August, 2007 archive

I’m glad I have an inkjet:

(Australian researchers) tested 62 office printers, and the good news is that 37 of the machines, about 60 percent, released no particles. But researcher Lidia Morawska, of the Queensland University of Technology, and her colleagues ranked 17 of the printers as high emitters. (Complete rankings: http://go.philly.com/earth/)

They also found that one printer emitted so many particles, using it was like standing next to someone smoking a cigarette – another office air hazard most companies banned years ago.

(snip)

The particles emitted, they realized, were the ultrafine powder used in laser printers instead of ink – the toner.

See the list here.

Or not.

Auth:

Contrary to Republican propaganda, taxes are not evil.

But betraying the public trust is.

A. No.

From today’s local rag:

He never should have been nominated to be attorney general of the United States. He never should have been confirmed. A president with a shred of common sense would have fired him long ago. If Gonzales were capable of shame, he would have resigned by now.

The nation will be a long time tallying the damage this man has done, at Justice and as a White House counsel: enabling the torture of terrorism suspects, playing fast and loose with civil liberties, destroying morale at, and public confidence in, the Department of Justice.

One of our weekly pleasures is listening to Le Show. For our radio listening pleasure, it ranks right up there with Car Talk and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me as one of those shows that, if we miss the broadcast, we catch it on the internet.

So imagine my pleasure when I stumbled on this at Brendan’s place:

We put over at Newport, drifted through Wilmington (all Wilmington is a “No Wake” zone), then ran up to Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia, taking pictures all the way.

The geography of the Delaware River is such that, as you pass Essington, Pa., you are directly in the flight path of the main runway of PHL, with planes taking off right over your head.

I’ll be posting the pictures to the boating side of the website over the next few days. Some of them are pretty neat, not because of who took them, but because of the subject matter. I’ll link to them when I post them.

(Addendum, 8/5/2007)

The pictures can be found here and here, towards the bottoms of the pages.

I’ve been to Minneapolis. It is a nice town full of friendly people.

I do not think I ever crossed the I-35W bridge, though I’ve crossed other Minneapolis bridges over the Mississippi, but I certainly traveled under it on the train–on the tracks that are now closed.

It’s a damn shame the bridge fell down.

It’s a even more of a damn shame that many Americans don’t want to pay for the services that they use.

Dick Polman has the analysis:

In 2005, the Minneapolis legislature enacted a hike in the gas tax, with the money earmarked for much-needed road and bridge repairs. But Tim Pawlenty – the Republican governor who has long been billed as a rising star in the conservative firmament, and who has sought to reign on a pledge of No New Taxes – decided that a gas tax hike would violate his principles. So he vetoed the bill. The lawmakers squawked, pointing out that the gas tax at the pump had last been raised in 1988, failed to override the veto.

Then, earlier this year, the lawmakers tried again. Mindful of the fact that Minnesota’s annual shortfall for road and bridge repairs had soared to $1.8 billion, they enacted another hike in the gas tax. But Pawlenty, deciding that the payment of an additional five cents per gallon constituted an undue tax burden, vetoed this bill as well. And again the lawmakers lacked the votes to override.

I’m not suggesting that this no-new-taxes governor is personally responsible for the I-35 bridge collapse; the span may well have fallen anyway, even if there had been new state money for repairs. (The states provide money for interstate repairs, but most of the tab is supposed to be paid by the feds.) But Pawlenty’s vetoes are symptomatic of a society that thinks it can survive on the cheap.

I will say forthrightly that I don’t like paying taxes, just like I don’t like buying gasoline at $3.00 a gallon.

But both the taxes and the gasoline are part of the cost of getting on with life.

If you don’t want to pay for the services you use, buy an island somewhere and go away so the grown-ups can take care of business.

And Chris Dodd calls him on it.

Then, again, O’Reilly’s a Bushie. He can’t help it.

See Attytood.

[COMMENTARY MODE ON]

If you want a hate site, try this one or this one or this one. KOS ain’t it.

[COMMENTARY MODE OFF]

Via Phillybits.

In gathering links for the previous post, I went to the Longwood Gardens home page.

They don’t seem to know what to do with Opera:

I unexpectedly had to go to Harrisburg, Pa., this morning. My route, perfected after dozens of trips over 20 years, takes me up Del./Pa. 52, past Winterthur, to US 1, past Longwood Gardens, to Pa. 41.

Pa. 41 is a heavily traveled two-land road through horse and farm country. It’s much favored by truckers going from Delaware and points south to Harrisburg and points west because it avoids the congestion of the Greater Philadelphia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Because of the heavy truck traffic, interspersed with tourists going to the Amish Country of Lancaster County (that’s LANK-as-ter, not LAN-CAS-ter; LAN-CAS-ter is in Cali.), farm equipment, speeding ADT trucks (I saw two of those, one in each direction), and the very occasional buggy (by and large, the Amish avoid 41), the incidence of impatient, aggressive driving, careless passing, and just plain old down home stupidity can be pretty high.

At one particularly dangerous hill near Atglen, Pa., I saw the sign.

Keep Two Dots Behind.

PenDOT has painted big white dots on the road to try to curtail tailgating.

As far I could see, it’s not working.

Oh, sorry. For once this isn’t a post about the Current Federal Administration . . .

My brother took this picture of a spider web he found in his yard. I’ve never seen anything like it. Frankly, it looks like something out of Close Encounters.

Now, it’s been a long time since 10th Grade Biology, but I think I remember reading that different species of spiders spin different designs of webs. Anyone have any idea what this might be. Here’s the web (it’s clearly not W3C compliant):

DelawareLiberal sums it up.

Phillybits.

Josh Marshall today looked at delusion now growing among certain segments of the population that opponents of the War in Iraq have somehow “lost the war.”

. . . As the dead-ender right’s plans and dreams about Iraq come under greater and greater strain from the alternative universe of reality, and as the president’s popularity wanes further and further, there’s a growing tendency for them to think about and write about domestic American politics in terms of violence and extra-constitutional action.

A minor example of this I noticed just yesterday on the Powerline Blog, where Sen. Schumer’s (D-NY) call to remove the “presumption of confirmation” from President Bush’s court appointments a “coup”. “Is This a coup? If not, what is it?” ran the headline to the post.

As the war for faux-democracy looks more and more like a debacle, the lure of authoritarianism at home becomes greater and greater for the war’s dead-end defenders. And as redeployment looks more and more likely, they have to keep raising the stakes on the consequences of doing so. Apparently our whole future, our honor, destiny, certainly our safety from the Iraqi insurgents who will restart the insurgency in the US — all of this is in the balance. The stakes must keep rising because that is, paradoxically, the only way for them to avoid taking responsibility for their failures. And cowardice that militant, in a faction within the body politic, is dangerous for the rest of us.

And in an interview today, Thomas Ricks, Washington Post reporter and author of Fiasco, remarked on the same phenomenon.

(According to the website, audio of the interview will be available around 6 p. m. today. It was a wide-ranging discussion including interesting phone calls from several veterans of the Wars in Iraq.)

After Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks published an account of the Iraq war last year, his inbox began overflowing with emails from men and women in the service. With new insight about the conditions on the ground, Ricks updated his book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.

Of course, the War in Iraq is lost.

And the persons who lost it? The Current Federal Administration.

It was a war that was not provoked from without, but rather, one that was marketed to the American people like a tube of toothpaste infused with antifreeze, corrupt from its inception.

And not one of the sliding scale of goals that the Current Federal Administration has announced over the years, as the effort slipped deeper into chaos and bloodshed, will be achieved, whatever the military outcome of the war.

And a war that achieves none of its goals is, ipso facto, lost.

The initial goal, the sales slogan, as it were, of finding weapons of mass destruction could not be achieved because there were no weapons of mass destruction (and remember how the Current Federal Administration rushed the deadlines for inspection as it became clearer and clearer that the weapons inspectors would find no weapons to inspect?)

And when that slogan proved hollow, a new slogan, “Bringing Democracy to the Middle East,” was run up the flagpole (while at the same time the Current Federal Administration attacks democracy at home.)

And it just hung limply there. Despite the Current Federal Administrator’s rhetoric, there is no “young democracy” growing in Iraq. A thousand flowers did not bloom.

There is an administration whose authority is limited to the Green Zone, which is incapable of taking action, which would not exist and cannot continue exist without force of American arms, while at the same time it defies its protectors.

So now the marketing slogan is “bring stability to the Middle East.”

So how did the Current Federal Administration lose the war?

They started it with lies. It was likely doomed from the start because of that.

Then they threw lie after lie at it.

They pursued it incompetently, making policy decisions based on their ideas of how the world should be, rather than how the world is. Perhaps the best example of this was their belief that, when Saddam Hussein toppled, American style democracy (which they undermine here) would just spring, full-blown, out of the desert soil, like Venus from the mind of Zeus.

So what did happen? War, war, and more war. And as the war deepened, Imperator fiddled about, playing the same tune over and over on his violin: “Stay the course. Stay the course.”

Any suggestions to change the course were disregarded.

And now his ship of state, our state, is trapped in the ice.

It is the captain that wrecked this ship, by steering it in the fog–the fog of his and his cohorts delusions–and by disregarding the advice of those who saw clearly.

There is no blame to those who knew from the beginning he charted the wrong course, or even from those who recognized later on during the voyage that the heading was wrong.

Only the hypocrisy–or perhaps it is the broken dreams–of what Mr. Marshall refers to as the “Dead Enders” prevents them from seeing that.

Bill Shein analyzes the impact of the Harry Potter craze:

The book makes many terrifying references to “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” an evil wizard who hopes to rule the world – but who is, in the late 1990s, hiding underground, possibly working at the neoconservative Project for the New American Century while plotting his return.

(snip)

Unfortunately, the “Potter” craze also means that most adults never read my important 1999 book, “Why Choosing a President Based on ‘Who We’d Like to Have a Beer With’ Will Soon Destroy America.”

Auth:

Why does this not surprise me?