George Carlin

I miss him.  He got to be a real pain in the ass for me when he flopped over into kind of a standard Glibertarian Mode, but it was always obvious to me that there was some real thinking going on.

This bit with Jon Stewart has some great stuff. My fave is Carlin's take on drugs and the cost/benefit angle.  I'm thinking that if we adapted his views into some coherent policy, the war on drugs would already be over.

It's A New Year

What we wish the man would say.

Just Askin'

Isn't there some probability that organizations like al-Qaeda will have to run out of dumb-ass rubes and poor little rich kids who're willing to blow their nut sacks off to suck up to Allah?

And also too - if it's such a geat fuckin' idea to be a suicide bomber, why don't Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahri do it?  These guys have to be some of the greatest salesmen ever.

My General Malaise

I've been wondering for a little over 10 years now what it is that gives me this feeling of unease.  There's been something going on (several somethings is more probable), but I can't quite get my arms around it.

Today, there's a post by DougJ at Balloon Juice that gives me a real starting point.  He links to a piece in The Atlantic by Chris Good, who writes that Repubs will run on the meme that everything Obama and the Dems are trying to do will end in disaster.  There's nothing new in that of course; the wingnuts on both ends have been screaming about that kinda thing for years.  What struck me is the phrase "untethered to verifiable fact".

Over the last 20 years or so, we've moved from a fairly well centralized info system (network TV and hometown newspapers) to a system that's fragmented down to a point where I can customize my "news" so that everythng I hear fits my own preconceptions.  If I get a story that challenges my worldview, it's easy for me to find someone to rebut that story and help me pretend nothing's changed.  I need that pacifier so I can spend as little time and effort as possible sorting thru the data and processing the information so I can get back to being stressed out over my job or my kids or my house or my car or my breakfast cereal or whatever else the marketing department is pushing on me this season.

I'd really like to find a way to wrap this up neatly, but I'm stumped again.  I guess all I can say is that I think we get closer to the Big-T Truth by gathering the smaller bits of little-t truth as we go.

Perspective

I seems like the usual freak-out from the wingnuts over the attempted bombing of the NWA flight was a bit mild, but apparently TSA is talking about pat-downs, and forcing people to remain seated at certain times, and banning the use of all electronic gear aboard international flights.  When do we learn not to lose our shit every time something scary happens?  Uber Geek Nate Silver breaks it down for us.

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
...
Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

Christmas 2009

There's something about the human voice raised in song. When a bunch of people sing (even in fairly traditional harmonies),  it trips some deep emotional reflex in me.  This is one of my all-time favorite tunes, and these kids really nail it.

Christmas 2009

The tree is now up.  Stringing the lights is a group effort and a semi-interesting study in committee-design, team-building, and family dynamics.  LOTS of lights.
I'd post some pix but I'm not working the camera very well right now.  Ain't that the way.

Be Careful What You Pray For

On the floor of the US Senate, this numbskull Barrasso called on the rubes to pray for divine intervention in preventing some random member of the senate to be unable to vote for cloture on the Healthcare Reform bill.  When it's discovered that Jim Inhofe hadn't showed up for the vote, one of the faithful called into C-SPAN worried that they hit the wrong guy.  I'm hoping this is performance art, but I fear that it isn't.

Winter Wonderland IV

We lost power last nite around 630.  Luke was stranded at a friend's house; Irene Nick Sadie and I sat around the kitchen table playing Yahtzee and Monopoly and poker under candle and glow-stick light til close to 1AM.  Everybody wore many pounds of clothing to bed. 
This morning the temp inside the house was 52, but the skies had cleared overnite, so at least we had the sun while we did the shovel work necessary to get the driveway passable for the Durango.  Took us close to 3 hours to move the 50 feet or so from garage to street (and our street has still not been plowed as of 8:15 PM).
We hooked up my little power inverter so we could watch some football, and pretend things were more or less normal for a while.  At about 3 PM, the power company called to tell us the problem had been fixed and that our lites should be on now - they weren't.  About this time Luke's friend's mom delivered Luke to the house (giant Suburban 4x4) and we decided to try to make it out for some dinner.  Encountered one of the neighbors trying to get back home after almost 3 days on shift at UVa hospital.  Fatigue must've clouded his judgement, as something possessed him to try driving his Lexus sedan down the unplowed road. Anyway, there he was blocking our egress not more than 100 feet from the intersection with the main road.  Fortunately, a couple of guys in Jeep CJ's from the Earlysville Fire Dept (right around the corner) had been working on it for a while and they winched his dumb ass out so we could escape.
We made it out toTGI Friday's (1st place we found that was open) and had a fine meal.  Trip back home was uneventful and when we got here the power had returned.  A big win.  Many thanks to all the people who know how to fix stuff.
I'm going to bed.

Winter Wonderland III

It's still coming down, but it's a lot lighter now.  Trying to figure out how to post some video.