perfidy

For those who thought there was no way that bagpipes could possibly be more irritating: you are wrong.  For those who think the opposite, you also are wrong:

Make sure you watch to the end for the big finish.

Interesting interview with sf author and singularitarian Vernor Vinge here.

Vernor Vinge: I see four or five concurrently active paths to the Singularity:

1. Artificial Intelligence: We create superhuman artificial intelligence in computers.
2. Digital Gaia: The worldwide network of embedded microprocessors, sensors, effectors, and localizers becomes a superhumanly intelligent entity.
3. Internet Scenario: Humanity with its networks, computers, and databases becomes a superhuman being. (Bruce’s story “Maneki Neko” is a beautiful and subtle illustration of this possibility.)
4. Intelligence Amplification: We enhance individual human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces.
5. Biomedical: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological function of our brains. (I regard this last item to be the weakest of the possibilities.)

AR is central to progress with possibilities (3) and (4).

If we humans want to keep our hand in the game, AR is an important thing to pursue.

Cool stuff, as you'd expect.  But the most exciting thing for me is the news that there will be a new Vinge book out this year, a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep called The Children of the Sky.  Sweet.

The Instapundit has been thrashing the higher education bubble meme for this little while, most recently lining to a longish piece in New York Magazine, The University Has No Clothes.  As you, Dear Reader, will be aware if you've been paying attention the Buckethead clan is homeschooling its youngins.  So the idea of college and education and assorted issues is important to us.  I have mixed feelings about college education.  It is in theory capable of providing the sort of knowledge that simply cannot be gotten any other way.  And we all like to think of it that way.  But the reality is something more akin to a four to seven year long, savagely, offensively expensive binger with a light frosting of vocational training and (for the lucky or skilled) a creamy filling of consequence- and moral-free sex.  At the end, you are tossed into the world with a credential of dubious and rapidly diminishing value and a mortgage for an expensive house you can't live in or sell.

Now, I would be the last person on Earth to undervalue spending the better part of a decade drunk, high and nailing anything with a heart beat.  But I managed accomplish exactly that with a bare minimum of debt by the simple expedient of not actually attending college.  And of all the people I met in college, a fair number of them did graduate with debt ranging from inconvenient to crushing.  And only one is actually doing anything remotely related to his degree, and of the rest very few are doing work that actually requires a college degree in even the most tenuous way.  Did they get their, or their parent's, worth of the money spent or borrowed?  I have no sheepskin, but I am doing better financially than a large number of graduates from the small Ohio liberal arts school I attended.  And I arguably had a lot more fun.  Because when I was doing my real drinking, I never had to worry about midterms.

If I'm willing to keep my kids out of public schools to give them a better education, college is certainly up for discussion.  Do I want to drop $200k (or more, hyperinflation depending) to allow my son, and equivalent or greater sums for three daughters to go on a four year bender in a world completely divorced from reality and end up unemployable?

I think I can think of better ways to spend the best part of a million dollars.

We've just recently hit a lot of fifty year milestones in space history. I've been somewhat surprised that a fairly wide spectrum of the public commentary has been negative on the long term effects of Apollo. I've personally felt for a long time that NASA's entire existence from the late fifties until this very moment has been a hindrance to real progress in space exploration. And not merely despite its successes, but really largely because of them. While I haven't been the only one saying this, it is gratifying to see that others are coming around. Rand Sindberg is the best example. (Oh, and not to suggest that this is a recent conversion for him - he's thought this way for a long, long time. But he puts it well. Related, and also interesting is this piece from James Bennett.)

I was born a month before we first walked on the moon. When I was a boy my son's age, we had a space station and the shuttle was on the horizon promising cheap access to space. Things seemed pretty cool, space-wise. Then we let the first US space station burn up, the shuttle turned into a hideously expensive, designed-by committee explodey thing, and the dream of space resolved into just that, a dream with no reality to it whatsoever.

So here I am, in my early forties. My son is eight, and we are again, maybe, seeing a rebirth of the dream of space. SpaceX has successfully flown the Falcon 9 and Dragon - which is, barring only some life support equipment, a vehicle capable of putting men in orbit for an less than a tenth the price of the shuttle. And they've announced that next year, they'll be test flying the Falcon Heavy - which will put 50 tons into orbit at a price of $100 million. Two launches to get the throw weight of an Apollo-era Saturn V, at less than a $1000 a pound. This is big news. At those sorts of prices, much that wasn't feasible becomes, well, feasible.

And better yet, there are others in the game. If SpaceX falls down, Rutan, Bezos, or someone else will likely be there to take up the slack. And everyone can fly to Bigelow's space hotels.

I've been reading a lot of economic doom and gloom (thanks, Zero Hedge!) lately, and the prognosis is, so far as I can see, pretty solidly doomy and gloomy. It feels like we've moved away from everything that once made us kick ass, and embraced everything lame. The list is long...

But, even though we've lost huge chunks of the manufacturing sector, and most of our exports are raw materials, and we can't even deliver pizza in under a half hour any more - the one bright spot in the last few decades has been the computer industry. And what makes me happy right now is that the people who did the best at that, and made the biggest piles of money, are using that money to reinvent the space program on their own terms.

Maybe we'll have an Indian Summer before it all falls apart.

I have a stupid reason for why I don't post more often. I hope you are now asking yourself, "How stupid?" and not muttering, "And this is surprising how?" And that reason is this: I do not have the luxury of pursuing lengthy trains of thought. While individually, my wife, son, three daughters, dog, cat, work, natural catastrophes, neighbor kids and Global Warming may only interrupt me only occasionally; collectively they are derailing my lengthy trains o' thought on average about every three milliseconds.

So the Grand Thoughts that I wish to think remain unthunk. Which pisses me off a little.

Because I feel that a lot of the stuff I think about is just this close to congealing into something more than a pile of unordered ramblings. I sense the outlines of order and coherence, but can't get it down on paper, or pixels.

So, I am making a conscious decision to: a) stop leaving things in my feed reader in the now obviously futile hope that I will get back to them and write something about them; b) prune the feed reader so that I have less to obsessively read; c) read more books; and finally, d) post smaller bits as they occur to me.

In aid of d), there's this: Aretae talks about immigration. Some of this has now been addressed in his comments, and he's updated his post a little from when I read it this morning.

To lay it out Aretae-style, my thoughts went roughly like this:

• Anti-Immigration summary: fair.  If something is hurting us, well, maybe stopping is a good idea.
• That's a good argument for letting that one Haitian dude in.  When you're confronted with one guy, you could even say, hey, I'll personally take a haircut of $2 a day (a substantive, if not crushing loss of almost $500 a year) to help Jean-Paul or whoever get a real life in the home of the free and the land of the brave.  That's charity.
• Wait a minute, where's Hati, where these Hatians are coming from?
• But, in the world of freely-entered contracts and libertarian (left- or otherwise-) why does Jean Paul get to come here and unilaterally cut my income and take $500 out of the mouths of my Children?  Do I get a say in this?
• Put another way, am I really morally obligated to give up my income and so reduce the prosperity of my family to help others?  More to the point, if I decide that I don't want to, is it right for others, like Jean-Paul, to force me to lose that income?
• Stalin said that quantity has a quality of its own, or something like that.  One Jean Paul - hard working, thrifty and pious - he's okay.  But what about five million of his less upright, smelly compatriots who have made a wonderland of their homeland in the 200 years of their independence?  Does their collective presence in this country make it less likely that immigrant n will get the same benefit from moving here?  Does it make it more likely that subsequent income loss to American workers will be more than $2/day?
• Aretae talks monkeybrains™ about everything except left-libertarian issues.  There is no tribe of all humanity.  As commenter Lurking Apple put it, "You seem to be assuming a spherical immigrant on a frictionless border..."  People are different.  Different tribes have different abilities, beliefs, and attitudes.  If we allow too many in, we cease to be what we were.  That may be good, but most mutations are not beneficial.  What we are - or at the very least, were - was very good at creating staggering amounts of prosperity from the nothing but hard work, ingenuity and the occasional tariff.  Add tens of millions of (to pick just two) notably prospering Mexicans, notably peaceful Muslims  - we might just end up with a shit sandwich on rye.
• It seems to me that while we should assiduously and strenuously hope that other places - backward, poor, disease infested, Global Warming-afflicted, trounced by Colonialism and the Man (you know where they are) - might adopt our miraculously effective package of property rights, innovation, and win! to rework their lives in a way that seems best to them, but in any event a richer version than what they have now.  We might even offer classes or something.  But it is probably not our job, as a nation or a people, to provide that life for them there, and it certainly isn't our job to provide that life for them here.

Anywho, that's my small thought for today.

[wik] And here is this amusing, if harsh, take on Libertarianism.

Here's some stuff I've managed to read whilst being distracted by, among other things, being swamped at work, dealing with multiple family medical crises, a new(-ish) baby, and ennui.

• Four Words That Make Me Suspicious of Myself When I Say Them I would add "Clearly" because that almost invariably indicates that I haven't really thought something through.  Clearly is academic code for "you're an idiot for thinking the opposite of what I'm about to say."
• "Amish" and "Contraband" aren't two words that normally go together.  But hey, why not.  When the Amish Mafia gets going, "Get Milk" will have an entirely new and sinister meaning.  I posted on the War on Milk™ previously, here.
• The Russian Fox and the Evolution of Intelligence - h/t to my pal Christian, who found this one.  The Russian domesticated foxes I first heard about when I watched a documentary on dogs - fascinating stuff, and Isegoria recently linked to another bit on the topic.
• Deflation or Hyperinflation? This piece goes into detail on an argument that's been bouncing around a lot on Zero Hedge, my new favorite source of economic news.  At this point, I don't think we can dodge econopocalypse.  The exact method of our demise is perhaps up in the air, but that seems to be about all that is in real doubt.
• Devin, Aretae, Foseti, and AnomalyUK have had some fascinating debates on matters Formalist.  I hope someday to have five minutes of uninterrupted time to string together a few thoughts on the matter.  Moldbug also posts on economics - something I've been surprised he hadn't hit sooner, given all the financial shenanigans that have been going on around here lately.
• Annoyed by partial RSS feeds?  I am, or rather, was.  This link provides several solutions.
• Ken, who was once the Oldsmoblogger, has a neato post centered on a quote from Wedgwood's The Thirty Years' War.  Another book I need to read.  And speaking of reading, reading is really hard.  It just isn't worth the effort to try and read anything more involved than a comic book when you can only devote five minutes at a time to reading it.

Evangel Cathedral.

A couple years back, I accompanied the wife to the actual Wammie award ceremony, and we were both amazed by this:

You can actually see her perform in this one - at about 4:55 - but the audio quality is significantly poorer. That girl's got a lot of voice.

To Dead Men's Hollow, my wife's band, on winning what is I believe their eighth Wammie award.  The Wammies are the Washington area's regional grammy-equivalent and this year they won for Best Bluegrass Recording for their album Angels' Share.

Angels' Share is Bluegrass Gospel, and its some good stuff.  Strangely, they don't seem to have any songs from the new album on their page, but you can hear snippets on the amazon page I linked above.  You can download some older live recordings here, or listen to more stuff on the band's myspace page.

My wife's band is better than your wife's band.  Unless you're Mike, Gavin, or Ari.  In which case your wife's band is my wife's band.

The Instapundit linked to the top five worst hyperinflations of all time.  The worst was in Hungary in 1946:

Highest monthly inflation: 13,600,000,000,000,000%
Prices doubled every: 15.6 hours

The worst case of hyperinflation ever recorded occurred in Hungary in the first half of 1946. By the midpoint of the year, Hungary's highest denomination bill was the 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 (One Hundred Quintillion) pengo, compared to 1944s highest denomination, 1,000 pengo. At the height of Hungary's inflation, the CATO study estimates that the daily inflation rate stood at 195 percent, with prices doubling approximately every 15.6 hours, coming out to a monthly inflation rate of 13.6 quadrillion percent.

The situation was so dire that the government adopted a special currency that was created explicitly for tax and postal payments and was adjusted each day via radio. The pengo was eventually replaced later that year in a currency revaluation, but it is estimated that when the currency was replaced in August 1946, the total of all Hungarian banknotes in circulation equaled the value of one one-thousandth of a US Dollar.

Holy devaluations, Batman!  An entire currency worth a tenth of a cent.  That just blows my mind.  That and having a radio adjusted currency.  Strangely, it sounds sort of science fictiony.  Like, if you didn't know how fucked up it is, it would sound cool.

I was surprised to see this at Breitbart's Big Government site - in tone it's more what I would expect from Mangan, Devin or Foseti.

Witness, Andrew Mellon:

Universally, democracy is being exalted.

Everywhere one turns, one hears of its virtues: how democracy ensures human rights, fosters prosperity and shepherds in modernity.

Yet democracy represents nothing more than the tyranny of the majority. In other words, contrary to the ideals of western liberalism, democracy does not ensure that the smallest minority, the individual is protected.
In the vast majority of circumstances, people free to choose their government get the government they desire. In Russia, the people have chosen again and again to elect KGB criminals. In Gaza, the people have chosen to elect either Hamas or Fatah, terrorist parties in perpetual war. Democracy does not a free society ensure. Even in America, citizens have not only allowed but encouraged the growth of a rapacious bureaucratic tyranny.

Wait, that last sentence was me. Mellon continues:

Democracy is merely a system of election – it is not inherently good as its results are entirely predicated on the voters themselves. Freedom-loving peoples will generally establish a political system to protect freedom. Those who prefer strict rule will devise a political order that squelches it.

This has obvious implications. But Mellon is speaking of Egypt.

I would argue that any Islamic society will refuse to establish a system grounded in property rights, individual liberty and free market principles because it is completely anathema to Islamic culture, history and religious tenets.

So why are doing the same despite our clear lack of Sharia? Finally, he wanders close to the point:

In our own nation which shifted from a Republic to a democracy (against the wishes of the Founders mind you), we have seen poor results. Even with a populace composed ostensibly of freedom-loving peoples, we have developed a social welfare state with crony capitalism, plunderous public unions, major slices of the private sector either outright or de facto nationalized and widespread wealth redistribution. When combined with political correctness, a chief component of cultural Marxism, our society in many respects has been rendered impotent.

Now all he needs to do is embrace the dark side and understand that Democracy is the cause of these tragic developments.  It didn't just allow them to happen, it didn't create an environment where the malevolent could make them happen - it created our world.

God at the Grammys:

One night last summer, Lady Gaga sat in a tour bus in England, covered in stage blood from her concert that day. She told me that she had cried hysterically before a recent show because she'd had a dream that the devil was trying to take her. She then said, in earnest, that the spirit of her dead aunt was literally inside her body and that she had eaten a bovine heart to face her fear of her father's heart surgery.

If a stranger on a train had said all of this to me, I would have moved a few seats away.

But this was one of the most famous women in the world. "It's hard to just chalk it all up to myself," Lady Gaga said of her success, explaining that there was "a higher power that's been watching out for me."

Cut to…Snoop Dogg in the living room of his home outside Los Angeles, smoking a blunt and discussing his comeback after leaving Death Row Records. "God makes everything happen," he said. "He put me in that situation with Death Row, and he took me out of it."

Cut to…a hotel room where Christina Aguilera is gorging on junk food and discussing her success. "All of this isn't something that I did," she told me. "It's something that is totally there for a purpose." In a separate interview, Ms. Aguilera's mother explained that fame was her daughter's destiny: "We thought there must be some divine intervention. Early on, I realized…God has plans for her."

Now that is one solid collection of righteous, God-fearing folk.  Still, interesting that success may be linked to belief not only in God, but belief in God's plans for you.

I took the psychopathy test that Vox linked to the other day, and this is the result:

True Psychopath

You scored 14 on Emotional Detachment and 11 on Chaotic Lifestyle! Congratulations, you are both emotionally detached, and you lead a chaotic lifestyle, which may indicate there's something seriously wrong with you. A combined score of 30 or more on this test supports a diagnosis of psychopathy. You are likely to commit, or already have committed, a crime. Stay away from knives, guns etc. although with your brilliant and versatile mind you will probably think of a dozen other ways of hurting whoever you feel like hurting. If your combined score is 5 or less, you are completely average compared to general population. If your combined score is 20 or more, you have a mind of a true criminal. If your combined score is 30 or more, you have a mind of a psycho.

Your Analysis (Vertical line = Average)

You scored 14% onDetachment, higher than 75% of your peers.

You scored 11% on Chaotism, higher than 53% of your peers.

As gratifying as those results are, I think the test might be a wee bit flawed.  Just a little.

I do have one more resolution, but it's really a part of the diet/health resolution.  At the end of the year, I let my membership at the gym at work lapse because, well, it was a shitty gym.  I am feeling the lack of exercise, and I don't like it.  I don't have any decent weights, gym equipment or even reasonable facsimiles at the homestead here, so I needed to either find a new gym or think of something else.

Seeing as part of the budget is to not spend money, I decided to think of something else.  Which meant google.  I found a book, You Are Your Own Gym, written by ex-SpecOps trainer Mark Lauren.  It's all about using your own body weight as resistance.  I've skimmed it, and it looks like a decent program - I just need to adapt his method to a more super-slow style, and I'll be set, I think.  I've been doing some pushups and sit-ups just to be doing something, so I think I'll be able to segue into this as soon as I have time to adapt his exercise schedules and play around with it a bit.

An update on progress in resolution world.

• Dieting.  Tragic fail.  Gained ten pounds.  There are lame excuses reasons for this one.  First was the baby. I'm starting off blaming young Anneliese for things beyond her control a little early, perhaps, but best get started now while she has no defenses.  The arrival of the baby was certainly the cause of chaos, and that made eating correctly more difficult.  Second was the diet plan itself.  Ferriss' idea is that one day a week is a cheat day, eat whatever the hell you want and basically be paleo the rest of the time.  This does not work for me.  Sure, I can cheat like all get out on Saturday, but switching back to paleo is all the harder.  There's usually leftover cheat food that I am sorely tempted to eat - after all, I picked it on the basis that it would be food I would really enjoy, but can't normally enjoy on a paleo system.  Also, throwing carbs and wheat into my body just as its getting used to not having them makes me feel sick and fatigued and a bit depressed.  So, I'm ditching the 4-hr body plan and going back to the more straightforward paleo that lost me much wait last year.
• Blogging once a day.  Tragic fail.  Still want to go with this one - and now that the new baby is calming down, this may be more feasible.
• Time consuming hobby.  Started accumulating stuff, but haven't had time to dive in.  I still want to carve out an evening for this, but this one's on hold.  Incomplete, abandoned.
• Read thinky books.  Started all of the books I mentioned, but haven't finished them.  Also started reading the Great Mortality, about the Black Death.  Fascinating.  Will have reviews soon.  Incomplete.
• Almost done with Volume I of the great books.  I hope to pick up the pace there.  Incomplete.
• Made progress on book catalog - all the history and military history books are catalogued.  I've found digital copies for some, but some of the books are rather obscure and I'm not finding digital copies easy to, uh, find.  If anyone's interested, I'll post the list.  Incomplete.
• Passports: tragic fail, no progress made.
• Made a budget, win!  Following budget, win!  I will be debt free, God willin' and the creek don't rise, on or about Friday, Jul 8.  Still need to rein in random spending a bit, but things are proceeding nicely on this front.
• I think I am definitely a better person than I was six weeks ago.  No closer to taking over the world.

New resolutions?  Well, I still have quite a list.  If I can wrap up the resolutions from last month by the end of this month - doable, certainly, then I will consider new ones for March.

I succeeded on the most important of my goals - the budget.  I consider the tragic fail on the diet to be a partial success, in that it was an experiment and I gained useful knowledge, which I can use going forward.  Three incompletes, but given time constraints and a newborn baby, not so bad - I did make some progress.

Another link from Christian, The Problem with Possession.  Weird that he linked this, as the day before he passed me this, I was sorting and organizing books and ran across my copy of Hostage to the Devil by Malachai Martin.  Which is by far the creepiest book I have ever read.  A sample:

The main door of Puh-Chi was ajar when the police chief arrived. A small knot of men and women stood watching. They could see Father Michael standing in the middle of the floor. Over in one corner there was another figure, a young, naked man, suddenly ravished by an unnatural look of great age, a long knife in his hands. On the shelves around the inner walls of the storehouse lay rows and rows of naked corpses in various stages of mutilation and putrefaction.

“YOU!!” the naked man was screaming as the police captain elbowed his way to the door, “YOU want to know MY name!” The words “you” and “my” hit the captain like two clenched fists across the ears. He saw the priest visibly wilt and stagger backward. But, even so, it was the voice that made the captain wonder. He had known Thomas Wu. Never had he heard him speak with such a voice.

“In the name of Jesus,” Michael began weakly, “you are commanded . . .”<

“Get outta here! Get the hell outta here, you filthy old eunuch!”

“You will release Thomas Wu, evil spirit, and ...”

“I’m taking him with me, pigmy,” came the voice from Thomas Wu. “I’m taking him. And no power anywhere, anywhere, you hear, can stop us. We are as strong as death. No one stronger! And he wants to come! You hear? He wants to!”

“Tell me your name ...”

The priest was interrupted by a sudden roaring. No one there could say later how the fire started. An incendiary? A spark carried by the wind from burning Nanking? It was like a sudden, noisy ambush sprung by a silent signal. In a flash the fire had jumped up, a living red weed running around the sides of the storehouse, along the curved roof, and across the wooden floor by the walls.

The police captain was already inside, and he gripped Father Michael by the arm, pulling him outside.

The voice of Wu pursued them over the noise: “It’s all one. Fool! We’re all the same. Always were. Always.”

Michael and the captain were outside by then and turned around to listen.

“There’s only one of us. One . . .”

The rest of the sentence was drowned in a sudden outburst of flaming timbers.

Now, the glass rectangle of the single window was darkening over with smoke and grime. In a few minutes it would be impossible to see anything. Michael lurched over and peered in. Against the window he could see Thomas’ face plastered for an instant of fixed, grinning agony a horrible picture, a Bosch nightmare come alive.

Long, quickly lashing tongues of flame were licking at Thomas’ temples, neck, and hair. Through the hissing and crackling of the fire, Michael could hear Thomas laughing, but very dimly, almost lost to I lie ear. Between the flames he could see the shelves with their gray-white load of corpses. Some were melting. Some were burning. Eyes oozing out of sockets like broken eggs. Hair burning in little tufts. First, fingers and toes and noses and ears, then whole limbs and torsos melting and blackening. And the smell. God! That smell!

Then the fixity of Thomas’ grin broke; his face seemed to be replaced by another face with a similar grin. At the top speed of a kaleidoscope, a long succession of faces came and went, one flickering after the other. All grinning. All with “Cain’s thumbprint on the chin,” as Michael described the mark that haunted him for the rest of his life. Every pair of lips was rounded into the grinning shape of Thomas’ last word: “one!” Faces and expressions Michael never had known. Some he imagined he knew. Some he knew he imagined. Some he had seen in history books, in paintings, in churches, in newspapers, in nightmares. Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Korean, British, Slavic. Old, young, bearded, clean-shaven.

Black, white, yellow. Male, female. Faster. Faster. All grinning with the same grin. More and more and more. Michael felt himself hurtling down an unending lane of faces, decades and centuries and millennia ticking by him, until the speed slowed finally, and the last grinning face appeared, wreathed in hate, its chin just one big thumbprint.

Now the window was completely black Michael could see nothing. “Cain . . .” he began to say weakly to himself. But a stablike realization stopped the word in his throat, just as if someone had hissed into his inner ear: “Wrong again, fool! Cain’s father. I. The cosmic Father of Lies and the cosmic Lord of Death. From the beginning of the beginning. I ... I ... I ... I ... I ...”

Michael felt a sharp pain in his chest. A strong hand was around his heart stifling its movement, and an unbearable weight lay on his chest, bending him over. He heard the blood thumping in his head and then loud, roaring winds. A dazzling flash of light burst across his eyes. He slumped to the ground.

Strong hands plucked Michael away from the window just in time.

The storehouse was now an inferno. With a tearing crash, the roof caved in. The flames shot up triumphantly and licked the outside walls, burning and consuming ravenously.

“Get the old man away from here!” screamed the captain through the smoke and the smell. They all drew back. Michael, slung over the shoulder of one man, was babbling and sobbing incoherently. The captain could barely make his words out:
“I failed ... I failed ... I must go back. Please . . . Please . . . must go back . . . not later .. . please . . .”

When they got Michael to the hospital, his condition was critical. Apart from burns and smoke inhalation, he had suffered a minor heart attack. And until the following evening, he continued in a delirium.

Before the fall of Nanking, he was smuggled out by the faithful police captain and a few parishioners. They made their way northwestwards, barely escaping the tightening Japanese net.

On December 14, the Japanese High Command let loose 50,000 of their soldiers on the city with orders to kill every living person. The city became a slaughterhouse. Whole groups of men and women were used for bayonet and machine-gun practice. Others were burned alive or slowly cut to pieces. Rows of children were beheaded by samurai-swinging officers competing to see who could take off the most heads with one sweep of the sword. Women were raped by squads, then killed. Fetuses were torn alive from wombs, carved up, and fed to the dogs.

All told, over 42,000 were murdered. Death enveloped Nanking as it had the entire Yangtze delta. Animals and crops died and rotted in the fields.

That's from the prologue.  The book was deeply disturbing to me, though at the time I read it I was a doctrinaire agnostic.  Hell, it creeps me out still just remembering it from fifteen years ago.

You can buy the book here, or read it online in html or pdf.

Effing hilarious.

I can't really excerpt, you have to read the whole thing, as the effect is cumulative.

[wik]: I was startled, when I actually opened the link in a browser, at how ugly the page is.  I read most webpages now through my rss feed reader app, Reeder.  It does a remarkable job displaying ugly websites in a clean, easy-on the eyes manner while retaining useful semantic markup.  If you're a mac or iphone/ipad user, I can't recommend it highly enough.

[alsø wik]: h/t to my pal Christian.

Twelve years ago today, I made a good decision. I wasn't sure that it was a good decision at the time. But that was only because most of the decisions I'd made as a nominal adult had been, on the whole, tragically unwise. This one, though, was wise, and by far the best choice I've made.

A dozen years of marriage was incomprehensible to the younger me. It has been more than I hoped, but harder too. I have more joy in one day of my life now than I did in weeks or years before. Not necessarily more fun. But more joy.

Life is good. My wife is the biggest reason why.

[wik]: Our anniversary is on Valentine's day by accident, not some sort of sappy design. And while I admit that not being able to forget my anniversary is a plus, it's annoying to hear people go, "aaww" when they find out.

Sure you would. And its only one, anyhow; me, Kasey and baby Anneliese:

The internet movie firearms database is hours of fun. This page I particularly enjoyed.