Cranky-D

Here is a site that contains photos of interesting” homes, and snarky captions to go with them. It’s a nice little diversion.

Thomas Sowell:

Contrary to clever political spin that likened those who refused to join the “global warming” hysteria to people who denied the Holocaust, no one denied that climates change. Indeed, some of the climate scientists who have been the biggest critics of the current hysteria have pointed out that climates had changed back and forth, long before human beings created industrial societies or drove SUVs.

It is those who have been pushing the hysteria who have been playing fast and loose with the facts, wanting to keep crucial data from becoming public, and even “losing” some of that data that supposedly proved the most dire consequences. It has not been facts but computer models at the heart of the “global warming” crusade.

Here

Unlike her enemies on the left, the conservative opponents of Mrs. Palin are a little puzzling. After all, except for its greater intensity, the response to her on the left is of a piece with the liberal hatred of Richard Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush. It was a hatred that had less to do with differences over policy than with the conviction that these men were usurpers who, by mobilizing all the most retrograde elements of American society, had stolen the country from its rightful (liberal) rulers. But to a much greater extent than Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, Sarah Palin is in her very being the embodiment of those retrograde forces and therefore potentially even more dangerous.

While I may not agree with the principles of the person who wrote this blog post, I have to admit that it is an epic tale. It sounds like something out of a crime drama. I definitely would not want to be the person who lived through this.

via comradescott on twitter

Freedom isn’t free

Taking away your freedom isn’t free either, but it is a joyous occasion for some

Earlier I wrote that I was watching the Perry Mason series. I have discovered since then that if you stream them from the CBS site late enough at night, the streaming works pretty well and it isn’t too glitchy. You have to watch a few commercials, which is okay with me. My big problem with streaming is that it is usually too damn annoying to put up with, since I had never watched a show that didn’t either freeze up all the time or drop out entirely during the playing of a given episode.

Technology that does not work as advertised annoys me considerably.

From the National Review Online

In a fascinating dispatch Monday, Reuters reported that an interesting mix of corporate bonds have “yields” — rates of return — that have gone below that of Treasuries. (A bond’s yield corresponds to its risk: High-yield bonds are also known as “junk bonds,” while very safe bonds have very low yields.) The fact that Warren Buffett’s bonds are considered a safer bet than Tim Geithner’s should have been sobering news, especially on the morning after Democrats in Congress sent President Obama a mastodon of a new spending program with a $2 trillion price tag. As hangover headaches go, this is going to be brutal, and investors apparently have more faith in Johnson & Johnson’s ability to sell Tylenol than in Washington’s ability to pay for it. Mitchell Stapley, an analyst with Fifth Third Asset Management, told Reuters that the numbers coming out of the bond market are a “slap upside the head of the government.” The fearful question is: How much harder does Washington need to get slapped before government comes to its senses?

Will we collapse in a sea of debt, or will we have a civil war to overthrow a government that no longer represents the will of the people? Maybe it will be both.

We are cursed to be living in interesting times.

Mark Stein:

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once-golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California become the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

It’s time to wake up once again, Jacksonians. Your (former) country needs you.

More anon.

Comment by Jeff G. on 3/21 @ 11:09 pm source

Our Congress just passed legislation saying you HAVE to hold medical insurance, and that you HAVE to pay for the medical insurance of others.

Think about that.

They just passed a law saying that they are allowed to steal from you — and the power they have to pass that law comes from you. So essentially, they are saying that your vote for them told them that they were permitted to steal from you.

This happened here, in America.

The PW site is one of my few daily reads, highly recommended

The United States of America: 1776-2010.

In the latest episode of NCIS Los Angeles, they could somehow look at the bullets after a shooting and know the shooters were using AK47s. Wow, I didn’t know that the 7.62×39 was only used in that rifle. That’s because lots of other rifles chamber that round. Furthermore, not every .30 caliber bullet will be from a 7.62×39. Also, they act as if acquiring an AK47 is somehow a difficult proposition. I happen to know that they are legally obtainable (at least in any state but CA) from lots of places. Importing them illegally to CA would be easy.

Finally, since the shooting was a drive-by, they showed people shooting from the inside of cars. None of the rifle barrels I saw looked like an AK47 barrel because they were missing the proper flash hiders.

This stuff is not hard to get right. They could have easily told the same story and had their gun facts straight, but I guess that’s too much for these clowns. Again, remember that they get stuff wrong all the time, because you and I know when they are getting stuff we know wrong.

I was watching CSI Los Angeles last night, and one of the plot points was this device that you can sit next to a computer and it will pick up all sorts of sensitive information without ever being connected to the computer. Right. Even if you can swallow that, they were trying to figure out what the code did, but they couldn’t tell because it was in Chinese.

Jeebus.

Machine language is machine language. I don’t even think there is a Chinese programming language (doubtful, because Chinese is not alphabetical, but you could still do it somehow if you like torturing yourself), but even if there were, it would still compile to binary, and disassembling that binary would result in assembly code in whatever language you would like to have it in (again, I don’t know if assembly language has been translated to something else but I highly doubt it).

Don’t believe anything you see on television. They get the stuff I know wrong all the time. That means they are getting plenty of other stuff wrong without me, or you, knowing about it.

Here is a good article on how one might create a theory and “verify” it with some statistical analysis while not proving one damn thing. No math is involved, though you have to understand what is meant by a “p-value (my interpretation is it measures the correlation of the theory with the data).”

Here is an article on how much pianos have changed over the last few hundred years. There are sound clips so you can compare the sound of a piano that the composers might have used to write the music with a modern piano sound. The difference is quite striking.

I was thinking that it might be possible to do something to duplicate the sound using sampling or other digital technology, and the feel by manufacturing special controller keyboards. It’s not the same as the real thing, of course, but antique pianos are not that common either.

Anyway, if you’re a music fan, I think it’s worth a read, and a listen.