Afterburner with Bill Whittle: The Train Set - YouTube:
"The love of theory is the root of all evil." Think about that for a moment and you start to see how powerful a concept it is. The love of theory is the root of all evil. I'm close to a cousin who is an anarchist. Through him, I meet a lot of socialists and communists and they always say that the theory of socialism or communism is sound, it's just never been applied in the right way. Communism killed over one hundred million people in the twentieth century. North Koreans are two inches shorter than South Koreans after three generations of Communism. It takes armed guards and razor wire and gunboats to keep people in communist countries; the Berlin Wall wasn't there to keep people out of East Germany. But Communism is someday going to be implemented perfectly and everyone will be happy and skittles will shoot out of unicorn butts.
Socialism is the perfect system except it doesn't work. Margaret Thatcher once said, "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." Socialism is wonderful, we are told, because the government runs everything. Name one thing the government does well. Roads? Nope. Education? We spend more money on education than any other country. We're 14 in reading and 19 in math. In California's state university system, there are more administrators than professors; fewer people teach than pass emails and forms around. If you look at large cities in the US, they are generally Democrat enclaves and have been for generations. They vary between the corrupt and incompetent Chicago to the post-apocalyptic and corrupt Detroit. US socialism is an utter failure everywhere it's tried. European socialism is a disaster as the recovery from the 2008 recession has stopped and this week Britain announced they are in a second recession. Most of Europe is broke and there's no one to bail them out. Europe is increasingly run by bureaucrats that were never elected administering regulations through a government that was never voted in.
The love of theory is the root of all evil. Obama and his cronies worship at the altar of Keynesian economics. Keynesian economics says that the government should tax highly and spend money it doesn't have to create economic activity. It's never actually worked, anywhere, ever, but the idea that bureaucrats can direct the world's most complex economic system is a seductive one. Quantitative easing is where the Federal Reserve buys US Treasury bonds with money that doesn't exist before the purchase. What this does is reduce the value of US currency because there's no actual goods or things of value attached to this new money. It's inflation, except the government has changed how it calculates inflation so it doesn't include things like food or energy. This is one of the reasons oil is more expensive; oil is a thing that has value and when money backed by less and less tries to buy it, you need more and more of it to get the same amount.
Billions are spent on 'green jobs' but company after company fold after taking hundreds of millions of dollars each. Green energy will create millions of good jobs except they can't make profits enough to keep going. Wind turbines are expensive to maintain and aren't reliable producers of energy; natural gas-powered electric generators have to be bought and be constantly idling in order to keep the electrical grid from suffering brownouts. In other words, you have to build the fossil-fuel generators as well as the green energy generators. We're told that we're on the cusp of a solar revolution but there just isn't enough energy in sunlight to make it feasible for large-scale power production. It's also dependent on it being day and is affected by cloud cover so, you guessed it, you have to build other power generation capabilities to make up for the fluctuations. Wind and solar plants are usually out in the middle of nowhere, meaning a lot of the energy created is lost during transmission. In the past month, Obama has touted algae and spinach as ways to create power, but they are also limited by the relative weakness of energy in sunlight. There are ways to produce power with no 'greenhouse gases' but they are disapproved of because they can hurt fish (hydroelectric) or make environmentalists made (nuclear).
There are a lot more theories that don't work but are beloved to the detriment of humanity. I'll go into more detail at a later time.
'via Blog this'
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Immigration and the Conservative
Romney doing the job Republican establishment just won't do - HUMAN EVENTS:
I'm a big fan of Ann Coulter. She's very witty and goes after liberals with a hammer and tongs and isn't afraid to make liberals sputter in rage. That she's a pretty and tall blonde doesn't hurt, either. Once you get past her turn of a phrase and the controversy that she causes (controversy means a conservative is correct and the Left has no leg to stand on), she's a good researcher and you get a lot of footnotes proving she's right as well as Right.
She talks about illegal immigration and how it divides the Republican party into the Establishment and Conservative wings. The sad truth is that many businesses hire illegals to work dangerous or exhausting jobs for little pay and the immigrants use America's social welfare system to make up for the lesser pay and no benefits. Let me give you an example: several years ago, my parents decided to leave their huge home and move into a much smaller home in a development. For several months, my dad and I would go to several developments a week that were still under construction and wander about, checking how well the buildings were put together, trying to see what room would go where and so on. If there was work going on after 5 PM on a Friday, the workers were Hispanic. If the workers were American, they were home by five and didn't work Saturday. Having illegals working for you saved you a lot of money in salary and workers comp. Hiring Americans exclusively put you at a disadvantage and lowered your profit margin. Illegal immigrants from Mexico are almost twice as likely to utilize government services as Americans (75% to 39%) and the services illegal immigrants use are less efficient in terms of money and time. Taxpayers end up paying for the benefits received by illegals while those companies that hire Americans have to pay for their workers' benefits themselves.
Another problem with illegal immigration is that it is unfair to those that want to come here legally. I've known people with green cards and it's a big bother to fill out all the forms and meet all the regulations and paperwork when being an illegal means you don't have to do any of that. It can take years to get through the waiting list to move to America where illegals that fly here without visas are usually given an appointment to go to court (which they usually skip) and allowed in to do whatever they want. Illegals can usually avoid paying taxes and in many states can ignore the requirements of having a license and insurance to drive. It is a bad idea to tell millions of people that they can break laws when it's convenient but they can get all the benefits of being a legal immigrant or citizen.
Our immigration system is broken. People come here illegally, often carrying drugs for the smugglers. Once they arrive, they are often enslaved to work in sweatshops or brothels. No one knows how many die in the desert or are killed by human traffickers. People following the law are punished and those who break the law are rewarded. Democrats don't want to change the system because illegals mean people the government will have to service, people that might fraudulently vote for them in elections, people who will need them for generations. Establishment Republicans see illegals as discounted workers and are comfortable breaking the law because the chance of being caught is low. People are dying, people are enslaved and people are being taken advantage of. It's okay to some because it means profits or government jobs for Democrats. It's simply wrong to conservatives.
'via Blog this'
I'm a big fan of Ann Coulter. She's very witty and goes after liberals with a hammer and tongs and isn't afraid to make liberals sputter in rage. That she's a pretty and tall blonde doesn't hurt, either. Once you get past her turn of a phrase and the controversy that she causes (controversy means a conservative is correct and the Left has no leg to stand on), she's a good researcher and you get a lot of footnotes proving she's right as well as Right.
She talks about illegal immigration and how it divides the Republican party into the Establishment and Conservative wings. The sad truth is that many businesses hire illegals to work dangerous or exhausting jobs for little pay and the immigrants use America's social welfare system to make up for the lesser pay and no benefits. Let me give you an example: several years ago, my parents decided to leave their huge home and move into a much smaller home in a development. For several months, my dad and I would go to several developments a week that were still under construction and wander about, checking how well the buildings were put together, trying to see what room would go where and so on. If there was work going on after 5 PM on a Friday, the workers were Hispanic. If the workers were American, they were home by five and didn't work Saturday. Having illegals working for you saved you a lot of money in salary and workers comp. Hiring Americans exclusively put you at a disadvantage and lowered your profit margin. Illegal immigrants from Mexico are almost twice as likely to utilize government services as Americans (75% to 39%) and the services illegal immigrants use are less efficient in terms of money and time. Taxpayers end up paying for the benefits received by illegals while those companies that hire Americans have to pay for their workers' benefits themselves.
Another problem with illegal immigration is that it is unfair to those that want to come here legally. I've known people with green cards and it's a big bother to fill out all the forms and meet all the regulations and paperwork when being an illegal means you don't have to do any of that. It can take years to get through the waiting list to move to America where illegals that fly here without visas are usually given an appointment to go to court (which they usually skip) and allowed in to do whatever they want. Illegals can usually avoid paying taxes and in many states can ignore the requirements of having a license and insurance to drive. It is a bad idea to tell millions of people that they can break laws when it's convenient but they can get all the benefits of being a legal immigrant or citizen.
Our immigration system is broken. People come here illegally, often carrying drugs for the smugglers. Once they arrive, they are often enslaved to work in sweatshops or brothels. No one knows how many die in the desert or are killed by human traffickers. People following the law are punished and those who break the law are rewarded. Democrats don't want to change the system because illegals mean people the government will have to service, people that might fraudulently vote for them in elections, people who will need them for generations. Establishment Republicans see illegals as discounted workers and are comfortable breaking the law because the chance of being caught is low. People are dying, people are enslaved and people are being taken advantage of. It's okay to some because it means profits or government jobs for Democrats. It's simply wrong to conservatives.
'via Blog this'
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Obama Selects Samantha Power to Chair Atrocities Prevention Board | TheBlaze.com
Obama Selects Samantha Power to Chair Atrocities Prevention Board | TheBlaze.com:
I know, I know, Glenn Beck yadda yadda yadda crying crazypants. You're wrong, but that's another post. There is a woman who happens to be influential in the administration, Samantha Power, that promotes a concept called 'Responsibility To Protect.' 'Responsibility To Protect' means that the US and other nations/organizations must militarily intervene to stop genocides, ethnic cleansing and atrocities. She was the voice in the administration that started the ball moving on our military intervention in Libya, where we removed a cowed dictator in order to allow Islamists to take power while Obama broke the War Powers Act. The US has troops in Uganda as part of an effort to track down the warlord Kony as part of the Responsibility To Protect.
The idea of 'R2P' is a nice-sounding and feel-good one but there are real consequences. First off, when the World's Only Superpower steps in, we ironically lend credibility to our opponent. Much of the world hates us and, if we are against someone, much of the world feels the need to support the other guy. One of the reasons that the monster Castro is beloved on the left is that he has framed his utter failure in leading a nation as a fight against the cruel and evil US. North Korea has, for sixty years, declared themselves at total war with the US and explained to their people that the famines and concentration camps and the fact that each generation of North Korean is shorter than the previous one because of malnutrition are all necessary sacrifices to keep the US at bay. Tinpot dictators and warlords the world over will use the fact we are supporting their enemies as propaganda and a recruitment for anti-American terrorists the world over.
The second problem with 'R2P' is that we are no longer deciding where and when the US military is to go in. We are giving corrupt bureaucrats and misguided idealists and people that can make a good youtube video the power to declare war and letting them guide how we use our forces. We did that in the 1990s when we bombed Serbia and intervened militarily in Kosovo. We are still there. No, really, a generation later we are still there. Just like we're still in Western Europe protecting them against the Soviet Union that dissolved even before Kosovo. The 1990s also saw us get involved in the first Gulf War to protect non-democratic regimes from being attacked by another non-democratic regime (our military being stationed in Saudi Arabia is what sent Bin Laden against us, by the way) and the intervention in Somalia (where those pirates that attack from Egypt to India come from) which gave us 'Black Hawk Down'. The US military is designed to do one thing and one thing only: to smash other militaries to tiny bits very quickly and at almost no loss of US life. There is another thing the US military does very well, responding to natural disasters overseas and providing food/water/medical aid and security against looting but that is essentially moving our military to smash an enemy and giving them food instead. As Vietnam and Afghanistan and the two Gulf Wars and Kosovo and Somalia have shown, nation building is something very different and difficult and we have really achieved it twice, in Germany and Japan, and that was after we utterly smashed them to pieces and kept millions of military-age men in POW camps for years afterwards.
The third problem with 'R2P' is that we will be working with unreliable partners. Look at UN Peacekeeping forces and their record of child rape and forced prostitution. The UN peacekeepers in Lebanon have let terrorists set up ammo dumps and launch missiles at Israel for decades from mere yards away and done nothing except watch. They don't stop the terrorists or blow up the ammo dumps or even alert Israel that rockets are going to be incoming soon. Pakistan has provided intelligence, logistical support and protection for the Taliban in Afghanistan in addition to Bin Laden living a comfortable life in the town home to Pakistan's version of West Point. The Oil-For-Food program run by the UN provided millions of dollars in bribes for UN officials to allow Saddam to siphon tens of billions of dollars for his personal use as well as to rearm after the first Gulf War. The Libyan 'freedom fighters' that we supported included terrorists that have stolen thousands of surface-to-air missiles.
The fourth problem is that 'R2P' can be used against our allies. The article I'm linking to goes into detail about Power said, in 2002, that 'R2P' would lead to the US occupying Israel and pouring billions of dollars into Palestine. She saw that as a good thing. Putting US troops into that mess would not be in our best interests. The UN is openly anti-American and putting our military at their disposal is just a bad idea. Putting our military at their disposal with them writing the rules of engagement is even worse. It also goes against the Constitution where Congress declares war, not the UN or the President.
One of the problems with liberalism is that the goals are what matter, not the results. Conservatives are forced to look at their failures and examine why they failed. Liberals, not so much.
'via Blog this'
I know, I know, Glenn Beck yadda yadda yadda crying crazypants. You're wrong, but that's another post. There is a woman who happens to be influential in the administration, Samantha Power, that promotes a concept called 'Responsibility To Protect.' 'Responsibility To Protect' means that the US and other nations/organizations must militarily intervene to stop genocides, ethnic cleansing and atrocities. She was the voice in the administration that started the ball moving on our military intervention in Libya, where we removed a cowed dictator in order to allow Islamists to take power while Obama broke the War Powers Act. The US has troops in Uganda as part of an effort to track down the warlord Kony as part of the Responsibility To Protect.
The idea of 'R2P' is a nice-sounding and feel-good one but there are real consequences. First off, when the World's Only Superpower steps in, we ironically lend credibility to our opponent. Much of the world hates us and, if we are against someone, much of the world feels the need to support the other guy. One of the reasons that the monster Castro is beloved on the left is that he has framed his utter failure in leading a nation as a fight against the cruel and evil US. North Korea has, for sixty years, declared themselves at total war with the US and explained to their people that the famines and concentration camps and the fact that each generation of North Korean is shorter than the previous one because of malnutrition are all necessary sacrifices to keep the US at bay. Tinpot dictators and warlords the world over will use the fact we are supporting their enemies as propaganda and a recruitment for anti-American terrorists the world over.
The second problem with 'R2P' is that we are no longer deciding where and when the US military is to go in. We are giving corrupt bureaucrats and misguided idealists and people that can make a good youtube video the power to declare war and letting them guide how we use our forces. We did that in the 1990s when we bombed Serbia and intervened militarily in Kosovo. We are still there. No, really, a generation later we are still there. Just like we're still in Western Europe protecting them against the Soviet Union that dissolved even before Kosovo. The 1990s also saw us get involved in the first Gulf War to protect non-democratic regimes from being attacked by another non-democratic regime (our military being stationed in Saudi Arabia is what sent Bin Laden against us, by the way) and the intervention in Somalia (where those pirates that attack from Egypt to India come from) which gave us 'Black Hawk Down'. The US military is designed to do one thing and one thing only: to smash other militaries to tiny bits very quickly and at almost no loss of US life. There is another thing the US military does very well, responding to natural disasters overseas and providing food/water/medical aid and security against looting but that is essentially moving our military to smash an enemy and giving them food instead. As Vietnam and Afghanistan and the two Gulf Wars and Kosovo and Somalia have shown, nation building is something very different and difficult and we have really achieved it twice, in Germany and Japan, and that was after we utterly smashed them to pieces and kept millions of military-age men in POW camps for years afterwards.
The third problem with 'R2P' is that we will be working with unreliable partners. Look at UN Peacekeeping forces and their record of child rape and forced prostitution. The UN peacekeepers in Lebanon have let terrorists set up ammo dumps and launch missiles at Israel for decades from mere yards away and done nothing except watch. They don't stop the terrorists or blow up the ammo dumps or even alert Israel that rockets are going to be incoming soon. Pakistan has provided intelligence, logistical support and protection for the Taliban in Afghanistan in addition to Bin Laden living a comfortable life in the town home to Pakistan's version of West Point. The Oil-For-Food program run by the UN provided millions of dollars in bribes for UN officials to allow Saddam to siphon tens of billions of dollars for his personal use as well as to rearm after the first Gulf War. The Libyan 'freedom fighters' that we supported included terrorists that have stolen thousands of surface-to-air missiles.
The fourth problem is that 'R2P' can be used against our allies. The article I'm linking to goes into detail about Power said, in 2002, that 'R2P' would lead to the US occupying Israel and pouring billions of dollars into Palestine. She saw that as a good thing. Putting US troops into that mess would not be in our best interests. The UN is openly anti-American and putting our military at their disposal is just a bad idea. Putting our military at their disposal with them writing the rules of engagement is even worse. It also goes against the Constitution where Congress declares war, not the UN or the President.
One of the problems with liberalism is that the goals are what matter, not the results. Conservatives are forced to look at their failures and examine why they failed. Liberals, not so much.
'via Blog this'
How Kalashnikov Guns Are Made | English Russia
How Kalashnikov Guns Are Made | English Russia:
One of the two things I am learning about blogging is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. I see an article or think of something that I think can be a good post, make a note of it because it's going to take thirty minutes to two hours to do supporting research and write the post aaaaaaaaaaaand it never gets done. I've got forty bookmarks that were supposed to be posts that are gathering dust. I'm going to start doing quick posts and then go back later maybe and do a second post to cover the concept/article in depth. This is the first one of those stump posts.
The Kalashnikov or AK series of guns (the AK-47 is most famous but there's an AK-74 and other variants) are the preferred weapon of our enemies. In some parts of the world, they can be gotten for the price of a live chicken and they are as reliable as a hammer. I knew a guy who stored one in an outdoor locker off Lake Erie, forgot about it for the winter, and fired it normally after kicking the bolt back to loosen the rust. They've been dug out of graves in the Middle East and Eastern Europe where they were buried with the men using them before death, had the bolt moved to chamber a round and fired in auto. They aren't accurate by any stretch of the imagination but... they just work. The rifle was designed after World War Two in order to provide the Soviets and eventually anyone who was anti-US with a rifle perfect for illiterate peasants to use effectively. The plant in the post has made over fifty million AKs.
The US needed a decent rifle after the start of Vietnam- the one they were using, the M14, was a modified version of their WW2 rifle, the m1- and eventually chose the M16. The M16 is an ingenious system that allows for easily changing the caliber (I've even seen a M16 crossbow. No, really. It didn't reload itself but the crossbow replaced the barrel.) but is finicky and needs to be kept clean. The original version of the M16 was an utter failure in combat, to the point where a third to a half of the rifles would jam in a firefight and the Pentagon did its best to cover this up until the redesign. The civilian version, the AR, is very popular with hunters because it's accurate and can be easily converted to many other calibers. Maybe half of the zombies killed during the inevitable zombie apocalypse will be shot by AR rifles.
There was a phrase I mentioned earlier, that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the AK is a good example of this. It's utterly reliable, kills a human or zombie very well, and is cheap to produce. The rifle isn't as accurate as it could be and the bullets are a bit heavier than they absolutely need to be (a big deal if you're carrying several hundred into combat) but it just works. The US was looking for a perfect rifle, settled on a good one but has to lie to itself that it's perfect even now (many troops in Afghanistan are carrying backup AKs that they are forced to hide from their superiors). We'll get more in the perfect being the enemy of the good later.
'via Blog this'
One of the two things I am learning about blogging is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. I see an article or think of something that I think can be a good post, make a note of it because it's going to take thirty minutes to two hours to do supporting research and write the post aaaaaaaaaaaand it never gets done. I've got forty bookmarks that were supposed to be posts that are gathering dust. I'm going to start doing quick posts and then go back later maybe and do a second post to cover the concept/article in depth. This is the first one of those stump posts.
The Kalashnikov or AK series of guns (the AK-47 is most famous but there's an AK-74 and other variants) are the preferred weapon of our enemies. In some parts of the world, they can be gotten for the price of a live chicken and they are as reliable as a hammer. I knew a guy who stored one in an outdoor locker off Lake Erie, forgot about it for the winter, and fired it normally after kicking the bolt back to loosen the rust. They've been dug out of graves in the Middle East and Eastern Europe where they were buried with the men using them before death, had the bolt moved to chamber a round and fired in auto. They aren't accurate by any stretch of the imagination but... they just work. The rifle was designed after World War Two in order to provide the Soviets and eventually anyone who was anti-US with a rifle perfect for illiterate peasants to use effectively. The plant in the post has made over fifty million AKs.
The US needed a decent rifle after the start of Vietnam- the one they were using, the M14, was a modified version of their WW2 rifle, the m1- and eventually chose the M16. The M16 is an ingenious system that allows for easily changing the caliber (I've even seen a M16 crossbow. No, really. It didn't reload itself but the crossbow replaced the barrel.) but is finicky and needs to be kept clean. The original version of the M16 was an utter failure in combat, to the point where a third to a half of the rifles would jam in a firefight and the Pentagon did its best to cover this up until the redesign. The civilian version, the AR, is very popular with hunters because it's accurate and can be easily converted to many other calibers. Maybe half of the zombies killed during the inevitable zombie apocalypse will be shot by AR rifles.
There was a phrase I mentioned earlier, that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the AK is a good example of this. It's utterly reliable, kills a human or zombie very well, and is cheap to produce. The rifle isn't as accurate as it could be and the bullets are a bit heavier than they absolutely need to be (a big deal if you're carrying several hundred into combat) but it just works. The US was looking for a perfect rifle, settled on a good one but has to lie to itself that it's perfect even now (many troops in Afghanistan are carrying backup AKs that they are forced to hide from their superiors). We'll get more in the perfect being the enemy of the good later.
'via Blog this'
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Obama and the Birther Movement
I was looking at a news site and there was a link to an article saying that a lawyer has admitted that Obama's birth certificate was faked. My first instinct was to roll my eyes but I think it might be of interest to explain why the Birthers believe what they do and why they are morons. By Birther, I refer to those that think Obama was not born in Hawaii as well as those who are 'just asking questions' because we all know they really mean they think the birth certificate was faked but don't want to look like morons. There are some that believe that Obama was born in Hawaii but his birth certificate has been modified or the original contained embarrassing details he is hiding. Others believe that he was not born in the US (Kenya is the usual theoretical country of birth but I've seen the Soviet Union in a few theories). All of them are Birthers and believe Obama is not eligible to be President.
To be a Birther, one must ignore the fact that Obama's mother was an American citizen and therefore Obama has American citizenship through her. Whether he was born in Hawaii, Kenya or on Mars, he gets citizenship from his mother. Birthers get around this by saying that the law at the time said the American parent of a child born outside the US had to be over the age of 21, but this goes against the Naturalization Act of 1790 which has no age limit for the parent.
Birthers usually state that Obama's father wanted his son to have Kenyan citizenship. Obama's father, who was a Kenyan bureaucrat for decades, never filled out the paperwork to get his son Kenyan citizenship. It should be noted that there's no Kenyan birth certificate for Obama so his father would have had to had the delivery outside a hospital and had no doctor or nurse attending and he would also had to not bother to report his son's birth.
A few days before Obama released a picture of his birth certificate, I came up with what I think is an ironclad proof that Obama and his parents couldn't have gone from Hawaii to Kenya and back in the few days no one saw them before the delivery. Passenger jet travel was still relatively new at the time and very expensive, too expensive for a college student and a teenager to afford on their own. There wouldn't have been direct flights from Hawaii to Kenya and the connecting flights would have involved long wait times, stretching flight time to beyond the few days no one say his parents. Customs for the layovers would have records of his parents' trip. Even an infant needs a passport, so Obama couldn't have gotten back into the US without proper documents. All of this travelling would have involved a nine-months-pregnant woman back when pregnant women were treated as if they were made out of spun glass. Even decades later, people would remember an about-to-give-birth white girl and an African man travelling together. The trip wasn't physically or financially possible in the time frame, Obama's father would have had to go out of his way not to leave a paper trail in Kenya, there would be an international paper trail and certainly problems returning to the US with a newborn.
In addition to my points above, there's the fact that there is hospital paperwork and a birth notice in the paper. So we have:
- His mother was a US citizen, so he was automatically one as well (the Naturalization Act of 1790 and the Fourteenth Amendment).
- There's no Kenyan paperwork or birth certificate.
- The parents couldn't have afforded the trip.
- There wasn't time to fly to Kenya, give birth and come back before their disappearance was noticed.
- Pregnancy doesn't give one a exact delivery time. There's no way to predict the time of birth closely enough to fly to Kenya and back.
- There are hospital records and a birth notice in a local newspaper showing a US birth.
Birthers, when presented with facts such as these, will shift focus to the fact that the Obama campaign didn't release the relevant paperwork during the 2008 election. Some will point out that John McCain had to prove he was an American citizen (his mother was actually interviewed to verify his citizenship) and it is true that the Hillary Clinton campaign did float the idea that McCain wasn't an American citizen because he was born on a US naval base in the Panama Canal Zone back when the US owned the canal. One of the things that drives the Birther movement is the outrage that a Republican war hero has to prove his citizenship but a Democrat with a foreigner for a father doesn't.
The Obama campaign was pretty savvy to use the Birther movement to make their opponents look like tin-foil-wearing morons. Several times in the first two years of his presidency, Obama's people made jokes about the Birthers or friendly news outlets would bring up Birthers when the Tea Party movement was gathering strength. After the 2010 election, Obama's close friend, who just happened to be governor of Hawaii, suddenly announced that he was going to stop these Birthers and release Obama's long-form birth certificate. For almost two weeks, his people were releasing odder and odder reports, from finding it to losing it to firing the Hawaii Secretary of State (who was in charge of keeping birth certificates, among other things) for an unknown reason and then finally admitting what many of us knew all along, that it couldn't be released without Obama's written approval. This circus managed to crowd out stories about how the Democrats had the greatest loss of Congressional seats since 1938 and they had lost the House.
Obama finally allowed a picture of the long-form birth certificate to be released after Trump had been ranting about it for a few weeks. Trump, who was trying to use the issue to make himself a Republican presidential candidate, saw interest in his political future quickly fade away. Recently, Joe Arpaio, a controversial Arizona sheriff under Federal investigation for racial bias and civil rights violations, has decided to investigate Obama's birth certificate because...? Arpaio has been marketing himself as 'America's Toughest Sheriff' for decades and is known for stunts like putting a 'Vacancy' sign in front of his jail, making the male inmates wear pink underwear and so on. He's also been fighting county government officials and judges for money and power to the point where it's a pretty ugly mess.
I think the appeal of the Birther movement is that of the Magic Reset Button. Liberals held onto the belief that Bush stole the 2000 election in the hope that some smoking gun would be found and he would be removed from office (they never seemed to realize that, if W was removed, Cheney would take over). Republicans had their Magic Reset Button in the 1990s with Whitewater and Zippergate. The 9/11 Truther movement (that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job or the government knew about them and failed to act) is a more recent one that seems to cut across political leanings. The Magic Reset Button has been around for well over a century- really, the Civil War, it could be argued, was the result of the South pushing the Magic Reset Button under the belief that the Founders simply forgot to include how to leave the US somewhere in the Constitution. The Magic Reset Button, if pushed, will right massive wrongs and make horrible things not happen. If Obama isn't an American, he will be removed from office (and Joe Biden would become president, something no one wants) and every decision he made will be reversed (actually, there would be a Constitutional crisis worse than anything since the Civil War) and...? Magic Reset Buttons aren't real but their appeal is simple and childlike, that the bad thing will go away. The Truthers are hoping that there are millions of Islamic fundamentalists dedicated to destroying us. The anti-Clinton-ers of the 1990s were hoping that history would stop with the fall of the Soviet Union and we'd be able to go back to a 1950s that never was or a Gilded Age where we could ignore the rest of the world.
The truth of the matter is that Obama is the legitimate President of the United States. I feel he's a horrible one, one that shares few beliefs with me or the majority of America. He lies constantly, is petulant and arrogant and refuses to look at any other viewpoint. He's skated on his looks and voice and personal narrative and now that he has the hardest job on the planet, he votes 'Present' and goes off to golf. There is no Magic Reset Button.
'Lilyhammer' -or- Sopranos in Scandanavia
Netflix is starting to make its own content and the first I've watched is 'Lilyhammer'. A Mob underboss played by Steven Van Sant rats on his boss and is relocated to Lilyhammer, Norway because he liked the Olympics in 1994. No, really. So he's trying to get used to Norway and his Mob tendencies are showing and the local police think he's a Muslim terrorist (no, really). I've watched four episodes so far and it's a great show. Van Sant is great and the Norwegian actors are all good to great. It's funny without having gags and Norway seems to be a cross between Ikea and the DMV. European socialism is not a favorite of mine and there are moments here and there that show the difference between the US and the rest of the world but it doesn't preach either way. It's worth a look if you have Netflix.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
"True But False" -or- Media Beclowns Self In Pro-Obama Bias
Are Obama’s job policies hurting women? - The Washington Post:
Obama has been talking about a War on Women the GOP is supposedly fighting (mostly because Republicans aren't trying to destroy the First Amendment) and the GOP is responding (!) with facts. Of the 740,000 jobs lost since Obama took office, 683,000 of them were held by women. -GOP
There are a few 'fact checker' columns or sites the media promotes and they usually have a strong bias for Democrats and a strong bias against conservatives and the GOP. This fact-checking is done by the Washington Post, one of the top newspapers in America. The fact above is true: the economy is still under 740,000 jobs* since Obama took office and there are 683,000 fewer employed women. The administration's figures are used for this fact. It's a bad fact for Obama to deal with, that his failed policies have been especially hard on women. So how does the Washington Post rate this official government statistic?
True But False.
Huh? Well, sure, the facts are true and the statistics are official government ones. But the GOP started the job-counting at the beginning of Obama's presidency, not when the stimulus that didn't work happened. They then compare apples and oranges or 'number of jobs total' with 'number of jobs created during the Obama administration, whether or not they were temporary.' So, yes, the GOP is correct but, if you look at something else, something the GOP didn't claim, the thing the GOP didn't claim would have been false if they had claimed it but they didn't. But if they had, it would have been wrong. So they lied about something they didn't say or imply but aren't wrong about the thing they said. So the Washington Post is Biased but Beclowned.
* I might make this into a whole post, but the Obama administration doesn't count unemployed people as unemployed. See, they count U-6 as unemployed. What's U-6? People that have been unemployed for under six months and are getting state unemployment. Obama started giving people unemployed over six months federal unemployment. You might remember charges in 2010-2011 that the GOP was going to cut benefits for the unemployed, but that was just the administration extending unemployment from six months to two years. People unemployed for between six months and two years don't count on the official unemployment register. After two years, when they lose their unemployment? They don't count as unemployed, either, but as people not participating in the job market. The raw number of people working in the US is lower than at any time since the Reagan administration when the population was 25% less. This is a huge deal because we've managed to lose thirty years worth of jobs. I'll have to make this a major post sometime soon because it's a huge deal.
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Obama has been talking about a War on Women the GOP is supposedly fighting (mostly because Republicans aren't trying to destroy the First Amendment) and the GOP is responding (!) with facts. Of the 740,000 jobs lost since Obama took office, 683,000 of them were held by women. -GOP
There are a few 'fact checker' columns or sites the media promotes and they usually have a strong bias for Democrats and a strong bias against conservatives and the GOP. This fact-checking is done by the Washington Post, one of the top newspapers in America. The fact above is true: the economy is still under 740,000 jobs* since Obama took office and there are 683,000 fewer employed women. The administration's figures are used for this fact. It's a bad fact for Obama to deal with, that his failed policies have been especially hard on women. So how does the Washington Post rate this official government statistic?
True But False.
Huh? Well, sure, the facts are true and the statistics are official government ones. But the GOP started the job-counting at the beginning of Obama's presidency, not when the stimulus that didn't work happened. They then compare apples and oranges or 'number of jobs total' with 'number of jobs created during the Obama administration, whether or not they were temporary.' So, yes, the GOP is correct but, if you look at something else, something the GOP didn't claim, the thing the GOP didn't claim would have been false if they had claimed it but they didn't. But if they had, it would have been wrong. So they lied about something they didn't say or imply but aren't wrong about the thing they said. So the Washington Post is Biased but Beclowned.
* I might make this into a whole post, but the Obama administration doesn't count unemployed people as unemployed. See, they count U-6 as unemployed. What's U-6? People that have been unemployed for under six months and are getting state unemployment. Obama started giving people unemployed over six months federal unemployment. You might remember charges in 2010-2011 that the GOP was going to cut benefits for the unemployed, but that was just the administration extending unemployment from six months to two years. People unemployed for between six months and two years don't count on the official unemployment register. After two years, when they lose their unemployment? They don't count as unemployed, either, but as people not participating in the job market. The raw number of people working in the US is lower than at any time since the Reagan administration when the population was 25% less. This is a huge deal because we've managed to lose thirty years worth of jobs. I'll have to make this a major post sometime soon because it's a huge deal.
'via Blog this'
Ashley Judd Slaps Media in the Face for Speculation Over Her ‘Puffy’ Appearance - The Daily Beast
Ashley Judd Slaps Media in the Face for Speculation Over Her ‘Puffy’ Appearance - The Daily Beast:
There was an article on Ace of Spades about this article where Ashley Judd blames 'the patriarchy' for gossip about her puffy face. The articles touch on the differences between men and women/feminism/anti-male bias and I wanted to talk about it.
Ashley Judd is a very good actress who's on a TV series I've never heard of and done a lot of movies. As of late, there's been a lot of articles on gossip sites about her appearance, from her having a puffy fact to having gained some weight. This has bothered her and she wants to shift 'The Conversation' (that's what she calls it, caps included) to how 'The Patriarchy' (her title/caps) is pushing this and why. It turns out that The Patriarchy is making snarky comments about women to destroy feminism and keep women down. She wants women to band together to ask The Patriarchy why they do this and make them stop because women should be united rather than divided due to snarky comments.
What a load of crap. Men, straight men at least*, don't read gossip magazines and don't watch gossip TV shows like Access ET Hollywood TMZ Edition. We don't gossip among ourselves and don't care about celebrity gossip unless it involves naked pictures. There's a blogger that regularly uses search terms for the most recent naked celebrity to increase his Google ranking (for a few celebrities, their name and naked pictures will reveal his blog as the first result). This is an aspect of how men and women deal with anger or social hierarchy differently. Men's anger tends to be acute and women's anger tends to be chronic. What I mean by this is that when men get angry at each other, there'll be an argument, possibly a shoving match and then they will either stop being friends or be okay with each other. Women tend to be more passive aggressive and will talk behind each other's backs and make snarky comments and gossip far beyond the capacity of a man to care about. An experience common to men in relationships is going home from a party and hearing all about a woman his girlfriend/wife hates and is jealous of. We're confused and a little bored but agree because we don't want that anger turned on us.
In the greater mediasphere, women and gay men** dominate the gossip agenda. They are the snarky ones talking about women's bodies and aging and weight and clothes and makeup and things we straight guys don't even know how to describe. Straight men's gossip is centered on whether we'd do her or not (the answer is usually yes). Beyond the gossip, you see women's magazines center on how women need to improve their hair/skin/makeup/body/fashion sense/bedroom skills/seductive skills. Guys aren't writing or editing those articles. We don't care. All of this reflects the importance that women place on their relative position in their social circles. Women are constantly evaluating their rank in the looks/fashion/financial/romance arenas and trying to talk down those they view as higher in the rankings. I'm not saying this is evil or maladaptive but it isn't straight guys that are doing it.
Here's a thought experiment; watch several hours of sitcoms and their commercials and count how many times the man in a couple is incompetent/mistaken/clueless and how often the woman is. Tim Allen made a career of being the grunting moron who, at the end of the episode, learned another Important Lesson about how to be less like a straight guy. If there was a Patriarchy, why would men allow themselves to almost always be the fool? If The Patriarchy is trying to keep women stupid, why would they allow women to graduate from college at a 3:2 ratio? Boys are less than half the population but more than 80% of children on Ritalin are boys. Why would divorce laws favor women if there was a Patriarchy in control?
I don't care about Ashley Judd's face, puffy or not, but to her I'm still sexist because I'm a man. She wasn't complaining about a Patriarchy promoting cute young things when she was a cute young thing. I doubt she's living on Ramen and rice. She grabbed the brass ring, got it, and now is complaining because it's not gold.
And for what it's worth, I saw a recent photo of her and I don't think her face is oddly puffy.
* Before you can start on a 'OMG homophobe!!!1!!!one!!!!' tirade, here are my bona-fides: two gay roommates, a friend that was a drag queen (I'd go to his competitions to cheer him on and be the only straight guy in a sea of drunk and horny gay men) and had a friend that was a transsexual. Not a homophobe.
** Perez Hilton. Look at a few sites and shows and you'll see I'm right.
'via Blog this'
There was an article on Ace of Spades about this article where Ashley Judd blames 'the patriarchy' for gossip about her puffy face. The articles touch on the differences between men and women/feminism/anti-male bias and I wanted to talk about it.
Ashley Judd is a very good actress who's on a TV series I've never heard of and done a lot of movies. As of late, there's been a lot of articles on gossip sites about her appearance, from her having a puffy fact to having gained some weight. This has bothered her and she wants to shift 'The Conversation' (that's what she calls it, caps included) to how 'The Patriarchy' (her title/caps) is pushing this and why. It turns out that The Patriarchy is making snarky comments about women to destroy feminism and keep women down. She wants women to band together to ask The Patriarchy why they do this and make them stop because women should be united rather than divided due to snarky comments.
What a load of crap. Men, straight men at least*, don't read gossip magazines and don't watch gossip TV shows like Access ET Hollywood TMZ Edition. We don't gossip among ourselves and don't care about celebrity gossip unless it involves naked pictures. There's a blogger that regularly uses search terms for the most recent naked celebrity to increase his Google ranking (for a few celebrities, their name and naked pictures will reveal his blog as the first result). This is an aspect of how men and women deal with anger or social hierarchy differently. Men's anger tends to be acute and women's anger tends to be chronic. What I mean by this is that when men get angry at each other, there'll be an argument, possibly a shoving match and then they will either stop being friends or be okay with each other. Women tend to be more passive aggressive and will talk behind each other's backs and make snarky comments and gossip far beyond the capacity of a man to care about. An experience common to men in relationships is going home from a party and hearing all about a woman his girlfriend/wife hates and is jealous of. We're confused and a little bored but agree because we don't want that anger turned on us.
In the greater mediasphere, women and gay men** dominate the gossip agenda. They are the snarky ones talking about women's bodies and aging and weight and clothes and makeup and things we straight guys don't even know how to describe. Straight men's gossip is centered on whether we'd do her or not (the answer is usually yes). Beyond the gossip, you see women's magazines center on how women need to improve their hair/skin/makeup/body/fashion sense/bedroom skills/seductive skills. Guys aren't writing or editing those articles. We don't care. All of this reflects the importance that women place on their relative position in their social circles. Women are constantly evaluating their rank in the looks/fashion/financial/romance arenas and trying to talk down those they view as higher in the rankings. I'm not saying this is evil or maladaptive but it isn't straight guys that are doing it.
Here's a thought experiment; watch several hours of sitcoms and their commercials and count how many times the man in a couple is incompetent/mistaken/clueless and how often the woman is. Tim Allen made a career of being the grunting moron who, at the end of the episode, learned another Important Lesson about how to be less like a straight guy. If there was a Patriarchy, why would men allow themselves to almost always be the fool? If The Patriarchy is trying to keep women stupid, why would they allow women to graduate from college at a 3:2 ratio? Boys are less than half the population but more than 80% of children on Ritalin are boys. Why would divorce laws favor women if there was a Patriarchy in control?
I don't care about Ashley Judd's face, puffy or not, but to her I'm still sexist because I'm a man. She wasn't complaining about a Patriarchy promoting cute young things when she was a cute young thing. I doubt she's living on Ramen and rice. She grabbed the brass ring, got it, and now is complaining because it's not gold.
And for what it's worth, I saw a recent photo of her and I don't think her face is oddly puffy.
* Before you can start on a 'OMG homophobe!!!1!!!one!!!!' tirade, here are my bona-fides: two gay roommates, a friend that was a drag queen (I'd go to his competitions to cheer him on and be the only straight guy in a sea of drunk and horny gay men) and had a friend that was a transsexual. Not a homophobe.
** Perez Hilton. Look at a few sites and shows and you'll see I'm right.
'via Blog this'
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Wait... What?
I'm not a fan of Obama. I think he's arrogant, vain, narcissistic, intellectually weak, duplicitous, mean-spirited and ruthless. His supporters say he is the most intelligent President ever. He has continually put himself in the top four or five Presidents when asked to rate himself. He was head of the Harvard Law Review (except he never wrote an article and didn't do any of the day-to-day running of the Review that normally comes with the job) and taught Constitutional law, except he didn't write any articles or conduct research and none of his students seem to remember anything about his classes. He's been trying to bully the Supreme Court to not throw out Obamacare by speaking out in public. Obama, the Constitutional scholar and smartest President ever said that the Supreme Court had never ruled a law unconstitutional and thrown it out. Except it has, because the job of the Supreme Court is to rule whether a law is or isn't Constitutional. It has in fact rules over three thousand laws unconstitutional since Marbury v Madison, something I learned in eighth grade.
After even the most in-the-tank journalist felt compelled to point this out, Obama explained himself. “First of all, let me be very specific,” Obama said. “We have not seen a court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce, a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner, so we’re going back to the thirties, pre New Deal.”
Turns out that, besides being wrong, Obama, Constitutional Expert, mentioned a court case, 'Lochner v New York'. The 'New York' part means the case was filed against the state of New York. Why? Because the state of New York passed a law that the plaintiff felt, correctly, was unconstitutional. Congress didn't pass the law. So Obama, the smartest everything in the history of everything, doesn't know that the Supreme Court can rule on local or state laws as well as federal and doesn't know that the Court can strike down laws that are unconstitutional.
One of the problems liberals have is that they are almost never challenged. They control the media and the universities and government bureaucracies and since the media repeats the lie that anyone that disagrees with them must, must be evil and/or stupid, they come to think that they are always right and there is no other valid viewpoint. Reporters covering the Obamacare case last week were stunned, utterly stunned at the power of the questions the conservatives asked. The solicitor general stumbled and stuttered and was openly laughed at, even by the liberals. For two years, the administration has argued that the penalty for not having insurance is and isn't a tax at the same time. One of the justices called the solicitor general on it, pointing out that he wasn't able to keep it straight in the answer to a single question. Obama is furious that people disagree with him and he's even more furious that their opinion matters.
After even the most in-the-tank journalist felt compelled to point this out, Obama explained himself. “First of all, let me be very specific,” Obama said. “We have not seen a court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce, a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner, so we’re going back to the thirties, pre New Deal.”
Turns out that, besides being wrong, Obama, Constitutional Expert, mentioned a court case, 'Lochner v New York'. The 'New York' part means the case was filed against the state of New York. Why? Because the state of New York passed a law that the plaintiff felt, correctly, was unconstitutional. Congress didn't pass the law. So Obama, the smartest everything in the history of everything, doesn't know that the Supreme Court can rule on local or state laws as well as federal and doesn't know that the Court can strike down laws that are unconstitutional.
One of the problems liberals have is that they are almost never challenged. They control the media and the universities and government bureaucracies and since the media repeats the lie that anyone that disagrees with them must, must be evil and/or stupid, they come to think that they are always right and there is no other valid viewpoint. Reporters covering the Obamacare case last week were stunned, utterly stunned at the power of the questions the conservatives asked. The solicitor general stumbled and stuttered and was openly laughed at, even by the liberals. For two years, the administration has argued that the penalty for not having insurance is and isn't a tax at the same time. One of the justices called the solicitor general on it, pointing out that he wasn't able to keep it straight in the answer to a single question. Obama is furious that people disagree with him and he's even more furious that their opinion matters.
It's NOT the JETPACK I was PROMISED, but it's a good start.
Manufacturers Bring Flying Cars Closer to Reality With Prototypes | Video | TheBlaze.com:
There are two different 'flying car' prototypes in the article with a video for each. People have been playing around with the idea since the 1930s with little progress. What people want is a car that takes off like a helicopter and flies like a plane. This is pretty much impossible because you have to carry around the car parts when you fly and you don't have the space for enough rotor/prop to create lift. Most flying cars have been cars that bolted into a wings-and-tail assembly. You end up with a crappy car and a crappy plane. It's far, far cheaper and safer to have a car waiting at the destination you fly to.
The first one is a car/plane that has the folded wings on the side of the car. If someone hits you in a parking lot, your $287,000 flying car can be ruined. The second one is an autogyro. It has a rotor instead of wings but can't take off vertically (there are two videos I've seen for it and neither show this, making you believe it's capable of vertical takeoff and landing). The autogyro itself looks like a good design and would be my choice for insanely expensive flying-car monstrosity. The company is marketing the autogyro for police and doctors working in an island-hopping practice. I'd want to see takeoff and landing footage before I decided it was practical.
It is NOT, however, a jetpack. Keep working.
'via Blog this'
There are two different 'flying car' prototypes in the article with a video for each. People have been playing around with the idea since the 1930s with little progress. What people want is a car that takes off like a helicopter and flies like a plane. This is pretty much impossible because you have to carry around the car parts when you fly and you don't have the space for enough rotor/prop to create lift. Most flying cars have been cars that bolted into a wings-and-tail assembly. You end up with a crappy car and a crappy plane. It's far, far cheaper and safer to have a car waiting at the destination you fly to.
The first one is a car/plane that has the folded wings on the side of the car. If someone hits you in a parking lot, your $287,000 flying car can be ruined. The second one is an autogyro. It has a rotor instead of wings but can't take off vertically (there are two videos I've seen for it and neither show this, making you believe it's capable of vertical takeoff and landing). The autogyro itself looks like a good design and would be my choice for insanely expensive flying-car monstrosity. The company is marketing the autogyro for police and doctors working in an island-hopping practice. I'd want to see takeoff and landing footage before I decided it was practical.
It is NOT, however, a jetpack. Keep working.
'via Blog this'
Monday, April 2, 2012
We're Doomed! No, Wait.....
Global Warming. No, wait, it's Anthropomorphic Climate Change. No, wait, it's Climate Weirding. When it's hot, it's because of climate change. When it's cold, it's because climate change caused changes in weather patterns. If you don't agree that 1) the planet is heating to death and 2) it's all humanity's fault and 3) we have five years to save the planet, you are a climate change 'denier'. As in 'holocaust denier'. You hate science and polar bears and puppies and sunshine and are ignorant.
Except it's not true. Nope. Let me explain.
I was a little kid when Star Wars came out and I loved it. My parents were good parents and used this as a way to get me interested in science. They bought me a telescope and some science textbooks (that I read for fun; yes, I am a geek) and took me to planetarium shows. If you've never taken a kid to a planetarium show, you really should. It will blow their mind. Anyway, a few of the planetarium shows talked about global cooling and how air pollution, specifically sulfur compounds in it, was going to cause a global ice age. The solution was to close power plants and factories and set up an international unelected bureaucracy with massive powers to regulate up to the point of limiting the number of children people could have. This was a theme carried over from a doomsday scenario from the late 60s and early 70s called the 'population bomb' claiming that there was overpopulation to the point that hundreds of millions of people were going to start starving to death in about five to ten years. The solution was to set up a massive international unelected bureaucracy with the power to regulate up to the point of limiting the number of children people could have. Several years later, temperatures changed and we were told about acid rain (primarily caused by air pollution, specifically sulfur compounds and carbon dioxide) and how it was going to kill plant and animal life and kill the oceans. After that, it was the destruction of the rainforests and then Global Warming.
Global Warming has been happening since... fifteen minutes after people stopped laughing over the global cooling hoax. The causes are the same, the solutions are the same, the people involved are the same and the time frame for massive action is always five to ten years. Global warming OF LESS THAN A DEGREE stopped in 1998 but warmists can't ever seem to mention that. They also can't seem to mention that there were similar rises and lowering of the temperatures of Mars and Venus and Jupiter, almost like the sun fluctuates in the amount of energy it releases. Al Gore (he speaks for the trees) won an Oscar for his documentary that ignored inconvenient facts like
Except it's not true. Nope. Let me explain.
I was a little kid when Star Wars came out and I loved it. My parents were good parents and used this as a way to get me interested in science. They bought me a telescope and some science textbooks (that I read for fun; yes, I am a geek) and took me to planetarium shows. If you've never taken a kid to a planetarium show, you really should. It will blow their mind. Anyway, a few of the planetarium shows talked about global cooling and how air pollution, specifically sulfur compounds in it, was going to cause a global ice age. The solution was to close power plants and factories and set up an international unelected bureaucracy with massive powers to regulate up to the point of limiting the number of children people could have. This was a theme carried over from a doomsday scenario from the late 60s and early 70s called the 'population bomb' claiming that there was overpopulation to the point that hundreds of millions of people were going to start starving to death in about five to ten years. The solution was to set up a massive international unelected bureaucracy with the power to regulate up to the point of limiting the number of children people could have. Several years later, temperatures changed and we were told about acid rain (primarily caused by air pollution, specifically sulfur compounds and carbon dioxide) and how it was going to kill plant and animal life and kill the oceans. After that, it was the destruction of the rainforests and then Global Warming.
Global Warming has been happening since... fifteen minutes after people stopped laughing over the global cooling hoax. The causes are the same, the solutions are the same, the people involved are the same and the time frame for massive action is always five to ten years. Global warming OF LESS THAN A DEGREE stopped in 1998 but warmists can't ever seem to mention that. They also can't seem to mention that there were similar rises and lowering of the temperatures of Mars and Venus and Jupiter, almost like the sun fluctuates in the amount of energy it releases. Al Gore (he speaks for the trees) won an Oscar for his documentary that ignored inconvenient facts like
- Climatologists say we were in what they call the 'Little Ice Age' until the 18th century.
- There have been many periods of time where the temperature was higher than it is now, such as the Roman Warming Period and the Medieval Warming Period. Gore's film ignored these because they invalidate his theory.
- There were ice ages when CO2 levels were higher than now.
- Carbon Dioxide levels and temperature levels do appear to be linked. The problem is, temperature levels change and the carbon dioxide levels change TWO YEARS LATER. Yes, temperature levels change and CO2 levels respond. CO2 levels don't drive temperature levels.
- All of the warmist predictions are based on computer models that don't work. If they were predictive, you would be able to take a period in the past, plug the data into the model and check your results with the actual data. The models don't do this. It's junk science.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
I was promised a jetpack. I WAS PROMISED A JETPACK!
When I was a kid, I was told the future would be full of wonders, from moon bases to jetpacks to robots walking my dog for me. Somewhere along the way, that future was taken away from us and replaced with one where we must be politically and ecologically and verbally and sexually and bio-psycho-socially correct, one where your intentions matter more than your actions and sensitivity means 'do what we say'. The jetpack is to be replaced with the high-speed train that shall take us from where they put us to where they want us to go. America can't put an astronaut into space. The Japanese have any number of robots that can walk a dog but we have invisible fences and it's good exercise, anyway, so the future gets a pass on that one.
My parents taught me to read when I was three, took me to get my first library card when I was six and made sure I read all the dangerous things; Orwell and history and good science fiction and Dickens and Twain. Ever since I was a kid, I've had problems with insomnia so there was always the History Channel (back when they had history on it) and Discovery and A&E and Carlin on HBO. All of it taught me to look for patterns and connections, to look at things from an angle and not to trust authority. One of the reasons I think global warming is a hoax is because I remember going to planetariums in the 1970s and 80s (I loved Star Wars so my dad used it to get me interested in science) and hearing about 'global cooling'. I had a sixth-grade teacher that made us watch the news ever night and I noticed how the media would pick a story and push it from the same angle until a new story came along and that major stories (drugs/AIDS/acid rain/nuclear disarmament or freeze/some other 80s problem) were 'popular' for three months or so and would give way to the new major problem.
I grew up as politically correct and liberal as could be, was properly cynical and probably insufferable until life and experience ground down the sharp edges. Time passed and my politics changed from liberal to moderate to 9/11 Republican to conservative. Underneath, though, there was the kid who wanted his jetpack. This blog is going to be a combination of musing on the day's events and political rants and essays about whatever comes to mind. It's also going to be a reminder about that jetpack. I was promised a jetpack, after all. Where is it?
My parents taught me to read when I was three, took me to get my first library card when I was six and made sure I read all the dangerous things; Orwell and history and good science fiction and Dickens and Twain. Ever since I was a kid, I've had problems with insomnia so there was always the History Channel (back when they had history on it) and Discovery and A&E and Carlin on HBO. All of it taught me to look for patterns and connections, to look at things from an angle and not to trust authority. One of the reasons I think global warming is a hoax is because I remember going to planetariums in the 1970s and 80s (I loved Star Wars so my dad used it to get me interested in science) and hearing about 'global cooling'. I had a sixth-grade teacher that made us watch the news ever night and I noticed how the media would pick a story and push it from the same angle until a new story came along and that major stories (drugs/AIDS/acid rain/nuclear disarmament or freeze/some other 80s problem) were 'popular' for three months or so and would give way to the new major problem.
I grew up as politically correct and liberal as could be, was properly cynical and probably insufferable until life and experience ground down the sharp edges. Time passed and my politics changed from liberal to moderate to 9/11 Republican to conservative. Underneath, though, there was the kid who wanted his jetpack. This blog is going to be a combination of musing on the day's events and political rants and essays about whatever comes to mind. It's also going to be a reminder about that jetpack. I was promised a jetpack, after all. Where is it?
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