enormous iNCoNgrUiTieS|A Beacon of Intermittence

No doubt we have too many laws in America and we are putting too many people in jail who are not threats to public safety. However, without including at least a footnote regarding the per capita executions I don’t see how the US per capita incarceration numbers are a valid comparison to those of your typical Dictatorship.

The report said the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which round out the Top 10. (Link)

Let’s not forget that Russia, China and other nations run by despots are known to round up people in the middle of the night who are not to be heard from again.

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Everyone has to pay the piper. Instead of a ride home Art Madrid and Trisha Turner should have been treated to ride to the police station.

[La Mesa Mayor Art] Madrid was lying on the sidewalk near the passenger side of his Ford Explorer. [City finance department employee Trisha ] Turner was in the driver’s seat, her feet pointed out the open door. Vomit was observed around the SUV. (Link)

Most people don’t lose their jobs over a drunken indiscretion but almost no one gets a ride home either. It’s not that I’m in favor of incarcerating people over minor alcohol offenses (though who knows what these two were doing prior to pulling over and passing out in their puke,) but I am in favor of government officials being treated like everyone else.

If government officials want to drink without fear of being robbed and thrown in jail they have to let the regular citizenry enjoy the same privilege. On the flip, what’s good for me is good for thee.

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Cult of the Dead Cow has released Goolag, an automated “Google Hacking” or data mining tool.

[T]hanks to a program that automates what has typically been painstaking manual labor. The program’s authors say they hope it will “screw a large Internet search engine and make the Web a safer place.”

Google hacking doesn’t mean anyone’s hacking Google’s Web site. Rather, it refers to a sophisticated searching technique used to uncover flaws in the way Web sites handle confidential details, such as public files containing password and credit card numbers and clues about the vulnerability of the site’s own servers.

The Cult of the Dead Cow is probably one guy, or gal I suppose. Maybe a Vegan making fun of meat eaters with the name.

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Up until now I thought wind energy was spotty at best with too many drawbacks to be a significant player in the broad energy market. Evidently I have been laboring under some misconceptions because apparently many are already dependent on wind energy:

Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said a decline in wind energy production in west Texas occurred at the same time evening electric demand was building as colder temperatures moved into the state.

The grid operator went directly to the second stage of an emergency plan at 6:41 PM CST (0041 GMT), ERCOT said in a statement. (Link)

That seems significant to me.

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In a blatant package check Hillary considers this Change of which Obama speaks.

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Deposed in a hair-splitting 142 to 139 vote. Sexy Photo’s at the link.

It looks like former Mayor Carmen Kontur-Gronquist has put on a few pounds but she obviously has no qualms about displaying the photo of her hot bod that have all the uptight assholes so uptight. Her face looks a hell of a lot better too.

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The rebuttals from the Global Warming nuts concerning current climate measurements should be quite entertaining.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Time’s running out on the Global Warming scam. At the very least it will be much more difficult over the next couple of years to advance the global warming “theory” as fact when billions of people are freezing the collective asses off.

Related:

Global Warming no doubt causes Global Cooling

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STUDY QUESTIONS EFFECTIVENESS OF ANTI-DEPRESSANTS: I have no doubt that anti-depressants are way over-prescribed. I have also several times in the past stated that the dope given to kids for treating severe kidness is way, way over prescribed.

Related:

• Stop Ritalin Abuse
• Riatalin Kids: A sign of the times
• Moreon the Ritalin Kids
• Congressional Steroid Investigation

UPDATE:

DON’T STOP TAKING YOUR MEDS!!! If you are thinking maybe your anti-depressant medications are snake oil, for gawd’s sake don’t suddenly stop taking them. See your doctor about slowly tapering off the drug or you could could wind up on a shooting rampage or something.

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DEMOCRACY PREVAILS IN PAKISTAN: An inter-ministerial committee has proclaimed “The filthy, rotten, YouTube has been banned in Pakistan. The People have spoken. Thank You. That is all.”

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The Kidz PC, an ancient Dell L500, caught a bug the other day so instead of fixing it I had the eldest kid pull the plug, literally. I made a deal that if each kid, there are two, put in a hundred bucks I would pay the balance for a brand-spanking new PC. I was figuring about $350 plus a monitor for a decent, Internet folly machine. I paid for the monitor since I was planning to get flat-screens for the remaining computers anyway.

For $459, which includes an $80 mail-in rebate, I got an Acer Aspire M1610 and a 19″ Acer wide-screen monitor with decent specs, and a Lexmark printer that I don’t need and will attempt to give away, if possible. In every way, shape, and form factor this PC is at least 10 times better than the Dell which it replaces. The Kidz are ecstatic, just like Christmas.

The Kidz had the satisfaction of exercising their purchasing power, along with the thrill of dickering with a moronic sales person, and slapping their hard-earned money on the counter when the deal was done. I think they are quite happy and proud with the transaction.

So anyway, I plug in all the bits and pieces and fire up the new Acer, which also came with Windows Vista Premium, and waited… and then waited some more. The machine came with a Gig of RAM but I think everyone who knows anything about Vista knows a Gig is not sufficient breathing room for the bloated operating system.

On the other hand, a Gig of Ram combined with an Intel dual core processor running Windows XP is blazingly fast. And WinXP is quite stable. I don’t need a fancy PC with a fancy operating system for an Internet folly device.

So I reformatted the hard drive, installed WinXP Pro, AVG anti-virus, Firefox, and Ad-aware and that’s my Internet-in-a-cheap box configuration.

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How can anyone expect a common person who might be concerned that they have broached the miserly .08 blood alcohol content limit to go to the trouble and expense of calling a cab when the director of a large DUI education program wont even do so when she is so stinking drunk she can’t even walk straight?

Margot “Peggy” Cioffi is one of the worst of the worst drunks, a drunk who gives other drunks a bad name. Even worse, Cioffi has been making a good living from the misfortune of those unlucky bastards ensnared in the government-run DUI scam.

Cioffi, whose blood alcohol level was measured in a breath test at 0.336, could not immediately be reached for comment. The legal driving limit in Florida is 0.08 percent.

Cioffi couldn’t be reached for comment probably because she was in a coma from alcohol poisoning. You’d think being such a smart drunk she would know better than to give a breath sample.

Cioffi is one of the retarded drunks out there who have ruined social drinking for everyone else because they are the ones who plow into people at high rates of speed with no warning. Stopping for a beer after work, or going out and having a few drinks with dinner, or an evening out at a dance hall have become a roll of the dice as to whether you might be pulled over and robbed by the state, denied your right to drive, and enrolled in expensive and time-consuming bullshit drunk classes run by the likes of Ms. Cioffi.

What good is a program that might save just one life if the director of the program is the one most likely to kill your baby while driving in a drunken blackout?

I bet a dollar there are many people who knew Peggy Cioffi was a drunk but didn’t want to rock the money boat.

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I started to read Michele Obama’s Princeton thesis — which is an undergrad thesis by the way, not a real piece of scholarly work, which is quite obvious — and I can see why the document has been “temporally withdrawn” from the Princeton library until after the election. It is pure racial identity bullshit. Had I been Michelle’s advisor I’d have read the first two pages and handed it back with an ‘F’ and told her to quit feeling sorry for herself and do some serious work.

The document just goes to show that the liberal universities are more about giving lip service to race issues as opposed to actually tolerating black people, even, or especially black liberals. If Ms Obama didn’t like the way she was treated by the elite liberals maybe she should have went to university at a more friendly school. Ms Obama has probably never once entertained the thought that liberalism is a crock of shit. No, to her every injustice is a simple matter of black and white.

If Michelle Obama thinks she was treated badly at Princeton, she would soil her dainties to see how they would have treated me– a white, middle-class conservative male.

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I probably wouldn’t have so much problem with the anti-war morons except for the fact that they are such fucking hypocrites. All proceeds from one of the latest anti-war propaganda flicks/soundtracks goes to Iraq Veterans Against the War. The site reads like a made-for-TV John Kerry’s Fairy-Tail Apocalypse Redux

From March 13-16th, U.S. veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan will testify to what is really happening day in and day out, on the ground in these occupations.

The so-called “documentary” exploits Tomas Young, an Army veteran paralyzed in Iraq, and funnels the money to a left-wing anti-war political group. I just can not get my mind around why they wouldn’t direct some, if not all, of the proceeds to wounded soldiers. Hell, they could even limit their donations to Wounded Iraq Veterans Against the War, which would be any sane one of them.

I don’t think there will ever be peace and since one can never know how long one will hold the winning hand, I am for nipping problems in the bud whenever the opportunity presents. Therefore I also think we should treat our soldiers a hell of a lot better than we do because we are someday going to need them with much more urgency than we do now. Matter of fact we will most likely have to rely on using much greater force in the future precisely because we wont use greater force now.

Make no mistake, the Arabs want a fight; it is historical in nature. We made the mistake of leaving Europe basically intact after WWII expecting different behavior to result and we still haven’t learned our lesson. The old ways of Europe are over; the stakes are too high.

Americans are the only ones who would rather not fight unless absolutely necessary but when it comes down to it we need to be able to “do it” without interference from the weaker political class. People like Springsteen, Neil Young and the rest have no idea of the peace and love for which they are so fond of waxing eloquent nor about how peace and freedom is obtained.

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GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz rebutts criticism of his claim that “Global warming is a crock”

Lutz, GM’s outspoken product development chief, has been under fire from Internet bloggers since last month when he was quoted as making the remark to reporters in Texas. (Link)

Don’t let the very loud minority sway you Bob, there are plenty of us bloggers out here that agree with you whole-heartedly.

American auto makers have to pull a rabbit out of their collective hats if they are to survive in present form regardless of what the climate is doing. If people want cars that run on bat guano badly enough, I’d expect to see a bunch of Batmobiles on the street.

If the automakers had absolute, undeniable proof that electric cars would ultimately lead to the destruction of the environment they would hide the research and still develop electric cars balls to the wall because that’s what the eco-libs have all but required everyone to buy as soon as they become available to the masses.

Remember how pissed the liberals were when they found out about nicotine? Wait till hell freezes over and they found out it’s mostly because of their electric cars. Bwaaahahhahhahhahaha!

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What if the local police said no?

Security details at Barack Obama’s rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena. (Link)

I am sure the Secret Service had their reasons to suspend the security checks but if the Dallas police were concerned over the order why didn’t they refuse? If they were so concerned — and after JFK was whacked in Dallas what sane Dallas official would not be concerned — why didn’t they just politely say, sorry but we can not do that?

The happy, swooning Obama crowd notwithstanding, it only takes a lone gunman to do the job.

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Independent Sources wonders what is it about Obama that has all the women swooning. I don’t know, but maybe…

Watch the video here.

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Frankly, I don’t see what’s so sophisticated about announcing the New York Times is a left-wing liberal rag.

Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign claimed vindication Thursday night after a sophisticated 24-hour counterattack turned a potentially lethal story in The New York Times into a conservative call to arms. (Link)

Effective, maybe, but sophisticated? Hardly.

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Don’t do anything the easy way when there is much more complicated, expensive, and intrusive way to do it.

In a university auditorium in the heart of Texas, the two rivals agreed that high-tech surveillance measures are preferable to construction of a fence to curtail illegal immigration. (Link)

Good fences make good neighbors. A good fence is relatively cheap to build and maintain. A good fence is unbiased since all it does it stand there. It is hard to find a real problem with building a fence.

We are not even free to say where people must enter the country by building a fence as a guideline yet we can monitor the comings and goings of every soul. How is hi-tech monitoring better for Americans than a freaking fence?

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JD is/was working on refinishing a piece of furniture.

Many years ago the wife and I were into antiquing with our disposable time and money. Before kids obviously. I acquired from an auction an old cedar chest from the McBride estate that had a cherry top thap was laminated wit something. The laminate was in horrible shape and had to come off. This was a very old authentic piece of handmade furniture but I only paid like $25 for it. I still have it as a matter of fact; it will be an heirloom after the amount of work I put in to restoring it.

I bring this up to say that it only took me a couple of hours before the belt sander came out. Tool Time, Buddy. Grrr. The damage done to the cherry wood under the laminate was smoothed out with a small hand-sander and the finish with very fine grit paper. You would have to be an expert with a long line of bullshit to convince anyone that there was once another 1/8′ of cherry wood on the lid. I stained the raw wood with a cherry stain and never touched the cedar at all. It’s a beautiful piece. I would not sell it for less than several hundred dollars and then only if I were in a real pinch.

Break out the sander JD.

Oh, yeah…  AMEN, Brother!

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Obama’s fainting schtick is his similtude for what he would have done if he were president during Katrina; a little play within a play where Obama shows the gathered throng how compassionate President Barak Obama would have been if he were in charge of the relief efforts during the aftermath. He would have called a halt to everything and brought medical attention and water and lunch to those who were suffering. To the most needy.

“…national security…wait… Do we have someone sick? Someone fainted? Do we have someone down? Hold on! Can we get some help? Medical attention is on the way. You probably didn’t eat lunch, that’s the problem. Can we get some water? Here, I have some water.”

Cheers! Applause! Hurl!

Gimme a freaking break. Are you kidding me? Like Bob would say, “What’s next! What’s next! What’s next!”

What’s next Obama? You gonna turn the water into wine? Or maybe pull some fish out of a basket?

I announced today at work that I was voting for Obama. I love doing that. I tried to convince everyone that I was voting for Ron Paul for a while until he hung himself with the newsletter thing. One dude’s wife is a Hilary fan. Ouch. Not good times for him in the next few weeks if Hilary gets tromped in Texas, like I think she will.

Here’s how it boils down. Regardless of all the crap I might have said between now and back then, I always said it doesn’t matter who the Democrats nomination the next president will be whoever gets the Republican nomination. The only way we can lose is to elect someone who doesn’t want to fight the “war,” which we didn’t start.

In my simple, but usually dead-on asessment, the 2004 election was an affirmation of aggressive foreign policy and 2006 was about turning out Republicans, not electing Democrats. That is why the Democrats couldn’t get anything done this past cycle: there is no real popular support for their goofy ideas. Really loud does not equal really popular.

Furthermore, the finger-in-the-air Republicans leaning left since returning to the Minority in 2004 have misread the winds which makes a good chance that we could have a Republican elected president without any coattails at all as another bunch of worthless Republican congressmen get the boot.

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Subway Jared’s ridiculously hot girlfriend… pics and some funny comments. Heh, and more similar comments here. The pics aren’t that great but if they keep dating I would expect the quality to go up. She looks like she could get Jared into some serious trouble.

I wonder what are the odds Jared would date a fat chick. But what if she had a great personality?

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Obama is NOT the Internet candidate. Did he think no one would notice the fainting and the, ahem, feigned concern is stump schtick?

What a dumbass!

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Fernando Garza, from Laredo, Texas comments on a MSNBC piece about Bill’s campaining tactics:

I recently changed my support from Hillary to Obama; even though, I had been blogging for her for several months.

Me and my family used to be the biggest fans of Bill Clinton. Everyone in my community can’t stand to see Bill on TV anymore. I’m not sure if its his older age or maybe the lack of sleep lately, but I truly believe his lost his mind. He makes no sense anymore, cares about nothing other than attempting to get his wife elected, plucks words right out of the air while stating nothing, and now even goes against the voices of mass voters…

What’s funny and what everyone who is not clouded by left-wing liberal idealism already knows is that the Clinton’s haven’t changed at all. I guess it’s easier for the libs to say the Clinton’s have changed rather than to admit they were wrong about the Clintons.

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WE SIMPLY CAN NOT HAVE our children eating mistreated beef.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sunday ordered the recall of 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse, the subject of an animal-abuse investigation, that provided meat to school lunch programs

…

Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said his department has evidence that Westland did not routinely contact its veterinarian when cattle became non-ambulatory after passing inspection

…

We don’t know how much product is out there right now. We don’t think there is a health hazard, but we do have to take this action,” said Dr. Dick Raymond, USDA Undersecretary for Food Safety.

Cows are so stupid it’s not even funny. It’s worth noting that the cows were being abused on the way to the slaughter house. I mean the nerve! abusing a stupid animal on the way to the slaughterhouse.

It sounds like a citation would have been the correct action.

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Yeah, I guess if you have $800 in you sofa cushions such a haughty opinion regarding your fellow citizens might make some kind of sense

“Nobody wants to sit there and say, ‘Well there’s no easy solution,”‘ Bloomberg said. “They want to send out a check to everybody to stimulate the economy. I suppose it won’t hurt the economy but it’s in many senses like giving a drink to an alcoholic.”

I knew I shouldn’t have read this story since I already know Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a blooming idiot. The $800 stimulus giveaway might not do much good but in no way, shape, or form will it be worse than leaving the money with the government to spend.

more…

For some inexplicable reason, especially since having just finished The Baroque Cycle, I could not grasp the spelling of “Noble” as in a member of the Nobility. I went with Nobile because it is a strange word and it does have a definition that kinda fit but inretro the definition doesn’t fit well enough to be clever or funny, so I went back with the correct usage.

However, I did get upset all over again after reading the quote from Hizoner the Mayor Bloomberg of New York. (See, now if Hizoner’s name was Bloombelli, “Nobile” might be funny.) Just exactly who are the drunks? I got one word for ya Bloomberg: Earmarks. And one more: Pork Barrel. Another: Government corruption. And another: Inept Bureaucracy. Bunch of drunken bastards caught in the bottle all.

Here’s an idea. Let’s make every member of Congress attend 90 AA meeting in 90 days and see if we can cut through some of this damn denial.

Mayor Bloomberg is a disconnected rat-bastard living in la la land.

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Charles Barkley: “I will vote Democrat no matter what.” “Conservatives are fake Christians.” “Every time I hear the word conservative it makes me sick to my stomach.”

Me and Chuck kinda part ways on philosophy there but I can agree that every time I hear the word “conservative” bandied about anymore it makes me sick. I’m sick of it. Nanny Christians are no better than nanny liberals. No matter what you lose!

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Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, at the annual meeting of the US National Academy of Engineering in Boston

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.

Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people’s brains to make them more intelligent, said Ray Kurzweil. (Link)

Kurzweil is among 18 attending engineers at the meeting who were tasked with developing a list of fourteen challenges facing humanity as were trudge along towards the impending Singularity. The list:

• Make solar energy affordable
• Provide energy from fusion
• Develop carbon sequestration
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Provide access to clean water
• Reverse engineer the brain
• Prevent nuclear terror
• Secure cyberspace
• Enhance virtual reality
• Improve urban infrastructure
• Advance health informatics
• Engineer better medicines
• Advance personalised learning
• Explore natural frontiers

I’d say in the near term affordable solar energy and the efficient energy transfer and battery storage which that implies will have the greatest impact in terms of economics and liberty. The ability to store massive amounts of energy off the grid will change the basic equation of “how the world turns.”

After that, I’d say advanced personalised learning is most important for no other reason than to get rid of public education which is and will continue to be one of the great hurdles to overcome if we are to achieve any of the rest of the items on the list.

If I were young and were going to pick an industry to slave in, why I guess exploring natural frontiers, whatever that is, would be as good as anything.

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The details of Bernie Wards child pron story are too graphic to disclose (not for me, but for the source) but I can only imagine how horrible were his actions by the conditions placed on him for the privilege of remaining in the free world:

Also, from the federal case file, we learned Ward’s conditions of release on his $250,000 bond. He surrendered his passport. He’s confined to his home with electronic monitoring — he can leave only for work and to drive his children to and from school. His computer use is limited to his employment and he cannot have unsupervised contact with minors other than his children.

That’s a hell of a bond for someone who as far as I can tell has not harmed anyone. If they can prove Bernie harmed a child I am in favor of hanging from the neck till dead but for simply sending naughty photos (especially if the photos were found by searching the Internet) and talking dirty in chat, I’m not so sure I’m comfortable with such severe sanctions.

Suppoedly there is much more information out there about the case and I will look it up when I get home since if it is as bad as the bond suggests I could be fired from my job if I look at it here at work. Maybe then I will be more accepting of the astronomical bond.

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Along with 88% of the rest of the nation, House finds Bolten, Miers in contempt of Congress

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Maybe I just haven’t been paying enough attention but since I first heard several weeks ago that a military satellite was going to fall from orbit I don’t recall it being noted that the damn thing was barely over a year old. Sounds like someone made a big boo boo at the pentagon.

The Associated Press has learned that the option preferred by the Bush administration will be to fire a missile from a U.S. Navy cruiser, and shoot down the satellite before it enters Earth’s atmosphere.

I wonder if it will be a “nukular” missile.

Related:

Missile defenses can be used to counter China’s strategic anti-satellite weapons

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