Category: observations

what it means to be a conservative

An interesting review of the conscience of the conservative creed (hint: there isn’t one). I recommend reading the whole essay: I have excerpted a lot of it here but there’s some more context and background available. The bottomline? Conservatives are the nattering nabobs of negativity, an army of anti-this, -that, and the other types. They fear change, they fear new ideas, especially but not exclusively furrin’ ones, and they fear knowledge, especially when it undermines belief. I’d heard Hayek was a smart guy (I think I tried to read “The Road to Serfdom” but my stamina for books I don’t have to read is gone now. I found it dated in some parts and repetitious or boring in others.) but I didn’t know he had this nailed so long ago. Institut HAYEK :: Why I Am Not a Conservative:

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. [ . . . ]

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paying your way

This bears looking into. This is a great way to scratch the itch of needing to use a car but wanting some way of mitigating the effects of that. I can’t not drive but that doesn’t mean I have to be complacent about it.

What you get | TerraPass: Fight global warming, promote alternative energy:

Your TerraPass purchase supports clean energy
projects. When you buy a TerraPass, you sponsor a guaranteed reduction in
carbon dioxide emissions.

For example:

  • An entrepreneurial wind farmer receives funds to expand his plant.
  • A small dairy farmer gets capital to install digesters on his farm to control methane emissions.

Bumpersticker

I’d like to find out more about what they fund and how popular this is.

Now playing: They by Jem from the album “Finally Woken” | Get it

quit or get fired?

What about “the relative demerits of fooling around with an intern vs. fooling an entire country into going to war based on false evidence” anyway? Where is the outrage from these moral guardians now? How many US service people from their subscriber rolls have been killed or wounded?

Newspapers Urge President to Quit:

Did newspaper editorials condemn Clinton for his screwing around, and lying about it, and leave it at that, or did they come out squarely for his exit from office?
What follows, from an Associated Press rundown on September 15, 1998, is a long list of newspapers that “called for President Clinton’s resignation.” AP added that some of those listed “did so before the release of Kenneth Starr’s report on Sept. 11.” [editor’s note: Sept 11? Odd, that. ]
Indeed, the Philadelphia Inquirer responded to the coming of the Starr report this way: “Bill Clinton should resign. He should resign because his repeated, reckless deceits have dishonored his presidency beyond repair.”
The Los Angeles Times pointed out: “The picture of Clinton that now emerges is that of a middle-aged man with a pathetic inability to control his sexual fancies.”
The New York Times, on its Howell Raines-led editorial page, thundered that until the Starr turn, “no citizen … could have grasped the completeness of President Clinton’s mendacity or the magnitude of his recklessness.” Yet a Washington Post poll that month showed that while a majority of Americans wanted Congress to censure Clinton, they did not want it to boot him out of office.
[Below the fold] is that AP partial list of newspapers calling for Clinton to quit (other papers no doubt joined in later):

Continue reading “quit or get fired?”

monetizing content or voting?

So after dropping out of Google’s AdSense program, they rolled out this FireFox bounty scheme.

I’m convinced it will not make me a thin dime, but I like the idea of advocating for something like an open, unowned Web and if it makes sense to do that with a consistent visual message, that’s fine.

It’s a lot like how I see personal weblogs in the blogosphere: Technorati be damned, I think link ranking is a useful metric. It can be abused, sure, but you can sift that out when you look at the referring links.

If you’re still using Internet Explorer, try something else. Mac users haven’t been forced to use it as their default for quite some time, but Windows users have some choices. FireFox deserves a look, even if you have horrible memories of Netscape products (this isn’t one, of course, and shares no code with that old trainwreck).

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on the longevity of rock bands

Listening to one of these DJ-less stations that are catching on these days, I heard Action by Sweet. Don’t remember hearing it back in their heyday, but I looked it on iTMS and read the bio details they offer. I was struck by the fact their career spanned 1970 to 1982, while Depeche Mode, who are playing here this week, have been around for 25 years. Likewise U2.

Is this a good thing? Discuss.
As a side item, I think any band that loses a founding member, after they have achieved a certain level of recognition, must change their name. (I’m looking at you, R.E.M.) They’re no longer the same group (for example, how do the Brian Jones-era Stones differ from the Mick Taylor-era and the Ron Wood-era?).

the missing factor in global warming?

This is a pretty shrill piece, suggesting that oil and gas extraction activities might have triggered the massive earthquake/tsunami combination in late 2004. What struck me was this passage. Living in Atlanta for 15 years[1], watching the traffic get worse and the weather get nastier, I wondered myself if miles of idling cars on blacktop for several hours a day (rush “hour” was from 6-9 AM and 4-7 PM) was driving those changes[2].

Indonesian Tsunami Probably Tripped by Exxon-Mobil Works:

Another obvious fact that is never quoted in relation to global warming is that internal combustion engines do not just give off greenhouse gases, they also give off tremendous heat – every single one of them. If you try putting your hand near the cooling-radiator or exhaust manifold of a running engine, you are going to snatch it away again quickly to prevent burns. The professors never factor this into the global-warming equations, and never mention it in the news. They mention only the gas emissions.

Think about the millions of engines giving off tremendous heat every day, some all day every day. Compound this on top of the greenhouse gases and you can see why the scientists’ and professors’ prognostications have turned out to be wrong. The ice caps are melting much faster than the “experts” first predicted, and faster than they are still wrongly predicting now.

1. Atlanta Heat Island 1972 – 1993: images
2. Atlanta’s heat island: article

living vicariously

The Deep North » Blog Archive » Moments of Optimism:

We have just spent a strenuous afternoon engaged in one of those seasonal middleaged sort of things, viz. planting bulbs. This always takes the same course; a huge box arrives from Peter Nyssen and we stare into it appalled; there is a hundred of this, two hundred of that. It is the busiest time of year; how the hell are we going to find time to get these little bastards underground? Well, it has been a nice sunny day. Laying aside 5 lectures, somebody’s PhD, a 700-page book for review, a malfunctioning Hoover, the inkle loom, this year’s Christmas book and a batch of bread dough (to mention only the things on my jobsheet for the weekend), the Northern Professor and I stormed out and got planting. We did this with considerable efficiency: 135 tulips, 100 iris reticulata, 30 dark pink lilies, 30 hyacinths and 100 muscari now adorn the beds in front of the house, and I have planted two huge pots of lilies and one of allium schubertii. There is more to go, but that was the biggest job. With a place this size, you need to plant bulbs by the hundred or not at all. And the other thing is, as it goes on , you feel more and more cheerful. Eventually, it will be spring. And when it finally arrives, it will be greeted by hundreds of flowers. The skies will not be steel-grey, soggy and dark for ever.

The skies are just like that here today, overflowing with drippiness, and not very inviting. But I can relate to the idea of setting out the bulbs now in hopes of a glorious spring. I never take mine in, given our mild climate and the low risk of a hard freeze, but that’s not excuse not to dig some more in when I get a chance. Have to remember what’s already out there and where, before I order any.