Not off the rails just yet

F Market & Wharves, taken last weekend
They call it a midlife crisis and turn it into a joke about blondes and sports cars and gold necklaces but doesn't it really make perfect sense that after a half century of building a life, one would reach a point where revisiting the path is simply inescapable? No one has made it to fifty and not done as much. Many just do it quietly, and they use unemployment or empty nest or time to write as the new lens through which to refocus on the remaining life yet to build. I'll do that too, real soon. 2009 is the year for hope and change. The question, for all of us really, is after that leap into the dark, was it off the high dive, and is there any water in the pool?

Confusion of Faith

Slow week: No one in the office, no one asking questions, no one expecting results. So I'm multislacking.

Wrote the following to Taranto wrt his quibbling over points made in debate by fellow non-believers but presumably politically non-aligned Christopher Hitchens and Heather Mac Donald (why else would he distance himself from them?). He writes about it at the bottom of today's BotW.

Summary quote from Mac Donald:

Do modern Christians still believe with the same fervor as in the past all those unyielding doctrines of eternal damnation for the unbaptised and unconverted? They sure don't act as if they do. If they really were convinced that their friends, co-workers, neighbors, and in-laws were going to hell because they possessed the wrong or no religious belief, I would think that the knowledge would be unbearable. Christians surely see that most of their wrong-believing personal acquaintances are just as moral and deserving as themselves. How, then, do they live with the knowledge that their friends and loved ones face an eternity of torment?

She goes on to suggest this conundrum as evidence of a widespread cognitive dissonance. Taranto thinks she's a little bonkers for regarding eternal damnation following the Last Judgment as an empirical matter. I don't.

Mr Taranto,

You are gently pulling Heather MacDonald's leg (and those of your readers) when criticizing her points. Your subtle sense of humor is at work here. I have to conclude this because even what little of her positions you have provided make good sense.

Obviously there will never be experimental evidence of a Last Judgment, so referring to its results as empirical could be described as inaccurate. But it is potentially so to those who truly believe in it. She is therefore asking of believers to own up to their beliefs: Either all your cherished friends and family who do not believe will be forever punished at the end-time, or you don't really believe what you say you do. If the former, you either don't care about their inevitable torment, or are pretending you don't. If the latter, you are being dishonest. Since very few people who are not sociopaths really don't care about the pain and suffering of loved ones, it's sensible for her to conclude that many, perhaps most, people of professed faith are to a degree lying to themselves.

Since you don't highlight this as the fundamental point of disagreement, it seems you are quibbling over whether or not after-life results could ever be verified experimentally. Obviously they could not if there is no afterlife, but it is a valid point for discussing the perspective of those who believe there is. That's why I think you're quibbling, with a bit of tongue in cheek.

By the way, she's right. My grandmother died without ever professing faith, yet those of her family who believed in faith as the escape route from everlasting torment mourned only her passing, and not at all her presumed fate. It would be ridiculously cruel for me to conclude they were indifferent to her suffering. Like most people who profess belief outwardly, in their hearts they just didn't believe in it.

I stretched a little here. My grandmother didn't really have family members who were believers, unless you include a temporary step-grandchild or two, but the point was more important than strict accuracy. Oh, I could have picked another example, but that would take more time. Hey, I'm busy here!

Solid Rubber for Outdoor Erection Work

So I'm shopping for solid insert tubes for my yard cart. Replacement non-pneumatic inner tubes that don't require air. Well, the tires are always going flat. I don't know, I use my yard cart in the yard and maybe it wasn't designed for that.

Took a lot of searching but I found me some. At a place called CupidsRabbit dot com.

Rabbit vibrators, condoms, constriction loops, erection aids, romance games, toys. Do I want to know why this place also sells solid non-pneumatic 26 x 2.125 inner tubes?

Actually, yes, but no, I'll go ahead and get my inner tubes from the medical supply place. Evidently, if I want inner tubes that can withstand a weed-filled yard, I need to get them from wheelchair supply. I guess if I want air-filled tires so my wheelchair rides nice and smooth, I have to go to garden cart supply for that.

What the hell is a rabbit vibrator?

Old Man in Pajamas

I spent my evening opening and logging mailed requests with donations for the troop to pick up retired Christmas trees, envelope after envelope, spreadsheet entry after spreadsheet entry, the laughter and conversation drifting down the stairs of teenaged kids who were fat and happy on pizza and DVDs and were talking, because they didn't know an adult was silently working at the bottom of the stairs, about first orgasms and the phenomenon of blue balls (these were boys AND girls). Finally the horrible, horrible thought occurred to me that I might hear my own son's voice enter into this conversation and I hastily shut down and went off to bed. I lay there a little while reading a book when I suddenly had the urge to write something, anything, notes for a story, a blog post, whatever, and rather than stare at the ceiling contemplating the essential practicality of keeping a notebook by the bedside (a very good habit I've never approached having), I got up to retrieve my laptop from the table at the bottom of the stairs. My bed clothes are just a pair of boxers and a t-shirt, unless it's too warm for a t-shirt, but I figured since no one had come downstairs for over an hour while I was working, what were the odds that they would do so while I was out there just long enough to get something?

What WERE the odds? Miz Liz heard me explaining to some teenaged kid I don't even know what cupboard to find the cups in, and was chortling most energetically when I came back to bed, wearing just a t-shirt and these droopy old sweetheart boxers with the faded hearts and X's and O's.

Hang a Shining Star Upon the Highest Bough

And have yourself a merry little Christmas ... no-o-ow.

I wish I had archer's brain

I mean, maybe I don't have a sense of humor right now because I'm stuck in a mid-evening phone conference which is mostly in Japanese and thus forcing me to listen without comprehension for that sudden fiercely-inflected interrogative "Don?" that signals a requirement on my part to be alert and knowledgeable and confident but never mind that, even if I carved out a few hours' time and lubricated it with one of my birthday bottles of Patrón there is no way I could make this article about new Christmas children's books that are based on global-warmism any funnier or more satirical than it is, unintentionally, all on its own. They've got it all:

Turn off lights to save polar bears!

Santa as the Global-warming Grinch!

Grand Grifter Gore!

Note, there's nothing wrong with turning out lights and saving energy. I was taught to do that as a kid. But unproven theories that more and more scientists are decrying as bad science and premature alarmism (I'm talking anthropogenic global warming here) is a hilarious way to get a book sold. Hey, it can work, and I wanna be an author too, and we all respect a well-run con game. But geez. I only wish I had the brain right now to expand on the humor in it.

* * *

Speakin' a humor, I think it's hilarious that we tell our large and very demanding (and very quality-driven, please buy their products) customer that "engineering teams" say this or are doing that, when by "engineering teams" we really mean "that guy over in the cubicle by the wall who just got out of college."

(Yes, yes, there are engineering women but let's face it, the females in this profession usually end up in management.)

* * *

All three-part blog posts need a third part, so now I'm writing it. I asked a bunch of fellow anthropogenic-global-warming skeptics why it always seemed to be engineers who were not only conservatively libertarian-minded but skeptical about such crowd-pleasers as anthropogenic global warming and the answer was the very obvious, "Because engineers know how to read and analyze data." Oh. Yeah. I guess one could allege as much.

Toy

For a long time Blogrolling has been broken. I finally got around to trashing it and using the Blogger blog roll widget. Created the list fresh from scratch. Bruised egos are welcome to drop hints.

Here's a weird thing. All the Blogger blogs have the Blogger favicon next to them instead of whatever favicon the blogger has implemented. This is because if you approach the Blogger blog from a certain direction, the Blogger favicon is the only one you will see. I figured that out awhile ago. But I don't remember what I figured out, or why, or how, or (again) what, so just drop it, huh? Geez.

Just before I did, or maybe while I was doing it, I found my Blogrolling blog roll was gone and my old blog roll from a couple years ago was in its place, full of blogs long dead, moribund, or banished. That was weird and unsettling. Got rid of that list right quick.

What a tiny box we live in, full of tiny details, when we decide to be a blogger. Or any other sort of hobbyist. Yes, I said hobbyist. What do you think we are, writers?

Ranting because I Looked At the News

Two towns I'm fond of are on the verge of insolvency.

More California Towns Face Bankruptcy

The County can't help. The State can't help. They're all learning the same hard lesson, and on a much larger scale. Let me say it boldly:

IT'S REALLY FUCKING STUPID TO BUILD A BIG-ASS GOVERNMENT ON TAXATION OF BUSINESS INCOME

Simple answer why: Business cycles, income, and tax revenue go down as readily as they go up. Big-ass government assembled by nanny-state do-gooders who think free-for-all government programs are the solution to Mankind's problems cannot be shrunk once it is grown without throwing all the worthless good-for-nothing^{(meant with the greatest affection)} citizens and others who have come to depend on it out into the freezing cold street. Where, the so-called liberal defenders of free-for-all government programs warn, they will turn to crime.

This highlights the difference between Liberals and Conservatives. Liberals think the poor are criminals in waiting if we don't pay them off with bogus programs to set them on their feet that no one ever follows up on anyway. Conservatives think the poor are middle-class people in waiting who simply need all those goddamn regulations that make employment, housing and food so hard to get swept out of the way. (All right, Conservatives also think of the poor as human resources that could be more affordable, i.e. slave labor that would be turning the cranks as soon as all minimum wage laws were set aside but hey, what do you want? Criminals in waiting, or workers that can compete with China?)

Rio Vista I haven't been to much. It's generally on the way to somewhere else, and often as not across the river from the route I'm taking anyway. But Isleton is very cool. Small, but cool. Some abandoned buildings on the main drag that date back to the 1800s, a few bars and general stores that thrive during the Crawdad Festival, streets that are most picturesque when lined with large American motorcycles, a few lawns and fine old london plane and sycamore trees and of course the not-so-mighty Rio Sacramento drifting by across the levee (and occasionally over it).

I don't know what they have in expenses such that a downturn in business has to drive them to bankruptcy, but I bet it's a bunch of social niceness crap imposed by laws written by the usual cabal of nanny-state do-gooders up in the state capitol building. Some of whom might actually be Republicans, who knows.

But anyway, it's clear the time is coming for self-sufficiency. Depending on gov'ment (or anyone) to feed, clothe, house, educate, or protect you is a ba-a-ad idea. It's great when we can afford to take care of everyone. But this economic downturn is either going to

A) Provide the painful lesson that the gifts of government can easily be taken away;
or,

B) Provide the painful lesson that government that can't shrink into its income is destined to become less than worthless.

Are those the same thing? I'm forgetting the new taxes our RINO governor has in mind. What kind of IDIOT would ever think it's possible to tax your way to prosperity? Seriously. 'Splain that one to me. 'Splain to me how taking MORE money from the people who create wealth and dividing it up in programs to protect the people who don't from the consequences of not producing wealth will result in MORE prosperity. That makes sense to a point -- don't get me wrong -- if the money goes effectively to schools, kindy to university, because schools are underfunded (or administered so badly as to be effectively underfunded, whichever). But bah. That's about it. Welfare? Cut it. Prisons? End the drug war, establish drug rehab and interventionist self-esteem programs at a fraction of the cost, problem solved.

Oh, and another thing. Why the FUCK do we have people streaming illegally over the border to work out in the fields, while at the same time we have countless young people in the cities hanging about doing nothing but mutually masturbate in their little gang wars? Maybe if we killed off the welfare state, allowed licensed pharmacies to sell cannabis and coca derivatives at competitive prices, and started sending farm-work recruitment buses into 'hoods full of now-hungry people, we could solve THREE problems for the price of NONE. Just a thought.

Next: Suffrage for property owners only. (Just kidding.)

A Post That's Not About Me

I want to know who is so STUPID, and so CHEAP, that they can’t be bothered keeping a damn ice scraper in their truck. I know this guy who found his truck frozen over this morning and lost patience waiting for the defroster and started driving to work even though he couldn’t see ANYTHING. All windows were white and opaque. Oh, except for a little teeny tiny hole the defroster made at the base of the windshield. So he tore down his little side street with his chin on the dashboard and then at the stop sign, had to sit there awhile because he couldn’t see whether or not any traffic was coming. Couldn’t roll down the windows because they were frozen stuck. What a DORK. Finally after working the button back and forth his driver side window dropped a crack and he could see when the way was clear. When he went, he nearly forced a family coming the other way into the trees because his big-ass truck couldn’t quite make the turn in just the one narrow-ass lane. Down the road he barreled, hunched over like he was dodging bullets, missing mailboxes on the one side and oncoming traffic on the other by fractions of an inch. People at intersections stared at him, wondering what sort of idiot doesn’t scrape his windows. He didn’t stop in the merging lane at the boulevard, either. Not that anyone should if there’s any chance of merging into traffic. But this IDIOT couldn’t see the traffic to merge into. So he just went, relying on innate abilities and instincts that defy a proper description. Perhaps by then the frost had thinned out somewhat and he could actually see out, though no one could see in. And he wasn’t even wearing a damn seat belt. Must be some sort of juvenile REBEL that way. Gawd. Who would do this?

End the War on Drugs

I guess I'll never be a liberal as defined by the American media (and, in my experience, most commenters, bloggers, etc). When moved to comment on the issues of the day, I trend towards the conservative side. Not to follow an agenda, however; that's simply the way I usually roll when inspired to react.

So anyway, here's a reminder to folks that us bad guys -- conservatives, Republicans, and the Wall Street Journal -- can actually be on the right side of things now and then, with this hair-raising lead:

Of all the casualties claimed by the U.S. "war on drugs" in Latin America, perhaps none so fully captures its senselessness and injustice as the 2001 CIA-directed killing of Christian missionary Veronica Bowers and her daughter Charity in Peru. -- WSJ, 12/14/08

More from us Kool-Aid^® guzzling haters on the subject here: Let's End Drug Prohibition.

Do You Hear What I Hear

I'm managing the fundraiser where we set up a table in front of the grocery store and solicit signups to come pick up people's Christmas trees after the season. Raises money for Scouts, helps the environment, blah blah. All weekend every two hours I'd go facilitate shift changes, make sure everyone does their hours, take care of problems, keep the morale up, and generally coordinate the whole thing over a period of two months with my mad Excel skilz.

I had stuff in the back of my truck and had locked it in so I showed up late and it was raining and I was fumbling with the keys. There are three keys that look like the one for the camper shell. Why the hell are there three keys? I don't even know what the other two are for. And they all look the same. I once offered to take them off but that idea got cut off right quick. Wife hates when people mess with her keys.

DO NOT touch the keys, I was told. Leave them there.

Okay, okay, whatever, I just don't know which is which.

Let me see, she said, and found the right one.

Fine, but what if I'm out somewhere and it's raining, how the hell am I supposed to know which is which but FINE, WHATEVER.

So this weekend I was out there somewhere and it was raining and I had to fumble with these three keys.

One. No.

Two. No.

"Oh, you God damn motherfuckers," I said out loud.

"Don?"

I turned. There was a parent and his young Scout, a fresh-faced eleven year old kid in uniform, ready to do his part to raise funds for the Troop.

Instant demeanor change, hearty greetings all around, let's get going, we set up, they got to work. They did a manful job of ignoring my vehement profanity. But, you know. What a schmuck, huh?

Out of the Cold

There is a bittersweet moment when shopping for my loved ones. Especially at Christmas.

I am a Christmas grouch. Life never runs smoothly and there’s never enough time and to have this demanding season thrown in the middle of it annoys me. I’d rather just keep to routine. But beneath the commercialism and consumerism and short-lived attempts at recalling some ancient Middle Eastern mythology there is some real cheer and eventually it finds me and I start to enter into the spirit.

I’m not sure what the spirit is. As described in the Dickens story, it is the happy fun pagan element of Yuletide, which Scrooge, the atheistic grandchild of dour Puritans who regarded Christmas as un-Christian, could not in his coldness abide. The Spirit of Christmas was the new unfolding merging of ancient traditions of social order reversal –- a-wassailing we will go -– treat us or else –- with the post-Puritan Victorian sense of sentimental Christian charity. Not a bad thing altogether, but I don’t know how much of that applies to Christmas today.

Gawd, I think way too damn much.

Anyway, so I go to the stores and I start casting about for material ways to show my love. This is a sickness but so many of us have it there’s no point seeking a cure. Not really knowing how to show my love in earthy daily ways that forge strong bonds, I reflexively, and probably as a typical male and/or consumer-culture citizen, put store in the giving of gifts or more precisely, the focused providing of wealth. I give not just things, but things the person given to will really enjoy having.

And in that moment of acquiring some desirable object or other, of imagining the moment when it becomes a part of and enriches the life of someone I love, my heart fills, and I’m standing there in an aisle at Best Buy surrounded by clamshell-encased technology with a water balloon in my chest about to explode and pink edges forming in my eyes.

But it passes. Suppression of emotion must be a survival trait: It happens so readily and without a thought.

It’s followed by a sort of peace -– mission accomplished but to a much greater degree, a general thankfulness that I am in a position to celebrate the season more or less as everyone else does, especially if I don’t struggle with it. My heart goes out to those who cannot – the poor, and the unloved, and to those who are losing their jobs. Sure, you could say that’s the spirit, or part of it. But that isn’t seasonal, really. I can afford a day off and an extra meal and a shiny gizmo or two. That isn’t seasonal either. I’m thankful all the time. Maybe a little bit more now, because I can duck out of the cold. But I still think of children who never really get presents. It all makes for a complex emotional cocktail. What do you do with it?

Secretariat

I love this woman. And we're trading her in for ... Hillary Clinton? Granted, Mr. Hope und Change, given his political debts, doesn't have a lot to work with ...

One thing about consciously becoming nonreligious after many years of giving it a go is I have grown comfortable not believing in the myths that hold the larger population in thrall. For example, that the Bush team leaves us weaker and the world in a worse state ... That's right up there with the Three Wise Men following the Star of Bethlehem. Wait and see.

Drive Em Out

So on the way home last night I was listening to NPR as I usually do and some gasbag was saying that if we let the Big Three automakers go under, that will also hurt the entire supply chain, which is huge, and that in turn will drag down the foreign makers who build cars here.

And this utter idiocy was left unchallenged by the journalist. Where the fuck do they get journalists these days?

One of the things that has steamed me up the most since I became a grownup and got a job in a real industry is that the major forces driving this world -- the making of policy and the analysis and reporting of same -- is left to lawyers and journalists and the occasional retired college professor. People in other words with no real understanding of how A leads to B leads to C. And so we are getting fuckeder and fuckeder every passing year.

Don't get me wrong. If GM and Chrysler go into bankruptcy, that will be very bad. The ripples will tsunami across the landscape and tear vast holes in the banks and houses and factories and everything else in the way. But the pain will be relatively short-lived -- a few years maybe -- as what's left of industry downsizes and retools and reconfigures and starts hiring again (here's an example of the sort of brilliance GM's failure will make room for). In contrast how the fuck long will the country be burdened with the unintended consequences of an unimaginably huge bailout? We'll essentially be rewarding an old-line 20th Century industry for fucking around in their old-line 20th Century way. They'll forget the scare and go back and do things the same way. Well, except for the oversight provided by, ahem, Congress. If you think that will help, omigod, go rent a brain, will you? Try it out, see if you like it.

I also recall hearing of a contention by the Ford guy, who doesn't really NEED the money, that if the other two go down, then he will need some money too. Well, a) no fucking duh, as CEO he owes it to his stockholders and employees to see to it that a gift given to their competitors comes to them as well, and yet otherwise b) that's bullshit, because it will not only mean he suddenly has a less competitive market to play in but a shitload of experienced and desperate auto workers and cut-rate factories available to go play in it with. Sounds like good times to me.

Did I mention auto workers? Oh, those poor fuckers. It took me two degrees and ten years of experience to make a salary comparable to your average union quarter panel installer and U-joint adjuster. Maybe twenty, I don't know. Fuck em. A major reason we're in this mess -- not the short term mess created by those creative wizards on Wall St but the longer term mess of steadily decreasing American industrial output and the massive strategic and economic Damocletian sword it represents -- is that the rest of the world is finally starting to catch the gravy train we leapt aboard after WWII, and our workers just aren't worth as much more than the rest of the world's as they used to be.

Oo, what a sentence. What meant: As the competing ladders of economic growth lurch upwards, lower costs elsewhere make our workers' entitlements unaffordable. That goes double for the non-workers' entitlements, but I'm not getting into the welfare state today. Seems a bad time of year for that particular rant.

But it is a good time of year for redemption. I offer a case in point, the lovely and talented Carly Fiorina, who lost her job after flying H-P a little too close to the ground but today has some good things to say about the auto company bailout: CEOs seeking bailouts should be willing to resign.

Silicon Happy Cake

Not sure where it came from.

Dropped into my lunch from an obscure pile of unintentional business trip souvenirs? A hand me down from the lady who owns the flower shop?

It is quite the incongruous mix of sensual pleasures: It looks like Play-Do, yet tastes like Play-Do, while in contrast it has the fine texture of dry Play-Do.

I am comforted to know I can rely on the uncompromising standards of Chinese food product manufacturing and quality assurance.

Just another deep pleasure in the day to day.

Shoes Without a Soul

The right rear made a horrible grinding noise and tended to lock up, especially on wet roads. We’re already getting sued for a rear-ender, we don’t need that to happen again, and the brake guy told me a year ago the drum was just about at the end of its life, so I figured, fuck it, let’s have a look. Raised the truck, took the wheel off, got a good grip on the drum and pulled. Pulled real hard.

Pulled for two days. Finally it came off in a clatter of shoes and clips and springs bent awry by the awesome forces I applied. Yes, I had backed off the shoes. Undid the little adjuster thing all the way. That puppy was stuck, baby. Yet when I looked at the inner workings, no discernible damage. WTF? I don’t even know why they were grinding.

But the machine shop says the drum is tweaked and I need a new one. No surprise except I probably tweaked it taking it off. Whatev. There’s no skimping on brakes. Especially if it’s the vehicle my kid drives.

All that was just to explain the black smudges on my fingers. Now we change the subject to symphonic heavy metal hybridization and a quick image search to find out what sort of creature has such a euphonious voice and, as I said once before under similar circumstances but can’t find the post right now, oh ... my ...

LOLCATAMITES

Walls n Dolls

(Image © 2008 Bryan Dongray, used without permission but hey)

The wall hit me sometime yesterday morning. Or I hit the wall. But I wasn’t aware I was driving so it must have hit me. It was the wall between lives.

Over there is a real life. Over here a blog life. Down there a Facebook life. Also a LinkedIn life. Tried a MySpace life once but it was completely pointless. Second Life pissed me off, it was so stupid.

Blog life is for trapping occasional moments of brilliance. Drollery. Dumbery, whatever. Facebook for having a less coy link to friends and family so inclined. LinkedIn I maintain in case the 10% force reduction rumors that came out today turn out to be true. Not that there will be any jobs. But one has to give the appearance of trying.

Us irredeemable computer users with broken social lives are a funny lot.

Anyway I was having fun seeking out coworkers whom I’m kind of friends with who have Facebook lives. There are tens of thousands of people in the company, so browsing Facebook for a few I knew was sorta diverting. And I found a few. And I was going to go all friendly and happy and friends them and all that crap. And then I hit the wall.

Because there’s also Burning Man stuff on there. Whatever you’re into, if there are people in their thirties into it too, it will have a large and seriously programmed presence on the internet. And I saw myself on the verge of linking my Work friends with my Burn life and that set off a big loud proximity alarm.

Not that there isn’t a little overlap.

But I never told anyone I work with I went to Burning Man. I don’t need any of the people who have input into my job performance and job prospects and professional life in general picturing me in face paint and a clown wig and a pink tutu. No, I didn’t! But that’s sort of the image of the place. That and public sex (false) and unabashed nakedness (true) and an unconcerned indulgence in certain herbs and spices (um, yes).

It’s a lot more than that but the image in the minds of people who’ve given it between two and four minutes’ thought is not properly conducive to success in the corporate shark tank I swim in. Hence the separation. Hence the wall.

I hate that.