The Power Of Nightmares

The best way to spend 3 hours:
A documentary from BBC.

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.

Winter Wonderland II

Winter Wonderland

The snow started last nite (Friday 12-18) at about 5 or 530.  This morning, it was up to 19 inches.  We don't get much of this kind of weather, so nobody is very knowledgable about how to cope.  Usually the first thing that happens is that everybody flocks to the grocery stores to lay in the emergency stocks.  Then they either forget how to drive altogether, or they think there's nothing you need to do to compensate for the conditions.  So today, on the main drag thru town (US29), there are hundreds of abandoned cars - to the point that the emergency responders are having a hard time getting thru the snarl.
Nick managed to get Haley (gf) back to her house in good shape; Sadie stayed home, and it took me a little more than 2 hours (to make a trip that should take 35 minutes) delivering Luke to his friend's house for a sleep-over.

It's still snowing now at noon on Saturday.  It's getting lighter, but the newsies are telling us we can expect "another few inches".

Sadie on the front stoop this morning:

White House Conference Call

This is the Q&A part.
David Axelrod makes a couple of great points:
1) If the Senate version of HC Reform is so bad, the insurance lobby wouldn't still be fighting so hard to kill it.  There are some heavy regulatory reform items that should do good things for insurance consumers.  For me, that's a pretty big deal.
2) Overall, getting something passed is better that getting nothing passed.  I still have big doubts about the mandate, and they will stay with me until I hear something that balances it out.

The kicker is that this remains a must win for Obama.

Oops

To err is human, but you need the US Military for a good old fashioned FUBAR.

Check this out.
Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.