YEAOWCH!

Stupid &#$@!ing knee joint... about fifteen feet from the employee's entrance at work, my right knee dislocated, bad on a slick bit of heavy frost. Had to punch the kneecap back into place. Boy, that hurt. They saw me inside, and helped me to my desk. This hasn't happened in at least five years, and thank god for that. Hurts like a sunofagun. I'm going to have to find where I left that stupid ace bandage...

There's nothing quite so surreal as sitting in a bar, listening to a Glenn Beck-esque harangue from a Republican, female pagan social worker about the evils of the 2010 census form, and thinking that you aren't nearly as conservative as you thought you were. Strange world.

I got yelled at by a co-worker for having already mailed in my census form. I pointed out that there was very little chance of my household acquiring any additional inhabitants prior to April 1st, and he said that wasn't the point.

And yes, I checked the "Race: Other" & wrote-in "American". If Pakistani counts as a race, so does "American". Heck, an "Asian" is an inhabitant of a continent - any racial definition which includes Vietnamese, Sri Lankans, mainland Hindus, Afghans, Han Chinese, and Iranians can only be as valid as a similarly genetically-blind "American" agglomeration.

I finished watching Pumpkin Scissors, which was a bargain-bin raid trophy from last month. I had only watched the first episode back when it first aired, and didn't think much of it, having been on some sort of authenticity kick or something like that. It's a show about a military civil affairs unit (more or less, they call it "war relief", but you get the general idea) in a world which recently wrapped up a World War I-type conflict, and is suffering from the mother of all demobilization recessions.

The two protagonists are Randel Oland, a towering, badly damaged stormtrooper with a severe case of institutionalization, and Lieutenant Alice Malvin, an aristocratic enthusiast who just barely missed the war - her academy class graduated on the day of the armistice. She basically picks up Oland from the side of the road - he's a shellshocked headcase, perpetually poleaxed & in search of someone to tell him how to live without the structure that the war gave him. He makes Alice his sin-eater - someone who promises to tell him how to live as something other than the dehumanized, monstrous killer that their empire's deeply amoral military made out of him. In turn, he goes on beserker rampages of shocking viciousness when she lets his leash loose. This isn't one of those bloodless fighting shows where the protagonists never kill anyone - his on-screen body count is in the dozens, although it trails off after the initial ten episodes' bursts of bloodshed.

I didn't pay the show more attention than I did initially because it comes with a somewhat silly gimmick. Oland was part of a bio-soldier engineering project to produce specialized killing machines - chemical troops, flamethrowers, anti-tank troopers, ninja - via obscure, madscience surgery and chemical manipulation. Oland was an "anti-tank trooper", turned into a thing that could charge a tank & basically tear it apart single-handed, with nothing more than a pair of the Jaws of Life and a preposterous fifty-calibre "Doorknocker" anti-armor pistol. The show looks like it's going to be "tank of the week"-style weekly rampages, but they drop that after about four iterations. After that, it turns into something a lot more interesting.

That's because Alice takes over the show, and Oland becomes a supporting character. He's a monster looking for salvation, but Alice is an actual Hero. She's a straightforward, bloody-minded, ruthless, hard-charging lieutenant, who never calls Oland on his monstrous beserker outbursts, or accepts the limitations and compromises demanded by the corruption of the military around her, and the economic failures of society in general. There's one arc which basically consists of Alice's merry band of "war relief" specialists repeatedly arresting the same group of drug dealers (who are victimizing the population of war refugees they're trying to get resettled), only to have them be bailed out the moment they get to headquarters. Eventually, she tries to save the dealers from their own boss, who grew understandably wroth with the hassle and expense of dozens of bailouts, and just ordered his Dragon to incinerate the whole lot of them, soldiers dealers and all.

Anyways, the TV series ends with a long six-episode arc about a gang of petty-marxist workers who were incited by a shadowy conspiracy to descend upon a nobles' ball, pitchforks and axes in hand, to kill a corrupt economic minister & slaughter the feckless, partying nobles while they were in the neighborhood. Alice, attending the ball with her fiance & sisters, spends the next six episodes attempting to defuse the situation in her own way: via the narrative of righteous, judicious violence. It's a fascinating dance of manipulation and pugnacity, as she retrieves her blade, challenges the corrupt, cowering minister to a duel, and proceeds to filibuster the potential massacre into an arrest of all guilty parties.

Eventually.

In the interim, there's a virtuoso display of the practical uses of violence, and an explicit demonstration of how weapons can be tools for changing the minds of your opponent. There's a soliloquy by a minor villain on why bladed weapons (or in his case, a flail) are superior to guns for the purpose of cowing civilians and repelling mobs, talking about the psychological impact of a pointed edge in your face. There's Alice's violent symposium of the purposes of nobility, for the edification of both the angry mob & the rather useless, cowering crowd of effete minor nobility, most of whom are at least a head taller than her. There's how her own troops, having rode to the rescue, eventually yell her down & threaten to put her under arrest for going on a rampage while off duty & without official sanction. And then there's the central set-piece duel, wherein Alice eventually demonstrates how to fight someone with a big, heavy machete when you've got a glorified long dagger. The whole arc is about the primacy of narrative over physical violence. Alice's object is to impose her narrative upon a much larger group of much larger men, and she does it with her principles, a great-lunged bellowing Voice of Authority, and concentrated, charismatic violence. It's *great*.

It's also about an episode and a half too long - like a Dragonball Z fight that seems to take two months to wrap up. But I was willing to give the show the time to make its point.

In short, Pumpkin Scissors is one of those military shows that gets all the details wrong - the unit's moe little secretary is a sergeant major, and thus effectively outranks every other member of that "little festival unit", including the commanding captain - while still getting the spirit of the thing exactly right.

Prof Mankiw claims, piously:

Sin taxes try to correct for behavior that some social planner deems as not sufficiently virtuous

in the process of trying to make a distinction between "sin taxes" and "pigovian taxes". Apparently, pigovian taxes try to correct for behavior which some economist finds to be an offense against economic morality. Oh, I'm sorry, he says "negative externalities", as if that means something other than an economist's notion of virtue.

I'll just note that no legislature has ever enacted a law in favor of the actions of gravity, but there are many which have tried to repeal the laws of thermodynamics.

There was a guy at the McCain campaign office in State College who was stuck doing gun-rights calls, since he apparently sort-of matched the demographic. He kept grousing that he wasn't actually a hard-edge NRA type, and was more of a fisherman than a hunter. But he never expressed any worry that Obama would want to keep him from fly-fishing. I suppose you never do see 'em coming, do you? They're gonna crack down on recreational fishing now, are they?

Eh, I'm not really a fisher, either. And the only thing I shoot with my shotgun is skeet. So I don't really have any skin in this particular fooferaw. But really, are they trying to totally alienate everyone who isn't an agoraphobic concrete canyon-dweller? What's next, extortionate new ecologically-justified green fees for golfers?

h/t

Yeah, if Palin actually does a reality show which doesn't feature ex-effects guys rigging a pair of tractor-trailers to sandwich a subcompact or fishing boats in the Bering Straits, then I'm done with her. I can't stand "reality show" piffle.

h/t

Yeah, you know what? I'm calling for the impeachment of Secretary Clinton, after she knifed our only reliable long-term ally in the back & deliberately acted in such a fashion as to encourage a second invasion of the Falklands. That's Kissinger-class wicked evil.

I know I've said elsewhere that I didn't want to hear any impeachment talk about Obama until he actually does something constituting a high crime or misdemeanor, but provoking an unnecessary war between two of our nominal allies has got to be some sort of illegal. Anyways, Clinton, not the president. Even if it's his idea, she could have resigned.

There's got to be some sort of pro-British plurality in the modern Democratic Party, right? They're not fighting in Belfast anymore, so the Irish aren't hostile anymore, and mant limo liberal types are big on British-style nanny-state social democracy. That's got to have some sort of transitive value, right?

And for those "WASPs must be wrong, first principles" types sure to object about colonialism and all that rot - the Falklands have been occupied continuously and exclusively by subjects of the British crown for over a century and a half, and even before that, the only thing on those islands was a rebellious Argentine penal colony. The United States has a better claim on Cuba than the Argentines have on the Falklands. And no, that's not an assertion of sovereignty over the Communist Wonderland. Just a reducto ad absurdum.

OK, OK.

She can just resign if she wants.

h/t

OK, this is just funny. Melissa Hart was my parents' representative when they still lived in the commonwealth. Apparently she's making enough money as a lobbyist to not worry about abandoning a car in the House parking lot. If you ask me, they have too many spots if you can leave an abandoned car there for *three years*, and not have it towed.

When I saw the Instapundit link, I thought that the malefactor would be Cynthia McKinney, and I was all ready to point and laugh.

More fool me.

But really, this is part of why the Republicans are in such poor odor, even with the current backlash against the socialists. No class, no style, no integrity.

Ye gods! The Indian portion of the "green revolution" is coming to pieces because the dung-brained socialists running the Indian agricultural ministry trapped themselves in a urea subsidy trap, and their farmers are uneducated enough that they think they can power through broad-spectrum nutrient deficiencies via over-fertilizing with urea.

For those of you without a passing acquaintance with basic farming, let me assure you - this is so basic it's almost a truism: nitrogen fertilizer can only address nitrogen deficiencies in a soil. You can't hose down a field with nitrogen & expect good results if your field is sulfur or phosphorus deficient. The only thing that over-fertilizing with nitrogen does is *burn the field*. And pollute the downstream drainage with runoff - really badly, too.

I don't even know how they're seeing any sort of boost by doing so, let alone what the article's quoted farmers claim. I wonder if it's some sort of placebo reporting effect? Maybe there's something I've never heard about that might explain what's going on there - I'm not exactly an agronomist - but it violates everything I thought I knew about Liebig's Barrel.

This is a classic example of the poisonous power of anti-market forces upon the environment. A subsidy imposed for political effect results eventually in ruined farms, environmental devastation, declining yields, and bankrupted farmers, all at taxpayer expense; let's not even talk about the primary market disruptions. Government intervention driving mal-investments, inefficiencies, and pollution. Ain't the anti-market wonderful?

h/t

Update: I asked a guy here at work, and he says that since burning a field with excessive nitrogen can sterilize the soil (and thus destroy the organic matter & microculture), increasing nitrogen usage can to some degree replace the nitrogen-fixing that organic matter & microfauna would normally have contributed to crop growth. So, basically, the farmers who were seeing marginal increases in yield returns with very heavy urea usage had already "killed" their fields, and are now essentially growing on dead soil.

Game, set, match.

Our climate records, due to this back-asswards adjustment of rural stations to match UHI-to-a-fare-thee-well urban stations?

Garbage.

Pfft. What a classic display of "yes, but" Republicanism. Governor Lingle now opposes the psychotically un-American Akaka bill, not on principles, but because recent amendments make it just a little more heavy-handed in its violation of American ideals, just a hair more front-loaded in its offenses against basic decency. Back when it was only lukewarm in its abominations, only somewhat horrible in its repudiation of everything that makes this country worth defending, oh, then, she was all in favor of it.

Keep walking down this road, you idiots, and we'll all have seceded from the country by racial means, forced to make our separate peace by binding ourselves to some squalid default tribal entity in a demonstration of a sort of Grisham's Law of group identity, where bad communitarian politics drive out the good.

Update: Argh!

This is the sort of gonzo eulogy which makes Hitchens so... Hitchens. But I tend (for the most part) to agree with him on Al Haig. I've been somewhat confused by the version of Haig that's appeared in the right blogsphere since his death, it bears no resemblance to the Haig I thought I knew. That Al Haig appeared in Sorley's A Better War as a sort of Renfield to Kissinger's Dracula, a Tyrell for Nixon's Richard III. The Haig I remember as a child during the Reagan adminstration is largely the one Hitchens describes; perhaps I was deluded by the mainstream media of the time, except Hitchens offers quotes from Reagan's journal which echoes the opinion of the journalists of the day. Haig was, as far as I can tell, a scary, unscrupulous General Ripper freshly escaped from the imagination of Stanley Kubrick, run amok on the American political stage.

h/t Mark Levin, who himself kind of scares me some days.

Ha!

"[H]ow can brie be elitist if you can buy it at Sam's Club?"

I don't know, man. I don't do Sam's Club - I don't bother with my company's standing offer of free Sams Club membership. I don't see why they need to waste the $40-$50 yearly fee just for me to buy the same crap I could get at WalMart at a slight bulk discount.

But from at least one lowly perspective, Sam's Club is a tiny bit elitist.

But just a bit.

the need of all of them for expert guidance would cause them to gravitate toward the consensus positions among scientists

The above is a quote from this Reason article, which just pissed me off to no end. The article's about a sociological research project testing the inclinations of loosely (and frankly, ludicrously) defined groups towards accepting or discarding scientific "expert guidance" which supposedly comes from their own or an opposing philosophic tendency.

The entire project, and indeed, the article itself, is predicated on the need for "expert guidance". Not testimony, not research, not evidence - although the writer of the article artfully elides "evidence" and "guidance" as if they were synonymous in a passage later in the article - but "guidance". It's also quite interesting that the study's four tendency-groups doesn't include an "elitist" tendency, although one might suspect that it might fall within the "hierarchical" grouping which is described solely in nasty terms which suggests that neither the writer nor the researchers would place their smug selves within the confines of their own study.

I'm rather perturbed that an allegedly libertarian magazine like Reason would publish something so indulgent of the dogmas and theocratic aspirations of the secular priesthood.

"Consensus positions". Humbug!

h/t

Sigh. I swear politicians and their staffers are getting dumber. That bill reads like a particularly ill-thought-out post by a drunken blogger. Maybe a lesser diary piece on Red State, one by a guy doomed to never, ever get promoted to the front page. Furthermore, it reads like somebody clumsily modeled it on one of those moronic Intelligent-Design-in-the-classroom brainfarts that Deep South legislatures are fond of passing as a way to fly their evangelical front flags.

Just because catastrophic warming is looking highly, highly unlikely doesn't mean you can legislate the opposite opinion, any more than you can legislate the definition of pi. I don't even care if you get the right definition for pi. It isn't a suitable subject for legislation.

h/t the Czar of Muscovy.

Frank J. of IMAO says it right the first time. And he does it almost without clowning around, which has to be a first for him. One thing, though - a fourth party was how the first Republican president got elected. No, seriously, follow my logic:

In the early 1850s, the old Whig Party imploded due to the solution of the problem it had been created to exploit - economic policy and development - and the emergence of new tensions and electoral splits for which that party had no answers - the sectional split, Mormonism, mass immigration, and the growth of Catholicism. The Whig Party itself had been a relatively short-lived creature of the Second Great Awakening, composed largely of politically active evangelicals and religious liberals. By the early Fifties, the Second Great Awakening had largely run its course, and a lot of the movements and trends in said SGA had collapsed of their self-contradictions or mutated beyond the pale of American society - see the Mormon exemplar. Meanwhile, the great developmental economic booms had attracted vast new populations of Europeans - mostly Catholic - who couldn't care less about the hyper-Protestantism which was the lodestone of the Whiggish moment.

Anyways, the Whigs detonated impressively, and the back-wash almost took the Democracy with them. The 1850s saw a lot of serial High Weirdness, including a brief moment when a conspiratorial secret society - led in part by an ex-president who had himself risen to national fame twenty years previously as the bannerman of a political party predicated on the opposition to a conspiratorial secret society - nearly took over the country. The Republicans were just another bit of political weirdness, less strange than the Know-Nothings, but also less broad-based. They decisively lost their first presidential election, and probably would have decayed into yet another regional oddity like Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, New York's Liberal and Conservative Parties, or the LaRouchites, if it weren't for the mad presidential election of 1860.

That was the year that the Democracy finally spun to pieces, and the sitting vice president led the southern Democrats out of their national convention and right into a splinter party. Before the campaign was over, even the border states had their own splinter party, Bell's Constitutional Unionists. Seward's wild little radical Whig third party, taken over by a charismatic former one-term Illinois congressman whom no-one had ever heard of before 1858, swept to a problematic victory due to the intervention of not only a fourth party, but a fifth one as well.

In short, third parties only win when they're not the third party at all, but rather one among a half-dozen, or the only default in an otherwise one-party system, which is, of course, naturally instable.

Yeah, Prof. Mankiw? I call shenanigans. The good professor seems far too fond of resorting to tax increases as a first concession in the best of times, so long as they are "pigovian". Might I suggest that he is just naturally biased towards a typically New England "high taxation" regime, and only has to look for reasons to cater to this inclination?

Also, there are valid political-economic reasons to despise the VAT, mainly for the same reasons that one should be hostile to government-run health insurance system - once the government is allowed a tool of such intrusive capacity, it will never let go of it, and never cede a dime extracted via its use. The VAT may have a theoretical edge over income taxation, but its practical application offers a significant negative externality in terms of the private-public power balance, or lack thereof.

Don't do crap like this, people. It's what the kids call "a dick move". The only reason to ever act politically in this fashion (like voting tactically) is if you think the one you're voting/signing a petition for is actually better than the immediate alternative in the immediate context. This is why I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2008 - not because I wanted the Republican to win (although I did), but because I thought she was the marginally-better option in the race. "Operation Chaos" was amusing but not really a factor in my 2008 primary vote. "The worse the better" is Leninism, and absolute BS no matter which party or faction is pushing for it. Always find the better option, even if that better option is no action at all.

For those playing at home, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana announced his retirement at the absolute last moment, leaving the Democrats in Indiana with only one, crazy-left forlorn-hope candidate with even close to enough petition signatures to get on the primary ballot by the deadline, which is, like, today. If they don't have any primary candidates, Indiana Democratic Party rules provide for a leadership caucus, which is what the Democrats are trying to achieve. What the conservative muckers are trying to do is sabotage that caucus by collecting enough signatures to pitchfork Mrs. Moonbat into the Democratic nomination by default. Not cool, even if I do prefer a generic Republican Senator from Indiana over a generic Democratic Senator. Don't play with dynamite, even if you're confident it wouldn't ever go off.

Well, I'm finally back in the county. Boy, that was a pain. I'm still at work, I guess I'll find out in a couple of minutes whether the house burned down. I guess I'll let you know if it did.

^_^