Best Pr0n Viewer Evah

This Privacy Monitor Hack is one of the better uses of recycled 3D glasses I've seen. Wonder if there's a market for pre-made privacy monitors? Hmm.

You can get anything you want ...

Georgia Judge Dennis Blackmon has rejected a petition from U.S. Bank to throw out a complaint from a homeowner whose mortgage the bank refused to modify, without explanation. The judge didn't mince words on his opinion of the bank's motion: 

I have to say a judge that starts his opinion with "apologies to folk singer Arlo Guthrie. . ." is a jurist after my own heart. Thank you Judge Blackmon. Further info is here:
Judge exercises extreme sarcasm on US Bank « Boing Boing

Lest we forget

I was reminded by this piece in Forbes of a conversation (more of an argument) I recently had with some acquaintances. They were insistent that the real cause of the financial crisis in 2008 was a law passed in 1977. When I called them on that (how can a law passed in 1977 cause a crisis in 2008? Shouldn't it have kicked in before that?) they changed the meme. It was passed in 1977, but it was changed in 1997.

So it wasn't Carter's fault, it was Clinton's fault. I was beginning to sense a pattern, as they skipped over all POTUS with (R) following their names.

When the raw math (see the piece in Forbes for starters) was presented to them, they then said the amount of lending didn't matter. Regulations on the financial market caused those involved in said markets to develop a mental block. Regulation causes stupidity. Not short-term greed. Regulation.

These folks with no connection whatsoever to the derivatives industry were convinced they had insight into the psyche of that industry, and claimed to be able to divine the motivation of random bond traders they have never met.

It was an amazing bit of cognitive dissonance - no matter what, it was the fault of a) Democrats and b) Government. No amount of evidence confirming the greed and stupidity of Wall St. caused them to examine their beliefs, rather it just pushed them further down the road towards daft conspiracy.

Wash, rinse, repeat

I just finished reading about Our Oil-Constrained Future and was struck by the following statement:

If this model is accurate—and if the ceiling on global oil production really is around 90 mbd and can be expanded only slowly—it means that every time the global economy starts to reach even moderate growth rates, demand for oil will quickly bump up against supply constraints, prices will spike, and we'll be thrown back into recession. Rinse and repeat.

So our economic future, perhaps the global economy going forward, depends upon alternative energy. You'd think the leaders in Congress who are most concerned with economic growth might be in favor of this?  You'd be wrong.
They have more important constituents to look after.

Starbucks CEO to DC: You've been cut off

Starbucks CEO to DC: You've been cut off

I am imposing a one week personal moratorium on mocking or otherwise deriding the Buckys. Well done, sir. Well done.

Big Trouble

The latest from Weathervane Music's Shaking Through Volume 2 is big fun powerpop from Ridgewood, NJs Big Troubles. Enjoy, listen, download, contribute.

Rand Paul doesn't care about his constituents (or the deficit)

I mean, you knew that already, but this pretty much proves it.

"Every regulation doesn't save lives," Paul said in the hearing, later adding that the regulations so far have done a “pretty good job” of reducing black lung. "There is a point or a balancing act between when a regulation becomes burdensome enough that our energy production is stifled. We have to assess the costs of regulation and whether they save lives."

Except in this case, they do save lives. Provably, empirically, they save lives. Rand Paul's constituents lives, since Eastern Kentucky is coal country and his constituents are still dying.

But Rand Paul clearly values campaign contributions over constituents lives.

Candidate	Office	Amount
Manchin, Joe (D-WV)	Senate	$178,848
Blunt, Roy (R-MO)	House	$145,253
Portman, Rob (R-OH)		$128,025
Maynard, Elliott (R-WV)		$112,300
Paul, Rand (R-KY)		$99,627

What does this have to do with the deficit? According to The Hastings Center:

The mortality of chronic lung disease is predicted to decrease at a rate of 1.5% a year until 2030, and yet the cost of treating it is predicted to more than double from $176.8 billion in 2006 to $389.2 billion in 2011 and to reach $832.9 billion in 2021. The reason for this skyrocketing increase is a 31.1% increase in the number of diagnoses predicted by the Milken Institute.
Medicare spent over $8 billion on respiratory disease, excluding pneumonia, in 2006, a figure that is bound to increase tremendously in the next decade.

 Wouldn't someone trying to cut the deficit want to prevent expensive, chronic disease?

So you just wanna buy the box set, huh?

Srsly, don't. Friends don't let friends by "remastered" compressed crapola. End the loudness wars, for pete's sake.

Glad we didn't get a lot of snow this year

Otherwise there's a chance my town could have used radioactive brine to melt the snow and ice. Like in West Virginia:

In West Virginia, for example, environmental regulators and highway officials last year announced plans for the state to start paying around five cents per gallon for gas drilling wastewater known as brine, which tends to be extremely salty, to melt ice on roads. They planned to buy about 1.2 million gallons at more than 120 sites around the state and to buy more as needed.

They know it might be radioactive, by the way, they just don't seem to think it's a big deal. West Virginia officials "said that only wastewater from shallow wells would be used, thereby reducing levels of radioactivity."


Lest you think this is just a winter-time problem, and hey, Global Warming will eliminate the danger, think again:

More than 155,000 gallons of this wastewater was sent by a drilling company called Ultra Resources to nine towns for dust suppression in 2009, state records show. The water came from two gas wells in Tioga County and contained radium at almost 700 times the levels allowed in drinking water.

“I was told nothing about frack water or any gas-well brines or anything else,” said Deborah Kotulka, the secretary of Richmond Township, in Tioga County, whose name appears on the state record. Her township received 101,640 gallons of the water from wells with high radioactivity, those records show.

 So when the dust bowl hits, I for one will stand against it with my glow-in-the-dark squirt gun.

And that's all I have to say about that!

I guess if I hadn't said anything at work in 5 years I might get a bad review or lose my job. Unless I was a Supreme Court Justice.

Now that evidence is mounting that suggests his silence was purchased I wonder how much longer he will remain mute?

Beck Adds Google, Community Organizers To His Socialist-Communist-Islamist Theory About Egypt

Beck Adds Google, Community Organizers To His Socialist-Communist-Islamist Theory About Egypt OMG! The Google is looking for the end of the Western Way of Life? Wow. Somehow I just don't buy that a company whose stock price is over 600 is looking to inspire a socialist revolution. Call me crazy.

They could have used jumpy stilts

All of the hullabaloo and bluster from Senator Survey claiming all of our problems would go away if we just build the danged fence turns out to be (wait for it) a truckload of shit.

It's not the gaps in the fence that make it a completely ineffective waste of money it's the fence itself. Observe:

I think this dude could probably shave a couple of seconds off their times: