Tuesday, April 03, 2007

American Idol: 3/3

What a wonderful night. The theme for the week is Swing and the coach is Tony Bennett, who looks incredible at age 80. Bennett seemed to be very inspiring because everyone did a good to great job.

As you may or may not know, swing is some of my favorite music. So last night was a real treat for me.

The usual suspects once again did a flawless performance. Melinda, Blake, Jordin and Chris all impressed the judges and the audience. Phil and Sanjaya less so, but I think they both did well. Especially Phil. Sanjaya is getting better, but I would love to see him go. But it won’t be this week, I think.

Gina was really good but for some reason Simon wasn’t impressed. Lakisha did really well, but I’m beginning to see her performances as all the same. She can definitely sing, but she doesn’t have the same spark and versatility of either Melinda or Jordin. 

The weakest link this time was probably Haley who I thought did OK, but the judges were dismissive. I think she’s gone tonight and from her reaction, I think she know it too.

She’s talented, but nothing we haven’t seen before. With this many good singers it comes down to style and personality. Sanjaya may lacking in the singing department, but he seems to appeal to a lot of teens. We all know how much taste teens have, so he’ll probably make it to the top four or five. I hope not, but teens usually have at least one in the race up t the top five.

All in all, it was a great night.

UPDATE: Gina, not Haley. Well, I was a bit surprised, but Smile is kind of a sad song and haley’s was more upbeat. Negative or downer songs are to be avoided at all costs on this show. Hopefully, Sanjaya will sing something depressing next week. 

Militant Black Guy

Making the world more PC

Stupidity DuJour

If you wonder why I rail against man-made global warming arguments so much, it’s not just because I find it all to be a big lie. I see it as a tool of bureaucrats to needlessly tax and dis-empower the people. And look no further than the EU for another example of what I mean.

The government of Belgium’s French-speaking region of Wallonia, which has a population of about 4 million, has approved a tax on barbequing, local media reported.

Experts said that between 50 and 100 grams of CO2, a so-called greenhouse gas, is emitted during barbequing. Beginning June 2007, residents of Wallonia will have to pay 20 euros for a grilling session.

The local authorities plan to monitor compliance with the new tax legislation from helicopters, whose thermal sensors will detect burning grills.

Scientists believe CO2 emissions are a major cause of global warming.

Control freaks never sleep. They will continue to come up with new ways to “fight global warming” by stealing more money and power from the people. This is the hallmark of a power grab. Creating a false crisis, then “solving” it by making the people give up their power and treasure to the faceless bureaucracy.

We really need to fight this stuff before it really gets out of hand. 

Vote for Sligh’s Band

Chris Sligh may have been voted off American Idol, but he’s already got a CD out and you can listen to some songs here. You can also vote for his band on the site to help them get more exposure. It won’t get rid of Sanjaya, but it’ll help out a decent guy. From what’s I’ve heard, his CD has a rich, nice sound.

Californication

There goes my home state. The lunatics are running the asylum.

Few issues are hotter in the Capitol this year than global warming.

Lawmakers have introduced more than 60 bills on the topic, and no wonder. Polls show widespread support among California voters for tackling climate change. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez received rock star-like affection worldwide for their work on landmark greenhouse gas legislation last year. And there is a seemingly infinite number of policy directions the state could take to lower carbon emissions.

“It’s become an apple-pie issue,’’ noted Darry Sragow, a longtime Democratic strategist in California. “It’s like being for better schools.’’

This year, lawmakers are pushing bills to require diesel-powered school buses to run on biodiesel fuel instead of regular diesel; change regulations to make it easier for housing projects to install solar power; require televisions and computers to be more energy efficient; create a new bureaucracy to consolidate the disparate agencies that study climate change issues; and add incentives for gas station owners to install pumps for alternative fuels.

In a repeat from last year, there is also an effort to require that half of all cars sold in California run on alternative fuels by 2020.

A check of legislation moving through the Capitol shows more than 60 bills have been introduced to deal with climate change. And Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, the chairman of the Assembly’s key energy committee, noted he had discouraged others from drawing up even more plans when they approached him “wanting to do something about alternative fuels, or solar power,’’ he said.

Some of these I don’t mind, but we’ve seen where this will all lead before. Reduced choices and freedoms for people. It’s like the anti-smoking hysteria all over again. First they introduced no smoking signs in hospitals and a few other places, then more and more places banned smoking until now, it is almost impossible to smoke anywhere. Even outside. These new bureaucracies will endlessly spew out more and more autocratic restrictions until you can’t do anything. It’s going to be really horrible. And it’s all based on pseudo-science and lies. Gore’s film is one lie after another.

The only possible saving grace is if they go too far and a voter backlash kicks out the crazies in power. But that’s not looking likely at the moment. The most popular mode of transportation for fanatics is the bandwagon. They created this false crisis purely for the purpose of driving through more and more restrictive laws and taxes. It’s just what the left claims the neo-cons did with the war on terror. Whether that’s true or not, at least the neo-cons aren’t trying to take us back to the stone age. 

Monday, April 02, 2007

In Case You Were Wondering

If you got account suspended or CPU exceeded errors when visiting this site today, it was due to two web crawlers indexing the site and hogging up the system resources. Shouldn’t happen again for awhile. Hopefully, a long while. 

Awww

Quote of the Day

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

H L Mencken

Hypocrisy Dujour

The EU government seems to be a circus composed entirely of clowns.

The amount of greenhouse gas pumped into European skies rose by up to 30 million tonnes last year despite the EU’s pledge to lead the world in tackling climate change.

A much-heralded emissions trading scheme, which is being copied by California and is seen as the market solution to reducing harmful gases, failed to achieve the cuts in industrial pollution needed to hit Kyoto targets, figures from the European Commission showed.

The Europe-wide increase in CO2 came in the second year of the scheme to allocate emission permits to companies and power generators. Critics described the EU trading system as “botched central planning” because too many permits were granted, enabling polluters to buy them at knockdown prices and carry on producing the gases that cause climate change.

Figures published yesterday for industrial emissions in 18 of the 27 EU countries, showed that European companies and power generators produced 1.79 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas last year. They came less than a month after the EU vowed to set an example to the world by making at a cuts of at least a 20 per cent in greenhouse gases by 2020.

Now for the irony. If all the factories and cars in the world stopped running tomorrow, CO² would still go up because that’s what happens when the sun warms the earth more. Factories and cars can’t compete with the untold trillions of plant, animal and microbe lifeforms on this planet who each produce some kind of “greenhouse gas” byproduct. And when the earth gets warmer, more life comes out of hibernation as more regions thaw. And if any volcanoes go off in significant ways, forget about it.

All of this carbon crap is mindless hysteria perpetrated by crypto-socialists who want to control capitalism. 

Holy Crap

Now this is impressive.

IBM trash-talks all those other chipsters with its latest breakthrough, an optical transceiver chipset that can accomplish the technological equivalent of cramming a basketball through a garden hose. The trick here is moving data through fiber optic cables at 160GB per second; that’s eight times faster than today’s optical components can do.

That means titanic files that take awhile to download, even with broadband, can come down in a second.

And check out the size of the chip. Wow.