If you sleep with dogs, you'll wake up with fleas

Google bent over and presented its backside to the Chinese government in order to drink from the economic fire hose that is China. They generated a breathtaking amount of spin in explaining how filtering search results in accordance with Chinese government guidelines did not violate their motto, "Don't be evil." They really have a lot of gall being surprised by the result.

It is axiomatic in business that if you give up your principles, you also give up your right to be outraged when your business parters act in an unprincipled manner.

I'm not alone

It seems Fred Reed agrees with me on the subject of Christmas.

I have to point out one bit of inaccuracy in Fred's article, though. The suicide rate doesn't appreciably increase during any of the holiday seasons. I used to believe that as well, but it seems it is a myth.

Anyway, I stopped buying Uncle Fritter anything for Christmas long ago. Honestly, I feel so much better about myself since I did.

Bev Perdue is an idiot

But you knew that, right? It was probably the harlequin make-up job that clued you in, right? If not, maybe it was her latest utterance. She says that creating jobs will define her term as Governor.

Sorry if you're reading this from outside North Carolina.

Maybe I'm expecting too much. North Carolina does not have a good track record for electing particularly bright people for Governor.

It is an elementary fact that government doesn't create jobs. It can't. It's categorically impossible. Government is not a producer. It doesn't make anything or engage in service-related commerce. Government is a parasite.

Perdue is (obviously) a Democrat. Democrats in America are identified by their complete absence of anything resembling rational thought when it comes to economics. Their Republican brethren are not much better, but occasionally you will hear a Republican mention something sensible about the relationship between government and economics. Democrats are not capable of such things because their brains are not properly wired to understand that government can't do anything about an economy but make it worse. In fact, government even has a hard time making economies worse in any long-term sense because economies almost always recover when someone steps in and pulls government's meddling fingers out of the mix.

The last time that happened was in Ronald Reagan's first term. I think everyone, even Democrats, can remember what the result of that was. For Democrats, the result was that they had to find new and interesting ways to give Bill Clinton credit for it ten years after it happened. For Republicans, it meant that all of the closet socialists in the party had to find new and interesting ways to associate themselves with Reagan. In the end, they just resorted to the same methods Democrats have used for years to implement an alternate reality: they got a talking head on TV to say it was so. Witness comparisons of (laughably) George Bush (either one) and (sublimely) John McCain to Reagan.

You might correctly point out that the Obama Administration is guilty of the same sort of nonsense in which Perdue is engaged. The reason I mention Perdue is a matter of scale. I think everyone over the age of five (or everyone with reasoning powers better than a five year old) is aware that we pissed a trillion dollars down a rat-hole trying to jump-start the economy (after pissing a trillion dollars down a rat-hole trying to bail out insolvent banks, which became insolvent because we pissed several billion dollars down a rat-hole trying to let people who don't make very much money buy big, expensive houses, but I digress...). The scale comes into play because the national gubmint can amass huge numbers to create statistics that make it look like they actually created jobs. Everyone who knows better understands that those are not jobs, but are either big number games or temporary employment.

North Carolina doesn't have the luxury of big numbers. Perdue can't game the revenue department's statistics to show that she somehow made jobs materialize. There are only about seven million people living in North Carolina and a pretty substantial number of them live in an agrarian economy. As well, North Carolina plays host to large underground and barter economies. Where tobacco once created hordes of "bib overall" millionaires, marijuana has taken over to keep those overall pockets full. It's going to be tough for Perdue to claim pot harvesters as gainfully employed (though I'm sure she would go for it if she knew how). Even in agrarian circles where the crops are legal, there are substantial numbers of people who subsist entirely within the barter system. They don't file a W-4 and no one claims them as an employee.

Of course, Perdue isn't particularly worried about anyone auditing her job claims. She knows what every top-end North Carolina pol knows. As long as you don't seriously piss off any of the state-level political machines, and as long as North Carolina doesn't end up on the national news too often, no one really pays much attention to what the Governor does.

Which is, of course, why we end up with idiots like Perdue in office in the first place.

Conan Doyle Rolls In His Grave, But He's Dead, So Who Cares?

I went to see Sherlock Holmes on Sunday. Do yourself a favor, go see it.

My oldest son had a problem with it, because he is a fan of the Conan Doyle books. If you are a purist, you're not going to like it. While sarcasm and wit were features of the original stories, the smirk that Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr. have pasted on them adds a dimension that will probably put some of you off.

Get over it.

Guy Ritchie movies are fun. If you've never seen Snatch or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels you are really missing out. Even Brad Pitt's abominable accent and pathetic over-acting were not enough to put a damper on Snatch. So, with a cast as strong as that of Sherlock Holmes, you can imagine that you're in for a good time.

The story involves Holmes chasing down a lunatic illuminatus, who has apparently come back from the dead. The story is great, with enough plot twists and turns to keep the most die-hard Holmes fan happy. Ritchie portrays Post-Victorian England in gritty grays, browns, and blacks. The Industrial Revolution never looked dirtier. Robert Downey's portrayal of Homes as a borderline nut-job is perfection. Jude Law's Watson is three-dimensional and entertaining, though once again, purists will probably frown. And here is where I would have to tell Conan Doyle's faithful that Guy Ritchie and Jude Law have definitely done Dr. Watson a favor. In the books, Watson was always a two-dimensional characature, really little more than a plot device to allow Holmes to expound his brilliance without appearing too pedantic. In this movie, the good doctor is actually a real person. Bravo!

It's long, 130 minutes, but I found myself disappointed when the credits began to roll. I wanted more. I'm no fan of sequels for a sequel's sake, and Ritchie (and the rest of Hollywood) should probably leave this one alone. That being said, I'm just enough of a sucker, and I enjoyed the movie so much, I would queue up with my $6.75 for another couple of hours with Downey's Holmes and Law's Watson.

Good stuff.

Let's hear it for life

I have a small marine reef aquarium. Without getting too nerdy over the whole thing, it's a small tank of seawater with rocks, invertebrates, corals, and fish. I started it by ordering something called "live rock" from a website. The rock comes wrapped in wet newspaper and you place it in the aquarium with some seawater, and wait for about six weeks. It's worth it, trust me.

The rock comes from Fiji, and is obviously volcanic. It has a mottled pink and gray color, and it looks like...well...rock. Not very exciting.

After about three weeks, the pink and gray is broken up with some green and brown. Algae starts to grow. Actually, the original pink is algae also. A very tough strain that survives shipping from Fiji. If you have the water chemistry right, the green and brown algae are short and slow-growing. After six weeks, the rock is "cured" and you can start to add corals.

An amazing thing happened about eight weeks or so after I started all of this. I was looking into the aquarium one day, and I noticed a little tube sticking out from one of the rocks. It had obviously not been there when I got the rock, it was too small and fragile. As I watched, a small, feathery fan unfolded from the tube. It was a feather duster worm.



I was astonished. I had not put the thing in there, but there it was. In all honesty, I shouldn't have been so amazed. Anyone who has been through high school biology knows about flatworms. If you cut a flatworm into ten pieces, you get ten flatworms. Worms are amazing resilient creatures.

As I continued to look, I also noticed some small, white polyps waving in the current. More amazement. I still don't know what they are, though I suspect they are some kind of small coral or anemone.

Now, six months later, I have added several corals, some crustaceans, a few snails, and some fish and the tank seems to be thriving. I look in there and see a number of things growing that I didn't add. Lemon sponges, lots of feather duster worms, some other kind of worm that sends out a single, long filament that is sticky and traps particles floating by in the current, and most amazing of all, clams. I have about half a dozen small clams at various places on the rocks and coral.

Life is amazing. Some would look at all of this and see a vindication of science, and I guess that's valid, but I can't help but notice the hand of God. I'm just saying...

Too Many Adjectives

I finally got around to watching two of the big hit movies from this Summer, Paranormal Activity and The Hangover. They were touted as being, respectively, the scariest and funniest movies ever.

Not so much.

And I guess I need to tell you that there are spoilers in this post, so proceed at your own risk.

Paranormal Activity has one of the highest creepy factors I've seen lately. It is easily creepier than its close cousin, The Blair Witch Project. It even surpassed the creepiest movie made lately, Thirty Days of Night. It did not, however, cross over into scary territory. It was close. The scene in which the paranormal entity drags Katie out of the bed and into a back room comes the closest to being scary since the door-bending scene in the original 1963 version of The Haunting (based on Shirley Jackson's excellent novel, The Haunting of Hill House). The creep factor is helped along by the effective use of the device of the movie appearing to be the contents of one of the protagonists' camcorder. The device is much more effectively used here than it was in Blair Witch. It is nearly as effective in Paranormal as it was in Cloverdale, though the latter is of a different genre.

The Hangover fell much farther short of the funny mark than Paranormal did of the scary mark. The best I can manage for Hangover is "amusing," though that's pushing it. There was a substantial amount of "annoying" in the movie, which, for me, kills all of the funny that might have otherwise existed. Maybe it's just me, but I don't find anything funny about stupid, neurotic people acting stupid and neurotic. There were occasional chuckles and more than a few smirks, but I can't think of a single laugh-out-loud moment in the movie. Honestly, I think the writers blew it with the post facto plot device. It might have been funnier if we had lived the night with these guys, though maybe not. They might have pulled it off had the plot been stronger, but alas, the story is trite and barely strong enough to sustain a whole 90 minutes of attention.

Paranormal Activity is worth seeing, but in my opinion, you can safely skip The Hangover. Go rent Terminator Salvation instead.

Or better yet, go see Avatar and spend 160 minutes in pure awesomeness.

What Are You Celebrating?

I'm out of the closet. No, not that way. I'm joining the ranks of such notables as Ebenezer Scrooge and The Grinch.

If you're over the age of ten, Christmas is overrated. Hordes of adults set themselves up for disappointment every year. They scurry around, thriving to create the "best Christmas ever" each year, only to discover, once the presents have been opened, the food has been consumed, and the last guest has departed, that the magic just isn't there any more.

Christians desperately cling to Christmas as a religious holiday. The political wing of Christianity has announced that there is a war on Christmas, pointing to petty instances of political correctness gone mad. Ironically, regardless of what you call it, the Holiday Tree or the Christmas Tree, it has nothing to do with Christianity.

Christians have taken to stridently declaring that "Jesus is the reason for the season." But Christmas hasn't had anything to do with Jesus for a long time. In fact, it technically hasn't ever had anything to do with Jesus. I think most Christians with an IQ better than that of a carrot are aware that Jesus wasn't actually born on December 25th. Sadly though, it appears that many Christians are completely unaware that the origin of Christmas was a con game by the early church fathers in Europe. They hum the "yule-tide carol" and adorn the tree, blissfully unaware that they are participating in rituals to celebrate a centuries old Druid mid-winter festival. They buy gifts for the kids to perpetuate the myth of Santa Claus, not knowing that it is an ancient pagan fairly tale from Bavaria that is now called "Weinachten," associations with Saint Nicholas of Turkey notwithstanding. The greatest irony of all, though, is the hordes of Christians who joyfully participate in the orgy of mindless consumerism. If Jesus was here today, I believe it would be one of those moments when he chastised his followers with harsh rhetoric. In other words, he'd take one look at this holiday celebrated in his name, and have a massive melt-down.

The season has little or nothing to do with the great Christian notion of charity either. "It is better to give than to receive" is a platitude with little or no meaning. Those who spend massive amounts of money to buy gifts for others are not acting out of charity, they are acting out of ego gratification.

What strikes me as the most foolish notion of Christmas is that it is a season for families to become closer. Shouldn't families be close all year? The idea that people have to participate in mob consumerism and incur burdensome debt in order to bond with other members of their families is pretty sad.

I think I'm done with Christmas for good. I don't mind if you go ahead with it, but I think I'll just sit it out from now on.