Today was otherwise a low-key day. I had enough clients to keep me busy most of the time, with occasional help from the other CAs on duty. Mostly they did other stuff in the back (the newest member has a lot of computer training to take) while I held down the fort out front.
My boss--seeing how tired I looked and acted--had actually given me permission to leave at 2 PM, but I ended up toughing it out and staying until 3:58 before I left. (The fact that El-Hazard was finished updating was mere coincidence....)
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Borepatch embeds the documentary that was shot at Eisenhower's orders to document what Nazi Germany did with people it wanted to be rid of.
At 31:30, we learn that the people of Arnstadt exhumed and moved the victims of the Arnstadt camp because the graves smelled bad. How do you move a mass grave and not know that something very, very bad is going on?
"Willful blindness", probably. Still, it shoots in the foot the idea that the general German populace didn't know what was happening; but I suppose if people had admitted they knew what was going on and did nothing because they feared for their lives there might have been a lot more suicides among the German people in the wake of WW2. You don't have to feel guilty about it if you convince yourself you didn't know it was happening.
The video is just as grisly and horrifying as the warnings would lead you to expect. I'm watching it all because it reminds me that the people who insist the Holocaust never actually happened are themselves just as evil as the Nazis were.
Near the end: shoving around massive piles of dead bodies with bulldozers because there was simply no other way to bury the immense number of corpses without risking the health of the living.
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Look at #1 on this list. The BLS says that about 9 million unemployed is roughly, what, 5% of the working population? Isn't 93 million unemployed 50% of the working population? Doesn't that mean we have a fifty percent unemployment rate?
"Working population" meaning people who are able to work, below retirement age but over 18, and not disabled? The statistics have been so mangled that it's impossible to say what the unemployment rate actually is, but the figures I've seen bandied about that approximate 20% would not even remotely surprise me.
We're in the middle of a depression, even if the news media is pretending we're not.
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Meanwhile, Obama wants to go on a spending spree because the deficit has been "reduced". As Karl Denninger pointed out not too long ago, the deficit is still over a trillion dollars per year. We're $18,000 billion in debt and getting deeper at the rate of two million dollars per minute.
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YES MITT YOU ARE MOST ASSUREDLY MAKING THE RIGHT CALL, HERE. Thank you for not being a complete shithead.
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"Are climate models biased?" asks the headline of this Arse Technica, the global warming resource, article.
Big surprise: they say, "NO, of course not, silly! Except they might overestimate the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions." Just look at the fatuousness on display in the first three paragraphs:
If you took an average output of multiple climate models, it would predict that the start of this century would have seen a strong warming trend. Instead, the planet warmed relatively slowly over this time."So far, analysis has seemed to come down on the side of reality"? Did they really just admit--grudgingly!--that reality trumps the computer models?
When models and reality disagree, it can tell us about two things: the models and reality. So far, analysis has seemed to come down on the side of reality. Evidence has indicated that one of the contributors to this century's climate has been small volcanic eruptions; another suggests that a run of La Niña years has helped hold temperatures down.
Now, a new study is out that turns the focus on the models. It finds no evidence that the models are biased toward predicting higher temperatures and instead suggests that their biggest issue might be in how they handle large volcanic eruptions.
"It finds no evidence that the models are biased"--did they even look for any? Did they consider Michael Mann's "hockey stick" model? Did they look at any of the predictions of the major models and then compare them to the temperature data?
I don't think they did. Because if they had, the conclusion would have been, "Holy shit, these models are biased as fuck!"
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So El-Hazard sat on the back counter the entire time I was at work, and I noticed that the hard drive was almost warm enough to cook on when I laid my hand atop the case.
Now: El-Hazard has a fan to cool its power supply, and I put a slot fan in the thing to move air through the case. But there is a large grille, on the back, for mounting two 2" fans. And it turns out that the air being expelled from the slot fan was being drawn in through there. (Big surprise.)
So I slapped duct tape over the grille, and mirabile visu the hard drive stayed nice and cool after that, because now air is being pulled in near, and is forced to flow past, the hard drive.
I want something neater than duct tape. I am going to make a blanking plate to install there, but it's not an emergency.
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Winter storm watch in effect from tomorrow night onward. Whee!