It’s time for it to die.
I have to continually kill the process to keep the browser from hanging.
[Late afternoon update]
Adobe has patched it again.
The Iran “Deal”
If Barack Obama was your lawyer, he’d get you life without parole for jaywalking and call it a “deal.”
[Update a few minutes later]
.@POTUS to Israel: "If you like your existence, you can keep your existence." #IranDeal
— Gay'd Helm (@GayPatriot) July 14, 2015
The Big One
What will happen to Seattle and Portland when it hits?
Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
…we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.
As she notes, the only question is when, not if. I hope it’s not any time soon; I’ll lose a lot of friends.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is a key point:
On the face of it, earthquakes seem to present us with problems of space: the way we live along fault lines, in brick buildings, in homes made valuable by their proximity to the sea. But, covertly, they also present us with problems of time. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.
This is also why it’s easy to persuade people that extreme weather events aren’t normal, and can be attributed to “climate change.” People have either not experienced, or don’t recall similar ones from the past, when the CO2 levels were lower.
Obscuring The Target
“You know what we got last week? We got 3,600 pages, half of which were press clippings, including articles about Richard Gere,” he said. “So if that is their idea of complying with a congressional investigation, then we are going to be at this for a long time.”
He also told CNN that Hillary Clinton was wrong when she said that she’d never had a subpoena in her interview with CNN.
“That is demonstrably false,” Gowdy told CNN. “You have an obligation to preserve the public record.”
This is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate. And of course, when someone says they haven’t been cooperative, they’ll say “We’ve turned over thousands of documents, but they’re never satisfied.”
Bernie Sanders
I have to say, I admire his honesty:
There are very few unspoken rules among major-party candidates for president, and Bernie Sanders is breaking one of them. He’s saying that America’s leaders shouldn’t worry so much about economic growth if that growth serves to enrich only the wealthiest Americans.
“Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1 percent,” Sanders said in a recent interview, even if that redistribution slows the economy overall.
“Unchecked growth – especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent – is absurd,” he said. “Where we’ve got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but we’ve got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for all of our people. In other words, if people have health care as a right, as do the people of every other major country, then there’s less worry about growth. If people have educational opportunity and their kids can go to college and they have child care, then there’s less worry about growth for the sake of growth.”
Socialists don’t understand that in order for wealth to be redistributed, it has to be created.
Scott Walker
Democrats are terrified of him, and they should be:
Obama and the Democrats asked for a class war and it’s a class war they got: they sowed the seeds, and now they’re reaping the whirlwind in the form of blue-collar conservative, union busting, arch-nemesis Scott Walker.
Imagine winning three elections (one being a recall election that public sector unions poured thousands upon thousands of dollars into) in four years in the deeply divided blue-collar progressive Utopia of Wisconsin. Imagine breaking the back of the organized heart and soul of the Democrat party and dispatching AFL-CIO leader Richard “Morrie The Wig Salesman” Trumka back to the White House to show the President the “W” shaped scar carved into his forehead as a warning to anyone else who stepped foot in the state.
Imagine doing all this after Democratic state legislators fled for the safe harbor of Illinois to avoid voting on your legislation. Imagine having woken up every day to phone calls relating tales unionized shock-troops on your parents’ front lawn and threats not only on your life but the lives of your kids. Now imagine having the real heroes, the brave national media, mock and ridicule you over this. Imagine accomplishing all of this while a partisan Milwaukee District Attorney authorizes the illegal invasion of the homes of your friends, supporters and aides, lawlessly confiscating private property, all while colluding with Lois Lerner and the IRS.
Now. Having gone through all of that, imagine still having the desire to face down and defeat that kind of contumacious Alinskyism on a national scale.
…On Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David, invoking the spirit of Henry Clay, quipped “a good compromise leaves everybody dissatisfied.” Compromise is the sort of talking point constantly pushed by moderates that pleases absolutely no one beyond the Beltway journalists feeding it to them. Conservatives–not even just the true-red hardcore ones, but the moderates as well who are tired of losing–don’t want a President who will reach across the aisle and work with Democrats. They want someone who will steamroll them like Obama did during his first two years, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. And Scott Walker? He’s certainly not going to be touting his record of working with Democrats in Wisconsin, not after signing Act 10, concealed carry, and Right-To-Work legislation into law…and that’s exactly why he’s enormously popular. Conservatives dream of someone who will break what’s left of the tired and aged Democratic minority in Congress, and leave them on an ash heap, barely able to comprehend how old and outdated their party faces have become while wallowing in the mess left for them to clean up as their own demi-god strolls out of office singing “Amazing Grace” to himself. There can be no compromise this election.
Yes.
How To Stop A Centralized Bureaucracy
Math:
The only thing that will upend the carefully crafted apple cart the political bosses have set up is math. The math that Mark talks about in the Soundcloud clip I posted is rapidly becoming a reality in states like Illinois. The answer from Democratic politicians has been to look for ways to increase taxes and fees to keep the shell game going. None of them have cut the size and scope of government. None of them have deregulated anything to allow more choice and freedom for people. Interestingly, the United States federal budget allocates 62% of all spending to entitlements, and the number will rise dramatically with Obamacare. It’s totally unsustainable but the crony capitalists in Washington don’t care about it. They’ll be fine.
They were told there would be no math.
Science
Is it ever “settled”?
As things stand today, Darwin’s notion of evolution, especially when we extend it with the things we’ve learned in the intervening 160 or so years, has stood up very well to attempts to falsify it.
That’s what science as a process really is: that process of observing, proposing explanations, and then trying to knock those explanations down. Eventually, you have only a few explanations left standing: our best explanations for what we observe in the real world. It’s that collection of best explanations that we call “science.”
What isn’t science is (e.g.) climate models, particularly when they can’t even hindcast.
“Settled science” is a newspeak phrase that the Left has come up with to impose their policy preferences on us.
[Update a few minutes later]
Why biology students have misconceptions about science.
I think there’s more of a crisis in science education (as with all education) than most people realize.
Birds Of A Feather
The Wisconsin thug who helped target Scott Walker and his associates was close friends with Lois Lerner:
After Walker’s victory in a recall election, Lerner’s long time friend Kennedy helped Milwaukee County prosecutors conduct an onerous, several-year investigation into Walker’s political allies, complete with secret subpoenas for phone, text message and email records and armed, middle of the night raids on Walker associates’ homes.
I know! I’m shocked, too!
German Textbooks
As noted, Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.
I wish this era didn’t feel so much like I imagine the 1930s did, particularly with what’s apparently about to become a cave to Iran.