Of course I'm writing today's post a bit earlier in the day. Still.
Yesterday was also really busy. After posting I had to go meet my sister-in-law at the Lincoln Oasis to pick up my nephew, then beat feet for church for Bible study. (My poor nephew had to participate in the class.)
Got home, chatted with nephew, but was pretty thoroughly wiped out, so I gave him my laptop and--after doing a few chores and chatting with Lemonzen on WoW--went to bed.
...sometime around dawn woke up from a hideous dream. WWIII, many large hydrogen bombs going off, me vaporizing--but only partially, so after the barrage I was this misshapen lump of flesh. The only sense I had left was touch, and not much of that since I didn't have much of a body left. The inchoate thought, Shouldn't that have killed me outright? WTF.
Of course if a person is exposed to enough radiation that some of the body vaporizes, pretty much all of it will--if nothing else because the bones will be heated to incandescence from absorbing all the X-ray flux.
I don't know what the hell that was about, but it sucked.
* * *
The EPA mandating low-sulfur fuels is having unintended consequences. Turns out that when your tractor is burning regular diesel fuel, the sulfur in it acts as a fertilizer. Since diesel can no longer have a lot of sulfur in it, and plants apparently need sulfur, farmers must buy fertilizer with it.
Considering that the exhaust from burning fossil fuels--carbon dioxide--is itself fertilizer, I am not terribly surprised by this.
* * *
DrewM writes an AoSHQ post about how the recent court decisions telling unions they may not collect political action funds from nonmembers is freaking liberals right the *F* out. He concludes:
Democrats always talk about "freedom of choice" but from unions to education, they want the only "choice" to be mandatory support for the institutions that support them. Dismantling these mutually supportive structures and the political assumptions that underlay them isn't simply a partisan fight, it's a fight for liberty.Yes, when liberals talk about "freedom of choice" they do not mean that you actually get to choose whatever you want. They mean "freedom to choose what we want you to", because otherwise you might choose something that limits their power and control over you.
This is why, for example, feminists pilloried Sarah Palin over her choice to have Trig when amniocentesis showed that he had Down's syndrome. (When they weren't claiming that the kid was actually Bristol's kid, of course, sired by her father.) "Pro-choice" means "having an abortion whenever there is a pregnancy we decide is unwanted". When you discover your baby is going to be born with Down's syndrome, of course you abort it! (Also whenever the kid is the wrong sex, or coming at an inconvenient time, or you change your mind about having kids, or forgot to use birth control that day, or-or-or.)
This is why "freedom of association" means "including all liberal grievance groups in your organization", so the Boy Scouts are a hate group for excluding gays, but the Congressional Black Caucus is well within its rights to exlude white people.
This is why "freedom of religion"--but do I need to go on?
* * *
Today's XKCD makes an excellent point:
And if anything, special effects are better today than they've ever been. NASA could do some fantastic things if they were all about making shit up.
...wait a second. The Goddard Institute for Space Science is making up global warming, and it's obvious. So maybe NASA couldn't get away with it, after all.
Food for thought.
* * *
They say "91" today, and right now it's ten degrees cooler than that. The wind has switched to the south, though, and I wouldn't be surprised...so the bunker's been closed up.
I cold-soaked the place last night, so hopefully with the thermostat at 76 the AC will stay off for a while.
A hundred tomorrow, and high nineties for the rest of the week. Whee! Welcome to summer!
...and the dewpoints are rising, too, so it's gonna be hot and sticky.
And I still have to work on the dirt bike. Well, I can always bring it inside!