A Dixie Carpetbagger

…is ridiculous.  Now, there are a lot of things I could comment on here– encroachment of government, the surreality of being fined for one bottle, the irony of a guy who recycles so much being fined while on vacation…  but I’m just going to say that this reminds me of something:

“This stresses the importance of compliance, and not littering.” No shit, Sherlock…

Is it wrong that the first thing I thought of while reading this story was a post-apocalyptic game set in a dystopian future which is controlled by a nanny-state government led by slug-like aliens?

What happens when hundreds of thousands of conservatives gather in our nation’s capital?  Blood in the streets, violent uprisings, maybe a few thousand simultaneous lynchings?  Nope– this.  (More photos here, here, here and an “aww” inspiring one here.  Newspaper coverage is here, Website coverage is here.)

As you can guess, the numbers the media has been throwing out have been lowballed.  (In the figures by CBS, by a few hundred thousand…)  Compare the crowd at the rally with the crowd from the “I Have A Dream” speech, and then with a few other crowd sizes, and it becomes apparent that there was a good-sized crowd.  (Waiting for somebody on the left to claim it’s all clones.  Yes, we’ve built our own Grand Army of the Republic, lefties…)

Of course, the commentary from said leftists has become… well, to be blunt, the sheep from Animal Farm had more cognitive ability than the commentators I’ve seen so far.  Case in point (via I Own The World):

The damn teabaggers and right wing Beckheads had the nerve to plant people in the crowd with trash bags coordinating cleaning up after themselves. Typical conservative selfishness that stops the union park service from work and earning a living. What right to they have to take jobs from the hard working men and women in DC. Their selfish, self-centered, and malicious manners make me sick.

So… not trashing our nation’s capital is selfish, because we’re somehow taking the bread from the mouths of union workers.  This would explain the condition the Coronation crowd left D.C. in– “Hurricane Latrina.”  (No, I didn’t think that one up.)  Also, I’m laughing at the “hard working” bit.  Then there’s the fact that (apparently) the entire crowd was “white trash,” complete with Igloo coolers and beer helmets.

The funniest part is that the left is becoming unhinged at Beck holding the rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Dr. King’s speech.  “The Ultimate Thumb In the Eye,” they’re saying.  I have to ask… why?  Dr. King was a registered Republican– as was his father– and Republicans were seen as the defenders of civil liberties until 1964, when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law.  (Ironically, LBJ opposed the CRA in 1957, when he was Senate Majority Leader during Eisenhower’s time as President.  You have to make hay when the Sun shines, I guess.)

So, all in all, it was a good rally– no-one got hurt (even though the Black Panthers and Al Sharpton promised they’d show up… ), the place was left in better shape (oh, the poor park employees with nothing to do…), and a large chunk of money ($5 million plus) was raised to help out a very good cause.

29 August 2005– Hurricane Katrina makes landfall as a Category 3 hurricane near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana.  Death totals in coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are lower than expected, for two reasons.  One, Katrina came ashore as a Category (Cat) 3 storm with sustained winds of 125 miles and hour, not a Cat 5 with 175 mph winds.*  Two, the local Weather Forecast Office of the National Weather Service issued this bulletin the day before.  When a weather bulletin contains words such as “devastating,” “most powerful,” and “will make human suffering incredible by modern standards,” it’s advisable for those in the path of said storm to get the blazes away from the damned thing.

I remember Katrina because I was, indeed, getting the blazes away from said storm– in the form of going to Lakeland for an engineer’s seminar.  One of the other groups was from Pensacola, and they were getting reports that even that far away, the storm was doing some decent damage.  Even before the news began covering it, everyone at the conference (all of us civil and structural engineers) knew that New Orleans would flood.  We also knew that N’Awlins was going to suffer great loss of life, due to the lack of evacuations.  (The highest estimate was around 5% of the population– 15,000 or more.)

We all shook our heads– didn’t these people understand what was coming for them?  I had Opal pass right over my head in ’95– along with close hits from Georges in ’98, Allison in ’01, and Frances and Ivan in ’04.  Heck, Cindy in ’04 went into almost the same area…

(H/T Linoge for reminding me… like the news coverage hasn’t…)

* Doing the math, a 125 MPH wind produces 40 (125^2 * .00256) pounds a square foot of pressure, but a 175 MPH wind creates 78.4 (175^2 * .00256) PSF.  (What’s sad is that I had to look this up– I used to have to know these calculations by heart.)  At some point below 175 MPH, the wind would have turned the low-pitched roofs on the coat into wings, and ripped them from the buildings.  Notice that in footage and photos from hurricane zones, the roofs that survive have a moderate pitch– usually around 45 degrees.  This allows the wind to blow over them, but not so quickly as to produce lift… like a spoiler on an aircraft’s wing.  Sorry, I worked as a structural engineer, this is fascinating to me….

Which is what I first said when I read this at Miguel’s:

And Catalonia bans bullfighting.

What… the… hell?  Spaniards… giving up the dance?  (shakes head)  Next you’ll tell me that the Irish have closed the Guinness factory.  One thing I want to point out from Miguel’s take, though.

Bulls back then were humongous animals with a bad attitude, specially the Miura line who probably killed more bullfighters than all other lines combined.

This is happening across the cattle world– bigger, more capable animals are being “bred down” to a level that their owners can handle.  As a personal example, back when we kept cows on the family farm, we had a Beefmaster/Black Angus mix bull we called “Little Man.”  People would see the bull, hear the name (or vice versa), and think it was a purposely ironic name.  It wasn’t– compared to his sire, Little Man was tiny.

At a mere 1,600 pounds.*  Standing on level ground, Little Man was eye level with the barbed wire on a fence.  He could also wrap his tongue around the electric fence wire and absorb the shock with no visible reaction.  His sire, however, broadsided a Chevy and put it into a pond– “no gasoline engines” means exactly that when you’re driving through a cattle pasture…

*Please note that it wasn’t my family that bred down Little Man.  We got him from the owner of his sire, “Big Man.”  (Also known as Brontosarco Rex… King Thunder-Flesh).  1,600 pounds is nothing to sniff at– his offspring tended to be 50% heavier than their mothers– but he was… small compared to his sire.

All of the science fiction authors of the past looked forward and saw a rosy future– man expanding to the Moon, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, the Outer Planets… then outward still.  (“Out ride the sons of Terra / Far drives the thundering jet, / Up leaps a race of Earthmen, / Out, far, and onward yet —”)

Instead, we’re perpetually “a decade” from the Moon.  Returning to the Moon, not going there in the first place!  Our second Space Station is behind schedule– and when we do finish it, it’ll be a mere five years from the scrapheap!  (Next year, the last Shuttle lifts the last component, and retirement is looking like a 2016 timeframe.)  By the Nine Divines, we were supposed to have spinning wheels in orbit that would make von Braun envious from beyond the grave!

Instead, we have a billion-dollar showcar that’s cross-dressing as a truck, kills a high percentage of its passengers, and can’t live up to any of its original performance specs– turnaround time, cost per pound to orbit, man-hours of maintenance per flight…

Instead, the last NASA Director who knew his rectum from a mine shaft lies in a hospital because he was flying in an aircraft as old as he was.  Where’s “No Sparrow Shall Fall” when you need it?

Instead, our space agency has been told that their new focus is outreach to the Islamic world.

Help us private industry, you’re our only hope…

Just finished watching AvP: Requiem.  All I have to say is: dadblame, but directors can screw up a good movie.  Hot blond in her undies at a pool?  Have the scene interrupted by her ex-boyfriend AND the alien!  Aliens taking out the rescue force?  Don’t show the actual firefight– just cut to it in one second bursts!  Government sets up a trap for the survivors?  Have them walk right into it!  (The film’s set in Colorado… the Red Dawn state.  Worse yet, one character even whines, “That’s crazy. The government doesn’t lie to people.”  She was not thrown from the vehicle.)

Overall, it was enjoyable for the sheer carnage, watching those untrained in self-defense perish*,  and the cheesecake (even though she magically found her clothes again in the midst of the horror and carnage).  One pinkie up.

* At one point, a woman is getting off late at night, hears the chef screaming bloody murder in the kitchen, and calmly and totally Condition White walks right into two Aliens.  She then sits down and waits for the end, surrounded by knives and stainless steel.  Oh, and at one point a hunter uses the butt of his rifle to tap on something, thereby pointing the muzzle right at his own face.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said that Jesus’ Golden Rule inspired him…

Well, that’s good…

… to vote to confirm Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court…

Lindsey…

I just finished one of Heinlein’s essays (the last one in the Expanded Universe), where he projects the 1980 deficit.  He then marvels at how our government at our government would be half a trillion in debt, and points out the staggering amount that is a trillion.  He uses the fact that the Earth’s pole star will change from Polaris to Alrai to Alvahat to Vega and back to Polaris in the time it takes you to count to a trillion– if you count up by one every second of every day… for a little less than 32,000 years.  (31,709, to be exact.)

Be glad Bob was cremated– Southern California probably couldn’t stand the vibrations if he wasn’t… because he’d be SPINNING IN HIS GRAVE.  Right now, we’re over $13,000,000,000,000 (thirteen trillion) in debt and climbing.  That means every citizen (not just the taxpayers) owes over $42,000 in debt.

And you wonder why our economy is bad?  Hell, not even “bad” anymore– unbelievable, in every aspect– the debt, our unemployment… heck, even the statistics are bad.

From Newbius:

What is the average length of time that a normal person should be expected to perform an unpleasant job function, without receiving any positive feedback or additional monetary motivation upon successful completion of the taskings?

Well, for me, it was over three years.  But it I had to do it over again?  I would have told my employer where he could place my job after the first 11 month stint.  (Worked for him for 11 months, worked for myself, then came back– after my former supervisor begged me– for two years and a few months.)  The job was (quite literally) Hell with fluorescent lights.

Why is Newbius’ question timely?  Because it was a year ago Friday that I told my employer that I wouldn’t be in on Monday– or any day after that, for that matter.

That means that Friday is my blogiversary…

Please note, the ice cream man will not stop for you in the middle of the road:

Also, I present you with the creepiest ice cream… vehicle… ever.  (Language warning.)

My first thought one seeing that… thing… was a line from Tango and Cash: “Who holds the pink slip?  Satan?”  My second thought was “that song, it will be in my nightmares, forever.”  (The fact that I just got finished watching End of Days didn’t help, either…)

(H/T both videos iOwnTheWorld)