It's still morning, right?

Posted by: andy at 04:50 AM | Comments (134)
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Well, the garden thread was supposed to be a parody sing along themed one, but that went south in a hurry. However, it just so happens I have a song I wrote to the tune of “Bonnie Blue Flag” back when the Tea Party was new, and that one goes great in an OT political thread. Here's the original song if you're not familiar with it, it was almost as popular as “Dixie” in the CSA. From the movie Gods and Generals:
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Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:26 AM | Comments (155)
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Thanks to Niedermeyer's Dead Horse and the cobs for helping me put this together.

Do you think your kids would appreciate having their Easter baskets stuffed with healthier items? Well sure they would!!! What kid wouldn't love to find an Easter basket stuffed with plastic eggs, inside of which are dried fruits??!!

But the best suggestions have to be: Tea, and Stationery.

Yes, stationery. Because children love quality writing paper.

You know, if you give your kid tea and stationery for Easter, you're kind of giving them permission to kill you in your sleep.

Might as well go whole hog and give your kid a Pet Fart (TM) as a gift.

And while you're breaking your children's hearts with gag gifts for Easter, you might keep in mind that some people treat even rats better than that:
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Posted by: Ace at 05:03 PM | Comments (880)
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Worst ever avalanche on Mount Everest kills 12 guides, with four people still unaccounted for.

Why so many guides and few climbers? Well... because Sherpas are really the climbers, and every season, they prepare the climb with predeployed supplies and equipment (and checking ropes and such) for the "climbing season."

With peak season just days away [I see what you did there -- ace], Sherpas and guides are busy preparing for the trek up the highest peak in the world.

"The Sherpa guides were carrying up equipment and other necessities for climbers when the disaster happened," a spokesman for Nepal's Tourism Ministry, Mohan Krishna Sapkota, told the AFP news agency.

Before a climber begins the assent, hired Sherpas set up camps at higher altitudes and fix routes and ropes on the slopes above.

Of course climbing Mount Everest is a serious achievement for anyone.

Still, you know. It's always strange to celebrate a climber when Sherpas are going up the mountain all the time. As their day job. Let's face it, they're the climbers. The "climbers" are really the luggage.

Don't ever call them socialist, but it just so happens that David Axelrod has been hired by a socialist candidate for UK prime minister.

The British Labour Party has appointed David Axelrod as a strategic adviser to Ed Miliband's 2015 campaign. Axelrod, who went on to serve as a senior adviser to President Obama after acting as an adviser on the president's 2008 campaign, will reportedly be paid a six-figure sum for his work.

These government-connected socialists do live well, don't they?

You probably won't believe this, but Politico seems to have a crush on Hillary Clinton.

Incidentally, while the left celebrates Hillary's soon-to-be electorally-useful Grandmother Status, they also attack Drudge for the "ageist" attack of calling her a grandma.

Which is what they're doing. Oh but right, they're talking up how that will make her the Best President Ever so it's different.

Oh, and just two weeks after NBC warned the country about the dangers of billionaires spending wads of money to influence elections, Mike Bloomberg appeared on NBC to publicize his donation of $50 million to, get this, "grassroots organizations," the media calls them, to fight gun rights.

NBC forgot to ask Michael Bloomberg about the perils of billionaires buying elections.

Ah well, I'm sure it just slipped their minds.

Breaking: Obama's a nasty little prick.

@RDBrewer4 sent me this audio of Quentin Tarantino's commentary for True Romance, specifically the "Sicilian speech" scene. (Oh, yeah, he didn't direct it, but he provides commentary as the writer.) Here's the part about the Sicilian speech, but I've listened to most of the whole thing, and I think it's a very good commentary.

Tarantino is not as annoying as he usually is, and he basically uses the commentary to tell the early story of his career (he wrote, in order, True Romance, Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction within a few years). It's pretty interesting, so long as you like any of those movies.

He also makes a few interesting observations, like his idea that a movie should be so autobiographically revealing about yourself that if you watch it a few years later, you should be embarrassed at how much of yourself you've exposed. He says he did this with his fantasy/juvenile portrayal of what an awesome girlfriend would be like with the Alabama character (he had never had a girlfriend at that point, and he was 25, so his idea of a girlfriend was entirely speculative and hypothetical) and I guess the Clarence character, who is a Tarantino Mary Sue.

So, if you thought, "Gee this Alabama character sure seems like an idealized wish-fulfillment creation of a romantically-frustrated arrested-development 25-year-old juvenile who knows almost nothing about actual women," Yup. You nailed it.

Worth a listen.

By the way, speaking of Bunnies, did you know people actually put rabbits through show competitions, including agility courses?

They do. There are a lot of videos like this on YouTube.
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Posted by: Ace at 03:12 PM | Comments (260)
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Brief book review. I read this a while ago. It's pretty good.

The premise -- which is a bit dodgy, but I'll grant the writer some latitude in establishing his premise -- is that a single member of a Mars exploration crew is left behind, presumed dead, when the entire team evacuates during a high-powered windstorm that threatens to destroy their camp.

The lone survivor -- the "Martian" of the title -- regains consciousness and takes stock of his situation. There is no possible hope of rescue for four years. He has enough food for something like 300 days (50 days of food for each of the six planned crewmen). So he has to extend his 300 days of food into something like 1450 days.

I mean 1450 "sols." You can't say "day" because a day is an actual measure of time corresponding to 24 hours. A Martian "day" is not the same length of an earth day (though it's pretty damn close), so instead it's called a "sol," which I guess is short for solar cycle.

The "Martian" basically becomes a Prepper. He uses almost all of the floorspace of his habitation unit -- and almost all of his excrement -- as a makeshift farm for growing the highest-energy-density food possible, potatoes. He realizes he also won't have enough water to grow his potatoes, so he's forced to engage in some dangerous chemistry to synthesize hundreds of liters of water out of oxygen and... rocket fuel. And he has to do perform various cannibalizations and modifications to his Mars Rover Vehicles, because his only hope of escape -- 1450 sols down the road -- is making a dangerous and lengthy overland journey over the perilously high/abyssally low Martian terrain to the site of the anticipated landing zone for the next Mars mission.

It's a pretty fun adventure/survival/settler book. (The book does not mention it at all, but it does suggest to a reader (or at least this reader) the travails faced by the early American colonists, or the Antarctic explorers. It's just kind of implicit in this sort of story, without having to be mentioned.)

It's mostly a collection of his diary entries while on Mars. I always feel this is a cheat, because it permits a writer to resort to a very bloggy, casual style of writing in which very little work is exerted. But it mostly works, and I guess is justifiable. This sort of epistolatory novel has a long tradition, after all. Robinson Crusoe was also journal entries, if I remember from the last time I read it. (When I say "I read it" I mean I briefly skimmed the Wikipedia entry.) more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:31 PM | Comments (137)
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Yup.

Oh, here was the real and credible threat he posted on Google+:

Intellectual Winter is Coming

Scary, huh? Yeah, that T-shirt is a quote from Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones.

It's a nerd culture t-shirt, in other words. The "fire" she's threatening people with? Yeah, comes from fire-breathing dragons.

But the professor has literally been suspended and is being investigated for this scary death threat.

But one contact — a dean — who was notified automatically via Google that the picture had been posted apparently took it as a threat. In an e-mail, Jim Miller, the college’s executive director for human resources, told Schmidt to meet with him and two other administrators immediately in light of the “threatening e-mail.” …

Schmidt said he met with the administrators, including a security official, in one of their offices and was questioned repeatedly about the picture’s meaning and the popularity of “Game of Thrones.”

Schmidt said Miller asked him to use Google to verify the phrase, which he did, showing approximately 4 million hits. The professor said he asked why the photo had set off such a reaction, and that the security official said that “fire” could be a kind of proxy for “AK-47s.”

Well, in fairness, the type of dragon alluded to is an "Assault Dragon," with extended stomach-magazines for additional literal fire-power.

Plus, "that part that goes down" (i.e., a tail).

It gets worse:

Schmidt believes the school is acting not to protect students from potential threats, but to retaliate against him. A week before being placed on leave, Schmidt filed a grievance against the school because he was passed up for a sabbatical.

Here's how Bergen Community College covers itself in further glory: by doubling down.

[Bergen Community College President Kay] Walter said she did not believe that the college had acted unfairly, especially considering that there were three school shootings nationwide in January, prior to SchmidtÂ’s post.

Well that's not the sort of sub-moronic utterance I associate with community colleges at all.

The professor is suspended, without pay, until he can pass a psych exam showing he is not a threat to the school.

So that's it, then: It's Idiocracy. We are a stupid, stupid people, and like most deeply stupid people, we are increasingly proud of our stupidity.

The greatest offense you can inflict on a stupid, ignorant person is to tell him something he doesn't know, and there's no possible way to avoid this offense, because the list of things he does not know is vast.

And he'll hate you for telling him something he didn't know. And he will mock you for having known this thing, and, if he can get away with it, he will inflict punishment on you. Corporeal punishment, if he's bigger than you, and if he's not bigger than you, which will usually be the case, he will resort to the more cowardly method of punishment favored by the weakling, to wit, social/political/bureaucratic punishment.

All for having made a f***ing moron felt briefly ashamed about not knowing something.

In no case will the proudly ignorant ever just laugh off their moment of revealed ignorance and apologize for the misunderstanding, because the thick-headed do not know the things it's okay not to know. That is, it's okay to not know character quotes from Game of Thrones; it's just a nerd-cult tv show and book series. Who cares if you don't know the quote, or never heard of Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons?

But the stupid know so little they cannot differentiate between those things they should be ashamed of being ignorant of and those that they shouldn't, so, always fighting from the position of a defensive flinch, they feel ashamed about being ignorant of everything, which would be fine, but being stupid, and therefore, in the center of themselves, aggressive and hostile, they lash out at their phantasmal "oppressors" by any means they can.

In related news, civilization itself was a major misstep and that error probably should be corrected as soon as possible.

Posted by: Ace at 11:33 AM | Comments (292)
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I think this problem can be subsumed under my general political observation that "People are just awful."

And there's really no way around that, is there?

Best we can do is mitigate the harm by making government smaller, thus limiting the harm that people can inflict when they gather into Battleclans for Tribal Warfare.

And of course that's not happening any time soon.

[Full disclosure and complete transparency] used to be my position. No longer. I had not foreseen how donor lists would be used not to ferret out corruption but to pursue and persecute citizens with contrary views. Which corrupts the very idea of full disclosure.

It is now an invitation to the creation of enemies lists....

Sometimes the state itself does the harassing. The IRS scandal left many members of political groups exposed to abuse, such as the unlawful release of confidential data....

The ultimate victim here is full disclosure itself. If revealing your views opens you to the politics of personal destruction, then transparency, however valuable, must give way to the ultimate core political good, free expression.

Our collective loss. Coupling unlimited donations and full disclosure was a reasonable way to reconcile the irreconcilables of campaign finance. Like so much else in our politics, however, it has been ruined by zealots. What a pity.

The whole column is worth reading, but I can't quote it all, of course.

Kevin D. Williamson has more thoughts on the related issue of the militarization of the speech police.

Down in Travis County, Texas, where the stink of cronyism has Republicans in the legislature and Democrats in the bureaucracies sniffing each othersÂ’ tails like opportunistic stray dogs, University of Texas regent Wallace Hall is facing the possibility of criminal prosecution for helping to expose the bipartisan scandal of Texas politiciansÂ’ seeking preferential treatment for friends and family in university admissions....

In a sane world, Wallace Hall would get a medal for bringing attention to wrongdoing by elected officials, but the university establishment and the political establishment relish their comfortable symbiosis.

Others dream of prosecution, too. The political class is infatuated with speech regulations (which we are expected to call “campaign-finance laws”) because its members harbor a self-interested desire to set the terms under which political contests are fought. That is corruption, and a particularly nasty sort of corruption at that: corruption dressed up as a reform crusade....

The irony here is that it is the ones doing the prosecuting are the ones who should be prosecuted. It is against the law to use IRS resources for political vendettas and to maliciously prosecute citizens to further partisan political interests. Those are serious crimes — serious because they pervert the fundamental relationship between citizen and state. But we are enduring what Sam Francis called “anarcho-tyranny,” a situation in which the government either refuses to or is unable to enforce its most fundamental laws — e.g. controlling the borders, ensuring that its revenue agents are not engaged in an unhinged political jihad with an eye toward stacking elections, etc. — while at the same time it seeks to regulate the minutiae of citizens’ lives with all the terrible moral ferocity of David Frum on a Tuesday afternoon espresso bender.

Meanwhile, Harry Reid -- who is more and more simply a monster -- continues making it clear that the Party of Government has personal interests, and it will stop at very little in vindicating those personal interests:

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Posted by: Ace at 01:39 PM | Comments (203)
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There is an argument against the technology itself. I'm not going to make that argument, because there's a much more obvious argument to be had here:

What on earth is the government of an alleged democratic republic doing hiding its actions from a supposedly free citizenry for fear that the citizens may object?

“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,” (LASD Sgt.) Iketani said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”

"In order to mitigate any of those kind of complaints."

The logic here is incredible, and yet, at the same time, perhaps inevitable.

We're going to be doing one thing that's creepy and scary -- watching you 24/7 per day -- so the thing we'll do to "mitigate those kinds of complaints" is also subvert democracy by keeping it secret from the public.

Like I say, perhaps this is inevitable -- if you're doing one scary thing, then logic dictates you "mitigate" it by doing an even scarier thing.

What the hell is going on in this country?

Posted by: Ace at 10:42 AM | Comments (282)
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At just a mere 500 light years away, why, it's almost walking distance.

It's in the outer limits of the habitable zone, though. The cold part of the zone, like Mars. But it's more massive than Mars (more massive than Earth, in fact) so it could hold more of an atmosphere and thus be warmer.

Water could exist in liquid form, if it exists there at all.

Kepler-186f actually lies at the edge of the Kepler-186 star's habitable zone, meaning that liquid water on the planet's surface could freeze, according to study co-author Stephen Kane of San Francisco State University.

Because of its position in the outer part of the habitable zone, the planet's larger size could actually help keep its water liquid, Kane said in a statement. Since it is slightly bigger than Earth, Kepler-186f could have a thicker atmosphere, which would insulate the planet and potentially keep its water in liquid form, Kane added.

The planet orbits a red dwarf, much colder than our own sun, but the planet is much closer to it (and so is within the smaller star's smaller habitable zone).

This is kind of interesting. I know, vaguely, that a planet's atmospheric make-up depends on its mass. Mass determines not just how much gas a planet will hold in its atmosphere, but which gases, specifically. I believe it's easier to hold heavier gases, and harder to hold lighter ones (like hydrogen and helium).

Mars, being quite a bit less massive than earth, can't hold oxygen or nitrogen.

This planet, being just about earth's mass (1.1 earth-masses) could. But anyway, here's the interesting part: You can't go much more over earth's actual mass before a planet will begin trapping hydrogen and helium (rather than losing grip on these light atoms and letting them slip into space), and thus become not very earth-like at at all.

"What we've learned, just over the past few years, is that there is a definite transition which occurs around about 1.5 Earth radii," Quintana said in a statement. "What happens there is that for radii between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii, the planet becomes massive enough that it starts to accumulate a very thick hydrogen and helium atmosphere, so it starts to resemble the gas giants of our solar system rather than anything else that we see as terrestrial."

So "earth-like" is a very, very narrow range as far as mass -- say, I don't know, 0.8 earth masses to 1.5 earth masses -- and as far as distance from star.

Not a lot of wiggle room here.

thanks to @rdbrewer4.

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (441)
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On the warpath.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren recounts in her new autobiography that she was “hurt” and “angry” by news reports that there was no documentation to support her claims of her family’s Cherokee heritage in the 2012 Senate race, according to a published report.

“What really threw me, though, were the constant attacks from the other side,” Warren wrote, according to Politico.com...

...

Efforts to reach a Warren spokeswoman yesterday were unsuccessful.

She once again makes the maudlin, manipulative claim that by challenging her use of her "minority" status for professional advancement, people were attacking her dead parents, who, she alleges, told her this silly story.

Of course, they never told her "And be sure to check off the 'minority' box in each and every job you apply for or land."

Incidentally, Warren also took credit (such as it might be) for the Occupy movement.

The article also states Warren was “confused” when the media jumped on her claim of inspiring the Occupy movement.

“There must have been a mistake — right?” Warren said she thought, before learning from an aide she had been correctly quoted as saying: “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do.”

Warren acknowledged, “My words sounded so puffy and self-important, and they made it seem as if I were trying to take credit for a protest I wasn’t even part of.”

Howie Carr has a simple suggestion as to how to resolve this controversy: if Elizabeth Warren will just be so kind as to swab the inside of her (high) cheeks with a DNA sample swab, he'll pay for a DNA test out of his own pocket to determine if she's a Cherokee.

ItÂ’s easy. Just swab the inside of your mouth. Check my photo on the left, IÂ’ll show you how to do it.

No more of this fact-free nonsense about your “high cheekbones,” or these ridiculous fables about your parents “eloping” to escape the racism of the Indian Territory when they actually returned to their hick hometown that same evening for a traditional wedding party.

The only explanation you haven’t trotted out yet is that you instantly knew you were an Indian when you first heard Cher on the AM radio belting out “Half Breed.”

It would be great publicity for your new 2016 presidential campaign book if you finally come clean. Plus, whatÂ’s the downside, if youÂ’re so positive that you really are an Indian princess?

Funny, but such a test would probably help her. It's quite possible she has 1/64th (or was it 1/128th?) Cherokee blood. It's even possible her parents told her stories of her distant, attenuated Cherokee ancestor. I'm told such legends are commonplace in Oklahoma.

But to claim to be a minority for professional advancement based upon such a tiny amount of minority status?

There's no simple DNA test for shamelessness and cynical careerism.

I don't think this is a gratuitous issue -- while I don't think Elizabeth Warren would challenge Queen (or is it Grand-Queen now?) Hillary, she does seem to be positioning herself for a possible bid if Hillary doesn't run.

Posted by: Ace at 08:45 AM | Comments (286)
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