Afterlife

In the afterlife
You could be headed for the serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But tomorrow there’ll be hell to pay
”Hell” – Squirrel Nut Zippers (CD: Hot)

Occasionally I scan back over the essays I’ve written over the past couple of years, and yes, there’s a lot of writing about death, one way or another, even before I had my intimation of mortality in the form of a fingernail-gone-really-bad. A friend of mine once observed that she thought that a lot of people considered me “morbid and macabre,” and who am I to disappoint my fans?

In the A&E Network show, the host, James Lipton has a question that he asks every guest: “If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?”

My answer would be “Well done. You get a free replay.”

That can be taken as the reincarnation option, of course, but I have a few revisions I’d make to the standard version. I’ll get to those in a little while.

The first version of the “belief dependant afterlife” that I think I recall is from Mark Twain, but he may have been taking a page from James Branch Cabell (or given the dates, vice versa), who had the afterlife both dependant on the individual’s religion and beliefs during life, but also subject to clerical errors, allowing one character to get the wrong afterlife because of tombstone erosion, the ultimate in typos. Robert Heinlein borrowed the Cabellian view in Job: A Comedy of Justice.

Reincarnation figures big in religions that don’t cotton to heaven and hell. One way of looking at the “Great Wheel” that’s featured in Hinduism is that this world is hell, and you are condemned to stay on the Wheel until you do a good enough job of it to get off into Nirvana, a sort of joyful non-existence (I’m simplifying here because it’s important to be able to compress centuries of religious thought into facile one liners). I think the important thing about Nirvana is that you’re supposed to be beyond all the petty desires, annoyances, pleasures, and minutia that, to me, make life worthwhile.

One unexamined feature of most reincarnation beliefs is that the incarnations are sequential in time; previous lives are in the past. But really now, there’s no need for that to be the case, is there? If something can transcend death and invoke various heretofore unknown (and unprovable) principles of the universe, surely time shouldn’t be a constraint. So there’s no reason not to have a reincarnation that can work backwards in time, allowing your next incarnation to be Alexander the Great, or, more likely one of the guys Alexander killed on his twenty-third birthday as part of the celebration.

The usual end result of this is the “everyone is everybody” scenario, the Mystical Experience, We-Are-All-One, where there’s a single, universal soul that inhabits everyone, and it’s time to sing Kumbaya, dammit, the marshmallows are ready and so’s the camp fire.

But if reincarnation can go backwards in time, there’s no reason for it not to go sideways, into one of those parallel universes that we hear so much about (and that I’ve written about more than once). Alternately, you can view it as a really big version of the film Groundhog Day.

If we get our afterlife of choice, here’s what I want: When I die, I want another go at it. In fact, I want all the goes at it. Not all of everyone’s lives, all of my lives. I want every single quantum possibility of my life, starting at conception. That includes every variation on what happens during my life, of course, like this earthquake happened on a different day, that snowstorm didn’t happen so I get to go to the banquet where I get the short story award when I was 15, Lee Harvey Oswald trips and sprains his ankle and can’t climb the stairs of the Book Depository, even the one where that single atom of potassium decays one second later, to no significant macroscopic effect.

I have no idea how many lives that is, except that it’s a lot. Nor do I really know how many of them can be considered “mine” given the slippery nature of identity. And since there’s no way for there to be any memory or awareness of those other lives, there’s no way to know if I will get / have gotten what I want.

Is that any comfort in the face of the knowledge of personal mortality? Let’s just say I take at least as much comfort from it as from the prospect of singing in a choir for all eternity.

Significant

Hmm. I may have a bit of a block on this. Let's just try to bull ahead then, and see what happens.

Over on Mark Thoma's Economist's View blog, there were a couple of discussions about a, well, let's call it a "raging debate," albeit one in fairly slow motion. The backstory papers are here:

McCloskey and Ziliak, "The Standard Error of Regressions," Journal of Economic Literature 1996.

Ziliak and McCloskey, "Size Matters: The Standard Error of Regressions in the American Economic Review," Journal of Socio-Economics 2004.

Hoover and Siegler, "Sound and Fury: McCloskey and Significance Testing in Economics," Journal of Economic Methodology, 2008.

McCloskey and Ziliak, "Signifying Nothing: Reply to Hoover and Siegler."

These papers were pulled from an entry on "Significance Testing in Economics" by Andrew Gelman, and there followed two discussions at Economist's View:

"Tests of Statistical Significance in Economics" and later, a response by one of the main players (McCloskey), followed by my arguing with a poster named notsneaky. That led to my essay, "The Authority of Science."

Okay, you are allowed to say, "Yeesh."

So let me boil down some of this. McCloskey published a book in 1985, entitled, The Rhetoric of Economics, in which she argued that the term "Statistical Significance" occupied a pernicious position in economics, and some other sciences. The 1996 paper by McCloskey and Ziliak (M&Z) continued this argument, and the 2004 paper documented a quantitative method for illustrating the misuse of statistics that derived from what was, basically, an error in rhetoric, the connecting the word "significant" to certain sorts of statistical tests. The forthcoming (to be published in 2008, the link is to a draft) paper by Hoover and Siegler (H&S) finally rises to the bait, and presents a no-holds-barred critique of M&Z. Then M&Z reply, etc.

Any of my readers who managed to slog through my criticisms of the use of the word "rent" (See "Playing the Rent" and subsequent essays) in economics (as in "rent-seeking behavior"), will understand that I start off on the side of the rhetoriticians. When a technical subject uses a word in a special, technical sense that is substantially different from its common language use, there is trouble to be had. "Significant" carries the meaning of "important," or "substantial" around with it, but something that is "statistically significant" is simply something that is statistically different from the "null hypothesis" at some level of probability. Often, that level of probability is arbitrarily set to a value like 95%, or two standard deviations, two sigma, which is about 98% for a normal distribution.

(I'll note here that in statistical sampling, one usually uses something like the t-distribution, which only turns into the normal distribution when the number of samples is infinite, so it adds additional uncertainty for the size of the sample. The t-distribution also assumes that the underlying distribution being sampled is normal, which is rarely a good assumption at the levels of reliability that are being demanded, so the assumption train has run off the rails pretty early on).

But some differences make no difference. Given precise enough measurements, one can certain establish that one purchased pound of ground beef is actually one and one thousandths of a pound, but no one who purchased it would feel that they were getting a better deal than if they'd gotten a package that was one thousandth of a pound light. We just don't care about that small a difference; some of the beef is going to stick to the package.

I saw something written recently that referred to something as "statistically reliable," and on the face of it, that would be a much better phrase than "statistically significant," and I will use it hereafter, except when writing about the misused phrase, which I will put in quotes.

So, okay, "statistically significant" is not necessarily "significant." Furthermore, everyone agrees that this is so. But one disagreement is whether or not everyone acts as if this were so. And that is where M&Z's second criticism comes in: that many economics journals (plus some other sciences) simply reject any paper that does not show results at greater than 95% reliability, i.e. the results must be "statistically significant." M&Z say outright that the level of reliability should adapt to the actual importance of the question at hand.

The flip side of this is that, in presenting their work, authors sometimes use "statistically significant" as if it really mean "significant" or "important," rather than just reliable.

Alternately, one can simply report the reliability statistic, the so-called "p value," which is a measure of how likely the result is to have come about simply because of sampling error. I have, for example, published results with p values of 10%, meaning that there was one chance in 10 of the result being just coincidence. I've seen some other p values that were much lower, and those are usually given in the spirit of "there might be something here worth knowing, so maybe someone should do some further work."

In fact, this giving lower p values, or using error bars at the single sigma level, is fairly standard practice is some sciences, like physics, chemistry, geology, and so forth. Engineers usually present things that way as well. On the other hand, the vague use of "significant" that M&Z criticize is often used in social sciences other than economics, e.g. psychology and sociology, as well as some of the biological sciences, including especially, medicine.

It's in medicine where all this begins to get a tad creepy. In one of their papers, M&Z refer to a study (of small doses of aspirin on cardiovascular diseases like heart attack and stroke) as having been cancelled, for ethical reasons, before the results reached "statistical significance." "Ha!" exclaim H&S (I am paraphrasing for dramatic effect). "You didn't read the study, merely a comment on it from elsewhere! In fact, when the study was terminated, the aspirin was found to be beneficial to myocardial infarction (both lethal and non-lethal) at the level of p=0.00001, well past the level of statistical significance! It was only stroke deaths and total mortality that had not reached the level of p=0.05!"

Well, that would surely score points in a high school debate, but let's unpack that argument a bit. M&Z say that the phrase "statistically significant" is used as a filter for results, and what do H&S do? They concentrate on the results that were found to be statistically reliable at a high level. How about the stroke deaths? What was the p value? H&S do not even mention it.

(As an aside, I will note that the very concept of a p value of 0.00001 is pretty ridiculous. Here we have an example of the concept of statistical reliability swamping actual reliability. The probability of any distribution perfectly meeting the underlying statistical assumptions of the t-distrubution is indistinguishable from zero, and the likelihood of some other confounding factor intervening at a level of more than once per hundred thousand is nigh onto one).

Furthermore, H&S use a little example involving an accidental coincidence of jellybeans seeming to cure migraines to show why one must use "statistical significance." Then, when discussing the aspirin study, they invoke the jellybean example. On the face of it, this looks like they are equating migraines with heart attacks and strokes, again, completely ignoring the context in which samples are taken, in order to focus on the statistics. In many ways, it looks like H&S provide more in the way of confirming examples of M&Z's hypothesis than good arguments against it.

Also consider what H&S are saying about the aspirin study, that there was a period of time when members of the control group were dying, when the statistical reliability of the medication had been demonstrated, but the study had yet to be terminated. Possibly the study did not have an ongoing analysis, and depended upon certain predetermined analysis and decision points. But how would such points be selected? By estimating how long it would take for the numbers to be "statistically significant?"

Some studies definitely do use ongoing statistical analyses. Are there really studies where a medication has be been shown to be life-saving, to a statistical reliability of 90%, where patients are still dying while the analysts are waiting for the numbers to exceed 95%? How about cases where medications are found to have lethal side effects, but remain on the market until the evidence exceeds "statistical significance?"

The blood runs a little cold at that, doesn't it?

The Duck as Spirit Guide

I’m not sure when I first began to take the duck as my animal spirit guide.

Of course the Carl Barks duck comics informed my childhood, as did Daffy, Bugs, and Elmer. Sure, I saw portions of Duck Soup on afternoon television, and later in its entirety, and “Why a Duck?” resonates, as does the duck that comes down and gives you a hundred dollars (or as I later joked, the Groucho Marxist duck that comes down and give everybody a hundred dollars, and hey, wait a second, didn’t Congress just talk about doing that?).

But if I had to pick a point in time, it would probably either be the first time I saw the Dillard’s album, Tribute to the American Duck.




Or when Howard first walked in out of the swamp in Man Thing comics, later to star in his own magazine, tempting many a comics speculator to folly.



By the time I got to Berkeley, I was committed to the idea that you could not go wrong by following the ducks. This was sorely tested by the discovery of some old issues of a comic called Super Duck that had been published by Archie Comics in the late 1950s, but in the spirit of true believers everywhere, I soon concluded that he was neither super nor a duck.

So, crisis of faith averted, when my apartment mate at the time, Steve Ellner pointed out a show that was at U.C. Berkeley by some comedy group named Duck’s Breathe Mystery Theater, I was bound to attend.




A little later, I commissioned Dan Stefan to do a faux movie poster: Duck Savage. It’s too bad I don’t have a scan of it (or permission to show such a scan), because it’s really choice quality stuff, as is Wendy Lindboe’s piece, Drakula.

And, of course, I have various decoys, little sculptures, etc. of ducks, generally in some sort of tableau with a like number of Godzilla’s, plus the occasional rooster, just to keep it real.

Like I say, I think that you can do a lot worse than following ducks. Oh, and the real ones have a really cool “Quack!”

Nashville

As I drive from your pearly gates
I realize that I just can't stay
All those mountains, they kept you locked inside
And hid the truth from my slighted eyes…

I fell on my knees to kiss your land
But you are so far down
And I can't even see to stand
In Nashville
You forgot the human race
You see with half a mind
What colors hide the face
Nashville
I'd like to know your fate
I'd like to stay a while
But I've seen your lowered state…


Tennessee, like Caesar's Gaul, is divided into three parts.

East Tennessee is Appalachia; it has two real cities, Knoxville and Chattanooga. Chattanooga has a north Georgia feel to it, while Knoxville was historically the home to the Tennessee Republicans, who ran the state in the Reconstruction years, to be beaten back once the Southern Democrats wrested control of the region from the Damn Yankees, and their fellow travelers, carpetbaggers, in the jargon of resentment. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville is a major presence in the city; some sections are a bit like a southern University Town, perceived by the outlying region as horribly liberal, but really staid and conservative, just with different things to conserve.

West Tennessee is Mississippi River land, and the magnet city for West Tennessee is Memphis, which also serves as the cultural capitol of Mississippi. Cross the Tennessee river heading west towards Memphis and you have entered the Deep South, but I have little experience with the Tennessee version. I've spent far more time in south Georgia than I have in West Tennessee, and that's another kind of Deep South entirely.

There was a time, when I was still strongly connected to the lands of my youth, when I could place a Southerner within about 200 miles of their home by their accent, a South Carolina accent being so different from a North Alabama accent as to be apparent within a sentence or two. It's been a long time and I'm no longer calibrated for playing 'enry 'iggins, and besides, there has been so much southern migration that I doubt the old standards apply.

The third part of Tennessee is Middle Tennessee, and its capitol is also the state capitol, Nashville.

I was born and raised in Middle Tennessee, in Davidson County, and the county government merged with the Nashville city government when I was in high school. We lived primarily in Donelson, a suburb of Nashville, and did not leave until I was 18, with two minor exceptions. Our family lived for about a year in, and near, Greensboro, North Carolina. I started school in a small town outside of Greensboro named Summerfield. We moved back to Nashville two months after I started school, so I was the "new kid" in school in a town that I'd lived in for years.

The last time I was back in Nashville, we discovered that Donelson Elementary School, where I'd spent the first and second grade, had been turned into a nursing home. I briefly flashed on the idea of some fellow who'd attended Donelson Elementary now in that home, and how he might wake up at night terrified that there was going to be a test the next day, and he hadn't studied. Would it come as a relief to discover that he was merely old?

A new elementary school greeted us for the third grade; this was during the feverish construction during the Baby Boom, after all. So I attended Hickman elementary until about six weeks into the sixth grade, when the family moved to Russellville, Kentucky, where we stayed a little less than a year, because the bowling alley that my Dad had been hired to manage, failed. Still, the experience gave him something to put on his resume, so he wound up getting another job as an assistant manager at an alley in Donelson, then got a better job at Pla-Mor Lanes, near a 100 Oaks Shopping Mall off I-65, pretty much in Nashville proper, but not downtown (note the shopping mall). That job lasted until after I'd graduated high school. The family moved to Illinois while I was in college, because my grandmother got sick and (for good reason) Dad did not trust the few remaining relatives to take care of her.

So all of this is basic suburban white boy growing up, southern edition. Except for the wanderlust, if that's what it can be called.

I explored practically every neighborhood in Donelson, on foot, before I was 14. Sometimes I had the excuse of selling candy and cookies, to pay for going to YMCA camp. Sometimes it was to visit friends. But mostly it was just exploring the world. I walked from one end of Donelson to another, a fetch of about 2 miles, maybe 4 or 5 square miles worth of territory to memorize.

When I was eight, my parents gave me the choice of continuing with the Boy Scouts in Donelson, or going to the downtown Nashville YMCA three times a week. It was no contest, really. The Y had a pool, a gym, and it was downtown.

There were probably some rules about where I was allowed to go downtown. Right. That worked. The only thing that really limited my wanderings was the time limits; I did have to catch the bus to get back to Donelson at a reasonable hour. Once I extended the time limit, calling my folks to get permission to go to a movie. I forgot to mention that it was a double feature. By the time I got home my mother was literally worried sick, nearly to the throwing up and needing sedatives to unclench her stomach part. I was careful not to worry her like that again, but it was many years before I realized the sheer courage it took, on an ongoing basis, for her to let me make those trips downtown, at such a young age.

In high school, as a member of the Donelson High Forensics Club (more nerd points for me), I went on numerous trips to other schools, public speaking venues, etc. By then I had a driver's license, and I tended to date girls from other high schools, often from other forensics clubs, because they were smart, verbal, and not from my high school. Oftentimes they were considerably more upscale than I was, so I saw how the other 5% lived pretty often. On the flip side, at the YMCA, then later when I was doing day labor the summer after my freshman year in college, I saw the bottom 5% pretty frequently, too.

The major industries of Nashville are banking and insurance, religious publishing (that Bible in your hotel room had a good chance of being printed in Nashville), and country music/show business, in that order, with the music biz being a distant third. But it gets all the publicity, of course, partly because it runs in part on publicity. Then there's the glamour bit.

There was recently a short-lived "reality show" called "Nashville." I tried watching it once, then fell back and tried to sample it by putting it on a channel surfing rotation. Even that was unbearable. Okay, it's not fair to call it out; one major type of reality show is about putting hot twenty-somethings in some sort of group arrangement and generating whatever salacious interest can be generated. In "Nashville," the group arrangement came from the bunch trying to "make it in the music business," so it was trying to cross pollinate from the other sort of reality show, Ted Mack's…American Idol. The talent part of it was a dismal failure as well.

Robert Altman's "Nashville" suffered from a related definitional problem, though Altman, being a semi-genius, managed to make a decent movie. It had almost nothing to do with Nashville, of course, and everything to do with Los Angeles. Show biz people think that all show biz is like it is in Los Angeles. Maybe it is, but that isn't what Nashville is about.

Nashville, the reality show never got anywhere near to Nashville the city. Altman's Nashville managed one actual touch that rang true: practically every character in the film was in church on Sunday morning. Only the real outsiders were somewhere else.

I stopped going to church when I was 14, after "membership training" in the Methodist Church, and the whole process that was supposed to make me a member for life. Bless my folks for understanding that after all that, it's okay to say, "no more."

I haven't lived in Nashville for years. Maybe the place I knew is gone, but every time I've been back it looks like it's still there. I wonder if anyone sees it but me?


Now I'm leaving - I've got all these debts to pay
You know we all have our dues - I'll pay 'em some other place
I'd never ask that you pay me back
We all arrive with more - I left with less than I had

Your town is made for people passing through
A last chance for a cause I thought I knew
But, Nashville, you tell me what you're gonna do
With all your Southern style - it'll never pull you through
Nashville, I can't place no blame
But if you forget my face I'll never call your name again
(No, never again, never again)
--"Nashville," Amy Ray, The Indigo Girls

The Authority of Science

In Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean relates a description of Authoritarian Followers, who form the greatest mass of authoritarian psychology. There are three basic underpinnings of authoritarian psychology:

Submission to Authority
Aggressive Support for Authority
Conventionality

It's easy to go deeper, of course, to fear of the unknown, a desire for stability, and an intolerance for ambiguity, all related, all consistent. Similarly, it's easy to find traits that the three basic traits can lead to. Sara Robinson on Orcinus blog has done some heavy lifting in condensing Dean's arguments to clarify the case, especially in her "Cracks in the Wall" series, that begins here.

We tend to speak disparagingly of authoritarians; the word itself is pejorative, as evidenced by the fact that people whom you or I would call authoritarian will simultaneously point the finger at us.

To some extent, they would have a point, in that Rightful Authority does exist, insofar as there are rules and laws of both man and the natural world, and there are networks of people (lawmakers, courts, and lawyers on the one hand, scientists, engineers, and technicians on the other), whose authority within their own domain matters. Courts can send you to jail, and your plumber can clear the water line.

Some of the examples of rightful authority are trivial, and some are deeply held, supported aggressively by their constituents. If you are visiting a construction site you damn well do what the site manager tells you to do. If you don't, someone could get hurt. And if someone you are with doesn't follow the rules, you help keep him in line.

The fact is that most conventional wisdom is, in fact, wisdom, just as each of us makes a thousand decisions every day, almost every one of them right, and almost every one of the wrong ones gets immediately corrected. We don't fall down the stairs, and we don't turn left when we should have turned right on the way to work.

I doubt that anyone who has read even a small fraction of what I've written who would take me as a servant of conventionality, and I score very, very low on tests that measure authoritarian tendencies. But I seldom break rules for the sake of breaking rules (well, okay, sometimes I break a rule just to see what will happen, but come on now, we've got to have a little fun). I do believe in process, and I do believe in rigor.

So I want it understood that my intention here is descriptive more than it is proscriptive. It's part of a fight I've been having (or so I come to understand) for a long time now. I've come to understand that it's a necessary fight, a perpetual fight, and a fair fight.

When I was starting out in the then bright shiny new field of computer simulation modeling, I quickly came to believe that the models we were using were complicated machines that needed an experienced and talented operator. There were a lot of moving parts, and a lot of things that could screw up. Moreover, you needed to have a feel for what you were doing; the sort of pattern recognition that we call "intuition" mattered.

You could not, as the saying goes, "Just turn the crank."

In fact, the people who were paying the bills wanted exactly that. They wanted something with a crank that could be turned to grind out the right answers. I've come to understand that there is a good reason for wanting that, incidentally. If you just turn the crank, if you don't know exactly what's going on, and what buttons to push to twist the results, then it looks like it's less likely that someone will cheat and deliberately give results to advance a particular cause.

But just because there is a good reason for wanting something doesn't make it ultimately work out that way. If you have several groups doing the work and you pick and choose whichever one accidentally gives you what you are looking for, then you've accomplished essentially the same thing as if you had someone twisting the knobs. If there is an accepted protocol, you use whatever flexibility exists in the protocol to give the results closest to what you want. You "game the system," to use the current phrasing.

And there you have the argument for the most inflexible possible system. It is less likely to be gamed.

Science (and scholarship, and the law, and tradition) exists in a constant tension between protocol and choice, between methodology and judgment. Some people, because of whatever combination of their experience and natural tendencies, wind up being strong adherents to, and defenders of, protocol and methodology. Others emphasize insight and judgment. As a strong proponent of insight and judgment, let me stipulate the importance of protocol and methodology. The methodology and protocols of science represent a tradition of judgment and a condensation of insight that cannot be replaced by a single individual, no matter how smart and clever.

Still, we must use judgment and insight to examine methodology and protocol, on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, the process of science becomes stagnant, at best in an endless loop of endlessly reinventing the wheel, just maybe this year in a different color.

All of this is basically an epilog and an introduction. There is a very interesting debate that has flared up in statistical economics, about the phrase "statistically significant" what it means as a descriptor and as a protocol. There is also an element of another phenomenon that I've remarked upon before: the use of a technical term that is substantively different from its meaning in ordinary speech, which means that it can have a pernicious effect on thought.

And, of course, I had an argument about it. But I'll write about that in a later essay.

Meanwhile...

Meanwhile, deep in the heart of the Ural Mountains, the secret Great Communist Conspiracy powers up their iinsidious Tesla Coil to send another burst of Dark Chaos at the heart of the One Nation Under God. The conspirators had already achieved their first purpose, of lulling the Western Powers into believing that Communism was dead, by pretending to relinquish control over the vast Soviet Empire. But the wiley Commies were never interested in mere empire; they required world domination. So they banked their fires in Mother Russia, and intensified their efforts to put across the Greatest Hoax of All: the Global Warming Conspiracy.

Now their plans were accelerating. Dark Prince Gore, having failed to acquire the job of President of the U.S. (only the heroic efforts of the Godly men--and woman--of the Supreme Court had managed to thwart that scheme!), forged a new alliance with Soros, that Elder of Zion, first to create a propaganda masterpiece of a movie, and then, through their Swedish dupes to steal a Nobel Prize.

Now the Tesla Coil was turned to the task of igniting fires on the West Coast of the United States. Significantly, the surreptitious heat ray was aimed at parts of the State of California that understood that the Communist Conspiracy was not dead, that its goal was to wreck the U.S. economy by a combination of air quality regulations and socialized medicine, because once those were under its insidious control, the Nation itself would soon fall....

I Have Officially Scared Myself

The folks at The World's Fair call it a meme, but it's really just a game:

...the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.

This takes a bit of effort since finding these statements takes a little trial and error, but I'm going to guess that this meme might yield some interesting insight on the blog in question.

To make it easier, we'll let you use a search statement enclosed in quotations - this is just to increase your chances of turning up as number one, but if you happen to have a website with the awesome traffic to command the same statement without quotations, then flaunt it baby! Of course, once you find your 5 statements, pass the meme on to others.

Okay, this blog I have here is not a high traffic site; I'm pretty sure I have yet to hit triple digits for a single day. But...

Killus gives my sff.net web page. But the following single words bring you here:

• trademarksism
• semi-karma
• vertkrieg
• vuutle

But wait! There's more! The following search strings, sans quotes, also come up #1 on Google:

• brittle strategies
• John Galt is a slan
• fox hollow cafe lena
• nonrepresentational art pollack
• nonrepresentational art richard powers
• creepy little smile
• death rays and disintegrators
• playing the rent
• dead catfish under the drivers seat
• rocket boys meet radioactive boy scout
• max headroom stirner
• magic market fairy dust
• phony tough crazy brave alsop
• privation morality
• tihs not typo
• dorothy slave girl of oz
• knurdly lasers
• slan a critique

These need quotes:

• "black swan bashing"
• "son of on the road"
• "moral equivalent of socialism"
• "why barry goldwater lost tennessee"

I'm giving up now. And maybe going upstairs to pull the covers over my head.