Wednesday, April 21. 2010
Our Urbanist friend shares another good Urbanism site: Discovering Urbanism.
He has a good post on the American lawn. Who knew that turf grass is America's #1 crop? Photo below is from a Pennsylvania turf farm:
Any 'House MD' fans out there?
Dip below the fold for a couple of goodies.
Continue reading "'House MD': A couple o' treats"
An ideologue is attached to an ideal regardless of facts.
A cynic believes that selfish self-interest is the primary motivator, especially of others.
A skeptic habitually doubts or questions conclusions of others.
A critic develops judgments based on the merits of the situation or argument.
A freeman uses civil and political rights and liberties, to enjoy life.
These categories may to some extent co-exist in each individual. But, to the extent any of us move predominantly from freeman or tolerant critic to habitual skepticism, or to being a cynic or ideologue, even when moved by others’ intrusion into our rights and liberties, we surrender some or much of our enjoyment.
The trick is to retain our focus on being a freeman (or freewoman, but I’ll use freeman here throughout).
If we don’t, we become susceptible to manipulation of ourselves or becoming manipulators of others. One can’t be securely free when others are not.
Soldiers volunteer knowing that life-and-death choices determine their and others’ fate. In effect, they are determined to be freemen.
The really religious know that opening their heart to G-d gives them freedom to enjoy themselves and others.
The true citizen participates and demands that chosen leaders respect all as freemen.
Look at history. Those whose names and legacy are most treasured were freemen.
Look at yourself. What are you? Really.
If not a freeman, you've surrendered.
 One Cosmos comments in On Recovering the Point of Your Filmography Before it's Too Late:
"I once abided in the infinite, and all I got was this lousy belly button."
Our umbilicus, he says, is our reminder that we have already passed from one mode of being to another. One quote:
...just as our physical body bears the scar of its incompleteness and separation, so too does our soul bear its own version of this. For it also has a "hole" at its center that we may spend our lives trying to deny or fill in inappropriate and ultimately fruitless ways. But the hole is there for a reason. It is actually a theomorphic and theocentric hole, and there is no way to fill it unless one is properly oriented to the source of one's being. We are connected to the source of our being by a vertical channel, or OMbilicus, through which energies pass up and down, in and out -- we call these energies aspiration (?) and grace (?) (the latter of which must be in-spired to become operative).
He does not mention the term "re-birth," but that's part of what his post is about. I know that some of our readers think Gagdad Bob is an annoying nut, but I have found plenty of his transcendental imagery to be useful to me (including his metaphor of "verticality").
It is an affliction of middle age, especially if one has spent much time and effort in life preoccupied with the daily, practical, dutiful, material, and mundane - as what Gagdad calls a "Flatlander" - to find oneself asking "Is that all there is?" ...and to do all sorts of wacky and reckless things to deal with that question and with that emptiness, which things, indeed, bear no soul-nourishing fruit but are only empty distractions of the "How many holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall" sort.
Yet what a crazy question that is for me or anybody to ask - "Is that all there is?" - in the midst of this buzzing, blooming miraculous and frightening cosmos which is packed with road signs of all sorts (including our humble belly buttons), pointing to God.
OK, that's enough preaching and platitudes for one day at Maggie's.
Here's a real question: Is God female?
The medical/spiritual image of a human belly button is h/t Theo. That "Nexus" shirt is right on the button, as it were, isn't it?
 Toon via Powerline's The Pen Is Mightier Than the Teleprompter
1/3rd of IPCC claims were not peer-reviewed
Obesity as a social inequity? Uncle Sam, stop me before I eat again.
Does the Supposedly Superior Expertise of Regulators Justify Libertarian Paternalism? Um, no.
Where do your Oxfam dollars go?
Cape Wind update. I think these giant fans are insane. Plus they rarely mention that we pay for these dumb bird-slicing eyesores.
Wrong narrative: The New Orleans Beating: Real Violence, Real Evidence, No Media
"That was Bill Clinton, blaming me for the Oklahoma City bombing..."
Am Thinker: A 'perfect storm' for socialism
Taranto: 'Populism of the Privileged' - The latest laughable attempt to discredit the tea-party movement.
Goldman is a heck of a good bank. Smart, hard-working people with good social skills. One example of their genius: Regulate Us--Please! One quote:
Goldman Sachs executives and employees contributed more money to Obama's 2008 campaign than a single company has raised for any politician since the dawn of campaign finance reform.
I don't know if it means much, but Obama's fifth-quarter Gallup approval slips, among worst 3 of modern presidents
I generally disapprove of armchair psychologizing because it usually consists of veiled ad hominems, but here's The President Who Won't Grow Up
Pew: Shocker: Public Fed Up With Government, Banks, Corporations, Unions, Hollywood, the Media
Another Obamacare tax nobody mentioned: Tax the sick. Great idea. They are probably too sick to complain.
Took this photo yesterday:
Tuesday, April 20. 2010
Lowry's Cynicism and Change: How did Democrats fall so fast, and take perceptions of government down with them? begins thus:
Barack Obama used to call himself a “hopemonger,” mocking skeptics who thought the young presidential candidate was entirely too hopeful. No one would accuse him of that anymore. President Obama has done more than anyone else during the past two years to destroy trust in Washington.
Related from Murchison's The Democrats' Big Disconnect:
If Democrats hope to tamp down the anger Clinton perceives in public discourse, they have an odd strategy -- that of enlarging government, and government costs, and government regulation, rather than diminishing those factors in the lives of the people.
There's a geometric/mathematical dimension to this business. The heftier government grows, the more people it affects and touches; the more such people who feel the touch of government, the larger the chances grow for offense and resentment and anger.
A government the size of Calvin Coolidge's, or even Dwight Eisenhower's -- you couldn't get unduly furious over its pastimes. There weren't enough pastimes. The government let you alone, comparatively speaking. A government -- ours, say -- about to start sopping up in taxes a quarter of the national wealth, yet unable to figure out how to pay for all its programs, is a government that it's all but compulsory to dislike.
The point escapes most in the White House and in the Democratic leadership. They want a bigger government still -- one that decides what kind of energy we use, and what size autos we drive, and what kinds of medical services best fulfill public needs. All this with nearly 10 percent of American workers still unemployed.
 I heard my first warbler of the Spring early this morning, the zee zee zee of a Black and White high in a budding Maple.
I went to All About Birds to double check my birdsong memory (which was correct this time), I found that they link a new feature for migrating birds: a monthly map called eBird. Click on the month, and see where they are. I checked it for the Black and White.
Today, modern Israel’s 62nd birthday, is a good time to ask the question, “What if there wasn’t an Israel, would things be different in the Middle East?”
The world would still be dealing with and suffering from MidEast extremists: First of the Soviet proxies, but without Israeli intelligence penetrating them and its military defeating them, exposing the Soviet Union as an unworthy sponsor; Then of the Islamist haters suppressing its peoples and fighting each other while harboring attackers of the West, but without Israel’s development and democracy serving as an unavoidable contrast to the potentials of freedom and sanity and its military and technology exposing the fundamental weakness of their self-created backwardness.
No one in the Middle East takes seriously that the Arab-Israeli or Palestinian-Israeli conflicts are the primary, secondary, tertiary or lesser cause of MidEast instability or its threats to the West.
Outside the Middle East, however, we have the core delusion among many of those raised on the puerile pap created by the Left that the modernity and successes of Western civilization somehow oppress the natural decency and advancement of Third World countries.
President Obama is the poster boy. But he is not the cause. He is merely the product. He and those who follow him, thus, fall back on the false premise that Israel is the problem.
No, the problem is their core delusion that we can escape history by denying it, even reversing it, though that still would leave the real root cause of MidEast instability, regional petty satraps, backward hatefulness, and those outside powers – from the EU to Russia to China – who benefit from retaining rule or access to oil.
If the initial thrust of President Bush’s strategy of spurring democratization in the Middle East proved hollow, then our subsequent neutralization of Iraq’s WMD potential and funding of terrorists and our struggling effort to retrieve Afghanistan from being ruled by as much a threat is at best a holding action. We, as Secretary of Defense Gates admitted, lack a strategy toward even containing Iran, its imminent nuclear armaments, its support for those who kill our soldiers and Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s and their peoples.
The exaggeration by Saddam Hussein of his own WMDs was to counter Iran. The US and initial allies entering Iraq missed the proper focus then as we do now.
Weakening Israel is not a strategy for peace in the Middle East but another abdication of what could reduce the dangers of the Middle East. The US administration and apologists are blaming the “salamis” for the failure to ice the botulism.
President Obama and followers are not the root cause of Israel’s current dilemma. They are the natural extension of the escapism that infects Western thought, that undermined President Bush’s brash, perhaps fruitless, but correct focus that peace can only come from shattering Middle East excuses and delusions and providing more fertile ground for the emergence of rulers more concerned with the betterment of their own peoples’ lots.
Israel shows the way, not the barrier. The barrier is the purposeful misfocus, the dangerous inanity, of the avoiders of truths. Isn't 62 years enough time to prove that if modern Israel didn't exist the catering to Middle East tyrants would still be the core cause of dire oppression there and threats to the West's security and prosperity?
Re climate, from our commenter here:
After aeons of huge changes and cycles, the earth has suddenly developed an instability, and at the precise moment in time when the means of cheap computation to issue urgent warnings about that same instability became available.
An incredible stroke of luck that these two improbable things not only happened, but happened at the same time.
"I can’t understand how these same people who distrust the power of large corporations tend to throw all their trust and faith into government. The government tends to have more power (it has police and jails after all, not to mention sovereign immunity), is way larger, and the control mechanisms and incentives that supposedly might check bad behavior in governments seldom work."
Coyote, in his And People Trust Government?. Well, the polls say most people do not. However, America is divided between those who want to be left alone and those who want stuff. At present, that is the gist of what Vanderleun terms The American Argument.
Similarly, Betsy addresses the two visions of government. In my view, too few Americans today see liberty as something precious, and I often wonder how many people would prefer to be slaves and serfs (as long as those terms aren't used) in exchange for life's necessities.
 I heard the funniest thing back when ClimateGate hit the scene. I actually heard someone say "global warming is dead."
I had to laugh.
Obviously someone didn't get the memo.
So I started collecting headlines on my daily rounds.
All of these are since ClimateGate:
Panel Will Review U.N. Climate Work
"Let me be clear, he said. "The threat of climate change is real." (NY Times)
Despite Climategate, IPCC Mostly Underestimates Climate Change
James McCarthy of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment noted that the IPCC usually errs on the conservative side. (Scientific American)
Climate Scientists Plan To Hit Back At Skeptics
Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be "an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach" to gut the credibility of skeptics. (Fox News)
Study: Human Impact On Climate Now Clearer
Scientists say the research shows greater evidence for human impact on the climate now than the data available when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its much-maligned report in 2007, warning of "unequivocal" proof of warming. (CBS News)
EPA, Countering Critics Of Greenhouse Gas Findings, Says 'Science Is Settled'
The EPA says it is going forward with "common sense measures that are helping to protect Americans from this threat" and said its critics are trying to "stall progress." (Fox News)
World Warming Unhindered By Cold Spells: Scientists
The pace of global warming continues unabated, scientists said on Thursday, despite images of Europe crippled by a deep freeze and parts of the United States blasted by blizzards. (Reuters)
Meteorologists: Last Month Warmest January On Record by Far
It is what climate scientists predict happens and will happen more frequently with global warming, according to an authoritative report by hundreds of climate scientists issued this month. (Fox News)
Peru Glacier Breaks Up, Causes Tsunami
It was one of the most concrete signs yet that glaciers are disappearing in Peru, home to 70 percent of the world's tropical icefields. Scientists say warmer temperatures will cause them to melt away altogether. (MSNBC)
Study: Stronger Hurricanes Loom
Top researchers now agree that the world is likely to get stronger but fewer hurricanes in the future because of global warming, seeming to settle a scientific debate on the subject. (MSNBC)
Earthquakes And Tsunamis Just The Tip Of The Iceberg, Say Experts
In papers published by the Royal Society, researchers warned that melting ice, sea level rises and even increasingly heavy storms and rainfall -- predicted consequences of rising temperatures -- could affect the Earth's crust. Even small changes in the environment could trigger activity such as earthquakes and tsunamis. (The Scotsman)
Undersea Arctic Methane Could Wreak Havoc on Climate
Why is the permafrost failing? According to the study, the process occurs naturally over thousands of years but is being accelerated by man-made climate warming. (USA Today)
Climate Change Will Impact Infectious Diseases Worldwide
But as Thompson noted, despite its challenges, climate change can be a relatively solid rock on which to moor infectious disease planning. Many functions of human populations, from geographical displacement to lifestyle changes, that influence disease transmission can be exceedingly hard to track, she said. "Climate is one thing you can actually measure." (Scientific American)
Climate Change May Extend Allergy Season
Sneezing, congestion, and runny noses from hay fever may be lasting longer because climate change may be extending pollen seasons, doctors in Italy said on Monday. (MSNBC)
Darwin Foes Add Warming To Targets
For mainstream scientists, there is no credible challenge to evolutionary theory. They oppose the teaching of alternative views like intelligent design, the proposition that life is so complex that it must be the design of an intelligent being. And there is wide agreement among scientists that global warming is occurring and that human activities are probably driving it. (NY Times)
Coast Guard Sees Increasing Need For Icebreakers
Allen sidestepped a question on whether he believes in climate change, though he said "certain things are undeniable," including a smaller ice cap and changes in ocean temperature and chemistry. (CBS News)
Report: March Was Earth's Warmest On Record
In addition, climate researchers have been reporting rising global temperatures for several years as a result of the Greenhouse Effect, in which rising levels of carbon dioxide and others gases in the atmosphere trap heat instead of allowing it to escape out into space. (USA Today)
Winter Was Fifth Warmest On Record
However, worldwide temperatures have also been climbing in recent years, a warming attributed by most atmospheric scientists to chemicals added to the air by human activities since the start of the Industrial Revolution. (CBS News)
On Global Warming, The Science Is Solid
While aspects of climate change impacts have been overstated, none of the errors or allegations of misbehavior undermine the science behind any of the statements made above. In particular, they do not alter the conclusions that humans have taken over from nature as the dominant influence on our climate. (Houston Chronicle)
US Senate Climate Bill To Be Unveiled April 26
WASHINGTON, April 15 (Reuters) - A long-awaited compromise bill to reduce U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming will be unveiled by a group of senators on April 26, sources said on Thursday. (Reuters)
To quote Samuel Clemens,
The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Monday, April 19. 2010
It would unquestionably be terrifying.
Suddenly, flying 30,000 feet above the ground, a massive depressurization takes place and the airliner starts to break apart. It tumbles toward the ground, bucking and spinning, as the last seconds of your life turn into a living nightmare.
The only good news is, in the chaos around you, your mind would be so overwhelmed that you'd be in shellshock, with no time to contemplate what could have been, no time to regret what never will be, and no time to say goodbye to life, itself.
But, as ugly as that is, there is one scenario that might even be worse.
You're flying along at 30,000 feet when suddenly...
Click.
All four engines stop.
You don't like the depressurization scenario? Well, lucky you, you now have minutes upon minutes to contemplate what might have been, to regret what never will be, and plenty of time to say goodbye to life, itself, before you cartwheel into the sea and disintegrate.
Lucky you.
A few weekends ago I decided to wig out and watch every single 'airline disaster' show on YouTube. There were about twenty of them.
And, as terrifying as many of them were, there was one that stood out above the rest.
The one where the engines suddenly went click.
 White Lefties go nuts when black Americans leave the plantation. They act like Simon Legree. h/t to Driscoll's Frank Rich Covers All The Bases
Related: Taranto's Why the Left Needs Racism - It serves a political purpose.
Also, at Tiger: Race as a political weapon against the right
Image is Tom's Final Beating, from the 1853 Illustrated Edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Tom has been a hero of mine since I first read the book in junior high school. How "Uncle Tom" became a pejorative is beyond me. His infraction, if you recall, was to refuse to whip the other blacks to "keep them down."
The Battle of Lexington and Concord. Those farmers had a lot of nerve to stand up to their government.
I heard "Call your doctor or dial 911 for any erection lasting longer than four hours."
Why? Isn't that normal?
 I suppose if you asked the question "What are the most destructive things to a computer?" and flipped through a computer mag, you'd come away with viruses, spyware, power surges, even lightening strikes.
But by the time the dust settles, the dust has settled. And dust covering the electronic parts is, over the long run, one of the most destructive forces of all, simply because it makes everything run hotter, from the electronic components to the drives. Enough dusty coating, enough external heat from a blistering hot summer's day, maybe clog up the tower's intake vents with some dustballs, and one of the components could exceed its factory specs and blow. And that means a new motherboard, and that usually means a brand new computer.
This is especially true coupled with the fact that electronic devices such as motherboards generate a field of static electricity around them, attracting small particles in the air. Throw in an intake fan for the power supply, maybe one for the motherboard, and, truth be told, that computer of yours is doubling as an excellent little room-sized dust filter.
The actual cleaning process is straightforward enough:
1. Unhook everything, figure out how to open the case.
2. Find a neighbor with a compressed air rig (they're always looking for an excuse to use it), some friend who owns a scuba tank and air nozzle, or head to the local gas station. You can also use those small cans of compressed air but they won't be near as effective.
Stand upwind on the closed side of the tower, reach the hose over and blast the hell out of the thing. The first gust should really kick up a ruckus. After that dissipates, face the insides and get real close to everything. Blast the individual components on the motherboard, the heat sink on the big CPU chip and the fans. Also blast the inside of the (enclosed) power supply through both vents.
3. Reassemble.
These days, there's not much worry about hooking things back up incorrectly. Everything's color-coded, a unique size, polarized, if not all three.
Once a year sounds about right. If you do a 'spring cleaning' routine, put it on the list. If the tower sits right on the floor, do it twice a year. If at all possible, the tower really should sit at least 8" off the floor, especially carpet. Please refer to accompanying photograph for demonstration.
I came into this world a few months before Israel; we’re both 62. I’ve had a life thankful to the security in the United States for me and my immediate family who escaped Europe’s persecutions and murders, and for the opportunities in the US. I’ve relied upon my exertions to give back in service and sacrifice, in appreciation and selfish preservation of these conditions.
Similarly has Israel. From Israel’s intellectual and military might the world benefits in the sciences, in inventions, and in manning the front-lines against the avowed armed enemies of the West and modern civilization.
Tomorrow, April 20, 2010, is Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel Independence Day, the day in the Hebrew calendar that corresponds to May 14, 1948. It fittingly begins the moment that ends Israel’s Memorial Day, Yom Hazikaron, Remembrance Day for Israel’s Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror. The two are that interlinked.
In my youth in the early 1950’s, it was a common question whether American Jews owed first loyalty to the US or Israel. As bigotry declined in the US and Israel was seen as our firm ally during the Cold War, that question evaporated. Until a new bigotry arose among the extreme Left, viewing the elimination of Israel as another way to deteriorate the West, and the extreme semi-isolationist Right, viewing Israel as no longer worth the alliance in the new Cold War against Islamist terrorism and its national bases.
Many American Jews, incubated within accustomed safety and advancement in the US, have lost sight of their essential link to Israel, viewing it as remote from domestic – mostly liberal -- priorities and respect for their position in American society. There is some awakening due to the open hostility toward and undercutting of Israel by the Obama administration. But, the pain of an open break has thus far been only hinted at from the perversion of their caring liberalism by Obama’s imposed statism and his administration’s abdication of the US’ priority traditions of international morality and security – of recognizing the difference between an ally and an adversary.
Hillary Clinton’s best wishes to Israel on its Independence Day notably breaks with UN Resolution 242 that Israel is entitled to “secure” borders, instead calling only for “recognized” borders, which to Israel’s foes and weaklings in the West means retreat to the 1967 lines that Henry Kissinger called the “Auschwitz Line” because they leave Israel so imperiled.
So, I’m actually glad to resurrect the question from my youth of whether my first loyalty is with the US or Israel. It is inextricably to both, and the weakening of Israel is the weakening of the US, and vice versa. I’m not loyal to any administration but to my and our security, here and there and elsewhere. Period. Any thing else is irresponsible sophist escapism that will only create the worst consequences for the US and Israel.
Lots of photos. Looks like Detroit.
 I asked Sipp what living in Maine was like. He did not reply to my email, but offers us a Maine Update, as of yesterday (with music, global warming snow, and deep-snark commentary about Life and Mozart).
I like the street. It's what I call "American." Hope my pal Sipp has a few fireplaces.
Down in more southern New England, I spent the weekend gardening while he spent hours producing that video, smoking Cuban ceegars and good Maine weed as the snowflakes fell, and sipping an ancient cognac by his cozy fireplace while the scent of osso bucco wafted from the kitchen where his sexy barefoot Goddess Mrs. Sipp was lovingly cookin' up a storm on the olde wood stove with nary a "Get off that damn computer and come help me, you lazy cyber-Yankee-would-be-Mozart-redneck."
It's on the Maggie's list of Best Maine Home-Made Videos of 2010.
 A book by Randy Barnett: Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty
Dubious Grousing over the Percentage of African-American Players in Major League Baseball
Dalrymple: In Britain, compulsory virtue stifles individual liberty. "Compulsory virtue" is an oxymoron.
Goldberg:
So, how many more Priuses will the world have to buy to offset this Icelandic volcano?
The UK: Up to 75% of births to be outside marriage
John at Powerline:
Government medicine is bad medicine. Why anyone would want to dismantle our health care system and replace it with the disaster that is socialized medicine is beyond me.
Was Jesus a Marxist? Am Thinker
Is the party over for China's Communist Party?
53% of Americans are now an "aggrieved elite"
More leftist hatred and violence. Related, via Driscoll:
On the West Coast, it’s the Clash of the Poseur Totalitarians! On the East Coast, more leftwing totalitarians seek to inflict violence. Glenn Reynolds suggests alerting the Southern Poverty Law Center, but their myopia causes a distinct blindness in their left eye.
Who is this mystery man Obama?
History and Ideology in Textbooks. h/t, Weasel Watchers. A quote:
...fully 60% believe that "most school textbooks are more focused on being politically correct than ensuring accuracy."
Prof Liu:
Speaking of the nomination of now Chief Justice John Roberts, Mr. Liu opined that words like "'free enterprise,' 'private ownership of property,' and 'limited government'" are "code words for an ideological agenda hostile to environmental, workplace, and consumer protections."
"Code words" for freedom, in my view.
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Iran, Islam & Cyrus the Great 