Parents! Caregivers! Older siblings with credit cards! Does someone in the family whine just too damn much? Does the moaning, complaining, shrieking grate away at your sanity? Now comes to you a service of such obvious usefulness, it’s a miracle it hasn’t been invented before.

It’s the wahmbulance!

What is it? We are a mobile service to give you a reprieve from the noise, that horrible noise, that noise that makes you think of inconceivably wrong ways of permanently solving the problem. You call us – our number is nine wahn wahn wahn wahn.

Once our twenty-four hour operations centre receives your call, and your credit card number, we spring into action. Our specially trained pawahmedics rush to your location with one of our patent-protected emergency silence vehicle. Upon arrival, we take into custody the noisemaker and safely store him or her in the secure silent storage compartment of our vehicles.

Is it safe & effective? Our world class engineers designed the best quality sound suppression and rubber padding enclosure for our vans. All six walls are covered with six inches of translucent rubber tiles that permit necessary ventilation and light, but are impervious to damage and to sound in the audible frequencies. A screaming five-year-old may emit 120 dBA, but through the walls it’s not even a whimper. Study after study has shown that the fastest legal (non-wounding) means of teaching a noisemaker to shut the heck up is to place him or her into a place where no one else is bothered.

Is it legal? Certainly. While a noisemaker is being protected from the consequences of his or her shrieks, the private-option wahmbulance van stays parked on your driveway, with you holding the ignition & lock keys. The noisemaker cannot be removed from this temporary extension to your home. Or if you’re on a tight budget, you may opt for our cheaper semi-private option, where a multi-enclosure bus may roam to collect multiple noisemakers from a neighbourhood. In this case, a live muted video feed lets you monitor your own noisemaker from the comfort of your local internet video receiver. Since no medical care is provided for the individuals in temporary custody, no particular licensing agency is involved.

After a few minutes or hours or days, when you’re ready to let the noisemaker rejoin your social cohesion unit, just dial nine whan whan whan whan whan. Our storage/education tank works so well, we hardly ever to serve the same person twice.

Call now.
Franchise opportunities available.

Spengler thinks about why societies are failing.
A few choice paragraphs are excerpted below.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn’s christmas column covers similar ground.
UPDATE2: Wretchard recaps.

The world faces a danger more terrible than the worst Green imaginings. The European environmentalist who wants to shrink the world’s population to reduce carbon emissions will spend her declining years in misery, for there will not be enough Europeans alive a generation from now to pay for her pension and medical care. For the first time in world history, the birth rate of the whole developed world is well below replacement, and a significant part of it has passed the demographic point of no return.

But not only the religious need the hope of immortality. The most atheistic communist hopes that his memory will live on in the heart of a grateful proletariat. Even if we do not believe that our soul will have a place in heaven or that we shall be resurrected in the flesh, we nonetheless believe that something of ourselves will remain, in the form of progeny, memories, or consequences of actions, and that this something will persist as long as people who are like us continue to inhabit the Earth.

Human beings may not be the only animals who are sentient of death. (Elephants evidently grieve for their dead, and dogs mourn their dead masters.) But we are the only animals whose sense of continuity depends on culture as much as it does upon genes. Unlike men and women, healthy animals universally show an instinct for self-preservation and the propagation of their species. We do not observe cats deciding not to have kittens the better to pursue their careers as mousers.

Freshly released is this investigation final report for an Airbus accident from 2008. In this event, the on-board computers spontaneously messed up during a routine flight, and harshly pitched the plane down for a second or two. This threw around unrestrained passengers and crew in the back, crashing them up to the ceiling. More than a hundred got injured, some seriously. The captain of the plane responded perfectly: declared an emergency, and diverted to the nearest suitable airport. He did not trust the avionics any more:

He then flew the aircraft without the autopilot or autothrust engaged, and using the standby instruments, for the remainder of the flight.

The bit that bugs me more is the root-cause-analysis and correction of the bugs in the system. The final report unnervingly qualifies this:

The failure mode was probably initiated by a single, rare type of internal or external trigger event …
The spikes in the ADR parameters were probably introduced within the CPU module …
A much more likely scenario was that a marginal hardware weakness of some form made the units susceptible to the effects of some type of environmental factor, which triggered the failure mode.

It goes on like that. They’ve done some impressive analysis of the systems, but the there is quite a collection of maybes and probablys.

But be reassured:

The occurrence was the only known example where this design limitation led to a pitch-down command in over 28 million flight hours on A330/A340 aircraft. …
It is widely accepted that not all the potential failure modes and failure scenarios for complex systems can be identified in practice, and fault-tolerant design features are included in a system to reduce the risk of such problems. …
The ADIRU manufacturer conducted a "theoretical analysis" of the potential for a single event upset (SEU) on the LTN-101 ADIRU. The overall result of this analysis was that "the ADIRU still met the aircraft manufacturer's safety objectives".
As a result of this redesign, passengers, crew and operators can be confident that the same type of accident will not reoccur.

It’s an uneasy situation. Having a sense of how much technology and effort goes into this sort of machinery, it’s clear that there are failure scenarios that we don’t know we don’t know. And yet we fly.

SmileTrain, whoever they are, made me this offer I can’t possibly refuse.

Mr. Eigler, make one gift and we’ll never ask for another donation again.

It was tempting. It was perhaps too good to be true. Might the invasion of donation solicitations finally abate, if I only paid?

Maybe. But maybe I’m the kind of fellow who doesn’t mind shredding the occasional postal kindling to feed the backyard bonfire. Maybe I get a tiny grin each time some agency spends their hard-earned (?) cash on mailing me some “Addressed Admail”, getting nothing in return. Except the kind of publicity in this blog post. Yes, maybe that’s just the kind of guy I am. Sorry about that.

It manufactures unemployment, or so says an old friend. The argument is not much more than what he describes as the agreeable Luddite one: that there is a perpetual pressure to cut costs and raise profits. “Unregulated capitalism”, whatever that is, races to eliminate employees. (How much more there is to the argument is hard to say, since the posting has become non-public.)

One response to such profundity is to match it with the observation that this looks at only one side of the coin. Capitalist economies also manufacture employment. (Few people hire others out of altruism. Few people can build lots of stuff without others’ help.) They also manufacture stuff. Lots and lots of stuff, which people want to buy. (Few people give others tons of stuff out of altruism.) When unnecessary costs are cut, customers and shareholders benefit.

The system is obviously in constant change, only roughly stable, and is unlikely to ever converge to a steady state some might idolize, where some economic status quo simply persists. In order to force a utopian order, it would require a level of control and force that would be familiar to those who studied totalitarian states. And there is no other endpoint possible. At any intermediate state, there will be some perceived “social injustice” that requires more force to “solve”. People who promote just a little more regulation should be expected to state their ultimate end-point: what is the maximum power for the state beyond which they would not advocate.

(The dual situation exists with us laissez-faire types. I would like a smaller state, less control, less competition with the private sector. How much less? A good first step would be balancing the darned government budgets.)

It appears that CAcert believes it can bind people to this license in order to redistribute their public root certificate. IANAL, but there seems little basis for that. A public key / certificate is just a few computer-generated numbers: no creative spark, so does not appear to qualify for copyright protection. They are by necessity public (or else the essential cryptography wouldn’t work), so no trade secret protection. They are not a process or invention, so no patent protection.

So what’s left? Legalese blurbage protection, whereby Powerful Words impress and frighten.