my whole life alone and celibate than face the horror of a life with the very smart, nice, and very marginally attractive family friend I'd been dating. A couple of years ago I told her I'd rather be a homeless man living under a bridge than take any legal job I could imagine that hadn't already rejected me. I believe both these things deep in my bones; perhaps that's enough to make them true.

I hardly ever ask a girl out, and never just to get to know her and pass some time having fun. When I do, it's because I already have a very good idea that she'd be very good for me, and it hurts like hell when she doesn't see the same in me. Similarly, I was apalled when I learned we were "only" allowed to bid for interviews with 40(?) or so firms during law school OCI. After more research than probably any five other students bothered to conduct, I determined I'd deign to working for maybe fifteen of those on offer, and manfully deluded myself into considering enough others to fill out most of my limit. None of them hired me, and I fell right into an extended black depression over the waste of three years of my life while I was only halfway through it.

Beyond the Sure Things I find that don't return the favor, I periodically fall into relationships that arise from a mixture of ennui and the usually unsolicited help of friends and family. I got my 2L summer job the same way. The other party always leaves with a high opinion of me, but it's never meant from the beginning to be anything more than a temporary arrangement of convenience, with the slim chance, but never hope, that it might grow into something more. It never does.

Both sex and money are nice enough, I'll grant, but I'd never sacrifice one of my overwrought and unrealistic ethical principles or commitment to existential angst for either. I dumped my pre-law school girlfriend for the proximate cause that I feared I'd cheat on her and felt the only honorable thing to do was preemptively end it. I once resigned from my pre-law school job with no savings and no backup plan because I couldn't bear the completely wasteful rotation away from my "real" job any longer. (The employer gave me a promotion back to the head office, saving me from six months more of purgatory or living in my mom's spare room. The girlfriend would have taken me back and saved me from a three year dry spell, but I have limits.)

There's a comparison to be made between masturbation and how I financially survive this extended period of joblessness, but I don't think either of us want me to go there.

Most of all, there are the big hopes and dreams, the shining savior on the horizon that I've kept chasing long after they'd become a mirage. In the romantic sphere there's the penultimate example, often alluded to here and on the old blog, Italian Girl. And today my stomach churned when I squarely considered that nearly a year of intent and six months of effort towards the only job I can imagine wanting right now might end up the same way.

Long term teasing with a mix of rejection and keep trying signals? Check. Half-hearted attempts to try out other "girls" in case she never comes to her senses and gives in? Well, maybe quarter-hearted. Maybe. Living under a bridge still seems preferable to most of the options I can imagine even trying, and it certainly seems the more likely outcome.

Because there is one pretty big difference between romance and work. A future woman who can forgive my other faults won't really care about how long I was single before her. That gap on my resume is a lot less forgiving. I'm more and more convinced that I'm either going to finally get "the girl" when the next and last opportunity arises in June, or I'm going to be under that bridge. The intermediate options, no matter how hard I try, just don't seem any more appealing.

Time for another extended black depression, perhaps. Which is, ironically, the entire problem.

Update: Perhaps this is a sign of how I should solve both my problems. "What made you interested in working for Philips?"

First as farce, then as tedium

I'm sad to report that one of my favorite vanished bloggers, Allahpundit, is back. In his original incarnation he offered a hilariously twisted view of politics after 9/11, complete with the best malicious Photoshops around.

Alas, now he is but a slightly sharper than usual cog in the rightwing blog machine as the main contributor to a Michelle Malkin vehicle, Hot Air. I guess I'm glad he's around at all and has some income from it, but it's truly sad when the clever kid who made you laugh grows up to be a stuffy investment banker.