Ahhh, but the movies!

I have, and have always had to the best of my recollection, what I describe as an extremely minor and utterly useless super-power.  Given a phrase of music or a few memorable spoken words, I can immediately identify where I first heard it, and even provide a description of the location sufficient to make a sketch of it.  This happens all the time when I'm listening to Ricochet podcasts on my walks and they cite passages from earlier podcasts.

I have no idea how this ability might have been selected for evolutionarily, or what its utility might be.  One person with whom I've discussed it said that remembering you heard the sound of a predator or prey in a given location might be a survival trait in hunter-gatherer days.

I haven't met anybody else who has this experience, and I don't think it has ever been useful to me in any circumstance.

I use Adblock Plus with Firefox and haven't yet seen a pop-up or pop-under at Ricochet.  I do, however, see them at:

• Hot Air
• Townhall
• NRO

We don't have the ability to use a strike-out font in the editor here, but that's how I now treat these sites.  I haven't decided precisely on the relative placement of the perpetrators of pop-ups and telemarketers in the Fourth Circle of Hell, but I'd probably pitch them both in the Pit of Bad Customer Experience.

Note that in some cases the operators of a Web site can be innocent of direct involvement in the appearance of a pop-up.  If they accept adverts from an ad server, it is possible for cleverly-coded ads to display a pop-up unbeknownst to the hosting site.  The same goes for that other bane of customer experience, auto-play audio and video.  In the case of the sites I list above, this is not an excuse, as the pop-up is promoting the site itself.

I still get spam from NRO (sent through their spam contractor "constantcontact") even though I rejected the digital subscription offer.

And then, as they did with Mafia witnesses in the 1960s, keep her at the table for four or five hours, reciting the full assertion of fifth amendment privilege for question after question, with the questions becoming increasingly provocative.  For example,

Q: Do you have any personal recollection of this targeted scrutiny of groups having been requested by officials at the White House?

A: I respectfully decline to answer….

Q: Do you have any personal recollection of this targeted scrutiny of groups having been requested by officials at the Justice Department?

A: I respectfully decline to answer….

Lather, rinse, repeat.

What will make this even better is that the alternation between Democrat and GOP questioners will show who are the sycophantic defenders of the regime and who are the people trying to get to the bottom of what really happened.

As I said to those who asked why I was leaving in 1991, “Get out while you can.”

In 1996 they turned the screw on U.S. citizens living abroad, retroactively, raising their taxes.

In 2004, they turned the screw again, and then in 2008 (before the election of Obama), yet once again.

For details, see the IRS document “Expatriation Tax”.

If you can take your (already taxed) earnings and leave, you are, or were, a citizen.  If you still owe the state something simply by choosing to leave it, you're a subject, or property.

Get out while you can.

By the way, anybody fascinated (as I am) by simple invertebrates, ought to visit OpenWorm, where they're striving toward building a complete digital model of a metazoan life form.

Ignore previous wire.

There are panics, and then there are genuine shortages.  I was a partner in a computer hardware company in the late 1970s, and our designs ran square into the great 74LS TTL shortage.  This was not a panic of inventory building, but rather a genuine shortage because these humble parts had been designed into a myriad of systems which came into great demand and you just couldn't lay your hands on the parts.

At one point I had about half of my net worth in inventory we couldn't ship because we couldn't obtain 74LS241 line drivers at any price.  One gets creative.  I found these parts were available, at an elevated but tolerable price, from various shadowy characters who sometimes delivered them in parking lots against cash.

One day I picked up an issue of an electronics trade paper and discovered one of my “suppliers” had been arrested and thrown in the slammer for selling stolen goods.  My first thought?  “Where will I get my 241s now?”

If the ammunition shortage is indeed a buying panic rather than a genuine shortage that's good, as the moral choices are easier.

The seizure is of an account used to transfer funds from Dwolla to Mt. Gox.  Dwolla is a PayPal-like service that facilitates payments over the Internet with lower overhead and (up until now) fewer imperial entanglements than PayPal.

Note that this does nothing whatsoever to impede Bitcoin commerce among those who exchange that currency across the peer-to-peer network, and that Mt. Gox continues to accept and deliver fiat currency via a number of other means, including the ubiquitous SWIFT bank wire system.  When this assault on Mt. Gox began, I posted on Twitter:

Bitcoin: the currency wars, begun they have.

We shall see if the attack against Mt. Gox broadens.  But note that striking down one instance of an idea whose time has come and which can be replicated in any jurisdiction never works.

Even in the teens!

I agree that he should compensate her for any damage to the mobile phone, and that in taking the action he did violated the libertarian prime directive of non-aggression (although I'd entertain an argument that the female [obviously not a lady] was the original aggressor and that he was acting in self-defence).

But while we're compensating people for damages, shouldn't the loquacious female also pay to refund the ticket prices of all the people whose theatre experience she injured?

The one aspect of the modern world which I find most striking, and which I have seen happen in my own lifetime, is one which very few technological visionaries and science fiction writers envisioned even when I was avidly reading science fiction in the 1950s and '60s.

Today, if something is known to the human species, you can usually determine what is known about it within 30 seconds of its popping into your head.  (In this I echo Bob Laing at #4 supra, but I find it so profound a change I think it's a phase transition in extrasomatic information storage.)

I remember when I had to drive 100 km and spend half a day in a university library looking up and taking notes about Warshall's algorithm.  Now it's a click away.

Of course, the fact that it's there doesn't mean you can understand it without some intellectual investment.  If you're curious about the Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa mixing matrix, one click suffices explain it, but understanding the explanation may take graduate-level knowledge of physics.

But the gatekeepers are gone.

The Fairness Doctrine: the state, in its sovereign capacity, shall not discriminate against any citizen in favour of any other.

Oh, wait—that's libertarian.  Never mind.

When money is taken coercively with an implicit threat of force to pay for something, how precisely is this not an “out of pocket cost”?  Does the fact that others are bled to pay for it make it somehow nobler or, perhaps, “transdermal” as opposed to “out of pocket”?

As a permanent resident of Switzerland (a status achieved after 12 years of residency—how long depends upon your country of origin), I am allowed to vote in elections at the commune (village) and canton (state) levels, but not in federal elections.  Whether a commune or canton permits permanent non-citizen residents to vote is up to them; some do, some don't.  This is in keeping with the Swiss principle of subsidiarity: “The laws you live under should be made by the people you live with.”

It's not a full biography, but I found Fred Greenstein's The Hidden-Hand Presidency an enlightening look at the presidential years.

One must be careful in evaluating such experiences to avoid selection effects.  In a world of seven billion people, hundreds of thousands every day may have a strong spontaneous feeling that something has happened (for good or ill) to a loved one.  Purely by chance, a few of them may then receive a telephone call confirming precisely what they perceived.  They will remember that event all their lives and recount it to others.  Those who had a feeling, equally as strong, which was not confirmed will quickly forget it.

Lest you think I am some kind of Vulcan engineer who exults in popping numinous balloons, I had a clairvoyant experience at age 21 which I cannot remotely explain, and another 34 years later which was completely unfounded in reality.  I have spent 15 years looking for evidence of retropsychokinesis, developed data collection and analysis software for the largest parapsychology experiment ever, and even made a stab at how such spooky things may work.

One of the most delightful investigations of the objective effects of a sunny attitude is “Wishing for Good Weather” [PDF].