An Impressionable Young Mind

Long ago, in a place far away, a clever young fool took to the adult section before he had a grain of sense.



In those days, the library had a fairly complete selection of Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo series. BFD! you say. And you're right, so don't try and deny it. It's a pretty insipid series about a communist mayor and his frenemy, the village priest. But to a bloody literal minded 11 year old, the whole angel/devil thing meant that one guy was good, the other evil. Never mind the constant silly tricks with the reserve tank, or even that the 11 year old was already a bit of an agnostic. Righteousness! Good days to be 11.

Then puberty & doubt hit. Many reversals of course. Guareschi was rejected, not for what he was, insipid, but for what he was imagined to be, fascist. I think Don Camillo took it well.


So after all the reversals, maturity, aging, doubt, & approaching senility, what stays the same? The need to maintain a coherent self image. Fortunately, part of this image has always been stinginess. Cheap bastard, never knows when to pull out the wallet,a step behind- fought it at times, but usually lost. One way to fight the cheapness has been to take vacations and try to relax. Trouble is, when you're on vacation and need a cap, or oranges, or something to slide down sand dunes, and you're in a small town, where do you end up?



That's right. The axis of evil in the modern world. And to drive home the evil, there's an old man near the back, who will smile at you and patiently get you a fishing license.

Figuring out how to disapprove of the corporate evil behind WalMart, while embracing the splendid, horribly underpaid, people who work there (and the low priced stuff! made in China) is the key to our times. Give me a call when you figure it out.


Barbie knows,but she's not talking.

The Man of Property

I was thinking it was about time for yet another go round of the old chestnut, the Forsyte Saga, but it turns out the last one was only 9 years ago. So Kate (can't say her full name, a promise was made) & Barbie (no last name needed for megastars) won't be fighting for the role.



They'll find other projects. Probably including Project Runway, which has a finale tonight of sorts. It's not Heidi, not Fashion Week, and most of all, not Tim Gunn. But there it is, and there's not much else.

The sausage grinders will most likely turn to Dickens. We're entering an era where the brutal injustices of Dickens novels are starting to look like the good old days.



What traditional English fiction has going for it is lots of words. You read a sentence, right behind it is another sentence. Or maybe a whole Paragraph, or even a Chapter, or )shudder( a Volume. Galsworthy churned out 2 sets of 5 books each. You don't have to worry about that here. Three sentences, a picture



& it's over.

The Old New Wave

For the last 90 years or so the main literature of teenage boys has been Science Fiction. From the clunky mechanical stuff of Hugo Gernsback to the mass produced fantasy of teh Goth era, most of it has sat well inside the boundary of Sturgeons Law: 90% has indeed been crap. But there was a time....



about 45 years ago when it looked like literature (and lots of sex) would break through, when Science Fiction could point the way into a new era. Along with Rock, Revolution and general desperation, it looked like we were on the edge of a change in society.

And we were, of course. And we're still in the grip of reaction, boiling over into insanity. Harlan Ellison is 77 years old. Phil Dick is 30 years dead.



And I see Hunger Games in my near future. It could be worse.

Utopia, Dystopia, ZEGS

Being that it's my core competence, I suppose I have to mention the excrement plopped into the public domain today by the zombie eyed granny starver running the majority party in the legislative body responsible for all revenue bills in these United States.

The immorality of the thing is overwhelming. That the entire function of the federal government can't be squeezed into less than nothing is also bleeding obvious. That the entire thing is a move towards bring out your dead dystopian idiocy is even more obvious. So what do I mean my core competence?



Posting silly pictures. But it's too depressing.

Kate Beckinsale may be a real person. Dammit.

About half the traffic that's ever hit this blog was looking for Kate Beckinsale ass. It seems to be time to confess that the only KB movie I ever saw was Much Ado About Nothing, a truly boring movie even by the loose standards of filmed plays. So who is Ms. B?



She won writing prizes as a child and went to Oxford. Then she did a couple serious movies, had a boob job, nose job & lobotomy, and became a movie star. Next she's in Total Recall, which I may go see, in what seems to be the minor Sharon Stone role from the original.

So fly away Kate. Your time here is done. I'm going back to roots. The source of wisdom.

“"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"
"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
"It's the same thing," he said.”

Another thing to think of every morning is one true thing that a lot of people ignore. Today my thought was : We really need more unions. The amount of anti-union rubbish drilled into people's heads that they can't see what's happened to us in the last 40 years of union busting is quite appalling.

More on deception...

If you think about it, wouldn't we all have been better off if this cover hadn't been a fakeout?



Aquaman is the firewall. As long as he's around, all the other detested superheroes get to keep on causing more trouble than they're worth. Which is most all of them, except Bubbles.



Because gosh darn it, as many times as the girls have destroyed Townsville trying to save it, they're still cute.

Yes, nice weather has melted my brain. Not just mine. I searched Boston.com for something at all interesting, and the closest there was turned out to be some routine Gourmet food from Maine. Time to go buy an orange shirt & get a job in a foreclosure mill.

Lying & Laughing, Ho Ho Ho

Every now and then, you have to pause in analysis and wonder at what people really believe. And then realize that huge swatches of it are utter rubbish, spread by people who know better, but just don't care.

i.e., paid liars. (And I dont mean Kate Beckinsale's plastic surgeon. However she got them, her boobs are real.)

Time to name some names, point out some occasions of deceit.

We covered global warming. Tracking Willard Romneys lies is a full time job.

Generation Opportunity is a standard issue Republican Astroturf operation designed to appeal to the Ute of Amerika. I ran into them because they set up a Facebook scam to drag in people upset about gas prices. The joke I posted go deleted in about 30 seconds. Of course, demagoging gas prices based on who is president is a major Republican effort this year. There was a bit of attempt to blame Bush in 2008, but on the whole sanity (and the collapse of the world economy) prevailed.

That Republicans freely lie to each other, strangers and themselves is not really news. This is after all the party that is attempting to worship a senile ex-actor whose entire presidency is a sham.

But who is the father of lies, the one who makes people happy to be lied to?



That's right. First we lie to children. Then, when kids start to catch on that grown-ups are conspiring to lie to them, they learn the big lesson : pretending to believe leads to good things. So they move on from Santa to the next layer of fakebelieve, the Old Man in the Sky. Again, good things happen to those who pretend to believe, nothing but trouble for unbelievers.

And that's why you need to do a child a favor : Tell them the truth. Santa is a wino working for minimum wage & the chance to have kids sit on his lap & pull his finger.

Otherwise, they could grow up to be a Fox News viewer, spreading chain emails and chuckling about those dumb old scientists who don't know about Jesus on a dinosaur.

Pets or Meat

Try as you might to avoid the subject, there could be a vegetarian sharing your food in the near future.

The just-released “Vegetarianism in America” study, published by Vegetarian Times (vegetariantimes.com), shows that 3.2 percent of U.S. adults, or 7.3 million people, follow a vegetarian-based diet. Approximately 0.5 percent, or 1 million, of those are vegans, who consume no animal products at all. In addition, 10 percent of U.S., adults, or 22.8 million people, say they largely follow a vegetarian-inclined diet.

Data for this survey were collected by the Harris Interactive Service Bureau on behalf of Vegetarian Times. The poll surveyed 5,050 respondents, a statistically representative sample of the total U.S. population. Vegetarian Times commissioned RRC Associates, a research firm in Boulder, Colo., to perform the data analysis.

The 2008 study also indicates that of the non-vegetarians surveyed 5.2 percent, or 11.9 million people, are “definitely interested” in following a vegetarian-based diet in the future.

The study also collected data on age, gender and other demographic factors. Of the vegetarians surveyed:

•59 percent are female; 41 percent are male.
•42.0 percent are age 18 to 34 years old; 40.7 percent are 35 to 54; and 17.4 percent are over 55.
•57.1 percent have followed a vegetarian diet for more than 10 years; 18 percent for 5 to 10 years; 10.8 percent for 2 to 5 years, 14.1 percent for less than 2 years.

40 years ago, there were only about 1% vegetarians. Nowadays, only about 1% of us ever eat veal. Throw in the horrors (and horrible lack of flavor) of factory farming, and long distance shipping, and you're stuck with the grim reality : You have to start thinking about what you eat.

For starters, there's the easy calls. These are pets:


No need to think. These guys have lived with people for thousands of years, and trust us. Trust is vital. And love.

Rabbits? Some people think they're cute. Some are pets, and you have to respect that. Wild rabbits will take your garden & spit in your face. Eat them before they do!

Then there are these walking hunks of meat -



A steer is born to be eaten. Seemed pretty simple a while back, and might still be if you take the medium view. People eat animals. Always have. And, for now, so do I -just not as much as before there was a v-person in the house. But how many of us could be the one that chops the turkeys heads off?



Every year the world gets more crowded, and we get more gentle.



For now.

50 people a day!

are coming here & saying nothing.



Except Riley.



So what do the rest of yuns have to say?

Burden of Goddamn Proof, Lady!

Calvin Trillin wrote a story about jury duty. There was one hold out juror, who insisted that while the plaintiff might have been damaged by the railroad, it was possible that he might not have. She just couldn't tell. After lengthy attempts to explain to the woman that according the the judge's instructions, this meant a finding for the defendant, had bounced off her head, Trillin was reduced to screaming "Burden of Proof lady! Burden of Goddamn Proof!".




While on a jury you can generally rely on a judge's instructions as to where the goal lines are. In other cases, the standards can be less explicit, but just as certain. Often it's Experts vs. Liars. I mentioned Megan McArdle's dithering a couple weeks back. Her Tallness was a bit uncertain whether she should go with All the Climate Scientists in the World, or the Wingnuts. Now, seeing as the scientists have done all the work, checked their numbers millions of times, understood the physics, doublechecked the history, and come to an agreement, some of them are getting a wee bit impatient that every knucklehead in the world has appointed themself a juror. When Robert Wilson scoffed at McArdle, her Twitter meltdown hit the Richter Scale. The epicenter was Wilson patiently uncovering Megan's method, which centers around never reading that which she talks about:

Megan McArdle ‏ @asymmetricinfo
@wilsonrobertj I've stated an opinion, defended it with examples, and indicated I'm open to correction. You've . . . demanded I name a paper

4h Megan McArdle ‏ @asymmetricinfo
@wilsonrobertj I find *your* refusal to name a model particularly strange. As if you don't know which ones are reliable, almost.

4h Megan McArdle ‏ @asymmetricinfo
@wilsonrobertj Given that when asked to do so, you fall back on "You can't name a model!", I tend to suspect it's because you can't.

4h Robert Wilson ‏ @wilsonrobertj
@asymmetricinfo I am simply asking that you provide some evidence of having read a scientific model before saying it is useless.

In equally glorious Fail news, Megan's sub Avik Roy demonstrated the futility of Medicaid:

Chapin White of the Center for Studying Health System Change has published an important new paper in Health Services Research, a journal of health economics, which suggests that a critical part of the Affordable Care Act--its expansion of Medicaid coverage to 16 million more Americans--may actually reduce those individuals' access to health care.

but forgot Rule #2 : Don't misappropriate the work of somebody who is watching you:

I asked Chapin White to comment on Avik Roy’s post about his work. In reply, Chapin sent me the following by email and authorized me to post it.

The author of the recent Atlantic blog post did not contact me while writing the piece, and I found that it missed several key points.

& details follow.

A big problem is the inability to distinguish between Data & Lore.



It's not that tough. Usually, when somebody tells you "Scientists don't know everything. 100 years ago everybody thought X" a little history checking will reveal that no, in fact the people who actually studied the issue in an orderly manner had concluded that X was a load of bunk long before.

Scientists are losing patience. Pretty soon, if we don't shape up, they'll unleash the killer robots.


And we know we don't want that.

Damn you kids, I don't have a lawn!

My favorite question is : Why are things so fucked up? When the obvious answer : "Somebody benefits from it" doesn't work, it gets more interesting.

Some things develop to meet needs & are hard to change when needs change : The QWERTY keyboard, stoplights.

Some things transition from fashion to custom: Lawns, big antlers. It can happen in biology, and when it gets too extreme, buh-bye.

Some things were originally made one way, and options only later came in : Asphalt shingles were always dark.

A couple of these items - lawns and roofs - have huge adverse effects on our energy and land use. Lots of people are working hard to change them.

It's Sunday, so let's just focus on something that was bloody annoying from the start: Asphalt colored cars are the most obvious example of misguided fashion, except when one is heading right towards you & you can't see it. With car sales and miles driven most likely permanently on the downside of the peak, at least in the US, the only way things will change is if repainting becomes popular again.


Who drives preference? And to what extent does preference drive purchasing decisions? 11.5% say they prefer silver, 8.37% gray - although I've never met these people. And yet they make up at least 50% of the junk on the roads.

Sure, you can make an ugly car in any color



(One of these used to live on my street - it was even uglier in person.)

But on the whole, nobody that I want to know looks at a row of bright shiny colored vehicles and thinks "Wouldn't this look better in gray?", although car thieves do. If you're worried about theft:

Of the 109 pink cars in the study, not one was stolen. A bright and uncommon color, like pink, may be as effective deterrent as an expensive security system. Ben Vollaard, who conducted the research, wrote, “If the aversion to driving a car in an offbeat color is not too high – or if someone actually enjoys it – then buying deterrence through an uncommon car color may be at least as good a deal as buying deterrence through an expensive car security device.”

Practicality & aesthetics are aligned : Go bright. After all,



"I won that shiny red car!" wouldn't have worked in gray, would it, Diane?



Update 3/27: The Ugly Car is back! I saw it at the shopping center.

Tomorrow's & Yesterday's Funnies Today

It's the weekend. Time to get stupid.



While nothing can top Family Circus for porntastic rip off potential, there's a lot of fun stuff out there.

Archie out of context is an endless puzzle : How bored were the authors when they came up with this stuff?



(And yes, there's a ton of gay stuff, not all of it Jughead)

Superman put all the jokes on the cover, and Superdickery ponders them.



Joe Mathlete had a good run before giving in to the unstoppable force of Marmaduke.

Marmaduke is about to sodomize a banker into signing his owner-man's loan papers.

And yes, before I get any emails, Marmaduke will probably eat the banker after he sodomizes him. What else would he do?

And some more or less current strips better than anything in the newspaper:

Cyanide & Happiness -




Emily Flake/Lulu Eightball used to run in Digboston, but now she's all over the place.




Babbage & Lovelace isn't so much a comic strip as a comic that weaves in and out of a blog.




So whadda you got?

The 101st Chairborne Fights On

Most people ignore the results of 20th Century Philosophy. This is a pretty good policy, since the major accomplishment of Philosophy was to prove that it's impossible to learn anything useful from philosophy.

But along the way to this clear truth, epistemology spit out a bunch of stuff about truth as observation, universal subjectivity, and uncertainty. Wonderful stuff, if you happen to be in the business of denying reality for fun and profit.

Which is how history became a battleground. Ronaldus Magnus, in late life a semi-senile nonentity snoozing in the Oval Office while his regents robbed the country blind, is recast as the Great Hero. Our blazingly illegal sack of Iraq is still being defended as well. They don't say why we did it, but whatever it is was cool, right?



Which brings us back, of course, to Willard Mitt Romney, Manchurian candidate. That every word that comes from his mouth, including "and" and "the" is a lie, is beyond dispute. Yet he's the Serious candidate.




Shorter Downpuppy: Arrrrrgh!

Ass Deans 2 :Eclectic Bugaboo

In a world that has descended to the point where bored TSA agents get to probe Kate Beckinsale's ass












Riley raised the question of where things started to go wrong.





"What a revoltin' development this is!", he pithily summarized.

The easy answer is 1970. Richard Nixon had power, and unleashed the incoherent rage of everyone who was feeling threatened by the end of white male domination and the old double standard. You can draw a pretty clear path from that moment to 2010, when it became clear to everyone that the released forces of resentment were in complete control of the Republican party, and that they put their movement ahead of any notions of Truth, Justice & The (Old) American Way.

Easy, but is it relevant to the capture by Management of higher education? I think so. The key is cynicism. By the 1970s, the ranks of administrators were already growing. To resist them required a dedication to the best interest of the institution. In a world where any mention of that will be assumed to be self-interest, how can it be raised?

I think the key here is withering scorn. Make the accusers who cite your self interest declare their greed openly.

After that it should be easy.



3/8: No new post today. Flu sux.

The Legion of Substitute Heroes

Megan McArdle is on book leave, with her Shoes of Endless Mockability filled by substitutes* -




and in meat world I was forced to deal with people who get all their information from chain emails and Fox News. It ended with merriment and hugging, so whaddaya know? Barbie remembers the Surreal Life, when Tammy Faye make friends with Ron Jeremy

so she says to give the Reason Droids a chance. Sorry, not that much time in this life. Meanwhile, what to do to roll back the seas of disinformation? Perhaps the help of a brilliant archeologist?



Alas, there was a car crash. So we need a person of billiance, knowledge, eloquence and absolute objectivity. So where in the world is there in the world a man so extraodinaire?





I humbly admit, I'm much too noble to lie. So time to, ummmm, add a few more links?


*The Superman comic was obtained legally during a boring part of Open Air Circus. Only the jpg was stolen.

Corrupt or systemic? Spreading the lice meme

I've been ponderously pondering the question of whether it's worth classifying organizations that aren't meeting their stated goals as evil or inept. In some cases, it's easy. Big banks & the NCAA are so far gone that there is no other sane approach than direct attack, with the aim of tearing them down stone by stone.

Then there are the boundary zones. Why is the Justice Department propping up the malefactors? Is the Catholic Church beyond salvation?

Of course, the concern here is with over-managed Universities. A University is a pretty grand notion and generally a well respected institution. Managers are an infestation - like cane toads in Australia, pigs in Hawaii, or sparrows in my hedge. How can the native species - professors and students - drive them out?

Think of senior managers as lice on Kate Beckinsale. Hot Kate Beckinsale has thought of them:

No bigger than the head of a pin, insects of the “Braula” genus live clinging to the fuzzy body of a honeybee and feed on nectar straight from the host’s mouth, even tickling the bee’s face until it regurgitates

Pity if she had to go bald -



And a pity for all the Ass Deans who'd have to find real jobs, but Hey! they all have the credentials to go forth & drag down less important institutions.

In any event, to add some educational content

UAB sexytime

Mostly the conversion of Universities from educational institutions to personal revenue streams for hordes of administrators is a pretty dry topic. Not always, thanks to Roger Shuler.

UAB is a pretty interesting place. They called me years back & enlisted me in a stroke study. Since I've had lots of ancestors die of stroke, many quite young, they didn't have to ask twice.

Turns out they hired the girlfriend of the UT President
as their president and the two of them proceeded to bleed both colleges blind.

Well, blinder. Turns out UAB has been specializing in research fraud for years. Shuler thinks the settlement only covered about 1% of the damage, which sounds about right. Shuler seems most upset that they hired a looser f'ball coach.

This is a pity. The women who call me every 6 months to see if I've had a stroke or significant brain damage are extremely nice, and quite dedicated. I suspect they haven't even siphoned off a significant chunk of the $400,000,000 Shuler thinks the researchers stole, and probably haven't been on any dirty weekends with Carol & John.

Messing around with the format

I like the layout but the background color isn't quite right.

It's too Heather Menzies



I want something more Linda Ronstadt

God is Still Dead

And now so is

William Hamilton

, who wrote GOD's obituary.

Being a theologian who did not believe in GOD made for an interesting career.

His son, Donald Hamilton, recalled how fellow faculty living on their leafy dead end street "hated my father."

Their family recited The Lord's Prayer before bedtime and attended a Presbyterian church until his father's notoriety made him no longer welcome at services, at which point he led his family in Bible studies at home.

Despite holding an endowed chair and full tenure, and being sent by the school to represent them at the funeral of four black girls killed in a church fire, William Hamilton was no longer allowed to teach and left for a new job at New College in Sarasota, Fla., said Ronald Carter, a student of Hamilton's at the time and now an emeritus professor of humanities at the University of Texas.

Barbie died for our sins.

Pay me, Bradley

My analysis of voting systems is that they should be responsive to revealed preferene. Derek Lowe points us to some new research in that area which indicates that members of the socionomically dispossessed orders have neurochemical disorders which manifest themselves rather frequently in forms of self abnegatory activation.

Although I support the universal franchise, I am not aware of anything about Voter ID laws that would impact them unfavourably. Indeed, Arnold Kling, Tyler Cowen and the Cato Institute are surprisingy united in their support for these laws. As far as I know my analysis of the metanarratives isconcordant with the lack of repercussions. There are only 20 million people lacking ID, which is less than 1 percent of the voting age population, and it seems to me unlikely that they have any stake in the outcomes. After all, anyone whose personal narratvie is centered around the ethos of the Untermenschen would prefer a beer and a doughnut, the working mans friends, to having to get out of their warm, happy homes to vote.

Update: A commenter points out :

Yet I've seen first hand and talked to people who have been recruited and had free cigarrettes, beer, etc. loaded on bus and taken to the polls to vote Dem being promised the Dems would give them more handouts. The town I grew up in was so predictable and every year you would see the buses rolling into the projects to buy votes.

Contest update : Just when I was afraid there would be no entries Katherine Mangu-Ward comes through with an effort that has winning potential : Most of the people who read it thought it was real McArdle! Also, she included a recipe & never broke the 4th wall. Best of all : Bradley really is paying her.