So let's start with a story from Australia:
Dirt cartoons featuring child characters can get you sent to jail. Isn't that lovely?
Pixy Misa posts an "in b4 its banned" response. One I can appreciate. Cartoon boobies FTW. (Japanese onomotopoeia: "pururuun!")
* * *
"Red state" used to mean "Democrat" and it was highly useful, as Farah points out. Now it means "Republican" because...uh...well, the media decided.
I agree with Farah that red is better suited to Democrats than blue.
* * *
Go ahead and smoke, Boss! Obama pledges not to smoke in the White House--WTF, he's the freaking president (or will be in about 40 days) and he for damn sure won't get to do a lot of other things.
* * *
Og on learning how to delegate. His father taught him a good lesson, one that I've taken to heart, too: never send someone to do something you're unwilling to do.
Unfortunately a lot of bosses do just that.
"If you want something done right...." but eventually you get to a point that you have to have underlings do tasks for you, and you'll have to accept that they may or may not be done as well as you wanted them done.
* * *
Vox Day again hits one out of the park. I don't hate other cultures. I love them. For example, I love learning about Japan and its customs and culture. But at the end of the day I live in my culture, and I prefer to live in my culture. My preference is not evil. Neither is it misguided or chauvanist. It is merely that I am an American, and I live in America, and I prefer to live the way Americans live.
This also means that I have a preference for not allowing people to blow other people up because they don't worship the right way. I have a preference for not allowing religious law to supplant the law of the land--specifically, Sha'ria. I have a preference for living in an open and free society, where I can eat pork if I damn well please, even if my neighbors are of a religion which disallows it.
* * *
Look at the legend of the chart that accompanies this article.
Up in the upper left corner it says, "Temperature relative to 1961-1990 average". This is where the legerdemain happens: 1961-1990 was a relatively cool period in the prior century.
If you look at the graph and ignore the origin, you can see how much warming occurred during the entire 20th century. Notice how much occurred before 1940.
Oh--one other thing: notice how the graph is meant to be a deviation from the "average" of 1961-1990, yet most of that period is below the origin? For that 30-year period, 2/3 of the time is below the 0 deviation.
Well, it's to be expected. The article is full of global warming bullshit; you can't expect them to post an accurate graph or anything. The article asserts that "human-induced warming" is why it's now much warmer than it was in "Charles Dickens' time"--no mention of, oh, the Little Ice Age, the Maunder minimum, solar cycles, etc, etc. Just an uncritical statement that humans have caused global warming.
I can infer from this that these people assume that the climate in Dickens' time was the "natural" climate of Earth. Is that an unreasonable inference? They say that the warming since then is "human-induced"; therefore I must assume that they think that the conditions 150-odd years ago is the "correct" climate for the Earth and that the warmer temperatures we're experiencing now are solely do to human interference with the climate via the emissions of carbon.
Assuming this is so, then, let me ask this: What about the Medieval Warm Period?
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP, or "Climate Optimum" as some call it) featured temperatures much higher than now, and there was no corresponding increase in atmospheric carbon to account for the temperature increase. Where is the "human-induced" warming that created the MWP? If the temperatures from Dickens' time are "correct", how can they explain the MWP which occurred without the carbon emissions from human activity?
They can't. Of course. That is why this is bullshit.
* * *
And, by the way, the US military has said that the information on climate change is "contradictory":
"In many respects, scientific conclusions about the causes and potential effects of global warming are contradictory."
Do tell.
* * *
Wear a fricking helmet and put a muffler on your motorcycle, asshat. I really don't know what else to say. I don't have any sympathy for someone who rides a motorcycle without a helmet and then gets his brains scrambled when he and his motorcycle part company while moving.
And those with straight pipes? Those people are douchebags. Especially when I'm trying to sleep and some asshat goes roaring down my street at full throttle. Fucktard.
* * *
Another Boortz piece, this one on what Obama said during a recent interview.
Pay particular attention to the last paragraph. Boortz correctly points out that when you have private industry which is government-controlled, that is fascism. Okay, the health care system that the Democrats want to give us? That's not actually "socialized" medicine; it is fascist medicine: because the the government will control the actions of private health-care providers.
But the people who decry everything Bush did as "fascist" won't know the difference, or care, but will welcome it.
* * *
I've been following the fall of Zimbabwe since 1999. The place became a festering shithole, as I suspected it would, but at a slower pace than I thought it would--I guess my assumptions were pessimistic.
But there is one tiny little bright spot in all the mega-inflation and poverty and famine and racial violence and disease: the cholera cases can be assumed to be HIV positive, which will give the "fight AIDS in Africa" organizations a much-needed boost in their infection numbers.
(Wow, that was really cynical of me. Sorry about that.)
* * *
The next several days promise on-again, off-again snow and/or rain and/or "wintry mix".
Blurgh.
I want to start with the Christmas decorations; I want to start with the Christmas shopping; and I still want to get the Jeep over to the garage for a lube job and tire balance. Dang it.
Saturday morning we got about two inches of snow, and it was blowing around enough that I needed to use the 4WD on the way home from work. And the damn indicator light didn't come on, meaning that either the light bulb has blown or else the switch has gone bad. Argh etc. The thing went into 4WD without a problem, though. That at least.
One more thing for me to worry about.
We're going to donate the van to the Salvation Army; Mom found the title today and I'll have to clean it out this week. (They can have the van and the accessories for it. They can't have all the tools and accoutrements that didn't come with it.) The van is 13 years old and has over 100,000 miles on it; it's been banged up a bit here and there--it's probably worth $1,000-$2,000, or would be if I could have fixed the problems it's got.
Problem is, we never use the thing. I last used it in August, when I needed to go get an alternator for the Escort, and otherwise it was last on the road in May, when we picked up the riding mower. What's the point? "Towing stuff"? I can get a hitch put on the Jeep for what it would cost to insure the van for six months.
And that ignores the fact that it's leaking fluids and has a "check engine" light that goes on and off at random, and we can't find the diagnostic port to get the codes read. And there's a possibility that there's something wrong with the transmission, too.
Rebuilding the transmission would, by itself, cost $1,500, and that's if I removed the transmission myself.
...so it's going to go, and we'll have a little more room in the driveway. If I can get rid of my '86 Fiero next, then I can put the '85 in the garage, and then we'll be down to 2 cars in the driveway--the Escort and the Jeep.
* * *
I suppose I haven't recently mentioned how much I detest the way people market shareware.
I had need, last night, of a program that could rip a video stream. So I went to Google and tried searching for "freeware" "video" "stream" "ripper".
...and what I got were several hundred links to crippleware.
Let me explain this: shareware is a program which you can get for free, usually by downloading it. If you like it and find it useful, you send the author some money. It's 100% on the honor system, though.
Freeware is software which is free to download and use. (Example: WinAmp.) You get complete functionality and never have to pay anything to use it. The freeware may lack features of the "pro" (not free) version, but mostly the "pro" features are not needed for everyday use. In other cases, the free version is for home use while the "pro" version is for business use.
But that's not what I see on the web these days. What I see is crippleware, what people used to call the demo version.
It is not called this. It's billed as "shareware"; but it is emphatically not, because you get a crippled version of the software and have to pay money for a code which unlocks the full version.
I don't mind that. I really don't. But when I am searching for freeware, it is not useful for me to find crippleware. Crippleware will not solve my problem; and usually the problem I am trying to solve is a one-time-only kind of thing. I don't want to--and will not--spend $50 so I can download one video stream.
So stop advertising your demo version as "freeware". Yes, it's a free download. No, it doesn't help, because your crippled program is fucking useless, and it only serves to make me hate you and your products.
Even download.com is no longer any help in this regard. I went there and found much the same shit I found via Google, and with the same stupid marketing tricks. No, don't bother to tell me that it's crippled until I download it and install it, that's fine--I don't mind having six tons of shitware clogging up my machine. (Shitware that doesn't work, to boot.)
But I did eventually find a piece of software that cost nothing and did what I wanted...to the wrong damn video. It's a moral victory. As for the video I wanted?
Put the browser up on the TV and recorded the stream using the VCR. Analog FTW.