The Fifth Carnival of Space is up at ‘Why Homeshool’.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

This has been most unusual spring in South Texas… it has not gotten really hot, except for a day or so at a time, before reverting to mild days and cool nights more typical of early spring. And it has rained… a lot. Holy Rubber Waders, Batman, it has rained so much that the wildflowers have lingered and lingered, well past the time when they have usually withered and died back into the grass, which is usually looking pretty crispy by this time as well. But no, as of this week there are still acres of scarlet and dark gold Mexican hat, purple thistles along the roadside, and masses of little yellow daisies. And everything is still green… so lush it looks variously like England (according to William) or North Carolina (according to Blondie.)

William was originally going to go down to Corpus Christi to visit an old friend, but he lost the address, and we couldn’t locate a current telephone number… so I thought it would be at least interesting to go down to the coast anyway. I rather wanted to see the site of Indianola, and the citadel at Goliad. Blondie was on spring break, and I had the day free, so what the hell. And the Lesser Weevil had never seen the ocean… or any body of water much bigger than one of the seasonal creeks at McAllister Park.

It was a beautiful morning, we had a cooler full of water, bottled tea and energy drinks, Weevil had peed her bladder dry, and so we set out early in Blondie’s Montero sport. My idea, the early start, and Weevil at least was enthusiastic. Blondie and William, being late night-owls and late sleepers were somewhat less enthused. My idea, also to take the secondary roads… well, there was no more direct way to get there, anyway. So, two-lane road, sometimes with a median, slow-down to go through towns that sometimes aren’t more than a hiccup of three houses and a post-office… but no traffic light. A stop sign, maybe. A mixture of houses, set back from the road out in the country closer to it in the hamlets, everything from an ornate wedding-cake of a mansion on a hill near Karnes City (it was a multi-million dollar house, on the market for years) all the way down the scale to houses that appeared suspiciously to be double-wide trailers battened onto a concrete slab and tarted up a little, and everything in between, from little craftsman-style bungalows to modern McMansions in two tones of brick

But in between was the countryside, green and rolling and beautiful. The hills go on for quite a way south of San Antonio, gentler but still recognizably rolling, but all of a sudden just south of Goliad and Victoria… the land abruptly becomes as flat as a pancake, and there are no more oak trees, and nothing to block the sight of the horizon in any direction. The clouds skated over in long lines; it all looked as big as Texas is always advertised to be. The road was elevated and many houses were on stilts, for an excellent reason; apparently there’s nothing to stop a storm surge coming in from the Gulf for a good few miles.

There was nothing left of Indianola but a monument and some markers, a scattering of holiday homes and pavilions by the water-edge. We induced Weevil to venture into the water, and watched a loaded barge move up towards Port Lavaca, and that was about it as far as amusements by the seaside went.

We couldn’t even find a place to eat, in Port Lavaca where we could sit outside with the dog, so we settled for a Whataburger in Cuero… That would have made somewhat more of a point to the trip, having something by the coast, but we just kind of planned on stopping wherever our fancy and chance took us. For some cruel reason, thought, there was nothing of the sort on any of the coast roads we took: no quaint smoky BBQ places where you eat off paper plates and clean up with a roll of paper towels, no funky sea-food restaurants complete with mooching seagulls. Blondie will be extremely annoyed if we find out we missed such a place by half a block or something stupid like that.

Now, Quero is a decent little town, with many beautifully kept old houses…it looks at least alive, which is more than can be said for Nixon or Smiley. Nixon looked like a sad, half-shuttered place, and if you sneezed as you drove into Smiley, you missed it entirely.
Karnes City and Goliad were lively enough, and the citadel was most interesting… of all the places where the Texas War for Independence were fought, it’s the one that still appears most like it did in 1836. Frankly, most people are a little disheartened about the Alamo; all that is left of it is the chapel and part of the barracks, but the Citadel la Bahia has a complete circuit of walls and buildings; much easier to visualize how it would have looked when Fannin’s men were marched away.

To me it was worthwhile, though; a chance to see that part of Texas looking more impossibly beautiful than I had ever thought it could be. Now I know why the early settlers were so taken with it, but I warn anyone who will come and hope to see the same, next year at this time: this year was an anomaly… it will not look this good again for about another fifteen years.

Didn’t expect that out of me did ya? 

Let me explain…no…too long…let me sum up.  I don’t agree with her views.  I find her snuggling up to Chavez just plain disturbing.

What I admire is that when she was attacked by the right, she stuck to her beliefs.  Then, when she went after the left and was attacked by the same people who wanted her nominated for sainthood, she still stuck to her beliefs.

What sickens me more than her anti-war views are the personal attacks the woman has had to endure from both sides of the political spectrum.  They’ve both found something they can agree on, once she began holding both sides’ feet to the fire, both sides have taken to calling her “attention whore.”

To make things clear, a woman who’s anti war and who’s lost her son to that war and who did her best to end that war so other mothers don’t have to feel the pain of losing a child is now an attention whore. 

Because you know, peace is just such a silly thing for anyone to work for.  The Democrats want to just end the war by pulling out, but they won’t cut funding to it.  The Republicans want to end the war by winning it but don’t seem to be doing anything to actually achieve that goal.

But some Mom who lost her kid in the war is the whore.

I guess I’m just getting more cynical…how exactly does that make sense?

Cross-Posted at Faster Than The World.

Specifically, educate me on the pros and cons of buying a foreclosed property. What should I be leary of? The property in question looks good on the real estate site, but only has one picture. The description raises no red flags (I stay away from places that say “sold as-is” or “no disclosure”).

I’m doing a drive-by this weekend, to make sure of the neighborhood, etc, but nothing beats seeing the whole thing and getting it inspected. I just don’t want to do that yet, until I’m closer to being sure that this is the one.

Lots of y’all are way more knowledgeable than me in this area - please share your hard-learned wisdom.

UPDATE: 2 June: Thanks everyone for your input. Please don’t stop.

I drove around the various neighborhoods today, and eliminated most of my possibilities. Then I stumbled across a FSBO property that is darn close to perfect. My two biggest issues with it are (1) the listing states lot size as approx 1.25 acres, and county tax rolls state lot size as .9 acres. Which do I believe? (2) It’s not fenced, so I’ll need to figure out how much fencing I can afford, so my hounds will have a secure place to run.

Or

I, for one, welcome our new bithead overlords.

Eric Schmidt said

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

How? Gathering personal data from everywhere. Which is not hard - most of us leave tracks all over the infosphere*, most of it just sitting there. Do you know how to encrypt email? What about using onion routing to mask your IP address? And for the love of God if you use onion routing do you know that some programs leak data to DNS servers to establish the onion route?

If the infosphere were a forest most of us are loud rubes from the city, gawking and tromping all over the place, being loud and scaring off game for a country mile. Bird watchers and fishermen are wincing as we come tromping by, wishing you’d just get back in your Winnebago and go away. It was nice before you showed up and it will be nicer once you leave.

But .. Google. Personal data in the hands of the unscrupulous is double-plus un-good.

After all, here we have a corporation whose executive are not publicly elected, whose activities are not subject to any form of public oversight, and who chose - not reluctantly, but enthusiastically and without the slightest complaint - to comply with censorship in China. To be honest, I’d probably trust the government more with the kind of information that Google wants to amass under the flimsy excuse of helping me find information and services I know how to find perfectly well already, thank you.

As an aside - where you stand on this depends on how you feel about government. Which in turn might depend on how recently you’ve been goosed by it. But I digress.

I don’t want to get too deeply into this but it’s worth noting that while we don’t elect executives in Google neither do we elect the executives in our government. We elect the guys who are in charge who in turn hire the guys who are running things. We elect the CEO. Get a layer or two down and the guys who actually run the government are pretty much just like the guys who run Google.

That’s not where I was going with this.

Transparent Society

David Brin speculated that cameras would soon be everywhere, would be networked and capture our public moments. Getting down to the bedrock issue here, we get down to a who watches the watcher problem. We have two ways of living in this future;

* The cops (The Man, John Law) monitor the cameras. Recordings are kept by them, for their use.

or

* There is no Monitor Central. The feed from the cameras is tossed into the ether for anyone to view.

I’m paraphrasing this badly - Brin is a writer and he does a much better job of this. Go read the article if you have not already done so.

Where we’re at is that this is not a deal you can stop. The cameras are coming. Our only choice is to have a society where the cameras are controlled by John Law or by no one at all. It’s that stark.

Here is the problem, and where Brin’s lovely thought experiment fails; cameras are mounted, paid for and installed not by a bunch of grubby hackers but by the Laws. Would your average bureaucrat just hand over data?

I won’t hold my breath.

Where I’m Going With This

You probably saw this coming a mile away. Is the man collecting data on you? If we are tromping through the infosphere like tourists from the city then our tracks in a thousand government databases are fossilized footprints. You’re known about a thousand different ways from Sunday.

Integration of all these databases will happen. Call it empire building or ‘but the people paid for this data they have a right to good data’** or a well-intentioned effort to thwart the pressing crisis of the day … it will be slow and expensive but it will happen.

Google is plowing forward with the same plans - but with a million sources of data that are not controlled by the State.  They’re doing it better and faster.

What Google - and a thousand scruffy hackers who want to be the next Google - are up to can be seen not as evil or even bad but an effort to build a public feed of data. Transparent Society Version 2.0.

Intentioned or not this is an effort to construct a better place to live than the one we’ll get if we do nothing.***

On the one side is that massive data integration by the State - and if you think you’ll see much data from that, you’ll be waiting a long time. On the flip side all the other data, just put out there for people to use. The State’s default mode is to hide everything, Google’s is to put it out there for everyone to use.

I know which society I’d prefer to live in.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

*I use this not in the way that a learned policy wonk would so he can up his fee for a speaking gig but in a mock-ironic sense. In fact assume that all consultant and wonk talk above is used in this sense.

*** Or not.

Daily Brief readers, I thank you for you indulgence. This is not your normal mil-blog deal and if you’re read this far you’re a champ and I appreciate it. That or you are wondering if I have lost my mind and you were reading this in the same sense that some people watch NASCAR i.e. for the car crashes.

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Let’s not forget why we have this day off, ok? Take a moment today, in the midst of your fun, and remember those who’ve given everything they had so that we might live in freedom.

Thanks

The mainstream media is hunting torturers… but only if it’s Americans doing the torturing. If Al Qaeda’s torture manuel just happens to be found, just lying around?

Quick, do another story about Abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo… something, quick!

I found this link to the manuel, as posted on “The Smoking Gun” yesterday through The Belmont Club. I thought I’d rather wait twenty-four hours, before posting it here. Please be warned, it is really nasty. But it puts the whole question of torture of the detainees at Guantanamo rather in a different light.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Just because…

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Just seemed to be especially relevent, this Memorial Day.

Last night was payday and the boys get to pick up a new book. Older Monkey is twelve; he was dithering over two books - a new addition to a young-adult series he’s been reading or this: Dangerous Book For Boys. He opted for the latter and I am quite pleased by his purchase.

Topics in DBFB? Famous Battles. Invisible ink. Latin phrases every boy should know. How to make a trip wire. How to make an electro-magnet. The Declaration of Independence. How to play poker. Girls. Girls?

You may already have noticed that girls are quite different from you. By this, we do not mean the physical differences, more the fact that they remain unimpressed by your mastery of a game involving wizards, or your understanding of Morse code. some will be impressed, of course, but as a general rule, girls do not get quite as excited by the use of urine as a secret ink as boys do.

Which is, sadly, true. I would have avoided a whole lotta marital strife if I’d learned this sooner than I did.

It reads like the Boy Scout Manual would if the editors had gotten their way and included the really good bits as well as the stuff BSA requires. Older Monkey spent an hour this evening making a tripwire using two AA batteries, wire salvaged from two dead fans and a light bulb. Of note is that he started using the directions and then strayed off using his own design. Which doesn’t quite work and led to learning how to troubleshoot electrical circuits and … more fundamentally .. learning troubleshooting techniques and stuff like .. logic.

Highly recommended.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Ok, so this is one of those sort of weeks… although I did get a dividend check from the auto insurance company; a paltry sum but actually very welcome nonetheless, and another agent sent the usual SASE reply saying she is intrigued and can I send her the Whole Entire Manuscript, Please…getting a print of all 336 pages and mailing it will still happen in something less than toot-suite time, and probably cost the whole of the dividend check! Well, things happen for a purpose, I guess.

William is here, a week before I was really expecting and ready for him, missing his flight last night… which I only found out about after I had been waiting at the airport for an hour, this after putting in three hours putting together some brochures for the current occasional employer, the worlds tallest ADHD child. So, out of bed at four AM, doing four circuits of the airport pick-up area; honestly, if I weren’t so fond of him and if it hadn’t been so long since he was here last, I would have just told him to get his ass into a taxi at the airport and I’d have breakfast ready by the time he got to the house.

And I have to re-write the Hot Wells article, it just didn’t suit the editor… but I think I have racked up bonus points for being agreeable about re-writing I was complimented on being completely professional about the criticism… which inclines me to think that a lot of the other writers must be… I don’t know; high maintenance? Prima Donna? Temperamental, even? Eh… if you are paying me enough for bespoke word-smithing, temperament is something I can’t afford to indulge in.

I was worried about Spike the Shi-tzu, AKA the Poop Factory for a couple of days, too. Plenty of input… no observable output. Given that every disgusting thing she comes across goes straight into her mouth, I was afraid it was only a matter of time until she ingested something that would expensively obstruct the old alimentary canal. Not to worry, though. The evidence of normal digestive function was fresh on the doormat last night. The smell of it would have gagged a buzzard, though. (What does that little wretch eat? And do I really want to know?)

I am sure that Spike was the one who dragged Williams boxer-shorts out into the living room around mid morning and left them on the sofa. Blondie to me; “Jeeze, Mom, can you consider that I live here too?” She only rolled her eyes when I said Spike must have dragged them in. From the pile of laundry that William carelessly left on the floor.

Wrote up a book review, over at BNN… is anyone reading me at all this week, or is it just my imagination?

Carnival of Space #4 is up. And there was much rejoicing.

The good folks there were kind enough to link to this entry at The Daily Brief.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

The summer of 1860 culminated a decade of increasingly bitter polarization among the citizens of the still-United States over the question of slavery, or as the common polite euphemism had it; “our peculiar institution”. At a period within living memory of older citizens, slavery once appeared as if it were something that would wither away as it became less and less profitable, and more and more disapproved of by practically everyone. But the invention of the cotton gin, to process cotton fiber mechanically made large-scale agricultural production profitable, relighting the fire under a moribund industry. The possibility of permitting the institution of chattel slavery in the newly-acquired territories in the West during the 1840s turned the heat up to a simmer. It came to a full rolling boil after California was admitted as a free state in 1850… but at a cost of stiffening the Fugitive Slave Laws. And as a prominent senator, Jesse Hart Benton lamented subsequently, the matter of slavery popped up everywhere, as ubiquitous as the biblical plague of frogs. Attitudes hardened on both sides, and within a space of a few years advocates for slavery and abolitionists alike had all the encouragement they needed to readily believe the worst of each other.

Texas was not immune to all this, of course. Of the populated western states at the time, Texas was closer in sympathy to the South in the matter of slavery. Most settlers who come from the United States had come from where it had been permitted, and many had brought their human property with them, or felt no particular objection to the institution itself. In point of fact, slaves were never particularly numerous: the largest number held by a single Texas slave-owner on the eve of the Civil War numbered around 300, and this instance was very much a singular exception; most owned far fewer. Only a portion of the state was favorable to the sort of mass-agricultural production that depended upon a slave workforce. In truth while there were few abolitionists, there were many whose enthusiasm for the practice of chattel slavery was particularly restrained especially in those parts of North Texas, which had been settled from northern states and around the Hill Country and San Antonio, similarly settled by Germans and other Europeans.

One of the subtle and tragic side-effects that the hardening of attitudes had on the South was to intensify the “closing-in” of attitudes and culture towards contrary opinions. As disapproval of slavery heightened in the North and in Europe, Southern partisans became increasingly defensive, less inclined to brook any kind of criticism of the south and its institutions, peculiar or otherwise. By degrees the South became inimical to outsiders bearing the contrary ideas that progress is made of. Those who were aware of the simple fact that ideas, money, innovation, and new immigrants were pouring into the Northern states at rates far outstripping those into the South tended to brood resentfully about it, and cling to their traditions ever more tightly. Always touchy about points of honor and insult, some kind of nadir was reached in 1854 on the floor of the US Senate when a Southern Senator, Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Charles Sumner following a fiercely abolitionist speech by the latter. Senator Brooks was presented with all sorts of fancy canes to commemorate the occasion, while Senator Sumner was months recovering from the brutal beating.

And even more than criticism, Southerners feared a slave insurrection, and any whisper of such met with a hard and brutal reaction. John Brown’s abortive 1859 raid on the Federal armory at Harper’s Ferry sealed the conviction into the minds of Southerners that the abolitionists wished for exactly that.

When mysterious fires razed half of downtown Denton, parts of Waxahatchie, a large chunk of the center of Dallas, and a grocery store in Pilot Point during the hottest summer in local memory, it took no great leap of imagination for anti-abolitionists to place blame for mysterious fires squarely on the usual suspects and their vile plots. Residents were especially jumpy in Dallas, where two Methodist preachers had been publicly flogged and thrown out of town the previous year. The editor of the local Dallas newspaper, one Charles Pryor wrote to the editors of newspapers across the state, (including the editor of the Austin Gazette who was chairman of the state Democratic Party) claiming “It was determined by certain abolitionist preachers, who were expelled from the country last year, to devastate, with fire and assassination, the whole of Northern Texas, and when it was reduced to a helpless condition, a general revolt of slaves, aided by the white men of the North in our midst, was to come off on the day of election in August.”

The panic was on, then, all across Texas: Committees of Public Safety were formed, as so-called abolitionist plotters were sought high, low, and behind every privy and under every bed, and lynched on the slightest suspicion. Conservative estimates place the number of dead, both black and white as at least thirty and possibly up to a hundred, while the newspapers breathlessly poured fuel on the fires… metaphorically speaking, of course… by expounding on the cruel depredations the abolitionists had planned for the helpless citizens of Texas. When the presidential election campaign began in late summer, Southern-rights extremists seamlessly laid the blame for the so-called plot on the nominee and political party favored by the Northern Free-States; Republican Abraham Lincoln. Texas seceded in the wake of his election, the way to the Confederacy smoothed by rumor, panic and editorial pages.

It turns out that the fires were most likely caused by the spontaneous ignition of boxes of new patent phosphorous matches, which had just then gone on the market, and the usually hot summer. But speculation and conspiracy theories are always more attractive than prosaic explanations for unsettling and mysterious events… and were so then as now.

More here on the Texas Troubles

A link to Taylor Dinerman’s article ‘Space solar power: why do we need it and what do we need to get it?‘ at ‘The Space Review‘ was linked to at 3 Quarks Daily.

Which is all kinds of cool and put a little sunshine in my day. 3 Quarks is a blog where S. Abbas Raza writes

my guest authors and editors and I hope to present interesting items from around the web on a daily basis, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating.

I’d gotten the impression over the past month that while the site is interesting, mundane stuff like ‘the future’ was not within their scope. Glad to see that the topic on on Mr. Raza’s radar.

And space solar power itself? That we need it is one of those ‘well duh’ things …

Professor Nocera makes it clear that neither conservation nor wind, nuclear, hydro, or biomass energy sources are going to be able, even when taken together, to fill the demand for energy that any reasonable standard of living will require. China and India alone will need more energy than is produced today by the entire planet. Coal, oil, and gas could provide some of the answer but environmental and security reasons tend to rule out those alternatives. Even if one is skeptical of the whole anthropomorphic global warming theory, there are good reasons to want to minimize the use of oil and natural gas and to tread carefully when it comes to using coal as a primary energy source.

So his solution is to go for solar energy in a big way.

One problem. Solar power is not always convenient to obtain. For another we could really use the ground that would be occupied by solar arrays for other stuff. Houses, yes, but also reclaimed wilderness. Would you rather see a hundred thousand acres of restored prairie or the same space covered by solar collection arrays? Thought so. But only 62 miles away is nearly limitless room and sunshine undiluted by an inconvenient atmosphere.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

It’s a curious movie, very different from the usual run of action flics. It reminded me in some ways of “Dances With Wolves”, in the degree of attention to detail paid to the lives of the Mayans. (Did anyone else but me notice, that in “Dances With Wolves”, every conversation among the Indians was carried out while they were going something? Work, mostly. No one was just sitting around, yacking to further the plot points. They were doing something, and talking as an aside…) The DVD of Apocalypto is available very shortly, and I posted a review on Blogger News Network, here.

…Europe was a quagmire, and we just should have pulled out our troops and brought them home!

(Courtesy of Instapundit.)

Mark Steyn on Flight 93’s memorial. The plan now includes - for the sweet love of thorny-headed Jebus - a wetlands. Full of life. Meant to provide reflection and social interaction. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, ducks are now a fitting memorial for our dead.

Go to any Civil War memorial on any New England common, and marvel at how they managed to honor their dead without wetlands and wind chimes.

A hundred years ago they didn’t have people whose sole job was to tell you that your ideas were tasteless or tacky or jingoistic. You wanted a memorial you hired a guy to sculpt a soldier, make sure the names on the bronze were correct and there, done; a memorial for the ages that can move a strong man to quiet tears a hundred years later.

What emotion would wetlands inspire? Nothing that would be fitting for Flight 93. I wonder if that’s what is truly desired.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Via.

A routine moment for the Navy, and for us.

ABOARD USS JOHN C. STENNIS – Cmdr. Muhammad Muzzafar F. Khan relieved Cmdr. Timothy Langdon as commanding officer of Sea Control Squadron (VS) 31 during a ceremony held at sea aboard USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74) May 13.

Khan is the first Muslim to take command of an operational aviation squadron in the U.S. Navy.

Not because this is a touchy-feely PC moment - whoop-te-do look at us for promoting an oppressed minority! - but because this kind of stuff happens all the time in the military. It’s only remarkable because he’s the first. And it’s only remarked on because that’s what PR people do.

Here is a guy who had it good in Pakistan; daddy was an airplane pilot and they just don’t give those jobs to anyone. Gave it up when he was 18 to come here and study, then join the Navy. This is what we’re good at doing - co-opting the best and brightest and letting them get as far as they want to.

And the West generally and the United States in particular do this all the time.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Four representatives prove they don’t know how to live like everybody else.

Ryan and three other members of Congress have pledged to live for one week on $21 worth of food, the amount the average food stamp recipient receives in federal assistance. That’s $3 a day or $1 a meal. They started yesterday.

According to the rules of the challenge, the four House members cannot eat anything beside their $21 worth of groceries. That means no food at the many receptions, dinners and fundraisers that fill a lawmaker’s week.

The stunt is to demonstrate that $21 dollars in food stamps doesn’t go as far as it needs to. But the terms of the stunt are self-limiting; Declining a free buffet because it’s not in ‘your’ budget? Can you say “setup an experiment in order to fail”?

“No organic foods, no fresh vegetables, we were looking for the cheapest of everything,” McGovern said. “We got spaghetti and hamburger meat that was high in fat — the fattiest meat on the shelf. I have high cholesterol and always try to get the leanest, but it’s expensive. It’s almost impossible to make healthy choices on a food stamp diet.”

Cry me a river. Food stamps are to supplement the diet, not be the entire enchilada. And for all of that I’ve lived healthy on a budget of $20 a week for food. I didn’t like it but it’s possible. Of course I cheated by eating ‘free’ bagels at work when available but I was aiming for ‘practical’ not ‘prove a point’.

Ryan blogs about here.
The McGoverns blog about the experience here.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

A fine rant, reproduced in full.

30 lightyear away, eh? Let me think. With a working Orion-style drive, assuming a payload, for purposes of rough calculation the mass of, let us say, Skylab or 20000 kg; figure that every ton of fully loaded and fueled spacecraft has a volume of 5 to 10 cubic meters, and ten percent of the fully loaded mass spacecraft mass is structural mass. Now, postulating an exhaust velocity of 30000000 m/s, and assuming this is all fuel, and plugging in the values for the rocket equation …. how many years, assuming equal periods of acceleration and deceleration at both ends, minus the relative motion of the star GJ4356 versus Sol … in terms of time, it should take us … let me get about my slipstick … Aha! here we go. My rough back-of-the-envelope calculations show that, under the assumption that we are working within the confines of modern technology, and assuming no fundamental breakthroughs in engineering, and assuming we advance this project at the same rate as other space exploration projects, it should get to his new planet in roughly about … NEVER because OUR SPACE PROGRAM IS TOTALLY DIS-FUNCTIONAL and WORTHLESS pack of time serving BUREAUCRATS who haven’t done anything but throw robots at the outer planets ever since Apollo 17! Do you know when the last moonshot was?? 1972! That was four years before the first airing of Charles’ Angels, it was so long ago. Aren’t those girls grandmas now? THIRTY FIVE FRELLING YEARS SINCE WE PUT A MAN ON THE MOON !!! That’s almost four decades!!!! Do you know what our forefathers could accomplish in four decades? John Ericsson designed the steam-powered ironclad Monitor in 1862; forty-one years later the Wright Brothers flew the first successful heavier-than-air flying machine; four decades later, in 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the first faster-than-sound jet aircraft. Ack! Gack!! Choking on geek-rage! Where’s my flying car? It’s 2007, for Kal-El’s sake! This is the Future!

I couldn’t say it better myself.

Via.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Blogging at a minimum this week due to a confluence of other literary demands, and just no enthusiasm for writing about something suitable for here. The WOT is the same old mouthful of well-chewed gristle, ditto for the prelim-presidential-campaign… jeeze, if I feel that way about it now, I’m going to be hiding in a bunker by next year. People, can we give it a rest? Ditto for American Idol (who?) And as regards Paris Hilton; this may be the only time I shall ever mention her.

Over the last month, we have had a very demented bird, a female cardinal who has taken to perching on a branch of the almond verbena, just outside the window to the living room, and flying repeatedly into the glass window. She will do this for fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch; regularly thumping against the window, as if she is either fighting another female cardinal reflected there, or trying to land on a non-existent branch. We have named her after the stupidest celebrity we know: Paris Hilton.

The pictures of Hot Wells came out very much as I hoped, so finish polishing the article to a high glossy shine, and edit the pictures suitably. I have a thick book to read and a review to write for BNN, ditto a DVD to watch and review… and there is another book on the way. Just when I worked out how to lead into events around the election of 1860 and the secession crisis in Texas, as they affected the characters in part two of Adelsverein; or as a reader described it “Barsetshire with Cyprus Trees”. So I am getting ready to plunge into the operatic drama of the Civil War; murder, lynch mobs, treachery brother-against-brother and all that.

I did get a response from the agent who wanted a look at the first 100 pages; a regretful pass. The first four chapters just did not send her into the transports of enthusiasm necessary to take on representing it, and a paragraph of the usual blah blah blah saying that it was a terribly subjective business, wishing me luck in getting representation elsewhere blah blah blah.

I have sent out fifty query letters for “Adelsverein” including a SASE for response over the last two months, but only gotten back twenty or so letters which usually begin “Dear Author/Writer” and apologizing for the form response. Which leave me wondering where the other queries are, and if they are peeling off my stamps and using them for something else!

Back to work, on Chapter Three, Volume 2. (First chapter posted here)