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Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representative, represents these San Franciscans, attending the “Up Your Alley” street political demonstration. This is not a private party on private property, closed off from the public, but a public event, officially sanctioned by the SF city government. Budweiser is a sponsor, although their presence is much reduced after last year’s Folsom Street Fair.

The given link goes to a content-warning page, rather than directly to the photos.Take that warning very seriously, but click through, blurred or unblurred, and take a quick look.

These are the folk who put Pelosi in office, that she is beholden to.

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We’re supposed to be tolerant of “gays”, because, hey, there’s not enough love in the world, is there? And who are we to deny it wherever it blossoms?

Do you see anything here suggestive or supportive of stable, long-term loving relationships?

Gay Marriage? See anybody here you’d trust to so much as sell you diapers, much less raise children of their own?

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I regularly see charity panhandlers here in Houston, soliciting for “AIDS Awareness”. Do you really believe that these people are not intimately, personally aware of AIDS and its risks? Seriously, folks, how much do think the government needs to spend to make this kind of behavior even remotely “safe”? And why should I pay for it?

I’m told that one of the pictures shows a hepatitis testing station; I don’t want to go looking for it. Gosh, I don’t remember seeing one of those at the last gun show I attended. (Although perhaps a cholesterol testing station wouldn’t be totally out of place….) I’m struggling to imagine behavior this careless being tolerated at a gun show. I’m struggling to imagine the kinds of restrictions placed on personal behavior at gun shows  being enforced here. Tell me again, who are the dangerous, irresponsible ones?

Oh, yeah: I dare you to try to get a permit to hold an open-air gun show on the streets of SF. Or here in Houston, for that matter. Go ahead. I dare you.

And yes, which public event supports an activity explicitly protected by the Constitution? What’s that you say? There’s a “penumbra” around the First Amendment right to assembly that permits public fornication, but the Second Amendment doesn’t really mean what it says about a “right of the people” and “shall not be infringed”? You know what, asshole? Piss off. But in private, please.

And again, don’t you dare, don’t you fucking dare, try to lecture me about how angry I get here.

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By the way, I still support these guys. I still say that, barring felony records, even the people in Zombie’s photo have the right to keep and bear arms.

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These pictures are courtesy of the anonymous Zombie Time, who devotes a lot of time photographing leftist, socialist, Democratic, homosexual, and antiwar public demonstrations in the SF area, and putting the pictures up for all to see.

For instance, here’s Zombie’s photo essay on the Code Pink demonstrations and vandalism at the Berkeley Marine Recruiting Station, officially sanctioned by the Berkeley city government. The Marines, by the way, were recently denied a permit to film one of their drill teams for a recruiting video in the Bay area. Do you really think the Marines would be more disruptive, more dangerous, more in violation of American ideals, than Up Your Alley?

Mike at Cold Fury excerpts two great articles contrasting the fascination of the socialist left with tyranny,  and what happens when you really do speak truth to power.

Excerpting his excerpts, here’s a whiff of Ralph Peters:

The extreme left loves to pretend it stands for freedom. It never has and never will. From the Reign of Terror in Paris onward, its core agenda has been the tyranny of egomaniacal intellectuals. The hard left hates an open debate - especially these days, when it’s out of new ideas.

The truly outrageous aspect of such comparisons is that the American left, with its Stalin-redux willingness to rearrange history, neglects to mention that, outside of Japan, all of the 20th century’s great totalitarian regimes had roots on the political left.

[Note: Japan's regime arose from a true imperialism, not capitalism or libertarianism.]

And a good strong snort of Christopher Hitchens, himself a leftist who seems to be waking up:

The simplest way of phrasing it is to say that Solzhenitsyn lived “as if.” Barely deigning to notice the sniggering, pick-nose bullies who followed him and harassed him, he carried on “as if” he were a free citizen, “as if” he had the right to study his own country’s history, “as if” there were such a thing as human dignity.

Read the whole things, all three of them.

Obama, Second Amendment Changer:

Via Caleb at Call Me Ahab.

Retired engineer Steven Den Beste reprints a valuable checklist for plausible alternative energy sources:

…For too many people “alternate energy” is more about religion than about physics. They believe that if we are just creative enough, we can overcome fundamental physical limitations — and it’s not that easy.

In order for “alternate energy” to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:

1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).

If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can’t scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2, but there are ways to work around that.)

The only sources of energy available to us now that satisfy all five are petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

Den Beste garnered a few good comments on that post (and quite a bit of attention elsewhere), but the best comments I’ve seen that answer some of the objections to this list are over here.

Of course, you should read Neo-Neocon’s article concerning T. Boone Pickens’ wind power project that SDB linked to, and SDB’s original detailed 2002 essay, which ought to be required reading for anyone discussing this topic.

And the 2002 essay links to SDB’s discussion of scale here:

My dad was an electrical engineer and he worked on power generation. (He spent most of his career on the hydro projects on the Columbia river.) He lived in an entirely different world than I did, a world where units like kilofarads and kilohenries were actually useful. That’s the kind of numbers you see when you’re describing long distance transmission lines. In my world, a microfarad is huge. In his world, a farad was tiny. (If you don’t know what that means, just let it pass.)

You’ve got to start thinking really, really big.

Anything which, when fully deployed, generates less than ten gigawatts average (10¹⁰ joules per second) is useless for our purposes in terms of actually making a meaningful contribution to the total amount of energy we consume.

SDB then goes on to discuss some of the more esoteric proposals for obtaining energy. It is a very depressing essay, because the scale is…bigger than most people can fit in their heads, the problems are hard, the cost is astronomical.

Steven’s preferred solution is coal, because it works and we’ve got plenty.

Still, burning carbon is stupid–it’s filthy, there is only a limited supply, it’s going to become increasingly expensive, and we need the chemical feed stock. (In my mind global warming is still very much, heh heh heh, up in the air, but I tend to discount it. We humans are simply not that significant on a planetary scale. See Copernicus and Darwin.) Simple conservation will not work for long — most of our energy systems are already extremely efficient, and “cutting back” to any significant degree would involve essentially rebuilding our society from the ground up.  Most likely, we wouldn’t like the results very much.

(Al Gore’s proposal to completely wean ourselves off carbon fuels in…am I remembering this right? Ten years? — yup, ten years, is simply stupid, particularly since I doubt nukes are even on the table in his plan.)

Everything we can do has at least a ten year lead time. First we need to open our domestic oil to drilling, including offshore and ANWR, so we can at least start to be somewhat self-sufficient. Start planning the nukes now.  There are several reasonable designs, but it will probably take at least five years to build pilot plants and choose two or three that can be standardized to reduce cost and increase competency. We also need to start pressing on fusion — not even uranium will last forever, and we don’t have good local sources, anyway. (Nearest is Canada, if I’m not mistaken.) However, fusion will involve new physics as well as fabulous engineering, and I note Steven’s response is, “Wake me when it works.”

Not that we should give up on trying make cheap solar cells and the like, but there’s a fundamental limit on how much energy comes down from the sun in a given day, and all of those solutions require an infrastructure with a huge surface area (see SDB #3).

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Oh, and speaking of St. Gore?

Irena Sendler passed away at 8AM (Warsaw time) on May 12th, in Warsaw, Poland at the age of 98…. Irena was one of 180 others to be nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace prize. In the height of irony, the award that year went to a man who has done nothing for peace, but instead threw the world into chaos and fear, while enriching his bank account - Al Gore.

Read the whole article, and honor someone who could have re-sanctified a prize that has never been washed clean of the blood from Yasser Arafat’s hands.

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The title for this post came from Tully at Stubborn Facts.

Originally, though, “The Cold Equations” comes from Tom Godwin’s notorious science fiction short story about orbital mechanics forcing a space craft pilot and a stowaway to make some hard choices. Wiki entry here, but beware, almost any discussion you find will necessarily involve spoilers. Let it be said that there’s some deep resonance with the current problem at hand: “Good physics, bad engineering.”

Ooh, here it is in full. It’s one of this collection of the stories that built the Golden Age of SF.

I’m not a fan of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-People’s Democracy of Frisco, CA). She’s a commie gun-grabbing terrorist-enabling would-be tyrant, but fortunately she’s also an incompetent weakling. She has led Congress to its lowest approval ratings ever, in the single digits, worse than the Bushitler.

Now, Slashdot points to a story on the righty Chicago Boyz blog featuring her latest attack on our liberty:

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who would like very much to reimpose the old, so-called, “Fairness Doctrine” that once censored conservative opinion on television and radio broadcasting, is scheming to impose rules barring any member of Congress from posting opinions on any internet site without first obtaining prior approval from the Democratic leadership of Congress. No blogs, twitter, online forums - nothing.

The Boyz, prompted by Rep. John Culberson (R-Shitkickers, TX) link to a PDF of the enabling letter from Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Massaidiots), then continue:

Set aside the nakedly partisan aspect of this plan for a moment - on the technological merits alone this may be the goddamn dumbest thing I’ve heard of regarding the Internet coming out of Congress in a long, long time. The dinosaurs who are uncomfortable with computers, the unwashed masses being aware of their actions and free political debate want to turn the clock back to the 1970s. Except during the 1970s no one would have dared to propose controlling what a democratically elected member of Congress could say to their constituents. Doesn’t it register in the Beltway that they are talking about public information that already belongs to the people of the United States? Senators and Congressmen should be interacting with citizens more freely, not less; the U.S. Congress needs radical transparency not greater opacity imposed by the Democratic House leadership to better hide shady dealings

It’s a brazenly Orwellian and most likely unconstitutional power grab by the Speaker of the House unlike anything dreamed of by any previous speaker - not Sam Rayburn, not Joseph Cannon. Nobody.

Oh, delightful! Downright tasty! Too good to be true!

Well, yeah. Too good to be true, indeed.

As many comments point out, both on the CBz site and on Slashdot, the letter appears to say nothing of the kind. In fact, it seems to be aimed at making it easier for Representatives to host official House documents, particularly video, on servers other than the the official House servers. It isn’t aimed at the personal communications of House members, nor at content they generate. The closest this document comes to “prior restraint”, as far as I can tell, is a restriction, “to the maximum extent possible”, on posting official House documents where they “may appear with commercial or political information or any other information not in compliance with the House’s content guidelines.”

[The PDF is a scan of the letter, so I can't cut and paste text, and I'm too lazy to retype it.]

In other words, as I read this, Congresscritters shouldn’t pass off stuff produced in the name of the House at large as being the product of their own offices, or vice-versa. This is not an attempt to restrict the dissemination of “public information that already belongs to the people of the United States”. To the contrary: it’s intended to make that information easier to get to.

C’mon, folks. Pelosi and company really are evil. They do plenty of actual bad stuff. It does us no good at all, and great harm, to make transparently unfounded accusations like this.

That’s stooping to their level, that is. We don’t need to.

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The 24-hour rule should be in effect on this story: come back tomorrow, after the dust has settled, and see where things are then. I, personally, am crossing my fingers in the hopes that Pelosi is as evil, and as stupid, as the Boyz make her out to be, and that her fellow ‘Critters boot her out to the street for interfering with their Constitutional right to dispense rabid propaganda to their sheep constituents.

In the meantime, I’m saving the text of this page, and the letter, in case they change or disappear.

…And the Federal Government wants to help.

1-800-SUICIDE is a privately owned, non-profit phone network that provides anonymous suicide counseling. A few years ago, they made a terrible, terrible mistake: they accepted a grant from the Federal Government.

Now the feds want to take control of the phone number. Likely result: instead of anonymous counseling, you get the cops.

I do not even know how to express the rage I am feeling as I type this.

I’ve said this before. I’m going to say it again now. I’m going to say it over and over and over until it sinks in:

We do not trust the government to read our mail. We do not trust the government to stop us on the street and ask for our papers. We do not trust the government to listen in on our phone calls. We do not trust the government to come into our homes and businesses and search our records or our belongings.

And yet, many of you f… — excuse me while I suppress a stream of shrieking profanity — many of you think you can trust the government with your health care? With the intimate personal records that it requires? Are you mad, or just so [deleting foul word] stupid that you cannot manage your own lives and in fact deserve to have your most intimate secrets in the hands of the people that want to turn 1-800-SUICIDE records over to the police? While taking half or more of your salary, and condemning you to a lifetime of filling out mind-numbing forms for the privilege of doing so.

God. Damn. You.

Wake the fuck up!

These people do not want to help you. They want to own you, every hair on your head, every cell in your body, every base-pair in your DNA. Every thought in your brain, if you give it to them.

Stop already. Just stop.

Because if you give them yours, they’ll take mine too, and if that happens, I will kill myself.

But I will take as many of them with me as I can, rather than let them take me away, and turn me into one of you.

God Damn You.

You asked for this.

The next President of the United States will probably give it to you, good and hard.

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“Them,” Dave? “They?” Who “Them”? That’s crazy talk, you know.

SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Adminsitration. Currently running 1-800-273-TALK, a competing suicide hot line. If you call this number, knowing that it is run by the feds, you deserve every single degrading humiliation they inflict on you, you idiot. Better you should just kill yourself now, OK?

Department of Health and Human Services

And the usual suspects, like the IRS, the DEA, the BATFX….

Dean Barnett, slamming Ezra Klein for claiming that “Democrats, even liberal Democrats” supported the surge:

Before charging forward, I should mention that a while ago I swore to ignore Klein’s commentary, regardless of how counterfactual or juvenile it was. I made this commitment at roughly the same time I vowed to stop knocking the walkers out from under enfeebled old ladies as they crossed the street in front of my house. I had come to the realization that picking on the lame and defenseless was wrong.

Got this from Mike at Cold Fury, who says, “They’ve got balls the size of church bells, I’ll tell ya that for nothin’.”

“I’ll tell you that for nothin’.” I like that. “I’ll buy that for a dollar!”

Flopping Aces gives us the Quote of the Day (so far; it’s only one o’clock in the morning) in response to David S. Broder taking Obama to task for shying away from debate with McCain:

Who would vote for a candidate who would cut and run from debates but would go and talk to Iran’s leaders without preconditions? Is John McCain, speaking on his own without a teleprompter a bigger threat to Obama than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Via McQ at Q and O, the most frightening set of charts I’ve ever seen. [The narration text is on the left, with a Mute button above it if you don't have the patience to listen to it.]

Ross Perot, “the hand grenade with a bad haircut”, as McQ puts it, presents a lesson on “Suicidal Spending”, explaining what the Federal budget numbers and projections mean, and it’s bad, very. Almost all of the bad news comes from “non-discretionary spending”, that is, “entitlements” the government is required to pay out to its dependents. Most of those are Social Security, welfare, and health care, and of those, the one that’s steaming out of control is health care.

Let me emphasize: It’s not the Bushitler’s War of Lies that’s exploding the national debt. Nor is it his Tax Cuts for the Weatlhy Not Poor.

It’s us Baby Boomer hippies, and our insatiable and insane desire to put our retirement and health care in the hands of a government we don’t trust to tell us whether or not we should smoke a joint.

I’m a Boomer, ashamed of and, increasingly, frightened by that status. My Generation is responsible for reducing us to a nation of superstitious cowards, traitors, and freeloaders. As Perot’s presentation shows, the ratio of workers to retirees is falling; the pyramid scheme is cratering. Further, the public education system, the one created, operated, and managed by My Generation, is turning out bleating sheep, not productive citizens, with zero ability or desire to take care of themselves, much less their parents and uncles and aunts.

Worse, the increasing willingness of the government to tax and flat out confiscate private property means that even capitalist pigs who, unlike me, have engaged in the oppresive fascist practice of prudent financial planning, will fare no better. Their bank accounts and trust funds will be socialized to feed the restless flock.

At this point, I’m no longer worried about whether I’ll be able to retire on Social Security and Medicare. I know that’s a rapidly evaporating pipe dream.

I’m worried about having to listen to “When I’m Sixty Four” blaring through the Golden Oldies Rest Camp loudspeakers when I’m led off to take The Shower.

Via Grouchy Old Cripple:

Followed by this:

Just think. If the ecotards and the Dimocrat Party had not kept us from drilling in ANWR, off our coasts, and on federal lands and if they hadn’t blocked the building of new refineries and nuclear power plants, we would be energy independent and this would be the peace we would be raining on Iran and Saudi Arabia. These are the two countries who are our worst enemies on this planet and the countries we will eventually be at war with. They sponsor most of the Islamic terrorism in the world. The sooner we realize this and take steps to destroy them, by first becoming energy independent, the better off we’ll be.