the matriarchy is oppressing me again (some (more) editing)

This in a comment at drhelen's, on a now famous post about how controlling pornography is an attempt to control men's sexuality.

It takes TWO people for a marriage to work. You will only get out whatever effort you put in.

Let me ask, "huh?" If you get out what you put in, regardless of what the other person of the two of you put in, what is the point of having the other person?

If it takes two people for a marriage to work (and assuming a he and a she in it), he will definitely not get out whatever he put in it, he will get out only what she put in. In the long run, she will not invest more than he does, nor he more than she did; but VB didn't say that. Would have been helpful if VB had.

What would it take, from the standpoint of a talented aphorist, to get these two proverbs to work together, in describing the effort to keep a marriage?

FWIW, drhelen and many of her commenters are conjecturing that the author of the article under scrutiny is a feminist harridan who froze her poor hubby out. That has a ring of truth to it, in a way that cuts very close to my own experience from 25 or so years ago.

Dr Anonymous, the article's author, seems to have taken an easy way to dismiss a serious problem, that He was addicted to Porn!, just as easy for drhelen's commenters to reply that Dr Anonymous was Frigid.

The truth is somewhere in between, I would guess, and really hinges on how well Dr Anonymous and Porn Addicted Husband communicated before she took on Frigid properties and he took on porn addict properties. It could have been averted.

Waste of ethics.

'Clause' for the day rather than 'quote' for the day. Sorry, that's the best I can muster.

What exactly would constitute a "waste of ethics"? In that ethics is self-approval in what one does not do, "waste of ethics" represents an exertion, an effort, an application of energy, to avoid doing what one's philosophy tells one not to do because the consequences (if discovered) are, um, existential. If your lapse is discovered, your reputation is forfeit. However, if you apply this effort and gain no return, is the effort wasted?

In short, can one look back on the effort one exerted to be ethical and deem it a failure or loss? Can one waste ethics?

My confusion elicits this post.

I happened upon that clause by following this chain: Bacchus to Susie Bright to a commenter at Susie Bright.

Warning: Joan Jett is involved. Don't tell Berke Breathed.

NRA Board of Directors 2010

This year I followed the recommendations of that there Snowflake guy.

With one exception. I voted for Bob Barr instead of Matt Blunt. In retrospect maybe I should have kept Gov Blunt because he led the reforms that made it lawful for me to CCW on my last trip to his State.

Oh well. I'll make up for that mild error by throwing some money to GOA.

Add Missouri

to the list of States where I have lawfully carried concealed.

So which is it?

On the one hand, it's going to be terrible, your son will have a violent alcoholic daddy, your wife will no longer recognize her ruined, spent and joyless man. Sackcloth and ashes:

There is unemployment, . . . and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.

On the other hand, we just didn't have enough confidence in what really works, we took our eyes off the ball, and we listened to the hucksters, disbelievers and naysayers, and we need to just buck up and smile:

When equity prices were falling in 2007 or 2008, the first time the market closed 10.0001 percent below its previous high, they were putting brightly colored banner headlines on television announcing the official onset of a bear market. But this didn't happen on the way up.

I'm confused.

Though as I read to the end of the gloomier article, the policy prescriptions therein have the ring of untruth. Gotta finish the cheerier article and come back.

how things have changed

I had to rent a car this week. In the compact lines, the only makes Alamo offered were Hyundai and Kia.

Back in the salad days of salarymanhood, they were always Buicks and Pontiacs. Earlier, they were Hertz Thunderbirds. Those days I stuck with one rental agency all the time, and usually rented mid-size then, but I still don't recall seeing Oriental imports on their lots at all in the late Nineties or early Aughts. Now they have crowded Murcan makes out the lowest rungs of the rental fleets as well as some prized places in luxury classes.

Not that I'm complaining, the compact handles competently if a little stiffly, and my favoritest-ever car was a Golf. Rental agencies surely have access to the numbers about durability, cost of ownership, and (ahem) brand loyalty. They wouldn't be renting Korean cars if it didn't make sense, and there were too many of them for it to be an experiment.

When did this happen, and where was I looking instead?

Actually I like Dan's better

Dan Hurwitz in Liberty, April 2007, p14:

What if Iraq were to model its new government not on the representative democracy of the United States, nor the parliamentary democracy of Great Britain, but rather the direct democracy of Switzerland? ... both are composed of fiercely independent, culturally diverse local communities......

The Swiss system is probably the most democratic on earth. It consists of a federal government and 26 semi-independent cantons (or states). The federal government — more properly called a confederation — provides a political umbrella guaranteeing individual rights, safeguarding property, and overseeing functions that are inherently national in scope, such as defense, public works, freedom of movement, and economic matters.

Your humble narrator, 4 years beforehand:

Don't try to build or rebuild a democratically governed Iraq. We should, instead, partition The Country Formerly Known as Iraq along those ethnic lines again. While the country is still reeling from its violent recovery from Saddam Hussein, we have the opportunity to draw some wide chalk lines on the map, to shove these people back into ethnic/religious cantons.

My submission was a lot weaker on the freedom of movement stuff and a bit more hawkish overall.

Quote from yesterday

In a free society, it is hard for 'good' people to do 'good,' but that is a small price to pay for making it hard for 'evil' people to do 'evil,' especially since one man's good is another's evil.

Milton Friedman

Layers of fact checkers

Boston Globe, in a story about the wardrobe choices of Senator Brown, R-MA:

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in today's "g" section about Senator-elect Scott Brown's barn jacket incorrectly implies that author Naomi Wolf advised Al Gore on his clothing choices during his 2000 presidential bid. Wolf consulted on women's policy issues for the Gore campaign.

Jessica Simpson mistakenly complementing the US Secretary of the Interior:

"I was introduced to the Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, I said, 'I really like what you've done with the place.' I had no idea that she was a member of the Cabinet, not an interior decorator!"

the junkman prevails

My outfit was spring-cleaning not long ago, and a TrippLite PR40 was destined for the heap.

It's a 40-ampere DC power supply. Well, it was, but it wouldn't supply any DC recently, and it was part of a suite of electronics that had been forklift-upgraded anyway. The proponent of the forklift upgrade didn't ask for it to be turned in.

Your humble narrator chose to snag it instead of letting it go to the heap, because I need a supply for other amateur radio gear that comes along.

This supply had no output voltage at all. I opened it and took the regulated DC off of the final board. Bingo, 22VDC. The crowbar circuit on the final board was shorting the output to ground, as designed.

TrippLite does not offer schematic diagrams for its products. It offered to take this PR40 back and offer me a sweet deal on a refurbished PR40. Total with shipping (this units weighs about 30 pounds) would have been around $200.

I asked around on qrz.com and was told that, likely, there are 4 NPN power transistors in parallel that clamp raw dc down to 13.8VDC, and one of them is smoked. If I wanted to go the incremental route, first change the IC that was applying the bias to those 4 transistors. For comparable power supplies, like an Astron, there's an IC just to do that. The TrippLite does not use that part, but 3 of the 4 opamps on a quad IC instead.

The quad opamp came for about $10 shipped. That didn't do it, replacing the power transistors would come next. I parked this project in the man cave.

The project came back around on the lost-cause rotation, so I sought out a good price on 2N3771 in TO3 cans on eBay. Somebody took my Make An Offer offer, 4 of them plus shipping for under $10.

I put them in tonight. With their outputs still away from the final board, dammit the output voltage was still 22V.

I touched up the joints on the opamp pins and tried again. Still nope. As I started to pack the tools away, it occurred to me that the IC on the final board might not be able to bias the transistors to cut the raw dc down to the desired 13.8V, if the outputs of the transistors are not coupled to the final board.

With the regulator outputs connected to the final board, the output voltage settled at 13.86 or so VDC.

I assembled the supply as far back to factory as possible, and found that I needed a new way to insulate the output post from the cabinet. The original supply used a stack of plastic washers, which disintegrated as I disassembled the supply the first time.

I improvised a pair of insulators from scrap lexan, one inside and one outside the cabinet, with a dab of silicone caulk to keep the red post centered in its hole through the cabinet.

I'll go back inside in a few days and put a rubber O-ring around the red post to better center it in the hole so it doesn't short out.

So now we have a 40A regulated DC supply for about $20. And we also can hook on to the raw DC in this supply for DC of higher voltage than the pickup truck would provide, the next time there's some anodizing to do.

Strip the Supremes of 'their' clerks

Lawprof goodness:

The simplest solution would be to strip the Justices of all their clerks. We think such a step is unnecessarily radical. Instead, we propose that Congress reassign the clerks (perhaps in reduced numbers) to the staff of the Court’s Librarian. The Librarian would choose and supervise the clerks, who would not be permitted to draft legal opinions. . . our intent is not to punish the Court or its members, but to encourage the Court to operate more like a judicial body and less like an academic faculty cum super-legislature.

Guest bloggers at VC.

There's a parallel here with Members of Congress voting on laws they haven't read: judges deciding cases on the bases of research they haven't read, and expressing their decisions through rulings they didn't even write.

We often get our cause and effect reversed

Gallup today:

PRINCETON, NJ -- In the wake of Republican Scott Brown's victory in Tuesday's U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, the majority of Americans (55%) favor Congress' putting the brakes on its current healthcare reform efforts

No, I think Gallup has it backwards, even exactly backwards. Because Americans disfavor current health care legislation, a Republican running against it won the U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts.

"In the wake of" is a sloppy way to write of cause and effect anyway. It implies sudden displacement rather than the steadily accumulating boilover that actually took place.

Quote for the day

Courtesy Radley Balko:

If only the media had as much contempt for lying, thieving, corrupt politicians as they do for sports stars who use steroids.

Some things are ageless

A reader at Instapundit notes:

I can’t think of any other transportation device, and very few machines of any kind, that can still function as a profit making business tool nearly 80 years after they were designed.

Emphasis mine. John Moses Browning's M1911 is still out there, profitably if you will. But it wasn't designed by committee.

The humble can opener really needs updating to the XXI Century.

More relevant than ever

Miles O'Brien:

. . . maybe we should just get it over with and fly like the fat, old French guys I see strolling around this little cute Caribbean town: in Speedos and plastic sandals.

What with Captain Underpants and a quote for today, I recall a post from the very earliest days of WUTT!

Those who would trade liberty for frequent traveler miles . . .

My prognostication failed in one respect: I figured travelers would be confined to their seats for the last 30 minutes of the flight, rather than 60.

The background check fee of $75 sounds a little outdated too.

Repeal the 17th

How many embarrassed Montanans would call their State legislature today to demand Max Baucus's resignation?

How many folks in Nebraska would like to recall Ben Nelson?

Well, they can't.

Just a thought.

homemade agitation videos against Obamacare

I'm contemplating borrowing the digital camcorder from work, and finding a few lab coats and doc-smocks, and hacking together a few low budget youtube commercials against Obamacare.

The pwogwessives did it to undermine GWB against Kerry, didn't they?

C'mon kids, get out your Flip camcorders and get crackin'!

there is life after the US Senate

Kimball via Instapundit:

"Nelson is a pathetic pawn in this game. He’s history and I hope he has plans for a new day job. He’ll need ‘em."

Actually, his prospects are rather bright for a lobbying job in DC, or a regulatory or Executive job in, er, . . . DC. He has shown his future clients that he knows how to hold out for a better deal. He also knows that the Tea Parties have a tough time converging on DC a) during a snowstorm and b) the last weekend before Christmas.

What Mr Kimball should be hoping for, in addition to an end to Nelson's career in the Senate, is that Nelson doesn't file amended tax returns for the last umpty-ump years.

Our only hope of limiting that man's future influence on or service in the Federal Government now lies in catching his fingers in the till, someway, somehow. He needs to be Daschled, good and hard and right the hell now.

Home parkerizing

Bettie Jean got the home parkerizing treatment. The parts kit from Sarco had some parts in need of a refinishing. Trigger guard and housing in particular. Before:



Brownell's Zinc Phosphate was the source, though I read of some hardcore DIY people who will cook their own from concrete etch solution and steel wool. I wanted zinc because of the gray appearance. Most of the rest of Bettie Jean's furniture is done in zinc already, and in good shape.

I cooked the parts in the parkerizing bath in a Pyrex casserole from the Goodwill store, heated on a Coleman camp stove. After 15 minutes of immersion, I rinsed the part off with hot water from a 30-cup coffeemaker (damned handy item) then shot it with WD40 while it was still hot. After that, I wiped off then blew off with compressed air all the WD40 I could, and bathed the part in vegetable oil.

After:





Next up, the gas cylinder and rearmost of the op rod.

Cops and non-lethal weapons

If you object to the use of non-lethal weapons by police (as I do) then pop over to this post at Volokh.

The post examines legislative presumptions about the right to use force, lethal or nonlethal, in self defense, it isn't really about stun-guns in use by cops per se; I do want to see EV take that topic on, though, and if enough knowledgable commenters show up he might take the hint.