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.

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly and explicitly promised that the health care reform process would be broadcast on C-SPAN.  He lied, and now the White House refuses to even acknowledge the issue.

Perhaps worse than the lie itself, though, is what it means: the Democrats pushing this absurd health care bill absolutely do not want the public to know what’s in it.

These people are supposed to represent us.  Instead, they’re creating laws in secret, forcing through the largest and most expensive government program in history -- one which the majority of Americans oppose.

This is the opposite of democracy.  The only thing these people represent is the complete corruption and perversion of our system of government.

On top of the fact that the people don’t actually want this bill, there’s the fact that we can’t afford it, and we’ll be lucky if it doesn’t destroy the country.

That’s why federal spending above its revenues should be illegal, punishable by crucifixion (or perhaps something even more painful).

Crucifixion would be too kind a fate for these people.

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.

There’s been so much ClimateGate stuff lately that it’s been hard to keep up with it all.  Below are some of the more interesting items I’ve read over the past week or two.  All of these are worth reading in their entirety but here are some quotes.

A nice non-technical overview:

Quoting Richard S. Lindzen:

Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming?  Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing.  Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally--such as for the last dozen years or so--it does little that can be discerned.

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre.  There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century.  The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction.  Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes. [...]

The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate.  Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming.  And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.

Lots of technical detail about where the "warming" comes from (hint: not from the data):

Quoting Willis Eschenbach:

So you can see why Wibjorn was concerned.  This looks nothing like the UN IPCC data, which came from the CRU, which was based on the GHCN data.  Why the difference?  The answer is, these graphs all use the raw GHCN data.  But the IPCC uses the "adjusted" data.  GHCN adjusts the data to remove what it calls "inhomogeneities". [...]

I went to look at what happens when the GHCN removes the "in-homogeneities" to "adjust" the data. [...] Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century -- but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century.  And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century -- when those guys "adjust", they don’t mess around. [...]

Intrigued by the curious shape of the average of the homogenized Darwin records, I then went to see how they had homogenized each of the individual station records. [...]

Yikes again, double yikes!  What on earth justifies that adjustment?  How can they do that?  We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on.  They all agree almost exactly.  Why adjust them at all?  They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data!  Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right -- but a six degree per century trend?  And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven?  What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style -- they are indisputable evidence that the "homogenized" data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

One thing is clear from this.  People who say that "Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK" are wrong.  At least one part of the data is bad, too.  The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

More evidence that the "warming" trend is a fraud:

Quoting Charlie Martin:

The green line is the version we saw above as part of the IPCC report, and the red line is the full series -- which goes down rather dramatically, instead of up as the story suggested.  If the full Briffa series had been included, the figure would look rather different.  The hook upward, the blade of the hockey stick, would have been much less dramatic, the implied global warming much less significant.  By truncating the data as they did, the global warming looks much worse.

And as the Climategate emails show, this was the result of a long discussion of how to best deal with "pressure to present a nice tidy story."  A story that fit the IPCC’s political goals, whether it suited the science or not.

The problem with "science" today:

Quoting Jerry Pournelle:

[O]f course science is not unitary, of course there is politics including dirty tricks and outright lying, faking data, character assassination, invocation of police and military power to suppress opposition -- and none of that changes the rules, which are that scientists when they are being scientists should welcome opposition hypotheses, and must account for all the data, not just that which favors their own positions.  Of course most of the time scientists are not acting like scientists.  They are acting like advocates, or sometimes like politicians.  When they do, they should have no more credibility than lawyers and politicians.  I covered all this years ago in The Voodoo Sciences.

Because scientists do not often act like scientists and often act more like bureaucrats, it is important to set up counter-bureaucracies when the subject matter is funded by public money (controlled by a bureaucracy) and the outcome is important to public spending.  I am a supporter of the National Science Foundation, but I want it reformed: I want 10% of its budget devoted to funding contrarian science that challenges existing consensus.  That should be done through establishment of a funded bureaucracy dedicated to finding and funding such challenges.

For better or for worse, the fact is that science is a business.  Science is no less corrupt than other businesses, and it’s just as much in bed with politicians as other businesses are.  We hold businesses accountable by choosing which ones to patronize.  We need to hold scientists accountable by demanding that they show their data.  If you’re not willing to show your data and methods -- if instead you hide and destroy your actual data, leaving only your conclusions, so that no one else can verify your work -- then you’re not a scientist, you’re a fraud.

The Russians state their belief that their climate data was misrepresented by some of these "scientists" as well:

Quoting Telegraph:

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.  Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, [but] the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. ... IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations. [...]

What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock. [...]

The crux of the argument is that the CRU cherry picked data following the same methods that have been done everywhere else.  They ignored data covering 40% of Russia and chose data that showed a warming trend over statistically preferable alternatives when available.  They ignored completeness of data, preferred urban data, strongly preferred data from stations that relocated, ignored length of data set.

Finally, getting right down to the core of the matter:

Quoting Jerry Pournelle:

This means -- assuming you believe in global temperature accuracies to tenths of a degree -- that the Earth experienced a warming of 0.7 degree C over the last century [through 2010].

The idea that there is such a thing as a "global temperature" number that is not only knowable by us, but able to be accurately measured repeatedly and consistently, is a myth.  Most people would probably realize that if they were to think about it -- what was the temperature in your back yard last year?  how about in your whole town?  or your entire country? -- though few people bother to think about it.  But certainly now that the ClimateGate data is coming out, and we’re able to see just what a mess and a fraud it is, few sane people would believe in such a mythical number any longer.  Unfortunately, sanity is not a defining characteristic of global warming alarmists.

Quoting Byron York:

The House is rushing to pass four major bills today -- a Defense Department appropriations bill, a debt-limit extension bill, a continuing resolution to keep the government going, and a new stimulus bill.  New versions of all the bills were only introduced last night -- one of them, the stimulus, is an entirely new measure -- which means lawmakers are scurrying to learn what is in the bills before the accelerated schedule of voting.  "They introduced a brand-new stimulus bill around 11-ish," says one House GOP source.  "And we’re voting on it today." There is little doubt that few lawmakers, Democrat or Republican, will have much of a chance to examine the bills before voting.

The reason for the rush is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is scheduled to lead a House delegation to the climate change summit in Copenhagen, and the delegation plane is scheduled to leave after the last vote tonight.

Despicable.

Peep this article. I, personally, thought you might enjoy this given your past history and distaste for cliches.

I love this screen from the What is Google Chrome OS video:

The whole video is interesting and worth watching, too.

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?

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Interesting list in the "You’re the Boss Blog" on the New York Times.  It’s clearly meant for a more fancy restaurant than the kinds we usually visit, but I can’t help wishing all restaurants took these kinds of things seriously.  In fact many of the items are just obvious, common-sense, good-manners issues, so it’s sad how many restaurants and servers are deficient in these areas.

Quoting Bruce Buschel:

12. Do not touch the rim of a water glass. Or any other glass.

13. Handle wine glasses by their stems and silverware by the handles.

25. Make sure the glasses are clean. Inspect them before placing them on the table.

33. Do not bang into chairs or tables when passing by.

34. Do not have a personal conversation with another server within earshot of customers.

35. Do not eat or drink in plain view of guests.

36. Never reek from perfume or cigarettes. People want to smell the food and beverage.

45. Do not curse, no matter how young or hip the guests.

47. Do not gossip about co-workers or guests within earshot of guests.

56. Do not ignore a table because it is not your table.  Stop, look, listen, lend a hand. (Whether tips are pooled or not.)

62(a). Do not let a glass sit empty for too long.

66. Do not return to the guest anything that falls on the floor -- be it napkin, spoon, menu or soy sauce.

68. Do not reach across one guest to serve another.

71. Do not race around the dining room as if there is a fire in the kitchen or a medical emergency. (Unless there is a fire in the kitchen or a medical emergency.)

77. Do not disappear.

78. Do not ask, "Are you still working on that?"  Dining is not work -- until questions like this are asked.

I also loved this one:

11. Do not hustle the lobsters.  That is, do not say, "We only have two lobsters left."  Even if there are only two lobsters left.

(source)

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

Great reporting by The New York Times on the appalling state of enforcement (i.e., virtually none) of water quality and safety regulations, at both the state and federal levels, throughout the US:

Quoting The New York Times:

In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times.  The violations range from failing to report emissions to dumping toxins at concentrations regulators say might contribute to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses.

However, the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment.  State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene. [...]

Some violations are relatively minor.  But about 60 percent of the polluters were deemed in "significant noncompliance" -- meaning their violations were the most serious kind, like dumping cancer-causing chemicals or failing to measure or report when they pollute.

Finally, the Times’s research shows that fewer than 3 percent of Clean Water Act violations resulted in fines or other significant punishments...

"I met our inspector at the spill site, and we had this really awkward conversation," [DEP regulator] Crum recalled.  "I said we should shut down the mine until everything was cleaned up.  The inspector agreed, but he said if he issued that order, he was scared of getting demoted or transferred to the middle of nowhere.  Everyone was terrified of doing their job."

Mr. Crum temporarily shut the mine.

In the next two years, he shut many polluting mines until they changed their ways.  His tough approach raised his profile around the state [of West Virginia]. [...]

In 2003, a new director, Stephanie Timmermeyer, was nominated to run the Department of Environmental Protection.  One of West Virginia’s most powerful state lawmakers, Eustace Frederick, said she would be confirmed, but only if she agreed to fire Mr. Crum, according to several people who said they witnessed the conversation.

She was given the job and soon summoned Mr. Crum to her office.  He was dismissed...

The 7-page report focuses on some specific West Virginia problems but deals largely with nationwide issues.  They’ve also compiled a national database of pollution-discharge compliance and violations.

After nearly two months of not approving my iPhone app, Apple finally approved it last week while I was away on vacation.  It’s called Alabama, it’s a music player, and you can get it here.

I created Alabama because I love music, and I love whole albums.  I don’t listen to singles, I don’t skip tracks, and "shuffle" is something I would never do to an album.  When you’re that kind of music listener, and you have hundreds of albums, scrolling through a long alphabetical list of artists or albums is annoying and unsatisfying.  I can never find something that I want to listen to that way.

So I created an app which is a simple music player with one important additional feature: a "Pick" button which picks one album at random from your music library.  You can then simply tap the Play button, or tap Pick again a few times until you find something you feel like listening to.

Another neat thing about Alabama is that it actually uses the iPod application to play the music, so it keeps playing when you quit the app.  And conversely, if you start playing something via the iPod app, you can quit that and launch Alabama, and then tap the "Now Playing" button to view what’s playing within Alabama’s interface -- which is superior to the iPod’s interface because it uses letters that are large and actually legible to display the artist, album, and track names.

So check out Alabama for your iPhone or iPod touch.  There’s a free lite version and a 99-cent full version.

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.

This article and the many comments on it are pretty interesting.  Here’s one that sticks out to me:

The cost of a college education has exploded since the Federal government began pumping huge sums of money into grants, scholarships and subsidized loans.  As with any such intervention on this scale the government has created disincentives, skewed incentives and inelastic pricing (or more accurately inflation).

The days of paying for college with a summer job are long over precisely because the government in its infinite wisdom decided that every student should attend a four year university, a right of attendance in fact.

The parallels with medicine are striking and the only reasonable solution is so simple it is beyond the grasp of Statists, stop subsidizing college tuition and in short order costs will plummet.

Directing all high school grads into four year universities with subsidies is a terrible misallocation of resources as evidenced by highly indebted grads who are stuck in low wage service sector jobs.  Debt slaves for life through no fault of their own.

When I was in (private) high school, it was clear that everyone was supposed to go to college.  Almost everyone in my school did.  And the clear implication was that going to college means getting a well-paying job afterwards.  The truth is, that’s far from guaranteed, and isn’t even necessarily very likely -- but no one tells you that.  And somehow, everyone conveniently fails to mention that you’ll likely be saddled with absurd amounts of debt for years if not decades, regardless of whether you get any job at all after college, let alone one that pays well.

These chips are good.  But it used to be the case that, about half the time I bought them, the bag would be full of dark chips -- and those chips were great.  Lately though, for the past 6-12 months I’d say, it’s extremely rare to get a bag of the dark ones.

The problem is it’s the same bag and the same variety and everything; sometimes they’re regular, and sometimes they’re dark.  And for some reason the people at the store frown upon customers opening all the bags in the middle of the store.  Or so I’ve heard.

Yesterday Kim went to Redner’s and got 4 bags: 2 of this kind and 2 of the same brand in the "Sea Salt and Vinegar" variety, which also exhibit this inconsistent character.  I opened them all right away, and the first 3 were plain old chips.  But the 4th bag was dark!  I was so excited; naturally I ate half the bag right then and there.

Anyway, I decided to document this irregularity with the hopes that I can bring it to the attention of the company (Kettle Foods, Inc.) and convince them to simply release a second line of dark chips in the same varieties.

These 2 bags of chips came from the same store on the same day, but they do have very different production codes.

Side-by-side:

Light:

Dark:

Light production code:

Dark production code:

The bags themselves including the SKU/UPC are identical:

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Apple will be releasing the "iPhone 3G S" on Friday, an upgraded version of the 3G whose main differences are that it’s faster, has more storage space, and has a better camera.

But they also dropped the price on the iPhone 3G to just $99.  So if the upfront cost of a few hundred bucks was your main barrier to getting an iPhone, it looks like today’s your lucky day.  This appears to be a while-supplies-last kind of thing, though, so I wouldn’t wait too long.

Unfortunately, AT&T is not giving existing customers the same sweet deal that we got when the 3G first came out.  At that time you could upgrade from the original iPhone to the 3G and get the new customer discount by re-upping your 2-year contract.  This time, though, instead of getting that same deal where the 3G S would cost $199 (16GB) or $299 (32GB) as it does for new customers, us existing customers have to pay $399 or $499.

That makes perfect sense since, as with virtually every phone in the US cell phone market, the cost of the iPhone isn’t really $199 or $299; it’s that plus the cost of the 2-year contract.  Still, it sucks.  I’ve been wanting a 32GB iPhone for a long time, and was absolutely planning to get one at $299.  But $499?  I don’t think so.  And judging from the outcry around the interblag, lots of other current 3G owners feel the same way.

Quoting The New York Times:

President Obama ... said the tobacco legislation was "a bill that truly defines changes in Washington" and one that "changes the way Washington works and who it works for."

These kinds of comments are often just political BS, but this statement is somewhat true since, as I’ve said before, the only reason tobacco is legal while heroin is not is the rich & powerful lobbying force behind tobacco.

Quoting The New York Times:

The legislation will enable the Food and Drug Administration to impose potentially strict new controls on the making and marketing of products that eventually kill half their regular users.

Obviously the fact that heretofore the FDA could not regulate tobacco -- a horribly addictive and deadly drug -- is just absurd.

Quoting The Wall Street Journal:

"Allowing the FDA to regulate tobacco in any capacity would inevitably lead to the FDA regulating the family farm," Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., said during the House debate.  "This could create uncertainty for family farmers as they are already struggling."

Talk about BS.  "Family farm" is not synonymous with "tobacco farm."  And guess what, when the product that you sell kills millions of people annually while serving virtually no valid purpose, then you deserve to go out of business.

Quoting Ed Morrissey:

Barack Obama told me that if I voted for John McCain, I’d see a revolving door between Wall Street fat cats and smoke-filled back rooms of the White House and Congress.  What do you know — he was right!

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.

No, seriously:

Due to the large size of their flocks, the [passenger pigeons] were seen as a threat to farmers.  In fact, in 1703 the Catholic bishop of Quebec actually excommunicated the entire species.

No word on what the response was from the passenger pigeon community, other than eventually going extinct.

Quoting Bloomberg:

Lawrence Summers, director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, earned more than $2.7 million in speaking fees from companies such as Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that later received taxpayer funds in the economic bailout.

Quoting the Netflix blog:

On April 1 Clay Shannon of Birmingham, Ala. received the two billionth movie, a Blu-ray version of the romantic comedy "Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist," and with it, a complimentary lifetime subscription to Netflix.

I called and emailed Clay to tell him the good news and for the longest time he thought it was an April Fool’s prank. Finally convinced, he was elated. [...]

It took eight years for Netflix to reach one billion shipments -- less time than it took McDonald’s to sell one billion hamburgers -- and just over two years to ship the second billion.

We love Netflix.  It’s essentially unlimited movies for $18 per month -- the cost of a single trip for two to a crusty movie theater.

It’s not hard to see why Netflix is so successful: they somehow manage to simultaneously be the cheapest and best way to get movies.

They seem to have a great corporate culture, too:

Quoting The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

When it comes to vacation, Netflix has a simple policy: Take as much as you’d like.  Just make sure your work is done.

Employees at the online movie retailer often leave for three, four, even five weeks at a time and never clock in or out.

Vacation limits and face-time requirements, says Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings, are "a relic of the industrial age." [...]

American workers get a median of 10 vacation days after one year on the job and 15 days after five years of work, according to Hewitt.  One in three Americans doesn’t use all his vacation, and barely one in 10 takes a break for two weeks straight, according to the nonprofit research firm Families and Work Institute.  But at Netflix, it’s estimated that most employees take off about 25 to 30 days per year, using the time to stay at home with the kids, travel to Cambodia or visit relatives in India.  It’s "estimated" because Netflix does not record vacation time, said Ms. McCord.

That whole article is worth a read.

We drove past this hilarious sign yesterday.  You know, I think I will stop in one of these days and give them a try.