Anthony Watts has some questions for the folks in Death Valley.
I hope he’s not holding his breath waiting for answers.
Also, somewhat related: (document thief and fabricator) Peter Gleick: Super Geenius.
A Local Superhero
The comments in this story are pretty funny.
Massachussets, Cradle Of Liberty
…is apparently where liberty went to die.
Nothing’s changed since the seventeenth century there, really. It’s just a new form of puritanism and witch huntery.
That Dumb Cowboy Bush
It’s sure a good thing we got rid of him.
[[Update a while later]
Who lost the Middle East? The wrecking crew in the White House.
[Another update a few minutes later]
Who are the good guys in the Middle East?
Prospects for liberal democracy there have never been bright, except for the one exception of Israel, which was formed by transplants from elsewhere.
Also, related: “Dismiss the Egyptian people, and elect a new one.”
The Mystery Of The Missing Toothpaste
I’ve wondered this for years: why do we get shampoo, but not toothpaste in hotel rooms?
It really does seem to be a true market failure, and one that’s become more acute since the stupid new TSA rules about carrying such things in carry ons.
Peak-Oil Blogging
…has peaked.
Now, let’s hope the same happens to climate-hysteria sites.
The Lawless Rolling Train Wreck That Is ObamaCare
The Affordable Care Act’s Section 1513 states in black-letter law that “(d) Effective Date.—The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013.” It does not say the Administration can impose the mandate whenever it feels it is politically convenient.
This selective enforcement of laws has become an Administration habit. From immigration (the Dream Act by fiat) to easing welfare reform’s work requirements to selective waivers for No Child Left Behind, the Obama Administration routinely suspends enforcement of or unilaterally rewrites via regulation the laws it dislikes. Now it is doing it again on health care, without any consultation from, much less the approval of, Congress. President Obama probably figures business and Republicans won’t object because they don’t like the law anyway.
Probably. But it’s a mess, and it’s only going to get worse.
America 3.0
On the anniversary of the birth of America 1.0, Michael Barone reviews a timely new book
A Declaration For All Generations
I’ve long advocated that a part of commemorating the nation’s birthday should be a reading of the declaration, and not just celebrating with beer, barbecue and fireworks. It seems particularly important in light of events of the past few years.
[Update late afternoon, as we’re slow-grilling ribs]
The Patriot’s Creed.
Testdisk: A Data Miracle Tool
Some of you may recall that I was having drive problems the other day. I was getting the data off my old drive and moving it to a new one when it started issuing bad sector and impending drive failure warnings. As a result, I failed to get the hidden files in my home Linux directory (the most critical data loss was my much of my sent email for the last three years). It was looking pretty grim. ddrescue, which is supposed to be a very powerful data-recovery tool, couldn’t see anything, and attempting to look at it with fdisk to see if the drive was even there just resulted in an overflow error. I took it to a local data-recovery guy, and he put his diagnostics on it, and told me that it was having a delay after the first 30g (of a 2T drive), and that he couldn’t do anything with it (though I think that he understood Windows much better than he did ext4). I was almost resolved to simply mourning the loss, or sending it to a specialist, with the potential of spending many hundreds of dollars and only getting back individual randomly named files with no file structure. But I tried one more thing.
I ran the program most of yesterday (it took from mid-morning until late evening to go through all two terabytes), but when it was done, the logical volume was restored, and the drive looked like new (it’s even possible that it will boot, though I haven’t tried it, and don’t really have any reason to). But I can’t recommend it more highly.
And yes, I will be backing up religiously, with a cron job every night (possibly also to my remote server).