What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Scott Adams, a free-weight rack that arrived disassembled, a visit to Home Depot, and a Shop-Vac.  What could possibly go wrong?

ClimateGate: Roundup...

Two informative posts at Watts Up With That?, one on the non-linearity of CO2's effects vs. concentration, and the other on yet another IPCC goof.

Totten in Romania...

The always-excellent Michael Totten recently visited Romania, and his resulting piece lives up to his high standards.  Hit his tip jar, won't you?  We need to keep him and Yon going...

Privatize the Post Office...

I've been saying this for years...

Amazon Fights Back...

Several states have passed the so-called “Amazon tax”, intended to force Amazon to collect sales tax for the state.  These tax measures are predicated on a redefinition of what it means to have “operations” inside the state (which in turn drives the issue of sales tax collection).  Specifically the redefinition means that participants in the “Amazon Associates” program are counted as “operations”.  Amazon Associates are owners of web sites that sign up with Amazon to direct traffic to Amazon in return for a (tiny) sales commission.  For instance, were I so inclined I could sign up for Amazon Associates and then put links on my blog for you to click on to buy a book (or some other product).

The states that passed this law expected that Amazon would simply sigh and comply.  They were wrong.  Amazon's reaction is to play hardball: it is shutting down the Amazon Associates program for anyone in those states.  This is a lose-lose-lose proposition: Amazon loses a source of referrals, the Amazon Associate loses a source of sales commissions, and the state loses the income tax (and most likely, some sales taxes) on the Amazon Associate's lost income.  It's a great example of ignoramuses in government not realizing what the consequences of their actions would be (despite Amazon telling them loud and clear), and it's also a great example of an American business exercising it's freedom. 

Let's hope the states wise up before too much time goes by.  The last thing we need in this recession is more government meddling with successful business models...

Arthritis, of the Leaden Variety...

An Amercian soldier who served in World War II complains to his doctor of what he presumes is arthritis – and discovers that he has had a bullet lodged in him for over 60 years!

A Real Education...

Last month a student at NYU was peeved because a professor (Scott Galloway) wouldn't admit him to the class when he showed up an hour late.  Professor Galloway is one of those rare professors with actual real-world experience.  Read his response to the tardy student.  I hope the student takes the professor's advice to heart.

After you read the letter, read the comments below – many are from teachers or professors, and you'll see why our students leave the educational system woefully unprepared for the real world...

Storage in the Cloud...

It's starting to happen, thanks to the conjunction of cheap bandwidth and cheap storage.  Here's a great example: back up your Mac to Amazon's S3 (their storage-in-the-cloud service)...

When Engineers Have a Question...

...they figure out how to answer it.  In this case, an engineer had a vital question: would a lava lamp work on the surface of Jupiter?



Why yes, it would...

Awesome, dude!

Taillights...

Driving into work this morning, I noticed a car that passed me because its taillights were a distinctly different shade of red.  A few minutes later, I pulled alongside that same car in traffic, and I saw that it was a 50-something Chevy – over a half-century old.  Somehow this triggered a cascade of memories...

Taillights used to be different, and somehow this happened so gradually that I never noticed it before. 

These days as you travel down the freeway at night, you'll see red taillights into the distance, all of virtually the same color (the LED lights are subtly different, but it's a tiny little difference).  Every once in a while you'll see the flashing amber of turn signals – and even they are of a perfectly uniform color.

This was not so when I was a kid.  I remember in the '50s and '60s that the taillights stretching out in front of you at night would be of many shades of red, and of very variable intensity.  It was common to see cars with taillights so dim you could hardly see them.  Some of the reds were almost purplish; others bordered on orange.  Amber turn signals were quite rare – nearly all cars used a single lamp for both brake light (steady) and turn signal (flashing).

It also used to be more common to see broken taillight lenses, as it was much harder to get replacments for cars more than a few years old.  Parts stores were relatively uncommon, and quite often couldn't get obscure parts like taillight lenses for cars more than a few years old.  Junkyards were your main resource, and even they were iffy – you had to find a junkyard that happened to remember having a car like yours.  There were no computers, no web sites to search across many junkyards, etc.

Technology changes many little things in our lives...

Edward Tufte: Obama Appointee...

If you have any interest at all in graphical presentation, then Edward Tufte is a name you will recognize.  I own several of his books, from which I have learned much (mostly about how little I know!).  Prior to reading about this appointment I had no idea that Tufte was a political scientist...

Scurvy...

The evils of scurvy were banished in the 1700s, or so I was taught.  While reading about Robert F. Scott's 1911 journey to Antarctica, Maciej Cegłowski caught something interesting: Scott's expedition was plagued by scurvy.  How could that be? Ceglowski's pursuit of the answer to that question is fascinating, and sobering.  Ceglowski must have an interesting life story himself: of Polish ancestry, but American, and now living in Romania.

Auschwitz Album...

The infamous “Auschwitz Album” – the only surviving photographs of Auschwitz in operation – is now online.  Also included are explanatory texts and some contemporaneous aerial photos taken by Allied intelligence.  Kudos to Yad Vashem for this addition to their ongoing efforts to keep humanity from forgetting...

The Haircut...

Every once in a while I wander “down the hill” to Rancho San Diego to get a haircut.  For several years now I've been patronizing a barbership owned by an Iraqi immigrant.  The barbers are mostly Iraqi as well, though not all of them.  This is unsurprising, as in the general El Cajon area (including Rancho San Diego and Jamul town) there is a large and thriving Iraqi expatriate community.

The owner, who often takes care of me himself, speaks English with a very thick accent.  I often have trouble understanding him.  Yesterday I went down for my semi-annual haircut (just kidding – I go at least three times a year), and the owner greeted me, then motioned me aside, out of earshot of the other barbers and customers.

“Err hou choo?” he asked.  I didn't comprehend, and I let him know.  We went back and forth a few times, both of us a little frustrated, until finally it dawned on me what he was asking: “Are you a Jew?”

I suppose my beard (a white Santa Claus-style beard that I don't trim very often) got him wondering.  But the fact that he asked got the ponder going.  Why did he care?  Would he refuse to serve Jews?  Did Jews require the use of special clippers?  Perhaps only certain barbers would work on Jews?  I didn't like where any of these thoughts were going.

So I told him I was not a Jew – and I asked him why he wanted to know.

With his thick accent, it took me a while to understand what he was telling me, but I'm very glad I took the trouble.

My barber is a Chaldean, an Iraqi Christian.  There are many Chaldeans here, refugees from Saddam, and over the years I've learned a bit about their history.  Amongst the things I knew: the Chaldeans were responsible for forcing many Jews to leave Iraq.  In general, relations between Chaleans and Jews have been less than cordial. Much less.

But the message from my barber wasn't what I'd expect, given that background.  What my barber finally managed to convey to me was this: the reason he wanted to know if I was Jewish is because he wanted to be certain that he never charged a Jew for a haircut – even if that Jew came in every day for a trim.

Why?

Because my barber's two sons and his brother were saved from Saddam in 1999 by Jews in his home town in northern Iraq.  Jews whom Saddam treated even more cruelly than he did Chaldeans.  Jews who truly had no reason to be friendly to their Chaldean neighbors.  Jews who nonetheless risked their lives to hide my barber's family from the Iraqi troops bent on arresting and executing them, and then smuggled them over the border to Syria, from where they eventually escaped to asylum the U.S.

So no Jew pays for a haircut at my barber's shop.  And I have a new reason to patronize him.  I'm not sure he wants his story widely known, so I'm not going to publish his name, or that of his barbershop.  But if you know Rancho San Diego, you can probably figure it out...

ClimateGate: Roundup...

James Delingpole smells fear amongst the warmenists...

USA Today on scientists' reactions to the AGW debate and the rise of AGW skepticism after ClimateGate...

Oops – global warming didn't kill those lovely Costa Rican toads after all...

All I Ask...

All Quin Hillyer wants from Obama is a little humility:

A little humility would be nice. So would a sense that he answers to the public rather than to some self-proclaimed (and self-determined) imperative of history and/or call of destiny. What Obama seems to fail to understand is that his own, overblown self-assurance and self-mythologizing is actually hampering his own goals. One need not stretch too far to observe that one of the factors adding to public opposition to Obamacare is a growing public disquietude about the lack of responsiveness, the authoritarian certitude, and the zealous near-fanaticism of the government that would run the new health-rationing system – all character traits as embodied by the president himself.

Read the rest of his piece, it's all good...

Quote of the Day...

This post could just as well have been titled a flying pig moment.  This is from that bastion of progressive propaganda, Newsweek:

It is difficult to dislodge the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out.

My blunt title for their article is How the Unions are Destroying U.S. Education.  They title it Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers.  Either way, it's extraordinary to see a piece like this in Newsweek.  It's the end time, folks, it must be...

Obamacare is About Statism...

Mark Steyn on Obamacare:

Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:

"Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?"

Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.

I've been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of "one-sixth of the U.S. economy" – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary "comprehensive" health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.

Don't miss the rest of it.

Yon: Saving the Life of a British Soldier...

Hundreds of people and millions of dollars...and a young soldier is still alive today...

Geert Wilders at the House of Lords...

Friday Geert Wilders was in London (and not detained this time), where he gave a rousing speech to the U.K. House of Lords.  One of many passages I liked:

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe in another policy, it is time for change. We must make haste. We can't wait any longer. Time is running out. If I may quote one of my favourite American presidents: Ronald Reagan once said: "We need to act today, to preserve tomorrow". That is why I propose the following measures, I only mention a few, in order to preserve our freedom:

First, we will have to defend freedom of speech. It is the most important of our liberties. In Europe and certainly in the Netherlands, we need something like the American First Amendment.

Second, we will have to end and get rid of cultural relativism. To the cultural relativists, the shariah socialists, I proudly say: Our Western culture is far superior to the Islamic culture. Don't be affraid to say it. You are not a racist when you say that our own culture is better.

Third, we will have to stop mass immigration from Islamic countries. Because more Islam means less freedom.

Fourth, we will have to expel criminal immigrants and, following denaturalisation, we will have to expel criminals with a dual nationality. And there are many of them in my country.

Fifth, we will have to forbid the construction of new mosques. There is enough Islam in Europe. Especially since Christians in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia are mistreated, there should be a mosque building-stop in the West.
And last but not least, we will have to get rid of all those so-called leaders. I said it before: Fewer Chamberlains, more Churchills. Let's elect real leaders.

Fewer Chamberlains, more Churchills.  Oh, yes.  Faster, please.  As they say, read the whole thing.