Why the Environuts Annoy the Crap out of Me

It has become tiresome that any discussion at all of an undertaking that might use the tiniest bit of electricity or other form of energy is instantly dismissed or discussed in terms of its environmental impact. I am a huge fan of all things Freakonomics and post at the Freakonomics blog regularly.  Today, there is one of their usually provocative headlines, “What’s More Likely: That Your Vote Will Matter or That You’ll Help Discover Extraterrestrial Life?” 

The first damn comment was this one:

“What about the power usage of a computer running SETI? Those costs are not negligible, especially when compared with the chances of finding life via SETI.”

Killjoy. Instead of discussion on the topic, this knucklehead instantly tries to derail the conversation into his own narrow view of the world.  As if power usage is the Single Most Important Thing in the world for every single aspect of our lives.  So I answered:

"Exploration, by its nature, carries with it the risk of absolutely zero real benefit. So are you, Jason@1&@6, Dan J@2, saying that there should be no exploration without knowing ahead of time that there will be an adequate payoff? Columbus had no assurances that he would find the West Indies or that he wouldn't die at sea, but he went ahead and killed a bunch of trees to build his ships anyway. And then we enslaved the Indians, blah, blah, blah--we're evil, etc., etc., ad infinitum. The SETI Project is taking advantage of otherwise idle resources, the very definition of responsible stewardship. Doesn't matter whether or not the payoff is there, if it does no harm, it's worth doing on the off chance that something good may come of it."

Sometimes, a thing is worth doing for the sheer sake of doing it.  SETI is not likely to produce anything of value in the near future, if ever, but that doesn’t mean you don’t do it.  The people behind SETI have enough interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life to raise money, write code, ask for help and generally do whatever they think they need to do to satisfy their quest for knowledge, quixotic or not.  And all these knucklehead environuts can think about is whether or not Mother Earth is being harmed a little.  By their standards, we should try nothing that cannot immediately show a return that satisfies THEIR standards for usefulness.  Assholes.

When is a 10-foot shark just a snack?

When you are a 20 foot shark:

I am of the generation that stood in very long lines to see "Jaws".  For that reason, I never go in the ocean much over knee deep.  Silly, I know, but there it is.

Voting Present

From the Wall Street Journal, via The Weekly Standard and to me via Hot Air.  Both the Weekly Standard and Hot Air rightly focus on this quote:

“People familiar with the internal debates say Mr. Obama rejected a strictly counter-terror approach during White House deliberations in early October. One official said Pentagon strategists were asked to draft brief written arguments making the best case for each strategy, but the strategists had difficulties writing out a credible case for the counter-terror approach — prompting members of Mr. Biden’s staff to step in and write the document themselves.”

But as I read the Journal piece, another passage caught my eye:

"Signs the White House is moving towards Gen. McChrystal's view of the conflict mounted Friday as the 28 North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense ministers endorsed the commander's counterinsurgency strategy and signaled they might be open to modestly increasing their military and civilian contributions to the war effort.

Gen. McChrystal made a surprise visit to the NATO meeting in Bratislava, Slovakia, to personally brief the defense chiefs on his strategic thinking. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters after the closed-door session that he had heard "broad support from all ministers of this overall counterinsurgency approach," though he cautioned that the NATO members hadn't taken a position on Gen. McChrystal's request for more than 40,000 new U.S. troops.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has also publicly backed Gen. McChrystal, and people familiar with the matter said the endorsements from Mr. Brown and NATO were likely part of a coordinated effort to lay the groundwork for Mr. Obama's eventual decision.

"This may be part of an effort by the Obama administration to have the suggestion come from Europe first before the president makes a public commitment," said one person who has discussed Afghan strategy with senior U.S. officials."

Emphasis added.  Our president has once again chosen to outsource the hard work and hard decisions to someone else.  He voted present in the Illinois statehouse, he was barely present in the US Senate and, amazingly, he is continuing that trend in the desk that Harry S. Truman once designated as the place where the buck stops.  Now the president is in the process of passing on the devalued buck to Europe.  While the Journal piece provides us with encouragement that our nobel peace prize* winner is coming to take General McChrystal's view of the long war, it only provides further evidence that our president is an empty suit.

*never again to be capitalized here.

Why Solar, Wind and Hydro Power Won't Work and Nuclear Will

This is maybe the best explanation I have seen yet for why nuclear power is our best bet to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.  Careful now, it involves some actual science, but is absolutely understandable by anyone with a high school education, or at least what a high school education used to be.

We can stop building the windmill farms now.  Maybe keep building solar, but it is only part of the solution at best.  And people will have to let go of some highly irrational fears over nuclear energy.  By the way, I live within an hour of a nuclear power facility and it is clean as a whistle.  A nuclear-powered whistle.

And "Nuclear Powered Whistle" is a good name for a band.

Thought this was an Onion headline...

"Music Stars Demand Records On Bush Administration's Use of Music For Torture"

...but nope, it's a real headline.

What are they gonna do, demand royalties?

Hint to "artists":  if your music is suitable for torture, you might want to tone it down a little.

And "Music for Torture" would be a good name for an album.

"Why do they always give nobel peace prizes* to pussies?"

Haven't seen these guys in a while and had forgotten how funny they can be:



Before all you Obama lovers get torqued up, remember this:  it's a joke!

*I will never capitalize those words again.

Gonna regret that last post

Because I have now been quoted in the New York Times in the Freakonomics blog in a post on global warming or climate change or whatever they are calling it now.  (Hmmm, how about "apocalyogenesis"--man-caused apocalypse because we all hate Gaia?  Climaticide?  I digress.)

Article is here.

There have been a series of posts at Freakonomics over the last week or so and they have flared up into a real full-on pogrom against any one who expresses anything other than unequivocal belief in man-caused climaticide.

It all began when Steven Dubner wrote about this article from the BBC titled, "What Happened to Global Warming?"  Dubner's article is here, with the prophetic headline, "A Headline That Will Make Global Warming Activists Apoplectic".  Boy, did it, and they unloaded on Mr. Dubner and Steven Levitt of Freakonomics.  Typically, the attacks got personal and histrionic very quickly.

Mr. Levitt followed up with this article, which seemed to only stoke the flames, thus adding to global warming.

And then today's post from Mr. Myhrvold, as referenced above.

I hope that this whole series of articles, appearing as it does in the New York Times and thus in front of the Upper East Siders, will provoke some actual thought processes about the not-so-imminent death of our planet as opposed to the current reflexive reactions it now provokes.  Live frugally, don't be wasteful, drive an SUV if it suits you and quit fretting over whether or not it is green to flush your toilet more than once a day.  We're not running out of oil, water, air or anything else any time soon.

Good Names for Bands

Sometimes, usually when I am talking to my kid, I will utter a phrase that I recognize immediately as being a good name for a band.  If I tweeted, I would post these there, but since I don't here begins a recurring feature, "Good Names for Bands".  This feature will recur as they come up.  The very first entry:

"Crop of Snot"

Don't ask.

WTF???

You really gotta wonder what goes through people's minds:




At least it's not scrambling a couple of hundred rescue personnel the way Richard Heene did.

Proving the lapdoggedness of the media

The first four minutes of this are a primer on how to manipulate the media, and it would appear that they grumbled about it, but went along with it.  She nails herself right around the 5:30 mark.  Yes, Anita, you made it onto YouTube with this little session:



I continue to be amazed by the media's complete abdication of its role as a watchdog. The only watching the media does any more is the watching of the lips of whatever administration official is telling them what to report.

The Smartest People in the World

God save us from these smart people.  They would tell you that they mitigated their loss and that they did a great job keeping it to only $500 million or as their CFO was quoted,  "In evaluating our liquidity position, we wanted to get some stability and some safety."  Which is the over-diploma'ed way of saying, "Jesus H. Christ, we can't pay the bills if we get tagged for this!  Quick, buy our way the hell out of the deal!"

Herd mentality took them into the swaps in the first place as the article points out that Yale and Georgetown, among others, also got caught.

These smart people are running our financial markets, our government, our media and most of our businesses.  Smart is useless if it is not coupled with both common sense and integrity; without those two things it leads us to where we are now.

More on the Little Bastard

Apparently, they are not pussified and proud of it:



Actually, good for them that they are active kids.  Bad for them that their parents are nut jobs who think it's cute to have a 6 year old kid sing, "Shut the fuck up!"  Starting to emerge now that maybe this was a publicity stunt that got a little too much pub.  They'll be on Oprah and all the morning shows and shortly afterwards, Dad will go to jail and the kids will go to Family Services.

And now for some full grown bastards.....

Just announced; the Dems have cleared the way to pass the health care bill via budget reconciliation.  In other words, after a summer of shouting at them and telling them we don't want it, they are going to ram it down our throats anyway.  This is not the way that a representative democracy is supposed to work.  The bastards work for us, not for themselves.

The Face of a Little Bastard

Little bastard, just spent thousands of dollars just so he wouldn't get in trouble.  Did the parents know where he was the whole time?  Just wonderin'...




Anyway, glad he's safe.

Hey y'all, watch this!

Who said that rednecks only live in the south?

Hope everything turns out OK with this.  If it doesn't, this post will disappear.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

UPDATE: The kid wasn't in the balloon. They're still looking for him. Jeez, I hope he didn't fall out. Possible prank may be afoot here.

More Smart Diplomacy

If our diplomacy gets any smarter, we're gonna have global thermonuclear war.

Supposedly, the Russkies never believed that we could pull off SDI, or the "Star Wars" defense.  So why have they always been so adamant that we stop developing/deploying it?

Because they know we can do it and they can't.

"Obama says he's looking at any way to create jobs"

Except lowering business taxes.

Or personal taxes.

Or the cost of hiring someone.

Or lowering minimum wage.

Or minimizing regulations.

Or simplifying the tax code.

Or keeping the Bush tax cuts in effect.

Or actually spending the ridiculous "stimulus" money.

But other than that, He's hard at work looking for ways to create jobs.

Man, I love me some smart diplomacy!

Well done, Ms. Secretary.  We all feel much safer now.

Ms. Secretary, you have him eating out of the palm of your pudgy little hand.

Any day now, the Norks will hand over the keys to their enrichment facilities.  The Iranians, too.

The smartest woman in the world, hard at work for all of us.

Ameroflot?

Uh, no to this.

A Public Option Airline would be a nightmare when coupled with our antiquated public option air traffic control system.  We'd all be flying in biplanes, with one ticket counter for the whole airport.

"Public Option Airlines".  Fly POA, otherwise known as "Piece Of Assness" airlines.

Real World Results Don't Matter

Politicians in general and Obama in particular don't let real world results affect their decisions.  In fact, the Left seems to believe that they can somehow centralize and handle our needs better than the Soviets did or better than the European socialist countries have just as the Right is convinced that unfettered free markets will always produce the desired results.  (And I am in the unfettered category; it's never been tried, though and never will be.)

Case in point:  Wendy Button, and her experience with attempting to obtain health insurance after relocation from Washington DC to Massachusetts.   The so-called "free" health insurance that she must purchase as required by RomneyCare is far more expensive than what she paid in DC.  And this is the problem that Obama's requirements for reform will cause.  He insists that pre-existing conditions not be allowed.  This means that the insurance companies have no choice but to price for the recurrence of possibly high cost health problems.  Price goes up.  Obama wants there to be no caps on coverage.  Price goes up.  Obama wants every single person covered but makes no changes to tort law or to break down competitive barriers across state lines.  Price goes up.

So we can have everything that The One wants to "give" us.  We just need to be prepared to pay more for our "gift".  He's not creating competition, He's driving costs up with one set of actions and attempting to lower them with another set of actions.  We should expect nothing more from a man who has spent his entire life in the Ivory Tower and has little real-world understanding of what it takes to run a business.