All at Once...

Attack all viri in one fell swoop?  If they can make this work, it will most definitely change the world...

The Great Orator?

Peggy Noonan does a takedown of Obama's oratorical self-image.  The conclusion:

The president has been obsessing on Ronald Reagan the past few months, referring to him in private and attempting to use him to buttress his position in public. They say Republicans can't get over Reagan, but really it's Democrats who aren't over him, and who draw the wrong lessons from his success. Reagan himself never bragged about his ability to convince the American people. He'd never point a finger and say: "I'll go to the people and grind you to dust." He thought speaking was a big part of leadership, but only part, and in his farewell address he went out of his way to say he never thought of himself as a great communicator. He thought he simply communicated great things—essentially, the vision of the founders as applied to current circumstances.

Democrats were sure Reagan was wrong, so they explained his success to themselves by believing that it all came down to some kind of magical formula involving his inexplicably powerful speeches. They misdefined his powers and saddled themselves with an unrealistic faith in the power of speaking.

But speeches aren't magic. A speech is only as good as the ideas it advances. Reagan had good ideas. Obama does not.

The debt ceiling crisis revealed Mr. Obama's speeches as rhetorical kryptonite. It is the substance that repels the listener.

Zing!  That's gotta hurt...

A Moment With My Dog...

Yesterday I worked from home (something I do on most Wednesdays).  Early in the afternoon, I felt like a cup of tea.  I put the pot on to boil, and while I waited, I played with the dogs.  Race (our youngest, a border collie) was being unusually affectionate.  Normally he's a non-stop player – wants me to throw a toy, wrassle with him, or some other kind of active play.  But yesterday he acted more like one of our field spaniels, wanting some attention.

So I sat down on the floor and gave him a hug.  He gazed at me with adoring eyes, tongue dangling as usual, and leaning into me.  While I was enjoying this moment of communion with my dog, I noted a feeling of dampness on my leg, near my ankle.  Then I heard something like the distant tinkling of water being poured.  So I looked down at my leg, and...my dog was pissing on me.

Not just a drip or two, either.  Nope.  A full-on, let-it-all-out, completely engaged piss.  Directly onto my leg.  Still with the adoring look in his eyes as he gazed happily into my face.

WTF?

None of our dogs have ever done anything like this to me before.  Debbie's theory is that for whatever reason, he had to go really, really badly.  I'm not so sure myself...

A Google search on “my dog pissed on me” yielded over 15 million hits.  Clearly I'm not the first one this has happened to!

Ya Think?

A Gift for Your Liberal Friends...

You can buy them here.

Icons for Anything?

I tried searching for five things that I thought would be unlikely (like a tractor) – and in all five cases, there were multiple icons in the database.

These come from The Noun Project.  Here's their mission statement:

The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way.

The contributors to this project sure put a lot of work into it!

All the icons are free, by the way.

My Work Here is Done...

Via my mom:

Ouch...

9,800 Feet Down...

Imagine being almost two miles under the Earth's surface.  A group of geologists recently visited the bottom of the world's deepest mine (copper/zinc), in Ontario, Canada.  They came back with photos and an interesting article...

Where's Your Budget, Mr. President?

Paul Ryan, in today's WSJ, asks the question.  A sample:

There is a better way—structural reforms that empower patients with greater choices and increase the role of competition in the health-care marketplace. The budget passed by the House of Representatives in April, "The Path to Prosperity," outlined the beginnings of such an approach by repealing the president's health-care law and proposing reforms that would make Medicare and Medicaid stronger and solvent for current and future generations.

In other words, we've put our cards on the table: According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), our plan puts the federal budget on the path to balance without resorting to job-destroying tax hikes. It will eliminate the shadow of debt that is discouraging job creation while advancing pro-growth tax reforms to get the economy moving again.

By contrast, the president and his party's leaders have refused to submit specific, credible budget plans that tackle health-care costs while restoring economic growth. Unwilling to reconsider their failed bureaucratic approaches to health and retirement security, the Democrats can only propose tax increases, and lots of them.

We need more Paul Ryans in Congress...

The Horrible Mess from the BP Oil Spill...

I'm sure you remember all the screaming and hollering from just about everybody, a year or so ago, when the BP oil well was spewing millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.  It seemed like the ultimate environmental disaster.  Numerous scientists were predicting things like 20 years of tainted, inedible fish and shellfish from the Gulf, or even the complete collapse of the Gulf's food chain and hundreds of years to recover.

But then a funny thing happened.  They lost the oil. That is, the scientists couldn't find the giant blob of oil that should have been left just a few weeks after the well was finally capped.  At first the assumption was that they really had simply lost it – couldn't find it with their instruments.  After all, the Gulf is a biggish place.  Then we heard that the oil must have fallen to the bottom and slithered to the lowest places in the Gulf, the hardest ones to explore.  But when they looked, it wasn't there.  In fact, wherever they looked, there was no oil.  The Gulf's recovery from the oil spill is already nearly complete, just one year later. 

What happened? 

I've been waiting for the first reports to come in from scientists who got past their embarrassment and actually figured it out.  Here's the first I've seen, and it says, basically, the microbes ate the oil.  Much, much faster than anyone predicted.

Mother Nature is an awesome lady...

The Debt-Ceiling Deal...

According to Bill McGurn (the lead):

When it comes to Murphy's Law—the idea that anything that can go wrong, will—we Irish have our corollary: Murphy was an optimist.

Even from this sunny perspective, it's hard to look at the debt-ceiling compromise and see it as anything but a conservative victory. It's not just that Speaker of the House John Boehner succeeded in imposing some conditions in exchange for an increase in the debt ceiling. It's that the deal has Democrats, including the president, essentially signing on to the Republican framework for defining the Beltway's budget problem: spending that is too high rather than taxes that are too low.

Dawn at Vesta...

The Dawn spacecraft has been inserted into orbit around the asteroid Vesta, and this is the first (of many!) science photos to be returned (as usual, click to enlarge).  Dawn is the first spacecraft to be completely reliant on a super-efficient ion propulsion system (instead of a chemical rocket) – not so long ago, these could only be found in science fiction.  You could fairly call this mission a proof of the system's viability...

National Creditworthiness...

Thomson-Reuters has an interesting (and, to me, surprising) infographic:

As usual, click to enlarge.  Lots of countries rated on here surprised me, in both directions. 

Standards...

Scott Adams nails it again – most hardware or software engineers will instantly recognize the uncomfortable truths he captures in three succinct frames:

 

Excellent, Mr. Adams...

I Don't Thought So!

That Green Thing...

Via my lovely wife:

In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment."

She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.

But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana.

In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us.

When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.

We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service.

We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Too Much Truth to This...

Via my mom:

Laugh or cry – you decide...

Congressional Reform...

Our friend Vera S. passed this along:

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

This is one of many variations of Constitutional Amendments running around, all the result of the current anger the public (including me!) feels toward their Senators and Representatives.  Some elements of this proposal I'd happily support; others (like 6) are more problematic – there are good reasons why the founding fathers decided that Congressmen needed protection from some law enforcement.

But... 

I think that such attempts to mandate the behavior of Congresscritters are largely missing the point.  Basically these are an attempt to get back to the “citizen government” that we like to believe is what our founding fathers intended.  But the truth is that we've drifted toward our current situation because of the Congresscritters we've elected, not because of the lack of any laws to control them.  The solution is actually simple, and does not require a Constitutional Amendment: we just have to elect the right people.  The Tea Party's successes in the debt-ceiling debate demonstrate quite graphically the power of the vote.  It's remarkable what they've achieved, despite being a tiny minority.

Imagine what they could achieve if they had the majority!

The 545...

My mom sent me an email containing a column by Charlie Reese, along with a poem and a list of taxes.  While the column was indeed written by Reese, it wasn't something published recently (as the email implied) – it was published in 1995 (and actually written 10 years before that!).  The rest of the email was a mashup someone decided to do.

The Reese column is a famous one, and worth reading if you've never seen it.  What I find most interesting about it is that its observations (like those of Mark Twain or H. L. Mencken) are just as pertinent today as when they were written.  Here's the conclusion of Reese's famous column:

We have annual deficits and a huge federal debt because that's what majorities in Congress and presidents in the White House wanted. We have troops in various Third World rat holes because Congress and the president want them there.

Don't be conned. Don't let them escape responsibility. We simply have to sort through 260 million people until we find 545 who will act responsibly.

Go read the whole thing.

Tea Party Anthem?

The music isn't quite to my taste, but the lyrics are: