MaxRedline

Going Nowhere

But it is the right idea.  Rep. Peter DeFazio has introduced a new House bill that would require the mandatory use of E-Verify for all businesses in the United States. The Triple E-VICT Act would help the 22 million Americans who can't find full-time work by ensuring jobs don't go to illegal aliens. Rep. DeFazio is a pro-environment Democrat who also understands the impact that high immigration levels, partly caused by illegal immigration, has on future environmental sustainability.

Good for him.  It won't go anywhere, but at least it keeps the concept on the national stage.

Shameless Plugs

Pensacola, Florida (News Journal) -- Two teenagers were shot Saturday night by a 72-year-old man they allegedly beat with a baseball bat during a home-invasion robbery in Ferry Pass.

About 8:45 p.m., three teenage males knocked on the door of a home in the 3300 block of Raines Street, Pensacola Police Department officials said.

When resident Jack Crawford, 72, answered the door, one of the teens hit him in the head with an aluminum bat and tried to force his way into the home.

"I opened it up, and he hit me right off. ... Wham! Split my head open," Crawford said.

"So I shot him and another guy," Crawford said, chuckling as he told the story to a Pensacola News Journal reporter Sunday evening. "I could have shot the third one, but I would have had to shoot him in the back as he ran away."

HTML corrected, as is often the case. It should be noted that most shootings happen in homes where owners keep firearms. Generally, that's not a bad thing. Certainly, it wasn't the case here.

 

Israel Shocked By Obama Betrayal

Why? Everybody knows that the guy has no sense, let alone any sense of ethics. Political commentators expressed shock at how the United States as well as its major European allies appeared to be ready to dump a staunch strategic ally of three decades, simply to conform to the current ideology of political correctness.

One comment by Aviad Pohoryles in the daily Maariv was entitled "A Bullet in the Back from Uncle Sam." It accused Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of pursuing a naive, smug, and insular diplomacy heedless of the risks.

Who is advising them, he asked, "to fuel the mob raging in the streets of Egypt and to demand the head of the person who five minutes ago was the bold ally of the president ... an almost lone voice of sanity in a Middle East?"

It's what happens when Leftists gain control.  It's also why Obambi is on track to go down in history as the Worst U.S. President. Ever.

 

Shot Down Again, BO Claims "Judicial Activism"

Another federal Judge has declared ObamaCare unconstitutional. That's two strikes in about six weeks. “I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that ‘if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,’” Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of the 78-page ruling Monday.

Naturally, BO's response is to act all outraged and surprised. "This ruling is well out of the mainstream of judicial opinion," Stephanie Cutter, an assistant to President Obama, wrote on the White House's blog after Judge Roger Vinson in Florida ruled that the entire law is unconstitutional. "Today’s ruling ... is a plain case of judicial overreaching. The judge’s decision contradicts decades of Supreme Court precedent that support the considered judgment of the democratically elected branches of government that the Act’s 'individual responsibility' provision is necessary to prevent billions of dollars of cost-shifting every year by individuals without insurance who cannot pay for the health care they obtain." 

Never mind that most Americans made it abundantly clear that they didn't support the legislation; never mind that Democrats hired by the people to represent them chose instead to ignore the will of the people.  This is not democracy, much less the representative republic that our Founders envisioned.  This is not government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

It is autocracy.

"We don’t believe this kind of judicial activism will be upheld and we are confident that the Affordable Care Act will ultimately be declared constitutional by the courts." 

We disagree, and with as much respect as you have demonstrated toward we, the people. Which is to say, none.

Come back and talk to us about "judicial activism" when you folks are ready to explain why your "justice department" suddenly dropped a rock-solid case against a band of thugs.  You may remember that: the "New Black Panthers" caught on tape intimidating voters.  Yeah.  Come talk then.

IPCC Faces Heat

The heat is on, and it's not Man-Made Global Warming. A growing chorus is calling for the little south-Asian dictator to resign as head of the U.N. IPCC.

The editorial board of the London Times thinks Pachauri should resign. It says he “presided over the use of dodgy science” in the IPCC’s 2007 report, that he ignored legitimate criticism when it first emerged, and that he has let us all down.

The editorial board of the UK Telegraph concurs. In its words:

In its zeal to persuade the world of the catastrophic consequences of man-made global warming, the IPCC has lost both its objectivity and the trust of the public. That is one of the main reasons why we… believe that Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC’s chairman, should step down. This issue is far too important for there to be a scintilla of doubt about the reliability of the reports and raw data on which policy must be based. While Dr Pachauri remains in post, those doubts will remain.

The New Scientist thinks much the same. It says Pachauri has spent “too much time defending the indefensible” and that his continued presence at the helm of the IPCC will “undermine efforts to rebuild the panel’s authority.” Similarly, the editorial board of the Financial Times says “the time has come for [Pachauri] to move on.”

Even Greenpeace is calling for him to leave.

"Dodgy science".  "Defending the indefensible".

The credibility of the IPCC has been shattered, which is likely why AlGore has been conspicuously silent of late, and why our local "science writer" has suddenly shut up on the issue of Man-Made Global Warming.

Well, at least we can refer to his previous pronouncements on the subject:

You don't have the right to ruin the planet for the rest of us -- it doesn't belong to you.

I do bring out both sides of an issue, when it's relevant. But journalistic balance does not mean spending 50% on one idea and 50% on its opposite. It means accurately reporting on what the scientific community thinks about the subject. And, whether or not you or anyone else here likes it or not, the climate science community overwhelmingly agrees that the AGW hypothesis has been proven.  

Thank goodness that we have folks like him around.

 

Behold! The Electric Car!

In its obsessive desire to promote the virtues of electric cars, the BBC proudly showed us last week how its reporter Brian Milligan was able to drive an electric Mini from London to Edinburgh in a mere four days – with nine stops of up to 10 hours to recharge the batteries (with electricity from fossil fuels).

What the BBC omitted to tell us was that in the 1830s, a stagecoach was able to make the same journey in half the time, with two days and nights of continuous driving. This did require 50 stops to change horses, but each of these took only two minutes, giving a total stopping time of just over an hour and a half.

Add in the effect of cold:

All batteries deliver their power via a chemical reaction inside the battery that releases electrons. When the temperature drops the chemical reactions happen more slowly and the battery cannot produce the same current that it can at room temperature. A change of ten degrees can sap 50% of a battery's output.

You've just lost 50% of driving range (assuming that you've dressed warmly and don't turn to frivolities like the heater).

You may be pardoned for not being especially impressed.

Once Popular, Car Pools Go the Way of Hitchhiking

The headline says it all.

The sharp decline has confounded efforts by urban planners, who over the years have tried to encourage the practice by setting aside highway lanes for car-poolers, as well as offering incentives like discounted parking.

Urban planning is a clear failure.  Fire all the planners.  Put the millions in financial drain that they represent into long-overdue infrastructure repairs.

He Shoots...He Scores!

As noted yesterday, Egypt tried to kill internet access in their country, but it's not possible.  Over on another blog, whose author claimed that Egypt had killed the internet, I posted a brief comment, which was expanded upon here.  Naturally, somebody had to tell me how idiotic I am:

Max? They very effectively KILLED the internet. Just because a few people are able to get a very small small fraction of material out(56k are you kidding?)does not in any way mean its alive. Waving semaphore flags hardly meets the need for the volume that was being exchanged.

Some talking heads also poo pooed the idea that the same could be done in the US. A small look into the "Switch board" of the internet, the DNS providers, would show that just as the whole us aviation industry can be grounded in a few hours, so can the Internet, including Cell Phones. Look into what happened when somebody monkeyed with the sea cables.

Just because I can read a paragraph with my indigo watch, doesn't mean I have "lights"

Posted by dman

Well, dang.  Just my luck to run up against an expert.

Oh, but a new item that turned up in my inbox indicates that the folks over at PC World share my take on the situation.  I deliberately didn't discuss the wi-fi possibilities; preferring to note that more primitive solutions exist to route around such attempts to control the flow of information.  

Remember when you stashed your old modems in the closet because you thought you might need them some day? In the event of a total communications blackout--as we're seeing in Egypt, for example--you'll be glad you did. Older and simpler tools, like dial-up Internet or even ham radio, could still work, since these "abandoned" tech avenues aren't being policed nearly as hard.

In order to get around the total shutdown of all of the ISPs within Egypt, several international ISPs are offering dial-up access to the Internet to get protesters online, since phone service is still operational. It's slow, but it still works--the hard part is getting the access numbers without an Internet connection to find them.

Unfortunately, such dial-up numbers can also be fairly easily shut down by the Egyptian government, so you could also try returning to FidoNet--a distributed networking system for BBSes that was popular in the 1980s. FidoNet is limited to sending only simple text messages, and it's slow, but it has two virtues: Users connect asynchronously, so the network traffic is harder to track, and any user can act as the server, which means that even if the government shuts down one number in the network, another one can quickly pop up to take its place.

The PC World folks tap into some items I had forgotten, like Fido. They also bring in the possibility of using now nearly ubiquitous wi-fi connectivity; a subject that I had considered but abandoned in favor of simplicity - the modem.  That was a bit hasty.  Folks in Egypt may well have some robust wi-fi infrastructure available, but as I don't know that, it seemed best to shoot for something that will certainly work.

 

Go Buy Tricycle

This is not a teaser for the show, "Portlandia".  This is reality in Portland. Or what passes for reality, anyway.  Can't wait to see this guy make a run up into the West Hills.

Wheelering And Dealering

In a letter Friday to Gov. John Kitzhaber, state Treasurer Ted Wheeler said employees who follow their agency policy — as Wheeler maintains that the officers did — should be shielded from future preliminary reviews and investigations under Oregon's government-ethics law.

"Under the current framework, any state employee who diligently follows his or her agency's rules could be in the professionally perilous position of having to face the Ethics Commission — and to incur significant legal costs," Wheeler wrote.

"For our bottom line, is it a smart use of public funds? A common-sense solution to this problem is to protect public funds, by providing a presumptive safe harbor to those public employees who demonstrate that they follow approved agency policy. I am convinced that this would save significant taxpayer dollars."

Oh..kay.  Is there something we're missing?

Aside from the money?  Legal costs have topped $100,000 so far for eight state Treasury investment officers facing state ethics reviews, according to a letter released Friday after a public-records request from the Statesman Journal and others.

The way I see it is that the state is spending some chump change, having hired members of the Neil Goldschmidt cabal to "defend" a few staff against ethics charges.  A hundred grand may seem like a lot of cash to you or me, but a state agency can pee that much away just on a "diversity" consultant.

Ted claims that he never said that anyone should be above ethics laws, in fact, I've said the opposite, and I have proposed a process to ensure that employees are, in fact, following ethics laws when they follow agency policy.

More to the point, he says that  1) agency policies should be ensured to be consistent with ethics law and there should be a process to ensure that this is the case, and 2) employees who can demonstrate that they followed those policies should then be presumed to be following ethics laws without concern about being subject to a costly and lengthy ethics investigation.

But just how do they "demonstrate that they followed those policies"?  Doesn't that involve a "costly and lengthy ethics investigation"?

Ted's "solution" seems to leave more questions than answers, and it's not what I expected to see from him.