December, 2007 archive
Self-Puffery 1
Hilary Clinton, who gives me the willies. From Fact Check dot org:
We find the ad misleading. In fact, active-duty Guard and Reserve troops already were covered by federal insurance, and four out of five non-active-duty guardsmen and reservists already were covered by their civilian employers or other sources.
Clinton did help expand and enhance health care coverage for reservists but can’t claim credit for creating coverage where none existed, as this ad implies.
Follow the link for the full analysis.
Vast Grasslands 4
The ban has been on hold since May, when Gov. Ruth Ann Minner signed a House-Senate resolution barring enforcement until Jan. 24. Legislators claimed at the time that residents wouldn’t have a convenient and affordable way to dispose of yard waste. The resolution directed state officials to develop a plan to “simplify and economize” yard-waste recycling for residents.
How stupid is it to bag “yard waste”?
Let me count the ways.
You take something that is perfectly biodegradable, wrap it in a plastic bag and turn it into something that will last forever, and toss it in the landfill.
Furrfu!
This whole idea of having a pristine, weed-free lawn is just an invention of the fertilizer and weed-killer companies anyway. And what do they care about? Creating new markets for their noxious chemicals.
Note that I’m talking about the lawn, as opposed to the yard.
We had a yard where I grew up. Several of them, in fact. About two and a half acres of yards: front, back, and side.
My father and later my brother and I cut it. We played baseball and football on it. And none of us thought much about it it, as long as it was green.
The idea that it should be populated with a single breed of grass and have no clover was completely unknown to us. Heck, that little patch of blue grass on the north side stood out really prettily from the bull grass.
And just, pray tell, is wrong with having grass clippings or leaves in the driveway or on the pavement?
Why must legions of persons carrying un-muffled leaf-blowers disturb the morning moving those leaves and grass clippings about. Honestly, that is what wind and rain are for.
And let us not mention the energy that gets used up just to move bits of biomass around. That’s energy as in gasoline being wasted in a pointless, senseless activity. (Unlike, for example, boating, which is a noble was of communing with nature, especially if you have an open runaboat.)
I say ban yard waste, mandate common sense, and get a mulching mower.
Oh, yeah, and while we’re at it, let’s ban leaf-blowers and edgers too.
Hambone 7
I generally like the area I live in. (Caveat: If there had been a little thing called “jobs” down home, I probably never would have left.)
It is truly deepest suburbia, with big city services readily available, but not too far from a boat ramp. My little corner of suburbia was built up in the ’40s and ’50s, so it’s pretty well settled. What you see is what you get: the traffic isn’t going to get much worse, because it’s already as worse as it can be, but, if you have the patience to nose them out, there are plenty of back roads for getting where you want to go without actually driving on the Conquered Concord Pike.
My house backs up to an abandoned quarry and, then an Office Park, giving the back yard privacy and giving us the comfort that no one’s going to come along and drop a Mickey D’s, or worse, a (Hoick! Ptui!) Walmart behind us.
There is one wart on this idyllic little suburban scene.
You can’t get a Real Ham (TM).
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The kind you have to soak overnight before cooking to leach the salt.
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The kind that you don’t have to refrigerate, because it’s actually been, like, you know, cured (I once had one hanging for four months in my crawl space till I got around to cooking it).
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The kind you have to scrub the mold from before cooking.
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The kind with a hambone.
I’m not talking about those puny Yankee “pre-cooked” attrocities that have to be refrigerated and that, when you cut a slice, the slice flops limply in your hand like a piece of balogna. I was looking at some of them in the store yesterday, and the labels said [BRANDNAME] SUGAR [or hickory or whatever] CURED HAM and water product.
Right away, you know that, if they have to add “product” to the label, folks, it ain’t real. It’s adulterated beyond recognition.
Aside: Indeed, I don’t think people in these parts even understand Real Hams (TM ). Many years ago, I went looking for one in a long-closed Super Fresh. None on display. I rang the little bell. This old guy leans out and I ask him whether he had any country hams. He said, “Sure,” and came back in a minute and held out this ham. Then he pulled it back and asked, “Where are you from?”
“Virginia.”
“Okay,” he said, and handed me the ham. I have no doubt that someone once bought a country ham from him, took it home, unwrapped it, and brought it back complaining about the mold.
(Full disclosure: Haldas Brothers does carry Real Hams (TM), but only during Eastertide. Other times of the year, they have to be special ordered, minimum order of five.)
Now, the cooling tower town is in slower lower Delaware, and lower Delaware fancies that it has some kind of Southern heritage. So, yesterday, after I finished doing the cooling tower thing, I decided to check out the local grocery stores for Real Hams (TM).
The meat manager at the Super Fresh said he didn’t have any, that for some reason he couldn’t get them this year, and finished with, “I’m going to have to drive to Virginia to pick some up.”
At least he knew what they were.
The meat person at the Save-A-Lot said she though she might have seen one once in Dover, but she wasn’t sure.
There were rumors of a Food Lion, but for some reason I couldn’t find it, even though it was right there. But I’m not sure I wanted to go there anyway.
Someone at the Cooling Tower Place had said he’d seem some in Walmart. Now, I try to avoid Walmart, because I don’t like the way they treat their employees or their suppliers, but I don’t completely blacklist it. I was desparate and it was getting late, so I checked out the local Walmart. Acres of Yankee hams, no Real Hams (TM).
I finally got lucky at the Dover Safeway. The meat manager said, “Sure, over here. . . . Whoops! Where did they go? I think I saw some in the back. Let me check.”
He disappeared into the back, and I fired up Opera Mobile while I waited for him. Five minutes later, he reappeared with a Real Ham (TM):
I’ll start soaking it tonight.
It’s Comcastic! 1
Un-be-freaking-believable.
Oh my goodness.
How stupid is this?
Jeez-oh-man.
Words fail me.
Phillybits via Brendan.
Separation of Powers 0
Give this article in the latest American Scholar a look-see.
Then be afraid.
(snip)
If the scope of executive power were a burning topic of politics, the breakdown allowing the power to expand dramatically might not feel so momentous— whether you regard it as a breakdown in the American legal process or in the system of checks and balances. Among the current Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, however, none has attacked executive supremacy as forcefully as past candidates assailed judicial supremacy. None has made executive restraint a rallying cry. Torture, illegal surveillance, and other contentious practices of the Bush administration have drawn criticism from candidates of both parties, but not one of them has focused on the underlying problem.
The most urgent legal and political issue of our time might as well not exist. Since 9/11 our democracy has functioned like an autocracy. In making one significant choice after another, the Bush administration has repeatedly done what Nixon only threatened to. But this is a nonissue in the current presidential race. That is so even though what’s at stake is a fundamental judgment about the nature of the presidency and, therefore, of the Republic.
Wingnuttia 0
Demo Booboos 0
Fact Check dot Org looks at Democratic candidates errors in the last Iowa debate. Score: Richardson 3, Dodd 2, Obama 1. Follow the link for a detailed analysis.
- Richardson claimed “enormous progress†in New Mexico education, when in fact the state’s eighth-grade reading scores have slipped and remain among the worst in the U.S.
- Richardson exaggerated the extent to which his state’s teacher salaries increased.
- Richardson said one-third of U.S. health care spending goes to “administration and bureaucracy,†but Medicare officials put the figure at 7.4 percent.
- Dodd criticized “the Chinese government†for slave labor, when in fact it just sentenced a slaver to death.
- Dodd said University of Iowa costs have gone up 141 percent in six or seven years; we find they rose 81 percent.
- Obama claimed Medicare would save “a trillion dollars†if fewer Americans were obese. We find little support for that figure.
Later: Link fixed.
(Aside: None of these corresponds with this list of whoppers.)
Drinking Liberally 0
Tuesday, Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Center City, Philadelphia.
Just a block from South Street.
I’m still waiting for Brendan to explain the gift exchange thingee to me.
He’s My Guy 0
Despite a couple of missteps in the latest Iowa debate (more about that tomorrow):
At last, a Democrat who stands up for, golly gosh gee, Batman, democracy.
I’m Glad I Was Not a Postal Clerk Today 0
Sooooo, I went to the local post office today to mail Christmas presents.
I wanted to get them off because a couple of them were to APO addresses.
I thought that by going early, I would miss the rush.
More fool I.
The rush got there before me. And the early rush included large numbers of persons picking up certified mail, registered mail, and holiday holds. When those persons got to the counter, the clerks had to leave their stations to look for their mail. further slowing down the process.
The clerks looked pretty numb.
(Thank heavens I had my mp3 player–I was listening to Diane Rehm’s Friday News round-up.)
Then, when I finally got to the counter, got the postage figured, and filled out the customs forms, the credit card/debit card system went down.
No, I didn’t have $67.41 cash on me. I got cleaned out over the weekend and made the mistake of not stopping at the ATM on the way to the post office.
The clerk was kind enough to hold my packages while I went to the ATM, though when I got back, I had to stand in line again.
The clerk told me that she had heard that this was not a local outage–that multiple post offices were affected.
I said to her, “There must be hell to pay in L’Enfant Plaza” (Post Office HQ is in L’Enfant Plaza South–I did a training class there once for the security department).
First smile I got from her all day.
Anatomy of a Hard Drive 0
Via Geekazine:
Geekazine Rocks.
So, too, for that matter, does Geek News Central, which is where I first met heard of Geekazine, when Jeffrey Powers did a podcast for Todd, from Geek News Central, while Todd was moving.
Pop! 0
Well over a year ago, I discussed the possibility that there was a housing bubble.
Today’s local rag had a story about a business analyst who got it right:
Finally, in e-mails and meetings with her firm’s money managers, Troll urged T. Rowe Price to sell its portfolio of subprime-mortgage securities.
“I just was amazed at how quickly these deals were getting done when you see constant deterioration in credit quality,” she said. “It just didn’t make sense.”
Based on her warnings, the Baltimore investment firm sold some of its subprime assets in December 2006 and cleared its books of them by early February – well before the summer’s credit crisis erased the market for these types of securities.
Ya know, this stuff ain’t rocket science. That doesn’t mean it can be done as a sideline either–it takes time to do the homework.
But what it boils down to is verifying that the investments reflect real value, rather than hopes and wishful thinking.
It’s like the sign on the Antique Shop: “We buy junk. We sell antiques.”
Unfortunately, changing the label does not change the product.
Break Time (Updated) 0
Delaware’s playing for the championship.
Not that I’m a big Delaware fan–they kick my alma mater up and down the field regularly, but two of my kids went there and a third is considering it, and, hey! it’s football.
Unlike what goes on up the road a piece.
Addendum, 12/17/2007:
Well, someone played football. It wasn’t Delaware.
Treed 0
(Taken with no flash and no lamps on in the room and with the camera set on speed priority, so the lights would stand out, then run through Paintshop Pro’s One Step Photo Fix.)
Torture is Their Pornography 0
Dan Froomkin:
The bill would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow interrogation rules adopted by the armed forces last year.
What does that mean? As Pamela Hess writes for the Associated Press, those rules explicitly prohibit “forcing detainees to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner; placing hoods or sacks over detainees’ heads or duct tape over their eyes; beating, shocking, or burning detainees; threatening them with military dogs; exposing them to extreme heat or cold; conducting mock executions; depriving them of food, water, or medical care; and waterboarding.”
Administration officials have consistently refused to confirm or deny whether any of those methods have been sanctioned by the White House and are in use. But really all you need to know is this: According to yesterday’s formal statement of administration policy, limiting intelligence agencies to the army rules “would prevent the United States from conducting lawful interrogations of senior al Qaeda terrorists to obtain intelligence needed to protect Americans from attack.”
In other news, pot, kettle, black.
I Just Can’t Resist . . . 0
District Judge Terrence Gallagher dismissed the charge against Dawn Herb, 33, of Scranton, ruling that she was within her First Amendment rights when she let loose a string of profanities on Oct. 11.
Although the language she used “may be considered by some to be offensive, vulgar and imprudent … such representations are protected speech pursuant to the First Amendment,” the judge wrote Thursday.
No sh*t.
Inside Your Computer 0
I found a couple of fascinating little videos over at Geekazine. Here’s the first: What’s Inside Your Computer.
