The Wrightwing

OK, another election is coming up and all the usual angst and apathy is showing up among those that still consider voting.

Jeff over at Alphecca has a rather intemperate if accurate rant on his feelings towards the whole situation. My only argument with him is language. He is far too polite and temperate.

My feelings are summed up in two bumper-sticker-like aphorisms:

Don’t vote: It only encourages them.

What if they gave an election and nobody came?

Since the political system has been suborned to the interests of the two old parties, and the courts are tools of the old parties, you have only two options: Do not vote or vote for some third party candidate that comes close, if you have one that has been able to jump through the rights-violating, unconstitutional laws that now regulate elections in this country.

So I vote. Desultorily. Reluctantly. With the hope of those that kept working in the concentration camps of so many tyrannies of the past: That a change will come before I die.

Each vote is a message. Even if they lose, as is all but guaranteed, each vote for a candidate is a message to whoever wins. The message is what people want.

This was far more apparent in decades past, when minority parties still had a chance. Note in that link that minority parties occasionally totaled more members of Congress than the difference between the two parties with the largest representation, and actually held real power. Once, in 1823-25, the total of third party seats was larger than the second party seats.

This all but ended starting in the FDR/Truman era, when ballot access laws were passed by the two old parties that so restricted access that minor parties were all but frozen out of the political process.

And since then we know what has happened. A continual erosion of rights and powers held by the citizens, all being transferred to the government at all levels. Ever increasing taxation, ever increasing regulation, an ever increasing, creeping, tyranny.

This will not end until freedom is returned to the political process.

But that is as likely as asking GM and Toyota to make it easier for and Nissan and others to sell cars.

The outlook is bleak folks, but bleak is not black.

Too bad None of the Above is not on the ballot. I would vote against them ALL. But since that is not an option, vote your conscience as best you can. Do not vote out of fear someone will get in you dislike. No matter who gets in will likely be just as odious as the other. Better to walk out of the voting booth feeling clean and honorable, than dirty and violated by a bad choice. I would rather cast an honest vote for an honest candidate that loses, than submit to being forced to choose between tweedle-scum and tweedle-scummier.

When you vote, do not waste it on the corrupt, cynical status quo of the two old parties. Look at all the parties and candidates and vote your consciences. There are many to choose from. Green and Libertarian candidates are the most active and largest of the minority parties, but even the smaller ones deserve your consideration, if they match your positions better.

Send a message, vote the truth, it just may set us all free.

The courts seem to think so. This court anyway:

A recent court decision in a custody battle between the biological father of a 2-year-old boy and the adoptive parents who have raised the child since he was 3 days old could have a “chilling and rippling” effect on future adoptions in New Mexico, legal experts warn.

The state Court of Appeals opinion, filed July 26, reverses the earlier decision by state District Judge John Pope in Valencia County to terminate the parental rights of Edgewood resident Mark Huddleston.

Not in so many words, but it seems that the needs of the child have little or no bearing on this argument which could just as easily be over a car as a kid.

Children need love, guidance, (discipline, if you prefer), and stability. This child has that from his two adoptive parents who care enough to fight this.
( As an aside: love, guidance and stability can be offered by any adult, whether a single or a couple, hetero or homo, or even a group family. Love and stability or dysfunction and abuse, are not exclusive to any particular arrangement.)

The natural father, while it seems to that he tried fairly quickly to gain custody, seems also to care more about winning than about what is best for the boy. After two years the bonds between the child and the adoptive parents must be pretty well made, and strong. To break them now, and place him in the care of someone who, to the child, is a stranger, seems uncaring if not callous. The court seems not to care either way. It seems to only care about the law as an algebraic equation to be solved for ‘X’, whatever or whoever ‘X’ might be. Solomon is missing in action.

In this case, the child should be the winner, not the biological father, not the adoptive parents, not the court and least of all the attorneys. But it looks like the opposite will occur. The court will make a logical decision, the adoptive parents will lose a child they love, the biological father will gain a tax deduction, the child will lose, and the attorneys will get fatter bank accounts.

So far as I know, one can not have rights to other people. You can have rights to property, like land and livestock, but not to people. Children are not toasters or other chattel. Rights to, or over, people is called slavery. Children are not slaves to be argued over in a market or courtroom. Children are young, developing persons that need nurturing, not pets that need feeding, walking and the occasional chew-toy.

Whatever the reasons for the biological father losing custody in the first place, at this point the child is in a caring stable home, and that should take precedence over whatever claims others may think they have, or the court thinks the law demands. And if the law says otherwise, the law is wrong.

Children are not property.

Jared Kushner, a 25 year old law student, somehow has the financial means to purchase controlling interest in one of the most influential, if moribund, newspapers in the nation.

Jared Kushner, the 25-year-old son of a wealthy New Jersey developer who was sentenced to prison last year, has bought The New York Observer, paying what one person familiar with details of the sale said was nearly $10 million for a majority stake in the weekly newspaper.

In a private, back room deal at that. How much you want to bet he is acting as a beard for his father, a notorious, if reclusive, power player in NJ politics?

The families habit of making huge donations, even before they are old enough to vote, has gotten them into hot water and even in jail.

So now they own a paper. Oh joy.

/SARCASM I guess we will finally see what a REAL liberal voice sounds like now. After all, who can trust those radical representatives of the Republican Right, The New York Times, the New York Daily News, The New York Post, or The Bergen Record, The Atlantic City Press and The Newark Star Ledger in NJ. Fronts for Pat Robertson and Dick Chaney, all of them. All of them I tells ya! /end-SARCASM

Just like a liberal to throw away money for ‘the cause’ in an attempt to buy influence through a centralized, controlled source. Maybe it will turn into another Air-America. I can only hope they bankrupt themselves before they succeed. Not likely though, when they have control of our wealth through the government they own.

No, make the “What Fucking Planet Do My Fucking Senators Fucking Represent!?”

Both of them, Bob Menshevek Menendez and Frank “The Replacement” Loutenberg, voted against Victims Rights and for police abuse.

That’s right. My two ignoble “Sinators” believe that in a disaster such as existed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck, when some 90% of the police force took off for high ground, leaving those left in the city to fend for themselves, whether either too poor to get out of the city themselves, and unable to, due to Mayor Nagin’s incompetence in failing to follow his own damn emergency plan, or able to but too stupid to do so, that these people left in the aftermath of chaos and criminality, should have their best, perhaps only, means of self defense summarily confiscated by any bossy little shit with a badge.

Perhaps they believe that those that populate Nagins “Chocolate City” are not to be trusted with guns? Many have thought that as well, in the past right up through today. The fact that these rich, white, men, who live lives of privilege in wealthy, well protected suburban communities with large police forces and near zero crime rate, also believe this does not surprise me at all. After all, aristocrats and royalists throughout the ages have objected to the arming of the peasantry, and always oppress the right to arms of those they deem potential threats to their power.

Please note that this bill would not prevent the confiscation of guns from those already prohibited by law from having them, (big help for DC residents, not!).

All this bill will do, (yes, ‘will’, since it passed OVERWHELMINGLY, provided it remains in the bill during conference), is forbid the few law enforcement authorities left from disarming the decent people that are just trying to defend what little they have left in the face of almost certain massive looting. The looters sure wont care about any law, hell, they’re LOOTERS, predatory scavengers taking advantage of people when they are at their most desperate and defenseless moment. I guess N.J. Sinators care more about the advancement of their plan to subjugate the populace of the country to the Progressive Agenda than they do about the lives of those beset by disaster.

Joined by the usual suspects in “hidiocies” like these, they once again show their true colors, the colors of the slave market, the red flag later adopted by socialists and progressives of all stripes.

Gun Control, Drug Control, Sex Control, Thought Control, Wage and Price Controls: They are all about CONTROL.

Hat tip: John Lott.

Over on NoGodBlog, the ‘house’ Blog of American Atheists, there is a post and comment thread about an attempted railroading of an Oklahoma Atheist family because their daughter objected to being forced into a prayer circle in her tax-payer funded Public School. The story is chilling in what can happen in America today. It is not just Islam that will engage in oppression and tyranny when it gains hegemony over a community. Without a courageous attorney and the support of American Atheists, and innocent man may have been imprisoned and a family run out of a state, forced to abandon their home and business.

So far, this case has attracted little attention outside the Atheist and Freethinker community. I can find no news sources on Google that mention it. Yet the only things this family did not endure were night riders and lynchings.

Corrupt and lying school officials, police, prosecutors and judges, along with biased and bigoted attorneys seeking to exploit and cheat them. It is a story out of the Jim Crow South. All you would need to do is change ‘Atheist’ to ‘African’ and you could not tell this story from others of that era.

Which brings me to arms.

I spend a lot of time, more than I probably should, on the NoGodBlog discussing and arguing with Atheists over politics, against collectivism and gun control, which many, though far from all, seem to support. At least within that grouping.

But one fellow there had a change of heart on guns, like I did over 25 years ago:

…I used to think as you do. I used to believe that guns were evil and the people that rely on them are cowards, afraid to back up what they say and do with little else but violence.

I swore I would never resort to gun promotion.

Then I took a job that required me to be armed, to take on the responsibility of protecting others. I leared how to safely handle a firearm.

The gun changed in meaning to me. I realized that it was little more than a tool. A tool when, in the right hands, has as much potential for good as it does for evil! Gun ownership did not transform me into a criminal. It did not give me any more desire to use a firearm on another human being than I already possessed.

It made me question the reason a free nation needs such a tool at all. I had my epiphany - arms make and keep humanity free and safe. Our revolutionaries did not merely bander harsh language with a tyrranical, abusive theocracy. They took lives and gave their own because they believed in their freedom!

I know how I must sound to you. Paranoid, delusional, even insane? I assure you that I’d have held those same sentiments not so terribly long ago! But I was an idealist. I believed in our police, our courts, our laws (and for the most part still do).

But I’ve also taken the bitter pill of realism, I’ve stood face-to-face with men that threatened my very life and the live of those I love. I’ve been forced into the harsh light of the truth: we will never, as a species, stop killing one another and we will never live in the utopias we dream of. The only solution to certain kinds of people will always be violence and it can only be met with violence.

There is more. Go and read the entire post and comments. A worthy story to become familiar with.

In my mostly wasted youth I was also very anti gun. I had stickers on my car from Handgun-Control Inc. The ones with a revolver inside an international ‘NO’ symbol, the circle-slash.

Then I went into the Army, (for the wrong reasons and all too briefly), and actually used some: M-16, M-60, M1911, M2, as well as taking the Armorer course, (not intentionally, it was ‘on the way’).

I still thought they should be severely restricted, but also kept reading on the subject, (among many). Being an activist in the LP, though coming to it from the left, for reason of personal freedom such as an end to Drug Prohibition, as well as an obsessive reader, I was exposed to ideas and thinkers from a wide variety of sources.

Having read the arguments on both sides, and having experience with arms, how they operate and their capabilities and just as important, their limitations, my mind was changed.

Everything I have seen, including the tragedies, since then has only reinforced my belief, a belief based on empirical evidence.

Like drug prohibition, gun prohibition is worse that whatever social ills it is supposed to cure.

While gun prohibition is no guarantee of political tyranny, it sets the stage. Every oppression or slaughter of minorities in history has been prefaced by a disarming of the targeted group. Go back in history before firearms were invented and you will see it. Look at modern history and you will see it.

In the past century alone, disarmed populations have been slaughtered in Armenia, Germany, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Uganda, Somalia, Rwanda, more.
The banning of guns has lead to massive increases in crime in Jamaica, Britain and Australia, not to mention cities like Washington, D.C. and Chicago.

Guns in the hands of individuals can lead to tragedies, but they are tragedies limited to what a single person can do.
Guns in the hands of governments, without an equally armed populace to restrain that government, leads to tragedy on a national scale, if not outright slaughter.

Minorities of all persuasions, racial, religious, political, all of them, should always keep arms, and not let the government know it.

The day the government decrees that you must give up your arms is the day you must use them, even if it is just to flee over the border to the safety of asylum in another country.

I am now sitting on my back deck. (And yes, yes I DO have a big deck).

I am working on a forum to add to this site, laptop in lap, where it rarely is, a jug of iced lemonade next to me, as well as an evening mug of Darjeeling tea, and I am thinking of opening a bottle of Ommegang Three Philosophers, a quadruple bock.

It is 79 degrees, low humidity, the slightest of breezes wafting by now and then, and I am in the shade of the trees that surround me. No one is running power tools; traffic is so light on I-287, about a mile away, that I can barely hear a quiet hum from it. The birds are active and vocal; my tenants scurry by every now and then and stop to stare at me. (Chipmunks are cute, but not very talkative). There is a pair of woodpeckers nesting nearby and often one scrambles around a tree close enough that I can watch it hunt for grubs by slamming it head against the bark. Something I find strangely entertaining.

A young deer, still in fawn spots, just crashed down the hill through the trees and stopped in horror at the sight of a human staring back at it. I shooed it back to mom. Someone just learned to look before they leap, literally.

The birds are chattering away so nicely I have not bothered to crank up some tunes, as I often do when working on the PC. (Current fave: Rob Costlow). The accompanying chirps, twitters and flutters, along with the occasional thwock-thwock-thwock from the woodpeckers are enough.

You know, sometimes New Jersey is not so bad, if you can forget the politics.

Crap. I shouldn’t have said that.

Recently, an Amendment to the Constitution was barely defeated. This Amendment would have authorized Congress to pass laws prohibiting the physical desecration of the flag.

The Text:

The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.

This would have been only the third time in U.S. history that the Constitution was used to oppress the rights of people under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government. The defeat was a good defeat, and hopefully this will not come up again. The upcoming elections in November will change the configuration of Congress, so that this will have less chance than ever of passing. At least it should if we have any respect for freedom.

Does anyone remember the two times violations of human rights were written into the Constitution?

The first time was at it’s very creation, and officially became law upon ratification on June 21, 1788 with that first and most egregious oppression of human rights, the Three fifths clause that institutionalized slavery in the US. The delegates knew that it would lead to conflict later on, but without it the slave states would not join a union, and fearing a division of strength in the face of the global powers of the day, not to mention the threat of mother England trying to regain control of her former colonies, the abolitionists relented.

And it did. A mere 73 years later, within the lifetime of many alive as youngsters when ratified, this bastard clause led to the Civil War in 1861. One of the bloodiest battles in history, the bloodiest in U.S. history so far, Antietam, occurred during that war. Wounds were created that still fester to this day, generations later.

The second time rights violations were written in was when Alchohol Prohibition was enshrined by way of the 18th Amendment. An attempt at human social engineering the world had not yet seen the like of in modern times, until the truth of the horrors of the Soviet and Red Chinese revolutions that were hidden at the time, saw light.

This rasp of idiocy led to a decade of violence, corruption and cynicism on the part of the American populace. It started the tear in the fabric of trust the public had in government, a tear that has grown ever larger as the decades since have rolled on. But we did learn one big lesson form that mistake. Never put these things into the Constitution, a lesson learned well by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he implemented his rape of the Constitution during his New Deal. A lesson learned by those that later went on to wage “wars” on Poverty, Drugs and Guns.

Both of these attempts to restrict rights through the Constitution led to violence and death. It could be argued that Prohibition still does, through the never abandoned idea that simply banning something potentially harmful, can make society all better.

What could be the consequences of a ban on Flag Burning?

The first erosion of the hard won victories in free speech, for one. After all, if we can ban something as offensive as flag burning some people, what can we ban next? Gay porn is offensive, so ban that. Next could be Heterosexual porn of certain genre’s and then of course all of it.

How about offensive political speech? I could certainly stand to see less of Rick “Gays ‘R Bad, mmkay?” Santorum, Ted Stevens, Cynthia McKinney, Jabba the Kennedy.

Those folks all spout stuff offensive to many, can we ban them next?

How about Intelligent Design nonsense? Can we ban that? No? Not enough support? Well Evolution then, that pisses a lot of people off.

What kind of response will we see from the population when more and more speech is banned as a desecration by more and more Amendments, provided the bother of further Amendments is even pretended. This would seem to be a perfect laboratory for the Law of Unintended Consequences. I, however, do not care to be a rat in that maze.

Flag burning is such an infrequent occurrence that to pass a Constitutional Amendment to ban it, it is clear, is nothing more than a cynical attempt to pander to the most rabid right wing ideologs in a manner that will intimidate the weak-kneed on the left to go along.

And it almost worked.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Why the First Amendment?

This is why:

A large Delaware school district promoted Christianity so aggressively that a Jewish family felt it necessary to move to Wilmington, two hours away, because they feared retaliation for filing a lawsuit. The religion (if any) of a second family in the lawsuit is not known, because they’re suing as Jane and John Doe; they also fear retaliation. Both families are asking relief from “state-sponsored religion.”
…
Classmates accused Alex Dobrich of “killing Christ” and he became fearful about wearing his yarmulke, the complaint recounts. He took it off whenever he saw a police officer, fearing that the officer might see it and pull over his mother’s car. When the family went grocery shopping, the complaint says, “Alexander would remove the pin holding his yarmulke on his head for fear that someone would grab it and rip out some of his hair.”

In addition:

Special privileges for christian students not available to jews or other non-christians, taunts, physical harassment, deliberate, premeditated violation of law and U.S. Supreme Court rulings by both the school board and a local judge.

Sounds to me there area few folks down there that need to start looking to their Second Amendment rights. And it aint the christians.

hat tip fark

Wanna have one?

Just watch THIS

You didn’t really want to sleep tonight, now did you?

Hat tip boingboing

Over at bicycledesign a few weeks ago, (Most blogs on my blogroll are monthly checks, few are daily or weekly checks), James is talking about a new Campagnolo crankset design, and going further to comment on how Campy has been more of a follower on innovation than a leader as Shimano has been, and looking back at what Campy meant in the past:

As a teenager in the late 80’s, I dreamed of owning a bike decked out with the brand new C-Record grouppo (I think it replaced Super Record in ’87). If I could have afforded it, I would have gladly ditched my Shimano 600 components for sleek looking Campy parts. My preference for Shimano didn’t happen overnight. Throughout the nineties, Shimano just kept innovating while Campy seemed to be resting on tradition, and occasionally following along. I know that some of you will disagree with me, but you have to admit that Shimano came up with some great improvements to the bicycle’s drivetrain in the last 15 years or so. I, for one, am certainly not interested in going back to friction downtube shifters and 6 speed freewheels anytime soon. Of course, to be fair, I should point out that Campagnolo also has a history of innovation. I like quick release hubs as much as the next guy, but really, how long can you rest on that one?

Yup. Back when I started cycling, and graduated to my first real bike, (around 13-14 years old????, 1972-3 era), it was a Frejus ‘Tour de France’ model. Did I buy it from Mike Fraysee in Ridgefield Park, NJ?, I forget, maybe. But somewhere in NJ, not local to my town. It had the typical hodge-podge of components common back then. Huret Jubilee rear derailleur, sew-up tires, Fiamme rims, quill style pedals with real toe-clips. Was it Reynolds 531 tubing?, I think so. I think it even had Bernard Thevenet’s signature decal on it, so maybe it was later. Anyone remember French and Italian threads? Or Detto shoes with those nail on cleats?

But it had no Campy parts, and I had to have something Campy. Even as a pre-driving-age teenager, with no cash, I managed it. From Ridgewood Cycle I scored three, count ‘em, THREE, Campy cable clips to keep my rear brake cable safely secured to the top tube, in a fashion no doubt better for it’s Campy-ness.

All that said, what I really hate about today’s components is obsolescence and a lack of spare parts and reparability. Similar to electronics, many, if not all, of today’s bicycle parts are throw-aways, even those costing hundreds, even thousands of dollars. The expensive components are sold to folks rich enough to not care, or desperate enough to want the best and willing to suffer the expense if, (when), they fail, and the inexpensive components are not worth the labor to fix, unless you can do it yourself. And then finding a way to fix it makes the time involved more than it is worth for all but the most resourceful and talented tinkerers.

Not everything new is better. Sometimes it is, sometimes it is just more cynically designed and marketed. Or both.

Please write the Sci Fi Channel to protest their presenting WRESTLING instead of science fiction:

What the heck are you doing now?

It was bad enough when you put on Jonathan Edwards cynical and fraudulent predation of the gullible, vulnerable and emotionally scarred, or that inane Scare Tactics show, or that Ghost Busters stupidity.

Now WRESTLING?

Have you gone out of your collective mind?

I’ll bet you thought the Pontiac Aztec was a good idea too.

What next? Live Call-in Astrology with a Caribbean palm reader?

Stop it. Stop it now and get beck to real Science Fiction. Even Plan 9 from Outer Space would be preferable.

In disgust,

Tom Wright

Write them here: Feedback at Sci Fi

Bill Whittle, whose writing I was introduced to with his post Tribes, just before he went on hiatus to go do something trivial like earn a living, has finally posted.

Humans are animals. I do not mean that in a negative way. But that is what we are: creatures capable of great good and great harm, susceptible to animal fears and passions, lower than angels but not without grace. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – a man who has seen a fair amount of both good and evil – wrote of that fault line, “that line separating good and evil, passing not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but right through every human heart. “

As animals, we are wired to live in a state of nature. In the long marathon of our history, our civilizations are only the last two or three halting steps. It took millions of years to design and build the human animal. It will likely take that long again to design out all of the passions and furies that brought us here.

Until then, we live with a choice: to live in a state of nature, or a state of law. The state of nature is the default condition that the huge majority of human lives has lived under, and continue to live under to this very day – lives solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short in Hobbes’ memorable phrase. Or, we can chose to impose upon our internal fault line a series of laws and customs, a Civilization, that imperfectly attempts to keep as many of us as possible on the side of the angels.

That Civilization is not a natural state.

A long and worthwhile post.

And he promises MORE!

Giggity!

Hat tip to Geek

Jeff over at Alphecca just sent me a note to say he was not able to connect to my blog, but all seems ok here. I can find me at .com, .net and .org urls.

It is nice to know there are folks out there looking out for you!

I have not posted in a while, since I actually got a job.

Plus I am back on the bike, when I can, trying to keep my waistline below my age.

Add keeping up with posts over at Colony: Alchibah, and I have been a busy boy.

Once things settle down and I get into the new routine, I’ll be back.

Maybe if I stop commenting on other blogs, I would have time for my own….

Update: Turns out I blocked his ISP. I was swamped by comment spam a while ago and blocked a bunch of ISP’s before installing a blocker, but forgot to unblock them even after I realize they were spoofed IP’s.

Sorry, if I blocked you, but at this point, you may not see this.

Kevin over at the Smallest Minority has posted a seemingly reluctant endorsement, (acquiescence?), to the need for a return to building nuclear power plants.

Some of the reasons he and commentors mention for, (and largely eliminate), halting nuke power plant implementation in the past include cost, inefficiency and danger.

Overly burdensome regulations, opposition willing to bankrupt itself to fight every plant built through regulatory hearings, the courts and by other means are all included therein.

Plus, as was pointed out, each nuke plant here is essentially a custom designed one-off. So each design has to be individually approved by regulators, rather than using a previously approved design. The costs are huge, running into the billions of dollars. No wonder power companies returned to building fossil fuel, (FF), burning power plants, like coal, oil and gas.

In addition, the design itself, requiring huge, redundant cooling systems guarantees they will be very expensive, even if regulations were streamlined, and designs were standardized

But what was not mentioned specifically is that expensive, high-pressure light water reactors are no longer needed, or may not be. There has been a move lately towards Pebble Bed Reactors, where the fissionable material is packed into billiard ball sized ‘pebbles’ and loaded into a reactor vessel. Helium is pumped through it, expands and drives turbines, at much lower pressure than steam, which also provides the cooling. Each modular reactor is fairly small, they can be spread out closer to the point of use, (lowering transmission loses and vulnerability to attack), and can be duplicated easily, since they are much cheaper to build than the current tech is.

Both mainland China and South Africa are leading in the drive to pilot and implement this technology.

The advantages are that if the reactor over heats, the Pebbles expand, increasing the distance between them, which slows down or stops the reaction, without the need to mechanically manipulate control rods, allowing cooling. If gas escapes, being helium, it rises through the atmosphere and eventually out of it, rather than cooling to water vapor and settling to the ground. Some designs do still use variations of a control rod, but the basic idea is the same.

Not a new design, a rather old one dating from the 1950’s. The high pressure light water reactors we use now were chosen for political reasons as much as for engineering reasons. Even then, they were given all sorts of subsidies and limits on liability in case of accident, all in a drive to make the US the leader in peaceful nuke tech.

Nuke tech has advantages, similar to those of FF, over renewable sources of energy, like ethanol and hydrogen as well as solar driven energy tech like photo-voltaic, wind and hydro, or geothermal.

Nukes can be placed anywhere, (within reason), just as FF plants can be.
Nukes are using a ready made store of energy that we only need to extract. The storing of the energy has already been done by geological processes over the course of millions of years. With ethanol and hydrogen energy stores, we need to do the storing of energy into them, (create them), that is not needed for FF.

With hydro, wind and geothermal, there are limited areas where they can be used efficiently, which is also true, to a lesser extent, for photo-voltaic. Not all places are suitable for hydro, lacking sufficient or suitable water sources. The same goes for wind, if it is intermittent or not sufficiently strong. Geothermal may be fine for Iceland, or those living near a place such as Yellowstone, but for Chicago, Boston, London and other cities not near geothermal vents it is a non-starter. Solar has the widest geological potential, but can be complicated with it’s need for battery storage to carry over through night or over cloudy days. While photo-voltaic panel costs are dropping, the cost of the infrastructure needed to support it has not moved much. Not to mention costs to recycle old batteries once they wear out. In some areas such as far northern or southern latitudes, it is not practical due to the weakness of the sunlight reaching the ground.

Nukes have been roundly criticized in the past, (and rightly so in many cases), but as the technology has matured, and new designs are being developed, it is time to reconsider it. Pebble Bed Reators are being critisized now as well. While some of the criticisms seem like complaining that modern cars do not have crank starters, we should listen to these concerns where they are rational.

What we should avoid though, is another drive to implement it as we had back in the 1960’s-70’s, with subsidies and liability limits. Streamline the process for approval, encourage the use of standard designs, perhaps by automatic approval of designs used elsewhere that were previously approved. But do not subsidize, and certainly do not limit liability in the case of an accident, as the Price-Anderson Act currently does.

Encourage the development of new technology, and permit use of designs developed elsewhere, such as China and South Africa. After all, in a global economy, there are US companies involved, (pdf link), in those efforts as well, so it will benefit us as much as them.

Lets stop being obstructionist, be watchful, but helpful, and let business and technology loose to solve our energy problems.

I used the phrase ‘up-thinking’ in a comment over at The Smallest Minority, and got a question from someone as to what it meant.

I realized it was rather obscure.

It is a reference to something that has been floating around in Libertarian circles for a few years now. An answer to how we define ourselves in the U.S. political spectum od Left/Right. Answer: We can’t.

But when you look at the various political quizes, such as The Worlds Smallest Political Quiz, arguably the most famous, and the charts the produce, the answer jumps out at you.

The answer is ‘Upwing’.

Which makes authoritarians of all stripes, left or right, ‘Downwing’.

I have recently seen Upwing used in some sort of quasi-collectivist technological context, but I have been hearing it in libertarian circles for at least a decade, so I feel we have precedence.

So if you consider yourself politically homeless, neither right nor left, socially tolerant and skeptical of govenment spending and solutions, perhaps you are Upwing.

Start spreading the word: Upwing.

You read that right: 24,000 pages. Twenty Four Thousand.

From the May, 31 2006 issue of IRS Newswire, (IR-2006-084):

The Internal Revenue Service today announced significant progress in its corporate e-file program, including the successful May 18, 2006 e-filing of the nation’s largest tax return from General Electric (GE).

On paper, GE’s e-filed return would have been approximately 24,000 pages long. After filing, GE received IRS’ acknowledgement of its filing in about an hour. The file was 237 MB.

“Having GE file electronically shows the program is working,” said IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson. “Having the largest tax return is a major milestone for the corporate e-file program. I appreciate GE’s work to get this done.”

(I just received this at 11:41 AM NJ time, it is not posted online that I can find yet).

Is there any better evidence that the tax code needs reform than that?

If my tax form costs me $200 for an “easy” one consisting of four little pages, it must cost GE well over a million dollars for this. At two cents a page to print it, it would cost almost $500 just to printit, plus copies for their own records, then the shipping cost…this is nuts.

I have some arguments with the Fair Tax, but they are fairly minor. It has some political momentum behind it, and with all its flaws, I think getting rid of this huge, invasive implement of torture and corruption that the income tax has become is imperitive.

No wonder so many companies and people are moving their legal residence to contries other than the US.

Recently, I have fed a troll over on another site who either refuses to, or is unable to, separate the sacrifices our soldiers have made, from earliest history up to today, from the actions of the politicians that sent them into harms way. This person, deficient in human understanding, paints all veterans, living and dead, with the stains of those that used them for reasons dishonorable, with no exception for those times that were honorable. It is people like this that have given Liberalism a bad name: The self righteous intolerance of the fanatic is not confined to religion.

Today I went online just to look up some poetry, thinking that would persuade and I found a lot.

Perhaps the most famous one:

In Flanders Fields
John McCrae
(1872-1918)

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Or this from Abraham Lincoln, while not poetry in the strict sense, is poetic how much it says in its brevity:

Executive Mansion
Washington, November 21, 1864

To Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass.

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department
a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts,
that you are the mother of five sons who have died
gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words
of mine which should attempt to beguile you from
the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot
refrain from tendering to you the consolation that
may be found in the thanks of the Republic they
died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the
anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only
the cherished memory of the loved and lost,
and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have
laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

Yours very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln

There is too much.

Perhaps I am getting soft in my old age, but much of what you will find brought tears to my eyes, and will to yours, if you have a heart and any human compassion in your being.

Do your own search, either online or in treeware, and find what affects you most.

I have been using Thunderbird for email for almost half a year and like it a lot, but it is missing some features that I need. Notably a Calender that I can sync up with my cellphone to keep track of appointments and tasks.

I have used the Outlook Calender on whatever office PC’s my job issued, but living without one when needed is inconvenient for someone with a disorganized cultch pile for a brain, like me.

So I needed install Outlook on my PC and migrate my email from Thunderbird.

Little did I know that this is an undertaking an average user should consider only as a last resort. I am an enterprise IT guy, dealing with mainframes and SAP, but not PC’s as anything other than as a user. I found this to be an annoyingly tedious task.

There are a few issues.

Thunderbird says they store email in a standard format called mbox. This may be true, but apparently the index files they use are non-standard, at least in their naming, according to one source. So Outlook and Outlook Express can not import directly. Nor is there a way to export email to another format, unless you open each message separately and do a ‘Save As’. With many thousands of emails this was not an attractive option.

In addition, moving the address book and email account settings is tricky as well. Also things you do not want to do manually.

There are a few ways to do this, but they all require multiple programs and steps.

The best way, for me, that I found was at broobles.com, but there are a few additional nuances I can add.

Here is how I managed it:

BUT REMEMBER, I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF THIS SCREWS UP. THERE ARE COUNTLESS VARIABLES, THIS WORKED FOR ME, IT MAY NOT FOR YOU.

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT DELETE ALL YOUR EMAIL FROM THUNDERBIRD OR UNINSTALL THUNDERBIRD UNTIL YOU ARE CERTAIN ALL IS WELL. EVEN THEN, IT DOES NOT HURT TO LEAVE IT INSTALLED SO LONG AS YOU DO NOT USE IT.

To migrate email from Thunderbird to Outlook:

• The one thing you must have first, other than the programs listed below, is the password to your email account, since you will need to enter this manually two times in this process. If you do not have it, change it to something new you will remember. your ISP can help you with this if you do not know how to do it yourself. Do not ask me!
• Install Outlook. (Outlook Express should already be somewhere on your PC).
• Download and install the IMAPSize program from Broobles.
• Delete email you do not want to keep from Thunderbird and then compact all folders. Remember to do this for each email account at each ISP separately. I had three accounts at two ISP’s. You will have one Inbox file for each one, highlight the line that contains the screen icon in the dropdown list and the go to File->Compact Folders on the menu at the top of your screen.
• Get the folder/directory names where your emails are stored in Firefox. I had my emails organized into many different folders, so this took a little detective work:
• Go back to that list of email accounts in your dropdown list just mentioned, right click and choose ‘Properties’, or got to Tools->Account Settings in the Firefox menu.
• Select ‘Server Settings’ for each account listed, and look at the bottom of the window at the ‘Local Directory:’ field. Copy this to a text document. To do this, click inside the field, hit your [home] key, then [shift]+[end] to highlight the entire contents, then [ctrl]+[c] to copy to your clipboard, and then paste into a text document, like Notepad.
• Compare the folder names to see if they are all the same or not. You will need to convert the emails in each folder.

These should all be in “C:\Documents and Settings\userid\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\something.default\Mail\mail.ispname-digit.xxx”

• Open Windows Explorer and navigate to these folders and start poking around.
• There will be email in any folder that contains another folder with a suffix of ‘.sbd’.
  Example: in the ‘Mail’ or ‘mail.ispname-digit.xxx‘ folder, there will be a ‘Local Folders’ file, in the ‘Local Folders’ file there will be an ‘Inbox.sbd’ folder as well as an ‘Inbox’ file and an ‘inbox.msf’ file. I do not know the purpose of the ‘.sbd’ folders. They seem to be some sort of sub-directory structure, but they should be considered as a marker, the emails will be stored alongside it, not in it. The index file is the ‘inbox.msf’ file. the emails are stored in the file that has no suffix, the ‘inbox’ file.
  Note that the ‘.sbd’ itself folder can be empty, or it can also store other ‘.sbd’ folders. So while an ‘.sbd’ folder will not store emails for itself, it will store emails for any ‘.sbd’ folders it happens to hold, if any. Confused? Good. Poke around in there a bit and you should figure it out.
• These folders are created when you create a folder to store emails in. You will need to run the IMAPSize program against each of these email files. So you can, if you wish, make your task easier by consolidating emails into fewer folders in Thunderbird, deleting empty folders through Thunderbird, and then compressing them to eliminate them. Do not do this through Windows Explorer, do it all through Thunderbird. It is easiest if they are all in the ‘inbox’ folder, though less organized.
• Once you know where your email files are, start the IMAPSize program you installed. If it asks about creating accounts, choose ‘no’.
• Go to Tools->mbox2eml. In the popup window, ’select mbox files to convert’, change the ‘Files of type’ selection to ‘All files (*.*)’ and start selecting all the files containing emails that you want to convert. You may want to convert emails from different ISP’s separately, but that is an organizational decision that is up to you.
• Choose a folder to create the converted emails in, I recommend creating a new folder, one for each ISP if you are converting separately. The IMAPSize program will create subfolders, one for each email file you selected.
• You can delete and recreate these new files a few times if you need to play with this a bit. Just do not touch the original files in the Thunderbird directories. The IMAPSize will only read them, it will not alter them in any way that I saw, but I did not write this program, so no guarantees.
• Export your Thunderbird address book by opening the Address Book in Thunderbird, going to Tool->Export, and exporting to an ‘.LDIF’ file.
• Open Outlook Express, go to File->Import->Other Address Book, choose ‘LDIF - LDAP Data Interchange Format (*.ldif)’ and browse to the file you exported from Thunderbird. Addresses should be imported without a problem.
• To import the emails, open both Outlook Express and then Windows Explorer. Try to have both open in small windows side-by-side, since you will be doing drag and drop.
• In Outlook Express highlight the Inbox folder. You should see three windows inside O.E.: A ‘Folders’ window on the left, and two windows on the right, one above the other.
• Using Windows Explorer, go to the folder to which you exported the emails from Thunderbird and open the Inbox folder. You should see a bunch of files with the ‘.eml’ suffix.
• Highlight all the ‘.eml’ files and drag them over to the upper right window in O.E. and release them. They should all be copied there, the first one will show up in the lower right window.
• Continue like this with all the folders created by the IMAPSize program. You can create new folders in O.E. to match any folders storing emails, by using File->New->Folder and creating a new folder name to match the name of the folder you are copying ‘.eml’ files from. Highlight the new folder in O.E. first, then drag the ‘.eml’ files over to it, and you will be keeping the folder structure you had.
• Create all your email accounts in Outlook Express by going to Tools->Accounts and select Add, then Mail. You can get all the information from Thunderbird by opening Thunderbird and going to Tools->Account Settings. If you have any problems, contact your ISP for help, since each has their own settings.
• Test your accounts by sending email from Outlook Express and receiving it in Thunderbird, and sending from Thunderbird and receiving in Outlook Express. Do a Send-Receive All in O.E. first, so you do not accidentally get a wayward email into Thunderbird. If that happens, just forward it to yourself as an attachment from Thunderbird and receive it onto O.E.
• Once Outlook Express is working, you have done the hard work, now we can import into Outlook.
• Open Outlook, go to File->Import and Export->Import Internet Mail and Addresses, Choose Outlook Express as the source program, and check the three selections at the bottom of the window, make sure you want to import Mail, Address Book and Rules. You will likely not have rules so nothing will be imported. This will import all messages and addresses from Outlook Express, retaining the folder structure you created in O.E.
• To import the account settings, in Outlook go to File->Import and Export->Import Internet Mail Account Settings, select Next, select Outlook Express, select Next and accounts should be imported. The first time you use them, you will need to enter the passwords. So do a test like the one you did when migrating from Thunderbird to O.E., but this time use O.E. and Outlook.
• This is an annoying process, so if you run into problems, remember that Google is your friend, and your ISP is a phone call away. Do not call me, I never want to do this again.

So after all of this, my questions are:

Why does Mozilla Thunderbird use a ’standard’ format to store messages in, but apparently non-standard index files, and non-standard file names, which at least partially destroys the reason to use a standard format?

Why does Thunderbird have no export function?

Even bigger questions for Microsoft:

Why, with all the resources at Microsoft’s disposal, does it take TWO intermediary programs to enable a migration from Thunderbird to Outlook?

Why is so much of the functionality to perform this migration left in Outlook Express?

Why is a third party program needed in addition to the Microsoft programs?

Doesn’t Microsoft want people to be able to migrate to their product?

Anyway, if you need to do this, I hope the above is helpful. Good luck, don’t call me, use at your own risk, your mileage may vary, past success is no garantee of future returns. Etc. etc.

Is it possible? Could there be a spore of a reformation wafting about the House of Submission?

A recent assassination of a senior judge by a religious-chanting assassin has sparked large protests from the secular parts of that society.

NRO’s Michael Rubin is on the case.

Instapundit is linking, but this seems to me to be a big deal with little coverage. We are talking about SECULAR protests in a MUSLIM country. Yet our media are not covering it. I suspect not so much out of sympathy for islamists as out general apathy over anything that does not involve the US in an immediate and direct manner. Though I could be wrong.

Drudge has two headlines, one right after the other on his front page right now:

THE MONKEY THAT TALKS IN SENTENCES…

Pat Robertson: God Says Tsunami Possible For U.S…

Just too true.

Somehow I think the first monkey, (the little hairy one), has more important things to say than the second monkey, (the larger, balder one).
The first monkey certainly makes more sense.