When to comes to linguistics, I'm a die-hard descriptivist: a language is what it is, not what people on self-constructed pedestals say it must be. Languages change, they evolve, they don't give a fuck about the prescriptions of self-appointed grammar police. So, I generally laugh at people who say "No, this word must not be used that way! You're ruining things!"

But, I hate this. "Because" as a preposition ("I use 'because' as a preposition, because hipster.") conveys, not so much information, but attitude. It drips with self-conscious irony. When I read it, I know it's supposed to convey a smug eye-roll and faux-weary shrug. All I can see is the writer is mugging for the reader; it distracts from whatever is being said. I want this to go away.

Somehow, it's different from all the other internetisms and literary mugging that I'm perfectly comfortable with. I don't know why.

Perhaps I need a vacation?

/grumpyOldFart

iPhone

Monday AM at the lake.

While many Americans have been led to believe the war in Afghanistan will soon be over, a draft of a key US-Afghan security deal obtained by NBC News shows the United States is prepared to maintain military outposts in Afghanistan for many years to come, and pay to support hundreds of thousands of Afghan security forces.

The wide-ranging document, still unsigned by the United States and Afghanistan, has the potential to commit thousands of American troops to Afghanistan and spend billions of US taxpayer dollars.

Maybe someone should ask the people if that's what they want.

This is not shocking:

Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense's accounts.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon's main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy's books with the U.S. Treasury's - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. "A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate," Woodford says. "We didn't have the detail … for a lot of it."

The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take "unsubstantiated change actions" - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called "plugs," to make the Navy's totals match the Treasury's.

Honestly, I do the same thing in Quicken. I have a category called "fixit", which I sometimes use to fill in a hole when I simply can't get a statement to reconcile.

But Mrs and I don't spend $16,000 every second, like the Pentagon does, and we're not spending other people's money, so it's not that big of a deal.

Two centuries ago, some Americans believed that an anti-fogmatic, a dose of spirituous liquor, would relieve the unhealthy effects of damp and rain. A dram before breakfast was said to counteract the figurative or literal fog of the early day, hence its name. It was even supposedly recommended by physicians:

Its great utility in preserving the planters from the effects of the damp and unwholsome air of the morning, has given it the medical name of an Antifogmatick.

[The Massachusetts Spy, or the Worcester Gazette, 12 Nov. 1789]

Australia's spy agencies attempted to listen in on the mobile phone conversations of Indonesia's president and targeted the mobile phones of his wife and senior ministers, Australian media reported on Monday, citing documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Spies spy.

Wow. This Rob Ford guy is one hellofa train wreck.

"Oh, and the last thing was Olivia Gondek. It says that I wanted to eat her pussy. I've never said that in my life to her; I would never do that. I'm happily married, I've got more than enough to eat at home. Thanks very much," Ford said to reporters.

Every day his story becomes wilder than the last.

AKA: Remember Perl Harbor !

This is part of a reader email that FOX News' Bret Baier read on his show; it's what passes for "perfectly and profoundly astounding" over in wingnut land:

Putting things in perspective: March 21st 2010 to October 1 2013 is 3 years, 6 months, 10 days. December 7, 1941 to May 8, 1945 is 3 years, 5 months, 1 day. What this means is that in the time we were attacked at Pearl Harbor to the day Germany surrendered is not enough time for this progressive federal government to build a working webpage.

Yes, let's put some things in perspective.

Firstly, Germany's surrender wasn't the end of the war, Japan's was.

The US alone spent close to five TRILLION dollars ($288B in 1940 dollars is $4.8T in 2013 dollars) in those three and a half years. That's 7500 times more than the highest Obamacare cost estimate (which is bullshit anyway).

The US alone lost more than 400,000 lives during WWII. I don't think anyone has died as a consequence of working on the Obamacare website.

During WWII, the US government involved itself in every level of the economy. Gas, sugar, bread and meat were rationed. The government limited the commercial use of steel, aluminum, nylon, rubber and copper. Pennies were made of steel because copper was too vital. Nickles were made of silver because nickle was too important. Cigarettes and chocolate were rationed. Whiskey was hard to find because many distilleries had switched to making industrial-grade alcohol for the war. Automobile production was stopped. An all-out propaganda campaign was launched to get people to buy war bonds (ie. to let the government borrow people's money). It's the closest thing to a centrally-planned command economy that this country has ever seen. All our allies (and enemies) did similar things.

It required the entire US military, nearly all of them compelled into service by government draft, along with no small amount of sacrifice from allies who had been fighting the war for many years before we got in. Russia lost 20,000,000 people and spent more than two trillion dollars. France spent almost two trillion. The UK spent almost a trillion dollars.

And, we didn't have the GOP fighting the President's handing of the war every step of the way.

If the US put five TRILLION dollars towards a website, diverted the production of all relevant industries to the effort, forced 10,000,000 Americans to work on it, and enlisted the help of all its allies, it could probably have built the world's best health insurance website.

But, obviously that's a crazy scenario and a ridiculous comparison. Nevertheless, the letter that spawned this comparison is what the wingnuts are calling the "Most important juxtaposing of issue imaginable. Gov't mgmt vs Free Markets."

That's because they are blithering idiots.

“Every time a politician talks, he’s out there deceiving voters," Wilson told KHOU.

You don't say...

It was a surprise to many voters when Dave Wilson, an anti-gay activist and white Republican candidate for public office, was elected to a seat on the Houston Community College Board of Trustees in a heavily African-American district. Most surprised were the voters who actually elected Wilson, who had led them to believe that he was black.

Wilson managed to beat out Bruce Austin, the African-American incumbent for the last 24 years, by willfully deceiving his voters. While making sure that photos of himself were kept from the public eye, Wilson instead filled his campaign materials with "smiling African-American faces" cribbed from the internet.

The materials also proclaimed that Wilson was "Endorsed By Ron Wilson," the name of a black former state representative...and, as the fine print on the campaign mailer explained, is also the name of his cousin.

Wilson defended his campaign strategy by explaining that he was elected on the issues rather than race, despite that fact that he used racially-charged tactics to do so.

h/t

A hard frost came through last night and appears to have put an end to my small forest of poblano pepper plants. I was out in the freezing rain last night after work, pulling off all the peppers that looked like they might be ready - the plants are still flowering and there are dozens of small peppers still growing on them. But, as expected, the plants were all wilted and defeated looking this AM. Alas. They had a good run, though.

Peppers are certainly the hardiest plants I've ever grown. Everything else in our little garden got eaten by bugs and slugs to one degree or another. But nothing really bothered the peppers, they grew 5' tall and produced like crazy all summer, and fall, long.

Next year: nothing but peppers.