Uncategorized

Morons On Parade

Senator Chuckie “Putzhead” (to use Al D’Amato’s term) Schumer teams up with his pallie across the Hudson, the apparently ever-increasingly senile Frank Lautenberg, to destroy the model rocket industry. They’re fighting to keep Senator Enzi’s bill from becoming law. The headline of the press release is typically stupid and false:

Lautenberg, Schumer Join Forces to Stop Republican Attempts to Pass Legislation That Would Make it Easier for Terrorists to Build Missiles in US

Well, it’s true that Lautenberg and Schumer are joining forces, but the rest of it is ridiculous, as I’ve previously discussed.
There are many better and cheaper ways of building weapons than using model rocket propellant (which is not, no matter how many times the Senators repeat the lie, an “explosive”).

To quote the aging junior Senator from New Jersey:

“Sometimes the things you see in Congress make you scratch your head in wonderment.”

Indeed, but his irony detector must be severely on the fritz. As is the case with yesterday’s bloviating about “making bets on death,” I don’t know what’s worse, to think that they’re really this brainless, or that they think that we are.

War Commentary

Useful Idiots

Glenn’s already noted it, but it’s worth broadcasting this far and wide. Here’s an insider’s view of the “peace” movement and how it made itself an unwitting dupe for one of the most brutal dictators in the last few decades, all for the hatred of Amerikkka.

To be perfectly frank, we were less concerned with the suffering of the Iraqi people than we were in maintaining our moral challenge to U.S. foreign policy. We did not agitate for an end to sanctions for purely humanitarian reasons; it was more important to us to maintain our moral challenge to “violent” U.S. foreign policy, regardless of what happened in Iraq. For example, had we been truly interested in alleviating the suffering in Iraq, we might have considered pushing for an expanded Oil-for-Food program. Nothing could have interested us less. Indeed, we even regarded the paltry amounts of aid that we did bring to Iraq as a logistical hassle. When it suited us, we portrayed ourselves as a humanitarian nongovernmental organization and at other times as a political group lobbying for a policy change. In our attempt to have it both ways, we failed in both of these missions.

We were so preoccupied with our own agenda that we didn’t notice or care that the regime made use of us. When critics asked us whether the group was being exploited by the Iraqi regime, we obfuscated, and in so doing put Saddam and his minions on the same level as the U.S. government…

Tonight, I caught a portion of one of the HBO series “Band of Brothers.” It was the one in which the troops come across one of the camps (I didn’t see the whole thing, so I don’t know which it was–I think that it was Dachau).

Continue reading Useful Idiots →

Uncategorized

Confusing Recall Story

Does anyone have more information on this decision? (Like, for instance, the actual text of the decision?)

U.S. District Judge Barry Moskowitz said voters will be allowed to cast a ballot for a potential successor to Davis even if they do not vote on whether he should be recalled.

This is written ambiguously, at least to me. Did he say that you can cast a ballot if you didn’t vote at all on the recall issue, or that you can cast a ballot if you vote against the recall? The former interpretation doesn’t really make sense–how many people are going to go to the polls who don’t have an opinion on the recall (other than, perhaps, those who are going to vote on the Racial Privacy Initiative), but that would be how I’d read the reporting here. If it’s the latter, they should have clearly said “even if they vote against the recall.”

Technology and Society

Desktop Manufacturing

…is getting closer.

Flexonics is still in its infancy, but the technology?s potential raises questions about what it will mean to be a consumer in an era of de-vices-on-demand. You?d no longer pay for a product, Canny says, you?d pay for plans. I look forward then to a generation of do-it-yourself industrial designers, tinkerers who tweak commercial product designs to improve and customize them. How will I access the fruits of their labor? Peer-to-peer plan networks, of course, where designs for blenders and mobile phones and TV remote controls are swapped like so many MP3s.

There was a lively couple of threads here on the ethical implications of this a few weeks ago.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!