Dude!

This needs no commentary:

Following the Money...

My own thinking about abortion has been focused on the moral issues. Here's a film that (from the trailer) appears to be mainly focused on something else: the money that Planned Parenthood is making from performing abortions, and how that allegedly distorts their behavior.

I have no idea about the truth of these particular claims; it's not something I've ever tried to dig up some facts on. I did a little digging this morning, and found several sources saying that Planned Parenthood performs approximately 300,000 abortions per year (in the U.S.) and receives about $700 million dollars per year for those services. That makes them quite a large business, and there's certainly enough money to affect people's behavior.

Food for thought, on an aspect of abortion that has relatively little to do with its morality...

O-M-G!!!

Updated:

I just discovered that the trees have responded to the EarthFirsters:



Original post:


Somebody please tell me that this is some kind of a put-on. 'Cause, you know, I'd sleep a lot better if I knew for sure that people like these didn't walk the earth with me...

The Cats In Our Lives...

Anyone who has spent much time with a cat will enjoy these videos. I've spent almost 30 years with an average of about 8 cats, so you can imagine how entertaining I found them! Via Super Tremendous:

Van Jones “Resigns”...

I used the scare quotes in the title because only the most naive amongst us would believe that Van Jones voluntarily quit his job. There's no doubt in my mind that he was asked to – very forcefully, with no real alternative.

The lamestream media has, once again, been carrying water for The One. Aside from the renegade outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, there hasn't been a peep from them on the subject of Van Jones. The White House did their best to help them out by announcing the Van Jones resignation at midnight on Saturday on a long holiday weekend.

I don't even know how to be snarky about these things any more – it's not like they're sneaking around doing this behind our backs. They're doing it right in front of our faces! This behavior is leading to the strengthening of a dichotomy that's existed for a long time: the politically informed vs. the politically ignorant. This used to be almost the same thing as saying those who listened to the news vs. those who didn't. What's different now is that even if you do listen to the news, you won't be very well informed – because the “news” from the lamestream media more closely resembles a stream of propoganda than it does actual information. These days, if you want to be politically informed, you really need to read the Wall Street Journal and a selection of political blogs (leftie, rightie, and libertarian). People who did that are completely unsurprised by the Van Jones resignation.

The best commentary on this affair I've read so far comes from blogger Jim Treacher:

If the mainstream media didn't prove its own irrelevance during the Rielle Hunter scandal, this clinches it. An advisor to the President of the United States, a man in charge of tens of billions in taxpayer funds, is resigning because of a scandal that has not been covered by most news outlets. Now they have to do the same dance they did when John Edwards confessed to his affair: "Looks like we have no choice but to talk about this now. Let's cover the story as if we've been covering it all along, while explaining it for the people who don't know about it because we're their only source of news."

So long to the lying, racebaiting, communist Truther in the White House. Correction: So long to a lying, racebaiting, communist Truther in the White House.

Tell it, brother!

Update:

Here's some more, with snark, from Scott Jacobs (blogging at Patterico):

The question remains, however: How the holy monkey-fuck did this guy pass the vetting process? Is the White House that stupid? Or could it be that they didn’t find anything wrong with his words because they agree with them – after all, would crazy talk sound crazy if you agree with it?

I mean, I’m sure to other truthers a phrase like “the first time fire ever melted steel” sounds perfectly rational, you know what I mean?

Edit – Looks like it hit the wires at about 12:10am Eastern. Yeah, there’s no way people at the White House were trying to bury this…

Update: The WaPo has a story now, with the following awesome quote from Van Jones:

“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide,” he said (emphasis added)

Smears? Lies? Distortions? Asshole, there were video cameras. We can watch you say the stuff we are claiming came out of your noise hole.

As I’ve often said in the past: “it isn’t slander if it’s true”.

Heh!!

Tiffany...Has a Lot of Growing Up To Do?

Offered without comment:

Excellent Lecture...

Excellent Rhetoric and Dramatic Gesture...

Her blog is here.

Station Fire Update...

Mostly it's good news: the western side of the fire, and much of the southern side, are largely under control. The fire is now mostly burning in deep, remote forests (some unburned for over 100 years) on the eastern edge. Click to enlarge the MODIS thermal imagery at right. No structures are threatened. The Mount Wilson observatory and communications towers were saved by the firefighters.

But two firefighters have died, and (unfortunately, unsurprisingly) investigators have pegged the cause of the fire as arson. The Los Angeles Sheriff's department is pursuing the case as a homicide, and Governor Schwarzenegger has put up a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the culprit or culprits.

Good News for Tetris Addicts...

Good news for my mom (a self-confessed Tetris addict):

Sinking blocks and clearing lines in Tetris may pay off with more than just a high score. Playing the classic shape-fitting computer game, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, for just three months may boost the size and efficiency of parts of the brain, a study published September 1 in BMC Research Notes finds.

Just about the only thing anyone's discovered so far that help fend off Alzheimer's is brain exercise. Intellectually difficult games (chess, Scrabble, Boggle, etc.) work. Some kinds of games, generally involving spatial manipulation (e.g., Tetris) also work.

But best of all is learning new skills or new understanding (as opposed to memorization). A great many things fall into these categories, from algebra to zener diode theory. If you're in your 50s or later, you'll stand a significantly better chance of avoiding senility if you stop watching the boob tube and instead start putting your brain to work (and no, the Discovery channel doesn't work out your brain)...

Government Employment is Inconsequential...

By which I mean that if you're a government employee, you can screw up massively, demonstrate your incompetence with crystal clarity, and you will not suffer any consequences for it. In fact, you'll quite likely be promoted the next time you cross some “time-in-grade” threshold, exactly as you would have been if you didn't screw up.

It certainly doesn't work this way in the real world of business, where incompetence is generally rewarded with unemployment – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but pretty much inevitably.

If I was incompetent and knew it, or even suspected it, clearly the optimal career strategy would be to wangle a job with the government...

The latest demonstration of this phenomenon is at the SEC, who notoriously botched the investigation into Bernie Madoff's $55 billion Ponzi scheme. Not only did multiple SEC investigations turn up nothing (much to Madoff's surprise – he thought even the idiots at the SEC would figure it out), but multiple independent investigators repeatedly tried to tell the SEC that Madoff was up to no good. The best documented of these was Harry Markopolos, who repeatedly fed information to the SEC for 16 years – and the SEC managed to ignore all this through sheer bureaucratic ineptness. Ironically the current investigators are relying heavily on Markopolos' data, and he's testified to Congress.

So if you were amongst the many innocents who presumed that such manifest incompetence would have some consequence for both the SEC as a whole and for the individuals involved – why, then, you're in for a surprise. Because every single one of the SEC employees associated with the Madoff investigation is either still in the same position, or has been promoted. And utterly nothing has changed in the SEC's organization. If Bernie Madoff hadn't already been discovered, the SEC would still be missing the boat.

Which, of course, makes you wonder how many other undiscovered “Madoffs” yet remain...

The lack of consequence for incompetence in government is high on my list of reasons why we should never entrust our health care to them. And why we should stop entrusting them with other things important to us, such as retirement funding, education, letter delivery, etc. I fantasize sometimes about a new President and a new Congress somehow injecting some consequence into government employees, but those are just satisfying fantasies. In the real world, I suspect the only effective recourse will be to take away the toys we let these unpunished idiots play with.

Fascinating Economic Information...

I just discovered a source of some fascinating economic information, courtesy of Google. They've been tracking the frequency of certain search queries since 2004. The results are publicly available.

For example, the graph at right shows computer and electronic related queries. An industry rule-of-thumb for many years has been that consumer electronics make a quarter to a third of all their sales in the last six weeks of the year. On the graph you can clearly see that exact trend, including two big peaks at Thanksgiving and Christmas. You can also see the generally downward trend of the past few years.

On the other hand, look as the graph at left to see how the current recession affects queries about unemployment benefits. Obviously we're not out of the woods yet (on the current recession)!

Dig a little deeper into that unemployment graph and you'll see small peaks of activity every January (when extra holiday season retail workers are laid off), and dips every mid-November (when extra holiday season retail workers are hired). There's a small peak in the summertime, I'll speculate because of high-school and college kids trying to find jobs.

Fascinating stuff, updated every day. Unlike government-supplied data, this is raw data – not “adjusted” in various ways with often political motivations. It's also near-realtime, so you don't have to wait a month or more to see what's happening. Personally, I'd trust my own interpretation of Googles raw data on unemployment queries much more than I'd trust the government's opaque unemployment numbers. I'll be watching this site...

How Tequila Works...

Word of Advice...

Never piss off someone who owns a backhoe.

I own a backhoe.

Miyuki Channels Nancy...

Hukio Hatoyama has just been elected Prime Minister of Japan. His wife Miyuki is about to become Japan's new First Lady.

Remember Nancy Reagan's reliance on astrologers and soothsayers? Well, Miyuki apparently is made of similar stuff. She claims to have been abducted by aliens, flown to Venus on a triangular UFO, and impressed by the Venutian lushness and friendly natives.

Oh, my.

I hope her husband is at least a little better grounded...

Where Obamacare Would Take Us...

Britain's National Health Service (NHS) is often cited by proponents of Obamacare as a model that we should be moving toward here in the U.S. One consequence of centrally-planned health care is the subject of an interesting article in the London Telegraph. An excerpt:

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

So it's expensive to try to cure old people, and pointless when they are most likely dying anyway. The bureaucratic fix is obvious (to a bureaucrat, anyhow): identify these resource-wasters, withhold all medicine, sedate the crap out of them, and wait for them to die.

Sound like the kind of health care system you want?

The Things We Do to Our Dogs...

Well, some people do. Via the one and only Rachel Lucas.

Health Care Debate...

Of all the reading I've done on the topic (and that's a lot, including several books), there's one source that stands out: Megan McArdle's blog at The Atlantic. Here's a sample from a post she made yesterday:

I think probably most people would agree that if Rand is right, and price controls shave, say, almost a year off of average lifespans, this is not necessarily a good deal for even the squishiest bleeding heart liberal--for the same reasons that socialism turned out not to be a good idea. No, I'm not calling you a socialist. I'm saying that if nationalizing companies and 90% tax rates on the very wealthy had worked well anywhere, a lot more liberals would be in favor of those things, because if you take away the unintended consequences that they turned out to have, they seem to conform to a lot of progressive priorities about justice, distribution, and so forth. But they didn't, and so most progressives have (or so I devoutly hope) abandoned these sorts of ideas in favor of a less intrusive agenda.

So ultimately I'm saying, I think this is the way that our government works, and this is the way that markets work, and for all the screaming, these are not crazy positions. There's plenty of evidence for government crowding out. There's plenty of evidence for price controls. There's plenty of evidence for what happens to markets that are largely governed by price controls.

You may disagree. You think government works better than I do. You think we'll be able to draw a line in the sand and keep the government from crossing over it to take over more of the market. You think government spending can substitute for R&D, because you don't find the socialist calculation debate compelling. Or maybe you say, hey, yeah, well, 0.7 years off the average lifespan isn't a bad tradeoff for covering the uninsured.

If you want to educate yourself about the health care debate, I don't know any better starting point than Megan's blog over the past few months. Health care is but one of the many topics she covers; her beat is economics and all things related to it, and I've been reading her for quite a while now for the general content.

But her sober, level-headed coverage of (and participation in!) the health care debate really stands out...

Oh, the Government Can!

Excellent!

Great Optical Illusion...

The image at right won the “Best Visual Illusion of the Year” award.

Why?

Because the two halves are identical!

Read all about it here.