Not Everyone Cheers

Guess who in the picture will begin their working
life with a $58,971 share of the public debt.

Warehouse 13

This site has some interesting old instruments. It's also got possibly the longest URL I've ever cut and pasted. The darned computer monitor shook when I pasted it.



It's the MUSEUM ARTIFACTS of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and they made the mistake of soliciting comments should anyone recognize a piece of equipment. Isn't that just asking for someone like me to write,"Dear Lord, the picture shows that you've got the Sastry Box set to seventeen! Quick, get everyone out of the building and into decontamination as soon as possible!"

Obama Lately

It's true, governing is on hold until the campaign is over. With governing like this, that can only be a good thing.

Utopia (thankfully) Averted

Did you read Walter Russell Mead's excellent article on the failure of Al Gore? Mead hits the nail squarely on the head:

You can be a leading environmentalist and fail to pay all of your taxes. You can be a leading environmentalist and be unkind to your aged mother. You can be a leading environmentalist and squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, park in the handicapped spots at the mall or scribble angry marginal notes in library books.

But you cannot be a leading environmentalist who hopes to lead the general public into a long and difficult struggle for sacrifice and fundamental change if your own conduct is so flagrantly inconsistent with the green gospel you profess. If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets. You cannot own multiple mansions. You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place.

It is not enough to buy carbon offsets (aka “indulgences”) with your vast wealth, not enough to power your luxurious mansions with exotic low impact energy sources the average person could not afford, not enough to argue that you only needed the jet so that you could promote your earth-saving film.

In Part II there's this, the crux of the biscuit:

Gore’s failures are not just about leadership. The strategic vision he crafted for the global green movement has comprehensively failed. That is no accident; the entire green policy vision was so poorly conceived, so carelessly constructed, so unbalanced and so rife with contradictions that it could only thrive among activists and enthusiasts. Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable. The only question was whether the comprehensive green meltdown would occur before or after the movement achieved its core political goal of a comprehensive and binding global agreement on greenhouse gasses....

...To make the case for a proposition like this, one needs to make the following argument: that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high, that the proposed measures are both feasible and effective, and that there are no easier or cheaper methods of accomplishing the goal. This is no special set of high hurdles invented for the purpose of frustrating the greens; it is the basic test that any proposal in any arena must pass.

Carbon regulation only sounded good as a vague concept. When you get down to it, corporations and people are the same - they aren't going to change their way of life unless compelled to do so by a significant force.

Carbon trading and regulation wasn't a nudge in the right direction. In order to work it would have to be a club, coming down to smite anyone who resisted. A nudge would have been a business expense. In order to work, carbon regulation would have to crush whole industries.

It was funny that Obama called for America to "up your game" while touring Alcoa Aluminum. Aluminum production is one of the most energy intensive industries you'll find. Given a free hand in the matter, Obama would would make aluminum a metal for the rich. They'd have aluminum walking sticks and monocles, we'd have stories for the grandkids about how we used to drink soda from aluminum cans.

I shudder to think what Obama and the EPA would do if given a free hand. Thankfully we took the House, and are in a position to cut funding to the stupidest of ideas. Now if we can take back the Senate and the presidency we can begin the task of undoing this blasted utopia.

Another Planned Parenthood Sting

When will Planned Parenthood learn to just stop answering the phone?



How is it that they get stung so easily? Because they're there for the abortions, plain and simple. They can pretend that abortions are just a small part of what they do, but the front office operates in public so it's not hard to show what they do.

Self Help

Why shotguns are not considered surgical instruments:

For five years Sean Murphy was driven to distraction by a painful blemish that no amount of creams, ointments or doctors' appointments could cure.

So he came up with his own radical and permament procedure to remove the stubborn wart forever - he blasted it with a 12-bore shotgun.

But not only did the blast take off almost his entire finger, it also left him facing 15 years in jail for the illegal possesion of a firearm.

Yesterday, with only a stump to show for the middle of his left hand, and a suspended 16-week prison sentence, he insisted he had no regrets.

Also, why beer isn't an approved anesthetic:

"The best thing is that the wart has gone. It was giving me lot of trouble.”

Richard Haigh, defending, said Murphy, 38, had been “a victim of his own stupidity when domestic pressures got to him”.

Mr Murphy decided to open fire with the Beretta after fortifying himself with several pints of beer. He settled down outside his caravan, took aim and opened fire.

Makes you feel smart, just for never having never done anything similar. Yet.

Donald Trump's Cat

and others...

Man, they're getting good at that stuff.

..seen in the area

various places and bits

Dangerous Stunt

h/t pre

Photoshop 1932

Old school photoshop - done in a darkroom circa 1932.

Reassuring Sounds

Here's an interesting article about designing sound into (5) products we use everyday:

A car door is essentially a hollow shell with parts placed inside it. Without careful design the door frame amplifies the rattling of mechanisms inside. Car companies know that if buyers don’t get a satisfying thud when they close the door, it dents their confidence in the entire vehicle.

To produce the ideal clunk, car doors are designed to minimise the amount of high frequencies produced (we associate them with fragility and weakness) and emphasise low, bass-heavy frequencies that suggest solidity.

Reminds me of the phones back in the days when there was only one phone company. That was Bell Telephone, and when I was a kid they offered one phone, the model 500. In the 60's they introduced the Trimline and Princess phones (the "gay phone" lines), but mainly everyone had the 500.

They were almost Soviet in design, no pretty in them, but they were solid and had the kind of heft that could put an unwary intruder into a coma should you choose to defend your home with Ma Bell's property.

Anyway, in 1970-something I had occasion to work in the recycling center for these phones. (the phone company actually rented you the phone back then; you couldn't own your own) In the warehouse, returned and damaged phones would come in on a belt and various parts would be replaced as needed.

So on one job I found a handset in the aisle where I was working. Not wanting anyone to break a toe on this rogue phone, I picked it up. But something was wrong. The darned thing only weighed a few ounces. It wasn't the hefty flail I had imagined I could fight off burglars with. So I asked one of the phone sanitizers I had gotten to know on the job. "Was this some kind of joke handset? A pretend phone of some kind?"

So she showed me Ma Bell's trick: All the phones were like that; so to give the customer the feeling that his rented phone actually had substance, they would put a bag of sand in the handle. It worked too. With the sand you had a phone; without it, the thing felt like a toy.

For some reason I felt betrayed by this simple deception. You mean all those years I was paying a dollar a month to rent this cheap, plastic, ugly device?

But it was the same thing as the car doors. Sure, it's misleading, but it gives you the impression that everything is solid. Stuff is dense and firm and nothing is going to break.

Sort of like a president that sounds good, intelligent, and caring; even though you know that there's nothing on the inside but a bag of sand, and sometimes chili dogs.