Just An Earth-Bound Misfit, I

They called the bank and made a reservation to rob it.

Worth a try!

You Would Think That George W. Bush Would Have Retired to China

After all, China is the most avid practitioner of the death penalty and, as everyone knows, Dubya simply got off on the idea of ordering people to die.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Michael Steele and the Strippers

No, that's not the name of a rock band. Michael Steele, the chairman of the Party of Hoover, spent $1,946.25 at Voyeur West Hollywood, a Los Angeles bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex.

You just have to love those Republicans when they put their blather about "family values" into practice.

Steele apparently has no qualms about spending Party of Hoover funds on financing a really luxurious lifestyle for himself. But absent something worthy of a Federal indictment, the GOP isn't going to fire him. He knows it and they know it.

UPDATE: The RNC issued a statement that basically said "Steele wasn't there, see, you can't prove he was there, see, so there, nyah!" They'll probably find some sacrificial staffie to fire.

FBI Raids Christianist Militia(s)

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

UPDATE: TPM has the indictment. We'll see if the press will throw around the terms "domestic terrorism" and "terrorist" in the same way that they would have done if the folks indicted were of a different faith. I'm not betting that they will. They don't here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Even the Canadian press won't use the T-word.

I guess one has to be a Muslim in order to be a terrorist (or to be confined incommunicado for three years in the Charleston Naval Weapons Station Brig and/or waterboarded).

Moscow Bombing

Two female suicide bombers hit the Moscow metro this morning. One of the women attacked the commuters at the Lubyanka station. There was probably a message in that one, as the Soviet/Russian security services have their headquarters at Lubyanka.

There was near panic throughout the rest of the Moscow metro system.

Immediate suspicion is that the bombers were from Chechnya or Ingushetia.

More here and here.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

"Gentlemen, You Can't Think In Here, This Is a Think Tank!"

That's probably about all I should say with regard to David Frum's being fired from a wingnut think tank.

I loved the AEI line: "We value a diversity of opinion."

Except when it differs from the party orthodoxy, it would seem.

Closing the Barn Door

Murdoch is going to charge for Internet access to the London Times.

Until every newspaper with a web site starts to do the same, I don't see how that will do much more than ensure that the Times of London is less influential aroun the globe. The choice to put news for free on the Internet was made back in the FTP days; the GUI of the web only made it easier.

Thug; Ventilated

50 rounds of .45 ACP ball at about seven yards:

I used the magnets to tack it to the refrigerator door to try and get some contrast with the target itself. Most of the shots were from practicing a Mozambique drill: Two shots as quickly as possible into the torso, followed by an aimed shot to the face. My second shots seem to hit lower and one would have given him a 230gr liposuction. A couple of the first shots would have smashed his gun hand and likely ended things that way.

One of the headshots was a clean miss (might have grazed him), the others would have put him down.

Thug is taking an old-style stance of looking over the sights, not really using them, and using his off-hand to protect his heart.

The cartridges were some Sellier & Bellot stuff that was in my ammo box. It had to be close to ten years old; I'm trying to make an effort to shoot out the older stuff that I have on hand, now that the Great Ammo Shortage seems to be easing.

Do They Make a Car Called the "Sloth"?

If you're going to park your car right in front of the supermarket...

.....driving a Honda Fit would seem to peg the irony meter.

Protecting the Interests of the Banksters

Yes, there is an entire Federal agency whose job is to protect the banksters. Whether it is by stopping states from enforcing usury laws or predatory lending laws or laws that stop the banksters from inserting onerous provisions in mortgages, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has the bankster's back.

I do not understand why we need to spend taxpayer's dollars to protect the interests of the banksters.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Knocking Them Together

President Obama is making some recess appointments.

In a tiredly predicable reaction, the Republicans are professing to be just outraged. They seem to be hoping that people will forget that the Hooverites were not so outraged when Chimpy made nearly 200 recess appointments during his soon-to-be-forgotten-by-history presidency.

Classic Maher

"The Democrats need to push the rest of their agenda while their boot is on the neck of the greedy poisonous old reptile. .... We need to put terrorists and other human rights violators on trial in civilian courts, starting with Dick Cheney."

Caturday Repaired

"Hey, moron, put down the camera and fix the food bowl!"

George is playing with a Q-Tip:

Gracie asks: "George, you're playing with a Q-Tip? Are you retarded or something?"

(I posted an earlier version of this on a time-delay. It seems to have vanished from the queue.)

Friday, March 26, 2010

The Banksters

From Bloomberg News:

JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and UBS AG were among more than a dozen Wall Street firms involved in a conspiracy to pay below-market interest rates to U.S. state and local governments on investments, according to documents filed in a U.S. Justice Department criminal antitrust case.

Banksters conspiring to commit fraud against their clients.

Gee, who'd a thunk?

I

I believe that UBS is the criminal enterprise that Phil "America is a Nation of Whiners" Gramm was representing during his last years in the Senate and which he went to work for after he quit being a senator. He might have been arrogant enough to have left his fingerprints over this mess.

(H/T)

Is Brain Bleach Kosher for Passover?

The Message: "Fuck With Me and I Will Fuck You Back"

That is the message that President Obama has given Prime Minister Netanyahu during his just-concluded visit to Washington. No state dinner, no joint news conference, even leaving a meeting so that Netanyahu could get his shit together.

The same message has, in essence, been sent by the Right's favorite general.

One of the problems for Netanyahu is that his erstwhile allies back home seem to be intent on embarrassing him at every turn. They seem to like to announce projects that can be viewed as provocative when Netanyahu is trying to make nice with foreign officials. I'm surprised that Joe Biden just didn't say "fuck this noise" and jump back on AF2 during his recent visit.

Fan; Hitting; Shit

A South Korean navy warship is sinking. It may have been torpedoed.

Things might get a little bit more interesting.

Deceptive Fucking ISPs

Their marketing is pretty deceptive.

I get advertising flyers from the two high-speed ISPs in this area: Comcast and Verizon. Comcast advertises that their service has "a maximum speed of 6Mbps". Verizon, which is still only offering DSL in these parts, advertises 1Mbps.

This is what is deceptive: Nobody gives a shit about bits per second. File sizes are not measured in bits, but bytes. There are eight bits in a byte. So if you want to download a large file on Verizon, you might as well go get yourself a cup of coffee, as that 10MB video is really 80Mb and, since the maximum speed is rarely ever achieved, it'll take awhile.

And if you have dial-up at 56Kbps, which is usually more like 48Kbps, you can go cook a meal and do a load of laundry.

The Clerical Child Molesters

The child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church just keep piling up. They are all pretty much depressingly the same: Priests and monks molest children and, if there are complaints, the molesters are moved to another parish, to a different diocese or even a different country and they continue to abuse children. The Church hierarchy does what it can to sweep it under the rug, even to the point of the victims that if they complain to the civil authorities, the victims will be excommunicated. When the scandal does come out, eventually, there are expressions of repentance and calls for prayer and contemplation, but never any hint that there is something rotten in the structure of the Church.

I have to wonder this: How much of this is due to the requirement for celibacy? The sexual drive is a powerful one, as probably every adult knows. The drive to couple sexually causes people to make a lot of stupid choices in their lives. Sometimes those choices are far over the line into criminal acts.

The drive for sex is maybe a little less than the need to eat.

So I have to wonder if the Catholic Church will ever face up to this reality and admit that the command that its priests, monks and nuns be celibate forever is a bad idea.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

A $1,400 Bottle of Wine is Just Cheap Plonk to Oxycotin Boy

There are a couple of guys who are raising money to buy Rush "I Send My Maid Out to Score Me Some Drugs" Limpbag to Costa Rica.

Well, el "All Druggies Should Be Executed, Except For Me" Rushbo is saying that "1,400 bucks won't even buy a bottle of wine on my plane."

Must be some pretty primo swill that His Assholiness guzzles down on his G550.

(The registered owner of that gold-plated barge is "CFS Air, LLC" in Connecticut. There may be no truth to the supposition that "CFS" stands for "Certified Fascist Shmuck".)

I would have thought that this would have been a more appropriate aircraft for him:

Cap & Trade--- zOMG, Socialism!!!1!!11!

You might have read all sorts of shit on the conservative blogs decrying the idea of "cap & trade" as a way to control CO2 emissions.

I guess they've forgotten that cap & trade was a Republican idea. Cap & trade originated from the GOP-allied think tanks over 20 years ago as a way to use market forces to control the emission of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides to reduce "acid rain." Cap & trade was a centerpiece of the 1990 Clean Air Act, which was signed into lay by a Republican president.

But now cap & trade is a dangerous liberrrrullll/commie/socialist idea, along with other formerly Republican ideas such as civil rights for minorities, limiting the power of monopolies and oligarchies ("trust busting"), ensuring that food and medicines are safe and protecting the rights of workers.

Go figure.

I gather that somebody had better enroll George H.W. Bush and the Republicans in the congress in 1990 into the CPUSA and get their party cards out to them..

Fascist Thugs

Threatening violence and carrying out acts of vandalism because your side lost a political fight?

Real classy moves. And they are sowing the seeds of future defeats for their case, as nobody cares for the opinions of bullies and thugs:

The dark and personal tone of the final stages of the health fight could complicate Republican efforts to maintain their attacks on the legislation if they are seen as inciting an undue level of outrage and, conversely, could bolster Democrats if opponents of the measure are seen as breaching the boundaries of civility.

No "could" about it. It will make it harder for Republicans. It will also push moderates towards the Democrats' positions, as there are legions of reasonable people who will not want to be associated with foaming goons and neo-nazis.

By the way, remember the "individual mandate" that has the Teabaggers and their boot-licking allies in the GOP so upset? Guess what: It was a Republican idea. Mitt Romney was for it (though if he hasn't flip-flopped away from it, he will). John McCain was a very early advocate of an individual mandate. Democrats were more in favor of a public option or even single payor, but went with the Republicans' idea.

But now, because it was a Democratic congress that pushed health care reform through and because it was Democratic president that signed it, the Republicans are against an individual mandate.

The GOP has no ideas, all they have is a deep-rooted need to play the politics of a schoolyard. They are the proverbial "dogs in a manger". So much for "Country First", a campaign slogan that has always been a absolute and total lie.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Polite Bank Robbers

The Flake Equation

From xkcd:

(As always, click on the image to embiggen)

In a conversation a few months ago, an acquaintance was describing something that had happened to her. At the end of her tale, she said: "I can't explain it, it must have been a miracle."

I said: "What do you mean by `I can't explain it', you just did."

She looked at me as though I had just switched over to speaking in Swedish. I left it at that rather than go on and point out that not having a rational explanation for the occurrence, she was offering an irrational explanation.

There are times that I'd like to have a retail store, just for the fun of pricing something as "$√-36, one per customer", just to see how long it would take for someone to try to pay for it with imaginary money.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Do We Have the Teabaggers to Thank for Health Care Reform?

Seriously. The Teabaggers may have made the difference.

I called my congressman's office on Monday to express my thanks for his vote on the health care bill. I also thanked the staffer who answered the call for working the phones and for putting up with the abusive calls. He told me that they got a lot of them.

Now I don't know about you, but as for me, I've never found it to be very persuasive when people threaten me and and insult me and yell at me in order to motivate me to do something. It often works the other way; I'll not do what they want at all, I'll figure out a way to fuck up the works of what they want done or, at the very least, I'll take my own sweet time about it and make sure that whatever I do for them is the barest of bare minimums.

I expect that I'm not the only person like that.

So when the Teabaggers called up the staffers of the congressmen who had not made up their minds and yelled at them, and when they screamed at the staffers of the congressmen who were leaning towards the bill, I'll bet that was reported to the congressmen. I wouldn't be a tad bit surprised if there were not a few congressmen who concluded "fuck these assholes" and voted for the bill.

Serious Drool-Inducing WANT, Pt. II

So take this airplane, which I blogged about before, and marry in this engine.

I'm not sure what the difference in weight will be. The Falconer weight is "firewall forward", the weights given in the Supermarine web pages are not. The Falconer's full power couldn't be used at takeoff, but you don't ram the throttle of a Spitfire or a Mustang all the way forward on takeoff, not unless you want to kill yourself with a torque roll. You don't want to go past Vne without some serious flutter testing.

But it would sound cooler and you'd have power up a lot higher.

Wastelands

Tew-Mac Airport as it once was:

Now a bunch of generic condos, because the world needs more faceless condominium projects.

But at least they made some use of Tew-Mac after they killed the airport. This is the Stormville Airport (N69). The legend is that the operator of the airport died; the offspring who inherited the airport were not interested in running it, so they drove the aircraft that were based there away and closed the FBO. They hold flea-markets there a few times a year, which is probably as many as they can get away with under the local zoning codes.

The airport is still officially open, possibly because the operator took Federal grant money for improvements. But there are no services to be had, no airplanes are based there. You can see the taxiways that ran by the tiedowns on the far side of the airport. Occasionally, someone will shoot landings into the airport.

South of Stormville is the old Mahopac Airport. It was a grass airport and the only airport in Putnam County, New York. It closed about seven or eight years ago. Nothing has been done with it since.

The county government bought the land for "watershed protection" reasons, as Putnam County is within the reservoir watershed for New York City. To be honest about it, if the environmental officials in New York City had their way, nobody would be living in Westchester County north of I-287, in Putnam and Dutchess Counties, and in and around the Catskill Mountains.

Kill the Bill?

From Driftglass:

Of course, the Teabaggers stayed classy right to the end, demonstrating their absolute lack of faith in the democratic process:

Really. You clowns lost an election, so the party and the president that you didn't vote for is enacting the legislation that they promised to enact, and your response is to threaten violence and assassination? Your reaction is to commit acts of vandalism and to shout racial and homophobic epithets?

Class act.

Why do the Teabaggers hate democracy? Why do they hate freedom? If they are so against the idea that there are two political parties and that the party in power will enact the legislation that they favor, why don't they just leave this country and move to a one-party state that is more in tune with their ideals? Heck, they can move to a no-government state if they want.

But if they have so little faith in the political process, here is a free word of advice for the Teabaggers: Emigrate.

Fuck Comcast

I've blogged before about the fact that those jerkholes at ComBastards now require that everyone have cable boxes for expanded basic cable. That means, of course, that you can no longer watch one show while taping another. Worse, you cannot set up a VCR/DVR to record shows that are on at different times at different channels. You have to manually switch the box to the second channel.

What I once did was that if I wanted to tape a show at 10pm and then catch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report at 11, I'd set the VCR to catch a rebroadcast from Comedy Central at 1AM. I'd do that because the shows these days have an annoying tendency to go a little long. But, like I said, the asswipes at ComBestialitists have made that impossible (unless I want to festoon my living room with cable boxes).

I mention all of that, again, because on Wednesday, I taped Justified and I missed this:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Sean Carroll

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Health Care reform

Fucking Comcast.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Waaah!

The Army does not like WikiLeaks. (PDF, 34 pages)

Poor babies.

The Armchair Generalist's post has it right: You cannot stop the signal.

Low-Tech Self Defense

Well, it was state-of-the-art five million or so years ago:

Police say a 66-year-old Massachusetts woman fought off a man trying to abduct her by bashing him in the face repeatedly with a rock and forcing him to flee with blood pouring from his wounds.

Whatever works. I'll bet, though, that in the UK, she'd be up on charges for assaulting one of the poor, hard-working members of Thuggus Britannicus.

All of which is a good excuse to post this PSA, which I found on BobG's blog:

Photoage

Somebody had a sense of humor when it came to naming this road:

Here we see a female member of the species Asshatus Americanus. This particular self-important bint scored a two-fer in that she both parked right in front of the entrance to the supermarket (presumably while her precious snowflake did her shopping) and she also managed to block the marked crosswalk.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

There Is a Reason Why "To Protect & To Serve" Is Not the Motto of the NYPD

Because "To Harass and Annoy" would be far closer to the truth.

Say you are on a subway train. You're coming home from working overtime on a second shift job. There are two other people in the subway car. You're tired as hell nd you spread out over a couple of seats. No harm, right?

Wrong. A NYPD goon will drag your ass off the train for "seat-hogging" and give you a $50 ticket.

The cops are doing it because, to put it bluntly, they are lazy-ass fucks. They can just stand in the station and look in the windows of the subway trains that pull into the station. They don't have to chase anybody or do anything other than go in a train and order people off.

The only thing that this accomplishes, though, is to create more animosity between the people of the city and the cops that are, supposedly, there to protect them.

Justified

I finally got around to watching my recording of the first episode of Justified. It was pretty decent. It helps, though, to ignore the idea that everybody in Kentucky has a full set of brilliant-white teeth, including the neo-nazi hangers-on. No browning from coffee or tobacco or missing teeth from fights or poor dental care.

Anyway, the sun is high, the clouds are non-existent, it's passably warm out, so I'm off to the airport.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

What Do Casinos and Big-Box Stores have in Common?

They're watching your every move, from the moment you drive into their parking lots until the moment you drive out.

The stores say that they are watching you "for research", like you're some kind of goddammed critter in a rainforest somewhere.

Sure they are.

Here's what is coming down the road: You walk into a one of the large-chain retailers. You buy something with a credit card. A camera at the register records that transaction and now they have your name, address and what you look like. If they get your e-mail address, then the next time you go to the store and look at something, but don't buy it, you might get a targeted e-mail offer.

But it'll all go into some huge-ass database somewhere and if there is anything that we have learned during the Chimpy Administration, it is that if the retailers assemble databases, the feds will get access to them.

It's Caturday!

Bella is peering from atop a chair. The photo was taken through the railings of a banister from the floor below.

Rocky seems to be a bit annoyed. He is a one-person cat and tha person is most assuredly not me.

Bella is curled up on a bed and watching me. What she wants is for me to put down the bloody camera and get to petting and scratching her.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Serious Drool-Inducing WANT!

Spitfire Mk26B:

I'm not a big fan of having fuel tanks behind the engine, as in a crash, that is a recipe for crispy-critters. But for this, I'd get nomex.

Not sure why the cruise speed with a V-8 engine is higher than Vne, but the bugger does move along. A Mk V Spitfire was 90 knots faster, but it did have a much larger engine, even if those eight .303s added some weight.

Yet Another For the Cranky Prof

Who has been feeling a bit sub-par of late:

It would have been nice, though, if the creator had a spell-checker for "apocalypse".

Somebody also might want to tell the shooter that overlapping the thumb of her support hand across the back of her shooting hand is not a very good idea when one is firing an automatic. With a decent two-handed grip (not holding one's wrist, as she is apparently doing), overlapping the thumb is a great way of getting it smashed as the slide comes back.

Bartender, Gimme a Brain Bleach, and Make It a Double!

Penis pants:

Tase-on-Sight orders have been issued.

The "Pervert Files"

No, it's not the latest show from Fox. It is an extensive collections of secret files, maintained by the Boy Scouts of America, and they go back for decades.

Whether they are evidence of a cover-up of pedophiles or proof that the BSA was trying to track and exclude them will be shown at an upcoming trial.

Headlines

From the Ironic Times:

Supreme Court Upholds “Under God” in Pledge of Allegiance
Drops “with liberty and justice for all.”

GERMAN CHURCH ABUSE CASE CLOSING IN ON POPE
Tells crowd in St. Peter's Square, “Ego mos nunquam capimini dum ego sum victus” (“They'll never take me alive!”)

Conservatives on Texas School Board Approve New History Curriculum
Lone Star State third graders will soon learn about American heroes Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy and present-day heroine Ann Coulter.

Limbaugh: If Health Reform Passes "I'll Move to Costa Rica"
Where he can be treated for an occasional OxyContin overdose by their highly regarded government-run health system.

Global Warming!!

If, as the tighty-Riighties all claimed, that a blizzard hitting the East Coast was proof that global warming was false, does the fact that the Northeast is over 20 degrees above normal temperatures for the last couple days prove that global warming is real?

Oh, now the Wingnuts will say that "a single weather event is not indicative of a global pattern".

I thought as much.

If the FBI Upgraded Cars and Firearms the Way That They Upgrade Computers

They would still be driving to crime scenes in Model A Fords

and carrying Cold Official Police revolvers.

That is because the FBI has been spending over ten years (and two contractors) trying to upgrade their computers with little success.

No surprise that LockMart is involved. They've done such a bang-up job at "fixing" the Flight Service Stations (they do the telephone weather briefings) that more and more pilots that I know have been using computerized weather briefings to avoid having to wait on hold in order to talk to the LockMart dudes.

What is it with these guys? Why is it so hard to install a computer network with decent security? Or is it that the FBI has so fucked up the specs to make it impossible?

Banning Lead Paint Leads to Fascism

Jon Stewart does a full-blown satire of the Weepy Fascist:

Intro - Progressivism Is Cancer

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

"It's so ingenious that it doesn't make any sense whatsoever."

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Conservative Libertarian

"Am I the only one saying that having a beard makes you a bloody theocrat?"

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Call Those Assholes

And urge them to pass the frakking health care bill.

Here is the list. Call your congresscritter, even in the bastard's a Rethug. And especially if your congressclown is a Democrat who is listed as "no" or "undecided". If he or she is a "yes", still call to support that decision.

Google your congressvermin and get the direct number to his Washington office. Pressure these guys.

From the "No Shit, Sherlock" Files

A few stories from Think Progress that are no surprise whatsoever:

Wellpoint, a health insurance company set up a "charitable foundation" to help people that have no insurance. But those lying fucks at Wellpoint has not spent anywhere near the amount of money to help people that they promised.

John Boehner is looking out for the interests of the banksters. The last thing Boehner wants to do is reform the financial system to make it harder for the banksters like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs to engineer collapses so hey can make money off them (and get the Treasury to bail them out each time).

Tactics that Republicans have used in the past to pass legislation are now "unconstitutional" when Democrats use them. It is just another iteration of the rule that "It's OK If You Are a Republican".

In This Country, They Would Have Tased His Ass

Feel free to write your own snark on this one:

:A man who assaulted a female police officer with his penis has been fined.

Marium Varinauskas, 28, tried to strike the officer on the head with his penis when she was called out to his flat, but she got out of the way.

(H/T)

How Texas Fucks With Your Kids

I like the part about "brushing your teeth with chocolate".

Don't Mess With Textbooks

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

It's Good to Be a Corporation

Go about 7 minutes into this to see Jon Stewart explain how corporations can turn a $900 asset into a $10 million asset.

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

In Dodd We Trust

Felix Baumgartner plans to jump from 120,000 feet up and to become the first skydiver to go transonic.

Die, You Emo Blood-Sucking Bastard, Die!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets that emo-douchebag from Twilight.

This thing is subtitled, so you can switch off your speakers to make it work-safe.

(H/T)

Happy St. Patrick's Day

His followers were probably some of the great PR geniuses of all time, since snakes were not indigenous to Ireland to start with.

There will be a lot of amateur drinkers in the bars today. It's a good day to stay off the roads after the end of the work day. Expect the cops to be out in force on DUI patrols.

Bring Back the Draft

And then we can have armed forces that only contain heterosexual males, since they seem to be completely incapable of keeping their filthy paws off anything they want to fuck.

Problem is, of course, the military has been unable to completely fill its ranks with het males for the last thirty years, so if "unit cohesion" and "good order and discipline" are what's needed, bring back the draft.

(After all, what's a few fraggings between friends?)

Heh. Heh. Heh.

Via McClatchy:

California attorney and “birther” proponent Orly Taitz must pay $20,000 in sanctions, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday.

In the two-page decision, the appeals court states that after considering Taitz’ arguments, “we find them unpersuasive and therefore affirm the district court’s sanctions judgment.

OK, Make that "Six Inventions That Changed the World"

A couple of years ago, I wrote about five inventions that changed the world. I had forgotten about that post until I saw it as a result on a search on my stats thingamabob.[1] I was astonished/abashed to realize one invention that I had left off the list:

6. The Paper Machine.

The concept of a machine that made paper in a continuous process was dreamed up and patented by a Frenchman named Louis-Nicholas Robert in 1799. France wasn't very stable then, so Robert's boss, Saint-Léger Didot, sent the design to his brother-in-law, an Englishman, named John Gamble. The Fourdrinier brothers (Henry and Sealy) in London owned a stationary firm, they improved the design enough to warrant a new British patent and built the first few paper machines. Virtually every paper machine running in the world today is a direct descendant of the Fourdrinier Machine.

Building the first few paper machines cost the Fourdriniers' over 60,000 pounds, an enormous sum at the time, when workers were paid about 12 to 25 pounds a year. Henry Fourdrinier went bankrupt and the design was widely pirated.

The Fourdrinier Machine, by mass-producing cheap wood-pulp-based paper, made possible the wide dissemination of information. The availability of cheap paper led to inventions of faster ways to print. The Gutenberg/Franklin-style manual printing press gave way to the rotary printing press which, when powered by a steam engine, could churn out millions of pages of print per press each day. News and information became available to anyone who could read and, coupled with the proliferation of public libraries[2], information no longer was the province of the elite.

All because of cheap paper.

[1] I'm closing in on 5,000 posts in the span of 32 months. Cut me some slack.
[2] Public libraries?!! zOMG!!!1!! Socialism!!

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Disrespect

This shit just drives me nuts. To my mind, flying a tattered and torn National Ensign is as disrespectful as publicly burning one:

It's not as though that flag is flying from the mast of a ship in a Force 9 gale. That flag is not flying from a fort that is being shelled by the Royal Navy. That this flag is flown in such a condition shows that the people who are flying it are casually and carelessly disrespectful of the flag.

Hell, I think it is even more disrespectful than burning it in protest. At least the protesters know what the flag stands for and, in a twisted way, they are acknowledging as much. Here, the flag is being treated more like a piece of decor, an ornament, and not as a symbol of our nation.

This is so wrong that it is not merely wrong.

If your flag is in such a condition, then shame on you. Better a bare pole than a tattered flag.

Geronimo!

Idiots

Michael Lewis on the Daily Show, promoting his new book "The Big Short":

"The people in the Wall Street firms, they actually forgot they rigged the market."

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Michael Lewis

The "Moment of Zen" should be shown to everyone who works for WABC:

Moment of Zen - Shallow Flood

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c