Travis at TJICistan invites us to consider whether we would be less tolerant of government spending if we conceptualized it as expenditure of lives, or years of a life, rather than as "mere" money. Travis is inspired to this by news that the Pentagon spent $47,960 on a portrait of Donald Rumsfeld.

One portrait: one human year.

* Tobacco subsidies: 6.2 human lives per year ($10 million/year)

* Obama’s inauguration: 93 human lives ($150 million – four times more than Bush’s)

* The new visitor’s center in Washington DC: 388 human lives ($621 million)

While TJIC gets points for creativity, there's a fundamental flaw in his plan, and I'm frankly a little surprised that he, as a fellow misanthrope, didn't spot it: lots of people just suck, and any prolonged contact with them tends to ram this point home. Scrapping the International Space Station to save 65,000 lives may seem like the right thing from the tranquility of your porch on a pleasant morning, but when you're behind all of them on the freeway and half of them have those stupid Truck Nutz things, suddenly the Final Frontier is going to seem a whole lot more worth the sacrifice. And I defy anyone to emerge from a committee meeting without concluding that you'd trade four or five lives for some public statuary or something.

So I'll make a counter-proposal. Express costs in terms of things that people generally like. "This project will cost eight bridges-that-won't-fall-down." Or "unless we means-test, this program will cost an additional 48 D-Days." Better yet — go with pets. Because, you know, Americans are generally hardened to all sorts of awful shit happening to people, but it really tugs at their heartstrings when an animal is hurt or abused. So, take the most deranged, incontinent, destructive, illness-prone pet you ever had, total up the lifetime cost of owning it. Say, a dog that chewed up your rare book collection one weekend and had to spend a week at the vet for hip displaysia, or a cat who had several rounds of chemotherapy. Then try to sell government spending by that measurement. "My fellow Americans, this bill would cost ten thousand kitty cats!" "If my colleague succeeds in getting this program passed, it would be as if your faithful Rex, and twenty thousand like him, never put their heads on your knee! The place would be a libertarian paradise in a year.

If you write a blog, and it isn't strictly of the wook-at-my-widdle-kitties or what-my-kids-did-this-week variety, then it's a good bet that a fair number of your posts are of the "Wow, this person is a ginormous idiot/asshole because of what he/she said." I'm as guilty of that as anyone.

I've noticed that when bloggers (including me) do this, we're usually not commenting merely on the actual text of what moron/asshole in question said. We're commenting on what we see as the subtext — what we assume that person actually means, and what we believe the fair and reasonable inferences from the text are.

Occasionally I am inspired to wonder whether my conclusions about what these apparent morons and/or assholes meant are skewed by my own experiences and foibles — whether, just possibly, my take is off-base or even completely bizarre.

Does this come to me in a fit of introspection?

No. Usually it's when I see someone flip out in a spectacular fashion based on their (polite version) idiosyncratic or (honest version) batshit-insane take on something benign.

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In the 20th century, scholar of the weird Charles Fort wrote:

If our existence is an organism, it would seem that it must be one of the most notorious old rascals in the cosmos.  It is a fabric of lies.  Everywhere it conjures up appearances of realness and finality and trueness-words that I use as synonyms for one state-and then, when examined, everything is found not to be real, or final, or true, but to be depending upon something else, or some other chimera, merging away, and losing its appearance of individuality, into everything else, or every other fraud.

In the 21st century, the director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics writes:

If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.

A hologram projected by a larger object, outside the known universe.

Via Kids Prefer Cheese.

If I had to write a review of the new season of 24, I believe I'd have stopped after composing this headline:

24: Yet Another Season of Mind-Numbing Torture.

Short. Sweet. And to the point.

Next week is zombie week. Valve software, the maker of Half Life and Team Fortress 2, finally releases the game I've most anticipated this year, Left 4 Dead, a multiplayer cooperative shooter featuring hordes of the hungry, risen dead. Even with the Prince spelling, I'm charged.

But I was most disappointed to hear, courtesy of my friend and sometimes commenter Andrew, that Left 4 Dead will feature perhaps the most annoying fad of the past decade: running zombies.

Zombies, quite simply, cannot run, and in my perfect zombie apocalypse certainly do not. As a Pennsylvania sheriff put it, "They're dead. They're all messed up."

When well made, zombie films are the gold standard in horror, and the gold standard in zombie films is the work of George Romero, whose first three films in the field, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead (which has undergone a critical reassessment after a poor initial assessment, an assesment that was always unfair) are among the best horror movies ever made. Romero's work is set in our own world, but one where the dead have begun to walk for reasons never quite explained (a viral infection of the living which kills and reanimates, and radiation brought back by a space probe, a la H. P. Lovecraft but with man going to meet the things which should not be known rather than them coming to us, are suggested but never confirmed). Being dead, their brains are damaged. They have no rational thought, but they do have full use of the lower portions of the brain, which are all about aggression and hunger. So they want to eat us.

The terror these films inflict is not just because they feature graphic and disturbing images of cannibalism. Death carries its own terror, as does isolation. A world in which one is isolated among the dead carries the two worst fears, death and being utterly alone, to an extreme, as Richard Matheson's short story I Am Legend, a 1950s vampire novella which is at the root of all of these films and which still packs a punch today despite the best efforts of Will Smith, attests. Romero, to the extent he improved on I Am Legend, did so by making its ideas explicit and by adding a jolt of social satire, which is quite evident if one can look beyond the gore.

But included within the fear of death is the fear of decay, the fear of aging run amock. Slow zombies, the dead that walk, don't remember, don't learn, embody the fear of aging as well as death. Recent remakes of Romero's work, however, feature zombies who can run and can learn. They miss the point. A zombie that can run, rip doors off their hinges, and learn how doors work is not a reflection of our own fears about ourselves, and the future that awaits us all in which we consume ourselves if we're lucky enough to live into ripe old age.

Simon Pegg, the star and creator of Shaun of the Dead, a hilarious comedy which pays tribute to Romero's films, yet is also quite scary in its own right and ultimately faithful to Romero's horrifying work, has much more to say about why zombies must not run.

(Note: If you think you've seen this post before today, you have. It was written last November at another site, where some of the content will eventually wind up here as reruns. I quite enjoyed Left 4 Dead, but haven't been able to play it as much as I'd like.)

January 27, 2009, Update: Despite his suicide letter, it appears that Arthur Nadel is alive and well, and in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Funny how times change.  A google news search for Arthur Nadel, who disappeared on Thursday amid allegations his Valhalla Investment Partners LP hedge fund blew $350 million of its investors' money, reveals only 55 stories.  A year ago, this would have been on the front page of the Times of London.  The Sarasota Herald Tribune, the paper of record in the locality where Nadel's funds were based, reports on the story in its sports section.

Fund principal Arthur G. Nadel, a prominent player in Sarasota social and philanthropic circles, disappeared this week. His wife, Peg, filed a missing person report with law enforcement after finding a suicide note.

Investors — from individuals to the Sarasota YMCA Foundation — in the funds branded Viking, Valhalla and Scoop were stunned this week to learn they may be victims in what could become the largest investment swindle in Southwest Florida history.

Despite the carnage on Wall Street last year, investors were told that their investments had earned more than 8 percent as of November.

Some are already calling the case a "mini-Madoff," after Bernard Madoff of New York, who has been accused of creating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme that promised similarly large percentage returns.

Some might call placement of this story, which a year ago would have been one of the biggest investment swindles in history, not just southwest Florida history, in the sports section a mistake.  I consider it clever irony.  Considering the rides given to the public by CitiGroup, Fannie and Freddie, Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros, GM, Bank of America, and Bernard Madoff, Arthur Nadel's alleged misdeeds seem about as significant as the outcome of a big basketball game between high school rivals in southwest Florida.

Even the "missing" angle isn't that interesting.  After all, Arthur Nadel isn't a young, pretty white girl.  So how can this be news?

On reflection, just to make this post interesting even to me, I'm going to have to insert an image of a pretty girl.  I give you: a pretty girl on a bicycle.

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It was going to take something really ridiculous to snap me out of my current funk. Something so patently bizarre and crazy that I couldn't help but toss a few poorly thought out jokes at it. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the State of Nevada.

Yes, the election for Verdi Television District Board (whatever that is..) was finally decided by drawing cards to settle the tie. Alternatively, they could have selected a coin flip, but that just seemed to random to the participants. So, Kim Toulouse now gets to decide how many times Murder She Wrote reruns can play, or whatever else the Television Discrict Board does, thanks to drawing an ace.

I would love to see the official rules for this card draw. Would this fly in any other state? I can't imagine…

The Supreme Court has granted certiorari in an appeal by the Safford Arizona Unified School District, on the question of whether school officials were justified, under the Fourth Amendment, in strip-searching thirteen year old Savana Redding.  The goal of the search was to determine whether Ms. Redding had smuggled contraband ibuprofen into the school, in violation of a "zero tolerance" drug policy.  An en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier held that a civil suit filed by Ms. Redding could proceed.

Many moons ago, in reviewing this case, I stated the following:

This being the Ninth Circuit, and this being America, it would not surprise me at all if the Supreme Court were to grant certiorari and reverse this holding. While the Circuits might divide on a case as revoltingly silly as this one, if there is a general rule in American jurisprudence on the rights of children suspected of drug possession in school, it is that they have none.

The question boils down to, may adults strip and humiliate a thirteen year old girl for possessing a legal product, so long as the adults are protected by their status as school employees?  Is membership in the American Federation of Teachers the equivalent of a badge?

I stand by what I wrote earlier: If this had happened anywhere but school, they'd all be in jail.

Via The Smoking Gun, an indication of why cheesy credit card marketing tactics like Capitol One's "design your own card" may be something of a threat to bank and information security. A dude in Oklahoma managed to get this card:

Pretty damned bad. My desk is awash with around 40 unsolicited applications for associate positions at my 13-lawyer firm — we're not hiring, we haven't advertised for a job in a year, and we don't even have a web site or Martindale listing up right now, but still the applications flood in. Some of them are senior attorneys willing to work as a junior associate, but most are young lawyers starting out. The inane glamorization of what legal practice is actually like, combined with the several-decades-old cultural tendency to treat law school as the appropriate path after college if you can't figure out what else you want to do, has led to this.

But just how bad? Well, consider this. When a contract lawyer crafted a satirical advertisement on Craigslist for a comically abysmal law job, he still got apparently serious inquiries. The job sounded rather clearly like a hoax:

* There is no health insurance, but we have an on-site 2nd year medical student who will abide by the upmost professional standards take care of any illnesses or injuries that occur, both on-site and off-site.

But that didn't stop some desperate inquiries:

He received over 100 e-mails in response, some wanting to confirm it was a joke; others saying, "I think this is a joke, but just in case…" and attaching their resumes; as well as 10-15 straight applications, with cover letters and resumes. One resume included a J.D. from UPenn, claims the lister. (He says he deleted e-mails immediately, and did not retain personal information or salary histories.)

Ugh.

Watch as someone who has never watched any of the Star Wars movies tries to summarize the plot.

Via Walter Olson (an avid twitterer) of the generally great Overlawyered site, two items on the Hudson River plane crash:

Astonishing.

And, though no humans died in this tragedy of collision between man and Canada goose, vultures are already descending.

This week's winner in the contest to determine who can twist the fear of child pornography to the most ridiculous extreme goes to prosecutors in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, who have charged three teenage girls with producing kiddie porn by taking nude photos of … themselves.  In the interest of fairness, prosecutors have charged the recipients of the photos, the girls' boyfriends, who are also teenagers.

This week, prosecutors in Greensburg, Pennsylvania charged six teens ranging in age from 14 to 17 with creating, distributing and possessing child pornography, after three girls were found to have taken photos of themselves in the nude or partially nude and e-mailed them to friends, including three boys who are among the defendants.

The age of consent in Pennsylvania is ordinarily 16, except that if a minor above the age of 13 has sex with someone no more than 4 years older, it isn't a crime.  (PA Crimes Code 3122.1).  Therefore, these boys and girls are free, under the law, to violate one another in the foulest ways imaginable, yet sending photos to one another marks them sex offenders.

Authorities argue that bringing child porn charges against teens is designed to educate them about the dangers of creating and distributing such images, which could fall into the hands of commercial pornographers, pedophiles or others who might want to harm or exploit them.

Oh, so this will be an educational experience for the kids, like a visit to a prison for a "scared straight" program.  Only this may be a rather more realistic prison visit than usual.  That clears things up.

Of course, hard cases make bad law.  The result in this case may seem harsh, even ludicrous, but it's for their own protection.  Someone has to protect the children, even if that means protecting them from themselves.

Jackass of the day: Frank Melton, Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. He was faced with a city council that refused to pass a law banning sagging pants. That's a now familiar way for the aluminum siding salesmen, Ford dealers, and retirees that make up our nations' local governments to amuse themselves. But Frank Melton knows that all that is necessary for visible boxers to triumph is for men who wear tighty-whities to do nothing. So he's going to ban saggy pants by executive order. In announcing this to the press, he had this deathless line:

The council members who voted against the saggy-pants ban said it likely was unconstitutional.

But Mayor Frank Melton, who joined the council meeting via telephone from Texas, said he will issue an executive order instituting the dress code.

"I certainly respect the Constitution," Melton said, "but we have some issues that are much bigger than the Constitution."

Now, I'm even a bit skeptical that saggy-pant legislation is unconstitutional. I haven't thought it through. But the notion that saggy pants are a problem much bigger than the constitution is jaw-droppingly cretinous. The notion that ANY local issue is "much bigger than the Constitution" is ridiculous. Yet it's an all-too-common attitude among government officials sworn to uphold that constitution, as I mentioned in the context of another local jackass earlier today.

People like Frank Melton don't get that their casual contempt for the Constitution — and with it, for the rule of law — is uglier than an army of plumber's cracks, and far more of a threat to public morals.

Finally, let me add that it appears that being a lawyer for the government is as glamorous as ever:

The state attorney general's office has not issued an opinion on whether the mayor has the authority to outlaw saggy pants through executive order.

Hat tip: Radley Balko.

I've just installed a new voice recognition software which, in theory, will make a number of my work tasks easier. I've written this entire post with it. clearly it is not without some flaws, as I have already accidentally deleted someone's comment with. The question, however, is this: do I talk less coherently than I write? at the very least, I think that I can promise fewer dashes in my text, inasmuch as I have not yet figured out how to make dashes. The last time I tried out any voice recognition software was in 2000 or so, and I have to say that I am extremely impressed with how quickly and accurately