What do you suppose President Obama would specify as the foremost goal of NASA?  Something related to space, perhaps?  Don’t be silly.

Quoting NASA Administrator Charles Bolden:

When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- [Obama] charged me with three things ... perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science...

Obviously, what NASA really needs to do is find ways to boost the self-esteem of Muslim nations.

Is it too much to ask for junior-senators-turned-presidents to know what NASA actually is?

Well that’s certainly the absurd headline of the day.  The TMI partial meltdown resulted in no deaths, no injuries, and no significant release of radiation; it was about the best possible outcome you could hope for in the event of a nuclear meltdown.  So how exactly is the Deepwater Horizon disaster "on the level of" TMI, considering that it’s killed 11 people and leaked several million gallons of oil into the gulf?

Or perhaps by "on the level of" he means that it will result in a decades-long stagnation of another vital energy industry within the US, while other countries move ahead with the technology?

But this article’s stupidity isn’t limited to its headline:

"Creating an independent blue-ribbon panel on this oil spill will help provide the recommendations to ensure that similar disasters do not happen again," said Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass.

No, it won’t.  Anyone with half a brain knows it won’t.  You can’t prevent accidents; all you can do is plan better responses to them.  And since the federal government has proven that it cannot or will not respond effectively to these kinds of issues -- from Katrina to Deepwater Horizon to the southern border -- it’s clear that relying on any such federal response is a recipe for further disaster.

While doing my taxes, I read something about the "EITC".  I wondered what that was, so I looked it up.  I arrived at the IRS website, on a helpful page that purported to tell me whether I’m eligible for this tax credit.

Ten minutes and several pages of questions later, I finally got to a page containing questions like these:

"Are you or your spouse younger than your relative?"

"Did you file only to claim a refund and neither spouse was required to file a refund?"

"How do you manage the telegramophone whilst wearing gentleman’s sport gloves?"

That’s where I gave up.

Comcast’s TV and internet service is pretty good.  I mean it hardly ever goes down, and it’s pretty fast.  It’s such a stark contrast with their customer service.

Yesterday I called Comcast to ask them to come out and replace my old modem with a DOCSIS 3 modem.  Their website explicitly states that there is no cost for this upgrade (other than the modem rental fee I’m already paying every month).  But the woman on the phone insisted that I’d need to upgrade my service to a more expensive package to get the new modem.

So I hung up and called back.  It’s impossible to talk to the same person twice at a giant monopoly like Comcast, so I knew I’d get a different person, and I assumed the next person would be a little less dense.  It turned out that he was indeed a little less dense.  He immediately said yeah, no problem, there’s no cost and we’ll send someone out tomorrow, how’s 7-9 AM?  I said that was fine.

So today, 9 AM comes and goes with no sign of Comcast.  I call them at 9:15.  They tell me my appointment is for 11 AM to 1 PM.  I tell them that’s wrong, but it’s no use.  We reschedule it for later in the week.

A few hours later, around 1:15 PM, I get a call from a Comcast technician.  He’s just calling to confirm our appointment and he’s about 5 minutes away.

So, to recap: the first person attempted to extort higher payments out of me based on a lie about DOCSIS 3 modems.  The second person told me my appointment was at one time, but scheduled it for a different time.  And the third person rescheduled my appointment (or so she said) but didn’t bother telling the technician in the field about it.

You’d think that in this kind of bad economy, companies could afford to fire people who are incompetent, and replace them with intelligent people, from the vast pool of unemployed workers.  But apparently not.

Quoting Joshua Rhett Miller:

Nine suspects associated with Hutaree, which is purportedly a Christian-based militia group, have been charged with conspiring to kill police officers and then attack a funeral in hopes of killing more law enforcement officials, federal prosecutors said Monday.  U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said agents moved on the group because the militia members were planning an attack sometime in April.

Cue the left-wing nuts in the media and online, frothing at the mouth with their gleeful comments about this, claiming it proves that Christians are dangerous extremists.  The nuts don’t care about facts, but reasonable people realize that these kinds of isolated incidents are exceptions, and that these conspirators are not typical Christians, nor do they represent what Christianity is about.  As a Christian, I condemn the attacks that these conspirators were evidently planning, and most other Christians would too.

Here’s the response from Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Wild Women:

What I saw was a pro-violence-against-women message... The ad connects the idea of male happiness with violating -- committing violence -- against a woman... It’s really a disturbing message when you think about it.

That’s in response to an ad showing a quarterback who pretends to tackle his mom -- while she’s in the middle of talking about him affectionately -- and after which he gets up and gives her a hug.  The ad is so sweet it almost makes you gag.

O’Neill’s comment is stupid beyond words.  It’s hard to believe that just a few weeks into 2010 we already have such a strong contender for the dumbest statement of the year.

I’m of two minds about this.  My first reaction is, where have these clowns been for the past 2 years?  NOW they’ll make job creation a priority?

But my second reaction is: great, with congress getting involved, we can wave goodbye to any hope we might have had about job creation happening soon.

Lorrie Goldstein nails it on Copenhagen:

It has everything to do with some of the world’s most corrupt dictators and regimes extorting billions upon billions of dollars from the developed world -- us -- which they will then spend not on reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), but in any way they please.

The science is far from settled and the "fix" won’t fix a darn thing.

This is the "tight corners" type attachment for our vacuum:

Notice anything strange?

Why are there 20 holes near the end that attaches to the hose?

Is it worse to think that they intentionally decreased the suction power, or that they failed to realize that’s what the holes would do?

(show full-size image viewer)

Quoting Politico:

Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who developed a close friendship with President Obama when they served together in the Senate, is threatening to have the entire health care bill read on the Senate floor.

More government stupidity -- the stupidity being the fact that they aren’t required to read the bills they pass in the first place, and that the bill-creation process itself has been so perverted, its products rendered so absurdly unwieldy and unreadable, that actually reading them can be used as a threat.

Here are two depressing and disturbing stories I read this week:

Congressional leaders fight against posting bills online:

Quoting Washington Examiner:

At town hall meetings across the country this past summer, the main topic was health care, but there was a strong undercurrent of anger over the way Congress rushed through passage of the stimulus, global warming and bank bailout bills without seeming to understand the consequences.  The stimulus bill, for example, was 1,100 pages long and made available to Congress and the public just 13 hours before lawmakers voted on it.  The bill has failed to provide the promised help to the job market, and there was outrage when it was discovered that the legislation included an amendment allowing American International Group, a bailout recipient, to give out millions in employee bonuses.

Criminalizing everyone:

Quoting Washington Times:

Robert C. Scott, Virginia Democrat, and ranking member Louie Gohmert, Texas Republican, conducted a truly bipartisan hearing (a D.C. rarity this year).

These two leaders have begun giving voice to the increasing number of experts who worry about "overcriminalization."  Astronomical numbers of federal criminal laws lack specifics, can apply to almost anyone and fail to protect innocents by requiring substantial proof that an accused person acted with actual criminal intent.

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn’t have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported.  The orchids were all legal - but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty’s new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

These issues infuriate me.  There’s something seriously screwed up about a system that not only can, but does routinely imprison people for accidental and trivial issues while simultaneously letting rapists and child molesters go free with merely probation -- and which is constantly passing new laws that the lawmakers themselves haven’t even read, much less given the public a chance to see.

This can’t be real, can it?  Ridiculous doesn’t begin to describe it.  It’s actually embarrassing.  It’s nearly painful to watch.

Cringely has a medical malpractice post that I don’t find terribly compelling, but here’s one of the comments on it:

Government trying to do anything for us is always bloated and inefficient because there are no checks and balances to keep costs down.  None.  Private business (up until the bailouts) must keep costs in check.  Government doesn’t care about that.  Why should they?  So when costs go out of control they either tax us at higher rates and/or print more money.

It’s not the party that’s in power, it’s the system that it has evolved into.  Have we not figured that out by now?

You might say that’s overly cynical but it seems about right to me.  I’m certainly no fan of insurance companies; I think insurance in general is just about the biggest scam that there is.  But I don’t consider it an improvement to replace [insurance system] or [other broken part of health-care system] with [corrupt politicians] or [additional layers of bureaucracy].

In the real world, you need to clearly identify the problem before you implement the solution.  But not in government.  It drives me crazy that these politicians are insisting on speed at the expense of correctness.  When Obama insists we must pass health care reform ASAP, it makes lots of people suspicious.  When Arlen Specter says that we have to "make judgments very fast" on a 1000-page bill that hardly anybody has even read, the crowd reacts instantly and angrily -- and rightly so.  What sane person thinks that it’s a good idea to make quick judgments rather than careful decisions on such huge and important matters?  Only politicians think that.

I’m all for reforming things that are broken.  But we need to clearly identify those things before we can fix them.  Ramming through a 1000-page bill is not a solution, and a government that would do such a thing is in itself broken, in a far more serious way than the health-care system is.

Various tidbits seen over the past week or two:

...

From the Times Square Tea Party: "Do I look like a racist redneck teabagger to you?"

...

A hilarious Good Samaritan story by Scott Adams:

Luckily I did not have jumper cables, because if I did, I knew we would be late for the movie.  I did my best to make a face that said, "I sure wish I could help," while being secretly gleeful that this was officially not my problem.  I wondered if the young man thought I was lying about not having jumper cables.  My fake sincerity face looks like a mime with an intestinal infection.

...

Joe Biden on rural broadband funding:

The bottom line is, you can’t function -- a nation can’t compete in the 21st century -- without an immediate, high-quality access for everything from streaming video to information overline.

I don’t know what I’d do without a high-quality access to information overline.  In fact, I don’t even know what that means.

...

This article claims that wheat bread is no better than white bread.  But what’s interesting is some of the detailed information about metabolic functions that it contains.

...

From amazon: Classic Live Lobster Combo for Two People.  I don’t suppose it needs to be said that amazon rocks, this rocks, and "Lobsters-Online" rocks.

...

Ceiling cat.  The photo of the cat looking down is great.

I don’t know exactly when all the TV news networks started referring to everything as an "ALERT", but now they do it all the time, and it’s annoying.  When the installation of a statue into a statuary hall is a news alert, then it’s to the point where the word is devoid of any meaning at all.  But sadly this is just another day in the life of the abused English language.

I love my iPhone.  It’s the most amazing and useful device.  Unfortunately to use it, you must also use iTunes, and iTunes is nothing short of an abomination of an application.  Here’s just one recent example.

A week or so ago, iTunes started crashing about a minute after launching.  I noticed that the crashes happened a few seconds after it started updating my podcasts.  So I set it to stop auto-updating the podcasts.  This is a bug, and it should be fixed, but it’s no big deal; bugs happen.  And I can always use my iPhone’s built-in ability to update podcasts in the meantime.

But now I wanted to sync my iPhone to iTunes in order to get some new music.  However, since my podcasts in iTunes are now a week out of date, I didn’t want it messing with the podcasts on my iPhone -- in particular which ones I’d already listened to and which ones I was partially into.  So in iTunes, in the iPhone settings, I unchecked the "sync podcasts" checkbox.

Now what do you think a user means when he tells an app "don’t sync podcasts"?  Seems pretty obvious to me.  But I can tell you for darn sure what it DOESN’T mean: it sure as heck doesn’t mean PLEASE DELETE EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE 2 GB OF PODCASTS ALREADY ON MY IPHONE.

I really wish iTunes were a person so I could strangle it to death.

During an hour-long press conference with Obama, during which only 13 questions were allowed, here’s the question that the New York Times came up with:

Quoting Jeff Zeleny, New York Times:

During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office, enchanted you the most about serving in this office, humbled you the most and troubled you the most?

Is this a press conference, or a third-grade field trip to meet the president?

There was a time when this would have been surprising, but not anymore.  Now it’s just embarrassing and sad.  It’s hard to believe there was a day when the New York Times -- now bankrupt in more ways than one -- actually mattered.

This product is annoyingly hard to find.  I just want this keyboard but in a light color.  It costs $7, has a wired USB connection, and has a standard key layout, which is to say, single-height Enter key, double-wide Backspace key, 1.5-wide backslash key, inverted-T layout for arrow keys, and 3x2 horizontal layout for the Insert/Home/etc keys.  Why the frig did Logitech have to mess with a perfectly good layout and introduce all these stupid "hip" key rearrangements which everyone else then copied??

The only thing that made doing my taxes even slightly bearable was the comments from the TurboTax community that pop up on the side of each page.  Here are some of my favorites:

The whole "online" concept just doesn’t work for some people.

AND MY KEYBOARD!!

Ouch.

I’d actually like to know the answer to this one because, frankly, I have no idea how my yax have to be paid back.

Well.

(show full-size image viewer)

Quoting Fox News:

American sea Captain Richard Phillips was safely rescued Sunday from four Somali pirates

That’s great news.

Quoting Fox News:

Three of the pirates were killed and one was in custody after what appeared to be a swift firefight off the Somali coast

And that’s about the best outcome we could have hoped for.  The reason these pirates have been attacking more and more frequently is partly because it’s extremely profitable -- to the tune of $50 million last year alone -- but mainly because there’s been virtually no risk in it for them.  Significantly increasing the risk/reward ratio is the only way to curb the attacks.

But the obvious question is: what is wrong with all these companies that they’re sending ships with millions of dollars worth of cargo through these pirate-infested corridors without any security on board?  Perhaps that’s somewhat defensible when ships are not being regularly attacked by pirates, but surely after the first or second or TWENTIETH attack, these companies would wise up and put a couple of armed security guards on each ship?

Quoting Roger Ebert:

Dear Bill: Thanks for including the Chicago Sun-Times on your exclusive list of newspapers on your "Hall of Shame."  To be in an O’Reilly Hall of Fame would be a cruel blow to any newspaper.  It would place us in the favor of a man who turns red and starts screaming when anyone disagrees with him.

Bill put the Sun-Times in his Hall of Shame for regularly publishing false and defamatory information.  Roger Ebert, in response, published a false and defamatory statement about Bill.

Bill’s show, The O’Reilly Factor, is on TV for an hour every weeknight and has been for over 10 years.  I watch it almost every night, so I know that Bill loses his temper only a few times per year, despite the fact that guests disagree with him every night.  The standard liberal line about O’Reilly, which Roger Ebert mindlessly repeated, is a flat-out lie.

Quoting Politico:

After promising to "push the reset button" on relations with Moscow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned to present Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a light-hearted gift at their talks here Friday night  [...]  She handed him a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow.  Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift -- a red plastic button on a black base with a Russian word "peregruzka" printed on top.

"We worked hard to get the right Russian word.  Do you think we got it?" Clinton said as reporters, allowed in to observe the first few minutes of the meeting, watched.

"You got it wrong," Lavrov said, to Clinton’s clear surprise.  Instead of "reset," he said the word on the box meant "overcharge."

So far this administration has been a non-stop blunderfest.  I wonder how long it’s going to take for people’s slobbering infatuation with Obama to fade, so they can start seeing him for what he really is: just a regular politician, and not even a particularly good one.

I miss W.

Just before making his stupid "website number" remark, Joe Biden said something that might be even more comical -- if it weren’t so sad and pathetic.  In response to a woman who asked how the stimulus would help small businesses, Biden said this:

Quoting Joe Biden:

For example, it may very well be that she’s in a circumstance where she is not able, her customers aren’t able to get to her, there’s no transit capability, the bridge going across the creek to get to her business needs repair...

It’s hard to imagine a better way to prove that you’re out of touch with normal Americans than by honestly suggesting that you’ll help their small businesses -- which are in many ways the lifeblood of the country -- by fixing the bridge that goes over the creek on the way to the business.

Of course the truth is that there’s virtually nothing in the "stimulus" bill that will help small businesses.  The truth is that I will continue to pay a ~$5000 per year penalty, primarily in the form of extra Social Security taxes, as punishment for owning a small business.

Joe Biden forgets the "website number" for... recovery.gov.  And this is the guy overseeing the stimulus implementation...

This is on a small humidifier we have:

Right... so how DO you clean it?