March, 2013 archive
A Bunch of Hot Air 0
“Wind turbine syndrone,” that is. Miles Grant reports:
Details and citations at the link.
Think Summer 0
On the deck.
Virginia Gets One Right 0
This was one public-private partnership we don’t need.
Documents obtained by The Associated Press show that state officials who evaluated the proposals concluded that GEO Group, a private prisons operator based in Boca Raton, Fla., focused too much on incarceration and not enough on treatment. Liberty Healthcare Corp. of Bala Cynwyd, Pa., scored better on treatment but would have charged the state $2.4 million a year more than it is spending to run the facility itself.
Sequestrian Dressage 0
PoliticalProf sees a long, long dance:
Read the rest, then you can decide whether he’s on to something.
The Rap on Rap 0
Now that you are hearing rap music–watered down, corporate rap, to be sure–in commercials on mainstream television, it’s safe to say that rap is here to stay.
With a few exceptions, all I know about rap music is that it’s too loud and I can’t understand most of the lyrics. (That’s also all I know about “death metal.”)
Oddly enough, that’s what my parents knew about rock . . . .
If that’s all you know about rap, listen to this episode of Hear Say, the local NPR station’s news and information show:
Segment A: The Politics of Hip-Hop
Virginia Wesleyan professor Dr. Murrell Brooks began researching his current curriculum over two decades ago, but he might not have realized it at the time. In 1980’s L.A., Murrell was a founding member of hip-hop group Double Trouble. He’s taken those experiences and applied them to his “Politics of Hip-Hop” course. He joins Cathy Lewis to share how he’s using the genre’s trajectory as the road map for teaching the societal circumstances that have shaped the art form since the 60s.
The Sporting Life 0
Daniel Ruth reviews the polls sampling public opinion about gunnuttery, then does the math:
The 255 figure represents the members of the House and Senate who are card-carrying members of the quaint-sounding Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus, which is an L.L. Bean kind of way of saying these folks are the willing handmaidens of the gun lobby. Put another way, nearly half of Congress is a pretty reliable vote to kill or water down any effort to bring a pinch of coherency to the nation’s frothing gun culture.
More math at the link.
Reason Umpty-Dumpty-Ump I Stopped Using Windows 0
Windows is annoying and clunky.
I have one dual-boot computer, over there, in the corner. For those unfamiliar with that term, it means that, when I power on or reboot the computer, a “boot menu” appears to allow me to choose either Windows* or Linux–in this case, Linux Mint 13, which is a long-term support release.
It had been running under Linux since before Christmas without a reboot,** during which time a number of Mint updates have been downloaded and installed.
I decided to boot into the Windows “side” of the box today to grab all the Windows updates.
Two hours and four–four!–reboots later, Windows decided it was updated.
______________________
*I have not just blown away the Windows install because, from time to time, I might be called on to use some software product that only speaks Windows. Windows is like a snow-shovel; you don’t want to have to use it, but it’s sometimes necessary.
**The longest one of my Linux computers ran with out a reboot was 156 days; it was my webserver back when I self-hosted this site. One of the members of my LUG discovered a server at his company’s data center that had not been rebooted for over 1,000 days; it just quietly served trouble-free services for so long that the staff forgot it was there.
Nor Any Drop To Drink 0
Colorado water utilities imposing severe limits on using water for ornament watering lawns.
More dryness at the link.
Break Time 0
Off to drink liberally.
Think Summer 0
H/T to my brother in Virginia’s Northern Neck.
Ryan’s Hope 0
Dick Polman:
Will somebody please stage an intervention and tell this guy that Obamacare is here to stay, and that therefore his new budget blueprint is delusional?
Do read the rest.
Droning On 3
Daniel Ruth makes a point about raining robotic death from the sky; follow the link for the rest.
It’s difficult, though. In my selective way, I concede that blasting some American al-Qaida member deep in Yemen seems reasonable. You can’t have the drone read him his constitutional rights through a loudspeaker. My attitude is: Occupy any area that is clearly a battlefield in a war against America, die. But too often there is collateral damage, the modern term for innocent people dead. We are on a slippery slope in a toboggan of our own manufacture.
My two or three regular readers know that I am not a fan of drone warfare.
Note that I am no more against drones in general than I am against M16s, Tanks, and aircraft carriers.
I’m not for any of them, but sometimes they seem necessary.
What troubles me is the packaging–drones are presented as somehow surgical weapons that always get the right target. Their PR makes gamers’ raining robotic death from the sky seem somehow, well, nice, antiseptic, almost harmless.
Too many wedding parties, too many children gathering food, too many innocents surgically struck have been destroyed.
Yet, the “surgical strike” PR helps the citizenry turn away from the dealing of death.
As Bob Cesca points out, there is a possible corrective, and it’s not yelling “Obama=Bush”; anyone who is capable of grasping more than one thought at a time can see that he doesn’t.
News, Ripped from the Ticker(less) 0
Warning: Some language.
Stay Classy, Republicans 0
They aren’t even trying to hide the racism any more.
“The politics are going to overwhelm the policy. It is good politics to oppose the black guy in the White House right now, especially for the Republican Party,” Crawford said.
Via ABL at Balloon Juice, who notes
If only the president would stop being black, poor people in South Carolina might be able to get some healthcare.
