BunkBlog

Happy April Fool’s Day.  Today, even more than other days, don’t believe anything on the internet.  I saw squeeze bacon and a Tauntaun sleeping bag on Thinkgeek, and a Sony UMPC with mini-CD drive on UMPC Portal.  Who knows what we’ll see on Slashdot and others by the time the geeks go to sleep tonight?

How many times is a variation on this story going to come out before someone finally realizes the absurdity of “no knock” warrants and the entire facade of the War on (Some) Drugs? Police shoot, kill two dogs during raid. They were looking for someone, nameless, and hydrocodone. Um, isn’t that the drug Rush Limbaugh uses? How is it legal to have a warrant for an address, with no name on it?

Another recent dog killing, in Tampa Bay.  This one, the dog’s owner wasn’t being interrogated or searched, she was voluntarily answering a query from a cop when the cop just plugged her pup in the skull and then walked away.

A state Senate hearing on the increasing militarization of our humble protectors, who are allowed to break into people’s homes without warrants in some cases, and don’t need to identify themselves or even have to apologize later for fucking it all up.

A pit bull who looks far too much like Leo, gunned down by cops looking for a DUI suspect by randomly running through people’s yards and shooting their pets.

Previous post on same subject.

To complain to Youtube, click here.

Scroll to the very bottom and click on “new issue”

Select “suspended account” from the options and express your opinion.

The mediafire link (to mirror the video) is here.

Is “until further notice” the most useless phrase ever used, or just among the top ten?

I’ve lived in Texas for 9 of the past 11 years. In all that time, I’d never seen a living armadillo. These stupid little critters are splattered all over the highways, but I didn’t see one actually moving. After so many years, I might be forgiven for thinking that the armadillo is actually a fictional creature, like the jackalope. I’ve seen plenty of dead jackalopes in souvenir shops, so it’s not too far to stretch for the fictional armadillo theory.

This weekend, Kat and I went on one of our occasional walks through the local nature trail, down by the water. At the beginning of the trail, we caught sight of a rabbit scurrying down the trail, which is a rare enough sight that we already felt lucky to have made the trip. As we continued down the trail, we encountered cardinals, squirrels leaping across the trail, and finally we came to a grassy field between trees and water.

Yes, that is indeed a live armadillo thrashing about, looking for bugs. The next day, we walked out there again and caught sight of another armadillo. Finally, the day after that, we went for a walk near a local campground, and a third armadillo walked across the road in front of us.

Thus begins the armadillo uprising of 2009. Mark your calendars.

Came across this Watchmen-inspired animation on Boing Boing this morning.  Just got to watch it when I got home from work (stupid anti-fun filter on-base), and it’s freakin’ awesome.  I love the idea of Ozymandias playing Shaggy, and Rorschach being just a little nutty.  Right.

Dear Oscar committee,

Some of us don’t have 85-inch televisions. Please put the “dearly departed” memorial on-screen in a way we can actually view who has left us. And, what’s with the spinning ballerina-like camera work? Vertigo much?

Kthxbye

News from several fronts on fossils today.

First, there’s a great skeleton of a pre-whale about to give birth, fossilized with the fetus’s head facing out, which means the animal probably gave birth on land, even though the body is blatantly aquatic. Maiacetus must have been clumsy on land, but a great find. This was found in Pakistan, and is published in the Open Science journal PLOS.

Second, the remains of a 42-foot long snake dating from 60 million years ago, which would have weighed around 2500 pounds. This is the largest snake to ever be discovered; the titanoboa could swallow a cow. The snake was found in Colombia, the oldest rain forest on the planet.

Finally, sponges left fossil evidence as far back as 635 million years ago. This is 100 million years prior to the so-called Cambrian Explosion (an explosion that took tens of millions of years), and is the oldest fossil evidence so far. The fossils were found in Oman.

These last two stories are from the Feb 5 issue of Nature, a really expensive journal for professional working scientists. Wish I could afford the subscription some days.

You know how the right-wing pundits have been crying about the stimulus package including too much money for poor people? Compassionate conservative my…

Anyway, those same pundits have been crying about the President’s budget proposal containing a 10% reduction in the defense budget. The proposal is for 527 billion dollars, which is actually the exact same number that former President Bush had projected for 2010. If you look at the numbers, this represents an increase in the military budget from 2009 of over 30 billion dollars. Somehow, the wingers didn’t notice the actual real-life decrease in defense spending from 2006 through 2008, yet they have invented a decrease for 2010 that doesn’t exist in any logical way. Oh, and by the way, we still spend almost as much on our military as the entire rest of the planet combined. I doubt anyone will think we’ve become weak and vulnerable any time soon.

As I may have said before, think for yourself and never believe pundits without research.

Michael Phelps, fastest swimmer on record, smoked pot. Well, that proves it then – doing drugs leads to nothing but failure. Some other pot-smokers I know of, just off the top of my head: President Obama, former President Bush, former President Clinton… Yep, a road to ruin there.

Check out the Galileoscope – it’s an attempt by the International Year of Astronomy to create a $10 telescope that can resolve the rings of Saturn.

The CBO analysis of the stimulus is available online. If you really want to know what the impact of the stimulus may be, read it for yourself. Don’t believe whatever talking heads say. Especially don’t believe what they said last week, before the analysis had been released. Lying bastards. It’s true that the CBO says much of the money won’t be spent in federal fiscal year 2009. If you think about it for a few seconds, you’d realize this is blatantly obvious. FY 2009 started in October, so it’ll be about one-third over before the bill becomes law. Then, it still takes time for things to get moving. The “quick” moves won’t be able to add money to the economy until April, half-way into the fiscal year. A multi-year stimulus which has a lower impact in a 6-month “year” than in the following 12-month year?  SHOCKING! A quote from the NY Times seems to be aghast that it may take a few months to a year to get some construction projects moving. Yeah, well…have you seen how long it takes to complete or even plan major construction projects? Boston could tell you.

One thing the CBO won’t tell you, quite explicitly denoted on the front page of their report, is what return on investment we can expect for each provision, or the bill as a whole.  No matter what Marie Cocco says, the CBO doesn’t make those predictions. But, most economists agree that tax cuts (while nice and I’ll take any money the government sees fit to give back to me) are not as effective as you might think.  Turns out, most of us actually save some of that money when we get it, rather than immediately spend every dime.  One typical comment:

“People are going to spend 30, 40 cents on the dollar, so the multiplier is going to be low,” said Adam S. Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute of International Economics.

Have I mentioned we have a kitten? She moved in early in December.

(The Youtube version seems to not work for no reason I can tell, and their support staff is ignoring me. Thankfully, Multiply works just fine.)

So, according to the vast majority of respected economists, including those with Nobel prizes, the stimulus might work, but it might be too late for anything to make things better in the short term.  Even Christina Romer (President Obama’s economic adviser) thinks the stimulus will only slow the growth rate of the unemployment rate in the near term, bringing it back down in two years. But, they all agree that to do nothing is definitely not going to do anything of value.

“We have very few good examples to guide us,” said William G. Gale, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the liberal-leaning research organization. “I don’t know of any convincing evidence that what has been proposed is going to be enough.”

Christina Romer, whom Mr. Obama has designated to be his chief economist, concluded in research she helped write in 1994 that interest-rate policy is the most powerful force in economic recoveries and that fiscal stimulus generally acts too slowly to be of much help in pulling the economy out of recessions, though associates said she now supports a big stimulus package if policy makers roll it out early enough in the recession.

Adam Posen, the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said Mr. Obama’s plan could provide just the right boost — if it was carried out properly.

Alan J. Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said the overall scale of the program looked “reasonable” at $800 billion over two years.

“It’s much bigger than anything that’s been tried in my lifetime, but this is scarier than anything we’ve seen in my lifetime,” Professor Auerbach said.

For those who point out that Romer once said that throwing money at a recession doesn’t work – no.  You’re wrong, that’s not what she said.  She said that monetary policy is better to use than fiscal policy. Unfortunately, the interest rates are at zero now, so there is no more room for monetary policy. Fiscal policy is what we have available, so that’s what we’re stuck with.

For those who think that tax cuts or tax rebates are better than paying for infrastructure buildouts – no.  You’re wrong, and almost no economist agrees with you.

Mark M. Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, a forecasting firm, told a forum of House Democrats this week that the “bang for the buck” — the additional economic activity generated by each dollar of fiscal stimulus — was highest for increases in food and unemployment benefits. Each dollar of additional money for food stamps yields $1.73 in additional economic activity, Mr. Zandi estimated, and each extra dollar in unemployment benefits yields about $1.63.

By contrast, Mr. Zandi estimated, most tax cuts produce less than a dollar for each dollar of stimulus, especially if the tax cuts are temporary, because people save at least some of their extra money.

Joel Slemrod, a professor of tax policy at the University of Michigan, said, “The research I’ve done on the 2001 and 2008 tax rebates suggests that the proportion of the rebates that went to spending was rather small, about one-third.”

I look forward to more random people throwing up logical fallacies. How about, “argument from personal incredulity?” That’s always a good one. After all, if something doesn’t make sense to you, I’m sure that highly trained economists have spent no time at all on it and it’s all just a guess to them too. Over 140 economists, including 5 Nobel Prize winners, support the stimulus package.  If you want to convince me of your point of view, bring more expert opinion than that.

Scenes from the Great Lazer Tag Massacre of 2009.

This is what passes for tactics in third grade:

I was behind a Hummer H2 today and noticed it had tie-down points.  WTF?  Is someone sling-loading these things below a Chinook?

‘Fantasy Island’ star Ricardo Montalban died this morning.  One of the most surreal memories I have of Montalban was in 1994.  Driving around the desert of southeastern Arizona in a friend’s sports car (incredibly unwise in an Arizona August), listening to Ricardo Montalban on the radio. Montalban was reciting the history of the border region, including the phrase indelibly etched in my brain, “The seven cities of Cibola,” in that rich baritone.

Goodbye, Mr. Roark.

I noticed in yesterday’s Best Buy ad a neat thing – the Acer Aspire One on sale.  Since I have no money right now, I am only window shopping for new toys.  In addition, I’ve always felt that certain personal technology must be seen and held before purchasing. This worked for me quite well, when I fell in love with the Sony Clie clamshell doodad (which The Boy has inherited with its new battery) way back when, and I stay firmly committed to this concept. I can’t imagine buying a laptop or MP3 player or cell phone (well, cell phone I can’t imagine at all) without first being able to handle the item. Some things are just too personal to be left to online research.

Anyway, back to Best Buy. I went to the store, and looked at the MP3 players for a bit, fending off three salespeople (my Sansa got dropped and now the headphone jack only works if you hold the plug at an unnatural angle). Then, I wandered over to the laptop zone, hoping to see a fabled netbook in the wild. I’ve already seen the Aspire One (a friend owns one), but the sheer novelty of one of the stores in this [expletive] town finally taking notice of the biggest trend in portable computing in years…well, I had to see where they had hidden the machine. It turns out, they hid it in some other store, because there was not one hint of the presence of the Aspire One nor any other netbook. So far, the only place in this [expletive] town I’ve seen a netbook actually for sale in the store is Target. We have an Office Depot, Office Max, and a Best Buy, and not one of those technology stores has seen fit to stock any netbooks at all. Nuts.

I wonder if the Sony Vaio P will end up in one of the local stores. I’m doubting it.

Apparently, it is now time for people on my reading list (RSS aggregator, LJ Friends, whatever you want to be called) to make predictions for 2009, and review their past prognosticative abilities. I’ll play along, but I’m taking all sucker bets, so as to get a hit rate much higher than Sylvia Browne ever will.

1. The WorldNutDaily and other extreme-rightwing nutjobs will continue to berate President Obama throughout the year, calling into question his patriotism, his citizenry, and perhaps even his sexual orientation, just in hopes that something will cause people to care about the right-wing again.
2. Windows 7 won’t be the savior of all things computing in 2009.
3. Netbooks will remain nearly impossible to find in retail channels anywhere with a population less than 5 million (like, say, where I live now).
4. The economy will continue to suck.
5. There still won’t be a single-sign-on system that anyone uses. Sorry, OpenSocial and Facebook API.
6. There still won’t be a crypto system that anyone uses.  Sorry, PGP.
7. The Digital TV changeover will be a complete goat-fuck.
8. Our elected representatives will continue to play reverse Robin Hood, taking as much money from the middle class as they can and giving it to the corporate overlords Eisenhower warned us about.
9. Weather will continue to be remarkable, which will cause climatologists to point out they predicted just such a thing. Denialists will claim that anything other than blistering heat in Alaska and seventy hurricanes reaching into Iowa is proof there is no such thing as global warming.
10. Kit will continue to amuse and enlighten us all with her LE posts.

Since there was great hue and cry recently over the completely unprecedented level* of cold that great parts of the United States have experienced this year, it’s reasonable to assume the same people are following this week’s weather news as well.

Unseasonable warm weather is causing flash flood warnings through much of the midwest. Gee, if “winter” is now considered to be a disproof of anthropogenic global warming, is “warm weather” proof? See also, “weather and climate are not the same word.”

* – by “unprecedented” we mean completely precedented in every reasonable way