Maggie's Farm

Perhaps I spoke too soon when I wrote about Andrew Meyer, AKA Captain Fantastic the Don't-Tase-Me-Bro Cowboy the other day:

No one anything like the people that were forced to choose between letting him carry on like the jerk he manifestly is, or removing him from the premises, will ever be heard from.

Jack Dunphy, the nom de plume of a policeman who works in Los Angeles, then writes it down for National Review, proves me wrong with a blast of reality from the trenches:

There is an axiom in police work that goes something like this: If you have a lawful reason for wanting someone to behave in a certain way, first you ask him, then you tell him, then you make him. In the case of Andrew “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” Meyer, the man now enjoying the waning moments of his Warholian fifteen minutes, the asking and the telling came up shy of the mark for the cops, thus bringing on the making. And the Tasing.

Read it.

There's been plenty of discussion about the student in Florida who was physically removed from a speech being given by John Kerry. You can see an excellent round-up of reaction to it here on Pajamas Media.

I'm sure if you read all those takes on it, you might think there's a wide range of opinion. I don't. I see one kind of opinion about it. It's the opinion that's shared by the nattering classes in everything. It's the point of view of the narcissistic attention-whoring college student. No one anything like the people that were forced to choose between letting him carry on like the jerk he manifestly is or removing him from the premises will ever be heard from.

The essential thing I saw, completely overlooked by all opinion makers I read, was this young fellow's attitude toward the people who were trying to get him to comply. They were nothing to him. But then again, they are nothing to all the commenters, too. Some people applauded what they did; some excoriated what they did; but in all cases the attitude is one of deciding how well the little people did performing some menial task that was their lot. It all felt like deciding to tip a servant or not.

It's funny --a little-- that the reason this guy was yelling at John Kerry was that he was angry that Kerry wasn't angry enough; wasn't nearly as angry as him. How dare he not share his rage. He was angry, ultimately, that democracy meant that he might be forced to submit to the will of people that exist only as an abstraction; to be discussed politically, or as proles to be ordered around. He doesn't believe for one minute that John Kerry really won that election. He's angry that John Kerry refuses to use the pretexts he can cite chapter and verse to overthrow the government, with some semblance of cover-our-ass due process, and put the little people, and their wishes that rankle him so, back down where they belong. And he was very angry that people that he ranks with all the serfs would remind him of his responsibilities as a member of polite society, by daring to interrupt him and trying to remove him from the scene of his triumph. He's going to argue with a Senator. You think he's going to let some glorified mall cops tell him what to do? They dress in polyester, for Christ sakes.

September 11th is on the horizon now. There will be a flurry of text commemorating the day. None of it will be written as well as this, so you may as well stop trying right now.

The Wind In The Heights

How the hell would I know what's going on in Iraq?

That is to say, I've seen the cooter of every trashy teenage "singer" getting out of car and going to a party. I've seen all I need to see of Brangelina and the football team of children they're trying to purchase wholesale instead of doing it retail like we all do. I've seen drivel and piffle and nonsense; I know that Anna Nicole Smith's "anus is unremarkable," since I've read her autopsy. WTF is going on in Iraq? Are there any paparazzi there?

Don't get me wrong. The media has not fallen asleep or anything. I know, for instance, that Bush is Hitler. I know every permutation of his brownshirt perfidy. I've seen and read and heard eleventy billion soliloquies, with photoshopped picture learning aids, exquisitely detailing his crimes against humanity, nature, and God-- except there isn't a god, of course. Silly me. And I'm beginning to supect Helen Thomas doesn't like him much, either. And yes, I understand that Bushitler had a ninja army of mercenary big tobacco executives and Enron jacklegs and someone named Scooter precisely plant explosives during lunchtime when the buildings are empty to blow up the World Trade Center to start his illegal war for oil. I get all that.

My bad. Let's not exaggerate. When you report these things, the hair farmer at the network desk always says:

"Some say" George Bush had a ninja army of big tobacco executives and Enron jacklegs and someone named Scooter ...

Finally, Katie Couric went to Iraq. Now we're getting somewhere. I read with studied interest her dispatch, because her Ernie Pyle style would doubtless clue me in to whole situation there. The Intertoob thingie must have had a kind of interstellar binary paper jam, as I read some sort of note apparently written by a teenage girl describing how grim life at summer camp is because the compressor on the ice cream refrigerator is busted and now we don't have any ice cream. And boy, it's hot and there's no ice cream. The end.

You'll have to expend a lot of effort, it seems, to have any idea what the hell is going on in Iraq. If you Google "unreported Iraq," for instance, there's plenty about Haditha, which was plenty reported. It was so very reported, for a while. The last report I got about it was that it made John Murtha get an unlisted phone number. But since pictures of flag draped coffins are not allowed by the fascist regime we've got going, there really is nothing to report until Nancy Pelosi puts on a scarf again.

Perhaps I'll try the Intergoogle again, and see if I can find out anything about what it's like to be a soldier in Iraq. I guess since everyone on TV and radio and the newspapers are going to talk only about themselves, we should let the soldiers do likewise.

The Iraq Unreported Pool

"Darwination ensues."

I've read this drivel a million times, and I've never seen it refer to anything that remotely fits the expression.

Posting a picture of Darwin in the comments thread of any news aggregator when somebody does something daring, or even something stupid, and then buys the farm, has become a sort of religion of its own. But it's a religion without any basis in fact. And what it really is is a kind of cowardice that wears the disguise of moral and intellectual superiority. If you never ride a bicycle without a helmet, you love to point at anyone that does and say: See, he had that coming --if they fall and hit their head. To be daring is to be stupid, and to be stupid is to be inferior. Ergo, I'm the top of the food chain by virtue of being an amoral coward.

No you're not.

This worldview is held by many who have been taught nothing for 16 years of school - and counting - but that Einstein meant everything is subjective; Schroedinger's Cat means you're not really lying when you are; glossing Hobbes means not only that all the brown people deserve to starve, but it would be useful if they did; the Cretan Paradox means anybody you don't like can be defamed; and reading Rousseau means you can have a high opinion of yourself for refusing to participate in any form of gentility related to civilization. You're not a boorish slob; you're authentic.

You're not atheists, you know. Christopher Hitchens isn't really an atheist, so I doubt you are. What you are is an ingrate. You are squatting in the house that religions built, pulling things off the wall to make fires to warm your bones, all the while chanting in your brand new version of the that old-time-worship-everything- pagan sect. You're not willing to submit yourself to the rigors of participating in a sophisticated relationship with the metaphysical, so you say that persons that contemplate the sublime are just worshipping an invisible sky pixie. It gets you right off the hook for any intellectual and moral heavy lifting.

Do not, under any circumstances, miss Gerard Van der Leun's photo essay on the "Hempfest" in Seattle, Washington.

American Digest --Stoned to Death in Seattle: Hempfest 2007 Comes to Town

The United States Government wastes a lot of money, time, and effort composing dreadful anti-drug messages that they broadcast on AM radio right after Art Bell goes to sleep, and on television in the wee hours just before the test pattern comes on.

Gerard should be given all the money, and we could all gather our kids around the computer, point at his pictures, and tell them:

"I don't care if you become an alcoholic, a pederast, a serial murderer, or god forbid, a State Senator; but under no circumstances will I allow you to end up like these people."

The 9/11 Truthers lend a touch of verisimilitude to the proceedings, too.

Just say...um... wait... What?

Did someone say Islamic Rage Boy Photoshop contest?

It's a trite old slogan now. You all know where it's from. But like most things that are truly useful, they fade into the background until they are essentially invisible, a plain sort of wallpaper perhaps; and people only point out whatever shortcomings such things have. Only Europeans are bigger ingrates than Americans. We seldom appreciate anything we have; they don't appreciate the things they have, and don't appreciate us, either.

An example: I could search the internet for half a second and come up with millions of documents, scholarly and rant-like alike, telling us all how bad the Interstate Highway System is. All the evils it generates. Try finding out the sum total of what it's added to the betterment of our country, and by proxy, the world. I submit to you that no one bothers to even attempt it, because the benefits of the thing are so enormous and so far-reaching that you couldn't even begin to quantify it. So everyone just takes the benefits of it for granted and rails about a swamp that got filled in, or pollution - a little real, mostly imaginary. But then, it's much easier to complain about your cable bill than to turn the TV off, ain't it?

I want you to read an entire blog. You heard me, the whole thing.

William Kamkwamba's Malawi Windmill Blog

I'd like to think that guy is just like me. But it would be presumptuous of me to claim it. But I'd be proud if someone said it about me, that's for sure.

I'm going to head a lot of people off at the pass right now. His accomplishments have nothing to do with Gaia-love windpower one-world eco-blathering World Bank recumbent bicycle Earth Day carbon footprint nonsense. A man, aided by friends and family, is able to use his active mind and his efforts to improve the quality of his family's life through his own exertions. That, and he is able -- and allowed-- in a small way to lay his hands on the things he needs to do it. It boggles the mind what that man could do with access to a library and a Home Depot.

Please take heed: I said library and not university. A university is now generally simply an intellectual bootcamp, where you are taught that no one needs what William, and many like him, desperately and manifestly do need; things that you take for granted because you have the dough for a 600 dollar phone toy with no inkling of how it, or anything else for that matter, gets to you. They talk a good game about helping people like William in the abstract, as part of a faceless horde. Reality intrudes quickly, though, and they don't do much of anything that helps any individual like William, and generally do a great deal to harm or hamstring him. I fear many might be sanguine about returning such as me to the local equivalent of where William is now -- reading a dogeared book in the dark, slapping at the malarial mosquitoes -- as long as they can call it "progress" on the trust-fund circuit.

Also take heed: I said Home Depot and not an Al Gore celebrity self-congratulation extravaganza. They fly over people like William and me, look out the private plane's window and say: No one needs what they want. Please have my concubine feed me another lotos blossom.

I feel better about the world because William Kamkwamba's in it. You want to help him? Start by getting out of his way.

"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone."

(Text of note found in the pocket of General Dwight David Eisenhower long after the D-Day landings succeeded.)

There are certain persons - politicians - who have come to believe that they understand how all the activities of everybody in the world happen, and how these actions interact, and believe that they can direct this interaction better that the individuals themselves can acting in their own sphere of knowledge and interest.

There are two big problems with this approach, generally:

First, you have no idea what you're talking about. About much of anything. You've never really worked a day in your life. You have only the faintest idea about how the average person gets by in this world. Polite persons are silent when they are ignorant. What does that make you?

Second, even if your knowledge, such as it is, is able to inform your decisions about what we're all supposed to be doing, We can't all stand still while you figure out all the forms we've got to fill out. I know you love standing in line. Check that -- you adore having us all standing in lines you get to cut to the front of. And you adore filling out forms. Check that; you just love having us fill out forms you get to weigh and shred, after extracting the check. And you just wet yourself in glee thinking about endless talking about what to do, rather than the endless doing required of we benighted souls if we're going to get three hots and a cot until we get the bed with a lid.

All bad managers don't like anything unauthorized to happen. That's why the worst managers, the communists, wrote it down for you: If you're not directed to do it, it's illegal. Got that? They just did wholesale what all politicians do retail: pass laws all day long. Sooner or later, everything will be "decided" either way.

So what you get is productive people standing around while the boss, serene in the idea that they're smarter'n everybody else, figures out what we all should be doing. This is how you get Jimmy Carter making out the schedule for the White House tennis court when he's supposed to be, oh, I don't know, responding to the attack on the sovereign US territory that our embassies represent or something equally important. I'm getting around to that. Hold on a second, I'm on the other line.

Anyone who's ever been in a socialist country, never mind a communist one, has read or heard the breathless announcements: Funds are just being released for this now! The Bureau of Reliquary, Fill Dirt, Rice Weevil Eradication and Toiletries is announcing their Five Year Plan for this crater!

We're all supposed to run in place while the Implementation of the Overarching Arrangement of the Synod of Blueprints of the Delegation of Design of the System Subcommittee of Schemes working with the Council of Convocations Delegation to the Body of the Congress of Lickspittle and Nepotism figger out where we all fit in their universe- you know, the one their faux socialist professors banged into their pointy little heads. EU, or Eeeeuuuww -- not a dime's bit of difference.

The paint's peeling off the "Coming Soon" sign from age, generally, if the goverment's involved heavily. It takes a year to get a building permit, minimum, in the town I live in. The house gets built in ninety days, by the people being ordered around by the those folks that need a year to make up their minds if you deserve that roof over your head.

So how am I going to prove it? How am I going to prove that Al Gore doesn't know how to run an Ice Cream Parlor, never mind a country --never mind a whole planet? How am I going to prove that someone that can't find billing records when they appear to be the most important thing in the world is unlikely to be of use running the entire healthcare industry, where laying your hands on records in a timely fashion seems kind of important to the persons involved, as they point the physicians towards the correct limb to remove and so forth? Easy.

I can prove people are busy doing things all the time you wouldn't expect, or anticipate, and no matter how kooky and weird they might be, you can't predict which will pan out. Let's go to the Patent Office. At the Patent Office, everybody's equal; just right it down and we'll see what pans out.

Item 1: Bird Diaper

Item 2: Spaceship Warp Drive

So tell me, all you smartie pants; which one will pan out? Damned if I know. But I know one thing; if I left it up to you, you'd choose wrong, spectacularly wrong, nine times out of ten.

I don't want to hear another word from a Marxist masquerading as a scientist. I'm fresh out of patience for two-trust-fund Savanarolas trying to impress some lumpen girl with a cryptkeeper complexion and a shock of underarm hair by joining ELF and burning down condos and keying elaborate station wagons. I don't want another exposition on why the world will end yesterday by a hayseed Frankenstein's monster droning through an apocalyptic PowerPoint presentation with the graphs upside down and backwards.

And I especially don't want to hear another word about hydrogen. Why? Because it's stupid, that's why.

The Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass says that she could believe “six impossible things before breakfast.” Such an attitude is necessary to discuss the hydrogen economy, since no part of it is possible. Putting aside the intractable issues of fundamental physics, hydrogen production costs, and distribution show stoppers, let us proceed to discuss the problems associated with the hydrogen cars themselves. In order for hydrogen to be used as fuel in a car, it has to be stored in the car. As at the station, this could be done either in the form of cryogenic liquid hydrogen or as highly compressed gas. In either case, we come up against serious problems caused by the low density of hydrogen. For example, if liquid hydrogen is the form employed, then storing 20 kilograms onboard (equivalent in energy content to 20 gallons of gasoline) would require an insulated cryogenic fuel tank with a volume of some 280 liters (70 gallons). This cryogenic hydrogen would always be boiling away, which would create concerns for those who have to leave their cars parked for any length of time, and which would also turn the atmospheres in underground or otherwise enclosed parking garages into explosive fuel-air mixtures. Public parking garages containing such cars could be expected to explode regularly, since hydrogen is flammable over concentrations in air ranging from 4 to 75 percent, and the minimum energy required for its ignition is about one-twentieth that required for gasoline or natural gas.

Robert Zubrin at the New Atlantis calmly eviscerates hydrogen weinies, and stomps on their bits. There will be some mathematics, and unlike the 'Reality Based' community, his numbers add up.

You want a hydrogen economy? Go to the sun, and get me some.

People will point a camera at almost anything. Other people like me will point a hyperlink at people who will point a camera at almost anything. Here's a marvelous and mundane look at what's quickly becoming an anomaly: A payphone. They've got all the continents, including Antarctica. The sign on the Antarctic phone says: "Emergency? Dial 911." Who would come?

If they wanted to keep the collection smaller, they could have only included clean payphones in safe locations. Rarer than honest congressmen, those are.

Payphone Pictures.

They say most start-up businesses fail within two years. There are plenty of mistakes you can make, never mind the vagaries of your market, your government, and your personal situation.

So it is with some sadness that I bring to you this report from BusinessWeek of the demise of the oldest continuously operating family business in the world: Kongo Gumi. How old is old? They lasted for two years --700 times!

Kongo Gumi also boasted some internal positives that enabled it to
survive for centuries. Its last president, Masakazu Kongo, was the 40th
member of the family to lead the company. He has cited the company's
flexibility in selecting leaders as a key factor in its longevity.
Specifically, rather than always handing reins to the oldest son, Kongo
Gumi chose the son who best exhibited the health, responsibility, and
talent for the job. Furthermore, it wasn't always a son. The 38th Kongo
to lead the company was Masakazu's grandmother.

Another factor that contributed to Kongo Gumi's extended existence
was the practice of sons-in-law taking the family name when they joined
the family firm. This common Japanese practice allowed the company to
continue under the same name, even when there were no sons in a given
generation.

In America, turning over the keys to your son-in-law is generally a recipe for disaster, but maybe things are different in the Buddhist Temple building business.

Farewell, Kongo Gumi. We hardly knew ye.

 Re our post on ethanol subsidies earlier today:

Look, I'm tired of Al Gore. You guys can point out that he's none too bright and a hypocrite for preaching the gospel of global warming armageddon while running his electric meter fast enough to use as a baloney slicer all day long. As for me, I'd just like to point out that the guy's just plain nuts.

No; really. Crazy. This isn't like calling Bush Hitler because you want no co-pay for your Paxil and Hillary's not president yet. I really think Al Gore is Grade A-Batsh*t-Laughing Academy-Bonkers. And I bet I can prove it.

Al Gore has Carbon Dioxide Bulimia. But being a narcissistic baby boomer me-first patrician, it's my throat he wants to shove his finger down when he's done with his binges. That's an improvement on his old boss, who wanted to shove all sorts of things into all sorts of places; but really, Al, if you feel guilty because you were born with a carbon spoon in your mouth, that's no reason for me and mine to shiver unemployed in the dark. Check yourself in whatever clinic the Kennedys use this month, and make a made for TV movie about it when they're done with you. Leave me alone.

So I'll prove Al Gore is nuts. I'll take the Wikipedia entry for Bulimia, and we'll see how few words I have to change to make it fit. The changes will be marked in red. Here goes:

You know, there's comedy; high comedy, low comedy, farce, satire; there's people that think Al Gore understands the universe and everything in it, when of course he's pushing sixty and can't dress himself yet. And of course, there's always fat women slipping on banana peels. That sort of thing.

It's cruel to laugh at people in distress. We shouldn't do it. It's unkind.

For instance, if someone was to get hold a stash of old Dating Service videotapes, and edit it for all the real winners, and then posted it on YouTube, and you were to watch it, it would be mean to laugh. Really. So don't laugh. I dare you to try not to. It's just not the Christian thing to do. Good luck.

Line forms at the left, ladies