Oh, this is priceless.
Giant footprint outlined in yellow fireworks.
Part of the Olympic opening fireworks display — a series of giant footprints in the sky – was faked.
What I like best about this story is the reason why the Olympic committee did it: they were afraid that Beijing smog would make a real fireworks display look terrible.
Snort.
No, I’m not going to be oohing and aahing over the damn Olympics this year, any more than I’ll be praising the next Arafat Peace Prize winner. Billy Beck explains why:
I can’t help it: it really does strike me that the Chinese might’ve thought much better than to hire one Albert Speer as a central planner on the Olympic Games. That would be: the son of that Albert Speer.
Bonus curiosity: the Taipei Times article is written by Nina Khrushcheva. That’s Nikita Khrushchev’s grand-daughter.
Now that, right there, is what we can reasonably call diagnostic. But it’s not the quote of the day, just a plain reciting of fact.
Beck’s trade is lighting rock shows. When he sees a show, he can tell exactly what was involved in putting it on.
All over the net, I’ve seen various ravings about the Opening Ceremony. That was the biggest cued lighting production I ever saw. The scale of automated lights control was out of hand.
…
The fly-rigging was amazing, and I’d love to see the drawings. What you saw the other night was the biggest extension of rock production technology to date, and make no mistake that that’s not what it was. None of it will ever tour, but almost everything about the hardware and a great deal of the design (color saturation, for instance) can be traced directly back to San Francisco acid shows in the 1960’s, the principles and aspirations of which rock-tour crews have been dragging around ever since.
The development of that hippie technology, by the way, is the result of applied capitalism, not applied socialism, much less communism.
From the cold eye of technique, this show was a stupendous integration of applied technology. This is what the craft can do today: show you a real-live illusion of a man running along an unfolding scroll over a hundred and fifty feet in the air along a circumference of over fifteen hundred feet.
What it cannot do is abstract the ethical purpose to which it’s put.
It was all very pretty, but I couldn’t like the look of it. If I had the fruits of over a billion peoples’ labor at my disposal, I should hope that I could paint big pretty pictures, too.
You want to know about another venue for pretty pictures?
North Korea, whose beloved leader Kim il Poofy Hair has a thing for huge flash card displays and mass dance routines. Watch the video at that link, and understand: those thousands of faceless performers are not fulfilling their own dreams, they are acting out the commands of a ruthless dictator who could order any of them to his bedroom, his torture chamber, or the firing squad, as easily as he could order these displays.
I haven’t seen the Olympic opening show. I plan not to, and I plan to spoil the enjoyment of anyone who tries to watch it in my presence.
It’s bright paint on the face of a hideous demon.
Beck has more words on the technicalities and its implications in a follow up here.
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?
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.
Les Jones has a great picture up:
I wish we knew who rides around in this beast. This picture isn’t quite a career-ender, but boy it could cause some campaign sweat.
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:
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).
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.
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.
In the meantime, I’m saving the text of this page, and the letter, in case they change or disappear.
So, I’m kinda thinking maybe I shouldn’t vote this year.
…They know that my vote is a fundamental nod in favor of their existence. Go watch those creepy assholes on NBC doing their video bumpers and telling me how important it is that I should vote.
They know the whole fucking charade would fall right over if they could not claim to ‘represent’ us.
Right, right, right!
Update via my favorite African American, Kim duToit, quoting Get Liberty:
America appears to have descended into a one-party system. And the only people today’s hand-holding politicians want to please is each other.
There is today, simply and solely, the “Governing Party.” There are those with power, and then there is everyone else. Conservatives understand this as we have been sold out time and again on everything from tax cuts to illegal immigration to the size of the Federal budget. And the Hard Left is quickly finding this out as the presumptive Democrat nominee, Barack Obama, moves his politics to the center to curry the favor of moderates, waffling one key issue after another—like NAFTA, public campaign financing, and the death penalty.
One major reason Americans are losing faith in their government is precisely because of broken promises.
I’m still, still, thinking I’ll vote. B. Hussein Obama represents a huge step away from limited government and individual liberty, while McCain merely twitches spasticly in place. (Then there’s the whole business about a vote for Obama being a vote for a Daley Machine puppet that still has that factory-fresh out-gassing circuit board smell, while a vote for McCain is a vote for an actual, if deeply flawed, human being with decades of experience and a proven willingness to fight and suffer for his country. Not to mention that a vote for McCain is a vote for telling the Main Stream Press Gang to go stick their titties in their inkblood-stained rollers….)
But damn, I’m gonna feel dirty.
What’s that? I should move somewhere else? (Have I mentioned the profound irony of socialist “liberals” telling me I should “love it or leave it”? This probably won’t be the last time.)
There is no place else. This is it. “The last, best, hope,” and all that. There is no “magical palace on the moon”. Plus, it’s mine. Ours. Not theirs.
However, this might be the election where the American people finally give it all away.
Gonna be an interesting fight.
I have been accused of being a conservative, mostly on the grounds that I believe that the Second Amendment means what it says, and that the Founders knew what they were doing when they wrote it and ratified it.
I deny the charge.
I enter into evidence the deposition of F.A. Hayek, who witnessed the rise of socialism and its demon twin Communism over the middle of the twentieth century in Europe:
I use throughout the term “liberal” in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that “liberal” has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.
…
A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.
– Hayek, F.A., The Road to Serfdom, “Forward to the 1956 American Paperback Edition”
Reprinted in Bartley (ed.), The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Volume 2, University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 46.
Moreover:
Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.
…
Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing.
– Hayek, F.A., The Constitution of Liberty, “Why I am Not a Conservative”, University of Chicago Press, 1960
[Emphasis mine.]
I very seriously object to being called a “conservative”, especially on account of holding a position which is all about “empowering individuals”, including individuals who belong to groups that have traditionally been oppressed by conservatives, such as blacks, women, the disabled, and gays.
I object to being called a “libertarian” on the grounds that I like having a strong central government; I simply want it to exercise its enumerated powers, and no more; and I want it to rigorously respect at least my enumerated rights.
I acknowledge that I am not current on libertarian thinking, so I may be wrong here. Nevertheless:
I kind of regard strict libertarians the way I do the Amish: they are hothouse flowers that flourish only because the rest of us provide an environment where they can do so. I strongly suspect that if everyone lived as they do, we would in general have a far lower standard of living (lower with the Amish than with libertarians, though.)
Still, while I’m not tempted to be Amish, I do admire the stance that honest libertarians take. I believe that being a libertarian requires an exceptionally high degree of self-discipline, and this is why I think libertarianism would fail: most people are simply not capable of it; I’m pretty sure I’m not.
[Braces self for comment flood by enraged libertarians. But what leaves me weak with terror is the prospect of drive-by shunnings from the Amish.]
Once again, I find I cannot resist linking to Eric S. Raymond’s essay, “Ethics From the Barrel of a Gun“. To the degree that I’m libertarian, I caught it from Raymond. The lessons he teaches here are:
Raymond continues:
To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is, therefore, to live in corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from “the dignity of a free man” would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising this demon, of reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal arms, is, ultimately, most important.
…
We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-death decisions, rather than fearing both. We can accept our ultimate responsibility for our own actions. We can know (not just intellectually, but in the sinew of experience) that we are fit to choose.
And not only can we — we must. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood why. If we fail this test, we fail not only in private virtue but consequently in our capacity to make public choices. Rudderless, lacking an earned and grounded faith in ourselves, we can only drift — increasingly helpless to summon even the will to resist predators and tyrants (let alone the capability to do so).
[I have slightly reorganized Raymond's paragraphs for my purposes. Read the whole thing; this should be a standard text in Citizenship Class, perhaps as a prerequisite for Militia Training.]
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