perfidy

Over 2100 gods online! Your online source for divininty of all shapes, sizes, colors, and ethnicities. It's Godchecker.

Merely a taste of the divine tastiness you wil find at godchecker:

FAFNIR: He was the son of HREIDMAR the wizard, together with two brothers, OTR and REGIN. Shape changers all. When OTR was in otter form, LOKI, who fancied a nice bit of otter to go with his fish, killed him by mistake.

This was a big mistake since he turned up at HREIDMAR's house in the company of HONIR and ODIN bearing a strangely familiar otter skin. The wizard family thought LOKI was a rotter. Now LOKI, HONIR and ODIN were in deep trouble.

LOKI, using all his considerable cunning, suggested a hefty ransom fee to repay his debt. This was agreed and the other two Gods were taken hostage until his return. Knowing where ANDVARI the Dwarf King kept his treasure, LOKI forced the dwarf to hand it all over, even down to a special gold ring he'd just forged. ANDVARI just had time to curse the ring so it would bring doom to whoever owned it.

LOKI never got to own it - in fear of his life and those of his compatriots he took it straight to the wizards, who released the Gods after a quick gloat.

FAFNIR gloated the most and was so inflamed with greed he turned himself into a dragon and stole the hoard, hiding it in a mountain lair where he could carry on gloating. He killed his father and exiled his brother REGIN, who by chance ran into the hero SIGURD.

The curse was now working overtime. SIGURD ambushed and killed FAFNIR, taking the treasure and pocketing the ring to use for a planned engagement to BRYNHILD. Untimely ends followed shortly.

Mythology with an edge, the sacred cut with sarcasm. It's crazy, it's wacky, it's Godchecker.

A couple days ago the RQ-8 Fire Scout fired two Mark 66 unguided rockets, becoming in the process the first autonomous, unmanned helicopter to undergo a successful live weapons fire.

Northrop Grumman is developing the Fire Scout for both the Army and Navy. "Today's test is a big step in the development of future UAVs across the entire industry," said Doug Fronius, Northrop Grumman's Fire Scout program director. NG is a big player in the unmanned autonomous vehicle field - uavs in service, production or development include the U.S. Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk and Army RQ-5 Hunter that are already in service; the BQM-34 and BQM-74 aerial targets; the multi-role Hunter II proposed for the Army's next-generation, extended-range, multi-purpose UAV program; the X-47 Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Air Force and Navy; and advanced systems like the KillerBee program being developed for low-altitude, long-endurance missions.

This is the future. Stealth can be defeated. Spoofing and jamming systems can be defeated. Any manned combat vehicle is vulnerable. Given our aversion to avoidable casualties, it will make increasing sense for hazardous missions to be alotted to autonomous combat vehicles. Instead of sending a billion dollar B-1, and risking the lives of its crewmen, send in a a flock of hundred thousand dollar drones armed with bombs and missiles. With satellite links back to controllers sitting in front of a monitor hundreds of miles away, you have greater ability to call the shots and ensure the destruction of the target. Loss of one or two drones doesn't risk mission failure. No possiblility of friendly casualties. The fighter jocks and bomber pilots in all the services will fight this hard, but the logic of redunduncy, accuracy, safety, economy will eventually win no matter what they do.

My son is of an age where he is expanding his vocabulary at exponential rates. In his great rush to add new words to his repertoire, he is sometimes slightly less than scrupulous in assuring that his pronunciation of a new word is correct before jumping to the next bright, shiny new nym. In most cases, mispronunciations or misstatements are merely cute. Of course, most anything a two-year-old does short of a full on temper tantrum is cute.

There are exceptions. For example, there is a set of common words that, translated through the mind and underdeveloped vocal apparatus of a small child that come out not just wrong, but wrong. We first noticed this phenomenon when Sir John-the-unintentionally-profane began to utter his charming version of the phrase, “fire truck.” Imagine that the second through sixth letters are not there, and you’ll have a solid idea of what came out of my son’s mouth.

At first, this was amusing. It was amusing because I have a dirty mind and we were not in the presence of strangers. As soon as he shouted his adorable riff on “fire truck” in public, I was mortified. After a kindly grandmotheresque woman at the grocery store informed me that this is, in fact, a common occurrence, I felt better. I went straight back to amused, though I attempted to act unamused so as not to encourage potty-mouth.

John got a little better at saying fire truck, though when under stress or excitement he would revert to his original model. Things seemed to be getting better. Then, on the way home from Ohio, he sort of learned to word, “Bridge.” There are quite a lot of overpasses on the interstates. For hours, my wife and I were treated to the spectacle of a cute, high pitched voice saying, “Under bitch?” about once every twenty minutes.

Over the next few days, I waited, hoping for that magical moment when I would see a fire truck on a bridge. My wife was not amused when I pointed it out to my son and then nearly drove off the road when he said, “Fuck! Bitch!” A little later, the word frog also transmogrified into ‘fuck,’ increasing the likelihood that we would be embarrassed in public. Whenever John said something that sounded obscene in the presence of others, my wife would be at pains to quickly and loudly say, “I don’t see any frogs, John.”

Shortly thereafter, my wife made the colossal mistake of pointing out that the pickup in front of us was both large and black. This was unfortunate because, a) John loves trucks and won’t stop talking about them and b) he pronounces the word truck more like “cock.” I was laughing, but in a sick and terrified way, as my son kept repeating that phrase. Even more so when he added, philosophically, “I like it.”

A friend, who works at a day care center, told of us of a child there who was normally very quiet and reserved. Unbeknownst to the staff, he harbored a deep and rather possessive love for horses. He did care for other children playing with the horses, nor did he care to pronounce the first ‘s’ in that word. So when some other miscreants started playing with his horses, we waded in, fists flying, crying, “My whores! My Whores!” I didn’t think a two year old could be that advanced on the pimp career track.

Put that kid with mine, and you’ll have a regular def comedy jam, or the vocal track to a decent rap album or porn movie.

So remember, tell all the horses and bridges to shut the frog up, you trucksuckers.

Check it out. If there was a mom like that at my school, she kept it too well hidden. A couple moms were really hot, but they certainly weren't providing me or anyone else with booze, drugs and sex.

Speaking of loan repayment calculators, certain acquaintances of mine are dealing with a client who wants an application that calculates loan payments. This client is a CPA in charge of finances for a large entity. This individual believes that a loan repayment schedule should look like this:

For a loan of 1000, for ten years, at 5% APR, with yearly payments.

Plugging the loan amount, number of payments and interest into a standard loan calculator, you get something like this:

Given that the stated purpose of using the first formula was to save the loan recipient money, the client's stubborn refusal to admit that maybe their conception of simple interest loan repayment plans is a bit out of touch with standard accounting practice, general wisdom and in fact reality.

A few things to consider: while the second scheme is not exactly intuitive, the total interest paid makes sense when you consider that over the term of the loan, you will owe half of the loan amount, on average. The decreasing interest/increasing principal as percentages of the payment amount make sense when you realise that at any given moment, you're paying 5% interest on the remaining balance. It has to work that way if you want a constant payment over the term of the loan.

I am not an accountant. I have software do my taxes, and I haven't ever thought about this subject in any depth whatsoever until today. But what is obvious to me is not to the client, who in the interest of protecting his loan recipients is proposing terms that a loan shark would love - especially the 50% interest on the last payment.

But there is a certain degree of... rightness about this.

Things I'm considering for t-shirt slogans:

• College
  
• Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
  
• Go Lemmings Go
  
• You bastards are... Bastards
  
• i hate clowns
  
• Stay back 200 yards :: Court Order
  
• RTFM
  
• WAR
  
• Hateful, talentless, war-loving trailer trash

An interesting bit in the the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists forwarded to me by a coworker. The author makes the case that the firestorm caused by a large nuclear blast will (for 100kton+ nukes) almost certainly be greater in extent than the blast zone.

Seeing as I work about four blocks north of the White House, I think it is safe to say that I will be well within the zone of "100% fatality" should someone light off a city killer within the District of Columbia. Now, if it was only a pony nuke - Hiroshima size or smaller, I might survive, depending on where exactly it went off. Unlike Hiroshima or other WWII-era Japanese cities, DC is built largely of stone, which should provide greater blast and fire resistance than a city made of, say, paper.

Interestingly, I was reading a while back that in many respects, a nuclear weapon is less effective than the equivalent amount of conventional explosives. The reason being is that while there is a tremendous amount of oomph in a nuke, it is very, very concentrated. Beyond a certain point, the stuff in the immediate vicinity of a 15kton bomb cannot be destroyed any more. But if you dropped 15,000 one-ton bombs in a grid pattern over a city, you would do more damage, because the destructive forces would be more evenly applied.

The great advantage of nukes is not their destructive power per se, but rather that so much destructive power could be delivered with significantly less effort. From thousand bomber armadas to a single plane. The economy of force is what made nukes so attractive to military planners. Political considerations made nukes unwieldy as a battlefield weapon, and we were stuck with conventional weapons for decades.

However, new technology has brought us to the same point. Precision weapons make it possible, again, to destroy targets with a nuke-like economy of force. A single plane with an appropriate load of smart munitions can destroy any given target. With dumb bombs, thousands of planes would be required to have even a outside shot of destroying a given target. *

I would wager that nuclear weapons will not be used in anything resembling a regular war in our lifetimes. With the advent of precision weapons, there's just no point to using nukes. The political fallout would cause more damage to the user than the bomb would to the enemy.

Where I would imagine their use is as a weapon of terrorists, a mad regime, or in space.

* [Wik] And if you're not familiar with the history of strategic bombing, you'd be stunned at how ineffective bombing was in the era before precision guided weapons. Post war calculations showed that pretty much the entire US Air Corps would have been needed to ensure that a single city was knocked out, and stayed knocked out, for the duration of the war. Bombers hitting their target was akin to winning the lottery. High altitude 'precision' bombing was a joke.

There were only two ways to ensure that a target was actually destroyed. One was to go in real low and slow. That tactic had the unfortunate side effect of leading to enormous casualties among the bomber crews. The other was to intentionally cause large scale firestorms with incindiary bombs. The fires would spread far beyond the blast zones of the individual bombs. This tactic had the unfortunate side effect of killing tens of thousands of presumably innocent civilians.

[alsø wik] Here are some nifty websites that allow you to calculate the blast effects of nuclear weapons:

• Here's a couple simple ones that operate like your basic loan repayment calculators.
  
• From FAS, a more sophisticated one that overlays blast radii on selected US cities.
  
• And here is the famous asteroid impact calculator, which allows you to contemplate the devastation caused by truly large explosions.
  
• Finally, a silly site that calculates the blast effects of nukes on spaceships.

In honor of the anniversary, yesterday, of the first landing of men on the moon google has loaded lunar map data into their google maps interface. Go here, and you can see where the six Apollo missions landed.

Zoom in on the place where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed, and you can see the actual terrain that those heroic astronauts walked upon.

Couple interesting developments in the space world today.

China announced that in October, they will attempt to send a second taikonaut into orbit. It's been nearly two years since they first sent a man into space, which indicates either a fair amount of caution, or limited capability. Either situation would suggest that their stated goals of orbiting a space station and sending an unmanned probe to the moon are rather ambitious.

Back in the states, the true hope for an actual space program is with private enterprise. The first X-Prize cup will take place in early October in New Mexico, where private space firms will put on a show and tell for the faithful. Although organizers hope that someday soon this event will entail actual space launch competitions, at least for now it remains relatively ground-bound. Highlights of the show will likely be Armadillo Aerospace's test flight of a scale version of its VTOL spacecraft, built just for the show; and XCOR's rocket plane. Armadillo's vehicle will take off, hover, and then land again; but may do more if the company gets an FAA waiver. XCOR's EZ-Rocket plane will conduct a series of flights, demonstrating its capability for rapid turnaround.

Within the next couple years, several of these startup space companies will be attempting their own sub-orbital flights on the lines of Rutan's flights last year. And off in the distance, there is the $50 million America's Space Prize sponsored by Robert Bigelow. That cash goes to the first team to send five passengers 400km up, orbit the earth twice at that altitude, return them safely to Earth, and then do it again within 60 days; all before January 10, 2010. Besides the cash, the winner will receive contracts to service the inflatable habitats that Bigelow Aerospace is currently developing. If you haven't already started, you better get off your ass, as you've only got a half a decade left.

Over at Naked Villainy, I see that the Maximum Leader has been sorted. He is a Ravenclaw. I, however, am:

Even though I prefer black,
I'm a Gryffindor!

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of book six of the Chronicles of Harry Potter tomorrow, obstreperous papist interference bedamned. Hopefully it will arrive early, so that I can read it while the wifey is off doing her hillbilly twangy music up in Harper's Ferry.

Which, by the way, would have been a much better location for our nation's capital than the malarial swamp they actually picked.

I see from the comments that few people got the point of my last post. Well, you got the point about Ebbers, fine, but not my little gedeankenexperiment. I am glad that all of you are upstanding, law-abiding boy scouts. I am an upstanding, law-abiding boy scout. I'm with you.

I know that none of you would want to steal from the little people, or leave the sick and hungry old without their pensions. The shame of being incarcerated for something like fraud would bring you to your knees. You don't even get the street cred of a felony murder rap. Fine.

Let's assume that some perverse trillionaire makes you an offer. He will staff an unused prison with felons on loan from the penal system. He will hire guards. He'll buy a set of free weights and subscribe to basic cable. How much money would you need to stay for three years in this facility that is in every respect just like a minimum security federal prison except that when its all over, you don't have a police record to sully your good name?

How much for a similarly staffed and equipped facility that instead models a federal maximum security prison?

What is the minimum amount that would make you say, "All right. I will risk my ass for that kind of money?"

The asswipe former CEO of Worldcom, Bernie Ebbers, was just sentenced to 25 years for $11 billion in fraud, the largest in corporate history. (Though still a distant second to the UN Oil-for-Food scandal.) This is all to the good. Ebbers will be stripped of everything but his house and $50g. He won't be eligible for parole until he's 85.

Discussion of this topic around the campfire at work led to some interesting speculation. Assuming that you would receive a nominal three year sentence at a minimum security prison, how much would you be willing to steal? In other words, how much money would make that three year sentence worth your time?

Parameters: Being stolen, that money would be tax free; however you could expect some restrictions in exactly how you could go about spending it due to continued gov't attention. The minimum security prison would offer your fellow inmates minimal opportunities for prison rape, but would not guarantee your safety. You'd have access to the prison library, exercise equipment and cable tv. You'd probably end up working in the prison laundry or some other, similar job while in prison.

What's your price, beeyatch?

Going further, how much would make it worth your while to spend three years in general population in a large, maximum security prison for violent felons? I think we all know what conditions are like there. Now how much will you need?

The Holy Father may not approve of the Harry Potter books. But I am eagerly awaiting the arrival by parcel post on Saturday of my copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I spent too much time explaining to the more religious members of my family why D&D was not actually Satan worship with dice to worry about what a German thinks of the morality of a fantasy novel.

For those interested in some of the (skimpy) information available about book six, you can go here and here. It's not much - who'd a thunk that scholastic books could keep a secret better than the CIA? Maybe we should put them in charge.

The OpinionJournal has a different take on the Rove matter than my esteemed colleague Johno.

I heard on the news last night that Rove was talking to Cooper on the agreement that what he said would be "deep background" and not to be used in reporting. If it is the case that Rove was telling a reporter that the story he was pushing (that VP Cheney was responsible for sending Wilson to Africa) was incorrect, then this is not such a big deal. You have to knowingly and with malice out an undercover agent for their to be a crime, and it seems that that particular line may not have been crossed. Are we even clear that Plame was actually, really, an undercover agent? I seem to remember that there was some confusion about that back when this story first came out, and before Wilson's credibility was shot.

Rove is a political operative. But that does not mean that he eats babies or that every single thing he says is part of some machiavellian scheme. This story frankly annoys me, if for no other reason than because it means I have to watch Kerry speak on the news again. Plame was not some daring agent on a secret mission behind the Iron curtain, whose unveiling could have resulted in death. Wilson is a self-aggrandizing hack who lied about what he did, when, and why in Africa. Rove is an oily political operative, but every president has one and it's rather pointless to scream, "He's an oily political operative! Fire him!" This is just an excuse for Democrats to scream at Bush, not that they really needed one.

Here's a whole site devoted to the exposure and ridicule of weasel words, no matter the source.

Gene Heally, him of the Cato Institute, has an op-ed up here regarding the growing power of obnoxious thugs passing laws to protect us from those notorious fools, criminals and scofflaws, us.

Right here in the District of Columbia, our nation's capital,

Last Tuesday, the D.C. City Council heard testimony on a bill that would make it illegal to smoke in a bar, even if the owner, the employees and the customers all agree that smoking should be permitted.

...The pro-ban forces have packaged their message in the rhetoric of workers' rights. It's an effective strategy, one that draws on the insights of smoking-ban pioneer Stanton Glantz. At a 1986 conference of anti-smoking activists, Glantz advised that "the issue should be framed in the rhetoric of the environment, toxic chemicals, and public health rather than the rhetoric of saving smokers from themselves."

And that was the gist of many of those supporting the ban. After kicking the smokers out of the bars, the next step is to ban smoking on sidewalks, in parks, and in one extreme case, even in the smoker's own home. Thankfully, that last didn't survive scrutiny. But these laws are eating away at our freedom as surely as the erosion of property rights we've been discussing here the last couple days.

Once nanny laws are in place, the next step is enforcement. What police officer wouldn't rather pull over a soccer mom for a seat belt violation than chase down some dangerous criminal? It's safe, and even if only unconsciously, they're going to emphasize that kind of behavior. And some police forces are going to absurd lengths to protect us. Witness:

One wonders if this is really the sort of thing police should be focusing on in the on-again, off-again murder capital of the United States. But the idea that the police should focus solely on protecting us from crime is one that many have come to think of as archaic. The new view is that it's also law enforcement's job to protect us from our own bad habits. In a 2003 sting operation, Fairfax, Va., police officers entered 20 bars, administered breathalyzer tests, and arrested nine patrons for intoxication. Fairfax police Chief J. Thomas Manger declaimed: "Public intoxication is against the law. You can't be drunk in a bar."

And two weeks ago, using night-vision equipment on loan from the National Guard, Maryland state troopers swept out and nabbed 111 offenders for the crime of driving without a seatbelt. Scores of people who were driving along, minding their own business, had their evening ruined by an unpleasant encounter with the business end of the law. Welcome to the era of jackbooted nags.

It's things like this that make my testicles clench whenever I see a cop, never mind the fact that I am a law abiding citizen going about my lawful business.

While everyone was (justifiably) freaking out over the stupendously bad Supreme Court ruling in Kelo, other property rights are taking a beating as well. Richard Diamond reports on the accelerating trend of state and local governments taking you car with the flimsiest of excuses.

Just days after the Supreme Court ruled that cities could take homes from private owners to build strip malls, the US House of Representatives issued a non-binding condemnation of the court’s decision. While the publicity firestorm could eventually result in stronger laws against public seizure of private property, state governments are happy to continue confiscating automobiles like property rights never existed.

The number of excuses given for government automobile seizures is expanding dramatically. Since 1991, the Commonwealth of Virginia has permanently seized 6,450 automobiles for crimes ranging from drug-running to “frequenting a bawdy place.” Now other jurisdictions are deploying new technologies to seize cars for the most minor offenses imaginable.

A key technology in the desperate fight against citizens with unpaid parking tickets or library fines is something known as APNR, or Automatic Number Plate Recognition. This system was originally developed to recover stolen vehicles. A small camera snaps a picture of a license plate, and a computer instantly performs a background check. In a large scale test in the UK last year, police took 28 million pictures, stopped over a hundred thousand motorists, and recovered eleven hundred vehicles. All to the good. But while they were at it, they also issued "51,000 tickets to drivers for offenses ranging from speeding, to drinking from a water bottle, to talking on a mobile phone." A system designed to recover stolen vehicles discovers its killer app: a honking big revenue stream for government.

Leave it to the Americans to take a good idea and take it to its logical endpoint. Just around the corner from me in Arlington, VA, city treasurer Frank O’Leary said in a TV interview, "I rub my hands together in great glee and anticipation... I think it’s beautiful. It gives us a whole new dimension to collection." Combining the new technology with the existing practice of vehicle seizure in complete disregard of the Constitution is the new way of doing business. Says Richard,

Before ANPR-facilitated seizure was deemed acceptable, a screwed-up parking ticket database was a minor hassle. Now it’s a Constitutional nightmare, mocking fundamental and cherished legal protections: the right to be presumed innocent, the right to a trial by jury, the right not to have excessive fines imposed, the right not to be searched or have your property seized without reason or warrant, and the right to due process.

States conducting automotive seizure rely on a doctrine found in a 1931 Supreme Court ruling stating "It is the property which is preceded against, and, by resort to a legal fiction, held guilty and condemned as though it were conscious instead of inanimate and insentient." In other words, it’s OK to confiscate your car because you forgot to pay an $85 parking ticket; you didn’t commit the crime, your car did. In 1980, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed the concept, convicting a 1976 Mercedes Benz 280S of drug-running. The Bill of Rights, the court argued, applies to people not to cars.

That ruling - the lynchpin of the RICO civil forfeiture process - makes a complete mockery of any rational conception of property rights. There are whole websites devoted to cataloguing the evils of civil forfeiture. While these laws were intended as a way of punishing slippery drug dealers and mafiosi, as is the way with all law enforcement powers they were soon used against other targets. And eventually, against ordinary citizens.

If the police take your car, they do not have to prove that it violated some RICO statute. You have to prove that your vehicle was "innocent." And now that these new laws are allowing the police to take cars for things like unpaid library fees (and who among is is without sin on that count?) basically they can take your car for any reason whatsoever. The only way in which this is different from auto theft is that the police are the thieves.

Many people say that the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy. But property rights seem to be on a slip 'n' slide right now, headed for the abyss.

[wik] Here's a good summary of the asset forfeiture phenomenon.

Click here for a fascinating and darkly humorous look at the antics of the less, well, able of the Iraqi insurgents/regime holdouts/foriegn jihadi/fucknuts.

My personal favorite:

Item 6: And an oldie but a goodie from the early days of military operations in Iraq. The enemy will always try to provoke you into doing something impulsive and, let's face it, stupid - so don't let them. This simple lesson was, alas, lost on Saddam's brave but foolhardy irregulars:

Before plunging into Iraq, U.S. psychological-warfare operators studied certain cultural stereotypes. One was that young Arab toughs cannot tolerate insults to their manhood. So, as American armored columns pushed down the road to Baghdad, 400-watt loudspeakers mounted on Humvees would, from time to time, blare out in Arabic that Iraqi men are impotent. The Fedayeen, the fierce but undisciplined and untrained Iraqi irregulars, could not bear to be taunted. Whether they took the bait or saw an opportunity to attack, many Iraqis stormed out of their concealed or dug-in positions, pushing aside their human shields in some cases to be slaughtered by American tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.

Not impotent; just stupid.

Sam, a commenter over at Murdoc's place, dropped this link when he read my recent post about the zombie dogs.

All you really need to know is this:

Three time winner of the World's Ugliest Dog Contest.