No, I'm talking about the pretendous stack of tabs I've got open right now.
* * *
Christian cop declines to attend services at a mosque in the guise of "sensitivity training" and is punished for it. And further there is evidence that he was being punished for that specifically, not "refusing a lawful order". That latter bit is just the excuse they used for suspending him.
* * *
So some nut went into the FRC office in DC and shot up the place and managed to hit the security guard in the arm.
Aaand "It's Looking Like a Politically-Motivated Hate Crime" goes the headline of that AoSHQ update on the story. The shooter was carrying a Chick-fil-A bag and reportedly said, "It's about what this place stands for!"
The press, of course, will ignore this story. If it gets any mention at all, it'll be the basic facts (armed man shot up a think tank in DC, one wounded) and that'll be it. "The shooter's a liberal! Bury it!"
And JayG asks the question we're all asking: "How could this have happened in DC, where personal ownership of firearms is heavily restricted? It's impossible! That man couldn't have been carrying a loaded gun because it's illegal!"

* * *
Incidentally? Her hair is disgusting.
* * *
Another story the media will ignore is all about the New Black Panthers and their racist desire for (and attempts to foment) black-on-white hate crime.
* * *
Judge won't issue a preliminary injuction against a Voter ID law in Pennsylvania but it doesn't mean anything since the plaintiffs can appeal it.
Guess who the plaintiffs are? They're racists who think blacks can't do anything for themselves and can't be expected to drive, open a checking account, rent a video, board an airplane, or anything that whites routinely do. No, those blacks are ignorant, stupid, helpless, child-like creatures who simply cannot be expected even to have something as basic as a government-issued photo ID. It simply represents too great a burden on their ability to exercise the franchise.
...in other words, the plaintiffs are Democrats and liberals.
* * *
I'm not impressed by this statistic. "In 2011, roughly one-third of the new generating capacity installed within the US was in the form of wind turbines,..."
Why? Read on, and you learn, "That represents nearly seven Gigawatts of new wind installations."
So, in 2011, 21 GW of new power generating capacity went on-line in the United States. Do you know how much electricity the US consumed in 2011?

And that's not an annual figure; that's daily so it doesn't relate--but it gives you an idea, at least, of how much energy we get from "renewable" sources like wind and solar.
I can't find annual figures for 2011 or even 2010. The number for 2009, however, is 3,961,559,000,000,000 watt-hours, or 3,961 terawatt-hours. This number is smaller than the figure for 2011, but I'm not sure by how much; let's just run with it.
So, 3,961,000 gigawatt-hours.
Let's assume that the new windmills generate electricity for an entire year. That's about 87,000 GW-h.
So our 7 GW of new windmill generating capacity is 2.1% of the total power consumption of the USA.
Seems reasonable right? But we have to apply the rule of fifths: "In practice, windmills actually generate 20% of their rated capacity." So in fact that 7 GW of windmill power will actually generate about 1.4 GW, meaning that they'll generate about 17,000 GW-h--which is 0.4% of the total annual power use of the US. (Assuming, of course, that the windmills turn the entire year. Which they don't.)
Yep, we're striking a blow against global waming now, you betcha! That 0.4% of our annual power use will save several hundred tons of carbon emissions! (Out of an atmospheric carbon budget of 206,000,000,000 tons. Yeah.)
...the Arse Technica piece admits that the rated capacity isn't the real output of the windmills, but, "the steady growth of wind capacity has now pushed the amount that is actually generated by wind to over three percent of the annual national consumption of electricity."
Wow! Three percent! We're saving the planet!
The US has 47 GW (rated capacity) of windmills installed. That's about 10 GW of actual output--less, actually, but let's be generous!
You can generate 10 GW with one nuclear power station.
* * *
I wasn't going to comment on this bit about quark-gluon plasmas (same source as above) but then I read this paragraph:
While the hunt for the Higgs boson has dominated press coverage of the LHC, the collider also performs heavy ion experiments using lead (Pb+Pb). In addition to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, which are used both for proton-proton and heavy ion collisions, LHC has a dedicated heavy ion detector named ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment, pronounced "ahLEES"). The two active detectors at RHIC are PHENIX (Pioneering High-Energy Nuclear Interacting Experiment) and STAR (Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC). These study the products of collisions between gold ions (Au+Au);..."AhLEES"? What the fuck is wrong with just saying "Alice" like the name Alice? Is "STAR" pronounced "STAAIRWEE"? Is "PHENIX" pronounced "phooweenixx0rz"? Come on. There ought to be a limit to how f-ing pretentious you can be. Shit.
* * *
The Democrat party has classically been about the concentration of power in as few hands as possible (the implication being that it would be Democrat hands holding the reins of power, of course) and one way to accomplish this is to pack as many people into cities as is possible. There's a reason Democrat machines tend to happen in big cities, after all, and relatively little of it has to do with their love for public transportation.
(That is to say, public transportation for others. Public transportation is for the proles; you're not going to see Rahm Emanuel taking the bus to city hall. Liberal elites get limosines and private jets, because they're important, right?)
* * *
Incidentally, The same thing goes for health care. When Obamacare was being debated in Congress, those of us on the right side of the debate (I mean that both ways) were making all these predictions about what it would mean for our medical system.
Now that Obamacare is law, people are really looking at what it all means and are beginning to see that we were right all along: it's going to make medical care more expensive, not less, and it's going to bring rationing and decreased quality of care with it. Doctors will quit rather than get paid a pittance for their efforts.
...in fact, there's another rant there that I'll get to later on.
* * *
Problem is, Xanax has recreational uses. See, here's the deal: if you take enough Xanax, you get high. Xanax has a street value because of this.
But read this: "The anti-anxiety drug alprazolam (also known as Xanax), was the drug most commonly found in toxicology tests, contributing to 231 deaths in 2011."
This merely says that Xanax shows up on the postmortem tox screen. It's not necessarily what caused the death. Okay, Heath Ledger and Whitney Houston both had Xanax in their systems when they died. Did they die of Xanax overdose?
What about aspirin or ibuprofen or acetominophen? How many times did those show up in these tox screens? What about alcohol?
Xanax is one of those drugs that just works. Used in a manner consistent with its label it does what it's supposed to do with a minimum of side effects, and the main side effect is drowsiness. This is why it's prescribed to so many people; and the larger the pool of users the greater the chance that some of them will die with it in their blood.
But it's not as if Xanax is some great scourge of a drug that will destroy us all. WTF.
* * *
Anyone with a brain will not be surprised by this Borepatch piece on what actually killed passenger rail travel in the United States.
What is the one thing that always stands in the way of economic prosperity? Eh?
* * *
Karl Denninger continues his economic doomsaying and has numbers to back him up.
The only bright point? Employment and hours haven't collapsed.Yeah--the employment numbers aren't dropping yet but if orders for new goods are declining the employment numbers must also decline.
Yet.
I wonder when I'm going to get a job. Or if.
AP continues to cheerlead for Obama and the Democrats by saying the "recovery" is the weakest one we've seen since WW2. And Ace finishes with:
This is the most underreported story of the past three years. The press have never underplayed economic misery to this degree before.Yeah, Ace, me too--and you know as well as I do that we won't.
I'd like to see an analysis of that--press coverage of this recession versus the previous ones.
* * *
Deaf girl wants to be in Girl Scouts but needs an interpreter. Apparently the girl's parents can't be arsed to be there to translate for her, and the GSA organization can't afford to continue to pay someone to be her interpreter.
The obvious solution, of course, is for the girl and her parents to sue the GSA to make them pay for a sign language interpreter whenever she's involved in GSA activities, because of course the girl shouldn't have to bear the costs of her own disability. Oh no! That's not fair if she can't do what the other girls can do just because she's got a handicap! The GSA is a big organization and they have money, so they should have to foot the bill to accommodate her!
In other news, a child born with no legs is suing the Little League to force them to have a pair of cyborg legs created for him, because it's not fair that he can't take part in youth baseball programs. Also, a diabetic kid is suing Hershey Corporation because it's not fair that he can't have chocolate.
Look: I'm big on encouraging people to challenge their limitations, but when you come right down to it sometimes your limitations are exactly that and you can't do what you want to do.
Fuck, when I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. In third grade, when I was seven, I started developing nearsightedness. You can't be an astronaut unless you've got 20/20 vision uncorrected and there's just no way in hell that'll ever happen--not even with Lasik.
(Besides also having about 2,000 hours in flying jets and a couple of degrees--but my eyesight alone is a major DQ.)
--so can I sue NASA? It's not exactly an open-and-shut case, is it?
I realize that in the liberal/progressive establishment, being deaf is not supposed to be a handicap and we're supposed to bend over backwards to accommodate people with disabilities...but the fact is that such accommodation is a luxury. Okay, if it costs $120 per day for the little girl to have an ASL interpreter present, the GSA isn't going to be willing to foot that bill for very long. If the girl's parents can't (or won't) pay, then what?
Being a member of the GSA isn't a right (any more than membership in the Boy Scouts is) and it's a private organization. They have the right to tell this girl, "Look, we'd love to have you in our organization but we simply cannot afford to accommodate your handicap."
Why don't they make learning sign language into an activity for the girls in the group? What's wrong with that idea? Some of them will resist it, but some will get interested and keep going even after the whole group moves on to other activities. One might even get so interested in it that she ends up being this girl's best friend.
* * *
A minifig-scale Serenity. Very nice work.
* * *
By the way, guys: titles are underlined ("Firefly") and ship names are italicized (Serenity).
That's why I always write the title of a recent major SF series thus: Battlestar Galactica.
James Cameron's big movie about a famous shipwreck is therefore written as Titanic. When you talk about a well-known nuclear-powered aircraft carrier you mention the USS Enterprise. (And the failed Star Trek series I really enjoyed starring Scott Bakula was called Enterprise.)
I don't understand what's so hard about this. Other than typing all the HTML tags and making sure they're closed correctly.
* * *
Okay, doctors:
See, being a doctor is a highly technical skill and it takes years to acquire. But a successful doctor generally has a pretty high social quotient and can interact with people very well--so he is not limited to practicing medicine, unlike--say--a slightly dumpy computer/electronics nerd who otherwise can only stock shelves or wipe butts. (*sigh*)
So when a doctor decides to leave his practice, he's not abandoning a $350,000 per year job to stand behind a cash register at Walmart, you know? His advanced education, intelligence, and people skills are enough to get him in the door in many types of industries. Many are medicine-related; many are not.
So that "Dr." in front of his name and "MD" after it do not restrict him to a life of examining tonsils. He could go work for a drug company in one of several capacities. His people skills would enable him to be a very good salesman; imagine a doctor selling x-ray equipment to other doctors--and he'd probably make as much money doing that as treating sprains.
(My brother-in-law--the one who drank himself to death in 2009--sold enough medical imaging equipment in one year that his paycheck was a quarter of a million dollars. He was originally trained as an x-ray technician; imagine what a radiologist could do.)
If Obamacare is allowed to be fully enacted, all the doctors in the country aren't going to blithely continue to ply their trade; oh no. What will happen is that the really good doctors--the smart ones with the people skills--will leave the medical treatment field and move into other areas of the medical industry.
Leaving the less-good ones to pick up the slack. The surly, the uninterested, the ones who rest on their laurels--not the involved, the ones who are always learning, the ones who want to help people and not just collect a fat paycheck.
All of this is eminently predictable; we need only look at how things have gone in other countries which have socialized medicine.
* * *
As for me, I've got chores to do. The grass is looking like it needs cutting, especially after the all-day drizzly rain we had on Monday. I want to get the dirt bike's cylinder off and taken to the shop, and seeing as it's nearly 3:30 I'd better get after that pretty damned pronto if I want that started today.
And the garage--
I rode the motorcycle to therapy yesterday, and then had a little low-speed ride around town for a while afterwards. The rear tire was at 24 PSI, right about where I'd left it after my trip to Walmart a week ago tomorrow. (An intermittent leak. WTF.)
Anyway, after I got home from that, I was looking at the garage, just gloating over the fact that I could walk to the back of the garage without having to step over junk, and thinking about the remaining pile. I could reduce that further simply by tearing into it--get the boxes organized, toss more junk, etcetera. I'd like to get after that relatively soon, if I can.
Maybe not today, but soon.
* * *
That 12-pack of Little Debbie oatmeal creme pies I bought last week is gone already. For some reason the damned things just hit the spot. They're on sale at the local grocery store this week, so I'll probably be buying more.
* * *
Last night Ormusia hit 70th level. Her first efforts in Borean Tundra were nasty, brutish, and short; fighting one monster her own level required a pause to bandage and heal afterwards.
Then I got into a group that hit the Nexus (instance) and I got four nice pieces of armor from that. Once she hit 70th I was able to equip a couple of 70th-level weapons which improved her DPS by 50 points per hand...and now she can go toe-to-toe with the bad guys in Northrend without needing a priest on hand to slap HP on her as she fights.
This is progress.