Extreme Suckitude
31-Jan-03
Did your day suck? Well, it could've beenworse. (link courtesy of )
What are they thinking?!
What next? Iraq to head U.N. conference on disarmament?
Fetishes
30-Jan-03
And now, for no particular reason, these are a few of my favorite things…
Short, dark hair cut pixie style.
Full lips. Large brown eyes. Clear skin.
Jodhpurs, a white starched shirt, and a riding cap.
Youth.
A hearty chuckle and a twinkle in the eye.
A throaty, smoky voice. (Joan Greenwood, Kathleen Turner, Terry Gross).
Small pert breasts.
A library filled with books.
Muscular abs, arms, legs, and buttocks.
Sports bras. Biker shorts.
A mischievous grin.
Chokers.
Gold and silver waist chains.
Insatiable curiosity.
Happiness.
Soft lips. A wide smile.
A women nude. Sleeping, breathing deeply as sunlight skitters accross her hair.
Black leather jacket, blue jeans, and black stompy boots.
Confidence.
Greasy, sweaty, working on a motorcycle engine.
The Simpsons on DVD.
Determination.
Tan lines, panty lines.
Pony tails.
Camel toes. Thongs.
Panties pulled half way down, the top of the bottom peeking out.
Calm.
Playfulness.
Boxes of legos, tinkertoys, and lincoln logs.
Brazenness.
Thoughtfulness.
Defending the Homeland Begins at Home
28-Jan-03
http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taejf03b.htm
By Chris Weinkopf
“LET ME TELL YOU, AS A COP, I’m not gonna be there,” Mark Granko told his students, who sat transfixed, listening to war stories from his 25 years as a police officer, including five on a SWAT team. “I don’t care if you call 911. By the time we get there, it’s over.”
That’s why the 15 men, mostly in their 20s and 30s, had trekked to the seedy Oakland suburb of Richmond for the weekend. We were there for one purpose alone: to learn how to kill an attacker instead of allowing him to kill us while we wait for the police to arrive.
This wasn’t a class on gun safety, although safety was the rule of the day. Nor was it a course on marksmanship, but we couldn’t let off a poor shot without getting an earful from Granko and his fellow instructors. After all, our targets were never more than seven feet away, just like real-life rapists, murderers, muggers—and possibly terrorists. As our coaches liked to remind us, a sloppy shot could make the difference between our own life and death.
That was the heart of the two-day Civil Shield class: life and death. The question was whether each of us, if tested, valued our lives and those of our family and loved ones enough to fight for them, or whether we would accept victimization.
In 1993, Jeffrey Snyder wrote a seminal piece for The Public Interest, “A Nation of Cowards,” in which he marveled at an odd contradiction in American culture—our collective, professed commitment to independence and autonomy, yet our utter refusal to accept, individually, the responsibility for protecting ourselves from crime. “While people are encouraged to revel in their individuality and incalculable self-worth,” Snyder wrote, “the media and the law enforcement establishment continually advise us that, when confronted with the threat of lethal violence, we should not resist, but simply give the attacker what he wants.”
This mentality assumes that the attacker—who has already broken both the law and our first social contract to respect the property rights, freedom, and dignity of others—will suddenly abide by a new social contract, one Snyder characterized as, “I will not hurt or kill you if you give me what I want.” At times that may be the case, but often, it isn’t.
There’s also the greater point of our duty to our fellow civilized, law-abiding man. It’s one thing to forfeit one’s own life, property, or dignity to an assailant, and quite another to submit one’s neighbor or loved one to the same. Where is the virtue in a husband who, honoring some imaginary social contract with a criminal, allows his wife to be raped? Or the parents who stand by helpless as an intruder carries off their child?
How about the citizen who quivers behind a potted plant as a terrorist unloads his rifle into a crowded theater? The war on terror adds a new dimension to the case Snyder laid out a decade ago. Today, self-defense entails not only protecting one’s self, but also one’s nation and its security.
Snyder wrote convincingly of each person’s moral responsibility to take up arms in self-defense: “Crime is rampant because the law-abiding, each of us, condone it, excuse it, permit it, submit to it. We permit and encourage it because we do not fight back, immediately, then and there, where it happens.… We are a nation of cowards and shirkers.”
Nearly a decade later, the dichotomy between our fetish of self-sufficiency and our aversion to self-defense is greater than ever. As a culture, we have increasingly come to realize that each of us can perform many of the tasks we once consigned largely to “experts,” whether it’s refinishing the hardwood floors or filing our taxes. Yet when it comes to confronting rapists, murderers, robbers, or terrorists, that’s a duty most of us—especially those living in the “blue states”—would just as soon leave to the professionals, even though the professionals are usually the first to admit that in most situations, there’s little or nothing they can do.
I’m a product of the culture of cowardice. I grew up in New England, where guns were considered the playthings of sociopaths and rednecks, with no place in the home of thoughtful, civilized people. I’ve lived in blue-state territory all my life, from New England to New York, to my current home in Southern California. In these parts, even among Republicans and conservatives, there’s a stigma attached to gun ownership, as if the commitment to individual responsibility stops short of self-defense.
When my wife and I bought our first home a year ago, friends and family helpfully advised us to buy a fire extinguisher—after all, we wouldn’t want a small kitchen fire to grow out of control and consume the house while we wait for the fire department to arrive. None, however, suggested that we buy a gun, lest a home invader rape or kill a member of our family while waiting for the police to show up.
When we enrolled in a Red Cross CPR and first-aid class last summer, we were widely praised for our forward thinking. Our instructor repeatedly advised us of the moral obligation to know CPR—without immediate attention, he said, someone in a state of cardiac arrest is unlikely to survive the wait for paramedics.
I got no such kudos when I told the same friends and relatives that we were headed up to the Bay Area for a weekend so I could take an intensive gun-training class. Then, the response was either one of disdain or bemusement. I repeatedly found myself offering an explanation—“It’s for an article I’m writing”—as though a professional interest in self-defense was more legitimate than a personal one.
I hadn’t so much as touched a loaded weapon until age 26, when, for my bachelor party, some friends and brothers-in-law took me to a local rifle range, where much fun was had blasting away at—actually, around—paper targets. Yet I had come to under-stand the societal value of gun ownership, and I was a supporter of the Second Amendment. But guns were still for other people.
My pro-gun convictions became more personal after 9/11, when the extent of existing dangers became all the more clear. So when Ed Isper, then the president of Civil Shield, a Northern California company specializing in both armed and unarmed self-defense training of all kinds, invited me to participate in a weekend-long class in pistol techniques, I eagerly accepted the offer.
The class began early Saturday morning, at a dusty rifle range tucked between several low hills that served as the backstop for our bullets. The classes, which cost $350 apiece plus nearly as much in ammunition, drew a largely upper-middle-class clientele. It was a serious group, with few if any showboaters, survivalists, or overly macho types. The experience levels ranged from novices learning their basic skills to a Berkeley cop, there to supplement his professional training.
With the single exception of the dance classes my wife and I took in the weeks before our wedding, I had never felt so instantly incompetent. Each time, as we were called to draw and fire our weapons within a matter of seconds, I found myself stumbling to be mindful of my motion, my stance, my grip, my aim, how my eyes would move to the target, the way my finger gently squeezed the trigger until—pow!—the sudden burst jerked the whole upper half of my body backward.
But the instructors earned their paychecks that weekend. I learned how to do a “combat reload,” and how to set up shots on the move by reacting to motions and sounds around me. I learned how to fire from one knee for close-quarters situations, and, when the circumstances demand it, how to perform a “failure drill”—two shots to the chest, one to the head.
By the end of the first day, I was holding my own. At the end of the second, I had the calluses, blisters, and bruises to show for firing off literally hundreds of rounds of ammunition. I was smooth on the draw—albeit far from quick—and when I managed to remember all the pointers my instructors had given me, I was a pretty decent shot. In one of our last exercises, when, instead of firing at black-and-white outlines of human shapes, we got to shoot up life-size posters of fictional assailants, I managed to put a bullet smack in the forehead of the Uzi-packing Asian gangbanger in body armor. I couldn’t help feeling a certain sense of self-satisfaction when the instructor looked at my handiwork and offered a one-word assessment: “Vicious.”
But underlying the thrill of the moment was the sobering reality that in real life my targets wouldn’t be made of paper, nor would they wait the several seconds it took me to get in my stance and aim. A lot more practice would be necessary. Still, the foundation had been laid, and my incompetence transformed to a basic confidence: Victimhood is a choice I need not make.
Ed Isper, Civil Shield’s former president, believes that September 11, 2001, “caused a lot of people to step back and re-evaluate their opinion on the use of violence in self-defense.” “Something like 9/11 causes some soul searching. People…are much less inclined to accept being terrorized.”
Indeed, if ever there was a crystallizing event to prove the inability of government to prevent, let alone stop, all acts of evil, it was that day. The combined, bungling efforts of the FBI, CIA, and myriad other law enforcement agencies proved inadequate to quash the murderous aspirations of 19 ruthless terrorists. Metal detectors, x-ray machines, and the perfunctory “have your bags been with you at all times” interrogation at the ticket counter didn’t stop the men from bringing boxcutters on board. After the first airliner crashed into the World Trade Center on that awful morning, and federal officials realized that other planes had also been hijacked, the Air Force scrambled fighter jets with orders to shoot them down. Even that horrendous, last-ditch resort wasn’t enough.
The terrorists did meet one setback that day: It was aboard United Flight 93, the plane presumably headed for the Capitol, but which crashed in Pennsylvania farmland instead. The difference was made by ordinary people—not experts, not police, not federal sky marshals—ordinary people who, thanks to their cell phones, soon realized that this was no “normal” hijacking. And so for those brave souls on Flight 93, the new mantra became “Let’s roll.” The terrorists thought it would be so easy, until a group of ordinary people made it so hard, staving off one more disaster on a day synonymous with the word.
Even after September 11, when airports worldwide made an obsessio of screening passengers, Richard Reid boarded a plane in Paris bound for Miami with plastic explosives encased in the sole of his sneaker. Once the plane was in the air, there was nothing any police agency or stricter law could have done to stop him. A flight attendant saw Reid trying to ignite his shoe. She called for help, and within minutes, a swarm of passengers had pinned him down and were busily tying him up with their belts and neckties.
One of the great lessons to come from the first year of the war on terror is that homeland security necessarily begins at home. It’s not enough for us to expect our government to stop every act of terrorism. We all must be willing to do our part.
On airplanes, doing our part is limited to hand-to-hand combat. It’s not feasible to let armed passengers aboard aircraft, although allowing pilots to carry guns will have largely the same deterrent effect. But it’s a mistake to believe that all future terrorist attacks will be confined to airplanes. And while hand-to-hand combat was sufficient to stop Richard Reid and derail the murderers on Flight 93, sometimes nothing less than a gun will do.
On the morning of July 4, 2002, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian, left his Orange County apartment for Los Angeles International Airport with two guns and a hunting knife. He proceeded to the El Al ticket counter, where he opened fire on passengers and clerks.
That Hadayet succeeded only in killing two and wounding five is a small miracle. Although the Los Angeles Police Department had beefed up patrols at LAX after 9/11, the deployments had gradually declined. At any airline other than El Al, Hadayet’s shooting spree would have been limited only by his supply of ammunition. But the Israeli airline has armed, private security guards at its ticket counters. It was the brave response of those guards—risking their lives for a nominal wage on a national holiday—that prevented Hadayet from killing far more people by shooting him dead.
Unarmed guards would have been impotent against Hadayet’s attack. Massive passenger mobilization, the likes of which brought down Flight 93, might have made a difference, but at a far greater cost. Terrorists with guns can only be stopped with other guns.
For all the nation’s much-trumpeted beefing up of security at airports and on planes, terrorists will most likely shift their attacks elsewhere—supermarkets, amusement parks, sporting events—the list of potential targets is endless. Because it’s unclear where or how terrorists will strike next, it’s also virtually impossible for the government to develop the appropriate safeguards for any potential attack.
What is clear is that the terrorists’ efforts will be considerably more difficult if they are met with resistance from their intended victims. If that resistance is armed and well-trained, their efforts will be complicated all the more. And if they had good reason to fear such resistance almost anywhere they might strike, their ambitions would be severely dampened.
Our world has changed over the last year, and with it our moral responsibility to defend ourselves. Effective homeland security is not a political abstraction, but an individual duty—a duty to be alert, to be prepared to strike back, and to be willing to do so when called. Cowardice can no longer be an option.
If I were still in the bay area, I'd like to go to this:
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
5:30 – 7:00 PM
Brass Rail, Benson Memorial Center-basement, Santa Clara University
Refreshments will be provided
Hope you can make it!
Directions to and map of SCU at the end of this e-mail
The Civil Society Institute Lectures on Globalization and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Present
Terry Anderson
Markets and the Environment: Friends or Foes?
Wednesday, January 29, 2003,
5:30 – 7:00
Brass Rail, Benson Memorial Center, Basement
Santa Clara University
After three decades of command-and-control environmental regulations, pragmatic environmentalists are searching for more effective tools. With its focus on incentives, free market environmentalism shows how markets can be harnessed to improve resource stewardship and environmental quality. Terry Anderson will survey the history of command and control and contrast it with real-world examples illustrating the potential for free market environmentalism.
Terry Anderson is the executive director of PERC, a think-tank focusing on market solutions to environmental problems located in Bozeman, Montana. He is also senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and professor emeritus at Montana State University. His work has helped launch the idea of free market environmentalism and has prompted public debate over the balance between markets and government in managing natural resources. Anderson is the author or editor of 24 books, including Free Market Environmentalism (Pacific Research Institute 1991), coauthored with Donald Leal which received the 1992 Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award, and Enviro-Capitalists: Doing Good While Doing Well (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), also coauthored with Donald Leal. His current projects include a forthcoming book with P. J. Hill on The Not So Wild, Wild West.
This event is organized in conjunction with the SCU Institute on Globalization
Directions to Santa Clara University
If you are coming from U.S. Highway 101:
Take the De La Cruz Boulevard/Santa Clara exit.
Follow De La Cruz Boulevard towards El Camino Real (stay in the right lane).
When De La Cruz Boulevard splits, follow the right split over the overpass.
Turn right onto Lafayette Street staying in the right turn lane.
Turn right at El Camino Real.
The main entrance to Santa Clara University will be on the right-hand side of the road.
If you are coming from Interstate 880:
Take The Alameda exit.
Travel north on The Alameda.
The Alameda will become El Camino Real.
The main entrance to Santa Clara University will be on the left-hand side of the road.
If you are coming from Interstate 280:
Take Interstate 880 north toward Oakland.
Exit at The Alameda.
Turn left on The Alameda.
The Alameda will become El Camino Real.
The main entrance to Santa Clara University will be on the left-hand side of the road.
For a map of SCU, go to: http://www.scu.edu/map/
Cosma Shalizi
25-Jan-03
I like to think that I'm well read.
However, I'm a mere piker compared to Cosma Shalizi.
Or Danny Yee.
Or this guy.
I'm Steve, and I'm a Supervillain
24-Jan-03
http://www.ubergeek.tv/switchlinux/
Priceless
24-Jan-03
Via
http://mknx.com/v/Mastercard.asf
(warning, rated PG-13…keep sound low at work)
Some interesting anecdotal observations…
http://personal.coslink.net/kpezzi/contest.htm
Why are attractive women as rare as dodo birds in emergency rooms?
After a decade of ER work, I can recall having had less than a dozen attractive female patients. Considering the countless thousands of patients that I've served, this fact is truly amazing and deserving of formal study. A considerable amount of money is spent every year on the research and prevention of accidents, yet I've never seen anyone look into the reasons why attractive women seem to be virtually immune to diseases and accidents that might cause them to need emergency medical treatment.
There's recently been a lot of hullabaloo in the press about the link between beauty and genetic superiority. The upshot of this research is that beauty is, if nothing else, a marker for good genes that confer a host of desirable traits, not just skin-deep beauty. If this theory is indeed true, then it may offer a partial explanation for my empirical observation that attractive women rarely need treatment in an ER. There are certainly more mundane explanations, but they alone cannot explain this phenomenon.
If you're a beautiful woman and you've actually been a patient in an emergency room, I'd like to hear your story to consider it for inclusion in my next book of ER stories. Burst my bubble of incredulousness and get published at the same time! Send your anecdote to [email protected] .
Interestingly, over five years after its inception, only four women who opined that they were attractive have submitted stories. Perhaps my asseveration (about there being an inverse correlation between a woman's beauty and the likelihood that she'll be a patient in an ER) is not as flip or as baseless as it might seem. Nevertheless, my observation smacks of political incorrectness and—like most conclusions that are true but politically incorrect—it has ruffled some feathers in a very predictable way. After having more feedback on this issue than I ever imagined (and certainly enough to draw statistically valid conclusions), there are five basic groups of responses. Specifically, they are from:
(1) Men who work in emergency rooms who've written to say that they've observed the same thing.
(2) Women (many of whom do not work in an ER) who take umbrage at my observation irrespective of its veracity. If you fall into this category and wish to send me a scathing e-mail message, please note that I'm swayed by facts, not pouting.
(3) Attractive women who agree with my observation. Such respondents sometimes pass along their conclusions about why a pulchritudinous woman is less likely to be an ER patient than a woman who is not a beauty. Here is a synopsis of just one of these conclusions: attractive women are more likely to have physicians as friends and family members. In anything short of a true emergency, those women generally prefer to call upon a doctor that they know personally rather than wait for hours to be treated in a busy ER by a doctor who may or may not be fluent with the English language, not to mention the nuances of medicine. The foregoing gray-shaded text was a synopsis; if you want to read the actual message, here it is:
I am currently reading your book, Believe It or Not! True Emergency Room Stories (which is, by the way, a great read) and I think I might have a viable reason for the disproportionate amount of beautiful women who never visit an ER. Judging from what I've understood from your book, I think by attractive you are referring to the whole package (not a life-size Barbie with a Barbie doll-sized brain). Aside from true life-threatening situations (i.e. MI's, strokes, etc.), I feel that what many people would view as an emergency is relative to their degree of education as well as their socioeconomic position (notwithstanding the “dirtbags” you mention early in your book). I also feel that the proportion of beautiful women is very high in the above-mentioned group.
You mentioned that you wondered “why attractive women seem virtually immune to diseases and accidents that might cause them to need emergency medical treatment?” Fairly educated people, with a basic understanding of diet, healthy living and hygiene most probably also have an internist (not to mention a veritable cornucopia of other specialists, as well). Any potential emergency situations are usually identified when they present themselves and are treated—rather than let progress until they actually are emergencies. It's no surprise that successful, well-educated professionals are more likely to get their “pick of the litter” when dating and selecting a spouse (i.e., the “good catch” theory—which I can expound upon later in another e-mail, if you're interested). Their social circles are comprised of other doctors, lawyers, etc. so when so-and-so's wife/girlfriend cuts her hand slicing a bagel, they simply call so-and-so's friend, the plastic surgeon, to meet in his office or hospital to take care of the matter. Attractive, well-educated people avoid the emergency room at all costs. It is the equivalent to grocery shopping in an ghetto supermarket, both because the quality of care is a crap shoot and the element of people that wait the interminable wait alongside of you leaves a lot to be desired.
As elitist as this sounds, it's true. I come from a family of physicians. I personally have never been to an ER as a patient. I don't know any of my girlfriends who have, either. We've been lucky enough never to have been involved in serious accidents, but I think you'll agree that many if not most serious accidents involve a degree of stupid behavior. In essence, pretty girls have doctor friends and family. And if you're wondering…yes, I am.
(4) People who suggest that this phenomenon under discussion is a reflection of the fact that my conception of beauty is more restrictive than that held by other men. The proliferation of “rate me” sites (in which people rate a succession of people's pictures on a scale of 1 to 10) on the Internet has allowed me to scientifically test whether this is true or not. By comparing my assessment to the average rating, I know that my notion of what constitutes beauty is fairly typical. The only time that there is a significant discrepancy is due to the fact that some men evidently think that every young woman who is slender and shows off her belly button is automatically a 9 or a 10 even if she's just a skinny young plain Jane. In summary, except for that one exception my overall assessments are similar to the average scores that are tabulated from thousands of men. Therefore, I offer this as proof of the fact that this “beautiful women aren't ER patients very often” phenomenon is not attributable to the fact that I possess an unreasonably high standard of beauty.
(5) Two people who propounded that ER patients understandably don't look good because of the very problems that caused them to seek emergency treatment. Not surprisingly, neither of those respondents were ER doctors. In my opinion, a good ER doctor should be able to automatically make an allowance for such circumstances and should be able to intuitively see what patients would be, sans the injury or illness. Want an example? Years ago I had a young lady as a patient in the ER after she'd been in a horrific car accident that mangled her face. If most people saw her they would probably wince in disgust, but I was able to instantly realize that she would be very beautiful once her face was reassembled. If I did not have this conception of the endpoint, how else could I have performed the surgery?
Another point that's even more pertinent to this topic is that most ER patients do not have emergencies. If someone sprains her ankle or has a bladder infection, will that degrade her appearance? Of course not. It goes without saying that there is nothing—not even an emergency—that will cause a woman to instantly gain 100 pounds or to develop facial wrinkles that were created by decades of cigarette smoking. Consequently, if I think that such a person is unattractive it has nothing to do with her “emergency.”
(6) Several people have written to me suggesting that attractive women must occasionally cut their fingers, thus making them likely to wind up in an ER. First, take a look at the gray-shaded text in #3, above. Now take a look at my experience. I've performed about every imaginable emergency surgical procedure on thousands of people but I've treated only one attractive woman with a cut finger. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that attractive women often get someone else to do things for them that entail a certain amount of risk. If you've ever taken a college class that explores the nexus between genetics and behavior, you don't need to be told that men trip over one another in their haste to mix their genome with that of beautiful women. Furthermore, there is no shortage of rich men waiting to open up joint bank accounts with women who are very attractive. Thus, such women are more likely to drive safe cars instead of old clunkers with bad brakes, and they are more likely to live in safe neighborhoods in modern homes that have every imaginable safety feature from electrical lines protected by ground-fault interrupters to dishwashers that obviate the need for women to wash dishes manually. And how many gorgeous women toil in dangerous factories or other perilous jobs? Is there even one such person in the entire United States? Incidentally, feel free to not treat that as a rhetorical question.
__________________________________________________________
While I haven't given this matter a lot of thought, I can offer another reason (in addition to the factors discussed above) for why this phenomenon is operative. Let's begin by taking a look at a list of behaviors that are under an individual's control:
*
smoking
*
drug use
*
alcohol consumption
*
poor diet (consumption of junk food or excessive caloric intake, or both)
*
excessive consumption of soft drinks (I'm listing this separately from diet since many people don't think of soft drinks when they're thinking of their diet. However, I've met countless people who consume a substantial proportion of their calories—up to 80%—from the empty calories in soft drinks. Not surprisingly, this leaves very little room in their diets for nutritious foods.)
*
inadequate sleep
*
inadequate exercise
*
risky behavior
It is not a coincidence that people who abuse themselves in the aforementioned ways do two things: degrade their appearance and their health, thus increasing the chance that they'll end up in the ER. Conversely, people who take good care of themselves are more likely to be attractive and healthy. It's no surprise that healthy people who don't engage in risky behavior rarely have a need to visit the ER.
Simon Market
19-Jan-03
Tom Bell is looking for help to start Simon Market, a real-money idea futures market named for the late economist Julian Simon. Why should you support the development of the Simon Market? Read Julian Giles article Wanna Bet?in the November 28, 2002 edition of Nature.