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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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

[update: Saturday. OK, I'm tired of it now.]

This post will stay at the top until…oh, until I get tired of seeing it. Give it a few days, maybe till Friday. Scroll down for new posts.

Tickets for the Pink Camo Breast Cancer Stag-15 Rifle are on sale at FBMG:

This Stag has been Duracoated in the oh so pretty pink camo job and is being raffled off to aid the fight against breats cancer. ALL procedes from this raffle will go to the breast cancer research effort at the American Cancer Society. FBMG has donated the firearms and our smith donated the effort and materials. We will announce the raffle at the 3rd Annual Machinegun shoot on October 4th. There is no limit to the number of tickets you may purchase. If you live in a prohibitted state, you may still enter, but we obviously can not ship the gun to you so you would need to make other arraingements. When you purchase a ticket, we will take your entry information and fill out a raffle ticket for you and place it in the jar. If you win we will call you the day of the shoot and inform you of your good fortune. Thanks for entering and good luck!

Per Larry Coreia at Monster Hunter Nation:

Tickets are $5 each.  They can be ordered in person at FBMG, online at:
http://www.fbmginc.com/Breast-Cancer-Raffle-AR-15_p_1-8969.html
via paypal at slg2qcorreia@yahoo.com, or over the phone at
(801) 571-1160.  Tickets will be on sale until October 4th.

[update]
Finally remembered to buy four tickets for myself.

Press Ganey is an outfit that does…uh, something having to do with… um, making hospital administrators feel good about themselves, maybe? Their mission statement:

For more than 20 years, Press Ganey has led the health care industry with a clear mission based on partnership, results, solutions, support, and care.

In other words, their mission statement is:

We have a mission statement.

One of the things they do is to give doctors awards based on patient satisfaction surveys. It seems that doctors are properly skeptical about this methodology.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

Here’s the award:

Why would anyone want a health care award that looks like this:

Show ▼

…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.

“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….

Please see “Comment Policy” over in the sidebar, to your right, which points to a spam comment I edited for my evil pleasure, just like the policy says.

I’m making this post specifically so I can put  “Bud Hookup” tags on it, in the hopes that this will pop up in a web search next to their ads.

In a Land of the Truly Free, these filthy scammers would be driven out of business by homegrowers. They’d be forced to fall back on outright burglary and mugging, and would be shot by citizens exercising their right to keep and bear arms.

If you’re wondering, Bud Hookup is one of a number of businesses selling unspecified plant material packaged and marketed to make you think you’re getting a legal substitute for marijuana. (It is, of course, in the sense that baking soda is a “legal substitute” for cocaine.) See this Cannabis Culture article, “Fake Buds Exposed!” for the debunking.

On the other hand, I have to admit that anybody who would spend $50 on unknown dried leaves and then smoke or ingest them in any manner at all pretty much deserves whatever happens to them.

Still: Hookup?

Eat shit and die slow, you lying spamming scum.

Now, dammit, I have to remember what it was I really came here to write.

[update]

Woo Hoo! Number four on Google in less than 24 hours!

[click for readable full size]

John Walker at Fourmilog (which, by the way, has one of the best mottos I’ve seen: “None dare call it reason”. That right there gets it a place on my blogroll) reviews James Dewar’s To the End of the Solar System, a history of the nuclear rocket engine program. The engineering details are daunting:

Consider: a modern civil nuclear reactor generates about a gigawatt, and is a massive structure enclosed in a huge containment building with thick radiation shielding. It operates at a temperature of around 300° C, heating pressurised water. The nuclear rocket engine, by comparison, might generate up to five gigawatts of thermal power, with a core operating around 2000° C (compared to the 1132° C melting point of its uranium fuel), in a volume comparable to a 55 gallon drum.

The payoff, however, would have been huge, up to and including the possible survival of the human race:

…What if it worked? Well, that would throw open the door to the solar system. Instead of absurd, multi-hundred-billion dollar Mars programs that land a few civil servant spacemen for footprints, photos, and a few rocks returned, you’d end up, for an ongoing budget comparable to that of today’s grotesque NASA jobs program, with colonies on the Moon and Mars working their way toward self-sufficiency, regular exploration of the outer planets and moons with mission durations of years, not decades, and the ability to permanently expand the human presence off this planet and simultaneously defend the planet and its biosphere against the kind of Really Bad Day that did in the dinosaurs (and a heck of a lot of other species nobody ever seems to mention).

Daunting those problems may have been, but they were within the grasp of the engineering gods of the time (late 50’s through early 70’s–which implies a great deal of the work was done on slide rules.)

What killed the project?
Goals were redefined, milestones changed, management shaken up and reorganised, all at the behest of politicians, yet through it all virtually every single technical goal was achieved on time and often well ahead of schedule. Indeed, when the ball finally bounced out of bounds and the 8000 person staff was laid off, dispersing forever their knowledge of the “black art” of fuel element, thermal, and neutronic design constraints for such an extreme reactor, it was not because the project was judged infeasible, but the opposite. The green eyeshade brigade considered the project too likely to succeed, and feared the funding requests for the missions which this breakthrough technological capability would enable. And so ended the possibility of human migration into the solar system for my generation. So it goes. When the rock comes down, the few transient survivors off-planet will perhaps recall their names; they are documented here.

[Bold mine.]

Read the whole, sadly enraging thing.

Now, tell me again, people: exactly why do you want these same elected gangsters and backroom thugs to run your health care?

Not, mind, that the market is perfect. Walker also details why he’s imposed the vendor death penalty on Hewlett-Packard.

For those of you who do not consider technical catalogs to be suitable bathroom and bedroom reading, here’s the skinny on the old H-P:

As a larval nerd, there were two technology companies I held in the highest esteem: Tektronix and Hewlett-Packard. Tektronix seemed to have a bit more flair: they hailed from the curiously named Beaverton in Oregon, and you’d often find something funny in the complete schematics they shipped with their oscilloscopes, such as the drive circuit for the lower gun of a dual-beam scope being replicated by a bow-legged cowboy labeled “top gun”. But H-P had real class; they printed a hardcover product catalogue, and flipping through it you found not just oscilloscopes, signal generators, and the like, but exotica like rubidium atomic clocks. Not that you were going to buy one, to be sure, but wasn’t it cool to know you could, given the budget, and that this company provided you the same specifications for the product they did to customers like the National Bureau of Standards who actually bought such gear?

Oh, yes: I’ve spent many happy hours flipping through both the H-P and the Tektronix catalogs. The Fisher Chemical catalogs are also a blast.

However, H-P, or at least their consumer division, has gone off the rails, apparently programming their printers to fail at preset times in order to force you to buy new ones, and leaving out critical parts which must be bought separately at hugely inflated prices. In this case, H-P sells you a memory module, which ought to cost less than twenty bucks, for $600, almost twice as much as the printer itself.

All’s well that ends well, though:

It’s amazing how turning one’s back upon vendors who betray you can streamline the procurement process for replacement products….

Hewlett-Packard? I turn my back on you, snuff the candle, and walk away in disgust.

Quite so, and that’s the difference between the market and the government: You can fire a bad vendor, but the government can fire a successful program–and there’s not a God. Damned. Thing. you can do about it.

Via Billy Beck.

Over the last 24 hours, I’ve met a crucial milestone:

My weight has dropped below 200 pounds. I’m at 199 +/- 1.

Best of all, I’m even on schedule.

It was my plan to photograph my scale when this happened, but unfortunately, I dropped my camera yesterday, and the shutter no longer works.

I actually saw 199.5 earlier in the week, but I got off the scale to get the camera, and when I got back on, about a minute later, I weighed 202. (My scale is a Taylor 7362. It claims to read to the nearest 1/2 lb, but in fact it, like many digital scales, is notorious for being horribly unrepeatable–in my experience, it can vary by as much as +/- 3 lbs over successive readings. Still, if I weigh myself several times during the day, I do get a reasonably consistent number.)

The 199 lb reading seems to be pretty stable, though.

I really wish I had a camera….

The other reason I wish I had a camera is that I accomplished this by pressure-washing the front of my house. The before and after shots wouldn’t be as dramatic as some I’ve seen, but noticeable nevertheless.

As far as weight loss goes, although the moment-to-moment effort involved in pressure-washing is not that large, if you do it for several hours, it adds up.

I also did some spade work. Let me explain. My front yard does not gently slope from the house to the street. Instead, it humps up in the middle, peaking about 6″ higher than the porch slab. (I plan to measure this over the weekend. ) To make it worse, the front walk is about 1.5″ lower than the porch slab. What this means is that mud washes down from the lawn and flows over the walk just where it turns to meet the porch at the front door. Once a year or so I have to get a shovel and scrape the mud off the walk, and dig out the excess from in front of the porch. That’s what I did today. I’m thinking of buying some concrete pavers to build up the walk to the level of the porch slab. There are other solutions (like, oh, say, skinning the sod off the lawn, removing about six inches of soil, grading properly, and putting the sod back, which is of course the real solution, and which will probably have to be done sooner or later), but that’s the easiest and cheapest.

I’m also probably going to dig a simple gravel-only french drain leading from the front downspout, which lets out right next to the porch, down to the sidewalk by the street,

OK, I think Edward Kennedy is very high on the list of evil people in Congress, but that doesn’t mean I wish him undignified suffering and death.

Instead, along with Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred, I “fervently hope that the good Senator from Massachusetts finds the best health care that Cuba or Canada has to offer. We know the choice as to where he receives treatment will be [a] difficult one, but the senator is a recognized and distinguished authority on the shortcomings of the American health care system. We are certain his choice will serve as an example for all Americans.”

Superstition kills.

EL SOBRANTE, CA (KGO) — The Contra Costa County Health Department is closing East Bay Waldorf School in El Sobrante until Monday because of a whooping cough outbreak. More than a dozen cases have been reported.

In the East Bay, a contagious disease has shut down an entire school.

Whooping cough has made more than a dozen kids sick. It’s easy to avoid with a simple vaccine.
…
Students attending California schools are required to get immunizations for whooping cough but parents can opt out.

The state averages a 99 percent immunization rate. But at East Bay Waldorf School, health officials say less than 50 percent are protected from the disease and say that’s why it was able to spread so easily.

“We believe the immunizations are quite safe. And in particular case of an outbreak like this is the appropriate choice for their parents,” said Contra Costa County Health Services Director Dr. Wendel Brunner.

The school’s administrator Morgan Cleveland issued a statement, saying: “our community is following the direction of the county health authority. We look forward to re-opening school on Monday with the county’s cooperation.”

The Waldorf School System was founded by Rudolph Steiner in 1919. He believed children were made stronger through illness and believed in a holistic approach to medicine.

Life is risk. The trick is assessing the risks intelligently. The known risks from vaccines, while potentially severe, are extremely rare.

The risks from the diseases many of them prevent include disfigurement, disability, and death, and entire unprotected communities can be hit.

I’m uneasy, in the extreme, about requiring parents to dose their kids with anything. However, I’m also so extremely disgusted with, and more than a little frightened by, the ignorance and knee-jerk defiance that resulted in this outbreak.

One of my catch-phrases, Larry Niven’s “think of it as evolution in action”, certainly applies here, but it is tragic that it is the children who suffered from their parents’ stupid neglect.

Full disclosure: I have a niece and nephew in California who attended Waldorf grade school. I’m relieved that they survived, and I hope they are fully vaccinated now.

Via Curmudgeonly and Skeptical, although I’m not sure Rodger agrees with me.

I’ve edited the title of this post about six times, but I think I’ve got it right, finally. Someday I’ll learn how to edit my stuff before posting.

Dammit, I’m supposed to be Learning Linux here, but I keep finding stuff I want to link to.

Like Lawdog’s tale of blatant jailhouse abuse of the helpless and undeserving:

In today’s news, we discover the poignant case of young Broderick Lloyd Laswell, currently in durance vile in the Benton County Bed and Breakfast over in Arkansas.

Young Broddy’s pitiful tale of woe and despair begins when he — allegedly — helped to beat and stab a a man to death before — again, allegedly — burning the victim’s trailer house to the ground in an effort to conceal the crime.

As the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men are aft wont to do, things went all agley….

…But let Lawdog explain how Young Broddy is “a shining example to useless parasitic bottom-feeding scumbag critters everywhere”.