Thursday 6 August 2015

People should be peeing on fire hydrants? More about the fallen lamp post in San Francisco.

The base of the pole was corroded by urine and it held up a banner.
The spokesman for the San Francisco Public Utilties Commission says “We encourage people and dogs alike to do their business in other places, like a proper restroom or one of our fire hydrants, which are stronger and made out of cast iron.”

The story's everywhere but the picture is missing. Here it is.





Hire Math

Retail staff may get lost having to count back your change but this story from a Burger King in the Okanagan beats them all.  The till showed my friend was owed 99 cents in change. The young lady rounded it off in her head and handed him two dimes.  He says "That's a mistake" and hands back the dimes.  She thinks about it and rounds it the other way, handing him a dime and a nickel this time.   He wishes I could post the dumbfounded look on her face when she still didn't get it.


This teenager didn't get along with "Matthew Matics" but there's also a school system that let her down.

Wednesday 5 August 2015

Reward politicians for good behaviour but don't trust them.

Barton Swain was speechwriter to disgraced governor, Mark Sanford, and has written a sobering but delightful account of it.  The take-away:
Author of "The Speechwriter"
"Why do we trust men who have sought and attained high office by innumerable acts of vanity and self will? .. Why do we trust the men who make careers of persuading us of their goodness and greatness, and who compete for our votes?  .. They serve because they glory in receiving glory... We should reward such people with the fame they so desire - if and when they perform real public services. Much of the hand-wringing commentary about the loss of trust in government resulting from Vietnam and Watergate is simply..a failure to appreciate the simple truth that politicians should never have been trusted in the first place.  They may be lauded when they're right and venerated when they're dead, but they should never be trusted.
Self-regard isn't a foible to which some politicians are vulnerable.  It is the peculiar and deadly flaw of modern democratic politics. .. Successful politicians are people who know how to make (voters) think well of them without our realizing that's what they're doing. .. I don't say this to demean politicians.  It takes an able and industrious person to do what they do, and many of them are capable of courage and honorable conduct.  But the same can be said of traveling salesmen;  it does not follow that we should trust them."   

Most Googled Is Trump

Ahead of the first GOP debate, across America it's TRUMP everywhere all the time on Google search.  Hat tip to Breitbart.





If you like your cholesterol, you can keep it.

The US decided to drop warnings about diet cholesterol.   Here's the short version:
"The body creates cholesterol in amounts much larger than ... diet provides,  ..The body regulates how much is in the blood and ... there is both “good” and “bad” cholesterol"
Too much cholesterol (the wrong kind) delivered to the wrong places (after being made and deployed in your own body) endangers your health.   For years you've been badgered by know-it-alls trying out the Beta version of their advice through lawfare and classroom indoctrination.  Don`t pooh pooh expert advice.  Just stay cautious.   The same story is being played out with salt in your diet. (`How the recommended low levels of salt in your diet might actually be dangerous.``)

Tuesday 4 August 2015

97% sure we are wrecking the world with C02 - NOT

Hold your nose.  There's no 97% consensus.  That's the kind of vote Saddam Hussein got in old Iraq (99.6%) and Barack Hussein Obama got in some Philadelphia precincts (100%) where not one Romney vote was registered. The 97% puffery is coming from the smelly end of the IPCC beast.



Two observations:
1.  (Hat tip to smalldeadanimals):  Since 31,000 scientists signed a petition to "Urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement" and since all but 3% of scientists agree about a global warming crisis, then somewhere there must be 970,000 scientists backing the global warming consensus.   They're missing and in fact there are but 2500 scientists that the IPCC claims to speak for.




2.   When you drill down to see how those 2500 got on the record, this appalling information emerges:
"While a total of 2,500 (or some similar number) scientists participate in some way in the writing or review of its reports, the IPCC’s working group responsible for assessing the causes of climate change and its future trajectory consists of only about 600 scientists, and many of those are activists working for environmental interest groups. For the Fourth Assessment Report, only 62 were responsible for reviewing the chapter that attributed climate change to man-made greenhouse gas emissions, with 55 of those being known advocates of the theory of man-made global warming. Of the seven impartial reviewers, two disagreed with the statement, leaving only five credible scientific reviewers who unequivocally endorse the IPCC’s conclusion, a far cry from 2,500."

SASK Dollar At Par

I used to like the "Alberta Money At Par" signs.  That joke is toast.  Albertans spent their heritage money, voted NDP, and have no one to blame but themselves.  



Seen on an Okanagan highway:

Monday 3 August 2015

Americans envy Canada as Harper appoints conservative blogger to Supreme Court

Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds wishes US was more like Canada.  
Russ Brown didn't have to water down his views in a bruising confirmation spectacle.  His years as a blogger at the University of Alberta are a feature, not a bug.

Six GOP last minute polls. UPDATE

View snapshots of six presidential polls coming out just before the August 6th GOP debates.
The first are two from conservative-libertarian websites:  Instapundit and HotAir.  Then four from Monmouth, NBC/WSJ, Rasmussen, and Quinnipiac.   Fiorina soars in the first two.


Instapundit
HotAir



Monmouth(August 3)


NBC/WSJ  August 2nd

Quinnipiac (July 30th)

Rasmussen.  (July 30th)
UPDATE The Breitbart poll  which has Cruz edging over Trump and Bush irrelevant.





For the next election, a semi-sincere effort will do.

I don't want a perfect Canada, "perfect" being the enemy of the good.  Bumbling along with competing policies, sometimes all of them wrong, is better for our country than being driven by 'pure laine' ideology.  Wanting hate-free speech or completely open markets to prevail is over reach. Likewise the view that we must all have a Come-To-Jesus moment or a meat-less, zoo-less, border-less world is intemperate.

One of my grandfathers would say: "Why is the sea so close to the shore?  The answer is, no matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney".     Some facts on the ground simply ARE and wishing to prevail over them by superior logic is folly.   "It is what it is" is a helpful insight, not a cop-out.  Life is a bit muddled and sort of complicated, not well-served by an ideologue.

Related:
"All that’s needed is a semi-sincere effort to avoid big deficits, combined with a semi-decent amount of economic growth".
How long is the coast of Great Britain?
It depends on your ruler
but it is what it is.

Saturday 1 August 2015

Tar sand mining IS the Clean Up


Just a reminder, tar has been oozing into the Athabasca River since forever.
Seventy or eighty miles along the river-bank, out of which oil oozes at frequent intervals... …tar there is … in plenty. … It oozes from every fissure, and into some bituminous tar wells we can poke a twenty-foot pole and find no resistance.(1909 & Cameron 71)
Have you seen that pop-up propaganda ad, "one drop of oil pollutes a million drops of water", the ad showing a guy with his mouth under a spigot of motor oil?

It was a profit to the natives when they patched their canoes with it but now there's better money available in cheques from the Tides Corporation.



Related: Forest fires this summer in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan polluted on a staggering scale compared to the tar sands.  h/t smalldeadanimals

Central USA June 29th
A reminder that smoke
must go somewhere.


Friday 31 July 2015

The Government America Deserves: The Donald Is A Better Fit Than Hillary Or Jeb

This is about democracy, not wisdom and it's no contest that a brash loudmouth with brains, money and bling is more  appealing to Americans than wussified slates of politicians. When I saw this video of two giggling black ladies telling us not to dump on Trump, I knew that if he wins the GOP convention, for better or worse America will have "President Trump" because he'll capture chunks of the Democrat's tame electorate.
Who should be number one?  An aristocrat or the common man, a plutocrat or an Ivy League lawyer, anyone who can get a majority of votes or the descendents of past rulers? (Bush, Clinton and Queen Elizabeth).   Democracy will always be gamed by strong players but even without them, democracy will just deliver the kind of government you deserve to get.  You may not like it but any political mechanism that forces an orderly recreation of the leadership is better than all the alternatives.

And today from Breitbart:
"Donald Trump ..is, culturally speaking, a terrific fit for black America. Blacks seem to identify with Trump’s swagger: they put him in enough rap songs, after all. He’s got hip-hop cred and defiant charisma the dreary Obama could never hope to match."


Wednesday 29 July 2015

Organic food laced with natural poisons

"99.99 percent (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves" The vast majority of pesticidal substances that we consume are in our diets “naturally” and are present in organic foods as well as non-organic ones. Moreover, “natural and synthetic chemicals are equally likely to be positive in animal cancer tests.” Thus, consumers who buy organic to avoid pesticide exposure are focusing their attention on just one-hundredth of one percent of the pesticides they consume.

Bruce Ames.jpg
Bruce Ames
Sourced at Forbes, quoting an unnamed Berkley study by Ames and colleagues. The Ames link is clear that he has published in this field and designed the most common test for mutagenicity but doesn't point to a specific paper.

It's no surprise that a life form that competes with us but has no legs has found a thousand tricks to be bitter, prickly, nauseating, sour, rash-causing and generally tough.  That goes into the food chain.

Tuesday 28 July 2015

Science fiction rocket drive sounding like non-fiction now.

An unexplained electromagnetic propulsion drive continues to pass tests.  "For every action there is an equal and opposite action" was gospel from Newton's day but this darn thing (RF resonant cavity thruster) just goes without a push-back.   The Telegraph story is one of many that hit the news this week.   It's been properly pooh-poohed for more than a decade because the science is still missing. But it's been duplicated and triplicated.  The EM Drive is turning into one of the top stories ever for space exploration.

From The Telegraph:
It produces thrust by using solar power to generate multiple microwaves that move back and forth in an enclosed chamber. This means that until something fails or wears down, theoretically the engine could keep running forever without the need for rocket fuel. (It) defies one of the fundamental concepts of physics – the conservation of momentum –
Shawyer invented it over ten years ago but recently NASA said they think it works and a professor at the Dresden University of Technology demonstrated that it produces thrust.  Chinese researchers also came up with a working model with net thrust.  The picture below (from the Telegraph) belongs in a Jules Verne movie with its coppery plate and myriad bolts.

The concept of a photon rocket has been around for a while, that the emission of photons can generate thrust in space.  The thrust generation of the new device has a thousand-fold advantage. Sounds promising.  Until the science is known, leave this one in the PENDING file, a game changer if scaled up and understood.


Using people to think will be like using monkeys to test drugs


We are no Lords of Creation, more like grass of the field that caught fire.  When the fuel is gone the fire will disappear.   I see three paths of combustion:  1. The singularity is near  with a hyperbolic transformation of human nature into something other.  2.  We perish from the earth for our sins or some accident from outer space.  3:  The flare-up of consciousness passes from people to AI.   Using people to think will be like using monkeys to test drugs, a cheap work-around until something better composes itself.

Picture billions of humans, sort of the Northern Spotted Owl of tomorrow, not very useful but cheap to leave content in ecological reserves.  Today there’s worry about jobs lost to robots as San Francisco raises the minimum wage to $15 and totally awesome hamburgermachines get invented to compensate.  Tomorrow it will be so cheap to supply basic energy, food and selfies to humans that most people will have no need to work unless they have a spark within.     


Per Ardua Ad Astra will be for the very few.  All progress is self-limiting, coming up with zoning rules, copyrights, review boards and Thou Shalt Nots to keep things just the way they are after I got mine.  With self-driving cars and bicycle helmets,  eco-reserves for minnows and frogs, reflective jackets and dawn-to-dusk parent-patrolled childhood, there will be less challenge and those who survive will be both fit and un-fit.  In other words, evolution is treated like the enemy.   People as we know them are becoming less fit to survive and reproduce though richer and freer than ever before.

What fuel these mortals be.
As a conservative do you protect the fuel or the spark?

Third party surprise

What if the third party run in the USA is the GOP?  A populist storm with Trump out in front could own the Republican brand.   The McConnells and Boehners and Cheneys would be the splinter in 2020 trying to re-brand for the good old days, a bit like the Progressive Conservatives trying to get their party back from the rednecks out of Alberta.  Clever Trump got in some points with the Palin crowd today.  He's no conservative but he's zeitgeist.

Monday 27 July 2015

Conventional wisdom about energy use


What you knew as a youth about energy is mostly baloney today. Look at the profound changes in the chart.  Remember muscle and firewood?  In my grandfather’s childhood they supplied 90% of Europe's energy.  Now they’re heritage sidelines for tourists who want to ride in rickshaws and see maple syrup made old-style in a sugaring bush.    The oil haters can’t trace their evil enemy back much before WW2 and it’s already being displaced by gas.  (The chart is normalized to 100% every year and gives relative importance only.)



Sourced here

Related: Where energy comes from and where it is consumed in America in a handy chart. Most waste is from vehicles and power generation while home and industry uses are tight.  The inputs are already out of date in this chart.

Canada's clean air and water prove the Pope's wrong about capitalism.

Capitalism continues to lift millions out of poverty when given a chance. It also pays for cleaning up the air and water.   Pollution is way down in Canada as the Fraser Institute has to remind us every year.
"It is precisely in the countries where markets are relatively free, and where private enterprise is allowed to pursue profits, that we have seen the greatest gains in environmental quality over the past half century. The best examples of this are two decidedly capitalist countries, Canada and the United States.    On almost all measures, Canadians currently experience significantly better air quality than at any other time since continuous monitoring of air quality began in the 1970s. Concentrations of nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, for instance, have decreased sharply. Concentrations of carbon monoxide, a potent toxic emission, have decreased everywhere in Canada. And it’s not simply air quality that has improved. As previous reports have documented, water quality in Canada is generally quite good, and forests are no longer harvested beyond levels that are considered environmentally protective. More and more waste water is subject to high levels of treatment before being released to the environment, more solid waste is being diverted to recycling, soil quality has improved, and the size of protected areas has increased over recent decades. The United States has seen similar (if not greater) improvements in environmental protection. A 2005 report published by the U.S. Department of State summarized 30 years of environmental progress thus: “During this time, the U.S. economy grew by 187 per cent, population grew by 39 percent, and energy consumption increased by 47 per cent, yet air pollution decreased by 48 percent. In 2002, 94 per cent of Americans were served by community water systems that met all health-based standards, up from 79 per cent of the population in 1993.” And improvements continue. As of 2013, according to the EPA, ambient concentrations of carbon monoxide decreased by 84 per cent of their 1980 levels; ozone had fallen by 33 per cent; ambient lead by 92 per cent, and sulfur dioxide by 81 per cent over the same time span."
Pope Francis should make his point by telling the world: "Search out lands where smog is beaten back and sewage kept from streams. Such emulate".

If you click on the "lift millions out of poverty" link above, you'll find Michael Totten's article on the miracle turnaround in Vietnam, a sample herewith:
"State subsidies were abolished. Private businesses were allowed to operate again. Businessmen, investors, and employees could keep their profits and wages. Farmers could sell their produce on the open market and keep the proceeds instead of giving them up to the state. The results were spectacular. It took some time for a middle class to emerge, but from 1993 to 2004, the percentage of Vietnamese living in poverty dropped from 60 percent to 20 percent. Before Doi Moi, the command economy contracted, and inflation topped out at over 700 percent; it would eventually shrink to single digits. After years of chronic rice shortages, Vietnam became the world’s second-largest exporter of rice."

Saturday 25 July 2015

President Trump: A credible preview.

This WHAT IF scenario comes from Roger Simon.  ("Get Used To It").
Amidst the humor you learn Trump has a drinks business in Israel and are reminded that negotiations will be brisk, that ISIS won't be getting any love, some deadwood will be fired and the private sector will be pumping out new jobs.  Iran will be out and Israel will be in.

"Trigger warnings" will be silly again.


Political Philosophies That Weaponize Losers

Use this meme to prevail in argument.  Sourced from Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and applied to Western followers of ISIS and Communism.

More at Holland's "Political Pilgrims".  People who seek Utopian "hope and change" are driven by a deep discontent with their own societies, which leads them to deny or excuse the myriad moral defects of the places they visit. (Paraphrased).