In a story that would be touching in the ordinary context, an 88 year old man and his 85 year old girlfriend built a portable water purification business from a dream to a reality. Nothing wrong there; such things are supposed to be part of the American Dream.

But now, their business is being ruined by one of the most unaccountable and tyrannical bureaucracies in the history of government, the DEA:

88-year-old Bob Wallace, and his 85-year-old girlfriend, Marjorie Ottenberg fell in love 35 years ago backpacking to the tops of the highest peaks in the world.

Wallace is a Stanford educated engineer and Ottenberg is a former chemist and decades ago they came up with a water purification product for backpackers like themselves called Polar Pure out of their garage in Saratoga, Calif.

“For an old guy with nothing else to do, this is something that keeps us occupied,” says Wallace.

Today, Wallace and Ottenberg are fighting the Drug Enforcement Administration and state officials to continue to operate their business. Why? The DEA says that drug dealers are using their product to make methamphetamine.

The DEA says meth heads are interested in Polar Pure’s key ingredient, iodine crystals.

Too lazy to go after the meth heads, they have to go after perfectly legitimate business, destroying the dream of two honest elderly Americans. You don’t have to be opposed to the Drug War to be opposed to such tyranny.

Wallace and Ottenberg’s business will of course be ruined, because they cannot possibly comply with the laws demands that they pay huge regulatory fees, plus “register with the state and feds, report any suspicious activity and keep track of each and ever person who bought a bottle of their product.”  Nor can their customers, which included camping stores and online outlets that stocked their product. They are being wiped out, and the DEA dismissively calls this “collateral damage”:

Instead of dealing with the new regulations they just dropped the product, effectively killing Wallace and Ottenberg’s business.

“Any time you deal with a government it’s a hassle,” says Ottenberg.

A spokeswoman for the DEA told the San Jose Mercury News that Wallace was “collateral damage.”

I suppose I could ask just what provision of the Constitution gives the DEA the power to shut down dealers in iodine. After all, I ask these questions all the time.

To no avail. We are no longer governed, but we are ruled. This government is monstrous. It no longer resembles what the founders envisioned, and very few people care. Those who do are ridiculed as cranks.

OK, so I’m a crank. I admit it. But that does not make me wrong. The DEA is operating outside of constitutional parameters so routinely that it has become a law unto itself.

And I don’t just mean asserting the power to regulate anything it wants. One of the hallmarks of tyranny is the detention of citizens without a hearing.

And more.

Representative Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) sent a letter to DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart asking the agency to comply with an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the detention of 23-year-old Daniel Chong. The UC San Diego engineering student was arrested during a drug raid, interrogated for four hours, then locked in a holding cell and left there for five days without food, water, or access to a toilet.

During those five days, Chong was forced to drink his own urine. Fearing that he would die in the cell, he broke the lens of his glasses and attempted to carve a message to his mother on his arm using a shard. Chong then tried to commit suicide by swallowing the broken pieces of his eye glasses. He was discovered unconscious and covered in feces, and admitted to a San Diego hospital suffering from dehydration, kidney failure, and a punctured esophagus.

Got that? The DEA held a suspect for five days and nearly tortured him to death. This is the United States?

And how about the severely injured woman who, after surgery for a shattered knee cap, went to the drug store to fill a perfectly legitimate pain killer prescription, and found herself hauled away:

The pharmacy called Lenhart to ask her exactly what time she would be in pick up her prescription. She thought it was odd, but told the pharmacy what time she would be there.

Still on crutches and unable to drive, a friend of Lenhart’s, drove her to a CVS Pharmacy in Oak Cliff.

She wasn’t able to pick up her prescription because a police officer arrived to pick her up.

“He was like ‘we need to go outside,’” she said. “I was on crutches and I had a permanent IV line in my arm. I had a big leg brace. I asked him if it was necessary and he said yes and he rather policingly escorted me out the front door and into the back of a waiting patrol car.”

Never mind that it was another bureaucratic mistake. This severely injured woman spent the night in jail.  After she was finally released on bond, she was charged with a felony.

The DEA, of course, is behind this racket too. They have unconstitutionally delegated to themselves authority to regulate every prescription for every controlled substance sold in every pharmacy in the United States, and as Radley Balko explains in his analysis of the case, pharmacists and doctors live in terror of them:

These idiots couldn’t even bother to call the woman’s doctor before tossing her in a jail cell.

Lenhart’s story has been making its way around the web the past few days, and has been generating the appropriate outrage. But it shouldn’t be all that surprising. This is the perfectly predictable outcome of all this painkiller hysteria of late. It’s bad enough coming from the usual drug warriors. But because there’s a big evil pharmaceutical corporation to play the villain, we now get progressive outlets like ProPublica, and Alternet and Salon spitting out the government’s hype without the least bit of skepticism—or concern for pain patients.

You can’t really blame the pharmacist, here. She risks arrest and criminal prosecution if some overeager prosecutor looking to make a name for himself decides she hasn’t been sufficiently suspicious of her customers. Think about that. The government will now throw you in jail for failing to be suspicious enough of your fellow citizens. (And not just with painkillers — remember this monstrous injustice?)

Don’t blame her employer, either. The DEA recently shut down two CVS stores in Florida because federal drug cops thought the stores should have been turning away more people who came to fill pain medication prescriptions. Not only that, the agencies also attempted to shut down the wholesaler who supplies those stores for not being sufficiently suspicious of them, a move that would have left thousands of patients in several states without access to the medication they need.

The government has created a poisonous, paranoid atmosphere in which every player in the painkiller process from manufacturer to patient has been deputized to police every other player, to the point where anyone who doesn’t continually question the motives and actions of everyone else risks losing his livelihood, or even his freedom.

Yes, and that includes 88 year old water purifiers.

Collateral damage? How far does it go?

MORE: I have to say, it never occurred to me that I might someday be InstaLanched by Sarah. (who is guest blogging for Glenn Reynolds). I consider this to be proof that anything is possible.

Thank you, dear, dear Sarah Hoyt.

Comments welcome, agree or disagree.

There is a new video reader out there called Wajam. Don’t use it. I will have more to report when I have removed the Wajam tool bar that the Fucks installed despite me telling the installer not to.

I can’t figure out how to correct the problem. Plus using the normal Classical Values toolbar is now impossible. I hate those damn SOBs.

The Parties Of Interzone.

Liquefactionist

The Liquefactionists are a party who base themselves on consuming (liquidating) one another, until everyone is liquidated into one person. As Burroughs says, the party will turn in on themselves, eventually, only one man will be left. This parodies racism and totalitarianism, with man’s hatred of one another ultimately leading to the destruction of everybody else.

Divisionists

The Divisionists create clones of themselves to take control of Interzone. Each man tries to create as many clones as possible without being noticed; he disguises his clones through cosmetic surgery. As people discover the clones they are mobbed and destroyed. Again, the idea of this party is that one man will take over the world. One clone of one sex of one race will ultimately prevail – a parody of racism and sexism.

Senders

The senders are the ultimate evil. They want to control the world through telepathic mind control. This party will take over when one man controls the thoughts of every other man. This is the most extreme form of totalitarianism shown in the book. Hassan is suggested to be a sender, and is the ultimate villain in the novel.

Factualists

The factualists are the only party with good intentions. They combat the evil of the other three parties by exposing it; this is enough to destroy an evil. They live for truth and freedom. AJ – who exposes Hassan – and Bill Lee – who writes naked lunch to expose evil – are the two main Factualists in the novel. The downfall of the factualists are that they are human, and subject to greed, making them liable to sell out.

The above excerpt was prompted by a discussion here of the Greek Golden Dawn. And of course the parties are from the imaginings of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.

Bonus: If the intersection of secret societies (specifically the Golden Dawn) and politics interests you this long bit (100 pdf pages) Hitler and the Golden Dawn (Age of Horus) is quite good. I once belonged (for about two years) to a Temple that was very Crowley oriented. So I know a fair amount about the subject from direct experience.

The dividing line between the parties for me once I figured it out is the Power and Control faction vs the Liberty faction.

Lord of Light by Zelazny is good science fiction on the subject as is “Naked Lunch”. The Control parties are always at war with each other vying for who will be the ultimate controller. The Liberty parties just want to leave you alone. Which of course in anathema to the Control parties of all stripes.

I am very proud to see that Sarah is guest blogging at Instapundit. Moreover, she is behaving in a very purrfessional manner!

It probably won’t surprise anyone that since I aspire to being the mad-cat-woman of science fiction (Yes, the competition is stiff.  Well, actually it’s soft, fuzzy and on occasion purrs) I love the idea of cat cafes and I’m thrilled to see them expanding out of Japan.  I wonder if the FDA would allow it to flourish here.

I could use a little mad-cat culture right here. I’m having a terrible time with squirrels ravaging my square foot garden, and I don’t know what to do about it. The dogs are not stealthy enough to catch the varmints; they just chase them, which not only doesn’t phase the squirrels, it seems to encourage them. They deliberately taunt the dogs — flicking their tails and chattering aggressively. Coco considers it to be anti-pit bull bullying — definitely hate speech — and she takes it very personally. I’d love to have some purrfessional help. Cats have more patience and cunning about these things. Plus, they know how to climb trees….

If it was food the little beasts were after I could almost understand. But what they are doing is digging up young seedlings, just as they are struggling to establish themselves. And they are not eating them. As this article points out, they “will destroy your garden by digging up the plants and discarding them.”

Little bastards. I could almost swear it was malice directed against me personally.

I have tried almost every legal means available to me. Cayenne pepper has not worked, nor has trapping. Coco and I need this Occupy Garden movement ended badly.

Please help! We’re desperate!

Speaking of the things They do to Us (and the frustration almost makes me understand the silly emotions that drive the 1% versus 99% dichotomy), I am one of those stubborn clingers to the past who wants to keep my Windows XP — a perfectly good OS that serves my needs. Anyway, simply because I had a recent motherboard problem and started looking into newer boards and CPUs, I started having fits of paranoia about the future of xp. It looks bleak indeed:

Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP on April 8, 2014. Security patches and hotfixes will no longer be available, leaving the OS open to vulnerabilities. Already, Microsoft has moved to a limited Windows XP support plan that provides security fixes for all users but only issues non-security updates to companies with a support contract. Microsoft also opted not to support Windows XP with its latest Web browser, Internet Explorer 9.

They’re already forcing businesses to upgrade, and it seems a little economic duress works wonders:

But for Microsoft, enterprise customers are the real challenge, and the company’s anti-XP blog post is aimed squarely at IT professionals. Citing a Gartner report, Microsoft warns that half of companies that don’t start upgrading by early 2012 won’t complete the process before support ends, and will therefore incur increased costs. The company links to a return on investment calculator that supposedly shows how much money can be saved by upgrading to Windows 7.

Both consumers and enterprise users, however, may be tempted to wait for Windows 8. Microsoft hasn’t announced a release date for its next operating system, but ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley has reported that Microsoft is trying to push Windows 8 out the door by April 2012.

As an angry old crank, I say screw 7 and the hell with 8! (As to what happened to four, five and six, who knows? Might there be a little numberphobia there?)

I’m not alone in my 7phobia Already a lot of people hate Windows 7 and want XP back.

I’ve been using Windows7 for almost 2 years now and almost everything about it in terms of user interface is appallingly bad.  The file hierarchy is nearly useless; it’s like trying to decode a plate of spaghetti. XP’s file hierarchy was logical and consistent.   In W7 you have to rely on memorization rather than logic or predictability to know where to find something.  The way files and programs are displayed is much more clumsy (example: Control Panel items are now alphabetically oriented left to right and then down to the next row instead of XP’s series of columns, which was so much more readable.  The Start Panel is utterly disorienting.)

Many tasks now take more clicks instead of fewer.  The options for customizing, when available, are buried in irrational locations.  But often the customization that is required isn’t available at all – even though there are an almost infinite number of useless customizations.

W7 has NOT made moving around in Windows easier, just the opposite.  It has a whole lot of useless and distracting flash without substance.  It reminds me of new cars that have every conceivable piece of useless flash but are only meant to be driven by helpless people – don’t even think about opening the hood.

It is clear to me that whoever designed W7 had a deviant mind combined with a severe case of dyslexia.

Microsoft: Give up on this bad bad interface and make the far superior XP interface your default going forward.

Unfortunately, going “forward” has come to mean dumbing everything down and promoting moronic schlock.  The new Microsoft Word appears to be catering to illiterates and third graders, and I don’t like such trends. All I want is to be left alone to enjoy that to which I have become accustomed. I don’t like being nudged into compliance with ultimatums. This feels like having someone come along and tell me I really should buy one of those newer style modern cars I hate (the ones that look like they were designed by and for video gamers), oh and by the way, your car will no longer be allowed on the road after 2014. So get on board with change!

This might be time to seriously consider dumping the Windows paradigm entirely. I have long dabbled with Linux, and when a serious virus hit my laptop over public wifi, I decided to never use Windows in public again. My laptop dual boots, and whenever I am out and about it’s always Ubuntu. Perhaps I should consider taking the plunge in private and just switch. Fortunately, this is still the United States, and They can’t yet stop Us.

There’s more than one way to change.

MORE: Oh, did I mention the high cost of change? Take me as an example. My house has four older Dell computers (usually two or three running at the same time), plus there’s my laptop. All run xp. With xp set to die, you might think that I would “only” have to pay over $1000 to “upgrade,” right? It’s nowhere near as easy as that. It requires new, clean installations and even when you use the programs to save your programs, the whole thing is a major pain in the ass:

…what’s involved with a clean install, you ask? It means you erase every last program and file on your hard disk during the “upgrade.” Ow.

You can save some of it. Microsoft’s Windows Easy Transfer , which comes in Windows 7, will let you save your files and your settings. Of course, some of those settings may not work anymore with Windows 7, but that’s a relatively minor pain.

The major headache is that you can’t transfer your old programs and device drivers from XP to Windows 7. So, do you know where your install disk is for Quicken 2008? How about Office 2003? Or, for that matter, do you really want to download iTunes and Firefox, plus a half-dozen must-have Firefox extensions, all over again? Well, you’d better know what you have on your current XP system, and you’d better be ready to reinstall them all and reset them to just the way you like them, because that’s exactly what you’re going to need to do.

For an individual, that’s annoying. It took me two or three hours, but I’m always installing and updating operating systems. Microsoft estimates that heavy users , people with 125GB of data and 40 applications, would need between 2 hours and 40 minutes and 5 hours and 43 minutes to upgrade their systems. A super user could take close to 20 hours But, wait, those Microsoft numbers are for Vista to Windows 7! XP to Windows 7 can only take much longer. At best, I suspect we’re looking at it taking a full day for heavy users to make the migration. Now, imagine multiplying that by a business’s dozens to tens of thousands of PCs. That’s not just a headache; it’s the kind of major suffering that companies try to avoid whenever humanly possible.

As to the cost, the numbers he cites for businesses are shocking. This is not something any sane person would look forward to. And if you go to Dell’s website (which I did) they say that the older computers are not xp compatible. Which means what? They’ll be junk in the near future? Why is that? Because xp won’t work and the Windows 7 drivers won’t be there for the older Dell computers, dummy. Neat trick!

You’d almost think the computer industry was involved in what appears to be a conspiracy to murder a perfectly good operating system.

Welcome to the future. All your computers are belong to us! We kill them!

MORE: ”Operating systems you probably never heard about.”

Using a new browser. WTF? I can’t remember… It’s….. Maxthon. That’s what it is. A friend just told me about it after the umpteenth Firefox crash.

Why they do these things to us, I don’t know. Nor do I know how seriously to take this new browser, but Google is taking Maxthon seriously:

On April 10, 2007, TechCrunch reported that Google had invested at least US$1 million in Maxthon;^[15] this was denied the following day by Chen.^[16] However, in an interview with the Chinese portal Sina.com, Chen did not rule out future “co-operation” between the two businesses.^[17]

Have to say, I like the fact that Maxthon lets me blog in WP he same way I do on Windows.

Competition is good. As long as it doesn’t mess with me and my choices.

Let’s see how it does with a favorite.

And another:

From Johnson (Pres) and Gray (VP) running on the Libertarian ticket.

Sarah Hoyt Is Standing In For Instapundit. She starts out with:

My name is Sarah A. Hoyt and I’m a writer. It’s been six hours since I last wrote–

I know the feeling.

A student at Valencia College writes:

As human beings, we are not really responsible for our own acts and so we need government to control those who do not care about others.

H/T Zero Hedge

Speaking of not wanting to start arguments, my post last night depressed me, because I couldn’t figure out whether by voicing a thought, I might be guilty of starting an argument. I mean, my normal process in everyday life is to just throw private fits when I see something I disagree with. I’ll curse and swear, and hurl invective, whether at the newspaper, the TV, or some irritating blogger or commenter. I’d be embarrassed as hell to voice these sentiments publicly, and that probably has something to do with the way I was raised. When it’s part of what they call your “cultural DNA,” being polite can become a disease. It may be psychology, but it is unfortunately harnessed by sneaky control freaks in ways that aren’t well understood. Simple human good will — politeness, if you will — is the very backbone of that obnoxious leftist trope we call “political correctness.” But the mechanism is hardly limited to the left. Polite people who are on the right (whether conservative, Republican, libertarian, or even “bow-tied” — a status I had to go to great lengths to avoid) often find themselves wiggling in the face of angry yahoos spouting a steady stream of crackpot conspiracy theories or anti-gay pronouncements in loud voices. And if these loud voices are said to be grounded in religious opinions, then all the more caution is required. Just like a good liberal doesn’t dare offend the sensibilities of a hard left Marxist, people on the right don’t want to offend hard right religious conservatives. So they may squirm, but they say nothing. Some of it is politeness (which as I say, is cultural), and some  is a rational belief in coalition politics. FWIW, I’m a believer in the latter, and a hapless victim of the former. Which means I don’t like to say what I think, except at home, when I become unbearable, even to myself.  Not recommended if the goal is sanity, and as I said last night, it interferes with blogging. Actually, I was understating the case. When you’ve been blogging for nearly a decade as I have, the blog can honestly be said to have taken on its own personality. So when I write something, I cannot but be affected by it. Factoring in my “natural” (OMG, that word) politeness and the desire not to harm the “coalition on the right,” and I often find myself with very little to say. If in addition to that there is a chance that by saying something I might start an argument, then I am deterred from writing. To call this “writer’s block” is not accurate; I don’t know what it is. (It feels creepy and dishonest, but it’s “for the good of the cause.”)

Who “starts” an argument, by the way? The one who disagreed with something that someone else said, or the one who said something that was later disagreed with? Is this a philosophical question? Geez, I’d hate to get into that, because I have found that whenever you get into a philosophical question, you find that some of the greatest minds in history have ended up in disagreement. So it goes in circles.

When I saw M. Simon’s post from this morning I was unable to keep my trap shut. Unable to figure out whether to laugh or cry, Simon complained that his “Right Wing Brethren” are both decrying the militarization of the police while fully supporting Drug Prohibition, which of course supplies the primary pretext for the militarization of police. So I ventured something I probably shouldn’t have said:

I hate to diagnose this hopeless disagreement in psychological terms, but it may be that they are in denial. Or maybe they think that America’s pre-drug war period was a failed experiment with freedom. Some of them may simply hate people who take drugs, and take comfort knowing that the people they hate are at least criminals who ought to be locked up. The WOD is the closest thing to real culture war that we’ve got going, right? We cannot back down, or America will be destroyed, just like it was before 1914!

I think many of them honestly believe that legal drugs threaten “the culture.” Still others see it as a threat to authority. To established order. Yet they also distrust that same authority and established order, so analysis gets a little contradictory. I want to understand these people, but the more I try, the more I fear I cannot.

As the commie political officers repeatedly said in Dr. Zhivago, my personal sentiments do not matter.

What does matter is that no matter how much I hate the right, I hate the left more.

What an awful admission. Should I just quit blogging?

I am amused at my my Right Wing Brethren decrying the militarization of the police.

And yet the Right in America fully supports Drug Prohibition. The main use of these militarized police.

It makes ya wonder. I’m trying to figure out if I should laugh or cry.

Education has never been cheaper. Credentials never more expensive.

The lead up to the really good stuff happens about 1:05 into the video.

This is interesting and may shed further light on the subject: Urban dictionary: Bow Tying

H/T Instapundit and the commenters at Wagist for Bow Tying.

I’m not surprised to see “science” confirm that heavily tattooed or pierced people are more likely to drink to excess. As M. Simon has pointed out many times in a slightly different context, people who suffer from PTSD are likely to do all sorts of destructive things which overlap and can thus be said to “correlate.” You might argue that wanting to do such things constitutes a disability. But many ordinary people would recoil in outrage over the social injustice of such an idea, because they all see every day that we reward the disabled. But alcohol is frowned on as a form of self indulgence as are drugs. Especially illegal drugs. Which is why many want to disregard our earlier history, and “keep” drugs illegal. We have to do what we did before, but not before the before!

Lock up the criminal degenerate scum up if they get caught, dammit! Otherwise, they will say they are sick, and inflict their illness on us. Because alcohol is legal, alcoholism is a legal disease. But because drugs are illegal, the disease is a criminal one and social disapproval is easily rationalized.

Seen this way, the ADA does much to keep the culture war going.

I say this as someone who finds his tattooed or pierced brethren very pleasantly reassuring, but cannot — no, will not — explain why.  What would be the point? I’d merely start an argument, and arguments never resolve anything. They do please argument lovers, though. But that’s hardly reason to start one.

Hey wait! If I say something to no one in particular but from my deepest “soul,” and someone then leaves a comment, who can be said to have been the one who “started it”? The one who said the thing, or the one who disagreed with it? Do you have to disagree to start an argument, or is saying something enough?

I’ve been shutting up too much, but perhaps that is not enough.

AFTERTHOUGHT: What a weird paradox it is to feel silenced by your own blog, eh? You’d think after 9 or 10 years things might have gotten easier. Alas, it has gotten harder. I’d say that learning from mistakes sucks, except that, too, might sound argumentative.

Eric has just written a post about the pros and cons of buying electronics. I have just written a post for ECN about making electronics and I’m also selling.

If you are super geeky and into making electronics (or just want to learn a little) check it out.

I’m happy to answer any questions you have.

I have a computer which runs a Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU. Although the machine is plenty fast I could stick in a faster CPU, like a Core 2 Quad Q6600 which I am told would be “twice as fast.” While keeping up with the Joneses often makes me feel twice as slow, if you think that’s bad, try Googling video cards, which I have done recently. (I’m still using the computer’s onboard video VGA, universally said to suck by the knowledgeable geeks in the smart set.)

Let me start with an admission. I don’t know diddly squat about video cards. All I want is to be able to use a DVI jack instead of the VGA jack, because I have been told it’s supposed to be “better.” Better for what I don’t know. I write blog posts, read the news, and watch occasional news and YouTube videos plus video I might shoot from time to time with my camera.  So while I don’t see any particular reason that the standard ATI RADEON or Geforce type cards (many of which are floating around on ebay for $20 or less) wouldn’t be perfectly OK, I was curious enough to Google the phrase “best video card” (bad idea) and the first hit or so went to a PCmag review of what is said to be “the best” — to wit, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680.

They cost — I am NOT kidding — from $600 to $700 at Amazon.com.

That’s a HUGE amount of money. More than I would pay for a computer, and just for a bleeping video card. So I have to ask some basic questions which will reveal what an idiot I am.

What exactly would I get with one of these cards? Better graphics? How much better? As things are now, I can see what I need to see, view what I want to view. I’m not especially thrilled with content, and I don’t see why it would be oh so much more thrilling to get more detail. Then there’s gaming. What gaming? I can remember the birth of video games with pong, then PAC-MAN and Donkey Kong, and I sort of liked Tetris which I still play on my cell phone, but complicated super realistic type games just don’t do it for me. I have zero interest. But if people are spending 700 bucks for a video card, that’s the sort of thing I notice, and while I am certainly not a Luddite, where it comes to today’s gaming I don’t even rise to the level of cultural neophyte. What exactly am I missing? Is it worth finding out? I don’t especially like video games, but a lot of people obviously do if they’re spending that kind of money just for a video card.

Still, where it comes to cultural things, I say to each his own. At least I’m not into My Little Pony (or “Brony”) culture — said to be a threat to the republic, or even a sign of the Apocalypse. America needs to “get in touch with its inner adult.”

I suppose threats to the republic and signs of the Apocalypse are at least arguably more dangerous than spending a small fortune on a video card to play games.

And to save my life, I don’t know how in touch I am with my inner adult. When I was a child I couldn’t relate to childhood, and preferred adults. But then in the 80s the shrinks came along and said I had to get in touch with my inner child, and while I tried to sort of invent one, I could never really relate to the whole concept.

All I know is that when I see prices like that staring at me, my inner something is worried. Maybe it’s not inner, maybe it’s outer.

The person on the left is George Zimmerman.

The person on the right is Elizabeth Warren.

Just in case you haven’t been keeping up (and who can these days?).

H/T Instapundit

A write-up on safes (ostensibly a discussion of the fact that many Americans prefer to store their wealth at home as opposed to banks) reminded me of the tension between secrecy and security. Safes — even high quality safes — are not necessarily good hiding places. If a safe is found, it would become the logical subject of a thief’s attention, and if he cannot crack it open, he might very well decide to haul it away and work on it later.

But if something is hidden well enough that a burglar cannot find it, that not only saves the cost and hassle of a safe, but can keep the goods safer than a safe would. The most mundane places can offer a perfect stash for a vacation. Valuables can be thrown into the kitchen trash can or into a washer or dryer full of clothes. A piece of large diameter ABS sewer pipe can hold a lot of stuff, and can either be made to “run” from floor to ceiling or from wall to wall into holes cut for the purpose (allowing the owner to simply slide it out whenever access is needed) or else accessed through a removable cleanout. Few burglars are going to disassemble what appear to be a house’s waste lines in search of valuables.

To add to the confusion, why not add a real safe? A cheap safe — the type that cannot withstand ordinary attack by a crowbar — could be put anywhere and bolted to the floor.  This could cause a burglar to waste valuable time tearing into it. And better yet, fill the thing with cheap crap that looks valuable. Fake gold coins, fake but real-looking jewelry, so that when he finally gets in, he’ll think he scored, and get his ass out of there ASAP. I think it’s safe to assume that many burglars are drug addicts or at least know the value of illegal substances, so to complete the appearance of a real score, why not throw in some herbs that could pass for high potency fake sensimilla, dried up store mushrooms in ziplock bags, and if you have an empty controlled substance prescription bottle lying around, by all means throw in some worthless old pills to make it look real. (And if you really hate burglars,  I guess you could substitute strychnine or something evil. But that would be wrong; burglars of unoccupied property really do not deserve to die, and his next of kin might turn around and sue you for setting a lethal burglar trap. So scratch that idea entirely.)

Ideally, though, you would want security as well as stealth. Throwing your gold in the kitchen trash or the dryer is not something most people would want to do on their way to a vacation.  So maybe a real safe that is very secure and very hidden, and an easier to find safe to waste the burglar’s time.

Title shamelessly borrowed from a favorite older flick, as is this picture:

After all, as Sarah said, “what is yours, you keep“!

MORE: Whoops, almost forgot. If you are one of those cluttered souls who cannot bear to toss or shred old paper and have accumulated boxes of it, just empty a box, throw in your goodies, and put the old files on top.

UPDATE: Nice comments! Commenter Neil opines that somebody might catch on to fake coins, which is true, although some of them are convincing. As to fake gold bars, they are certainly good enough to fool thieves. Why not only can they fool experts, they even fool governments.

On Wednesday, the BBC reported that millions of dollars in gold at the central bank of Ethiopia has turned out to be fake: What were supposed to be bars of solid gold turned out to be nothing more than gold-plated steel. They tried to sell the stuff to South Africa and it was sent back when the South Africans noticed this little problem.

This is an amazing story for two reasons. First, that an institution like a central bank could get ripped off this way, and second that the people responsible used such a lousy excuse for fake gold.

Governments defrauding governments? That should not surprise anyone, and I’d say that there might be some poetic justice involved, except the government swindlers aren’t even that good at it. The real con artists don’t use gold-plated steel; they use gold-plated tungsten:

Tungsten is vastly cheaper than gold (maybe $30 dollars a pound compared to $12,000 a pound for gold right now). And remarkably, it has exactly the same density as gold, to three decimal places. The main differences are that it’s the wrong color, and that it’s much, much harder than gold. (Very pure gold is quite soft, you can dent it with a fingernail.)

A top-of-the-line fake gold bar should match the color, surface hardness, density, chemical, and nuclear properties of gold perfectly. To do this, you could could start with a tungsten slug about 1/8-inch smaller in each dimension than the gold bar you want, then cast a 1/16-inch layer of real pure gold all around it. This bar would feel right in the hand, it would have a dead ring when knocked as gold should, it would test right chemically, it would weigh *exactly* the right amount, and though I don’t know this for sure, I think it would also pass an x-ray fluorescence scan, the 1/16″ layer of pure gold being enough to stop the x-rays from reaching any tungsten. You’d pretty much have to drill it to find out it’s fake. (Unless, of course, central bank gold inspectors are wise to this trick and have developed a test for it: Something involving speed of sound say, or more powerful x-rays, or perhaps neutron activation analysis. If bars like this are actually a common problem, you certainly could devise a quick, non-destructive test for them, and for all I know, they have. Except, apparently, in Ethiopia.)

Well, we can’t expect too much from government bureaucrats. Either in Ethiopia or here.

What’s a taxpayer to do?

From the comments at Wagist slightly modified.

If a woman goes out with a black man because black men are reputed to have big packages, was the man racially profiled?

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That was just too funny to pass up.

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Further down the thread there was a mention of the supposed “big nose” correlation.

I’m down with that. I have a Jewish nose. For obvious reasons.

H/T Conservative Tree House