Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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“Mugger” Pledges: Will Give Money Back

…just not all of it and not exactly to the people it was taken from.

Yep, the Congress is promising an approximately $150B bill to return a portion of what it has ripped from productive citizens’ pockets, just not necessarily to those it took the money from (the aforesaid productive citizens), of course.

So, if the train stays on the track, expect perhaps as much as $600 per person in “beer money” to be distributed in a purely socialist fashion sometime this summer.

*pfui*

Big stinking deal. We’d be better off were that amount of “mugged” funds spent in a WPA-like investment in energy infrastructure: nuclear plants (MIT has placed the plans for a modular pebble bed reactor in the public domain–set up an assembly line and tell the Saudis and Chavezes of the world to go suck a sour lemon); new, more efficient, oil refineries; biomass to oil or methanol plants, etc.; conversion of railroads to electicity (with enough PBRs, that’d be a real step toward energy independence).

All that could be funded out of congresscritters favorite pork, without raising a dime of taxes. HEck, use ONLY pork and we could probably start paying down the national debt, too…

With the $100+/barrel oil now being held over our heads dealt with, other steps to really help the economy in substantive ways”

1. Abolish the IRS/16th Amendment in favor of the FairTax
2. Institute a 10% across-the-board import duty on ALL imports, no exceptions.

Those two things alone would make American products much, much more competitive in the international markets and start rebuilding America’s manufacturing capabilities, providing even more jobs, over and above the “jobs” (government funded jobs are parasitic on the economy–OK, a few offer some symbiotic benefits) that building new energy infrastructure would provide.

And it’s jobs, not government handbacks (or handouts, for those who didn’t pay in) that would be the real economic stimulus we need.

Of course, expecting something sensible from Congress is like expecting fairy dust to make pigs fly. First, you have to find the fairy dust (No, you can’t get any from homosexual activists. They don’t even pollinate). Then you have to catch the pig. Then you have to get clearance from the FAA to conduct fairy dust-flying pig experiments, an environmental impact assessment from the EPA, an OSHA evaluation of risks to the flight crew, etc., and an ASPCA/PETA signoff on the plan…

Come to think of it, that sounds a lot easier and more likely to happen than Congress growing some brains and then finding the balls to actually do the right thing.

BTW, I blame Rosemary for getting my crank turning on this topic. 🙂 She talked about the Fed cut, its possible effect on the housing market, and pressure on congresscritters to bail out irresponsible home “buyers” (who really, for the most part, just went into more debt than they could afford to “buy” a house they hadn’t earned and couldn’t afford to maintain).

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Shadowscope, Leaning Straight Up, Big Dog’s Weblog, Cao’s Blog, A Newt One- The Truth Surge, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Woman Honor Thyself, The World According to Carl, Pirate’s Cove, Blue Star Chronicles, The Pink Flamingo, Wolf Pangloss, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, CORSARI D’ITALIA, and Dumb Ox Daily News, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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T-13, 2.03: 13 Things Off the Top of My Head

13 Things Off the Top of My Head… some from the dregs of my soul. *sigh*

1. My hat. Only on my head when I’m outdoors.

2. Why is it that when I clean things up–my desk for example–within 15 minutes, whatever I’ve cleaned is messier than it was before cleaning? Is it some universal law of the universe… or just my lil pocket of it?

3. I may as well write this day off as eaten by locusts. From the gitgo, “Whatever can go wrong [has gone] wrong.” Looking for silver linings. Any help here? 😉 Comments from Murphy not allowed.

4. The thing about growing older is that I don’t feel as old as I am. Until I wake up. Still tired, as usual.

5. Ever notice that some things proliferate beyond all reason? Ragweed, politicians *spit*, bureaucraps. All part of the Curse of Adam, I suppose…

A short string (could easily have become a T-13 of its own, but I’m in full ADHD mode today and short on coffee. Blame Murphy) of related items:

6. IF (and despite the Chicken Littles the jury is out, hung only by the paltry few scientists who owe more to politics than to science) AGW were a fact, we’d have more to be thankful for than to bemoan. After all, the earth is overdue for an ice age…

7. So, despite the fact that it appears that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a crock (it appears global climate change is largely due to solar influence, mediated or exacerbated by orbital mechanics and a few other factors beyond man’s ability to influence), and we nevertheless seem to be in a very minor uptick in global temperatures, who’s unhappy with slightly warmer winters besides ski resort operators? Who’s sorry to see slightly longer growing seasons and slightly larger growing areas? Oh, right. Socialist tinkerers and nannystaters who want to use “global warming” to restrict capitalism and your freedoms…

8. Another benefit: maybe–just maybe–the sheeple who’ve been gulled by the lies of AGW Chicken Littles will wake up and smell the coffee when the doom and gloom doomsday scenarios do not come to pass. Maybe. But I don’t hold out much hope. After all, if they weren’t self-lobotomized dummies, they wouldn’t be sheeple to begin with, now would they?

9. On a cheerier note (and leaving AGW behind for now), the cold snap that’s been around for a few days here in America’s Third World County™ seems to be on its way out, and warmer weather is in the offing for this weekend. Nice. Gotta love that global warming… (Oops. Slipped there.)

10. What is it with trifocals? Some days, I feel like one of those bobbleheads.

11. If Mass Media Podpeople and politicians *spit* could all be dosed with an effective truth serum… they’d be out of work the next day. Heck, they’d likely all (or as darned close as to make almost no difference whatsoever) find engraved invitations to necktie parties hosted by Dr. Tarr and Mr. Fether in their hands.

12. Well, with Fred Thompson out of it, there’s no longer anyone worth voting for in the presidential election. The offerings all come down to, “How fast do you want to drive the country off a cliff?” *sigh* (“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward to perdition.” Preach it, brother… *profound sigh*)

13. I truly believe that, since States control what actually goes on their ballots in elections–or should–we as a country need grassroots movements in every state of the (dis)Union to get state constitutional amendments enacted to place “None of the Above” as an option for every elective office, such amendments to provide that if “None of the Above” recieves a plurality of the vote then ALL listed candidates should be disqualified from running for that office and a new election with a completely new slate of candidates offered to the electorate. Ditto for the federal Constitution, just to cover the bases. For presidential races, keep the electoral college, but allow it the same option.

Noted at the Thursday Thirteen Hub and Trackposted to Pet’s Garden Blog, Outside the Beltway, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Allie is Wired, Right Truth, Shadowscope, The Pet Haven Blog, The Pink Flamingo, Big Dog’s Weblog, A Newt One, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, Adeline and Hazel, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Snow Day!

Well, America’s Third World County™ schools have had a snow day declared… even though I can’t see any measureable precip from my door. Ah, well, it’s those roads back in the piney woods that’re always the problem. If more kids walked to school like we did in The Golden Years (five miles through feet, feet I say, of driving snow *heh*), AND if government schools weren’t paid by head count, my Wonder Woman would still be going in today. As it is, unless there’s an emergency call, I’m going to have a holiday with her and take off, myself.

So, expect a twc post about anything but “Snow day!” today? Nuh-uh. Just send me a reading list. I’ll catch up tomorrow. Maybe.

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Bright Line Test

There is one clear bright line that even idiots could use–if they could think to do so or suppress their basic sloth–to clearly choose candidates in races for all elective offices who would serve not only present interests but the interests of generations yet to come, and it’s found in a post I wrote a year ago…

Folks, the only difference of opinion that bears on elections of late is this: do you or do you not favor scrapping America in order to make it over into a fledgling third world country, as France, et al are attempting to do in Europe? Each and every one of the potential candidates [running for office as Dhims, and most who are running as Repubs *sigh*] are in favor of policies that would Frenchify America even further. It is still possible that the Republican’ts may come up with a candidate who is willing to at least drag his feet in approaching the ultimate goal of pulling America down to the level of Mexico or Saudi Arabia or Iran or even *shudder* France.

Remember: modern liberalism’s ultimate goal is to destroy the America the Founders left us (debate on this topic welcome, but be forewarned: I come armed with facts and I’m willing to use them. :-)). Modern “conservatism” (so-called) is simply modern liberalism lite, along the vein that R.L. Dabney observed of 19th century conservatism:

“Conservatism’s history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward to perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It tends to risk nothing serious for the sake of truth.”

You need know nothing of Dabney’s considerable credentials (or his occasional lapses into Southern apologetics–ed.) to observe the authority of his statement; it is self-evident in “compassionate conservatism” that cedes America’s borders to foreign state-sponsored invasion, etc. (Yeh, how about the Mexican government issuing GPS devices to aid illegal border crossings?)

Consider the wisdom of James L. Burnham once again:

“Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western civilization as it commits suicide.”

Repeat that mantra every time you hear a NON-LIBERAL modern lefty spout modern liberalism’s talking points:

“Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western civilization as it commits suicide.”

Repeat that mantra every time you hear a modern (FAKE) “conservative” say something assinine like, we need illegal aliens to “do the jobs Americans won’t do” (thank you very much for the lying meme, President Bush).

“Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western civilization as it commits suicide.”

Again: the bright line,

Do you or do you not favor scrapping America in order to make it over into a fledgling third world country, as France, et al are attempting to do in Europe?

Strangely, there’s slightly more hope for France, since I wrote those words a year ago. But less hope for the U.S., as the unholy alliance of governors effecting virtual sanctuary states (*cough* Mike Huckabee *cough*) for alien invaders (and cities doing the same for localities), Mass Media Podpeople, congresscritters *spit* and other politicians waving the “Run away! Run away!” flag, and all other kinds of surrenderist anti-westerners duke it out with a remnant of States and localities (and individuals) seeking to preserve what little remains of the Republic the Founders left us–even attempt to restore some little bits of it.

What will be the end of the conflict? I dunno. But more and more, unless folks seriously ask the bright line question over and over concerning every candidate for every elective position, our children and grandchildren can look forward to no longer being a part of a great nation.

Do you or do you not favor scrapping America in order to make it over into a fledgling third world country, as France, et al are attempting to do in Europe?

And if you don’t, what the HECK are you doing about it?

Trackposted to Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Mark My Words, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Big Dog’s Weblog, Nuke Gingrich, Right Truth, and DragonLady’s World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Add to my wish list

For years I had a 61-key midi controller sitting on my desktop (PC keyboard was underneath on a slideout tray). Kinda bulky and space consuming. The clip below shows something that’s now on my wish list: a PC/MIDI USB keyboard from Creative. OK, so the sounds are the typical rather low-quality Creative midi patches (I particularly dislike the strings patch), but it’s still a cool product, and used with better patches (Roland, say :-)), it’d be a nice addition. I like it, too, that when not in use, a cover for the MIDI keyboard converts it into a palm rest.

Yeh, I know the thing’s been around in earlier versions for a while, but I kinda need a new desktop-capable controller, and this one’s the best fit for my computer use I’ve seen. At $50 or so, the price is about right, too… if I can find it in stock for that. *sigh* Oh, well, $75 would be OK (and I’ve seen it marked up to that from Creative’s suggested retail in some places). Heck, my previous 61-key controller was about $250 (and I may find a use for that in the future, still).

No, the thing wouldn’t be useful for actually playing music (for one thing, it lacks the sustain pedal my old controller has, and for another, the keys are off-size), but it’d sure be useful for sketching out pieces in transcription software, which is all I really used the other one for, anyway.

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Interesting read…

…from a guy who has some knowledge of the subject. As Wikipedia (not always the best source, but close enough here) puts is, “Jerry Pournelle is a essayist and science fiction author. He holds advanced degrees in psychology, statistics, engineering and political science.”

The Voodoo Sciences

Even though its focus is not directed specifically at the science/politics interface, it’s worth reading as a prelude to considering how politics affects what is regarded as science in climatology, medicine, and other fields.

Writing elsewhere referring to the essay linked above, Pournelle does a nice shirt cuff precis of the essay:

“I long ago did an essay on “The Voodoo Science” in which I pointed out that novelists require only plausibility, lawyers need evidence, but science requires data — and also requires that ALL the data be taken into account, which means going outside closed systems to check with the real world. And that, I think, is the real difference between the fuzzy subjects and the sciences and the humanities: if you endlessly apply logic to a closed system with no chance of checking against reality, you had better have chosen the right closed system — and we have no way of knowing what that one is.”

Worth taking a couple of minutes out of your day to read and ponder, IMO.

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Dontcha Love All That Helpful Spam?

Another couple of comment spams got me thinking (not hard and not long, just twigged a couple of synapses):

“How to pick up women”

Well, I don’t need that info. Those days are long past. Although I do recall that I used to pick women up with ease. Why, I recall one whole day (when we were just dating, many, many moons ago), I picked my Wonder Woman up and walked around around an amusement park with her riding piggyback…

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Just for Fun: pico-brewing

I bottle condition the beers I make using a small shot of sugar and/or (sometimes) some of the trub, cos that’s the only way I really have of ensuring a good carbonation in the final product. OK, it also helps the flavors mature just a tad, as well. But since I add a tad of sugar to each bottle for the conditioning process, it does mean I have a lil sediment in every bottle–some more, some less.

So, as a lil experiment, I’ve been saving the sediment in one (clean) bottle and now I’m making a “one boittle pico-brew” out of it. *heh*

Added about a tablespoon of molasses and warm water, shook. Roasted some pearled barley (cos it’s what I had) and ground it up really fine; added a little Malt-O-Meal to that and ground it up some more; funneled about a tablespoon of that into the bottle, filled it with warm water, gently rolled it around a bit to get that mixed well, then placed the lid of the swingtop bottle loosely on top. Placed the bottle in my conditioning drawer. Last I looked, the top was acting as a kinda one-way airlock letting carbon dioxide out, but seemed to settle back on down after each lil mini-burp. Nice floculant on top & I can see it actually brewing.

It may be a tad high in sugar content, what with the molasses and malted grains, but… oh, well. 🙂

We’ll see how this turns out. Even though I used some trub-heavy sediment from the bottles, I don’t expect much in the way of hopsiness, and it’ll be REAL heavy on sediment (trub, in this case)… which I’ll save when I decant it into another bottle for further conditioning.

Heck. I just thought: shoulda added some coffee to it. *heh* Maybe next time, if this turns out at all well…

*heh*

Yeh, weird. And just for fun. Not going to count as one of my “real” brewing experiments, but might just turn out semi-drinkable anyway.

And the trub? Gonna make some bread. In fact, I have some I saved and dried just for that purpose. Think maybe I’ll make some “beer bread” tonight.

BTW, you know the oldest known beer recipe used bread to make the beer. In fact, it seems from the context of the Sumerian text that’s been translated that beer was thought of as something like liquid bread (as it appears some Medieval monastic orders also thought).

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T-13, 2.02: A Love-Hate Relationship

(*heh* Bet you were expecting something about politics. Nope, politics isn’t a love-hate relationship for me. *sigh* You work it out… )

Regular readers probably know by now that I have a love-hate relationship with Me$$y$oft’$ products: I kinda love to hate ’em. *heh* Oh, I use Me$$y$oft’$ products pretty regularly (in fact, I’m writing this post on a Windows 2000 machine–that’s one of only two versions of Windows I don’t habitually think of as “Windoze”), and I do like some features of more than a few of Me$$y$oft’$ products, but… there are more than 13 things to hate about Me$$y$oft’$ products and practices. In no particular order until the last:

13. Feature creep. Oh, every software publisher does it, but with Me$$y$oft’$ products it’s a major element of every “upgrade”: how many unecessary “features” can be added to clutter up the interface and contribute to

12. Bloating. Example: Windows 95 could comfortably (safely, with the full needs of the OS considered) be installed on a hard drive with as little as 100MB free space (by contrast, my first Win3.1 system only had a 100MB hard drive and only about 1/10 of that was the OS). Windows 98 needed 2-2.5 times as much space for a comfortable installation and Win2KPro, nearly 10X as much! XP? 2 gigs of hard drive space is just about right. Have the OSes been 10X-100X better? Nope (although THE sweet spot, Windows 2000 Pro, was many, many, many times better than the old Win 3.1 or Win95 OSes, IMO). The same applies across the board to M$ applications, for example…

11. FrontPage. Vermeer FrontPage 1.0 was pretty good. Nice interface, decent web page output, etc. Bought by M$ and “twiddled with” to brand as M$ Frontpage 1.1. Still pretty good output, easy WYSIWYG editing. Not all that bad. Then M$ began to “tweak” it and add features. By the time FrontPage 98 was out, it was full of “features” that bloated the product and…

10. Fixed things that weren’t broken until they were. Yep. M$’s goal seems to be to remake the web in its own image, and so FrontPage, by FP98, was putting out all kindsa non standards-compliant gibberish (just the kind of thing M$’s non-standards-compliant browser likes). Pretty much ditto with M$ Office: M$ kept adding “features” and changing file formats (probably just to frustrate folks who were using other companies’ products that’d learned to “play well” with M$ Office and inconvenience users of those products). Result: bloatware that did NOT play nicely with others.

9. Active X. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I could do a T-13 just on things to hate about Active X. Start with the security nightmares and extend on to and through its sluggishness, memory footprint and on and on. Hate it.

8. Internet Exploder: the world’s crappiest browser (and that’s exactly how any copy of IE I install or manage is branded: “Internet Exploder, the world’s crappiest browser” *heh*). Heck, I even like Lynx better, and it’s command line only. At least it is pretty safe to use, unlike–still!–Internet Exploder. And is there ANY other modern browser that’s LESS standards-compliant? No. (Yes, I keep copies around just so I can help the poor benighted souls who still use it regularly.) Even in its latest “Me Too!” interation, it’s at least a generation behind modern browsers in both features and standards-compliance. Crappy browser, simply crappy.

7. OS “activation”. Can you say, “We think ALL of our customers are crooks, thieves and liars”? Does it stop piracy? Nope. Scemes to avoid activation abound. All M$’s activation scheme has done is inconvenience ethical users. Hmmm, seems M$ has finally (after what, seven or so years?) twigged to the fact that its activation scheme is stupid: WinXP SP3 will relax it a lot and when Vista shipped, it offered a way to avoid it altogether… Still, it’s a pain in the neck (although my real opinion is that the pain is actually located somewhere south of there) and a slap in the face to millions of honest users.

6. Sloppy code. It’s a well-earned meme: buying M$ “gold code” final products is simply buying “shrink-wrapped betaware” complete with a plethora of bugs and traps and security holes, Oh! My! Only fools (and folks who test software until it breaks on purpose) buy the first iteration of a M$ product version “upgrade,” because it WILL break something on your machine. Count on it. Shrink wrap beta. Wait for the first few patches to come through. Patch one will fix security holes M$ is willing to admit they know about (but not willing to admit they already knew about before they shipped the product, even it it’s true). Patch two will fix the things patch one broke, etc. *heh* Maybe.

5. Speaking of which, how long does it take to fix all those security holes? Take Internet Exploder, for example. Dozens more known security holes uncovered every year and M$ almost always takes months and months and months to get around to patching the damned thing (now, that wasn’t a theological assessment of the thing but a fervent wish). Other browsers, maintained by more ethical support and development staffs, usually plug security holes within a day (or days, maybe in extreme cases weeks) or so of discovery. M$ products in general vs. products from other sources: pretty comparable time scale on plugging security holes. Why? M$ just doesn’t seem to care until and unless enough poressure’s brought to bear to force it to patch its products. See #1

4. Crappy websites. M$-run websites. *sigh* Active X. See #9. Buggy, broken, messy non-compliant html and xhtml. (Yeh, I’m not much better any more, but their coders do this stuff for a,living. You’d think they’d at least try to get it right! Instead of doing it the M$ way. *heh*)

3. Cluelessness. Vista. Need I say more? The most useless downgrade of OS I have seen since Windows Muppet Edition (ME). Extravagant resource hog. Almost all the real feature upgrades promised by M$ missing (cos M$ couldn’t implement ’em and make its marketing schedule for milking the cattle of more $$). And Vista’s just the most recent example oif M$’s cluelessness. For a company with so many really smart people involved, dumb, really dumb.

2. A lot of the above boils down to the fact that M$ does things three ways: the right way (surprisingly often. Seriously), the wrong way and the M$ way. The last two are prevalent enough to seem almost overwhelming, though. *sigh*

And number 1?

Attitude: arrogance. It’s the “Do things the M$ way or screw you,” attitude that really chaps me off. It’s almost as bad as Apple that way. Not quite, but almost. *heh*

Tracked back to the Thursday Thirteen Hub and Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Woman Honor Thyself, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, Celebrity Smack, The Pink Flamingo, The Amboy Times, Big Dog’s Weblog, Leaning Straight Up, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, and Adeline and Hazel, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.