perfidy

Finally someone puts all that nifty information visualization stuff to a use we can all understand. Even if maybe we really didn't want to. Check out the spiffy graph of "who did who". The sheer number of stories amazes me. It's a red pixel/blue pixel soap opera, complete with tragedy (slept with one hot guy and never recovered), opportunistic men, settlers, searchers, and bona-fide hoochie-mommas. Ah, the human condition.

At least not in the "classic" sense, as if there even were such a thing as a "classic" blogging ethos. It's just a test of the Onion's "blog this" function, on a story I found funny, and I wanted to see if its cut-and-paste had as much of a diarrhea-like effect on the blog as those fucking Quizilla snippets do.

[wik] Nope, it doesn't. 

[alsø wik] But yet it also does, two decades and several migrations through various CMS platforms later. I believe I'll just leave this as it is. [-buckethead, writing on 22 Oct 2025]

One of the biggest failures of this administration, and indeed the last several administrations going back to the time of my birth, has been an unforgivably lax approach to the problem of our southern border. And now, a candidate for the House of Representatives and former contestant on the reality show The Apprentice has pointed out in a, well, colorful way just how lax it is.

Long understood as an enemy by uptight people everywhere, pot is now recognized as a bona-fide obstacle on the battlefield.

Canadian soldiers are having a tough time trying to fight in Afghanistan's forests (forests!) of 10' tall pot plants. In addition to all the marvelous, world-changing properties that hippies say weed has, unwashed peaceniks will be happy to know that it also dissipates heat and stores moisture in amazing quantities. The net tactical result is that it is not so very difficult to thwart the Canucks' thermal imagers. Pot can bring peace, after a fashion, by making it hard to find people to kill. Not surprisingly, the immediate remedy of removing the interfering ganja was to try and burn it.

These are professional soldiers people, and I absolutely trust their judgement on this issue: burning the weed was the best military solution.

Well, it turns out that they store so much water it's damned near impossible to burn the stuff. Except for a few stands that were already dead or d(r)ying, which went up quite nicely but did cause- ahem- "ill effects" on a unit downwind of the burn. I'm assuming they meant "ill" as in nausea, not as in "License To".

No lasting effects were reported, although the entire stockpile of pre-positioned NATO tactical cookies in theater seems to have vanished.

Like Ash from the Evil Dead trilogy, you are the hero. Congratulations. As the chainsaw toting king of witty one-liners, you certainly know how to handle any of those undead nasties heading your way, don't you?

From today's "What's News" column teaser-page (on-line; item didn't appear in today's Texas print edition):

The U.S. scrambled fighters over several cities after a small plane hit a 50-story residential building in New York, but it proved to be an accident. Two on board died, one of them Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle, who is a pilot.

Ahem. "...who was a pilot." Or "...a former pilot, now taking a nap of indeterminate length."

[wik] Alternate possibility: "...a former pilot, who has now assumed ambient temperature."

[alsø wik] No, I have no idea why I'm in such a disrespectful mood today, but thanks for asking.

Well, the feces is hitting the fan-blades with even more alacrity at Gallaudet, the Harvard for the Deaf. Relative to deaf colleges, they bring to my mind Michael's view of "Jimmy", in The Ringer (sixth quote down).

According to today's Washington Post, "Student Rebellion Boils Over At Gallaudet". "Campus Shut Down; Arrests Threatened", &c.

They don't like the University's latest pick for president, the woman who's been provost for the past six years:

As faculty pressure tightened on incoming president Jane K. Fernandes to resign before she takes office in January, she repeated her refusal to do so. Students angrily confronted longtime President I. King Jordan, alumni flocked to the campus and a counter-protest movement grew during a day of upheaval.

This has been going on since May, and has periodically flared up in the news cycle.

Now, the football team, apparently irked that classes have been disrupted, has blockaded the gates to the campus. Complaints about Ms. Fernandes appear to circle around the fact that graduation rates have hovered around 40% during her tenure.

Asked for comment on that complaint, I'd hope she responded with something like "Well, graduation rates would be higher, but these students seem never to listen".

Complaints about university leadership coming from faculty impress me not-at-all, as I assume Gallaudet's faculty is statistically similar to many faculty members elsewhere, implying that they're functional morons with tunnel vision. I could be wrong on that, of course - maybe they're all geniuses, but I don't care enough to go try to disprove my hypothesis. At a minimum, I think we can agree, they're all employees of the university, and nobody offered them a vote. Rightly so, I'd add.

The protesting students, on the other hand, require no such quibble - college students tend to overblow their importance in the scheme of things. I know I did, and I'll assert that these are as well. Like the faculty, they, too, are absent from the table at the presidential selection process.

As such things go, it seems likely that the university will cave, putting expediency over principle. This will be a shame. On the bright side, it's probably been a fairly quiet protest, eh?

[wik] Update: In the Oct 13 WaPo, a story about Fernandes' meeting with the protesters:

...Fernandes said she would not step down -- even as the university's alumni association urged her to resign and declared that there is overwhelming support for her removal.

"She is not willing to come halfway," said protest leader Delia Lozana-Martinez, saying Fernandes wanted to talk to the students only about opening campus. "It disappoints and disgusts me. I don't think it was productive at all."

"She is not willing to come halfway"? Actually, her resignation would seem to be "all the way", and Ms. Lozana-Martinez is less right to be disappointed and disgusted than to be embarrassed for how inanely she thinks, speaks, or both. Turns out the protesters aren't just deaf, they appear to be dumb, too.

The attentive reader may have noticed a slight rearrangement of the sidebars, and the addition of a new item, namely, a small chunk of text advertisement. This is not entirely without precedent here at the Ministry, as for some time there has languished at the bottom of the right sidebar a small, tentative foray into the world of advertisement. This effort proved fruitless, and was summarily cancelled. Our new effort was undertaken after careful thought and considerable research, namely, Minister Patton said, "Hey, what about AdBrite?" and Minister Buckethead said, "What the hell? Why Not?"

Our new arrangement with AdBrite is already paying off, a tribute to the foresight and business acumen of those ministers. So far, we have been assigned ads that are euphemistically referred to as "Network Ads." We have come to understand that this really means cheeseball ads for ringtones and hair replacement therapy. Nevertheless, we are in the loop, adwise, and soon some hapless sap thoughtful and broadminded advertiser will see our site among the listings, and think to himself, (we are sure) ""Jesus H. Particular Christ! That's where I need to be peddling my shit!" And, then, brothers, we will be into the long green. In only a little under two days, we have already - already! - accumulated $.39. At this rate, we will get our first ten dollar check sometime before Christmas. We may even be able to afford Christmas bonuses for the Code Whittling Gnomes and the underage Laotian who labor in the HTML mines. And if some patron chooses us as the vehicle to drive to his own personal monetary and fiduciary goals, we could make as much as fifteen times that amount. Think of the celebrations we could have with that sort of cash!

We are even now pursuing other, possibly more lucrative venues for advertising dollars. What fo you, the readers, think of this move? Are you disappointed that the Ministry, long a bastion of selfless, ascetic devotion to blogging has sold out? Or are you surprised that such puissant thinkers and planners as the Ministers have taken this long to hold out a bucket when it's raining soup? We welcome your input - though be advised that money is a more powerful lure than the respect of others.

Popular Mechanics has a short interview with Burt Rutan, the man who will build our space armada when the Giant Fighting Robots come. In the meantime, he is working on a commercial follow-on to the X-Prize-winning and cumbersomely-monikered SpaceShipOne, which he has graced with the inventive name, SpaceShipTwo. Branson will be buying a boatload of these for his Virgin Galactic spacelines in the near future, so go and check out what the future will hold for us in regard to the spaceships, and other neat stuff.

Harvard researcher Robert Putnam, a respected political scientist, natch, has released a study indicating that diversity sucks. Of course, distinguished researchers do not summarize the results of their study with phrases like, "Diversity sucks." Nevertheless:

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.

The core message of the research was that, "in the presence of diversity, we hunker down", he said. "We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us."

Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, "the most diverse human habitation in human history", but his findings also held for rural South Dakota, where "diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians' picnic".

When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. "They don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust institutions," said Prof Putnam. "The only thing there's more of is protest marches and TV watching."

Well, then. We have been informed by the most august of personages and institutions for some time that diversity is something to be encouraged, celebrated, nay, wallowed in. And now, we find that human persons when confronted with outsiders make like monkeys and throw post modern feces across the stream. Perhaps after all there is a human nature.

It would be without precedent for a Harvard researcher to present findings such as these without a prescription for the remolding of soceity to overcome such trifles as human nature and people's innate distrust of those they don't know. And, lo, Putnam delivers:

Prof Putnam stressed, however, that immigration materially benefited both the "importing" and "exporting" societies, and that trends "have been socially constructed, and can be socially reconstructed".

In an oblique criticism of Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, who revealed last week he prefers Muslim women not to wear a full veil, Prof Putnam said: "What we shouldn't do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us."

Right! We'll get right on that, and we should have a new us ready by next Tuesday. Meanwhile, I need to load my shotgun. There's some immigrants lurking in my neighborhood, and I can't trust my damn fool herring eating Norwegian Mayor to do anything about it.