Ugh. The bed-wetting over Gitmo detainees has begun.

Glennzilla covers the worst offenders:

The newest fear-mongering campaign from the Right and the media

And in response to a heartening post from Will Wilkinson, I demonstrate the need for anger management training.

Thank You, Barack Obama by Will Wilkinson On January 23, 2009

My unhinged post:

> http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/where-should--1.html

Bed-wetting.  The only risk from bringing Gitmo detainees into the US justice system is exposing the Gitmo kangaroo court.

I don't find the justice system of 3rd world juntas attractive.  In this I am in a 60% majority (per current polling on US citizens' appetite for sanctioned torture).  I weep for the US, because 40% of the population is more than enough to fully staff a totalitarian prison system, all in the name of our "safety".

Allow me to preemptively apologize.  At this point, I am usually chastised for not supporting the open discussion of opinions.  I apologize for crushing the tender flowers of free expression.

Explaining Megan McArdle's Schitck

Enfuriating crap from Megan McArdle, with a great Glennzilla take-down:

Megan:

Everyone's hailing Obama's decision to suspend all Guantanamo trials for 120 days. ... Doesn't this just further prolong the incarceration of anyone who might be innocent?

Glennzilla:

Despite the fact that it's only 74 words, one could spend hours highlighting the factual inaccuracies in McArdle's "uncomfortable question."

...

But to say, as McArdle did:  "Gee, what's all the fuss about with these military commissions?  I thought people wanted Guantanamo detainees to have nice trials under the UCMJ like they're having now" is to demonstrate a complete ignorance about what the entire debate is about.  There's just no way to have paid even a tiny amount of attention to what's been going on at Guantanamo and not understand that the controversy is over the rigged and profoundly un-American military commissions themselves, the denial of rights that the UCMJ affords, and the mockery of Western justice they entail.  That is why Obama didn't want his name anywhere near those proceedings and why he immediately suspended them.

And "Sadly, No!" explaining Megan's place in the Bloggo-Sphere - "Teh Megan, Matt, And Ezra Show":

Megan McArdle: What I mean is, why do you drive on the parkway and park in the driveway? Isn’t that a contradiction? It seems to me that it’s immoral to fund social programs because black people smell, and also paradoxes, like why is a carpet neither a car nor a pet?

Matt Yglesias: I think Megan misses the point with her post on the morality of social spending.

Ezra Klein: Studies clearly show that black people do not, in fact, have a distinctive odor.

McArdle: When I said that it’s immoral to fund social programs, I was not referring to black people.

The Canny Chicago Politician

Are people serious about wanting a new Lincoln? The "word cloud" comparison of Lincoln's two inaugural speeches demonstrate clearly how he intended to run roughshod over the Constitution. (I admire Lincoln, but I definitely don't admire what he did to the Constitution.)

Also, who is this transformative presidential candidate that people keep talking about? I voted for the canny Chicago politician, and I thought that is who won.

From comment to Will Wilkinson: The Speech

Self-satisfaction is a primary human trait

From my experience, even in a relationship with very high leverage (an employer working with an employee), it is practically impossible to motivate somebody to work on any relative deficits, even if the rewards would be considerable.

Self-satisfaction is a primary human trait.

To a first approximation, in a western democracy, the best we can do is corral and socialize humans until the age of 16 (sometimes the age of 20), and hope they pick up the habit of motivating and improving themselves. If that doesn't happen, then corral them for 50 more years, in institutions differentiated by the tiny amount of liberty they allow.

Comment prompted by Arnold Kling in Econlog: Goldin and Katz and Education Policy Failings in Historical Perspective

Good news and Bad news on Parenting, from Bryan Caplan

Bryan Caplan in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Many of us worry that our nation will pay a heavy price in years to come because modern parents are shirking their responsibilities to the next generation. If you combine the results from time diaries and behavioral genetics, however, you get a different picture. It turns out that there is some really good news and some mildly bad news. The really good news is that we can stop worrying about the horrible fate of the next generation. The bad news is that parents today are making large "investments" in their children that are unlikely to pay off.

My comment:

I will remind myself to teach my daughter the tools to achieve her own goals, per her own morality, any present my morality only through my example.

#tmbg Undernet Memroids: Booga visits Kelly in some Salty Fishing Villiage

Went to visit Kelly Mendenpants in a tiny upstairs apartment in Bremerton, or some other salty pirate village near Seattle.  I waited at a gas station for him to pick me up, and went inside the convienience store to buy some beef jerky.

Half of my nutrition comes from the jerky.  The other half, lichens.

When Kelly finially arrived, I pretended to be polite and offered him some jerky, hoping he would decline.  He ate some of my jerky.  Rat-bastard.

From then on, I plotted my revenge.

In the drawing above, Booga lunging about a small table and two chairs, and Kelly be having hair.

The Bullshit that is "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory"

Image via Wikipedia

Ulrich Drepper: What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory

This is bullshit. 114 pages! A revision history!

Obviously this is hardly "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory". This is one guy's "Everything I Can Say about Memory In One Place without Contradicting Myself".

This is the usual "lambda-the-ultimate" "The Society for the Prevention of Programing" circle-jerk.

Fucktards...

For the sake of argument, lets say you refuse to play the "premature optimization" game. For the sake of argument, lets say you are satisfied with the length of your dick.

How do you in fact make programs with good performance?

(Step 1) Straight-forward & correct implementation

(Step 2) Timing tests and timing profiles under real-world loads. (Don't fool yourself, the best you can do is approach reality with profiling - you can never achieve perfect real-world profiling.)

(Step 3) Under Revision Control, hit the place in your code where you sense you will get the biggest bang for your buck

Repeat Steps 2 & 3 until you sense futility, until you sense rapidly diminishing returns.

(Step 4) Roll back some of the improvements! I am not kidding, you have to give back some of your hard won performance. You need to find a balance between Performance (Latency, Throughput, and Resource Use) and:

• Readability
• Maintainability
• Portability
• Testability
• Ease of Understanding
• Predictability/Stability
• Fewest Lines of Code
• and Validity is merely the "ticket of admission" - without that, nothing counts for shit.

You won't know what Performance you have to give back, until after you implement it and time and profile it. Sorry, that is the way it works. If your coding is so laborious that you cannot bare to think of throwing away even a single line of code, then the Universe is trying to tell you to stop. Programming is Hard, Let's Go Shopping!

(Step 5) Now that you have Performance, add at least one test of the Performance to your automated testing suite. Or else you will give it all back, and then some, with a single ill-advised change to your code in the future. If you don't care enough to Test It, then you don't really care, Period.

(Step 10000) As you write more code, your instincts improve. Your first 100,000 lines of code will be of poor quality, and your next 100,000 will be slightly better. You have to pay your dues, because nobody else is exploring your exact problem domain. You have to find your own road.

Image via Wikipedia

Any other approach is just sucking your own cock through a soda straw. While other people are getting results, you are still playing with yourself.

Two Blue Stickie Notes, Two Goats

Pillow/Oily-Hair Induced Diabetes

A non-commissioned portrait of myself.  Someone near and dear drew this.

Disneyland, Adult Priorities