Friday, August 03, 2007
Worst City NamesThere’s plenty of good ones here. My personal fave is Loonyville, Texas.
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Too Small For MeAfter The Deathly Hallows
JK Rowling did an interview with Muggle.net explaining all the unanswered questions after the last Harry Potter book. What became of the characters, etc. I just finished it, so I was wondering a lot of things since the last chapter is kind of vague.
Goofball Conspiracy DuJour
Chem Trails...AKA Vapor trails from jet aircraft...are actually part of a BIG CONSPRIACY!!!!!!
No Peak Oil Here
Peak Oil is a myth, that largely benefits the oil industry. It keeps priced unreasonably inflated. Which is why its hilarious so many oil company bashers believe it. They’re playing into big oil’s hands.
But whatever, the fact is, we didn’t leave the stone age for lack of stones. We’re always coming up with new solutions for problems. Such as:
The biofuel of the future could well be gasoline. That’s the hope of one biotech startup that on Monday described for the first time how it is coaxing bacteria into producing hydrocarbons that could be processed into fuels like those made from petroleum.
LS9, a company based in San Carlos, CA, and founded by geneticist George Church, of Harvard Medical School, and plant biologist Chris Somerville, of Stanford University, had previously said that it was working on what it calls “renewable petroleum.” But at a Society for Industrial Microbiology conference on Monday, the company began speaking more openly about what it has accomplished: it has genetically engineered various bacteria, including E. coli, to custom-produce hydrocarbon chains.
To do this, the company is employing tools from the field of synthetic biology to modify the genetic pathways that bacteria, plants, and animals use to make fatty acids, one of the main ways that organisms store energy. Fatty acids are chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms strung together in a particular arrangement, with a carboxylic acid group made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen attached at one end. Take away the acid, and you’re left with a hydrocarbon that can be made into fuel.
A New Rule is Needed
Stupid Morons shouldn’t be allowed top jobs or make idiotic statements to the press.
Frankly, thee self righteous clowns have overstayed their welcome. Here in Oregon, you can’t smoke within 40 feet of a doorway, if you are outside! That’s how retarded the laws have gotten in some places. And if you hate smokers, don’t be so smug. They will get around to whatever it is you are in time. Don’t worry. We really need to stop this kind of madness before it keeps spreading.
Bureaucracy • Medical Issues • (1) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Hell Hath No Fury…Like Left Wing Bloggers scorned owned.
The Porn Myth
It’s kind of hilarious to read an article by a feminist from the 80s defending porn today. Well, it’s not really a defense, more like a sad kind of shrug. I don’t entirely disagree with her conclusions, but I do have to say that the feminists kind of brought them on themselves by attacking men so voraciously in the 70s and 80s. That drove men away more than porn did.
At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.
The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had, Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as David Amsden says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?
She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.
But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.
The truth about porn is, it creates porn fatigue. In Scandinavian countries, porn was made legal in the 60s and after a period where it was all the rage, people just came to accept it as background noise and then it was something that elicited shrugs from most people. When something is legal and easy to get, it loses its stigma and forbidden fruit excitement. It becomes blasé. Banning does not stop people. It encourages them.
As for our current cultures fixation on porn style women, we’re seeing a slow backlash. Britney, Lindsey and Paris got a huge negative response to walking around without underwear. People are getting turned off by the whole slut movement.
When the pendulum swings one way, it swings back the other way sooner or later.
UPDATE: Meanwhile...
Democrats Betray Again
Those of you who are pro-Democrat, watch as they betray everything they claimed to stand for earlier this year. And don’t look surprised. Whatever they tell you has nothing to do with their intentions.
Under pressure from President Bush, Democratic leaders in Congress are scrambling to pass legislation this week to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers.
Democratic leaders have expressed a new willingness to work with the White House to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it easier for the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on some purely foreign telephone calls and e-mail. Such a step now requires court approval.
It would be the first change in the law since the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants became public in December 2005.
In the past few days, Mr. Bush and Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, have publicly called on Congress to make the change before its August recess, which could begin this weekend. Democrats appear to be worried that if they block such legislation, the White House will depict them as being weak on terrorism.
“We hope our Republican counterparts will work together with us to fix the problem, rather than try again to gain partisan political advantage at the expense of our national security,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said in a statement Monday night.
All that howling about illegal wiretapping ans spying on Americans has been forgotten. Now they are throwing about weasel words about “fixing” the rules. Yeah.
The bottom line is the government is being given more power to spy on people and the hits just keep on coming.
What Now?
Dealing with the phone company.
