Atomic Fungus by Ed Hering
 
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Below are 20 journal entries, after skipping by the 20 most recent ones recorded in atomic_fungus' LiveJournal:

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    Wednesday, May 1st, 2013
    1:49 pm
    #3823: Remember the victims of communism.
     May 1, May Day, and it's the day communists celebrate the glorious triumph of socialism.

    ...100,000,000 million people murdered in the 20th century. Lenin's broken eggs. Gulags, concentration camps, purges.

    A Borepatch post from 2010, and he quotes TJIC:
    ...[I]f when you attempt to implement “wonderful communism” and every single frickin’ time you get mass murder, starvation, and gulags, then that is communism.
    Emphasis in original.

    Communism is murder, oppression, horror, and terror. It always leads to that end, always, because it can not do otherwise.

    * * *

    Here's something for Republicans to discuss in detail. Just tell the American public that Obamacare is law. Repeatedly, until people are sick of hearing it. I can guarantee that enough people will connect "Obamacare is law" with "my health insurance just doubled in price" that we can win on this issue and repeal that bitch.

    * * *

    Obama is the greatest gun salesman ever. That's just how it is, folks.

    * * *

    "Return to the gold standard" used to be the cry of crackpots, self included. These days, however, the wisdom behind those words has become more apparent; "backed by the full faith and credit" is fine as long as it lasts, but sooner or later all fiat currencies fail, when someone discovers that all he has to do is to order the printing presses to "emergency maximum". That's what's happened here (QE, QE2, QE3) even as the feds continue to hide inflation by gaming the numbers. ("Food and energy are too volatile to include in our calculations of the Consumer Price Index...." while food and energy prices are skyrocketing, but "there's no inflation". Yeah.)

    * * *

    Because the economy has been in the shitter since 2008, home ownership is perilously low. "Lowest since 1995," the headline says. People are renting out houses rather than selling them; there are too many houses and not enough buyers.

    Thanks, government!

    * * *

    The United States has an immense amount of exploitable oil deposits. Gee, if only government would get the fuck out of the way....

    * * *

    This comes as no surprise. Friend of the Fungus Brian Dunbar remarks on Gene Roddenberry's penchant for lecture.

    * * *

    Vox Day writes about the difference between fiction and science fiction. Interesting stuff in the comments about Game of Thrones, too, primarily about the economics of Westeros.

    40,000 person city supporting a 10,000 man army? Uh, no. Sorry, George Martin, no. Economically impossible.

    Speaking of which, I'm now 2/3 of the way through GoT, and I do have to admit that the story is keeping my interest despite the plodding nature of the prose.

    ...which also, incidentally, reminds me of something I scoffed at in the second season of the TV series. King Joffrey got a fancy new sword made and he named it Hearteater and I laughed my ass off.

    "King Joffrey is a fuckin' munchkin!" I hooted. If he played WoW, he'd make an orc death knight and call him "Pwnerlord" or something equally stupid, then whine and complain about how he can never win duels or PvP battles because everyone else is cheating.

    When the big battle he anticipates finally arrives, he runs away like the little punk-ass bitch he is. And:
    Joffrey has a habit of frequently getting new and quite impressively made swords, and giving them fierce names like "Lion's Tooth" or "Hearteater", but he never actually swings a sword against an opponent at any time in the narrative. When he does personally execute people he uses a crossbow, because he doesn't actually know how to wield a sword.
    Don't go looking at that page if you don't want spoilers, though.

    Interesting point, probably already known by my readers: in the real world, the crossbow was seen as peasant's weapon. It's a subtle hint about Joffrey's character that he prefers them to any other weapon.

    Other interesting point: the only time we see Joffrey wielding a sword against an opponent, his opponent is a common-born boy armed with a stick, who knows he doesn't dare even pretend to hit the crown prince of the seven kingdoms. This scene, I have to say, very nicely delineates Joffrey's personality. (I didn't say George Martin couldn't write. I just said I found his prose "plodding".)

    * * *

    I can't think of anything else to write about. Sorry.
    Tuesday, April 30th, 2013
    10:17 pm
    #3822: Bet on it being space junk, not "a small stone from the universe".
     Unless your definition of "small stone" includes, y'know, jetsam from rocket launches. Yes, it's good that the "small stone from the universe" didn't hit the ISS Boondoggle's hull, but the thing has a layered construction with lots of kevlar and other energy-absorbing materials.

    * * *

    Antihydrogen might just fall up. Antimatter ought to exhibit anti-gravity, considering that it behaves like time-reversed normal matter, but no one really knows...yet.
    Using data they had already obtained, the ALPHA team determined they didn't yet have enough data to rule out antigravity or strange behavior in antimatter.
    Woohoo!

    * * *

    For the first time this year, I have fans pulling air into the bunker. It got rather warm today; and it looks as if it's going to be about the same tomorrow, which is the first day of May.

    Well, that's fine. Maybe tomorrow I won't be too sick to ride my motorcycle....
    4:48 pm
    3821: What a lousy day to be sick.
     That goes for my wife on Sunday as well as myself today.

    Sunday was Mrs. Fungus' birthday, and she had come home from work very early on Saturday because she was sick; she was scarcely better on Sunday. Around dinnertime she had recovered enough to eat the dinner she'd asked me to make for the occasion. Yesterday she was better, and we ended up planting the rose bushes she bought last week.

    Anyway, today I am feeling dizzy and achy and have no energy whatsoever; naturally it's the first day above 75° since last year.

    On the plus side, Saturday afternoon I went to see Og. He was putting a power steering pump into his optometrist's car and I was mainly standing around talking to him, but he thanked me for the (im)moral support and handed me more Suzuki motorcycle bits. That's the first time I've really hung out with any of my friends since I got married.

    I rode the bike to Og's, of course, and it was a fantastic day to ride. Og gave me a horsehide jacket that no longer fits him; it's stiff as a mofo but would provide more protection for my skin in the event of an unscheduled landing than the seude jacket.

    ...but I won't be riding the bike today. *sigh*

    * * *

    Russian scientists are still confidently predicting a cooling period. The sun's 200-year cycle is showing a decline, and that would rather neatly account for a lot of the data trends we're seeing.

    Bonus quote:
    If only there was some natural source for variations in the earth's temperature. The source of such variation would have to be large, though: on an order of magnitude of our own Sun.
    Gee, y'think?

    * * *

    The economy of Texas is booming, and I would wager that this has something to do with it: "The south Texas Eagle Ford field is now the largest oil and gas production field in the world. 6 years ago it was barely a blip." Emphasis theirs.

    There's all kinds of oil out there. Now that we're able to get at some of it, all we need now is to be allowed to build some new f-ing refineries, and the price of gasoline and diesel can drop precipitously...thus giving our economy a much-needed boost.

    * * *

    Kermit Gosnell's butcher shop is not unique. That is to say, there are places just like it all over the country. (Probably all over the world.) And everywhere they exist, it's because abortion-as-contraception advocates are turning blind eyes to them because nothing must stop the abortions.

    *sigh*

    * * *

    Twinkies will return, and not be made with union labor. The people who bought out the wreckage of Hostess relocated it to a right-to-work state, and $5 says that the new employees will be less than enthused about unionizing after what happened to the 18,500 former employees of the former Hostess Company.

    * * *

    Mrs. Fungus found her box set of A Song of Ice and Fire books, the huge George Martin epic which begins with Game of Thrones.

    ...so far I've managed about two hundred pages of the thing. It's a slow read. This is a guy who devours a Tom Clancy novel in a day or two, who can read the latest Dresden Files book at one sitting--but not this shit. Damn.

    It's not even that it's impenetrable prose; it's not. Though Martin tends to use two dollars' worth of words to write a five-cent sentence, at least some of the words he uses can be reduced to common one-syllable words on the fly. ("Destrier"="horse", for example.)

    If it's not that, then I'm really not sure what it is; but this thing is plodding. And supposedly Game of Thrones is the best book in the epic.

    I'm not allowed to read past the end of A Clash of Kings, not until the third season of the TV show is over. If what I've seen on various wikis and such is true, the TV series pretty much runs one season per book, so the first season covers GoT, the second CoK, and the third (running now) covers A Storm of Swords. I get to read SoS when season 3 ends, but can't pick up volume 4 (A Feast of Crows) until the end of the fourth season. (If it comes. And if I haven't given up by the end of SoS.)

    Additional commentary: the TV series is raunchier than the book is. Recall please that I referred to it as Game of Fuck Thrones because of the nigh-gratuitous use of the word "fuck" and all the nudity; lots of the nudity in the series does not appear "on-screen" in the book.

    * * *

    Car stuff:

    Thanks to a post on MGB Experience I have learned of the existence of Weber Carbs Direct, a company which specializes in Weber carburator conversion kits for various cars. That last link is to the kit which would fit the 1977 MGB in my garage; the only other parts needed is a pre-'75 exhaust manifold and a pipe connecting it to the existing exhaust system in the car.

    $300.

    Contrast that with the upper right kit from MGB specialist Victoria British, which costs a mere $560 and is exactly the same goddamned thing.

    Now, before finding that link, I thought it would be prohibitively expensive to put any kind of alternative carb in that car, unless I lucked into finding a used set of carbs for an early MGB somewhere on the cheap; I figured I was locked into sticking with the stinkinous Zenith-Stromberg 175CD that was original equipment just because it was prohibitively expensive to do anything else. $600, $800, and on up from there. $1,500 for fuel injection, if I wanted to go that route.

    Not so. I have to keep reminding myself that MGBs are popular cars and you can get parts all over the place for them. For cripes sake, in 2004 I was able to order a carb rebuild kit from AutoZone for the damned thing. They didn't have it on hand, but I had it within the week and it cost under $40.

    $300 is doable--or will be once I'm employed, assuming that ever happens. That would mean being able to tune the engine properly, so that it doesn't backfire all the f-ing time, and eliminating the manual choke we had to install after the automatic choke went balls up. (Automatic choke assembly for Z-S 175CD: $300. No, I'm not kidding. And it was pretty crappy from the factory, to boot.)

    But that's long-term. Short-term is just to get the thing roadworthy again: engine starting and running reliably and tuned, bearings greased, brakes working, etc. Once it's drivable, I can plate and insure it and clean it up nice and shiny, and then put it up for sale. As time goes on, I can fix things and make it niftier and niftier...and raise the asking price in the bargain. Whee!

    * * *

    Finally: as I said, yesterday Mrs. Fungus and I planted the rose bushes, and while digging out the shovel I found the post-hole digger, so I was able to get after the window well and get that mucked out. It's still not really up to my specifications but it should get by for the time being.

    Spring has arrived with a vengeance: yesterday the pear tree looked bare, and today there are blossoms beginning to open. The honeysuckle bushes have exploded with greenery in the past three days, and the lily of the valley in the front yard have burst from the ground. Thursday, the tulips were barely showing flower buds; today they are in full bloom.

    ...and it looks as if the grass needs cutting again, already. *sigh*
    Saturday, April 27th, 2013
    1:08 pm
    #3820: Wow, that was a productive day
     Yesterday, despite my fatigue, I got all my errands and chores done. The one thing I didn't manage was to get the dishes into the washer, but that's okay; they're still waiting in the sink for me.

    I took the motorcycle to the bank, and had a nice ride around town afterwards, because it was such a screamingly nice day. Once that was done I went to the gas station for gasoline for the mowers. The riding mower was totally dead, so I hooked up a battery charger to it and played WoW for about half an hour or so; when I went out to try the mower, it started right up.

    Cut the grass, got the pusher out and trimmed; then put everything away. Next up, I whacked back the foliage on the north side of the driveway so I no longer have to wrestle with shrubbery when entering or exiting my truck, and piled the cuttings by the street for easy pickup on Monday.

    Doing the necessary chores left me feeling drained, of course, and once all that was done I sat in front of the TV and vegetated.

    I have several chores today that need attending to, one of which being the dishes; but fortunately I can wait to do them until later. Right now I'd like to get out on the motorcycle and take it for a spin, because it's just so much fun, but first I have to do some grocery shopping; and before I do any of that I need to get a shower.

    Whee!

    * * *

    "Today, I was denounced for being a terrible person, because my family raises chickens, some of which we eat. I was then told how cruel I am for "killing innocent birds" and that "good" people buy their meat from the supermarket. FML"

    ...yeah, because the meat from the supermarket comes from a giant meat factory in Poughkeepsie, NY, where it's made from shale oil and grass clippings. *sigh*

    That kind of over-civilized obliviousness just begs the question, "Where do you think the meat in the supermarket comes from? A meat mine in Colorado?" As if there were a couple of old coots down in the ground, hacking away with machetes: "Hey, there, Pecos! I think I struck a vein of sirloin!" WTF.

    * * *

    So my bank--which failed last year and was assumed into another bank--has sent out new checks and new ATM cards.

    Upon receipt of the new ATM card, I destroyed my old one and tried to activate it at my bank's ATM. It didn't work; and then when I got home I discovered that the fine print on the mailer told me that the card's earliest effective date was May 3.

    *sigh*

    On the plus side I can survive without my debit card for a week or two. I've actually considered leaving the thing at home and forcing myself to carry cash or write checks for everything, but it's too useful in case of emergency.

    The other thing is, they also issued new checks, because the routing number has changed, so now I've got to deal with that nonsense. Same story, they don't work before May 3. And I just bought a new pack of checks earlier this year, which have now been rendered useless. Whee!

    * * *

    I submitted my second-ever application to a fast food joint this past Tuesday. The Culver's here in the Fungal Vale--an e-app, via the web.

    I haven't applied for a fast food job since 1986. Jeeze louise. At least the ice is broken.

    * * *

    Well! Them chores ain't gonna get done with me sitting here rattling keys. Hooeee!

    Please don't ask me why I descended into hick-speak. I don't know.
    Friday, April 26th, 2013
    12:48 pm
    #3819: I have to run some errands
     And I really don't want to, but I will...mainly because it's a gorgeous day and I haven't ridden my motorcycle for a while. Yeah.

    And once that's done, then I get to go buy some gasoline and cut the grass, because it needs doing. Assuming the tractor will start, of course. (If it doesn't, I need to first hook its battery up to a charger to cram some electrons into it, and then cut the grass tomorrow.)

    Whee!

    * * *

    This DPUD post starts with a link to an article about the possible end of the "peak oil" theory.

    What I read of the actual article doesn't say a word about Thomas Gold's abiotic oil theory; the part I read talked mainly about methane clathrates on the ocean floor--which represents a huge reservoir of hydrocarbons we could potentially tap for fueling just about everything. Whee!

    ...right below that, then, in the DPUD post, is a segment on "pedophile pride day" and NAMBLA.

    *sigh*

    Related to that? Ace weighs in on the "14-year-old girl forced to ask another girl for a kiss in front of her class" story.
    If the Gay Rights people are insisting that children must kiss same-sex children in order to make their lives more convenient, then I am going fully Anti-Gay-Rights.

    You cannot demand that someone afford you the right of liberty while in the same movement stealing that very thing from everyone else.

    How about this for an insane idea: Just as people have the right to be gay, other people retain their right to not be gay.
    Emphasis in original.

    As always, the left will allow you to choose...as long as you choose what they want you to choose. A woman has a right to say "no"...unless she is trying to say "no" to government educators. Yeah. You step off their plantation and it's the hoosegow for you, buddy!

    * * *

    It's going to take a while for me to get my brain in gear. I'd better start on that.
    Thursday, April 25th, 2013
    7:54 am
    #3818: Congress wants to exempt itself from ObamaCare...of course.
     I'm actually surprised that it wasn't already exempted. I guess that's what happens when you have to pass a law to find out what's in it.

    Reason? It's going to be too expensive.
    There is concern in some quarters that the provision requiring lawmakers and staffers to join the exchanges, if it isn’t revised, could lead to a “brain drain” on Capitol Hill, as several sources close to the talks put it.

    The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty.
    It's going to be too expensive for politicians and their aides, but not too expensive for a family of four trying to live on $20,000 income, right?

    Gabriel Malor at AoSHQ says it best: "I believe the first part of any rational response to this proposal has to begin: 'Fuck you, you fucking fucks.'"

    Advice Goddess also comments on the latest example of government hypocrisy.

    That's how it is, though; Congress always exempts itself from laws it finds inconvenient, like the minimum wage law, or the one prohibiting insider trading.

    * * *

    From that same AoSHQ link, the following:
    Animal rights "activists," accurately referred to as terrorists, ransacked a lab in Italy and set back research for treating autism and other disorders by years. I believe the first part of any rational response to this act has to begin: "Fuck you, you fucking fucks."
    Italian scientists were doing research into autism and schizophrenia, and eco-terrorists decided that was intolerable...so they ruined years--and millions of dollars--worth of work.

    Weer'd points out their error.
    Guess what the first thing they’re going to do when the researchers get back into that animal facility? Euthanize ALL the animals. ALL OF THEM. The research is ruined, as there is no way to be sure which animals are which, and what was done to them. More than likely these goons didn’t wear protective gear so they introduced bacteria and viruses into clean areas. All animals will have to be culled off. Any unique strains will have to be re-derrived inside a quarantine facility. (For those who don’t know, its usually done by in-vitro fertilization in a germ-free foster-mother animal) and the rooms will need to be fully fumigated to return them to clean status.

    If any animals are released they will die in the wild as they are bread to exhibit disease models, not survive on their own.
    This kind of reminds me of the eco-terrorists who burned an agricultural research facility, thus destroying about 90% of the extant examples of a particular species of an endangered plant. F-ing brilliant, jerks.

    * * *

    I'd ask what the hell is going on in our public schools but I already know the answer to that. In the guise of "anti-bullying" we have girls being forced to kiss other girls, in order to make some kind of point about something or other.

    "Parents say they were not notified of the presentation." Gee, why do you think that might be? Surely it's not because some parents don't want their kids given instruction on sexual technique, right?
    [A female student's mother, Mandy] Coon said her daughter was distressed by the presentation and wondered why she’d been required to ask another girl to kiss her.

    “She told me, ‘Mom, we all get teased and picked on enough – now I’m going to be called a lesbian because I had to ask another girl if I could kiss her,’” Coon said.

    According to the mother, the school said the lesson was meant to “teach girls boundaries and how to say no.”
    ...except, apparently, "No" to school officials who are telling you to kiss someone of the same sex in front of class.

    Also, the school is fostering rape culture:
    Parents of middle-school boys were outraged by the school’s lessons on condom usage and determining whether a girl is a slut.

    “I was absolutely furious – really furious,” said one parent of a 13-year-old boy. “They were teaching the boys how to decipher if a girl is a slut.”

    According to the parent, who wished to remain anonymous, boys were told to determine whether girls are promiscuous by the way they dress or the number of boys they date.

    “We don’t judge people like that in our family,” she said. “We don’t call women names because of what they wear or who they date.”
    Sure, it's perfectly reasonable to tell teenage boys to assume a girl in revealing clothing wants sex.

    Holy crap what a clusterfuck.

    * * *

    Sexual offender is jailed for watching anime. Wow. I mean, the guy's watching anime and they're putting him in jail, because "It's all part of that spectrum."
    Anti-child pornography group ECPAT Child Alert director Alan Bell said the images were illegal because they encouraged people "to migrate from there to the real thing".

    "The distribution of it is damaging. You have to ask what impact does it have even if it's not harming [an individual child]."
    So if you're watching hentai anime about fairies and trolls having sex, you're one step away from kidnapping and raping children? What the fuck.

    Related: The government cannot force you to reveal the password to your encrypted hard drive, because that violates the Fifth Amendment. That is to say, police can't gather up your encrypted data storage and force you to decrypt them all as they search for files you might have. If the police have formerly seen the files on your machine and it is now inaccessible, they can make you decrypt that.

    It makes sense and seems reasonable. If Pervert A has an ecrypted laptop but someone sees illegal images on it while he's using it, the government can compel him to issue the password to unlock the machine. If Pervert B has been accused of having illegal images, but only he knows where they are stored, the government cannot compel him to issue passwords to decrypt his hard drive(s).

    ...and if you're going to have all kinds of incriminating data on your computer, it's probably best to have an alternate password which will wipe it clean. The alternate password should be written somewhere obvious (post-it on the monitor?) and the program should start by wiping the MBR and proceed from there to scrambling the FAT. Bonus points for purposely fragmenting files so it's nearly impossible to put them back together without the FAT. After that it could start wrecking the files themselves, but the idea is to render the information as inaccessible as possible as quickly as possible, before the person accessing the device can realize it's happening and cut the power. This would make it very difficult and expensive (though not impossible) for someone to recover anything from the drive.

    But that kind of data security requires some serious programming chops, which is probably a good thing for law enforcement.

    I'm all for prosecuting people who break the law, don't get me wrong, but the Bill of Rights exists for a reason and we must continue to toe that line. Without rule of law, the government can do as it pleases; and if we give the government leave to ignore civil rights to prosecute child molestors, the government will soon start ignoring civil rights for a lot of other crimes.

    Heck, they're already doing it with asset forfeiture laws (eg "Cook County vs. $150,000 in cash"). Isn't that bad enough?

    * * *

    The weather is seasonably cool, and it's been damp, but I'm hoping to be able to get the grass cut today or tomorrow. Mrs. Fungus bought a trio of rose bushes which we want to get planted, too.

    Work on cleaning up the bunker continues apace. Yesterday I took out four bags of garbage, only one of which was normal household refuse. I've got more donatables piled by the front door. I'm also getting rid of my old high-back desk chair, because I haven't used it since I got the current chair, and I don't think I'm ever going to use it. Anyway, desk chairs are fairly inexpensive, and that one makes my back hurt, so why keep it?

    All three satellite boxes are going to the recycler. I'm not going to pay for satellite TV, and anyway these boxes are years obsolete, so why keep them?

    There's still a lot to do, but it's nice to be making progress.
    Wednesday, April 24th, 2013
    1:16 pm
    #3817: Is it Wednesday again already?
     WTF.

    * * *

    Mrs. Fungus and I have been watching DaVinci's Demons and Defiance, and we're not sure we like either series.

    The latter series is one we want to like, but the complete lack of likable (or even sympathetic) characters is a major problem. The writers of the pilot just went over to TVtropes.org and treated the thing like a checklist. Starting with The Sheriff:
    Stock plot — The Gunslinger (sometimes, the Young Gun, but if so he'll have his more experienced advisor with him) comes into town, and is immediately appointed The Sheriff by the townspeople. This invariably means there's a villain (an Outlaw or a old-west-style Corrupt Corporate Executive) in town who has run off or killed the old sheriff and is terrorizing the townspeople, stealing cattle, cheating at poker, and probably not paying his brothel bill. It's up to the new guy to avoid getting killed, beat the villain, then move on. Also see The Drifter for more detail on this.
    There's the usual Romeo and Juliet subplot, there's the "alien customs conflict with human morals" thing, and on, and on, and on.

    The most interesting character is the new sheriff's adopted alien daughter, and at that I don't even like her any; she just has the most interesting story behind her because she's not obviously any of the Typical Television Cardboard Cutout Characters. ($5 says that it becomes obvious what her character type is within 2-3 eps, and it'll be something just as boringly typical as the other characters in the series.)

    So unless things get a lot better and fast, we're going to cut it.

    DaVinci's Demons suffers from trying to be the Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes set in the Renaissance. We've only watched the pilot so far, but--again--none of the characters are likable and it's like ticking off a checklist. Ooh, the main antagonist is very powerful in the Catholic church (I think he's supposed to be the Pope) so naturally the first time we see him, he's naked in a huge bathtub with a young boy, holding a knife to the boy's throat in some kind of weird S&M thing. *rolleyes* (Of course the boy ends up dead at the end of the scene, floating face-down in the bath, his throat cut by the Pope's thug because he heard something he wasn't supposed to hear.)

    It also suffers from trying to use many of the same cinematographic tricks used in the Sherlock Holmes movies, for much the same reason--DaVinci is a super-genius--and of course he's an expert swordsman who is ambidextrous to the point of being able to fight two-handed.

    Yeah, okay.

    On the plus side, Game of Thrones continues to be good. Having had a bit of a tiptoe through the various Wikis on it, I've learned that the first season covers the first book, second season the second, and so on. I read a spoiler on one page about something that's going to happen in this season, which ought to be quite entertaining. Sunday's ep had some major doings in it; one was a plot point that I predicted last week, and contained an element I had been expecting (or, at least, hoping for) all season.

    Turns out Mrs. Fungus has some of the books, so if we ever find them I can read them without putting any of my money in G.R.R. Martin's pockets. (I don't know the story but I feel as if "George R.R. Martin" is an affectation meant to be like "J.R.R. Tolkien". I'm probably wrong.)

    * * *

    There's not much else to comment on right now. I'm just surprised that it's f-ing Wednesday already.
    Saturday, April 20th, 2013
    7:47 pm
    #3816: Who has a nickel for another gallon of gas?
     This post is full of trivial bits of information. Everyone knows some of them.

    * * *

    Gasoline was once a byproduct of refining kerosene from crude oil.

    * * *

    All the gold in the world would fit neatly in a cube less than 21 meters on a side.

    * * *

    The firing order for a 1985 Fiero with a V6 is 1-2-3-4-5-6. This is true of many V6 engines.

    Related, nearly every 4-cylinder engine in the world has 1-4-3-2 as its firing order.

    Also related, the cam in a single-cam 4-cycle engine rotates once for every two rotations of the crankshaft, which means that all the cylinders fire in two revolutions of the crankshaft.

    * * *

    Because the war effort needed all the copper the US could mine, only a handful of pennies minted in 1943 were made from copper. The rest are zinc-coated steel. If you have a copper 1943 penny, you have a very valuable coin. (You probably don't.)

    When they wanted to build the calutrons for the Y-12 uranium enrichment plant, copper could not be had in sufficient quantity. The Manhattan Project therefore borrowed tons of silver from the National Reserve and used that to make the necessary magnet wire. After the war was over, the electromagnets were gradually replaced with ones made with copper.

    * * *

    Sound is measured using a logarithmic scale. Every increase of 3 dB represents a doubling of intensity.

    * * *

    VGA is an analog video standard, not digital.

    * * *

    Superman originally could not fly; he merely jumped very high.

    * * *

    Horespower is equal to torque at 5252 RPM.

    * * *

    When Hewlett-Packard came out with the original LaserJet printer, it cost $5,000 and could print four pages per minute.

    * * *

    The 80386 processor was first introduced in 1985. It was manufactured for 22 years and ceased production in 2007.

    * * *

    Lowering the top on an MGB roadster is a 14-step process. (I used to be able to do it in about five minutes.)

    * * *

    Speaking of MGBs, a 1977 MGB roadster with a 1.8 liter engine goes from 0-60 in 17 seconds, and does the quarter mile in 18.5 seconds with a top speed of 65 MPH. This is approximately as fast as a 1987 Suzuki Samurai with a 1.3 liter engine and manual transmission.

    * * *

    A modern desktop computer can emulate a Cray X-MP in real time. (You might have to give up Vista to do it, though.)

    * * *

    You can use hair spray to get ink stains out of clothing.

    * * *

    The average person radiates enough body heat to melt 100 pounds of ice per day.

    * * *

    Air resistance--drag--rises as the cube of velocity.

    * * *

    Finally, the human brain consumes about 42 watts of power. Talk about being a "dim bulb"....
    Friday, April 19th, 2013
    1:37 pm
    #3815: Islamic terrorism strikes again
     The perpetrators of Monday's attack in Boston? Islamic Chechens, in the US legally.

    Boston is locked down because ohmehgerd, terrorists!

    "How do you think the Mercedes-driving liberal feels now that he’s been coexisted into a hijacking with a sterling member of the coexistence shock troops?"

    JayG, like several others, discusses the uselessness of laws in preventing criminal acts. Massachusetts has highly restrictive gun laws, yet look at what happened.

    * * *

    NYT is upset that Fox News covered a fertilizer plant explosion in Texas that leveled half a town, rather than concentrate on Obama's gun control bill.

    * * *

    Vox Day talks about George RR Martin and Game of Thrones (or whatever the series is called) and how it's essentially a leftist fantasy land. "So, amorality, secularism, nihilism, feminism, perversion, and a cleverness fetish."

    Everything he says about the series is spot on. The TV show is entertaining, at least.

    * * *

    Mrs. Fungus reported that she saw snowflakes as she was leaving for work today. Whee! Snow in mid-April! That global warming sure is getting bad, isn't it?

    ...also, the Citrus Grove--where she used to live--flooded so badly they were taking people out in boats. I wasn't terribly surprised; the western suburbs of Chicago got pounded by rain all day Tuesday.

    * * *

    Getting to sleep last night required a whole dose of Xanax, so naturally today I feel like gravity's been turned up about 15%. Well, it's the first time in a while that I've needed the stuff, so what the hey. I do have to go pick up the refill. *sigh*

    Because of the anxiety attack, I didn't get to sleep until after 5 AM. I woke up to a strange sound around 8 AM; it sounded like someone was tapping on the side of the house, but there wasn't anyone outside. Back in bed, fell asleep pretty quickly, at least until the alarm went off for Mrs. Fungus.

    Then, as I was doing my pre-blog surf, after Mrs. Fungus left for work, I hear this weird screeching noise from the west end of the house. Turns out Mrs. Fungus accidentally trapped one of our cats in her closet. "That's what you get," I told him as I let him out.

    * * *

    I finished reading The Shining yesterday. The book's ending was better than the one Stanley "megamind of the universe" Kubrick had in the movie.

    * * *

    I'm trying to come up with some new ideas for short stories, but the best one I've had so far doesn't seem to work very well. Argh etc.

    * * *

    So, WTF, more home-brewed Garfield Minus Garfield, in lieu of further content.





    Guess I'll have to upload more of them soon. That last one is #117 for me, and right now I'm standing at 180 strips.

    But not now, because Xanax, and I still have to bring up the garbage can. *sigh*
    Thursday, April 18th, 2013
    12:11 pm
    #3814: Did someone build an ark?
     Because damn. It rained for hours yesterday, after raining on Tuesday and Monday and--

    For the first time in a very, very long one, the back yard here at the bunker actually has standing water in the part that gets swampy after a good rain. Choir practice was cancelled tonight because the choir director's family is suffering from a rash of flooded basements.

    It spit rain on and off all day yesterday, but once evening came it began to rain in earnest, and it didn't stop until early this morning.

    And it is still rainy. WTF.

    * * *

    So let's talk about gun control, shall we?

    Vox Day gloats about the NYT's butthurt editorial on the failure of tyranny.

    The willful-liar-in-chief angrily denounces his opponents as willful liars. Love these "pot-kettle" accusations that liberals inevitably let fly during the tantrums they throw when they don't get their way.

    Boortz tells the President, "People don't trust you."

    Liberals are willing to allow cops to have guns because they have special training, but of course the average person is too stupid and inept to own firearms.

    Heh.

    * * *

    A promise made under duress is not binding. In other words, if your professor forces you to sign a pledge promising to vote Democrat--the article does not say what the consequences of refusing to sign were, but I assume they were dire enough to warrant her being fired over this--then you are not obligated actually to vote Democrat even if you do sign.

    Notice, however, the totalitarian impulse of the tenured liberal college professor: "Vote the way I tell you to!" Typical.

    * * *

    So: in West, Texas, a fertilizer plant caught fire and blew up.

    Over at AoSHQ there's a video embedded that some guy took with his cell phone from the driver's seat of his truck. The plant is maybe half a mile away, maybe a bit farther, and when it blows up you see the explosion for a couple tenths of a second before the shock wave reaches the guy. Then he drops his phone, and his kid can be heard saying "I can't hear! Let's get out of here!" over and over again. The first time I watched it, I thought the vehicle had been struck by shrapnel, but I don't think it was.

    Fertilizer is pretty potent stuff, chemically speaking. Most fertilizers have significant amounts of nitrogen compounds in them. The more nitrogen you have in a molecule, the more 'splody it gets, generally speaking. And fertilizers tend to be oxidizing compounds; potassium nitrate, for example, is the go-to oxidizer for people who want to make "caramel candy" rocket motors. And don't forget that one of the most potent explosives you can make is essentially diesel fuel and fertilizer, mixed in the right proportions. ANFO, it's called--ammonium nitrate and fuel oil--and it's even used in mining because it's cheap and easy. The Oklahoma City bombing was done with ANFO.

    So when you see a fertilizer plant on fire--assuming that you know it's a fertilizer plant--the thing to do is run away, not sit there with a cell phone recording the fire. The only reason I don't deride the guy as a screeching moron is that I assume he doesn't know what was being made at that plant; at least, he didn't understand the chemistry involved.

    Safest thing to do is to stay away from any industrial fire, though, if you can. You never know what's going to go "boom".

    Anyway, this one is a major disaster: hundreds of people injured, blast damage for miles around, and so forth.

    * * *

    The other night, Mrs. Fungus and I watched Apollo 18, which is a horror movie about a super-secret Apollo mission that discovered aliens on the Moon.

    The conceit was that the Department of Defense prompted NASA to send one last Apollo mission to the Moon, where they set up some kind of super-secret monitoring stations to keep an eye on the USSR. The whole thing was shot and edited to look like video footage from the actual mission, a la Blair Witch Project and some others.

    The technical direction was excellent; whoever wrote the thing really knew his stuff vis a vis the technology and procedures of the Apollo program.

    One scene made me jump, which led Mrs. Fungus to exult, "You jumped! You never jump!" I had to admit she was right.

    It was not art for the ages, but it's not like I paid anything to see it, and it was entertaining enough.

    * * *

    Last night, Wheeler Dealers featured an MGB-GT.

    They bought the thing for about $1,500, and sold it for not-quite $4,500. Mostly it needed paint and an interior; that was kind of a shame, because I was interested in seeing the difference between the UK and American configurations. The car they featured was a 1980 car, yet it had twin carbs. As a previous owner had converted it to chrome bumpers I have to wonder if he also swapped in a set of SUs to replace the stinkinous Zenith-Stromberg, or if that was a US-only variant of the thing because EPA.

    The GT is a coupe, but the one they featured had the same mechanicals as the roadster sitting in my garage. (There was a V8 option for GTs, but I'm not sure what years it was offered.) It was nice to see a car I knew on that show; heck, it's nice to see a vehicle I know on any car show, since I'm not into muscle cars or Harley Davidsons.

    The MGB was made from 1962 through 1980, and many of the parts simply did not change in that time. I was looking through the Victoria British catalog the other day and was surprised that the MGB uses two-piston calipers on the front brakes, and did for the entire 18-year run. Nearly all the front suspension parts remain the same throughout the run. Of course the body panels don't change, even though they switched to rubber bumpers in 1975.

    ...watching the show last night I was surprised that the MGB-GT had only two windshield wipers. The roadster has three--and then I realized that was because the roadster has a shorter windshield.

    I'm going to have to work out how to dump video from the DVR to a DVD; I want to keep that episode.

    * * *

    Ace on raped girls committing suicide. He seques into a discussion of bullying in schools:
    was very annoyed by Anderson Cooper's anti-bullying campaign when he mounted it. But a month ago I saw the documentary that set him off--simply called Bully, streaming on Netflix, I think--and I'd strongly recommend it. School officials seem evenhanded to a fault, if one can call it that, in these matters, not differentiating between the aggressor (the bully) and the victim (the bullied), but rather engaging in this weird "cycle of violence" sort of thinking in which both parties are, somehow, equally responsible for the fact that one kid goes home every night thinking about suicide (and sometimes carrying through on that thought).

    There's also a very weird "Well what can we do to stop it?" mentality. I can only think of twenty things off the top of my head, from suspensions to parent conferences to a semester hitch at alternate school (for first-time offenders; those who just continue being sadists can and should stay in a more structured environment, as a bureaucrat might euphemize it).
    Letting kids fight would help a bit, too. Let the victim fight back, rather than punishing him for defending himself while the bully gets off scott-free. Ace's solutions are probably better, but at a bare minimum just allowing self-defense would go a long way towards eliminating bullying.

    ...of course, self-reliance is anathema to government, and the mission of socialized education is to turn out obedient subjects who are dependent on the feds for everything. *sigh*

    * * *

    Let's finish with more of my home-brewed Garfield Without Garfield strips!











    Whee!
    Wednesday, April 17th, 2013
    2:35 pm
    #3813: STANLEY KUBRICK IS THE MEGAMIND OF THE UNIVERSE
     ...whatever you do, do not bother watching 237, the documentary about Stanley Kubrick.

    Mrs. Fungus put it on one afternoon because it was about The Shining, which is one of her favorite movies; and we watched this melange of ludicrous assertions by insane people who think that every last minor detail in various Kubrick films (mostly The Shining) is Extremely Significant Subtext Put There On Purpose Because Stanley Kubrick Was A Super-Genius.

    One psycho went as far as claiming that Kubrick is "the megamind of the universe". No, I don't really know what that means, nor do I care.

    It was a bunch of lunatics making a whole lot of lunatic assertions. The Shining is allegory for the Holocaust. It's Kubrick's admission that he helped to fake the Apollo moon landings. It's this, it's that--you know, maybe the guy just made a fricking MOVIE.

    *sigh*

    ...then, this past Saturday night, Mrs. Fungus and I watched Saturday Night Live and--for once!--it had a sketch in it which not only had a laugh-out-loud moment in it, but more than one. I can't remember the guest host for the episode--it was the ep shown on 4/13--but she was a chunky blonde woman; and in this particular sketch she played the hardass coach of a collegiate girls' basketball team.

    The first thing that made me laugh was when she was perched atop a stepladder holding a brick, on the basketball court, and when one of her players made a mistake she hollered, "Guess what? BRICK!" A little bit later she runs into a classroom and stun-guns the professor, then starts hollering at her players and stun-gunning random people in the class. It was, uncharacteristically for SNL, hilarious. Then again, this woman perfectly captured the "hardass female PE major" schtick, and in her I recognized every scary female PE teacher I ever encountered in public school.

    I do believe it was that episode where Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones) showed up in the middle of a not-funny "Drunk Uncle" segment as "Peter Drunklage", during the "SNL News" segment. Mrs. Fungus was fast-forwarding past it when I said, "Hey, that's--that's Tyrion!"

    Remembering, as I do, the days of Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtain ("Jane, you ignorant slut!") puts the present-day version in a poor light. Peter Dinklage was the funniest thing in that entire segment.

    * * *

    Mrs Fungus has been after me to blog about these things for a little while. At least I can take this one off my "honey do" list.
    1:12 pm
    #3812: As always, the first reports were wrong.
     Two bombs only--no others. Still, they were quite enough, even so, weren't they? Lord have mercy.

    That poor guy I was talking about yesterday lost both legs below the knees. That link is safe as they've cropped the image so that it doesn't show the gruesome parts.

    Another person likening the Boston Marathon bombs to Bill Ayers' bombs.

    JayG also mentions Bill Ayers:
    consider "white terrorists. After Tim McVeigh, we've got... Um... Let's see... Oh yeah, that's right. Bill Ayers. Next, what would "special privilege be? McVeigh was executed in - for the death penalty - record time; his conspirator jailed for life. Bill Ayers? Remind me what his sentence was, again?

    Maybe there's something to this after all - as long as those white terrorists are mentors to the current Teleprompter-in-Chief...
    The left just makes me sick.

    * * *

    Roofers' union that supported Obamacare is now against it, because they've tardily realized it will make union workers more expensive and therefore less competetive in the job market.

    Welcome to reality, guys! We were waiting for you!

    * * *

    Karl Denninger discusses the popping of the metals bubble. It's not just gold; it's other metals, and copper is a big one.

    Again: take a casual look around you. Everything within sight that uses electricity--everything--has copper in it. That doesn't even begin to include other products that also include copper; I know nearly nothing about metallurgy but I do know that we alloy things with copper to lend certain properties to them. Anything that's chrome plated has a thin layer of copper plating under the chrome.

    Like aluminum, copper is a metal that is essential to the world economy. If the price of copper is falling, it means demand is falling, and that is emphatically not good for economic prospects.

    * * *

    Looks as if I'm going to have to cut the grass pretty soon. That is to say, if it will stop raining long enough so the back yard isn't a frickin' swamp....
    Tuesday, April 16th, 2013
    4:54 pm
    #3811: Pressure cooker bombs
     AoSHQ has a story saying the things were made out of 6-quart pressure cookers.

    XKCD "What if": "Am I right to be afraid of pressure cookers? What's the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker...?"

    *sigh*

    Ann Barnhardt--DO NOT CLICK IF YOU'RE SQUEAMISH--has, for the moment, a gruesome picture of a bombing victim being hauled from the scene in a wheelchair, his left foot gone and most of his left shin bone exposed to air. It's hard to see how even the most gifted surgeon could repair the man's lower leg; in all probability he's going to lose everything just below the knee. You can't really see what happened to his right leg, but it looks as if it was completely severed just above the knee.

    Boortz talks about the bombing. He notes that this is similar to Weathermen bombings in the 1970s, perpetrated by Bill Ayers et alii.

    The last news report I saw said the Boston PD had found three unexploded devices, for a total of five bombs. It would have been worse but for the incompetence of the people who built the bombs.

    American Airlines' entire fleet grounded due to "computer glitch", probably not related.

    So, from the first link, here's what we think we know: the bombs were made using black powder, and put in pressure cookers to provide containment. Black powder won't explode on its own unless you use a lot of it, and even then you're better off containing it. It's a deflagrating explosive, meaning it merely burns very quickly and generates a lot of gas in the process. This is why it's good for propelling bullets and/or model rockets, but as soon as we had anything better (eg nitroglycerin, TNT, Semtex, C4, etc) we stopped using it for mining or other tasks requiring an explosion. (Hint: you cannot build a nuclear bomb with gunpowder as the triggering explosive; it's not fast enough. And $5 says someone, somewhere, wrote a "steampunk" SF story in which someone was building a nuclear bomb using gunpowder. *sigh*)

    But if you take a pressure cooker, fill it with gunpowder, nails, and ball bearings, put the lid on, and set it off--whew. It's going to be nasty if that thing goes off in the middle of an unsuspecting crowd.

    So it's an IED, built in exactly the same fashion as IEDs from the middle east. It's a terrorist weapon, used to perpetrate a terror attack; and because they were built by a terrorists, three of the five bombs failed to go off...which is the only thing that prevented a much, much greater body count.

    Two bombs about 100 yards apart--that was meant to herd people into the middle, and I'd bet $1 the three unexploded bombs were between the initial two explosions, and if they'd gone off--

    * * *

    This is why the media refuses to cover Kermit Gosnell's trial for murdering babies. Because it exposes the reality of abortion-as-contraception:
    This is what happens in the case of unrestricted late-term abortion:

    a) If a woman wants her baby, he is her precious newborn son, a patient of the hospital, and even if prematurely delivered he will receive humane medical care.

    b) If the woman does not want her baby, cut his head off and toss the body in the bin with the others.

    Note that the difference between a) and b) is merely the emotional whim of one parent. This is what distinguishes this killing as 'abortion' and not infanticide, to the extremist end of the pro-choice crowd.

    On the lady's word, that which would otherwise be considered a child, lives or dies.
    This is a debate that pro-abortion people do not want to have, for one important reason: they will lose. They'll lose, and they know they will lose, so the best thing to do is to treat the inevitable horror stories as nonevents: "It's just a local murder story." Yep, just a black man killing brown babies, nothing to look at here, because a woman's right to choose is too important for us to worry about a few brown babies more or less in the world. There are plenty of them anyway and if we have to lose a few people in the process of furthering the cause, well, it's just the cost of doing business!

    It's no accident that leftists are the ones who are most stridently pro-abortion.

    * * *

    Meanwhile, Obama's disdain for England continues. He's not even sending an official representative to Margaret Thatcher's funeral. What an anus the Arrogant-Cuss-In-Chief is.

    And "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" is #2 on the charts in England, because leftists never miss a chance to dance on the graves of people they hate:
    If the American media ever reported all the left's obnoxious, crude, hateful behavior, the public might not have the sense that they're the "easygoing, flexible ones." Fortunately for the left, this will never happen.
    It will never happen because the press itself is also heavily leftist.

    * * *

    "So the [diehard warmistas], the bitter-enders, the one who've gotten easy undergraduate pootie-tang for 20 years based on their bullshit models, are now scrambling for a paradigm in which bullshit is actually sort of scientifically heroic." Because global warming is not man-made, because we've gone 15-17 years with CO2 rising like crazy but without a concomitant rise in atmospheric temperature, because reality stubbornly refuses to align with their junk science predictions, now the warmistas are trying to convince us that their models are still right and require only modest tinkering to fix.

    Quoth Ace:
    Note how arrogant they were before when they were making predictions--overwhelming consensus, the science is settled, "global warming deniers," etc.--and how modest they appear now. Now everything's all about "unknown factors we don't yet understand" or "perhaps we overestimated the actual warming factor of CO2."
    Emphasis in original.

    His second link cuts right to the chase, reducing the issue to three salient points:
    1. All of the scary global warming scenarios are based on computer models.

    2. None of the models work.

    3. There is and has been no scientific consensus.
    #2 is the most important part: NONE OF THE MODELS WORK.

    * * *

    Saturn V first stage engines are being resurrected. NASA's got someone doing the right thing, finally.

    The F-1B engine does away with the complicated regenerative cooling system of the original engine, whcih was complex to manufacture, in favor of a much simpler two-layer nozzle design that still incorporates regenerative cooling while featuring a vastly reduced parts count.

    This is a lot smarter than building entirely new engines from scratch.

    * * *

    We have one of North Korea's expended rockets and we think it means that NK can loft a nuclear warhead as far as the United States. Meanwhile Son of Gargoyle continues to rattle his saber, ever louder. I have to wonder if he's not privately asking himself, "Hey, this always worked when Dad did it. WTF?"

    * * *

    Put me in the "vaporized" column. Underground nuclear test ended up propelling a 4-foot manhole cover at about 41 miles per second, briefly.

    ...the post does not say what year this happened, only implying that it happened before the Sputnik launch in 1957. Film running at 160 frames per second show the manhole cover there in one frame, and entirely gone in the next; the poster's calculations say that means it had to move at 41 miles per second, which is almost six times escape velocity.

    But consider how much acceleration is required: going from zero to 41 miles per second is some 6,765 gravities of acceleration if you do it in one second; doing it in 1/160th of a second requires over a million gravities of acceleration.

    There's no material I can think of that can withstand that sort of acceleration.

    So what do I think happened? Under that sort of acceleration, the manhole cover was crushed to powder: it just shattered into tiny grains of iron dust, which may have then further oxidized and vaporized as the "exhaust" from the detonation exited the hole. I don't think it even made it very far off the ground.

    Sorry, guys.

    * * *

    Plenty of "April showers" here. Last night I had to go outside three times to fiddle with the window well pump, to get it to shut off. Sometime soon I must find the post hole digger (or borrow Og's) and clean the thing out so I can stop mucking about with it every time we get more than a sprinkling of rain.

    I'm caught in the old hillbilly paradox: when it's not raining, the thing doesn't present a problem, and when it's raining, I can't fix it. *sigh*

    I got a little motorcycle ride in yesterday, though; I had some errands to run and the motorcycle seemed like the best way to do them. That's what I got it for. (Well, that, and because it's fun. Dual-purpose FTW.) Then I was home and realized I'd forgotten to pick up bread at the store, so I took off again and got rained on, a little bit.

    On the plus side we avoided getting any of the snow that was predicted. It's April; I don't want any more snow this year, at least not before November. Damn it.

    * * *

    For some reason, IrfanView no longer plays Flash files with sound. I checked the sound settings and it wasn't that, so I had no f-ing clue what's wrong.

    And what turned out to be the trouble?

    Well, sometime in the not-so-distant past, I apparently set the volume on an MP3 to "off" when it was playing via IrfanView, and apparently that setting somehow screws up the volume settings for all file types, even when they don't display a volume slider.

    Tell me: why the everlasting fuck does an image display and manipulation program have to play MP3 files? Argh etc.

    Whatev; now I can watch the old "Homestar Runner" flash files again. Whee!
    Saturday, April 13th, 2013
    4:16 pm
    #3810: I'm gonna try looking over the PDF.
     This PDF, the grand jury report against Kermit Gosnell. Reportedly it is a gruesome view of Gosnell's little butcher shop of horrors.

    "This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women," the thing begins. After reading the first eight pages--according to Adobe Reader, that is, not the numbers on the pages--I'm already horrified.

    And then I read page nine. Yeesh. And there's this damning bit of text on page ten:
    Only in one class of cases did Gosnell exercise any real care with these dangerous sedatives. On those rare occasions when the patient was a white woman from the suburbs, Gosnell insisted that he be consulted at every step. When an employee asked him why, he said it was “the way of the world.”
    In other words, Gosnell knew that if his butcher shop killed a white woman, there for an illegal late-term abortion, he'd end up in the soup. But the various black women? No one cares about them, so it's fine? (Is Gosnell a "self-hating black"?)

    Elizabeth Scalia has written several pieces on this story, but the linked one includes the following, which I think is chock-full of important questions a truly unbiased press would be asking:
    * Nail salons and Tattoo shops are inspected twice year; Gosnell’s practice had not been inspected in 17 years. Why were inspections suspended? Is it common for abortion clinics to be bypassed? Does that not encourage unsafe, unsanitary conditions to flourish?

    * Would Gosnell have severed baby feet and kept them like trophies if he had any fear of surprise inspections? Could regular inspections have saved women’s lives? Did political pressure from abortion advocates precipitate end of inspections, limited regulations?

    ...

    * Did ERs treating women with infections, perforated uteruses and colons, or uterine abscesses due to filth and unrecovered fetal remains not report Gosnell to the Health Department and the Medical Licensing Board? In the Grand Jury report, one of Gosnell’s untrained workers, Marcella Stanley Choung, says she filed a complaint with the Department of State, but the department “never acted on it”. Why not?

    * Poor, minority women were anesthetized by untrained 15 year-olds, and frequently delivered their late-term (often living) babies into toilets, with no doctor present. At trial testimony we hear, “white women got more and better treatment”. How does this speak to the treatment of underprivileged women. Could this sort of treatment every be ignored if it touched monied white women? If there is a “war on women” isn’t this a trench worth fighting in?

    ...

    * Is the Gosnell story a moment the president can lead us through?

    ...

    * Why are [abortion advocates] angry about laws meant to better-regulate abortion clinics?

    * Why was Gosnell holding on to all those fetal remains in freezers? Is there a market for fetal tissue that encourages late-term abortion?
    Nearly all these questions can be answered by saying, "Because the abortion lobby wanted it that way." The problem is, that makes the supporters of abortion-as-contraception look like murderous lunatics.

    The national media has been, more or less, shamed into taking some notice of the story, but you can expect any coverage of it to be spun and minimized in order to keep the most horrifying details silent. The whole thing will be presented as a problem with Kermit Gosnell, not the abortion industry in general; and you can bet your last dollar that none of the major media stories will focus on how rich Kermit Gosnell got from running his abortion mill.

    This story is a real problem for supporters of abortion-as-contraception, because this is what it looks like, especially in the inner city. It looks exactly the same as the so-called "back alley" abortion sites because exactly the same kind of people are running them. The conditions are no different because this is how it is.

    There had been no inspections of Gosnell's clinic for seventeen years because if there had been it might have been closed, which would have meant some women might not have had abortions--and the people who support abortion-as-contraception find that intolerable. It's why they oppose cooling-off periods for abortions. It's why they insist that the baby is only a human being if the mother wants it, regardless of viability outside the womb. It's why they don't care about women dying in slaughterhouses like Gosnell's: the abortions must continue unabated, so no butcher shops must close for any reason.

    ...so it's not surprising that, by and large, leftists are huge abortion proponents. It's not surprising that they lie about hoping that abortion is rare. It's not surprising because leftism is a bloody ideology, and its successes are built on a mountain of human skulls.

    * * *

    This just made my jaw drop. Karl Denninger writes about an article in Forbes which discusses the prevalence of pedophiles in state government, getting--of course--a pass from law enforcement etc in those self-same state governments.
    There is a national crisis of federal employees engaged in the child porn industry and a related epidemic at the state level. I’ve documented two states, Vermont and Maine, that appear to be running state protected child trafficking rings with evidence of cops, judges, lawyers, clergy and government employees covering for each other. This kind of racketeering creates powerful, and extremely profitable, pedophile rings.
    So, there you have it. If you're a pedo, just get yourself to Maine or Vermont, become a cop or something similar, and you're in like flint.

    If you're a suburban mom who just dropped off some film at Walmart to get pictures of "baby's first bath" developed, you're a dangerous pedophile and you're gonna get no-knocked very soon by a SWAT team armed with automatic weapons. Your kids will be taken from you and you'll spend a long time in jail.

    If you're a judge in Maine or Vermont who likes to diddle little boys and you know the right people, no one's even going to say anything to you. And an irate father who attempts violence on you because you raped his kid? That guy goes to jail...if he's lucky enough to live that long.

    Hooray for "rule of law"! It sure works in modern America!

    *sigh*

    * * *

    Really going to lighten up now, because this shit's seriously depressing.

    Vista never seemed slow to me. Of course, I bought a new computer with Vista already installed on it, and that computer is a dual-core Pentium D running at 3 GHz. After bumping the memory, it ran fine.

    No, all the problems I had with Vista came from none of my f-ing software works. That was fixed a few months after Vista's release, though, and I haven't had much trouble in that regard since then.

    "Would you rather have the Windows 8 bizarro world interface or the Vista rolling whorehouse pimpmobile interface?" Asks the post. I don't think of Vista's interface as anything of the sort. Of course, the first thing I did was set my start menu to "classic", because it works. The default start menu for XP and later versions of Windows has this deal where it shows you only the stuff you access the most often, and you must click something to see all the stuff you've got installed. I hate having to take an extra step to see everything.

    Vista Premium has some neat bells and whistles, but they're not worth the extra money.

    One thing I'm amazed by: a quick search on Pricewatch.com shows that Vista is still selling for full price. It's now two generations obsolete, since Win 7 and Win 8 have been released, but you can't get it for less than $80.

    I'm still thinking that I'd like to upgrade my desktop to 64-bit Vista and increase the memory to the machine's maximum (8 GB); that would go a long way towards maximizing the thing's performance--but by the time you add up the OS and the memory, you're approaching "new machine" territory. Pity I can't pay a few bucks just to upgrade my OS to 64 bit, but that would mean that I wouldn't have to buy an entirely new license from Microsoft.

    PC distributors get a price break from Microsoft on what they pay for OS licenses, but the retail price is a hefty chunk of median machines. A new machine with a Core i5 processor and 4 GB of RAM runs around $530 (Gateway) and if a new Win 8 license is over $100 at retail, well--

    I say "median" because low-end machines are flirting with the $300 price point. You do not get a lot of processor for that money, but in all probability it's enough to do 90% of what people do with computers these days. Just remember: I spent $136 on building El-Hazard, and it will do everything a typical office worker would need to do. And it runs Vista splendidly.

    El-Hazard would have cost around $170 if I'd needed a hard drive and picked my cheapest option. That would have been perhaps a 160 GB drive in 2.5" form factor, and that would have worked just fine for a typical office computer.

    If I could just get a f-ing video card that would work in the thing, I could play WoW on it. Yeah.

    Vista ran "okay" on Jurai, which is a P3 running at 1 GHz with 1 GB of RAM, but I never really tried to do much with it. It shipped with WinME and I never had any serious trouble with that OS, so I never felt the need to upgrade it. Everything I wanted to do, I could do without trouble.

    When I think about what upgrade I'd most like to do to this machine, I inevitably conclude that all I really want is to get a bigger monitor. This one's 22" diagonally, and I think something about 27" would be splendid. I could use a 27" LCD TV, in fact, and connect via the HDMI port; that's how most video cards connect, now, and DVI is virtually an afterthought. (My video card has a dongle for converting DVI to HDMI, so that's not an issue.)

    I ran WoW to the blab slab once that way and it looked gorgeous. I could almost--almost--see moving the 'slab into the computer room, mounting it over my desk, and using it as my monitor...but that's a bit much for word processing, really. I'd have to move my chair back a fair piece from the desk to do anything, even playing WoW.

    Overkill. And to make it truly usable I'd have to do far too much futzing around with software settings, anyway. Frustrating, nitpicky fiddly stuff--so that's out.

    * * *

    I'm making a to-do list:
    * Get MGB back on the road, fix the problems, and sold. ASAP, to take advantage of summer weather.
    * Get Fiero put back together and back on the road.
    * Get the dirt bike back together and street legal. (I have nearly all the parts I need to do this.)
    * Remove all the useless shit from the garage and clean it so Mrs. Fungus can store her car inside when the MGB is sold.
    * Convert my parts washer to use a solvent that works.
    * Implement my air conditioner-door idea so I can work in the garage even when it's stifling hot outside.
    * New chain for road bike; also, check the valve clearance, get a tune-up, and sync the carbs.
    It's quite an ambitious list, isn't it? All it takes is money (except for "clean the garage") which means it's all down to GET A JOB, MORON. Well, I'm trying; problem is there ain't much out there that doesn't involve "Do you want fries with that?" and every time I've applied for something unskilled lately I've been rejected out of hand. *sigh*

    * * *

    Culver's has brought back the pub burger. Guess where I'm going for dinner?
    Friday, April 12th, 2013
    1:23 pm
    #3809: "A local murder story"
     Well, that just explains it all, doesn't it? Kermit Gosnell trial is a "local murder story" and therefore totally uninteresting to the national media. The guy ran an abortion mill and killed viable babies, delivered alive--infanticide under Pennsylvania's state laws--but since it was a black man killing brown babies--and women--no one in the national media cares.

    Yeah, I just played the f-ing race card. Sauce for the goose.

    The media want this story to go away as quietly as possible, because the media support abortion-as-contraception.

    Ace weighs in.

    Ace weighs in again, this time about Wikipedia considering the deletion of its page on Kermit Gosnell. This link also discusses the lunatic assertion of Amanda Marcotte that Gosnell's butcher shop was the fault of pro-lifers, which is just about the craziest thing I've heard in a month of Sundays.

    Vox Day unloads both barrels and let me tell you: he isn't wrong, especially when he discusses how the people of the future will regard us.

    * * *

    North Korea is a communist totalitarian shithole. I know that, intellectually; I know it because that's the inevitable endgame for any and all communist totalitarian shitholes. The intelligentsia tell us it's because of unfair blockades and embargoes, but it's not; it's because government consumes wealth and communist dictatorships consume it like necrotizing fascitis consumes living flesh.

    Nothing depicted in those images surprises or shocks me because that is the face of leftism. That's what leftism is, that's what it does, that's what it's all about: total government control of a helpless populace.

    * * *

    The above two items are related. Believe me.

    * * *

    Last year, on this day, gas was $4.16 per gallon. This year it's only $3.73.

    ...I saw, not very long ago, an article which discussed the news that the US now produces more oil than Saudi Arabia does. That being the case, why the hell is the price of gas flirting with $4 per gallon?

    Refinery capacity, I realized. We still have to run our refineries at "emergency maximum" to keep up with demand for fuel, and no new refineries are being built because econazis. *sigh*

    * * *

    Now Cyprus needs 23 billion euros rather than 17 billion because the theft of deposits and the other shenanigans are causing unemployment to skyrocket and thus reducing government tax revenue.

    * * *

    We got pounded with rain Wednesday night, to the point that the daffodils are kind of beaten down, but the buds continue to open despite temperatures in the upper 30s and low 40s. The grass is turning green and leaves are beginning to sprout.

    Spring is coming slowly, but it's coming.
    Thursday, April 11th, 2013
    7:41 pm
    #3808: Well, now I don't know what to do.
     My submission to the magazine was rejected. They wrote me a very nice rejection letter which said (in part) that they'd really wanted to like it. *sigh* Well, that's how the cookie crumbles, and I suppose I'll have to try something else.

    It's disappointing, but there's not much I can do about it except "try, try again".

    * * *

    Karl Denninger is boycotting Connecticut. What a great idea!

    * * *

    Oh well. This would be longer if I felt like writing, but I don't. Sorry.
    Wednesday, April 10th, 2013
    5:24 pm
    #3807: Another hiatus prompted by marriage.
     Spending time with my wife rather than blogging. I'd say "I've been a bad boy" except everyone here knows I haven't, and will gleefully remind me that my wife takes precedence over dispensing "free ice cream".

    Sunday, Mrs. Fungus spent her evening at a transvestite revue with some friends from the office. I spent that time with one her friends' husband, who's in the process of rebuilding a 3.5 V6 for a Chrysler 300--the older curvy model from the 90s--and I do believe we had a pretty fair time of it.

    He's taken a big diesel V8 from a school bus--7-odd liters' displacement--and put it into a Chevy pickup truck. It looks like it belongs there. Then again this guy's a professional mechanic from a family of pros.

    * * *

    Leftists are always hypocrites. "One standard for thee, another for me, monseur." Of course the problem extends to other prominent socialists in France. It's not going to be just this guy; there will be plenty more who have offshore accounts to shelter their wealth against France's punitive tax rates.

    I honestly don't know why anyone is surprised or shocked by this. It's like being surprised that a rattlesnake has fangs.

    * * *

    Gun control stuff:

    New York State is confiscating guns. We were told this wouldn't happen, but it's happening. The end goal of liberal gun control is an unarmed populace, which is why no one who supports the civil right to self defense can ever believe the leftists when they say they promise double-pinky-swear that they're not going to confiscate guns.

    *

    Pat Quinn, idiot governor of Illinoistan, doesn't like being told that Illinoistan must allow concealed carry. Illinoistan is the last holdout for Democrat gun control, and the Supreme Court has struck down its ban on carrying weapons.

    Myself, I desperately hope that the Illinoistan government will fap around and do nothing and thus give us Constitutional carry--but I'm not going to hold my breath, and in fact I expect we'll end up with a hyperregulated system similar to Massachusetts, where you have to pick your jurisdiction carefully if you want to be able to get a CCW permit.

    Further, I bet they'll make the laws draconian enough that if anyone can see your gun (such as if you bend over and it "prints" through your clothing) you go to jail and lose your rights, and open carry will still be illegal.

    *

    College gun scare in Rhode Island, where campus security guards are disarmed. And Ace says:
    The good news though is the heavily armed state police (who showed up only 20min after the call) confiscated a Nerf gun from some student, although nobody knows if that's what set off the panic...but they took it anyway just to be sure.
    Yep! You can't be too careful. Why, that lad with the Nerf gun might be a danger to, uh, well...something.

    *rolleyes*

    So there you have it: if you're a college student who intends to go on a shooting spree, Rhode Island has the softest targets in the country. Not even the campus security guards have guns and it takes nearly half an hour for the police to show up after the campus has been locked down. And since the security guards don't have guns, naturally the students will all be disarmed, too.

    What a load of rot, foisted on us by rot-headed morons who think we live in a fantasy world.

    * * *

    An 80386 in a building. That's the short form; this is an article about a network of computers built by the US government to coordinate defenses from airborne bombers armed with nuclear weapons and the technology of the day required that a very large building be filled with tubes and transistors to get the require computational power.

    It's never a bad idea to remind yourself just how far computer technology has come since 1945.

    The one thing I take exception to in that article--and it's not much exception--is where the guy discusses how this single 80386 ran everything in the building and could do all these complex things. This computer was programmed with the philosophy that every instruction cycle was sacred; running at a clock speed of 75 kHz the machine did not have power to throw away. It's probable that it was programmed in machine code, which was painstakingly optimized to waste absolutely no processor time whatsoever.

    Contrast that with the modern desktop computer. Computer cycles are so cheap that we find ways for our computers to waste them even when we're at work. (Ever have one of those little animated kittens following your mouse pointer around?) A modern computer has power to burn, which is why in 2001 I was able to sit at my computer composing text while simultaneously using the computer to play music (via headphones)...and at that the computer was still loafing, spending a majority of its processor cycles in an idle loop, simply waiting for instructions.

    Same here; when I'm not actually pressing down on a key, this computer is doing nothing other than OS housekeeping, so the people who wrote the OS did not spend a lot of time on minimizing OS overhead. There's no need to.

    If you took a modern computer and programmed it the way the SAGE computers had been programmed, you could get a lot of work out of a single CPU...and you'd end up wasting a spectacular amount of time, too. Much more than it's worth, considering how cheap processing power is these days.

    * * *

    Mrs. Fungus and I slept right through voting hours yesterday. It doesn't seem to have made a difference, at least in the Representative race, because a Chicago Democrat won the election...of course. And that person did not win by a margin of one or two votes.

    I just have to wonder if my parents voted for him. *sigh* Such is life (and death) in the Peoples' Demokratik Republik of Illinoistan.

    * * *

    Monday's weather was gorgeous, and to our surpise on Tuesday the daffodils had bloomed. I didn't even see the buds coming up; then again I hadn't really looked for them--so it was extra-surprising to see the brilliant yellow blooms Tuesday.

    Surprising, and welcome, believe me. This has been a very chilly spring; they're predicting "wintry mix" for Friday. Well, I guess that's how the global warming cookie crumbles.

    Incidentally, not long ago I saw something about how the oceans were soaking up all the global warming, which is why the atmosphere hasn't warmed in 17 years--and again I must point to the Laws of Thermodynamics which demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt THAT SHIT IS PATENTLY IM-FUCKING-POSSIBLE. You cannot have two connected systems in disequlibrium; you especially cannot have THAT EQUILIBRIUM GET WORSE.

    Unless there's some magical refrigerator somewhere, pumping heat out of the atmosphere and into the oceans. Entropy tends towards a maximum, not a minimum. If these guys were actually scientists, they might understand that.

    But it's been a chilly spring, and not just here; it's been particularly bad in Europe. They got feet of snow in northern England over Easter weekend. There's a huge system crawling across the US which pasted the Rockies with more snow.

    ...and it's nearly mid-April and I've heard one peeper. One. I should have heard them by the ton on Monday evening, when it was so warm here we had most of the bunker's windows open; but the ground has to thaw and get warm down far enough that the things bestir from their hibernation, and apparently that hasn't happened yet. Usually those buggers are out and done with mating by April; not so this year.

    * * *

    I just don't know what else to say. I can't figure out the last time I posted a Garfield Without Garfield strip, either.

    Looks like it was in December, so let's get caught up!















    Now we're getting somewhere.
    Saturday, April 6th, 2013
    12:54 pm
    #3806: Although it would be nice, I will never have one of those golden rockets.
     I don't vote the right way, and won't just to win a prize.

    That's how I was able to tell what John Scalzi's politics were like without reading anything he'd ever written; he wins writing awards. People who win those awards always vote a certain way and write a certain kind of story.

    One time when I went to an SF con, there was a "Bulwer-Lytton Contest". People could enter by submitting a chunk of writing similar to "It was a dark and stormy night...." Who won? The same guy who always won, according to comments from those present. The guy who's chummy with the guests of honor (who voted on the winner of the contest) and who's well-known in the national SF community. There were other pieces of purple prose which were better (worse?) examples than his--which ended with a lame "Barney" joke--but they weren't even considered. (I do not include my own entry in that category. I tried, but wasn't bad enough.)

    Yet Another Data Point: It's not who you know, but who you blow.

    Fortunately, I don't really care all that much about it. I'd much rather have commercial success than critical acclaim any day of the week; money is the ultimate validation and all the writing awards in history won't improve your credit rating.

    * * *

    Amazingly enough, it's above 60 today. It's windy and gusty and I took half a Lunesta last night, so I'm not going to try riding the bike today.

    Half a Lunesta--I am not nearly as spacy today as I was yesterday, but "better" is frequently not "good" and this is no exception; I am finding myself too easily distracted. One should not ride a motorcycle when he is easily distracted.

    * * *

    Local elections on Tuesday, and I'll be glad of it when they're done. I have to go vote for a new congresscritter, so I'll probably vote in the local as well, except that I don't really know who I want to vote for.

    I know who I want to vote against in the "village administrator" position, though. That's not a lot of help, but it's something. A-number-one on that list is the asshat who had a pickup truck in last year's Christmas parade with "VOTE FOR [his own name]" on it. Your political aspirations have nothing to do with Christmas, you dickhead.

    I'm also tending to want to vote against the incumbent, solely because he's had the job since 1985.

    * * *

    I love this scene from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series:



    "I demand that I may...or may not...be Vroomfondel." Douglas Adams had a wonderful flair for weird names.

    And it's such a wonderful depiction of how union goons act in the bargain.
    Friday, April 5th, 2013
    1:48 pm
    #3805: WHAT IN THE BLUE BLAZES IS GOING ON
    All the cats have turned into raving psychopaths today. I've had to give one of them a soaking because he simply would not stop attacking the other cats, and then Luna suddenly reverted to her kitten days and began splashing all the water out of the water dish. WTF. It makes me want to pack them all in boxes and ship them to Abu Dhabi.

    The weather is not abnormal for April and they're all neutered/spayed so it's not anything to do with pheromones, either. I don't know what the hell it is, but it's pissing me off.

    * * *

    12-year-old girls have been given unlimited access to "abortion pills" by judicial fiat. Because while you're not adult enough to have your own medical insurance before age 27, and you're too young to smoke at age 17, and too young to drink at age 21, of course you're old enough to decide on having an abortion when you're 12. That's just common sense! Even though you're not mature enough to consent to sex before 18, you're mature enough to take an over-the-counter pill that plays hob with your still-developing endocrine system.

    DrewM adds:
    At some point we need to either get control of the federal judiciary or just admit the actions of the political branches are nothing more than the first drafts of policy that judges can rewrite as much as they want.
    That is certainly the case. Judicial fiat has gone too far and must be reined in--but that much was true after Roe v. Wade passed, and it hasn't gotten better in the last 40 years.

    * * *

    Spectacularly rude vegan...or is that redundant? Vegan brings his own pasta to a restaurant for them to prepare--

    You know what, stop right the fuck there. If I'm running a restaurant and someone brings his own food in, I tell him to GTFO and go cook his own damned food. I don't know what's in that food or where it came from and I'm already responsible for the health of people who eat in my establishment; I'm going to limit my liability to foods wherein I know what's in them and where they came from and how they were prepared.

    But even if I am willing to cook stuff people bring in, there's no way they get a significant break on the price. As is pointed out, we're talking about $0.12 worth of pasta; the rest of the ingredients are supplied by the restaurant--but most of the price of a meal is the chef's time, the labor required to prepare the meal. That's why $5 worth of steak costs $15 at a restaurant.

    Expecting a fifty percent discount on a meal--just because you brought one of the ingredients with you--is ludicrous. Particularly when you're doing something like this on a Saturday night, which is typically when restaurants are at their most busy.

    Here's an idea: if you don't like the food the restaurants serve, don't eat out. Cook your own goddamned food.

    * * *

    Two from Karl Denninger:

    The latest unemployment report is just plain bad. That's what he says, emphasis removed:
    The fact of the matter is that real improvement in employment does not exist and has never existed since the bottom in 2009, despite what the useful idiots on the TeeVee have been telling you.

    Average workweek ticked up 0.1 and hourly earnings ticked up one cent, but among non-supervisory employees hours were flat and earnings were down a penny.

    The trend has clearly shifted and is just plain old-fashioned bad.
    The other post of his, today, that I'm commenting on is the impending raid on retirement accounts.

    I said that was going to be the next place our government looked to find money to continue its spending spree. Looks like they're going to take an incremental approach, though: tax IRAs that can supply more than $200,000 per year of retirement income first; then they'll gradually expand this crap until the federal government has taken all the money and replaced it with IOUs.

    And of course when it comes time for you to collect, there won't be any money to pay you. The IOUs will be treasury bills or other government bonds and investors will have to take a haircut because of austerity measures, and "Here, we're issuing new bonds and you either trade in your bonds for these lower-value bonds or you'll end up holding worthless paper."

    Just like in Greece.

    * * *

    I can barely think.

    ...last night, Mrs. Fungus had me try a tablet of Lunesta to see if it would help me sleep. It did, all right; but it's been 12 hours since I took it and my brain feels as if it's wrapped in cotton batting. It's hard for me to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time.

    That's why I never like to take stuff like that.

    Anyway, now that I've come to the end of the link-and-comment stuff, I find I haven't got anything else to say, because without an external focus my brain just kind of wanders aimlessly. I've caught myself making some stupid grammatical or semantic errors, so if you happen to find any, just ignore them.
    Thursday, April 4th, 2013
    5:13 pm
    #3804: There's nothing like knowing what you're talking about.
     One of the morons behind Colorado's anti-gun law wanted to ban high-capacity magazines because she thinks they're expended in use. That 15-round magazine, you just throw that away after using it, because all the bullets are gone. Yeah.

    Her office later issued a "clarification", saying that she meant clips rather than magazines, but you can reload clips too--and in any case the law specifies magazines.

    ...and are there "high capacity" clips? Like 15, 20, 30 round clips? Somehow I doubt it; seems like that'd be unwieldy.

    So this "clarification" gets an official Fungus nice try, but no cigar award.

    Morons.

    * * *

    Arse Technica, the global warming resource, doubles down on anthropogenic global warming. Triples down. Quadruples down.

    The entire article is 100% uncritical of AGW even though all the models and projections have been proven wrong. It's too late to stop climate change, the article intones gravely, but if we cut our carbon emissions now we can reduce future warming!



    And let's not forget James Hansen!



    ...but these guys never miss a chance to beat a dead horse, because "the science is settled" and "we have a consensus!"

    Heh.

    * * *

    Even fewer people want Chevy Volts now. March 2013's sales figures were 35% lower than March 2012's figures, and March 2012's figures were nothing to write home about.

    You know, it's a shame that President Obama isn't a Fiero fan. Maybe GM would bring back the Fiero if he were...but unfortunately it would be some eco-correct hunk of shit no one would want to drive EXACTLY LIKE THE FUCKING VOLT IS.

    * * *

    Hooray! They're building a new nuclear reactor in the US! A real honest-to-God commercial power reactor, brand new! The first one in 30 years!

    Ooh! Two new reactors are being built!

    ...contrast that with China, where twenty-eight new reactors are being built.

    *sigh*

    * * *

    Germany is beginning to feel the pinch of recession. The entire world economy is in shitter, and the ruling class is doing its damnedest to "hide the decline" with Keynesian stupidity that didn't work the first time--spending massive amounts of money that the various governments do not have in the vain hope of staving off economic collapse for just one more election cycle.

    That's why employment is on the floor, by the way. There's no money out there for hiring new employees; it simply costs too much. And while the cost in actual dollars is rising, the dollars themselves are being inflated into toilet paper by the issuance of so much government debt.

    Monty points out:
    The reality is that we've chosen the European social model of social welfare at the cost of high structural unemployment at just the time when this model is failing all over the world: in Japan, in Europe, and here. At exactly the time young people need to be entrepreneurs, jacks-of-all-trades, and self-starters, we're turning them into under-educated, over-entitled, helpless, unskilled wards of the State.
    Which segues rather neatly into the next link du jour, wherein George Will talks about our schools being indoctrination centers rather than educational facilities. Indoctrination centers and, yes, employment programs for education bureaucrats. That little thing about teaching children the essentials of education--the traditional "Three Rs"--has fallen by the wayside, because teaching those things get in the way of making sure children vote reliably Democrat once they're old enough.

    "All is not lost," Monty says. "The world still needs people who can carry a plate of food from the kitchen to the table."

    *sigh*

    * * *

    If you are a rich communist, you can quite literally get away with murder. The '60s radicals now lionized by popular culture--people like Obama friend Bill Ayers--came from rich, well-connected families. The young radicals took no issue with mommy and daddy's money and connections with the establishment when it came to keeping them out of jail; and here we see (again) that one of the essential components of a leftist is hypocrisy.

    It's an ugly story, and it's always been an ugly story, despite the Hollywood left's attempts to whitewash it. Communism is a bloody business.

    * * *

    Turns out that Karl Marx was just as unwashed and smelly as the morons he inspired. And lived in his parents' basement.

    "Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people." I like that. (Emphasis in original.)

    * * *

    And right from the land of fruits and nuts--and right on schedule--comes a bill aimed at normalizing pedophilia. The first step in normalizing pedophilia--as was the case with homosexuality a few decades ago--is to legitimize it as an "alternative sexual orientation".

    The bill is ostensibly aimed at making it illegal to "counsel" a homosexual to heterosexuality, but it also includes pedophilia in its descriptions of "alternative sexual orientations". Please note that Democrats defeated an amendment intended specifically to exclude pedophilia as a sexual orientation while leaving others intact.

    Got to love the pro-gay lobby.

    * * *

    Cadwallader hit 90th yesterday, finally. You just can't power-level a high-level toon when you only play three or so hours per week, but I haven't been averaging much more than that since I got married. Too many other things to do.

    That may change once Mrs. Fungus and I finish getting the house rearranged and redecorated, but somehow I doubt it. Sooner or later I'm going to find a job, and that will mean I have even less time for computer shenanigans.

    None of my applications has yielded any fruit, though; the app I submitted to Lowe's was rejected in three days flat. I am just about ready to make the rounds of the fast food restaurants, because this shit is ridiculous.

    See above, though, re: the job market. *sigh* The recession has continued in all but name since 2007. No one with any sense is hiring right now, except to replace staffing lost to firing or what-have-you, because it's not hard to read the writing on the wall if you're paying any attention at all to the economic indicators. The real ones, I mean, not the Dow-Jones and the faked-up unemployment figures from the Obama regime's Bureau of Lies and Statistics.

    If McCain had won in 2008, the press would be talking about the Depression and how It's All McCain's Fault. Instead, the media is completely incurious about anything that might make Obama look bad.

    *sigh*

    Still, I've got to start making money, and I've got to start soon--and if it has to be fast food, then it has to be that, like it or not.

    It'd be nice if I got e-mails from publishers soon telling me they were buying, though. I'm not going to hold my breath.
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