Thursday, July 29. 2010
h/t, Theo. This is off Cape Town. I think the whale is practicing for a Moby Dick re-make.
The asteroid. I read on the internet that global warming causes asteroids.
Did you know that the govt is giving out free cell phones and free airtime? (h/t, Moonbattery)
 Anatomy of a Microburst. Often mistaken for tornados.
Is being a slut liberating?
Pre-Cambrian life forms
The Boy Scout parade
SEC Says New Financial Regulation Law Exempts it From Public Disclosure. Huh?
New Calculator Shows How Much More Taxes Will You Pay Next Year
NYT Reporter Surprised at Lack of Gratitude in Texas for Obama-Care Handout
Heather MacDonald: What Judge Bolton’s Injunction Doesn’t Say
The President Wears Prada
We have had quite a few posts about Woodrow Wilson lately. This from Scott at Powerline:
Reading the scholarly work of Woodrow Wilson is an educational experience. It is shocking to read the expressions of his disaffection for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. As R.J. Pestritto has demonstrated, the intellectual roots of modern liberalism lie in an assault on the ideas of natural rights and limited government. They eventuate in an administrative state and rule by supposed experts. Obamacare represents something like the full flowering of modern liberalism.
I want to go the the museum at the Belevedere Palace in Vienna more to see the Kokoshkas than to see the jazzy Klimts. Klimt is fine, but Kokoshka is one of the gnarly German Expressionists that I get a kick out of. Well, Austrian in this case.
I have a good Klimt quote though:
I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women...There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures.
Kokoshka's famous 1914 Bride of the Wind:
Wednesday, July 28. 2010
A quote from his interview:
You know what that rally was? The "me first" rally. "Pay me my raise first. Pay me my free health benefits first. Pay me my pension first. And everybody else in New Jersey, get to the back of the line." Well, you know what? I'm not going to sit by and allow that to go unnoticed, so we'll shine a bright light on it, and we'll see how the people react. But I think we are seeing how the people of New Jersey are reacting, and that's how you make it politically palatable in other states in the country. Just shine a bright light on greed and self-interest."
It's the right time to take on the greed of government unions. Somebody's got to do it before every Dem state goes bankrupt. As I always say, the marriage between government unions and the Dem party is an intrinsically corrupt conspiracy against the people.
Bob Dylan's use of the phrase, "You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows" in Subterranean Homesick Blues encouraged the young to make their own decisions, including about drugs, to know what's happening based on changing conditions in order to know about what's coming. It's based on the nautical phrase to know the windward side.
This latest chart of ObamaCare only shows about a third of the complexity of the hurricane and where it is blowing us.
In the garage I still have a copy of the chart for HillaryCare. It was simple, Alice's Wonderland was easier to wend through, compared to this maze, a maze we're doomed to wander in search of care.
Only repeal is real.
 Not my fault. I blame Bush.
Meanwhile I learned about the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, via which you can travel from Rotterdam to the Black Sea by water if you want to.
Could be sort of like America's Great Loop, without the loop.
The Viking/Normans, who explored the Danube from the Med, would have enjoyed that canal.
This article is from the British paper The Star.
This is one of those rare moments in life when you realize you've just read something such as you've never read before, nor may ever read again.
ON 21 July, we published an article claiming that the video games company Rockstar Games were planning to release a version of their popular Grand Theft Auto video games series titled “Grand Theft Auto Rothbury”.
We also published what we claimed would be the cover of this game, solicited comments from a family member impacted by the recent tragedy and criticised Rockstar Games for their alleged plans.
We made no attempt to check the accuracy of the story before publication and did not contact Rockstar Games prior to publishing the story. We also did not question why a best selling and critically acclaimed fictional games series would choose to base one of their most popular games on this horrifying real crime event.
It is now accepted that there were never any plans by Rockstar Games to publish such a game and that the story was false. We apologise for publishing the story using a mock-up of the game cover, our own comments on the matter and soliciting critical comments from a grieving family member.
We unreservedly apologise to Rockstar Games and we have undertaken not to repeat the claims again. We have also agreed to pay them a substantial amount in damages which they are donating to charity.
Rick Moran led us to the real meaning of Dog Days. Via Wiki:
For the ancient Egyptians, Sirius appeared just before the season of the Nile's flooding, so they used the star as a "watchdog" for that event. Since its rising also coincided with a time of extreme heat, the connection with hot, sultry weather was made for all time.
Sirius is the shiny dog collar tag in Canis Major:
Here. It was Edwardian: high-fashion with post-Victorian mores and plenty of mineral water. Edward Vll himself loved to hang out there and pick up chicks. Back then, being a bit pudgy was not a problem. We remain in his debt for making tweed respectable, and for replacing white tie and tails with the simple black tie of today.
To enhance Bird Dog's experience with Customs when he visits Europe in a few weeks, we've ordered some stickers for his luggage. Yeah, full body search. If you visit the site, there's one for his female companions.
 
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
Richard Feynman, via The Difference between ‘True Science’ and ‘Cargo-Cult Science’ at Pajamas
 City and County Government Associations: Obama Economy Will Create or Save, Eh, I Mean Destroy or Eliminate 500,000 Public Sector Jobs. Toon borrowed from that piece at Ross.
The “does it make me look fat?” question
Caddell: Our Divisive President - "Barack Obama promised a new era of post-partisanship. In office, he's played racial politics and further split the country along class and party lines."
Hawkins: Seven Deceptive Mainstream Media Techniques
Reason.tv: Arthur C. Brooks on the Battle Between Free Enterprise and Big Government
"Temporary marriage" in Iran: "We call on all our sisters who are virgins" to put out for the lonely pilgrims - for cash.
At Thompson:
Greg Lukianoff on knowing why you think what you think.
One of the great harms of speech codes and campus censorship is that it leaves students with the false impression that censorship is what good, compassionate people do.
Reynolds: Taking Photos In Public Places Is Not A Crime: Analysis. "Too many officials think taking photos is a crime. Here’s why they’re wrong." h/t Ace
"Set up a motion-activated camera at a stock water tank in South Texas and you'll catch all manner of critters."
Good advice: Surviving the Low-Level Job. People will need to get used to this.
Tuesday, July 27. 2010
I once booed Jewel at a performance. It was the year she toured with Bob Dylan, and I saw them in New Haven. (She once said that she thought Bob was gay because he didn't hit on her during the tour. Disappointed by that, it seems.)
I booed because she had to bring some political snark into her chatter, assuming as such folks do that their audiences are all on the same page politically. Rude of me, but that sort of presumption bugs me. As usual, my friends were embarassed by my behavior. She was not really known, then.
Here's the whole song that was chopped up on Dr Merc's fun post:
It's good to hear Tom Sowell say it: How Smart Are We? Elites may have more brilliance, but they can’t have as much experience as the people whose decisions they preempt.
One quote:
One of the ideas that has proved to be almost impervious to evidence is the idea that wise and far-sighted people need to take control, and plan economic and social policies so that there will be a rational and just order, rather than chaos resulting from things being allowed to take their own course. It sounds so logical and plausible that demanding hard evidence would seem almost like nit-picking.
"Things taking their own course" means, of course, people exercising free choice.
Some of us here have been accused of being elites ourselves. If I am in that category somehow, put me in the subgroup that has no interest in controlling anybody but myself. Just that is difficult enough, and often impossible.
 One pesky little computer problem is when you run a program most of the time the computer is up, like an email program, but it minimizes to the Task Bar and clutters up the place with its icon. For 'permanent' programs that run all of the time, the better routine is to stick the icon in the SysTray (the area just to the right of the Task Bar) and leave the Task Bar area for current projects.
Some programs have a setting in their Options that tells them to minimize to the SysTray, so check that first.
To solve this little poser, we have a program with the cheek-pinchingly cute name of Trayconizer. It's not promised to work on every program, but it's worked on the three I've thrown at it.
Home page is here. Get the 'Unicode build'.
Unzip the file to its own 'Trayconizer' folder in a place you'll later be able to locate. This is, if you put the Trayconizer folder in a 'Tools' folder, remember it for the next step.
To set up a program for trayconizing, go to the Start Menu, find its icon, right-click on it and open the Properties.
In the 'Target' box, put the full path to Trayconizer before the path to the program.
(capital letters are only used for clarity in the following)
For example, if you placed the Trayconizer folder in a 'Tools' folder, the path would be:
C:\Tools\Trayconizer\Trayconizer.exe <existing path to program>
If you stuck it in a folder with a blank space in the name, like 'Program Files', you need to put the whole path in quotes:
"C:\Program Files\Trayconizer\Trayconizer.exe" <path to program>
If there's an error in the path, Windows will let you know when you click 'OK' to close the box. If you get stuck, open the Properties of the Trayconizer icon, highlight the 'Location', copy it to memory with Ctrl-C, paste it into the 'Target' box with Ctrl-V.
Now when you minimize the program the icon should go to the SysTray. Single-click on it to get a few options, double-click to pop the program back open.
Good video summary of the American aircraft carrier. Most of our readers probably know it all, already.
For our hillbilly friends, safely below the fold -
Continue reading "Dear Abby"
Monday, July 26. 2010
As I always do before trips, I am catching up on history. This trip will be Vienna and the Danube. I view these places historically as the hinterlands, but you cannot fault their production of music in recent centuries. Music, wars, and sort-of hideous baroque architecture.
Vienna had been a Roman frontier outpost, but surely had been a barbarian settlement before that.
I do recall that European History in high school made my head spin from the endless alliances and endless wars and the reconfigurations of empires, kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and nations. With my ADD, it's a wonder I did so well with it. Forgot most of it. The War of the Spanish Succession.
I did not forget some details of the devastating Franco-Prussian War, but I certainly had forgotten that "German Austria" wanted to be part of Germany after WW1, but the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations forbade it. German Austria reached down into the (still) German-speaking areas of northern Italy. The Austria of today is a relatively brand-new nation (1945 or 1955 - pick the date) although it was a Babenburg duchy in 1156 and later was roughly the core of the Hapsburg's power for 640 years.
The Hapsburgs are credited with keeping the Ottomans out of Europe in 1683, but the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski, deserves lots of credit. There were 300 years of resisting the Ottoman Empire's invasions. I have never understood why Middle-Easterners coveted Europe, but they still do.
I find it amusing to think of what was going on in the wilds of the American colonies at the same time. Only Spain really cared, because of the gold. Otherwise insignificant except as pawns in larger European power games.
In the early 1700s, the Hapsburgs counted among their imperial control Belgium, Sardinia, Corsica, the Duchy of Milan, Naples, and Sicily. Two hundred years earlier, HRE "Emperor" Charles V in 1516 also happened to be King of Spain, bringing Spanish America, for a while, into the bounds of the Holy Roman Empire - such as it was: A crown, a flag, a bunch of castles and palaces, a title, and some truly snazzy outfits with fancy medals on them to impress the gals. Being King of Spain, on the other hand, was probably a cool gig with plenty of perks and babes.
The modern European nations are all younger in their configurations and their governmental structures than the US (except for the post-Empire island core of Britain).
One thought this perspective gave me is that the EU may be little more than an expanded reconstitution of the Holy Roman Empire - combined with the old Roman Empire. In time, it will pass too.
Photo below, Palace Schoenbrunn, first constructed as a hunting lodge in the early 1700s. "Hey, honey, have you seen where I put my camo and my ammo?"
That's from a time when royal governments lived off the labor of the people. Not like now, right?
Stumbled across this web site today. An oasis of calm in a world of chaos. As a semi-amateur photographer, I'm always amazed at the way creative people come up with new ways to make and create new and interesting photos: Mila's Daydreams.
An email from a buddy:
 I came across a Japanese Type 14 Nambu pistol. These were reasonably well made Japanese semi-autos, used from mid-1920's until end of WWII. The ammo is available for around $25/box of 50. I had planned on using it for a project that didn't work out
If interested, I can email photos. I'd like just what I paid for it - $300.
I don't need one and do not want one, but it's an interesting firearm from an historical point of view.
Everything about the Type 14 here.
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