Breathtaking and Obvious

Good old Jonah:

As Noah Glyn noted the other day, apparently Nancy Pelosi is not content to let Harry Reid win the title of shabbiest congressional leader uncontested. She says Republicans want to poison children with E. coli. Or something.

“I say to [Republicans], do you have children that breathe air? Do you have grandchildren that drink water?,” Pelosi asked. “I’m a mom and I have five kids . . . as a mom I was vigilant about food safety, right moms? If you could depend on the government for one thing it was that you had to be able to trust the water that our kids drank and the food that they ate. But this is the E. coli club. They do not want to spend money to do that.”

The dishonesty and/or stupidity of all this is really quite breathtaking — and obvious. First of all, you could cut government funding down to 1950 levels and still have money for food safety. But this is what liberals do. They metaphorically lash children to the fenders of government so that the budget cutting blade must slice through them first. Then, after insanely putting them in harm’s way, they proclaim it is the sane budget cutters who seek to harm children. In fairness, sometimes liberals hold the young human shields in reserve and put firehouses, historic monuments, and old-age homes outside the budgetary walls of the fiscal keep. And, again, they declare that the fiscally sane want to get rid of firefighters and the Washington Monument — and not, say, the Export-Import Bank or agricultural subsidies.

Jonah knows from breathtaking dishonesty and/or stupidity:

Arguing that the U.S. food supply is 99 percent safe, House Republicans cut millions of dollars Thursday from the Food and Drug Administration’s budget, denying the agency money to implement landmark food safety laws approved by the last Congress.

Saying the cuts were needed to lower the national deficit, the House also reduced funding to the Agriculture Department’s food safety inspection service, which oversees meat, poultry and some egg products. And lawmakers chopped $832 million from an emergency feeding program for poor mothers, infants and children. Hunger groups said that change would deny emergency nutrition to about 325,000 mothers and children.

Winning the Kids Over

Katrina Trinko notices that young Republicans give far less of a shit about what naughty bits go where than they should.

I’m 24, and I’m used to being the odd one out among my peers in opposing the legalization of same-sex marriage. But I also get the impression that very few young adults have heard a good argument for why it should be opposed.

Maybe you should give them that good argument! Next sentence:

It’s not that they’ve heard the argument that marriage should be tied to procreation – delivered charitably, with an awareness that many young adults have gay friends and/or family — and have rejected it so much as they simply have been emotionally moved by the case made by gay and lesbians who wish to be married.

There you go: people who are not having children are not allowed to be married. Good one! Follow the link she gives to the NRO editorial on gay marriage and after some moaning about being called bigots we have Liberty:

What the institution and policy of marriage aims to regulate is sex, not love or commitment. These days, marriage regulates sex (to the extent it does regulate it) in a wholly non-coercive manner, sex outside of marriage no longer being a crime.

Now THERE'S an argument that college-age kids of libertarian bent can appreciate: applause for the government regulating orgasms with a wistful nod at anti-fornication punishment.

David French responds:

Katrina, thanks for your post. I particularly liked this statement:

But at the same time, it’s foolish to ignore the social issues — and to give up on changing anyone’s mind. Social conservativism has a compelling moral vision, one centered on human dignity and the preciousness of life. That case deserves an airing, particularly to young adults, who may be more familiar with the routine mockery of social conservative values than with the arguments for those values sincerely and thoughtfully delivered.

This is exactly right. Implicit in many reports like the Times story you link to is the notion that young voters are somehow showing us the way. (This notion rightfully drives Jonah crazy.) We social conservatives have a good case to make, we should make it, and we shouldn’t turn generational responsibilities upside down by letting juniors lead their elders.

College Republicans who are, say, 24 need guidance from elders like David French, who is surely in his mid 40s and must ache to pass on his wisdom as death approaches. Will the youngsters listen or has the Ladies-Wearing-Pants Revolution gone too far already?

I Figure This Won't Last...

Some algorithm'll spot the samples.



The idea was sort of musical trolling. Initially I just wanted to loop those opening Led Zep bits and never start the song. UNFULFILLED EARWORM. As it turns out Magic Bus is near the same BPM and it makes my ears perk up like a busy little terrier in about the same way. Same with Fopp. So I figured I might try to make something out of beginnings only.

The result is that I pretty much trolled myself and needed something that sounded final. Thus the 99 Problems bit.

Stupid Names on the Internet Are Safe

This via Boing Boing is the end of an interesting story:

But let’s say he did know, and failed to stop it. Hell, for the sake of argument, let’s say he did it. Let’s say he pulled the trigger. The weird thing is, I’m not even especially angry at Phobia, or his partner in the attack. I’m mostly mad at myself. I’m mad as hell for not backing up my data. I’m sad, and shocked, and feel that I am ultimately to blame for that loss.

But I’m also upset that this ecosystem that I’ve placed so much of my trust in has let me down so thoroughly. I’m angry that Amazon makes it so remarkably easy to allow someone into your account, which has obvious financial consequences. And then there’s Apple. I bought into the Apple account system originally to buy songs at 99 cents a pop, and over the years that same ID has evolved into a single point of entry that controls my phones, tablets, computers and data-driven life. With this AppleID, someone can make thousands of dollars of purchases in an instant, or do damage at a cost that you can’t put a price on.

One of the major factors in figuring out this guy's information was that he consistently used his name for email addresses. I think I might reorganize some accounts to refer back to other fictional accounts rather than things attached to my name. I have a pretty cool but unused email address I could use as a contact, and then set up some mail forwarding to get alerts from it (and also to keep it live).

I actually feel kind of dumb for sending something to a USian via Amazon recently just because Amazon's protocols seem so stupid. And then there's Apple binding everything to an Apple ID...

ALTERNATE TROLLY TITLE:

Gosh Darn It That Cloud Didn't Help At All.

Priorities

FOR GREAT JUSTICE:

TEXAS — Two young students in Hood County have been arrested for creating a fake Facebook account using the name of a classmate, and were taken to a juvenile detention facility on felony charges.

The girls, ages 12 and 13, were each arrested July 16 on a count of online impersonation, a third-degree felony, said Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds.

Deeds said the victim’s mother alerted authorities June 28 after she discovered the site. The victim, a girl who did not have a real Facebook page, did not know about the site until it had been active for more than a month, he said. The account had 63 friends before it was shut down.

Imagine if a banker had done something so awful.

Puppy Water

Follow ye link:

At first I thought it was a joke when I read a recipe for “The Puppy Water” in a recipe collection compiled by one Mary Doggett in 1682. “Take one Young fatt puppy and put him into a flatt Still Quartered Gutts and all ye Skin upon him”, then distill it along with buttermilk, white wine, pared lemons, herbs, camphire, venus turpentine, red rosewater, fasting spittle, and eighteen pippins.

Although Mary Doggett’s recipe does not specify purpose, puppy water was a facial treatment – as immortalized by Jonathan Swift in his poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732):

There Night-gloves made of Tripsy’s Hide,
Bequeath’d by Tripsy when she dy’d,
With Puppy Water, Beauty’s Help
Distill’d from Tripsy‘s darling Whelp.

Swift also, however, refers to another canine usage: gloves made from dog’s hide. As noted in Nicholas Culpeper’s Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1718), “little puppy dogs” (and various other animals, such as hedge-hogs, snails, foxes, moles, frogs, or earthworms) “may be made beneficial to your sick bodies”. Robert James’s entry for “Canis” in his Medicinal Dictionary (1743-5) explained that Europeans “generally abstain from Dogs Flesh, till Necessity… obliges them to use it.” But use it they did: the flesh, fat, skin and excrement could all be incorporated into medicines recommended even by renowned medical practitioners.

Not quite what I was looking for:



I think it was National Lampoon's Terrier Water that was "sparkling water from the center of the dog."

Something to See

You might want to go look at some photos by Peter-Paul de Meijer.

Vanilla

Jay Nordlinger:

“Vanilla,” they say. [Ohio Senator Rob] Portman is “vanilla.” What a bizarre putdown, in more ways than one. First, as I’ve said before, vanilla is one of the best and most beloved flavors in the world! Any yogurt-buyer knows there’s a big difference between plain and vanilla. Couple of months ago, I was in the grocery store, hurrying, and mistakenly picked up plain instead of vanilla. After the first bite, I almost curdled and died.

WAIT UNTIL THE TOFU DISASTER.

Furthermore, isn’t this charge of “vanilla” a kind of . . . hate speech, as the Left would say? Where are the language cops? You also hear, “Can’t have two white guys on the ticket.” Oh? What if someone said, “Can’t have two black guys,” or, “Can’t have two Hispanic guys”? Would that be kosher? Why can’t people simply be people, without regard to race, ethnicity, or sex?

Or boringness? I think it's in the constitution.

Completely Lazy

There is just too much summer relief going on. Going out to drink this evening and it's an open question if I can get prepared in the seven hours left to me. It's bliss.

Your Friendly Anonymous Representative

This is an interesting video:



Story here.

Assuming it's real I guess I don't have a problem with these guys making life hard for a somewhat jerky little company, but it's only a jerky little company. And hey, do Anonymous look like your pals in videos like this? I appreciate the amusement value in it, but does it help them get the online freedom they want or does it help governments justify cracking down on anonymity?

Some Changes

Remember this?



Today it looks a bit like this:



The Lovely Daughter is off to camp. A whole week without relatives of any sort pushing her around. She's had a rough go of some things but I think a corner is being turned.

Oil, Delivered Right To Your Door

Convenience!

WISCONSIN - Canada’s Enbridge Inc. raced on Sunday to repair a major pipeline that spilled more than 1,000 barrels of oil in a Wisconsin field, provoking fresh ire from Washington over the latest in a series of leaks.

The spill on Friday, which comes almost two years to the day after a ruptured Enbridge line fouled part of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, has forced the closure of a major conduit for Canadian light crude shipments to U.S. refiners and threatens further reputational damage to a company that launched an over $3 billion expansion program just two months ago.

And hey, what do The Terrorists make of a giant pipeline full of flammable stuff snaking across The Great Satan?

Suing People is the Model

How to make money from art:

The record labels that successfully sued The Pirate Bay for millions on the grounds that the network had infringed upon artists' copyrights have announced that it will not share any of the money it receives from the suit with those artists. Instead, the money will be used to bankroll more "enforcement" -- that is, salaries and fees for people who work for the industry association.

Believing the Hype

Via Yglesias via Atrios here is an article about Microsoft's various and continuing failures. This is the kind of thing that's fun gossip - who doesn't like to see the impediment to what they do take a kick in the teeth? - but more than that it's a frustrating demonstration of how much bullshit about making things has been internalized by people who think they're experts.

Microsoft’s low-octane swan song was nothing if not symbolic of more than a decade littered with errors, missed opportunities, and the devolution of one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products.

There are fifteen mentions of some form of the word "innovate", which is interesting because I can't really think of any Microsoft innovations. Were there some? I'm sure I'm missing one or two. Or is this standard middle-management language that justifies middle-management positions? Yglesias, eyeing a future in management, sees this bullshit and follows with:

The basic issue facing Microsoft over the past ten years has been this—innovating is really hard.

He says some other boring stuff too. As a long-time unwilling Windows user I cannot recall wanting them to innovate, I just wanted them to clean their fucking systems up, make tasks take less clicks, show me the information I wanted, et cetera. Microsoft got where it did by having The Stuff That Is On The Machine, not by "innovating". Everybody else beat them to the good stuff and they fucked it up, from MS-DOS forward, but they did good business so that was what you got. FUCK INNOVATION, LET ME DO MY WORK. The Atrios take is right in principle:

I think the real lesson is it's okay to be a big company with a stable revenue and stable predictable dividends.

That used to be the norm.

That's true, but Microsoft produced stuff that people always seem happy to abandon where there's a viable alternative. The lock on the pre-loaded OS has always been their big strength. They can't just cruise along because they've never built the good stuff. They're the god of the gaps, needed by those who don't see or understand the alternatives. If Windows or Office were inherently satisfying their position might be different.

Now we infuriate mikey. I think I'm going to investigate 10.8 largely because of Dictation. It could make my mom's life a lot easier if it works well.

Just Not Bothering

Kevin D. Williamson:

A little perspective on the gun-control debate: According U.N. data, the number of homicides committed with firearms in the United States runs typically between 9,000 and 10,000 a year, with the numbers going:

2009: 9,146
2008: 9,484
2007: 10,129
2006: 10,225
2005: 10,158
2004: 9,385
2003: 9,659
2002: 9,369
2001: 8,890
1999: 8,259*
1998: 9,257

According to the Journal of American Medicine, the number of deaths caused by U.S. cardiac patients’ not bothering to refill their heart-disease prescriptions is about 113,000 per year. (The cost of filling prescriptions is of course a factor, but not the only factor. More from Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog here.) In one category of disease, skipping meds causes about eleven times as many deaths in this country each year as all firearms murders combined. One of these things is treated by liberals as a national emergency, the other is not. This is a curious thing for people proclaiming themselves to be empirical, evidence-driven rationalists.

In a classic case of putting the punchline before the pantomime horse, the item is entitled

Laziness Is 11 Times More Dangerous than Guns

...

DEATH UPDATE!

Where is the liberal outrage?

The Lay of the Land

Mike "Gamecock" DeVine has a question about the Chick-fil-A stuff:

But seriously, are there enough gays, lesbians, transvestites, transgenders and even gender questioners anywhere except San Francisco and Mid-Town Atlanta to make an ongoing boycott discernible? I’m asking, and shouldn’t boycotting same-sex marriage advocates be defined as intolerant, anti-parental-diversity-for-children-o-phobe bigots?

I am guessing that Mike "Gamecock" DeVine has been to one big city and it is Atlanta. Perhaps it was fun.

Getting Your Own Seat On the Bus

Yes, it's a long-awaited portrait of me riding the bus and looking especially dashing. For those with the temerity to experiment with Quartz Composer it turns out there's a face-recognition widget. Follow the file path thisaway and you'll discover all the special effects modules in the nearly useless Photo Booth application, which can bug your eyes out or whatever:



Since those thingies were only intended for Photo Booth they won't work in Quartz Composer without you adding the video input patch, but that's easy enough, and then they provide an example of how to extract positional data about the face it finds, allowing you to manipulate to your heart's content:



You too can be a Resident.

Mitt's Charisma Advantage

Thomas Sowell, on side for his team:

After the charismatic -- and disastrous -- Woodrow Wilson presidency, the voters did not elect another president in the next decade who could be considered the least bit charismatic. Let us hope that history repeats itself.

Taste

Via a bunch of vias and I'm sure there will be a bunch more...bottom to top:

Sweetness

Ann-Marie Murrell:

Comparing the differences, I finally understood why so many Democrats remain Democrat no matter how unreasonable and unintelligent it may seem.

In food terms, Republicans are the healthy (yet boring and tedious) meat, potatoes and vegetables of a meal. They are there to nourish, and to keep you strong and fit. Although Republicans represent the most responsible and important part of the meal, they’re nothing to really get excited about--unlike the sugary, yummy excesses of dessert.

Which is exactly the part of the meal that Democrats symbolize.

Ah, dessert. It’s what most children would rather eat first, skipping the “healthy” portions altogether.

Children don’t care about nutrients, vitamins, minerals—they just want the stuff that tastes good in their mouths. They don’t care how it’s made, who made it, how it got there--they just want it in front of them so they can scarf it all down. Or as Veruca Salt famously said in Willie Wonka, “I want it and I want it NOW!”

In real-life terms, Republicans will talk a thing to death, providing details and data and reasonable, logical facts while Democrats thrive on as few words and sentences as humanly possible: Things are fine! Go Green!

Sigh.

So how can boring, wordy Republicans compete with the “desserts” of the world?

Add delicious toppings.