enormous iNCoNgrUiTieS|A Beacon of Intermittence

About a month ago I wrote a post about Francisco Linares, a Los Angeles man who was sentenced to jail for making property improvements to his home. I was looking around the net for a followup to see if anything else developed in the case but didn’t really find anything and the original article was gone as well but I did find a LA Times link to the story. What I really wanted was to see the extent of the property improvements that were worth sending an insurance manager to jail for six months.

Ain’t GoogleMaps cool? I see a dirt road running into someone’s back yard. I wonder how that fits into such tight homeowner’s code.?

In the comments of the LA Times blog post discussing the issue some guy said:

So, had they let Linares off the hook, here’s the message it would have sent to the law-abiding who spent the time and money to comply: SUCKERS — You got run through the wringer for obeying the rules, and you should have ignored them like Linares did. You may not like the rules, but isn’t it up to the citizens of RHE to decide what kind of community they have?

Hillary could not have said it better. Getting run through the wringer for obeying the rules you’re saying: I’m a sucker too.

It doesn’t say who wrote the post but he or she says, “I agree with the judge. What’s your opinion?”

Figures.

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When good people ask for help we should send whatever help we can.

“Tell them to send foreign troops, UN troops,” said a young monk at the Mwe Kya Kan pagoda. “Please, fly them to our country to save our lives.”

An American in Rangoon told me yesterday about an opinion poll carried out on Burmese attitudes to US foreign policy.

“Like most people, they thought that it sucks,” he told me. “But not for the usual reason. Burmese wanted to know why George Bush hasn’t invaded their country yet.”

Not only is it the right thing to do, but it would sure take the news off of Iraq, if you need another reason to do it. People who beat and murder and rob monks sure sound like the same guys we hate in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria and such.

This is from a news article dated April 29, 2004:

That suggests that the junta understands its problem with world opinion. But token steps do nothing to solve the larger problems of repression, civil strife and epidemic poverty. [Only international pressure is likely to break through Burma’s wall of repression.]

I guess the people in Burma know best what they need and it sounds like they don’t believe “international pressure” is doing the trick. Sounds like they think they need some boots on the ground.

I got a dollar that says there are mass graves in Burma full of men women and children. Even babies.

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Speaking of Al Gore inventing the information age with his clever little Internet gadget, I was just bitching about AlGore in a recent follow up effort to the pithy “Creatures from outer space” post that never was finished.

I was getting short on time to get out the door so I kinda left the post short but I think my point was kinda obvious. These damn eco-freaks can’t get it through their thick skulls that humans are in fact a natural phenomenon that evolves, exists and survives on this planet just like every other thing, living or dead, organic or inorganic.

Global warming is a big scam that is run by a lot of wealthy people from around the world who are trying to marshal all the available resources they can swindle in a futile effort to protect their real property holdings in the event adverse conditions should, say, submerge New York City, or something. More likely is that New York City will still just be a sewer but a significantly warmer climate will render now fertile crop land into a more arid, less hospitable clime, resulting in a poor long-term business outlook for existing, bountiful agribusinesses.

Ordinary people like me don’t give a damn if other people besides the people now are making gobs and gobs of money. And I certainly don’t care that Al Gore will own a big dirt farm. If it were just a bunch of small farmers losing their ass global warming wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar.

Big corporations in the farming and real estate business don’t like the thought of their landholdings suddenly becoming worthless.

I’ve seen the data on this, so I know I’m right. I managed to get a copy of one of the key bits of intel:

Current climate conditions:

Any day now the world will look like this:

At least the Arabs have a bunch of oil to fall back on. In Tennessee dirty burning coal will suddenly become en vogue once again and Al Gore will be leading the charge.

UPDATE: “Rice vows USA committed to tackling global warming” …Whoa there, Nellie. Are we? I’m not. I reject the theory that we can “fix” “global warming”. I’m not even convinced that humans are, by simply existing and surviving, causing any significant amount of warming. Besides, I want the biggest fattest carbon footprint I can possibly achieve. “Hey, Buddy, my carbon footprint is bigger than yours, ha!”

UPDATE II: “DEM Plan Uses Taxes to Fight Climate Change”… Come on, everyone pitch in to save my jet.

UPDATE III: Gore calls for global Marshall Plan…

“This is an emergency,” Mr Gore told the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative. “I think that the key to fighting global poverty is to have the wealthy nations and the developing nations join together to reduce global warming … I think what we need is a global Marshall plan to make the creation of jobs around the reduction of carbon the central principle for how we develop this.”

Does anyone else find this “global Marshall Plan”Ironic considering my turn of phrase above? But, hey, what about letting the free will of free people who decide what they want to be when they grow up form the basis of job creation? I know it’s a crazy idea.

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Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on free data sharing:

Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an “information economy”. The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world’s governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies to “protect” information — stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology.

The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you’ve paid for it.

…

The world’s governments might have bought into the old myth of the information economy, but not so much that they’re willing to ban the PC and the internet.

Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.

It’s a good article explaining why the Internet was no bubble for a lot of people but I think his premise is off. It’s not so much that the government bought into the “old myth” of how information needs to be secured instead of shared, it’s that they need it to be that way.

The old myth is not a myth. In a spice economy, he who controls the spice controls the universe. In an information economy, he who controls the information controls the universe.

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Alien creatures may cause shifts in polar ice caps:

Scientists acknowledged that both poles were extraordinarily complicated systems of ice, water and land, and that the mix of human and natural influences was not easy to clarify.

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There is a special place in Hell for people who pick on seventy year old great grand mothers:

In July, Perry was cited by Officer James Flygare of the police’s Neighborhood Preservation Unit for failing to water her lawn. Perry refused to give her name to the officer and, when Flygare tried to stop her from going back inside her house, she reportedly tripped and injured her nose.

She was arrested and taken to police station but released shortly afterwards.

There is also another special place in Hell for people who kill old retarded ladies confined to wheelchairs:

Within an hour of her call to 911, Delafield, a wheelchair-bound woman documented to have mental illness, was dead.

Family attorney Rick Alexander said Delafield’s death could have been prevented and that there are four things that jump out at him about the case.

“One, she’s in a wheelchair. Two, she’s schizophrenic. Three, they’re using a Taser on a person that’s in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes,” Alexander said.

If you tasered a cat to death your ass would be hanged within a fortnight. What kind of idiot does one have to be to become a police officer anyway? Is there a special test? Are people with common sense or who is not an egomaniac with a huge inferiority complex automatically rejected?

My advice: never, ever call the police. The police are not your friends. They act like they are your friends, but they are not. The police are more destructive to our society than they are beneficial.

Wake me up when the revolution starts.

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What is Hillary’s favorite kind of nut?

CasHsu’s

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OJ got arrested. Who cares?

Who’s Mukasey. I am sure he is well qualified. Who cares?

Surprise! $110 Billion Universal Hillary-care. It doomed her before, it’ll doom her again. Who cares? The presidency is a leadership position and Hillary is no leader–she just wants to be in charge of everything.

Gore won an Emmy so he must be right about global warming. Right?

If Greenspan claims much of Fed policy was politically driven, then maybe he is not as smart as everyone thinks he is. I bet he’s a big dunderhead and because he is a Clinton stooge the media has always played him up like a genius. Another fabrication of the left.

SO Miami is giving it’s officers assault weapons. At what point do you start giving law-abiding citizens weapons? If you take any city in America–or the world for that matter–that is ravaged with violent crime up to and including insurgency from homicidal mercenaries, and offer an “assault” weapon to everyone over 16 who qualifies to own one and conduct voluntary organized neighborhood training on the use of weapons and tactics, the crime problem would be over within six months, tops. There would be bodies stacking up at first up but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: some people need killin’.

Like Josey Wales said, “Dying ain’t much of a living.”

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A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller.
He can see from her nameplate that her name is Patricia Whack.

“Miss Whack, I’d like to get a $30,000 loan to take a holiday.”

Patty looks at the frog in disbelief and asks his name.
The frog says his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it’s okay, he knows the bank manager.

Patty explains that he will need to secure the loan with some collateral.

The frog says, “Sure. I have this,” and produces a tiny porcelain elephant, about an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly formed.

Very confused, Patty explains that she’ll have to consult with the bank manager and disappears into a back office.

She finds the manager and says, “There’s a frog called Kermit Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000, and he wants to use this as collateral.”

She holds up the tiny pink elephant.
“I mean, what in the world is this?”

(you’re gonna love this)

The bank manager looks back at her and says…

“It’s a knickknack, Patty Whack.
Give the frog a loan, His old man’s a Rolling Stone.”

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Yesterday about 5:30 PM:

I’m sitting here playing a few hands of poker at FullTilt listening to Kid Rock Cocky in honor of the Kid bitch slapping Tommy Lee. lol. Difficult to fuck with, indeed. lol.

So TS Humberto is a few miles off the coast and I am waiting for the deluge. On Monday everyone was talking about the “cold front” that was coming and i told them to forget about it; a cold front can’t move in when there is a hurricane.

About an hour ago a huge red band of foul weather was moving ashore from, would you believe, between Freeport and Galveston, so figuring if I could get in front of the plant traffic I could make it to the house before the worse of it was inland I wrapped it up at the J.O.B. in Texas City and made my way lickity split to the casa in Angleton. Some light drizzle is all I hit on the drive but there was clear contrast between what I was in and what was churning just a few ten miles over my shoulder to the southeast.

I hate to get all excited about the possibility of catastrophic flood, but there you go. What can I say? Don’t think I wish for people to suffer under horrible circumstances, because I don’t. But there is nothing you, me, or anyone else can do about it. We are subject to the whims of Mother Nature and it is in our human nature to survive.

Heh. I’m getting all worked up over nothing. I just peeked at the radar out of Galveston–which I always keep up and running on my desktop no matter where I’m at along along with whatever satellite is pertinent at the moment– and guess what? Looks like we might miss the whole damn thing. I think it just changed direction in the last hour or so towards a more nor’easterly pull. It was definitely bulging ashore over Freeport early this afternoon but now it is clearly bulging in the direction of Beaumont/Port Arthur. In the short term they tend to move towards the bulge. The “cold front” has it. We’re not going to get any rain I bet.

Talk about some no-weather-predicting meteorologists. I had fell into a fit of mild depression because the adrenalin rush that came from mentally ticking through my flood survival checklist as Humberto dry humped our leg was suddenly turned off at about 6:30 when it became abundantly obvious that Humberto was going to go all in up near the Louisiana border and the weather predictors were still holding steadfast to their landfall prediction of “between Freeport and Galveston”. I suppose they changed it eventually but that was well past the point at which I had quit paying attention. At six O’Clock I knew that the plant in Texas City was going to be on the dry side of TS Humberto and thus the event no longer concerned me in any way.

I was so bummed out that I shut down TheGarage and went inside to channel surf for a while and then went to bed. But I am okay now because it’s fun to laugh at the weather forecasters. lol.

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As a casual observer it seems very likely to me that Hillary was the mastermind of former co-President Clinton’s alleged Chinese money laundering problems. I have a deep-gut feeling that Hillary is a crook. Always have. To her and her Hsupporters any means justifies the ends.

Even though it is most likely that her filthiness will never face justice for any of her diabolical schemes I find it hard to see a way for her to escape the Hsuge political mess she should be in right now. The fact that she will most likely not only survive it but be one of the final contestants for the big prize next November says a lot about the American people and our priorities. Remember when lounging on a yacht with a hottie was enough to send a candidate into exile for life. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Maybe Americans don’t care that the Chicoms have a seat at the White House table and a hand in our policy as long as it is free and easy to kill babies in the womb. I wonder how many more Hsu boxes full of cash Hillary has accepted from the Chicoms. If she will take large Hsums of money from all the Hsusual suspects how do we know she wont take it from even more sinister sources, like, say, Saaatan!

There is a probability not greater than zero that anyone will not know where a million dollars came from. There is absolutely no chance of that. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Null. Undefined. After returning so much cash I would imagine Hillary needs a new pair of Hsues.

By the way, are we Hsure Vince Foster really did Hsute himself?

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Jake Tapper of ABC news reports, er, opines on the MoveOn hit piece on Gen Patreaus:

The chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said the ad “is outrageous and it is deplorable” and called upon her “colleagues on both sides of the aisle” to condemn the ad and, somewhat inexplicably, to apologize to the general for the impugning of his integrity.

Emphasis added. Well, Tapper, let me help you out. Even though the somewhat inexplicable ad was purely a fiction designed solely for political purposes, it was also an unwarranted vicious personal attack on David Patreaus, his life’s work, and his integrity. Remember how much we were all against the politics of personal destruction when it was the Clinton’s who were the well-deserved targets? What happened?

I suppose if you are a far-left liberal whack job–as if there is any other kind of liberal these days–whose primary means of survival is lies and distortion, you might feel betrayed by facts that are contrary to your delusional world view.

If there is any betrayal going on it is by the liberals who have consistently and fervently been trying to sabotage any and every effort made by the Bush administration to fight some very nasty people who are well armed, well funded, and who want us dead.

I smell treason in the air.

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Now that I have spent all the time and effort rearranging my blogs I guess the big question is why did I do all that work if I am not going to write. Well, my intentions were, and are, to continue writing. The purpose of the rearranging being to make the process of creating and managing content easier and less time consuming. I believe I have accomplished that purpose and now it is just left to do some writing.

Well, that’s easier said than done. I’ve been over the “free time” topic before; time is not free and is something that you can’t save up. One can spend time, or one can sell time, or one can buy time. A person’s potential value can be represented as a sum total of the amount of time available times the value of that time, net any costs associated with buying and selling excess time. You can get really fancy and throw in all kinds of variables to account for factors affecting the value of time being spent or purchased, such as level of education, risk, etc. to get more and more accurate estimation of a person’s inherent value in a capitalistic society.

What I am saying is that all my excess time is being bought or otherwise rendered worthless by someone else. The big problem for me right now is that to sell 40 hours of my excess time requires a total contribution of almost 60 hours from me. Not that I am complaining, but it is a problem that will have to addressed at some point in the future.

The way I figure it is that if I have 60 hours available I need to sell as much of that time as possible to maximize my earning potential and thus my inherent value as a member of a progressive capitalistic society. I need to figure out how to capitalize on the 20 hours of wasted time without risking the 40 I am already selling.

For example, consider a professional who is able to command $50 an hour on the market for his or her time. In rough terms, using the consultants *2000 hour/year rule-of-thumb, $50 an hour is about $100,000 a year, no benefits, if he or she can manage to stay fully engaged, which is a big if. Consider this scenario:

Hourly rate: $50

Time sold: 40 hours

Gross proceeds from sale of time: $2,000

Now consider the overhead in terms of time, not money

Weekly Commute: 12.5 hrs

Mandatory breaks: 2.5 hrs

Time associated with commute (Car maint & fueling, morning time spent preparing to go to work, etc): 2.5 hrs/wk

Total overhead time spent 17.5

Total time contributed to sell 40 hours: 57.5 hrs

Hourly rate net of overhead: 34.78

Then there are some dollar costs as well. Here are a few of the major ones off the top of my head:

16% of $50 for Self Employment tax: $8

Hourly rate net of overhead and self employed tax: 26.78

Weekly Fuel: $90/40 = 2.25 / hr

Effective hourly rate: $24.53

So what does all of this mean? Well, the most obvious thing is that if I could find a job near my house that paid more than $25 per hour I would be better off to take it over the one paying $50 / hour that requires a 50 mile commute because it would give me the opportunity to either sell 15 hours of time or otherwise spend that time how I like–doing family things, for example.

* * *

*The rule of thumb is based upon 40 hours a week for 52 weeks (42 x 50 = 2080) less the ten paid holidays that are taken by most corporations (10 x 8 = 80) giving 2000. To further make it equivalent to a regular job there is another week or two of vacation and/or sick time that most normal people take every year for various personal and family reasons.

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Instapundit links Megan McArdle:

MEGAN MCARDLE: “I’m probably going to end up voting for Obama just because I like his senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee . . . and then regretting it as soon as he actually starts doing things.” Plus, thoughts on Ron Paul.

Who cares what someone who says they will probably wind up voting for Obama because she likes his economic advisor thinks about Ron Paul? But McArdle is a pretty good read so I figure it’s going to be tongue in cheek. Of course it is. There is some pretty good stuff in the comments as well.

Regarding Ron Paul’s kooky politics… well, someone is paying for him to travel around the country to shake hands and kiss babies and I bet you a dollar whoever it is with the open check book believes fervently in the gold standard and many other of Paul’s kooky ideas.

Anyone familiar with the Libertarian platform? Ron Paul is no dumbass and just like the Democrats and Republicans have to do during the primaries Paul has to run his campaign to satisfy the base, even if they are nutcases.

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