Category: Uncategorized

Here’s a perfect example of why zero tolerance rules are bullshit.
(Via Best of the Web.)

EPA is easing new, more restrictive clean air rules on power plants and so forth.
This actually makes sense. There is a rule of thumb in engineering that says that the closer you get to perfection, the harder it is to make any progress. In other words, the last 10% of the job probably costs as much or more than the first 90% did. (I think there is a name for this rule, somebody’s Law, but I can’t remember it offhand.) And this was going to be very expensive.
The fact of the matter is that the US is not the problem in world air pollution. The Third World (including China) is the problem. And it’s in our best interest to help Third World countries that still burn copious amounts of “dirty” fuel to upgrade their economies so they don’t have to do that anymore, if we really want to do something about worldwide clean air.

Service may be interrupted for a while.
UPDATE: Oh. That was easy.
UPDATE2: Wow. There’s a search CGI now. See the SEARCH THIS BLOG link at the right…

You have to love it when a Canadian official calls our President a moron. It sort of takes one to know one, especially where the Canadian government (not its people) are concerned.
On the other hand our State Department doesn’t exactly have a handle on the language.

In Washington, a State Department official whose area of responsibility includes Canada said he hadn’t heard about the remark. In any event, he said: “We have no intention of going anywhere near it with a 10-foot pole.”

OK…so what do you have an intention of going near it with? A five-foot Japanese?
[SUDDEN THOUGHT: Send that 10-foot Pole to Indianapolis, we can use him on the Pacers.]

Like Eugene Volokh, I don’t agree with the politics of this gag, but overall it looks like something I would have done 20 years ago if I had had a Mac, Photoshop and, er, talent.* (Invitations to parties at my home in those days were generally sent out as movie poster spoofs.)
*Not that I’d buy a Mac today, nor that I have Photoshop or talent along these lines today.

God, what a great line. Why didn’t I read Ledeen yesterday? I meant to, I just never got to it.
Faster. Faster.

Via Best of the Web, a new idea for housing the homeless in NYC.
The best part about this is that, once they get the homeless on board, they can ship them out to somewhere else. I wonder if Bloomberg and his minions thought of that one yet?
Problem is, who would take them…

Listening to Rush, and hearing these grating phoned-in ads (local ads, during the breaks) for a company called Frontline Security. This woman who supposedly owns the company has one of the most annoying voices I’ve ever heard. The advertising school of thought that says “it may be annoying but people will remember it” doesn’t work well with me, because indeed I do remember it…and I won’t ever buy anything from them.
Same thing with this Billy Mays character who does the TV ads on Fox and other channels. I wouldn’t buy anything he flacks in a million years.

should be made out of this metal. James Robbins has the right idea. Write your Congresscritter.

I see the government wants to keep a massive database of all of our purchases.
This doesn’t worry me. Who, precisely, is going to read and correllate this data? The already overworked and generally-terrorism-impaired intelligence community. Keep all the data you want about the books I buy, the weapons I keep supplied with ammo, and the meals I eat. I don’t care.
Information glut is going to kill any real chance of our vaunted intelligence agencies actually finding anything before it’s too late. This is what happened before Pearl Harbor — the ratio of noise to signal was way too high for any meaningful intelligence to be developed. This kind of stupidity just adds to the noise.