Not So Fast

Politicians shoveling jobs at people to get them to shut up?! I’m shocked, shocked to discover this sort of thing going on. Giving straight up cash has got to be illegal (I sincerely hope), is it surprising they just do it a different way?

I may n0t have mentioned my dislike of Lost and it being lumped into the science fiction genre before, but Wil and Levar nail it here.  (skip to 8:45)

The clown sweatered Wesley on a unicorn pegasus kitten vs.the Scalz-orc.

Wikileaks, using  TOR routers to get information, secret networks infiltrating NGO and government computers, I smell a movie.

I had no idea that cops had to stop questioning you if you invoke your Miranda rights.  Now you have to do that out loud. Of course, my knowledge of Miranda comes mostly from cop shows.

I loved this song when I was much younger and was suddenly reminded of it today. It didn’t age as badly as I thought it would. That whole “pump it up” part wasn’t in the radio edit. Thankfully.

Appalling ads from the 70s. Thank goodness I don’t remember much from that decade.

Why liberalism overreaches. And how to stop it.

Bob Uecker and Jim Powell discussing the furries convention in their hotel while calling a Brewers game.

“…and Braun hits a three run homer. Wow what a blast! Anyhow the ball is being catered by Purina.”

You can borrow from the future for only so long. Sooner or later someone has to pay. And guess what?

So the welfare state is discredited. In the past, we used to be warned that static population growth, vast public-sector employment, early and generous retirement benefits, and high taxes were not sustainable. In recent years, those lectures were caricatured as partisan or hypothetical. No longer. The Greek meltdown — with Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain on the brink — has shown that European socialism does not work. Bankruptcy, not politics, is the final arbiter: Individuals, firms, and nations either buy particular bonds or they don’t. And a nation like Greece, in turn, either pays what it has borrowed or it doesn’t. All the op-eds in the New York Times cannot change that fact.

RELATED: I’m glad that the lousy economy and the East Anglia selective data email debacle has slowed the green movement before they saddled us with even more debt for projects that would, I have no doubt, have had massive, expensive, unintended consequences as politicians tried to be seen to be doing something.

Visualizations of how much sugar is in various drinks.

Related: How much caffeine is in various drinks.

By far, the best variation on the 3 wolf moon shirt ever.

It’s Towel Day.

While the books are brilliant, I’m not about to walk around with a towel all day.

New Firefly fan film coming out this year. Here’s the trailer:

You know, I like swing music, could we bring some metal sensibilities into it because that would make it AWESOME!

You can play the Google logo today.

Supernova is spewing out calcium. It’s just not one of the elements I think about when I think “SPACE”.

Birds prefer better nutrition to arbitrary man-made labels.  Tangentially, I have never understood the dislike of genetically modified foods. High protein, glow-in-the-dark caulicarrocorn? Bring it on.

How animals spend their day.

Does the Taliban/Osama not know that America has a West Coast? Or middle? At first it’s like, ha they’ll never attack here, but now it’s getting insulting. Granted, 90% of American’s couldn’t point out Afghanistan or Iran on a map, but I expect better of a group that makes hating a place their raison d’ete.

I’m really going to regret this post should an attack happen anywhere not on the East Coast.

They’re not from earth, which obviously makes them ideal representatives for the Olympics.

I’m looking forward to the 2012 Olympics, mostly because it means more Boris in the news.

Lost bodies of work that would have been useful for humanity to have. [Cracked, NSFW;  you learn, and you laugh at the inappropriate pictures]

What’s going on in Thailand. Kind of, it does start in the middle of the story. So, Thaskin and the coup d’etat.

Pictures, because that’s too many words.

Mark Steyn. Mockery is one of the best weapons against totalitarianism. One of the best non-violent weapons, I guess I should specify.

Worries of inflation ease as worries of deflation grow. At least the economists always have something to worry about. Keeps them off the streets at night.

Great Britain (and Canada, to a lesser degree) has helpfully gone on ahead of us and shown us the way.

None of the above are “right-wing” in any sense that Steyn or Rumsfeld or Cheney would recognize the term. Mrs. Duffy is a lifelong Labour voter; Mr. Newman is one of those pox-on-all-their-houses types; the property company that fired Mr. Nicholson is so wretchedly politically correct it employed him as “Head of Sustainability,” a title of near parodic bogusness. Yet all fell afoul of Lord Justice Laws’ “irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary” laws. Because it’s hard not to. Because once you establish the principle that the state has the right to police ideas, sooner or later one of yours will catch their eye.

…

Real “rights” are restraints upon the state—“negative” rights, as constitutionalists have it; they delineate the limits of the sovereign’s power. But in the modern era “rights” are baubles in the state’s gift, and the sovereign confers them at the expense of individual liberty. Truly, this is an Orwellian assault on the very foundations of freedom.

The Senate findings on the Abdulmutallab failures. Not Abdulmutallab’s, the government’s. Which, from my reading, amounts to; no one talks to each other. Wasn’t that why we got the DHS? And so why have we spent millions of dollars creating another layer of bureaucracy to coordinate these sorts of things (I said laughing at the irony)?

As for the rest, it has to be hard to walk the line between security and police state.  Government agencies should have to have compelling reasons to put people on watch lists. But once they have reasons the response should be fast, decisive and without second-guessing the legal ramifications. I doubt it is possible to nail that line down and we’ll just have to stagger along, hopefully not straying too far to either side.

You may remember the article discussing why we don’t hate communists like we hate Nazis.

Here’s a bit of a response and then a rebuttal. And as with all (okay, maybe not all, but every one I’ve ever heard) debates, they argue past each other. I think Radosh is being a bit nit-picky and missing the original point, but hey, I’m not a author or fellow or anything like that.

The Geek Alphabet. It’s pretty awesome.

An actually funny SNL skit. Okay, maybe mildly amusing is a better term. I give them credit for not being actively annoying.

The USGS has a video about it here.

The Big Picture has pictures, oddly enough. #26’s caption is particularly amusing.

Nova’s Zombie Mountain Will Eat Your Brains is overwrought, but does have a very nice depiction of the first eruption.

It didn’t impact me at all  since I lived in South Gate, at the time. But my grandparents got us little vials of authentic ash from it. And a coconut from Hawaii.

The 10 worst internet ideas. Also missing, pop-under ads.

Youtube is 5 years old now. Geez, I remember when we had to post our videos as animated gifs. Those were the days…

The last space shuttle Atlantis launch is today at 2:20pm EDT. You can watch it live here.

And then I guess we sit around and twiddle our thumbs hoping we don’t need to get into space for anything, like science.

Mythbusters bridge of duct tape.

The lousy global economy is showing the cracks in everyone’s big plans. The Euro, Kyoto.

A dirt cheap USB microscope for your cell phone. Not actually available yet, but still, awesome.

Communism.

Bureaucracy. The hardest word to spell in the English language. I blame the French.

A tiny violin plays for Somalian pirates as they claim Russia shot them instead of just turning them adrift on the ocean.

UPDATE: Russia kills the organizers of the March metro bombings.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said there had been no option but to kill the “terrorists”.

“Those who put up resistance have to be eliminated – you cannot show pity,” the Russian leader was reported as saying at a meeting with Mr Bortnikov.

If they would just confine themselves to the guilty, which I doubt they do, I would applaud their technique.

Jupiter is trying a new look. Scientists don’t know why. I’m guessing because it’s about to collapse into a star.

There’s loose talk (again) about the government seizing 401(k)s and turning them into a Social Security like fund. Because that’s worked so well we need to have 401(k)s in the first place, if we don’t want to starve in our old age.

Jeremy Clarkson talks about class warfare and the Porshe 911 GT3.

Sweden thinks so.

New technology, new complaints about people stealing IP. [Cracked, NSFW]

Voyager 2 is having problems communicating. It’s going to be mad when it comes back.

Rubik’s Cube, Android, Legos.

A really cool interactive 360 degree view of Paris (Danger: it plays music).

The future is out there and they’re going to figure it out. Of course, we know the flaw of psychohistory is that it can’t predict the actions of an individual which will allow an telempathic megalomaniac to take over the universe. Oops.

Lileks has several fantastic lines in this essay. Which I will now spoil for you by quoting. (Kidding, there’s more in there.)

If you react otherwise, you’re a squinty-eyed Bubba who thinks this here country started goin’ downhill (spit) since we started lettin’ Veetner-mesians (spit) come in and run restaurants. Not saying they don’t make good rice because they do ‘n all, but this all here’s a Christian nation. And ah say that in full reee-cog-nition of the Deism of some Founders, inasmuch you can place Deism outside of the bound’ry of angnostercism and link it to yer monotheistic assumptions.

…

It must be terribly frustrating to the jihadis: we’re completely upfront about our goals and rationales, and they still don’t take us seriously. What do we have to do?

Apparently there’s some flooding or something in Nashville. I wish every disaster got this level of coverage instead of the endless hours of mindless speculation based on very few facts we normally get with a disaster.

What Nashville really needs is for some European to complain that the US can’t take care of its own people. That’ll get the help pouring in.

I want tacos.

Pictures from the Vietnam War.

I’m not saying “Hurray, coat the Gulf of Mexico in oil!” but some perspective on how much oil has been spilled is a good thing. When the news is reporting that a second, yes a second, bird has been rescued from the oil, it might be time to tone down the rhetoric a bit.

Facebook’s eroding privacy policy in handy timeline form. It’s about time for a competitor to pop up and steal everyone away.

Denver Post has an awesome collection of WWII Pacific Theater pictures.

Muppet’s Bohemian Rhapsody was nominated for a couple of Webby’s so they gave us an audio commentary and Animal calling his mama.

“Something needs to be done,” said Jim Kleczka, a doctor at Froedtert Hospital and the Medical College of Wisconsin who participated in a news conference Tuesday with Uecker. “He’s at high risk of something bad happening.”

Dumb it down, Poindexter.

Japan is going to launch a space yacht with solar sails.

Everything I know about solar sails I learned from that one DS9 episode where Sisko rebuilt one and got blown into Cardassian space, so I don’t really have much to add here except I hope that the Japanese one doesn’t get sucked through a tachyon eddy and into enemy space.

Clean air, bad for the environment.

I couldn’t care less about Iron Man 2 or AC/DC, but this is an awesome lightshow.

8 minute HD video of the first 30 seconds of the Apollo 11 launch.

Why Congress can’t win against Unintended Consequences.

The United States Code — containing federal statutory law — is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117pages long and composes226volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can’t be aware of all the real-world complications it’s producing, it can’t even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it’s doing.

Google Streetview team is scanning private wifi networks and recording MAC addresses in Germany.

Bonus quote:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said internet users shouldn’t worry about privacy unless they have something to hide.

Jonah Goldberg has a long, but good, look at what socialism is and what it looks like in America today.

Because Marxism was taken seriously as an economic theory for so long, it gave socialism an empirical patina that it otherwise lacked. But at its core, socialism remains a rationalization for a fundamentally tribal and premodern understanding of economics.

The “pragmatic” Obama is only interested in “what works” as long as “what works” involves a significantly expanded role for government. In this sense, Obama is a practitioner of the Third Way, the governing approach most successfully trumpeted by Blair, who claimed to have found a “third way” that rejected the false premises of both Left and Right and therebylocated a “smarter” approach to expanding government. The powerful appeal of this idea lies in the fact that it sounds as if its adherents have rejected ideological dogmatism and gone beyond those “false choices.” Thus, a leader can both provide health care to 32 million people and save money, or, as Obama likes to say, “bend the cost curve down.” But in not choosing, Obama is choosing. He is choosing the path of government control, which is what the Third Way inevitably does and is intended to do.

John Tesh rocking out + Zappa dance moves = horror of a level unknown to mankind before now.

The Big Picture has pictures of Sudan what with the voting thing going on.

Number 37 was particularly striking to me.  I carry more personal possessions on me than she has in her entire room.

As someone  who actually has a stake in this and has kept an loose eye on the situation, Walt Minnick has been a better congressman than the previous (Republican) one. The Republicans in Idaho better bring some game if they want back in.

Hulu is going to start charging for older episodes and put in more commercials.