Month: July 2005

Yes, we’ve just returned from Las Vegas, where the temperature broke all sorts of known records– 117 degrees on Tuesday, tying for hottest ever recorded there. Yipes. And 95 degrees for the low, making it the highest low ever. Second highest was 93 on Sunday. And it’s been above 115 for the past four days. And on and on and ugh.

Oh, and there’s a monsoon on the way. So soon it’ll be hot, flooded, and muggy for the weekend. Lucky them.

(Yes, I went to Vegas to recover from San Diego Comic-Con. I am truly nutso.)

Man. Not a fun voyage out to San Diego. A six hour trip turning into thirteen with delays, layovers, missed connections and… let’s just say it’s a good thing I had the Firefly DVDs with me, or some people would have been killed.

My initial post on the journey seems to have been eaten by the net traffic jams, much to my irritation, so I’ll have to give floating con reports later. Weather report: hazy and humid, but nowhere near as hot as it is inland. Time to dig out the sunscreen… and here’s hoping that this post goes through, as the net connection in the hotel is very intermittent, probably from overuse.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:

It was that rat bastard Cooper:

“By any definition, he burned Karl Rove,” Luskin said of Cooper. “If you read what Karl said to him and read how Cooper characterizes it in the article, he really spins it in a pretty ugly fashion to make it seem like people in the White House were affirmatively reaching out to reporters to try to get them to them to report negative information about Plame.”

Oooh. That’s dangerous stuff there. It may not be the smartest thing in the world for Karl Rove’s lawyer to be disparaging Matt Cooper on the day before he testifies, do you think? They only know what one e-mail says and they have no idea what Cooper is going to say. Bizarre.

(Via Hullabaloo.)

Sure, blame the media, it’s always worked before.

A few notes on this particular spin tactic: it doesn’t matter that Cooper burned Rove legally. The CRIME was Rove telling anybody without the required security clearance that Joseph Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent. Doesn’t matter if Rove told his priest, his Russian mistress, his secretary, or his mommy. If they didn’t have the security clearance, he was guilty. The fact that he told somebody with major media access was just insult to injury.

As for me, I do blame the media. Cooper’s been sitting on this information for two years. He’s let the crime go unreported for two years, and he knew who and what was involved. In the meantime, Rove has had access to even more secure information, and Bush trusted him enough to promote him. Don’t you think it would have been nice for Cooper to use his soapbox and let the American people know before the election? Heck, don’t you think Bush should have known as soon as possible?

Of course, that presupposes the idea that Bush didn’t already know, doesn’t it?

I got this bad idea from Pandemic of Brainlessness:

July 11, 2005
The glamorous Maria Bartiromo was just on CNBC talking globalism (and China in particular) with two Wall Street cretins. China is a great play said Cretin No. 1 because they have 300 million potential middle class customers for America’s manufacturers. Excuse me, what do we still make that the Chinese either can’t make themselves or can’t copy five minutes from now?

As Cretin No. 2 waxed effulgent over China’s fabulous prospects for growth, CNBC flashed a bunch of American brand logos across the screen, including Pepsi Cola and Exxon-Mobil. These companies are going to so clean up over there, Cretin No. 1 chimed in, or the shareholders are going to want to know the reason why.

Yeah, soda pop is really hard to make. They’ll have to buy it from us. You thought computers were hard? There are four ingredients in soda pop (water, sugar, favoring, coloring ) and you have to get the proportions just right or it don’t come out good!…

The public discussion over the global economy is symptomatic of America’s new pandemic of brainlessness, the mainstream media especially. The head cheerleader, of course, has been Tom Friedman of the New York Times, author of The World Is Flat. Friedman and the rest of the cheerleading squad believe that that the global economy is a permanent institution. Now that it is established, we can only expect more of it. More and better. Forever.

What all these cretins seem to miss is the cold hard fact that today’s transient global economic relations are a product of very special transient circumstances, namely, relative world peace and absolutely reliable supplies of cheap energy. Subtract either of these elements from the equation and you will see globalism evaporate so quickly it will suck the air out of your lungs.

Also, it must be obvious that relative world peace depends on equitable distribution of cheap energy. If the industrial nations don’t get the oil and gas they need at a tolerable price, they are going to get very cranky, and when nations get cranky, peace itself is in short supply.

Three quarters of the world’s oil is in the eastern hemisphere — two-thirds of the total is in the Middle east alone. Guess what? All of it is a lot closer to China than it is to us. Some of it they can walk to. Do you have any idea how desperate for oil both China and America are going to be in five years? Do you have a clue how tapped out America’s WalMart shoppers are going to be as jobs vanish and the value of a dollar craters in the face of runaway energy prices?

Globalism is yesterday’s tomorrow. The future is about living locally on a much smaller scale. Pepsi Cola and Exxon-Mobil are exactly the kind of gigantic enterprises that are going to wither and die over the next decade. China is not tomorrow’s geopolitical colossus, it’s a geopolitical super train wreck waiting to collide with the reality of its environmental devastation, population overshoot, and energy starvation. Americans will be lucky if they can do each other’s laundry ten years from now, let alone sell massive amounts of soda pop to people twelve thousand miles away.

Is it an accident that there is so much Realty TV in America when, in fact, there is so little reality?

(Via Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler.)

Somehow, it put me in line of the great exchange of dialogue from Get Shorty, between John Travolta and Delroy Lindo about coming up with a screenplay:

EClark asks why I haven’t commented on the Kelo vs. New London decision. Probably was just busy.

I happen to think it’s a pretty bad decision, but that’s because it’s a particularly bad case. But, as the Shinecock Indians say, So what else is new?

My big complaint is that there’s no obvious way to judge “the best interests” here. I think a case like this screams for Heinlein’s tax solution from The Number Of The Beast…

Taxation is low, simple– and contains a surprise. The Federal government is supported by a head tax paid by the States , and is mostly for military and foreign affairs. This state derives most of it’s revenue from real estate taxes. It is a uniform rate set annually, with no property exempted, not even churches, hospitals, or schools– or roads; the best roads are toll roads.

The surprise lies in this: The owner appraises his own property.

There is a sting in the tail: Anyone can buy property against the owner’s wishes at the appraisal the owner placed on it. The owner can hang on only by raising his appraisal at once to a figure so high that no buyer wants it– and pay three years back taxes at his new appraisal.

In this vein, I’m quite happy to hear about the folks who are trying to use eminent domain to grab Justice Souter’s home to build a hotel.

And now, off to San Diego. See you all there– I’ll be at the IDW panel and Comics Weblogs panel, in the audience at least, and I wrote a few questions for the fan/pro trivia contest. Feel free to say hi if you see me.

Just why hasn’t anyone gotten around to telling me about Brewster Rockit? Hmm?

This via the Associated Press

Report: State employees’ lack of writing skills cost nearly $250M

States spend nearly a quarter of a billion dollars a year on remedial writing instruction for their employees, according to a new report that says the indirect costs of sloppy writing probably hurt taxpayers even more.

The National Commission on Writing, in a report to be released Tuesday, says that good writing skills are at least as important in the public sector as in private industry. Poor writing not only befuddles citizens but also slows down the government as bureaucrats struggle with unclear instructions or have to redo poorly written work.

“It’s impossible to calculate the ultimate cost of lost productivity because people have to read things two and three times,” said Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, vice chairman of the National
…

While two-thirds of companies surveyed in the 2004 report said writing was an important responsibility for workers, 100% of the 49 states responding to the anonymous survey said it was. More than 75% said they take writing skills into account when hiring.

“You have to be able to write, convert an idea and turn it into words,” said Bob Kerrey, the former U.S. senator and governor from Nebraska, who is chairman of the commission.

In public office, “I read things that were absolutely incomprehensible,” Kerrey said. He shudders to think how Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, published 229 years ago Monday, would have read in standard, government-worker bureaucrat-speak.

“It would be 10 times as long, one-tenth as comprehensive, and would have lacked all inspiration,” Kerrey said.

(Via d r i f t g l a s s.)

Go back to the post about Toyota and math teachers.

The biggest problem I have with certain religious and political movements is that it’s okay not to think. Mind control to make people dumber (as opposed to what? Controlling your mind to make yourself smarter, of course) and this is what you get.

And it confuses me to this day– why do people want to create a class of dummies they can rule over? Great, then you run an army of morons. Can anyone possibly be proud of that?

‘Red Ken’ Livingstone, Mayor of London

“I want to say one thing, specifically to the world today — this was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful, it was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers, it was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian … young and old … that isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted fate, it is an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder.”

(Via MaxSpeak, You Listen!.)

I suspect that telemarketers have found a way around the do-not-call list: by pretending that they’re conducting a poll.

I just got a call from a “pollster” asking about the economy and problems in the US that ended right after they found out I had less than $500,000 in cash to invest in anything.

Either that, or pollsters don’t care about the opinions of folks who make less than $150,000 a year. Yes, they asked about that too.

…occasionally someone else writes the blog post I would have anyway. In this case, it’s TBogg:

YRNC 2005 Chairman Nathan Taylor has been responding to attacks by leftists who threaten protests at the 2005 Young Republican Convention.

‘In recent weeks I have received numerous e-mails from leftist groups bent on infiltrating the Convention and protesting the appearance of veterans of the War on Terror. We will not allow these cowards to dishonor our servicemen,’ stated Taylor.

Actually the protestors are protesting the fact that able-bodied (and we’re being generous here) young Republicans like Nathan are ducking out on their patriotic responsibilities and avoiding a war that they wave their little pom-poms for. That Nathan would see this as an attack on the servicemen that they say they are planning to ‘honor’ would mean that ol’ Nate plans on adding Weasel to his resume right after Chickenhawk and ‘charges-dropped embezzler’. He just can’t seem to stop from hiding behind others when attacked.”