Quote of the Day - Alcoholic Beverages edition

From Sonic Charmer, on not getting it:

Russ Roberts, What’s Wrong With Keynes. Worth a read, but do we really need to delve so deeply into it? One may as well be asking in 2010: What’s wrong with phlogiston? What’s wrong with the luminiferous ether? What’s wrong with phrenology? The main thing that’s wrong with ‘Keynesianism’ is that (unlike these others) it’s still with us.

I think that you could make some outstanding cocktail names from these.  For example, a Phlogiston would be 1 part sparkling Reisling*, 1 part schnappes, and Baccari 151 floated (and ignited) on the top.  When the 151 burns off, the cocktail is considered dephlogisticated.

Leave your own recipes for a Luminiferous Aether (please, no actual ether) or a Phrenology in the comments.  Or for a Keynesian Crash, for that matter.

* the originator of the theory of Phlogiston, J.J. Becher, was from the Rhineland-Palatinate area of Germany, a major producer of sparkling wines.

All right, your Christmas lights are better than mine ...

Note to the Trela family: a grateful Internet thanks you.  Especially for the reindeer in the hula skirts.

Say the name

Brigid remembers her mother.  Go read it.  And remember the song of life, and living, and being human.

Those unable to grieve,
or to speak of their love,
or to be grateful, those
who can't remember God
as the source of everything,


might be described as a vacant wind,
or a cold anvil, or a group
of frightened old people.


Say the Name. Moisten your tongue
with praise, and be the spring ground,
waking. Let your mouth be given
its gold-yellow stamen like the wild rose's.


As you fill with wisdom,
and your heart with love,
there's no more thirst.


There's only unselfed patience
waiting on the doorsill, a silence
which doesn't listen to advice
from people passing in the street.

- Sufi mystic Sanai

Brigid will never be described as a cold wind.  She remembers.

Interlude

Greg Lake in concert.  And they say that the Bass player isn't as talented as the guitarist ...

Remember, Christmas should be for other people ...

As a Christmas present for Pistolero, here's my favorite Rascal Flatts song:



Heh.  And it's serious Dr. Who inside baseball, for you Dr. Who fans.

The lyrics are simply delicious:

Shedaisy: I sold your Rolex
To buy that gold Versace dress
Rascal Flatts: I set free your whiny French poodle
So you could get your beauty rest

And I did it all for you
I did it all (I did it all) for you
This Christmas (This Christmas)
All your dreams (All your dreams)
Will come true

Rascal Flatts: I put your mother on a greyhound (You did what??!)
You always hoped she'd have the chance to see the world - now she can!
Shedaisy: I torched your Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues (No, no, no,no)
So I could be your only girl (And now I am!)

And I did it all for you
I did it all (I did it all) for you
This Christmas (This Christmas)
All your dreams (All your dreams)
Will come true

Shedaisy: How can I forget
All you've done for me
I'll get you yet
Rascal Flatts: This is the season to give
But I can never forgive the damage that you've done
(Damage that you've done)
This must be love

Shedaisy: I sank your bass boat (Not my bass boat, no, no, no!)
So you'd have more time to spend with me
Rascal Flatts: I hocked your grandma's diamond earrings (AHHHHH!)
For the down payment on my SUV
Shedaisy: Fully loaded, heated seats, in hunter green-is this for me?

And I did it all for you
I did it all (I did it all) for you
This Christmas (This Christmas)
All your dreams (All your dreams)
Will come true
Ooooh....

Ah, the spirit of giving!

What does Mid-Winter's Day look like?

Something like this:

So what's noteworthy about this picture?  It's from Australia, where today is Mid-Summer's Day:

Snow and ice covering buildings and cars on December 19, 2010 at Mount Hotham,Victoria, as snow fell in Australia. The usual hot and summery December weather was replaced in parts by icy gusts sweeping up from the Southern Ocean, giving the country a taste of a white Christmas. Snow has fallen in parts of east coast states New South Wales and Victoria.

That's like snow falling in the Poconos on June 20.

Yeah, yeah - weather, climate, yadda yadda.  Does anyone think for a minute that six days of record heat in the summer wouldn't be front page news, with the Usual Suspects bloviating about the crisis in Global Warming Climate Change whatever the politically correct term is these days?

I didn't think so.  It's the hypocrisy that stinks.  That and the lousy science.

How about waiting until you catch a terrorist?

Just One?  Rick emails to point out what the Department of Homeland Security is doing rather than catch the Bad Guys:

At an all-day White House conference on "environmental justice," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that her department is creating a new task force to battle the effects of climate change on domestic security operations.

Sheesh.  Not only do they say that guys like me are terrorists (look at the logo in the upper right hand side of the blog.  Click on it for the story).  Not only are they frisking nuns, 3 year old girls, and foreign ambassadors at the airports instead of actual, you know, security stuff.  Now they're putting scarce resources on a politically-driven, junk science power grab.

The best that you can say is that this demonstrates a massive inability to prioritize.  The worst you can say is that they have an outstanding ability to prioritize power-grabbing schemes.

De-fund the DHS.  Hey Stupid Republican Party: this was your baby.  It's turned into a monster.

Kill it.

Censuses have consequences

Via TJIC, we find that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts expects to lose a congressional seat due to the last census.

Maybe if they didn't keep enacting obnoxious laws, insane taxation schemes, and all around treating everyone like a child, guys like might still live there (and they might not be losing a seat).

Then again, if we had some ham, we could make ham and eggs. If we had some eggs.

Climate Science Reasoned Discourse™ breaks out!

An Anonymous Coward stopped by this post, and left a comment I reproduce here in its entirety:

hey dumbass, that is why it is called weather (conditions over a short period of time) and not climate (conditions over a long period of time)

how quickly the deniers try to move light away from the reality that 2010 was the warmest year on record (long period of time, get it?)

but to your ignorant point, as the oceans become warmer more moisture is evaporated into the atmosphere, that leads, inevitably, to heavier rains in the summer and more snow in the winter.

you and inhofe need t service each, and quick, to deal with this latent bloviation you have bottled up inside

Whew! Glad for the constructive engagement!

Let's look at the science briefly, and then move on to the more interesting part.

1. The "2010 is the warmest year EVAH" is based on satellite measurements, which only go back 31 years. That's some righteous "long term" right there.

2. The 2010 figure does not include November or December, which have seen widespread record cold in the northern hemisphere. You're counting chickens that haven't hatched, AC.

But here's the interesting part. When skeptics like me use precisely the same tactics that the warmists use ("It's a record heat wave! ZOMG!"), folks like AC pop up with his Reasoned Discourse™: "dumbass", "ignorant", "bloviation".

Why people like this think they're great Defenders Of Science like this is quite frankly mystifying.

But thanks for providing the plucky comic relief, AC! Stop back soon!

Monday morning links

I'm traveling today, so I'll leave you with some posts that are worth your while.

The Kings Of War write on Al Qaeda's self-inflicted wounds:

The findings are sharp, counter-intuitive and they face head-on the almost paradoxical nature of the threat — to put it bluntly: al-Qaeda became stronger and weaker at the same time. The report should raise a humbling question for the objectives in the war in Afghanistan. What can actually be achieved there against jihadist militancy?  – The authors add a note of caution at the end. Recognizing internal divisions enables weakening jihadi groups, they write, but it will not lead to “a grand solution” to the problem of Islamist militancy.

Radiation scientists question safety of TSA PervScan™:

The news about the potential health dangers of the TSA's naked body scanners just keeps getting worse. An increasing number of doctors and scientists are going public with their warnings about the health implications of subjecting yourself to naked body scanners. These include Dr Russell Blaylock (see below) as well as several professors from the University of California who are experts in X-ray imaging.

Their argument is that while the total dosage from the scanners is low if distributed across the entire body, that's not what the scanners do.  Rather, the entire dosage is concentrated on the skin and tissues immediately below, resulting in a far higher dose.  Orders of magnitude higher.  Keep your eye on this story.

The shift from IP version 4 to the new IP version 6 remains controversial.  ISPs simply don't want to do it, because it will cost them a lot of money, and their subscribers won't notice any difference.  As a result, the ISPs are doing more NAT (Network Address Translation) to save IP addresses.  It looks like this will help spammers.  Slashdot has a good article, with some very interesting comments.  This is techno-geeky stuff, but good techno-geeky stuff.

Anger

I'm told that grief has several well-defined stages. One of these is anger.

I can testify that this is true. This disease is cruel in what it does to the body; any military organization that did even a fraction of this to a prisoner would be guilty of war crimes.

Anger is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, deserving an entire ring of Hell in The Inferno.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned ...

Blogroll update

I keep asking people to let me know if they've blogrolled me, and this last week it worked!  David emailed to tell me that he has me on his blogroll over at his plave, Vote For David.  He's another one of those Gun Nuts, so you've been warned.

Plus, he describes why it's not exactly a great idea to send text messages from your phone asking for work.  It's sort of a do you have Prince Albert in a can meets SMS.  Hilarious, but modestly NSFW.

Summa Conscientia

The early fifth century saw the accelerating fragmentation of the Roman Empire.  The Goths sacked the Eternal City itself in 410 A.D., by which time it was obvious that the end of the Civilized world was nigh.  It's arguable that Martianus Capella, a proconsul in the Roman province of Carthage, saved western civilization.  He caused the Roman educational curriculum to be condensed into nine volumes.  Everything that a Roman governmental official needed to know was captured there, and was preserved in Medieval monasteries by generations of monks.

Rhetoric, grammar, argument, music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy were quite simply saved from extinction, at least in the West.  It was, you could say, the ultimate collection of knowledge.  A Summa Conscientia.

Kevin Baker has just channeled Martianus, producing a Summa Conscientia for the RKBA community.  It deserves generations of monks to lovingly copy and preserve it, or at least the entire gunblogger community to see that a New Dark Ages can never extinguish its light.

Go now, and bookmark.  This is the curriculum that must be studied, and learned, and preserved, and propagated.  Unlike the fifth century, we have the Goths on the run, but we must ever remember Euripides: All is change; all yields its place and goes.  The Goths may yet turn and press the fight.


The battle is joined, the game afoot.  Go, read, and read again.  Credo.

The Lay of Three-Fingered Admin and the Ring0 of Doom

ASM826 opines on how to speed up your Windows system, in a post worthy of Homer.  Get thee hence to listen to the bard, and learn of great battles with CPU thieving system services, and how to slay the Performance Dragon*.

Well played, sir.  So very, very well played.

And heed his exhortation to back up your data.  It is as true about data as it is about concealed carry firearms, that two is one and one is none.  A man with but a single copy of his data is soon called "dataless".  Don't be that man.

* I'd never heard of the Indexing Service, or realized what a deep pit of suck it is.  Yech.

266 vs. 521

What stands out the most to me about Bob Feller, the great pitcher who just died at 92, is how like Ted Williams he was.  Consider:

• Williams is arguable the greatest hitter who ever played Baseball; Feller is arguably the greatest pitcher olf all time.
• Feller played his entire career in Cleveland, and then remained in the city as a pillar of the Indians organization.  Williams played his entire career in Boston, and then remained in New England as a pillar of the Red Sox organization.
• Feller won "only" 266 games because he enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor.  Rather than a cushy morale boosting post playing baseball, he insisted on a combat posting, and served as a Gunnery Mate on the battleship Alabama.  Williams hit "only" 521 home runs because he enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor.  While he spent World War II training Marine fighter pilots, he returned to service in the Korean War, this time flying combat sorties.

In New England, one of the perennial subjects for chewing the fat is how many home runs Williams would have hit had war not taken his greatest years.  The same question can be asked on Bob Feller - just how many games would he have won had war not taken his prime years?

We don't see this type any more.  God speed, Mr. Feller.  I hope that the good Lord lets you pitch to Teddy Ballgame once again.

Patty Loveless - How Can I Help You Say Goodbye?

Dad is being stalked by an old foe, and when I flew out to see him this time, I wondered if this might be the last time.  It may be.

He's quite a man.  I haven't heard him complain even once.  He's not focused inward; on the contrary, he's spending his days helping his family.  Just like he's always done.

There's a country music song for that, one that I never much liked when it came out.  It was too maudlin, too direct, not subtle enough.  Now I find that it's hitting like a ton of bricks.

I usually try to write more about the singer, and the song.  Today, my heart's just not in it.  All I can offer is a quote from the ancient world, to pair with a "redneck" song:

Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear.

- Marcus Aurelius

My father's quite a man, still teaching his children.  It is, though, a hard lesson.



How Can I Help You Say Goodbye? (Songwriters: Burton Banks Collins, Karen Taylor-Good)

Through the back window of a '59 wagon
I watched my best friend Jamie slippin' further away
I kept on waving 'till I couldn't see her
And through my tears, I asked again why we couldn't stay
Mama whispered softly, Time will ease your pain
Life's about changing, nothing ever stays the same

And she said, How can I help you to say goodbye?
It's OK to hurt, and it's OK to cry
Come, let me hold you and I will try
How can I help you to say goodbye?

I sat on our bed, he packed his suitcase
I held a picture of our wedding day
His hands were trembling, we both were crying
He kissed me gently and then he quickly walked away
I called up Mama, she said, Time will ease your pain
Life's about changing, nothing ever stays the same

And she said, How can I help you to say goodbye?
It's OK to hurt, and it's OK to cry
Come, let me hold you and I will try
How can I help you to say goodbye?

Sitting with Mama alone in her bedroom
She opened her eyes, and then squeezed my hand
She said, I have to go now, my time here is over
And with her final word, she tried to help me understand
Mama whispered softly, Time will ease your pain
Life's about changing, nothing ever stays the same

And she said, How can I help you to say goodbye?
It's OK to hurt, and it's OK to cry
Come, let me hold you and I will try
How can I help you to say goodbye?

How can I help you to say goodbye?

I don't know, Calvin

I just don't know.

But I sure wish I did.

UPDATE 17 December 2010 22:19: Changed picture from link to direct embed.

I need one of these for Christmas

I so need one of these.



Of course, it would have been better if I'd had one 20 years ago ...

Via Theo Spark.

Now go away, or I shall mock you a second time

The biggest fallout from last year's ClimateGate science scandal is that Global Warming has increasingly become an object of mockery.  Some of this is obvious, as in I just had to shovel another six inches of Global Warming.  But increasingly, it's about the environmental movement's totalitarian approach to dissent.

And it's coming from everywhere.  This is brilliant:



When I was a wee lad, the '60s radicals used mockery to withering effect.  Now, all those radicals have become the Establishment, and find to their dismay that The Man is still a ripe target.

The kids are all right

G4 is a TV channel devoted to all things videogame.  X-Box, Halo, that sort of thing.  As you'd expect, it's wildly popular with the youngsters.

Well a G4 announcer babe went to the range to try out some shooty goodness.  What happened next was, well, exactly what you'd expect.  After all, shooting things is fun!

Game Trailers - E3 2011 - AOTS Exclusive

What makes this interesting (other than the obligatory Chicks 'N' Guns thing) is that G4 aims at the under 30 demographic.  These are the kids who grew up in a world that told them that Guns are bad, mkay?  They didn't have the positive examples that kids of my generation had.

And still you get a very positive segment.  We're winning, where it counts - the new generation.