Tuesday, April 03, 2007

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. 

The Stupidest Decision Ever

The Supreme Court has made a decision that may have serious consequences on the economy and everyone’s lives, and I don’t mean that in a good way. All because of the unproven and frankly superstitious belief that greenhouse gasses are a “pollutant”.

The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency must consider greenhouse gases as pollutants, in a blow to the White House.

“Because greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious definition of ‘air pollutant’ we hold that EPA has the statutory authority to regulate the emission of such gases from new motor vehicles,” the court ruled.

Led by Massachusetts, a dozen states along with several US cities and environmental groups went to the courts to determine whether the agency had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide emissions.

“The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized,” said judge John Paul Stevens as the ruling was carried by five votes in favor to four against.

This is what happens when hysteria and ignorance rule the day. Watch as the EPA bans lots of things that are perfectly harmless.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

XP to Vista

While I wait for a new computer I am ordering, after my old one gave out, I am working from my laptop which has Windows Vista Home Premium. I know some of you like Vista, but for me the experience of using it is sort of like this.

I will say a lot of hype about it is over rated. It’s just a nicer looking version of XP, with a lot of great features removed or moved where I can’t fine them. 

The Truth About Desserts

I knew this from experience. Don’t buy dessert at a restaurant unless you really know it’s made there. Most of the time, they are reheated frozen crap or made from a mix you can buy yourself. 

Is the RIAA Crumbling?

Interesting.

Music industry executives announced this morning that they were withdrawing support for the trade group the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and launching a new representative body called Respect the Artist, Respect the Audience (RARA).

The move comes in the wake of a perceived failure of the RIAA to achieve its goals of fostering a business and legal climate that supports and promotes its members’ creative and financial vitality. The RIAA has in recent years become synonymous with the industry’s flagging business models and poor reputation with music fans. Recently the RIAA was ranked as the least popular business organization is the USA.

In announcing the break the four major record labels Sony/BMG, Warner Music, Vivendi Universal and EMI have also committed to dropping all pending lawsuits, and will instead join with Apple and Microsoft to create an environment where Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology will be eliminated from their online music stores. The companies are joining other personal electronics manufacturers and independent labels in a new organization, Respect the Artist, Respect the Audience (RARA) that will focus on creating a climate better associated with the creation of art, and the fostering of musical talent.

Of course, this came out on April 1st, so we’ll see if it’s real. I think something like this is inevitable, however. The RIAA has probably done more to hurt the music industry than recover any money.

UPDATE: It’s a joke, apparently. But this isn’t. EMI is dropping DRM and Apple will follow.