Look at this nonsense. I see an Oklahoma state trooper who has gotten a little too much power and sense of self-importance.
Jun 132009
Jun 132009
One “Free Kittens” cardboard sign, a soft-sided pet crate, a hatchback, a grocery store parking lot, one and a half hours standing around, one young couple looking for a single kitten and one farmer looking for as many mousers as he can get equals a basement now devoid of hungry little poopmachines. Distressing, but necessary.
Jun 132009
Day before yesterday, I took Local Breeding Champion “Mommacat” to the vet. Now, Mommacat is not *my* cat; she’s just a local semi-feral who’s quite friendly, has been here longer than I have, and is an expert at creating little cats to spread the joy. She’s also kinda up there in years. When I came back from travels, her left cheek was puffed up; I vowed that since she’s not mine and money is in short supply, I’d let nature take its course, most things heal on their own. But by the day before yesterday, she was in a pretty sorry state… the puffiness had moved upwards, and the lower eyelid was turning inside out and had locked shut the left eye. It was clear that she was in some fairly substantial agony, so I gave in and took her to the vet. Fortunately, the problem was quickly discovered and easily resolved… one of her molars was infected, and consequently removed, and the rather nasty cyst behind it cleaned out. As of today, the puffiness has gone way down noticably. Sadly, Mommacat also lost her licence to practice… she got spayed while she was there.
While the problem was easy to fix, the vets office – capitalist pigs that they are – wanted to get paid for their efforts, to the tune of a bit short of $90 (Where’s my bailout? Huh? Huh?). So if’n the photo below from two days ago tugs at yer heartstrings and makes you want to go digging in your wallet… feel free to go here and donate.
CAUTION: Slightly icky.
Jun 132009
Lovely.
House Health-Care Proposal Adds $600 Billion in Taxes
Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.
Ah, yes. The stock-standard response to how to deal with a bad economy: tax the hell out of people in order to fund massively inefficient government bloat programs (“bloagrams”?).Barack ‘I am not a socialist’ Obama sells healthcare reform in Green Bay
…As for Republican fears that he secretly plans to socialize medicine, Obama said, “Great Britain has a system of socialized medicine. I don’t know anybody in Washington who is proposing that. Certainly not me.” With the U.S. government now owning huge pieces of the private sector, such as GM and Chrysler and half of Wall Street, Obama likewise rebutted charges that he is some sort of megalomaniac who wants to run the healthcare system too.“I’ve got enough stuff to do,” he said. “I’ve got North Korea and Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t know where people get this idea that I want to run stuff. “
I wonder.
The US spends more per capita on health care than anyone else in the world, and by some measures (see Note) gets substantially less for it’s health-care dollar. And so what’s the Obamatarian response to this? It’s certainly not for the government to spend less per capita… but to spend even more.
Note: The US is, unlike many other industrialized nations, a very large, incredibly diverse country. There are substantial cultural differences from place to place… sometimes within just a few blocks. These cultural variations, which can include such fun and exciting concepts as “obesity,” “chain smoking,” “getting falling-down drunk,” “smoking crack,” “sexing up random strangers,” “robbing the 7-11 to prove you’re a man,” “gang warfare,” “drug dealing” and other life-shortening hobbies, should, but rarely are, entered into the list of reasons why the US life expectancy is shorter than other nations. Japan, for instance, probably has very little in the way of Bloods and Crips and MS-13 doing drive-bys on each other and random bystanders. The point being… a shorter life expectancy is not necessarily and indicator of a less effective health care system, but could instead be indicative of other issues.
I’ve noticed that since 9-11, when anti-Americanism became quite the fashion, that one of the common comments about Americans is that, compared to our more enlightened superiors in Europe, we are fat. I suspect that there is some substantial truth in this… were are a land of lardasses to be sure. But this is *not* due to the government failing to provide us all with liposuction… its due to our choices to eat fatty, sugary crap in staggering quantities. While this may not last through the Obamaconomy, we have been a land of plenty… cheap, tasty food and lots of it. Well, being a chubbo will limit your lifespan, and spending a few trillion dollars more to hire an army of parasitical bureaucrats is not going to fundamentally change this. All they can do is crash the economy. Remind me: were we a thinner, healthier, longer-lived people during the Great Depression?
Jun 132009
I suppose I might as well post some of the panoramic views I captured whilst travelling around recently. Why? I dunno. It’s what one does on a blog, I suppose. These will be in chronological order, spread out over a series of posts. Some will be cropped and cleaned up; some not. Cuz I’m lazy, and y’all ain’t payin’ me.
Near Pier 39, San Francisco (reduced to 15% of original size):
Seals near Pier 39 (25%)
San Francisco from a boat (15%):
Next up: Uvas Canyon State Park
Jun 122009
From the last “ID this aircraft” contest:
An irritatingly undated brochure (seems to be from 1961 based on a schedule) details a tilt-wing concept that NAA tried to sell to the military for an all-singing, all-dancing aircraft. Roles included:
- Troop carrier
- Medical transport
- Fuel transport
- Mobile emergency maintenance shop
- Aerial fire support
- Aerial spray (defoliants, chemicalw arfare agents, etc.)
- Surveillance
The design was a fairly conventional tilt-wing design with four 500-horsepower turboprop engines driving four 13 ft, 3 in blades and a tail mounted fan for pitch control and added lift. For VTOL missions the payload was limited to 2,640 pounds; for STOL missions it could go up to 4,000 pounds. For STOL missiosn the radius at 200 knots cruise was 250 nautical miles without refueling, with a landing at the far end and a return payload of 2,000 pounds. For VTOL missions, the radius dropped to 100 nautical miles with 2,640 pounds out, 1,200 pounds back at 200 knots.
Take off gross weight for VTOL was 11,000 pounds; for STOL it was 14,000 pounds. Max airspeed was 240 knots. Ferry range with max fuel was 3,000 nautical miles. Time from end of preliminary design to first flight was predicted to be a brisk 15 months, with first production vehicle delivered about 19 months after that. Must’ve been a design from before the PowerPoint Era.
Jun 112009
A new Boeing promotional video for the F-15SE has shown up on YouTube. I’ve grabbed a couple of the images…
The exhaust nozzles don’t look especially special… not dedicated 2-D vectorable nozzles like on the F-22, at any rate. This is not to say that these “round holes” can’t vector, nor is it to imply that the CG model used in the video is necessarily accurate. Just “good enough” for PR purposes. On the other hand, there appears to be some slight facetteing going on forward of the cockpit. The underside of the nose *looks* like it might be flattened.
Jun 112009
The constellation, that is. From a UC Berkeley press release:
The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star in the constellation Orion, has steadily shrunk over the past 15 years, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers.
Long-term monitoring by UC Berkeley’s Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) on the top of Mt. Wilson in Southern California shows that Betelgeuse (bet’ el juz), which is so big that in our solar system it would reach to the orbit of Jupiter, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993.
This could be a cyclic thing, Or it could be the deep breath before the plunge, with the red supergiant Betelgeuse about to go supernova. At about 640 light years distance, the explosion won’t do damage to Earth (though a few years later, when the charged particles get here, we might lose some fraction of our satellites), but it should be bright enough to see in daytime, and will leave the constellation of Orion with a missing shoulder.
Gonna need a bigger boat.
Oops. Wrong movie.
Jun 102009
This *could* be it, folks.
From the SCOTUS Blog:
Alan Gura, the Alexandria, Va., attorney who won the historic Supreme Court ruling last year establishing a personal right to have a gun for self-defense at home, started a new challenge in the Supreme Court Tuesday. It seeks to have the Second Amendment right enforced against state, county and city gun control laws.
…
Arguing that the Second Amendment right is a “fundamental” one, the new petition said that means that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees that such rights “may not be violated by any form of government throughout the United States. Accordingly, Chicago’s handgun ban must meet the same fate as that which befell the District of Columbia’s former law.”
Part of their argument is that the Justices should step in now to resolve a dispute among federal appeals courts and state supreme courts on whether the Second Amendment is absorbed (technically, “incorporated”) into the Fourteenth Amendment — a part of the Constitution that operates against state and local government.
Here’s hoping. As I pointed out yesterday, the idea that the 2nd Amendment somehow does not actually apply to citizens of the US if their state or local governments don’t want it to is a stupid one. Personally I was surprised that the Heller decision was even allowed to make it to the Supreme Court…. the USSC has studiously avoided the 2nd Amendment at every turn for decades. But once it got there, I was appaled – but not overly surprised – that it came down to a 5-to-4 ruling. In a sane world, it would’ve been a 9-0 ruling in favor of Heller. But now that the precedent has been set, the USSC is going to find it difficult to not incorporate the 2nd, as it’s applicability to all citizens is obvious.
One of the Four Dumbasses who voted against Heller was David Souter, who will soon be retiring, and likely replaced with 0bama’s pick, Sonya Sotomayor. Sotomayor’s views on the 2nd Amendment are vaguely understood (although her record has shown that she supports arresting people who have sticks within their own homes), but can be relied upon to be anti-Constitutional and pro-totalitarian (otherwise 0bama would not have picked her).
The “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment states:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This is pretty clear. The 2nd Amendment recognizes that all citizens have the right to keep and bear arms; any state that attempts to deny that right is in violation of the 14th Amendment. My preference would be for “lawmakers” who pass laws that abridge the Constitution to be summarily removed from office and barred from ever holding any elective office ever again (with termination of all government benefits such as medical care and pensions).
If this court case comes to pass and the USSC rules in favor of incorporation, expect to the see the totalitarian Left go completely ape, and start screaming about “blood in the streets” or “old west shootouts” or other hysterical fear-mongering nonsense… just like they trot out whenever a state goes from may-issue to shall-issue. And just as in the case of concealed carry, their fear-mongering will be baseless.
Jun 102009
A free download of any one item under $20 to the first responder to accurately ID the aircraft that goes along with this cockpit:
Is it an airplane? If so, is it unusual? A helicopter? If so, is it unusual? Something else entirely?
I’ll give this one till the weekend or so. I suspect that *somebody* will recognize this one.