Of moderate interest

I took the Myers-Briggs test last year and got

INTJ Introverted	Intuitive	Thinking	Judging
Strength of the preferences %
78	50	88	78

I just took it again and got
INTJ

Introverted	Intuitive	Thinking	Judging
Strength of the preferences %
67	62	88	56

Extremely well put

Instapundit on Wal-Mart

You know, to me Wal-Mart is a lot like George W. Bush. It's not that I'm that big a fan in the abstract, really, it's just that the viciousness and stupidity revealed in its enemies tends to make me view it more favorably than I otherwise would.

Which says it exactly right. For someone I didn't vote for and for a place I rarely go (and when I do, it's usually because of the hours, and not the price) I've spent a fair amount of time defending both. Ditto for the pro-lifers. Hmmm.

An interesting graph

I recently came across this somewhat useful chart as a link off of digg.com.

It displays the discretionary budges and it quite useful in that regard. However, it does not show entitlements. Given that entitlements such as Medicaid and Social Security make up about two thirds of the total federal spending, this seems quite odd to not include.

The creator of the graph's explanation for not including these figures is that "Congress has no control over mandatory expenditures". These expenditures are mandatory in the sense that they are automatically renewed and their numbers altered by formula ever year, with no congressional vote needed to reauthorize them. However, a simple majority could reduce the expenditures on these things to zero.

Ouch

John & Al, Paris & Nicole

Kerry has become the Paris Hilton to Al Gore's Nicole Ritchie on the stage of American politics: creatures whose fame has become self-sustaining; and who remain in the public eye not because of any achievement or acumen, but who are simply famous for being famous.

Kind of like Dan Quayle when you think about it.

Thursday rapid fire

• The art of bootstrapping in a small business.
• A cool article on facial recognition technology
• The navy still chases pirates!
• The best old-time record collector ever. Adam and Stephanie will be this guy in 40 years.
• A revealing interview with Cindy Sheehan - after reading the interview she just seems like a sad, pathetic creature and not the self-serving caricature she originally seemed to be. How she's paying for her crusade is a question that to my knowledge no on has asked.
  
• A relatively old article about Roe V Wade, choice quotes

  "Abortion rights have been slowly whittled away while we haven't even been looking," said Kitty Striker, 22, who decorated her hair with small coat hanger replicas for the protest. "That's what's so shocking and so scary to me."

  Decorated her hair with small coat hanger "replicas"? Isn't that like a holocaust survivor decorating herself with swastikas?
  

Finally Bush does something right

This sort of makes up for the steel tariffs, assuming he holds to it.

Report: Bush Says Gov't Might Not Bail Out U.S. Automakers

NEW YORK — President Bush is offering no encouragement to any U.S. automobile companies that might be thinking about turning to the federal government for a financial bailout.

"I think it's very important for the market to function," he said in an interview in the Thursday editions of The Wall Street Journal.

He said companies need to manufacture "a product that's relevant" and that his administration has discussed new fuel technologies with the nation's top two auto makers.

"As these automobile manufacturers compete for market share and use technology to try to get consumers to buy their product, they also will be helping America become less dependent on foreign sources of oil," Bush said.

He repeats this whole foreign oil canard, as did 60 minutes last week ("dependence" is a poor description of our current situation, which is wholly dependent on price anyway, also, we use less foreign oil (as a percentage) as the price increases) but there's been a lot of corporate welfare in this administration, probably more than Clinton's and it's nice to see it NOT happening somewhere.

Quote of the moment

Kin Hubbard

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

and

From The Corner

How does Kanye West, self-confessed porn addict (confessed in this cover story!) pose as Jesus on the news stands? Rolling Stone’s theology is interesting: they’re tongue-in-cheek about Jesus and genuflect under the ashes of dope fiend Hunter S. Thompson.

While at one time I was was a huge fan of HST (and still am to some extent) and a supporter of the right to die, he did:

• Shoot himself, thereby proving a messy cleanup for someone, most probably a family member or friend. Totally unnecessary due to his drug connections.
• Shoot himself while his kids were in the house. As far as anyone can determine there was nothing special about the time. That's far worse than the above I think.
  

That should be enough to taint his memory.

A quickie from Lifehacker

Clean HTML From Word Documents - I wish I'd had that a week ago.

Tuesday afternoon news roundup

While I'm stuck on some SQL problems (use SQLite only if necessary), here is a quick roundup

• 'American Taliban' Father Urges Clemency - What does it take to lose your citizenship? I would think joining a foreign army should do it fairly easily, but it would seem not.
  

  In the spring of 2001, John Walker Lindh told his parents he was going to dodge the desert heat and spend the summer in the mountains of Pakistan. He did not tell his parents that he planned to cross into Afghanistan and join the Taliban army.
  
  The younger Lindh saw bin Laden speak twice while he was training in Afghanistan, but had no idea that he was involved in terrorism against the U.S., his father said.
  
  On Thursday, Frank Lindh emphasized that John Walker Lindh was involved in an Afghan war, not a fight against the U.S., when the Muslim convert joined the Taliban army to fight the Northern Alliance. He noted that the U.S. once supported Taliban fighters when they were fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

  This is either a blatant lie or a remarkably large error. The Taliban formed after the Soviets left and Northern Alliance was mostly composed of anti-Soviet fighters. Leave alone the fact Lindh could attend an al-Qaida training camp (one of whose main reasons to exist (though not it's only one) is to kill Americans) and not know anything about it's goals, let alone it's many public declarations to that effect.
  
• Larry Franklin got 12 years for passing secrets to the Israelis. Seems a bit low to me.
• Maryland's latest anti-Walmart legislation may come back to haunt them. The company may not build a warehouse in one of Maryland's poorest counties.
  
  It's always amazing to me how people think that the way to help people is to limit options, whether it be 12 year olds building toys in Malaysia or 70 year old Walmart greeters. If they had better options, they would take them, why remove the best available choice to them?
• Russians endure, cheer frigid winter - curiously no mention is made of global warming. Since Russia contains one sixth of the earth, you would think this would be significant one way or the other. They certainly do stories about a lot less.
• Patients suspect they've been given tissue stolen from corpses
• Atlanta saves itself from people who would otherwise live in the suburbs. Isn't mandating housing size a strike against diversity?
• Check out the fiddle tune book.
• Home genetic testing - find your true heritage for a remarkably low price.
  

For all you philosophy nerds out there

http://meaningoflife.tv/

Quote of the moment

I came across this on Wikipedia

"Life... is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You're stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-crunching nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left... is an empty box... filled with useless, brown paper wrappers."

How is this possible

Amazon, Maher to swim in 'Fishbowl'
"New 30-minute entertainment Web program will make its debut June 1, exclusively on Amazon.com."

How is Bill Maher still popular, much less more popular than ever? His delivery, never a strong suit of his, has gotten more tortured than ever, or at least it was before I quit watching him. He also prefaced every line with "Isn't it really....".

I find a lot of left-wing comics (Mark Maron, Jon Stewart has come back quite a bit after a bad slump) funny, so I don't think it's that his politics are offensive to me, he just seems about as funny as an episode of Mama's Family these days.

De gustibus non est disputandum I suppose.

Quite good

So last night, I finally saw Walk the Line last night (finally) and I was quite impressed. A surprisingly good performance by Reese Witherspoon and Joachim Phoenix as well. It does end in the late 60s and leaves a lot of his life uncovered, but that's probably just as well.

Zing!

This why I like the Agitator
...

Former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes got it right when he said, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."

The Holmes quote is popular with the anti-smoking crowd. But it's not quite accurate. The Ban the Ban folks always responded to it by saying that given that patronizing smoking bars is strictly voluntary, the proper analogy would be for you to run full speed into my closed fist, then complain when you walk away with a bloody nose.

Frankly, even that is probably giving them too much credit. Given the science on secondhand smoke, you'd have to run into my fist several dozen times per day for about 30 years before you'd even begin to see the first signs of a bloody nose. But of course, as soon as one person out of several thousand did get a bloody nose, you'd start agitating for laws calling for the arrest and imprisonment of people who stand around with close fists, lest some anti-smoking activist accidentally bump into one.

This article had me enraged for about an hour

Really, an hour. Here is money quote

Junk-food suit targets Nickelodeon, Kellogg

"But then they turn on Nickelodeon and see all those enticing junk-food ads," Carlson said. "Adding insult to injury, we enter the grocery store and see our beloved Nick characters plastered on all those junky snacks and cereals."

Carlson and another plaintiff, Andrew Leong of Brookline, Massachusetts, spoke at a news conference organized by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

They intend to sue Kellogg and Nickelodeon parent Viacom Inc. in state court in Massachusetts and served the required 30 days' notice on Wednesday.

"For over 30 years, public health advocates have urged companies to stop marketing junk food to children," said Susan Linn of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. "Even as rates of childhood obesity have soared, neither Viacom nor Kellogg has listened."

It's as if this woman's children have their own money and do their own grocery shopping. Furthermore, I have it on good authority that children existing before television. Why not just take that away? Why aren't we calling in some sort of family services on people who can't control their kids?

And campaign for a commercial free childhood?

A pleasant development

The AJC is covering the Bill Campbell trial in blog form.

Quick roundup

• It's depressing that two senators don't realize how off they are. If you want to characterize the Republican majority in the House of Representatives negatively, then the proper term is fascism (taken literally, strength in numbers, and a dictatorship thereof) rather than a plantation, the relevant characteristic being oppression of the many by the few. All to work in a racial angle I suppose.
• Tom MacGuire has more interesting thoughts on the NSA wiretapping thing. Still, why not change the law though?
• An interesting post from the Belmont Club "A stone killer is never idle in a lawless Third World country"
• America's possible action on Iran:. Evidently some lessons were learned from the lack of immediate American response to Afghanistan after 9-11.
• The Great War of 2007 - very scary possible history.
  

Quote of the moment

From Inside the Net podcast - "A business plan will emerge."

Interesting

Holland might ban the burqua. Here is a link to Georgia's largely unenforced mask law, which would ban it here as well.

They make it sounds so negative

Hikikomori.

Sunday rapid fire

• A nice summary of the demographic predicament of the Democratic Party. The Roe Effect is curiously unmentioned.
• 39 Mega pixel digicam! Via Digg.
• A very good article on NRO about the current state of 527 organizations.
  

  ...led by the so-called 527 groups, was a broad-based, grassroots effort, it was, in fact dependent in substantial part on just five donors: financier George Soros, Progressive Insurance chairman Peter Lewis, Hollywood mogul Stephen Bing, and the California investors Herbert and Marion Sandler. Together, they spent about $78 million in the effort to defeat the president — more than the $75 million in federal funds that each presidential candidate received to conduct his entire general election campaign. (It was also more than twice what the late-starting top five Republican 527 donors spent on their side.)

  The low number of people funding really does explain a lot about the Kerry campaign.
• The Iranians seem to refine technique.
• A good look at what could the scenario with the FISA/NSA case. One thing I would still like clarified: Is it wiretapping when it is recorded, or when someone listens to it? It still seems like a massive amount of datamining to me.
• Blues guitarist Rory Block has an unappealing FrontPage website, but a very interesting life story.
• I intent do explore AJAX more thoroughly when I have more time, but here is a tutorial, and a good open source download site. Here is an AJAX library it seems.
  

The new faucet

Last week I decided to finally get a new faucet. Much to my surprise, the previous owner had installed the last one horribly. All of the nuts where misthreaded and stripped and it worked out to be a 6 hour pain. I wound up having to take the entire counter apart to get good leverage on loosening and remove everything.

An astonishing amount of gook can accumulate on the underside of the faucet over the years.


The counter with the back panel removed.

Dirt!


The underside of the old faucet.


Here is the finished product

Everything you can say about America is true

Vampire Candidate 'Won't Hide Evil Side'
Thursday, January 12, 2006

MINNEAPOLIS One gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota is giving a whole new meaning to the "dark side" of politics. A man who calls himself a satanic priest plans to run for governor on a 13-point platform that includes the public impaling of terrorists at the state Capitol building.
..
Including the impaling of terrorists, rapists, drug dealers and other criminals, Sharkey's platform includes emphasis on education, tax breaks for farmers and better benefits for veterans.

I think govenors have been hiding their evil sides for far too long, and I welcome his candor. Throw in his impalement policy and I think we have a winner. Sure, it didn't work for Dole in 96, but America has changed since then.

This is interesting

DNA Tests Confirm Executed Va. Man Guilty. And it would seem that Schwarzenegger is not going to pardon the elderly mass murderer in California either. An eventful week for capitol punishment. Kudos to the govenor for ordering the test.

The Steyn Article

I've been meaning to comment on the Mark Steyn Op-Ed "It's the demography, stupid" is for a long time (the page has been open in Firefox for a week now.) but it looks like i won't get around to it, so I guess I'll just post the link. James Lileks comments on it are here.

While I think Steyn overstates his case by a lot, mostly in not counting the positive value of immigration (buying, rather than building Westerners) and longer lives for a lot of people (who will be disproportionately our best and brightest).

Now that I think about it, he also overestimates (IMHO) the importance of population. There is really no reason to think that the asymmetries currently in existence will disappear. Still a society that can't sustain itself (not true of America but true in Europe and Japan) is not healthy. Curiously unmentioned are payroll taxes.

Another random thought: the similarities to our current problems and late 19th century Bolshevism are eerie.

Free people are clean people

Triple the heads, triple the power! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Triple Shower Head. No longer live according to the artificially low federal limit! I like the captains's quarters the best.

And of course, the government might take it away.

HT: The Agitator

Joke of the moment

From a Reason article on the future of Russia.

Answering a question about the future of democracy in Russia, Shevtsova said: “To add some optimism to my conclusions, I’ve got my favorite joke that, it seems to me, reflects the ambiguity of our democratic movement.

A sick man is picked up by an ambulance. He asks the doctor, ‘Doctor, where are you taking me?’ The doctor replies, ‘To the morgue.’ The man says, ‘But I’m not dead yet!’ The doctor says, ‘But we’re not there yet.’”

If this is Russian-style optimism, I’d hate to see what the pessimism looks like.

The pro-war libertarian quiz

The ever interesting reason magazine posted

The Pro-war Libertarian Quiz

How far are you willing to go to win the War on Terror?

These days I'm more for finishing Iraq favorably than pro-war, but I am strongly against just "declaring victory" or "strategic redeployment" without really changing anything.

Recently, here are my answers

1. Should the National Security Agency or CIA have the ability to monitor domestic phone calls or e-mails without obtaining judicial approval?
   
   Nope. I think this is an impeachable offense too. The current case (supposedly) only monitored calls that crossed borders, which is legally a different matter, if I'm understanding things correctly.


2. Should the government have the ability to hold an American citizen without charge, indefinitely, without access to a lawyer, if he is believed to be part of a terrorist cell?
   
   No. If caught on the battlefield I support stripping them of citizenship (by virtue of them being a foreign army and then treating them as one would a foreigner).


3. Can you imagine a situation in which the government would be justified in waterboarding an American citizen?
   
   Yes. This question doesn't belong here at all. This should be subject to warrants as well, but there are several situations where this could be the right thing to do.


4. Are there American journalists who should be investigated for possible treason? Should Sedition laws be re-introduced?
   
   If they committed treason (using the standard definition that is unrelated to journalism) ,then yes. If not, then no. No to sedition laws. FYI - I consider freedom of the press to mean publishing, not protecting confidentiality of sources. They should be able to publish whatever they want, its the cover-ups and withholding information that I don't consider protected.
   


5. Should the CIA be able to legally assassinate people in countries with which the U.S. is not at war?
   
   Yes


6. Should anti-terrorism cops be given every single law-enforcement tool available in non-terrorist cases?
   
   No. I guess this is really asking is if we should have super-cops or not.


7. Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a suspected (though not charged) American terrorist, and then sell it?
   
   No. Absolutely not. Due process of law in all things.
   


8. Should the U.S. military be tasked with enforcing domestic crime?
   
   No. With a possible exception of keeping order in case of natural disasters.


9. Should there be a national I.D. card, and should it be made available to law enforcement on demand?
   
   No.


10. Should a higher percentage of national security-related activities and documents be made classified, and kept from the eyes of the Congress, the courts, and the public?
    
    No. Anything classified should have an automatic sunset date commensurate to it's secrecy, but nothing should be indefinite.
    

8 out of 10.

Digital irritants

I finally get around to installing the DV cable to the new LCD, and I find out there are several kinds of DV cables, and I ordered the wrong one. How irritating.

A good design

Once you get past the Flash, is Gorilla Nation Media.

Now this is interesting

The Smoking Gun is running a long article on James Frey, author of A Million Little Piece. Apparently he made it up.

Of interest to me

During the October show, which featured Frey as its only guest, Winfrey discussed details of that tale. He was, she said, "the child you pray you never have to raise," a raging, drug-abusing teenager who had been arrested 11 times by age 19. In college, he drank to excess, took meth, freebased cocaine, huffed glue and nitrous oxide, smoked PCP, ate mushrooms, and was "under investigation by police." By the time he checked into Hazelden in late-1993, Frey, then 23, was "wanted in three states," added Winfrey.

Now really, if you've been arrested 11 times by 19, and done all the drugs listed above, what's left to investigate? Heavy, Bad Lieutenant style drug use would seem to preclude most heavy criminal activity, and pretty much anything else. If you've reached the crapping blood stage of drug use (as he claims), I don't think you rate any high powered police attention.

I haven't read the book, but the article is very good and very detailed. If true, (and it seems to be) Frey is quite the liar.

Insights from the Carter Family box set

I got the first Carter Family Box set recently. It's quite good, and nowhere near as repetitive as most of these things. And at $25.99 its well worth it for disks. I think all Carter Family stuff is out of copywright, which is why it is so cheap.

The current zinger, from the children's song "Chewing Gum"

I'd never marry a lawyer, I'll tell you the reason why
Every time he opens his mouth, he tells a great big lie

I wouldn't have a doctor, I'll tell you the reason why
He goes all over the country and makes the people die

Site of the moment

How to Do Harsh Death Metal Vocals

Are you in awe of the raw, vocal stylings of death metal bands? Do you ever want to sing along? Here's how to emulate the guttural lyrics that make death metal music distinct....

This is weird and scary

Private industry eavesdropping

The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone -- for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts.

Criminals can use such records to expose a government informant who regularly calls a law enforcement official.

Suspicious spouses can see if their husband or wife is calling a certain someone a bit too often.

And employers can check whether a worker is regularly calling a psychologist -- or a competing company.

I've been wondering about this. I wonder how much the media does this as well. There has been very little coverage about cell phone privacy since Gingrich was recorded illegally several years ago. PGP encryption coverage has been curiously non-existent as well.

Saturday rapid fire

1. Forests paying the price for biofuels - not that surprising really. Everything has a cost.
2. Good and bad procrastination
   

   That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.
   
   What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary.

Interesting

A tad overblown, but an interesting article on RFID zappers by John Robb.

Annoyances

So, last night I was in a CD store, and came across Merle Haggard's new CD Chicago Wind. Hag has been on a great song-writing streak lately so I was about to buy it, but then I see the warning label

[CONTENT/COPY-PROTECTED CD]
This product limits your ability to make multiple digital copies of its content, and you will not be able to play this disc or make copies onto devices not listed as compatible. Content/ copy protected CDs should allow limited burning, as well as ripping into secure Windows Media Audio formats for playback with most compatible media players and portable devices. In rare cases, these CDs may not be compatible with computer CD-ROM players, DVD players, game consoles, or car CD stereos, and often are not transferable to other formats like MP3.

which annoyed me to no end. Who would buy something with that label? I haven't listened to music directly off a cd in years, everything gets ripped when I first get the CD and then put on a shelf for safekeeping.

UPDATE : Yes, I have seen theSony rootkit news, quite extensively actually. I did not realize that the warning was actually on the CD, which just goes to show I've been buying nothing topical lately. I thought it was just when you tried to play it in a computer.

Abramoff

It's odd to see who Jack Abramoff was actually representing. All of the big industries (construction, military, healthcare, unions) are absent. He represented the small fish on the great leviathan food chain, which makes me think that the big fish are so entwined with the existing legislators that they don't need to lobby.

I predict that this will have no effect whatsoever on the party make-up of anything, even if people do go to jail. Sadly, no one will think of this as a good reason to resort to term limits either, which would help matters a lot.

Does anyone I already know....

Need a new monitor? My 19" is currently unused and would like a new home. It's a 3 and a half year old Samsung.

Public declaration

LCD monitors are the coolest, best, and most eye-saving thing ever. Thanks Mike!

2 things that annoy me

1. When pundits, wags, and periodically me use the term "unintended consequences" as a rhetorical trump card. It's a well established concept by now, and it is usually used to refer to a foreseen, but unpleasant risk, not anything unexpected.
2. When people say "It's more complicated than that" when they really mean that the set of options or outcomes is different than what the original speaker thinks. The situation is not necessarily more complicated, and it could even be simpler than originally thought, just different.
   

Wow

The music genome project.

Via Althouse.

Pathetic

Apparently CNN expects us to take them seriously when they run a headline of
"Give me an O! U! C! H! -- Cheerleading injuries on the rise". The preceding sentence is on their main page, not the article page.

A cost of story would be the greatest thing for news possible. Not perfect sure, but an improvement.

Two odd things

1. The fact that Bolivia has elected a president that wants to legalize coca production is receiving very little attention.
   
2. The Cisneros Independent Counsel investigation from the Clinton era is finally wrapping up. And they're not releasing all of the report either. We really need standing ICs to investigate whatever comes up.
   

I'm in the market for a new...

Cell phone, and possibly plan. Anyone know of any good ones? I'm currently on Cingular, but all of their re-up options are quite crappy, as are their phone prices. I would happily switch.

Quotes of the moment

La Brigada has the best baby lamb intestines you can imagine.

You have a status quo bias. And like most people, you probably overinvest in goods and underinvest in experiences. Get off your bum and go. Many major cities in the USA have direct connections to Buenos Aires. You fly overnight and sleep on the plane. You wake up in a new universe.

Tyler Cowen

Oddness

So I take the plunge and get a flat screen monitor (the Samsung 930 B). I even get a new video card with a DV) - out as well.

All that, and the fricking new monitor only comes with an analog cable!?!?!! Why do manufacturers do that? I had that happen with both of my SATA drives as well.

On the whole though, the monitor seems quite nice.