emergency spending.

Hillary Umbridge Clinton got stomped in NC, and barely scraped out another Pyrrhic victory in Hoosier Land.  The nomination has moved almost entirely out of reach for her, so what does she do?

She donates another $6.4 million of her own money to the Clinton Campaign. 

The lust for power is strong in this one.  Six point four million bucks, for a new set of lances to keep charging at windmills.  And she has the balls to call other people “elitist”?

How many school lunches could you have bought with that?  How many midnight basketball programs, soup kitchens, and college scholarships could you have financed?  How many health care premiums, food vouchers, or heating bills could you have paid for the poor, downtrodden folk you’re trying to bribe into voting for you?

I don’t begrudge anyone their fortune, and I don’t claim the right to tell anyone where, when, and how to spend their own money, but damn.  If your platform involves harping on the selfishness of the wealthy, and threatening the  extortion of money from my pocket to pay for the ailments of the less fortunate, you had better lead the way by example.

on the ritualistic charring of animal flesh.

Any of you folks in the Greater BoSox Allegiance Zone interested in a meet-’n-feed at Casa Munchkin Wrangler some time in the next few weeks?

It just dawned on me that we’ve been in the new house for close to six months now, and I haven’t met any local bloggers and Intarwebz pals yet.  Now that the snow is gone, and the temperatures are climbing, we can actually hang out on the back patio and throw some dead critter onto the grill, shoot some guns, and do some of that socializing that everyone keeps raving about.

We’re in the Upper Valley, west-central NH, right by Lebanon and Hanover…an easy shot up (or down) I-89 or I-91.  Chime in if you’re interested and willing to make the drive.  It’s about an hour from the MA border if you come up I-91 through VT, and little more if you come up via I-93/89 through Manchester and Concord. 

Bring the kids if you have ‘em, and absolutely bring whatever guns you want to shoot/show off.

What say you?

a good day for elitism, is it not?

Via Atomic Nerds, we learn of the scientifically illiterate crowd concerned citizens filing suit against CERN because they’re afraid the impending test of the Large Hadron Collider will create a Black Hole that will destroy the planet, or cause some other similarly unpleasant event.

I love the snark in the CERN spokesman’s comment on the lawsuit, where he points out that the nature of quantum physics means there’s some probability of almost anything happening, including the chance that the LHC “might make dragons that will eat us up.”

Personally, I think the chance of creating dragons is a compelling argument for the activation of the LHC, because that would be totally awesome.

In related news, I am striving to replace certain expletives in my vocabulary with new, less blasphemous variants. I’ve grown particularly fond of “Reason H. Science!”, and “Oh, for Sagan’s sake!”, but I’m always shopping for new ideas, so if you have any scientifically-themed alternate expletives, feel free to submit them.

the bird diner is all fucked up.

Some commando squirrel raided the bird feeder last night, skillfully chomping through the string to make the whole thing crash to the ground and dispense its contents.

Should have added “BIRDS ONLY” to that “FREE BIRD SEED” sign.  Damn unintentional loopholes.

places to see before i die, part II

Can you believe I lived in Europe for the first twenty-four years of my life, and never once took the opportunity to go and see the Sistine Chapel?

If I was asked to compile a list of humanity’s greatest artistic achievements, this one would be right near the top of it. Four of the top ten slots on that list would list works by two Italian Renaissance artists, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. In no particular order, they’d be the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Pietà, the Last Supper, and the Mona Lisa.

The nice thing is that when I do go to Rome and Paris again to see those works in person for the first time, I’ll have Quinn and Lyra with me, and they’ll get to see them, too.

search term safari.

It’s Monday morning, which means it’s time to milk the Stats page for easy blogging material!

best price neo alpha smart

The Neo will cost you $219 if you order it from Renaissance Learning, and their reputation among writers and journalists means that even a used one on eBay rarely goes for much less than $180 or so…that is, if you can even find one.  People who have them tend to hang on to them.  I plan on keeping mine long enough to have them put it into the pine box with me when I take that final dirt nap.  Who knows, I may go some place where I can keep up that 1,000-words-per-day schedule.

fbi firearms sidearm

The Feebs carry Glocks.  They get their choice of either a Glock 22 or Glock 23 at Quantico.  Personally, I think they downgraded when they moved away from the S&W Model 13 to autoloading pistols.  That was a no-nonsense fighting gun.

donated organs shouldn’t be allowed

Huh?  I mean, I’ve heard arguments against organ donation for profit, and some of them make sense, but what kind of argument could you offer against organ donation per se?  I don’t need my spare parts anymore when I’m dead, and even if my family can’t get any money for my heart or kidneys, it would be a complete waste to let them rot with the rest of me when they can save someone else’s life.

best laptop for writing novel on

See “Alphasmart Neo” above.  Weighs two pounds, runs for a year on three AA batteries, comes with a great keyboard, and doesn’t distract you with the Internets or even Solitaire.  It’s an input-only device, which really increases productivity.

marko munchkin atheist

Kind of sounds like me, although I’m not a munchkin.  I just wrangle them…hence the title of the blog.

putting g1000 in an older baron

You can’t do that.  The Baron 58 is type-certified for the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit, and you can only order a new Baron with one installed.  Retrofitting an older Baron is not possible yet.  The only Beech aircraft certified for G1000 retrofit is the King Air C90 turboprop.

vietnam war statistics under truman

Harry S. Truman left office in 1953.  American participation in the Vietnam Conflict didn’t kick off until 1959. 

walther p1 disassembly

Remove the magazine, retract the slide, and make sure the weapon is clear.  Lock the slide to the rear with the slide lock lever, then rotate the disassembly lever located near the front of the trigger guard.  Grasp the back of the slide and guide it forward off the frame.  Turn slide and barrel upside down, pinch in the locking “button” at the rear of the barrel locking wedge, and slide the barrel out of the slide assembly.  Your Walther P1 is now field-stripped.

why was dresden chosen as a target 1945

It was largely undamaged, packed with refugees, Wehrmacht units, and factories, and close enough to the advancing Russians to make a good demonstration of what Allied air power can do.

word processor reduce eye strain backgro

I like maroon on beige, or amber on black.  Supposedly, the most eye-friendly color pattern is amber on green.

bdu pants why buttons and not zippers

Less prone to breakage, easier to fix in the field (just sew a loose button back on with your issue sewing kit), and more quiet in operation.

best computer keyboard munchkin

“Best” is subjective, but a great many heavy-duty typists like the tactile feedback of the buckling-spring design in the old IBM Model M.  It makes a terrible racket, but it feels awesome, with distinct tactile feedback…not too heavy, not too mushy.

revolvers a more elegant weapon

Yes, they are.  From a  more civilized era.

victorinox gak pocket clip

The German Army Knife doesn’t have a pocket clip, nor does it have a provision to attach one.  I keep a “monkey fist” paracord-wrapped ball bearing attached to the lanyard ring on the GAK, so I can lift it out of the pocket with the paracord. 

I just noticed that today’s edition is mostly helpful rather than mostly snarky.  I’m going to have to work on my attitude this morning…

a depressing theory.

Here’s why the Welfare State always ends up collapsing under its own weight:

We negate natural selection by letting the crummy genetic material propagate.  What’s worse, not only do we allow it to propagate, we let it prosper to the point where it crowds out the more adaptable genetic stock.

It’s not so much that we “allow” the stupid and lazy to breed.  You can’t ethically prevent anyone from having kids, and any policy aimed at forcible birth control smacks of eugenics and has “immorality” written all over it.  No, the folly of the welfare state is that it shelters the stupid and lazy from the negative consequences of their own choices, and keeps those particular genetic lines from dying off like they would in nature. 

We not only don’t discourage them from breeding, we pay them to have offspring.  We then proceed to shelter them from every possible bad consequence of their laziness, inability, or stupidity by providing food stamps, free housing, free health care, and little warning stickers on the toasters and blowdriers that tell them not to use those devices in the shower.  We foster a culture of altruism where any self-caused misery on the part of the have-nots and know-nots is automatically made the responsibility of the people who didn’t make the same mistakes.  We remove most of the incentives for being smart, being productive, and for avoiding decisions that may lead to starvation. 

When you reward someone for birthing kids they can’t feed by taking money away from the people who don’t produce more mouths than they can feed, is it a wonder when eventually the first group outnumbers the second?  Is it a surprise when the first group figures out they can outvote the other group to keep the honey flowing?  In a system where the vote of the non-productive counts as much as the vote of the producer, you’ll eventually and inevitably have fiscal collapse, as the number of contributors gradually shrinks to a point where it will no longer support the number of leeches on the system.

Is this the opinion of a heartless egoist, or that of a realist?  Am I just totally off-base for thinking that the current system of dolism has nothing to do with “compassion”, and that it is mathematically and ethically unsustainable? 

a model libertarian society?

I’ve gotten a ton of backlinks from a splog. The “Links” section on my stats page is now virtually useless, since all the links back to my blog get swamped by the incessant backlinking from that one spam blog on Blogger. The interesting thing is that the splog is ostensibly all about jokes, and none of the links on their page visibly lead back to any of my posts, but they found a way to create backlinks to a zillion WordPress and Blogspot blogs in an attempt to make their Google ads profitable and drive up their search rating.

This kind of thing sort of reminds me of the sad fate of Usenet, the Internet newsgroup system.

Once upon a time, before the emergence of the vBulletin forum, I was a dedicated Usenet participant. I had a long list of groups to which I subscribed, and things were fun. This was in the pioneer days of the Intartubes, in the early-to-mid-1990s.

Towards the end of the 1990s, Usenet newsgroups became increasingly difficult to actually use for their purpose, because spammers essentially started taking over many newsgroups. Before long, most of my favorite newsgroups were completely unusable, since nobody wanted to download a few megabytes of newsgroup spam to get to the few real posts buried in all that spam.

I’m the administrator of a well-respected firearms discussion board, and the only thing that keeps the vBulletin forum system from suffering the same fate as Usenet is the increasingly sophisticated technical anti-spam arsenal built into the software. Still, I have to delete at least a dozen users and their associated drive-by spam posts every week–people who do the virtual equivalent of dropping their pants and shitting into someone else’s front yard, leaving a steaming pile of cell phone, sneaker, or iPod spam.

Now, the Internet is in many ways the model for a libertarian society–very little regulation, and minimal government interference. Free speech and free markets all the way. What the Internet lacks, however, is a mechanism to effectively and consistently punish those who would visit fraud on others, or infringe on virtual property rights. In real life, you can have anything from a neighborhood watch to a pintle-mounted Ma Deuce on the front porch to discourage those lawn-shitters, but in the virtual world, you’re mostly limited to banning their IP address and cleaning their mess off your virtual lawn.

This leads me to my conviction that a minimal government is a necessity for a functioning society, because there needs to be a mechanism to safeguard the rights of the citizen who can’t do so themselves, and put the retaliatory use of force under objective control. The Internet lacks such a mechanism by design, and as a result, it’s infested with scammers, fraudsters, thieves, and people who walk all over people’s property rights because they can–because there’s nothing in place that provides an effective deterrent to force or fraud.

Maybe that’s where the anarchists and “anarcho-libertarians” have it just as wrong as the Communists and the Socialists: they don’t take human nature into account. Where the Commies fail to recognize the human drive to act in one’s own interests, the anarchist crowd fails to recognize the lack of rationality in most people when it comes to pursuing those interests.  While libertarians and Objectivists advance rational self-interest as the most important guiding principle, they, too, fail to take into account that, while everyone pursues their self-interest, few people do so rationally.

Since you can’t reason with the unreasonable, the only other option left to protect your rights is force, which brings us right back to why we need a government. Its first and (ideally) only function is to a.) protect the rights of those who cannot do so themselves (since an inability to answer violations of one’s rights with force leads to the spammers and thugs of the world to walk all over the weak members of society), and to b.) make sure that the use of that force is under objective control, so the whole place doesn’t merely devolve into a sort of feudalism, where the people who can afford to buy the most enforcers and hire the most judges get to run the show.

Usenet turned into a spam-filled wasteland because there are no property rights on Usenet, and no way to enforce them even if there were any. In the absence of a way to enforce such rights, the cell phone spammers and 419 scammers of the world will move in and use any available avenue and patch of virtual real estate for their own purposes, even if it destroys the very thing they use as a marketing vehicle. These people pursue their self-interest, but without the rationality required to make a libertarian society work. They’re like locusts, feeding off of resources until they’re destroyed, and then moving on to other pastures.

Still, with all its theoretical flaws, the beauty of libertarianism is that it proposes the maximum amount of freedom and property rights for those who play by the rules, and the least restrictions on defending the same rights against those who don’t play by the rules. (The rules being “Keep your hands to yourself”, and “Mind your own business”, which makes for a rather short and uncomplicated criminal code.)

a pointless math exercise.

That post about the guy trying to cash a $360 billion check had me wondering how much paper we’re talking about when we fling numbers of that size around.

Because they’re all the same size, all U.S. bills are the same weight, just a hair under one gram, or 0.03 ounces.

A billion dollars of cash in the largest possible denomination ($100), would weigh 10,ooo,ooo grams, or 10,000 kilograms–ten metric tons.

Three hundred and sixty billion dollars in $100 bills would therefore weigh three thousand six hundred metric tons, which is almost four thousand short tons–eight million pounds of paper money.

That’s a bunch of weight. Your average American tractor trailer can haul a maximum of roughly forty short tons, which means that you would need 99 tractor trailers to haul three hundred and sixty billion dollars in cash, give or take a trailer or two.

I’m almost entirely sure that our criminal mastermind genius pulled up to that bank in something less than a convoy of ninety-nine big rigs.

the intartubes and you: reflections on anonymity.

I don’t hide behind a super-secret Internet handle.  I write this blog under my real name, and anyone with half an ounce of computer skills can Google my name and dredge up all kinds of information.  There are a dozen or so Internet forums (fora?) where I am a member, and I usually post under a variation of my real name there as well.

I was reading through the archive over at Heather Armstrong’s place, and it appears that she has gotten a lot of flak for sharing not only details about herself, but also for sharing pictures and details about her daughter Leta.  Other big-time bloggers seem to be split on the issue–Danny Evans at Dad Gone Mad doesn’t post any pictures of his children, because he says that his first duty is to protect them, whereas John Scalzi has no issues with posting pictures of his daughter Athena.  Many of the most widely read bloggers freely share much information about themselves, and some stay fiercely anonymous.

I post pictures of my children, and I suppose that this increases their exposure to potential harm, since anyone with an Internet connection and mad Google skillz could probably figure out where we live.  I made the choice to write about them anyway, since a.) they are obviously a big part of my life, and b.)  most of my readers seem to enjoy the pictures and anecdotes.  Rest assured that I am highly selective about the things I post, and that I choose to keep private 99% of the things that transpire here at the Munchkin Wrangler ranch.  I also don’t consider myself nearly important enough to maintain anonymity–if people like Heather by-God-Dooce Armstrong, one of the most widely read bloggers in the country, or John Scalzi, a bestselling author, can post about themselves and their families without getting abducted/raped/killed in their sleep by stalkers, I think I have very little to fear from my Internet audience.  My take is that we run risks every time we venture into public, and that it’s wise to mitigate those risks as much as possible, but that there’s a point at which you have to sacrifice living your life and being social for the added safety that comes with obscurity.  I enjoy writing the stuff I do, and I think that, all factors considered, it’s an acceptable tradeoff.

My concerns about Internet stalkers are also greatly mitigated by the fact that we’re well-armed and skilled with our weapons, and that we have a highly sensitive alarm system.  When I think about the possibility of someone breaking in and doing something to my family, I don’t feel much fear, but rather a great swell of pity for the poor soul who would come to this place looking for trouble.  (Imagine that last bit spoken with a Professor Xavier/Patrick Stewart sort of accent.) 

When I look at my blogroll, the anonymous bloggers outnumber the openly named ones by a factor of at least two to one, so my attitude towards anonymity is probably not the most common one in the Blogosphere.  I know some of you by name, and a lot of you by screen name only.  I have my picture up on my blog, but I don’t know what many of you look like in real life.

Why do you choose to post under your real name, or choose to remain anonymous?  Do you think it’s irresponsible to put up the pictures and names of one’s children, and the city/town of residence?  Do you consider your existence Google-proof?  What’s the difference between posting your childrens’ names and pictures on Flickr, and taking them out into public where a zillion strangers can notice them and potentially just take down our license plate number or follow us home?  Are you unconcerned about people finding out your real identity, or paranoid about it?