Saturday, November 24, 2007

Songza

Songza is an interesting site where you can search on any song to listen to it. You can also share it with others or embed it in your blog or website. I randomly chose Toploader’s cover of “Dancing in the Moonlight”. They not only had several versions of it by Toploader, but also a techno dance cover. And here it is.

I did a search for all kinds of obscure songs and usually found them. I searched on old ‘80s Anime shows and found their theme songs, including this one which is an all time favorite. Lupin III ‘80. A perfect Jazz swing version of the Lupin theme. Probably one of my all time favorite theme covers ever.

This site can also send you to the You Tube music videos of the song, if it can find one. 

Good News, Bad News Time

I’m back. Had a great time.

And things have happened over the holiday. Some good, some bad. Let’s start with the good. Sarkozy stared down the strikers in France and won. Chriac must really feel like a EUnuch now.

In France, a country with a tradition of violent mob eruptions dating back at least to its revolution, the street is the ultimate ballot box.

So when its transportation and energy workers struck, costing the French economy $4 billion-plus a week, some thought it might be the end of Sarko’s ability to govern. Surely, they thought, he’d have to bend to the unions’ will, wouldn’t he?

But they underestimated Sarko’s resolve. Nine days into the strike, Monsieur le President forced the unions to back down. And in so doing, he has earned what American hip-hop artists call “street cred.”

On Friday, Sarkozy vowed to go ahead with economic reforms that may help end France’s long economic slide into irrelevance. “I have no intention to stop the reform movement, no intention to slow it down, no intention to forget my promises,” he said. “I made commitments. They will be kept.”

Those phrases echo those made by both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher when they faced similar union-made problems — in Reagan’s case, with air traffic controllers; in Thatcher’s, with the Marxist-led coal miners. Both stuck to their guns and won. Now Sarko’s done the same.

France really needed Sarkozy. He just might be the man to save it from its downward spiral. Australia isn’t so lucky. Now for the bad news.

Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffered a humiliating defeat Saturday at the hands of the left-leaning opposition, whose leader has promised to immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and withdraw Australia’s combat troops from Iraq.

Labor Party head Kevin Rudd’s pledges on global warming and Iraq move Australia sharply away from policies that had made Howard one of President Bush’s staunchest allies.

Rudd has named global warming as his top priority, and his signing of the Kyoto Protocol will leave the U.S. as the only industrialized country not to have joined it.

So, they want to sign the worthless Kyoto Accords which achieve nothing except hurt your own economy. No signatory nation has ever met its goals, by the way. Like AGW, it’s just a scam. And they want to pull out of Iraq at a time when it’s stabilizing. Well, gee, kind of a pointless exercise. But that’s what the left is good for. Watch them turn the Aussie Economy around...into the crapper, ala Jimmy Carter. Hopefully the Aussies won’t have to put up with too much BS from these clowns.

Any politicians who make global warming their #1 priority obviously aren’t too concerned with doing anything useful. They must have gotten tips on effective leading from Ray Nagin.

But some things in the next few weeks may hold promise.  Hugo Chavez is holding a referendum vote and he is losing his lead. Of course, that makes him want to threaten voters. This is what you get when a leftist gets in power.  A nut job who wants to be president for life. (see Robert Mugabe). Let’s hope the people of Venezuela manage to vote this creep out before he solidifies his power.

UPDATE: Bush beat the Australians and is removing way more troops than they are from Iraq. They only have about a 1,000 troops there.  So Rudd’s making a rather theatrical gesture by removing them.

Friday, November 23, 2007

The Nature of Green Insanity

One of the reasons I rail against green hysteria is that it seems to instill a deep kind of self hating psychosis in people. And that can lead to mental illness.

These two stories are a perfect example. In one, a woman has herself sterilized to “lower her carbon footprint”. She had aborted a fetus for the same reason, previously. Sure, one can joke that she’s doing the gene pool a favor. But I feeel sorry for her. There will come a time when she’s older when she may regret her decision and there’s nothing she can do about it.

In the other story, two scientists claim we’re shortening the life of the universe.

New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the cosmos to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end. “Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe,” Prof Krauss tells New Scientist.

The team came to this depressing conclusion by calculating how the energy state of our universe - a kind of summation of all its particles and all their energies - has evolved since the big bang of creation 13.7 billion years ago.

The ego that’s involved in both stories: the delusion of power that they attribute to humanity, and thus, to themselves, is so out of bounds it really should be considered a pathology. Humans are prone to delusion because it’s a survival instinct we have. It helps us to put up with harsh environments. Thus, people are found at all corners of the globe. They can psychologically adapt to just about any kind of place. What we do is create a simplified reality for ourselves. We define the rules of this reality, no matter how unrealistic these rules may be. Thus we get magical thinking. Thus we get bizarre religious cults. Thus we get the green hysterias that man has some kind of godlike impact on the planet.

It’s one thing to work to have a cleaner world, and cut pollution and needless development. It’s another to castrate yourself because some politician like Al Gore convinced you that you were a bad person for even existing.  The hysterics are leading gullible people down a self destructive path. And they are forcing the rest of us to put up with laws and taxes and (almost worse) self righteous lectures that aren’t even necessary.

They keep amping up the hysteria to ridiculous degrees. I’d love to see how they top the theory that we’re killing the universe by observing it.

Just watch. Someone will. The absurdity of their self righteousness is lost in their hubris. 

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m about to set down to a T-Day spread my mom made with my sisters. Turkey, Ham, Baby Back Ribs and a host of side dishes that look awesome. Then there’s Kaluha pie waiting afterward.  Hope you guys have a great holiday. What did you all eat?

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Visiting Relatives

I’m down in San Diego for the next few days. Blogging should be sporadic. Happy Thanksgiving!

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

The Call of Nature

The UN is Bogus

From the people who brought you the IPCC, another lie has been exposed. The UN’s AIDS numbers were a bit off.

The United Nations’ top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement.

AIDS remains a devastating public health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic.

The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year’s estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV—estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising—now will be reported as 33 million.

Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.

“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” said Helen Epstein, author of “The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.” “I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way.”

The UN’s IPCC had to downgrade its scare numbers for climate change in their fourth report. But they were back to screaming and hollering only a few days ago.

Bottom line, UN agencies cannot be trusted to provide accurate data because the have a political agenda and they are prone to hysteria. What’s the value in their science if its that off base? In any other field, their credibility would be disastrous. But because they have a monopoly on the “global do-gooders” business, they can make any claim and get taken seriously by gullible saps (eg. the press and their ilk). 

I suspect that there will be further revelations about their fudging of numbers, not just on AIDS, but on Climate Change.

Shaolin Exercises

Amazing stuff.

The Science of Trolls

Interesting article from New Scientist on the psychology of web trolls.

Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity – a process called deindividuation – we are less likely to stick to social norms. For example, in the 1960s Leon Mann studied a nasty phenomenon called “suicide baiting” – when someone threatening to jump from a high building is encouraged to do so by bystanders. Mann found that people were more likely to do this if they were part of a large crowd, if the jumper was above the 7th floor, and if it was dark. These are all factors that allowed the observers to lose their own individuality.

Social psychologist Nicholas Epley argues that much the same thing happens with online communication such as email. Psychologically, we are “distant” from the person we’re talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we’re more prone to aggressive behaviour, he says.

Another factor influencing online communication, according to Epley, is simply the risk of miscommunication involved with text-based messages, which are inherently more ambiguous. At the same time, he notes, email “has the feel of informality – we just fire something off”, even though we probably ought to treat it with the same care as a written letter. And, as most people probably know, this can cause problems for both the sender and the receiver.

I also believe there is another phenomena there, which is an extension of group think. When people belong to a certain group, they feel empowered to be bolder than they normally are, to cut loose. Because they think their friends have their back. So when you get a horde of people coming to a site to trash the owner, as happened to me recently, they believe they are in the right because their group is going along with it. People often don’t want to do something unless others do it. Then they believe its OK. This is why we see examples of bad behavior from mobs time and time again. The individual people would probably never do something like that, but ginned up on angry emotions by the crowd, they move like fish in a school or herds of enraged water buffalo. The herd mentality is really a nasty thing.

And like I said, AGW seems to be a herd mentality thing. Most people don’t know good science from junk science. So if a bunch of scientists say something, they just shrug and accept it. Just as when a popular website makes some claim, the fans of that site get all riled up like sports crowds for their team. It then becomes an anti-intellectual exercise. 

Monday, November 19, 2007

Read of the Day

Orson Scott Card really gives it to the AGW crowd. Money quote:

The Global Warming alarmists are the anti-science religion that is trying to forcibly indoctrinate and convert everyone while suppressing dissent. And the news media are their patsies, their stooges, their puppets.

The more you research AGW, the more you realize that the AGW shills act exactly like a religious cult. They use guilt to try to get you do follow their orders. They threaten some kind of apocalypse if you don’t. The way they respond with mantras like “overwhelming consensus” and “only real scientists believe”, as if it’s some kind of magic spell that’s supposed to block any criticism, is really sad. I’ve had conversations with many otherwise intelligent people who buy into this stuff. I think a lot of them believe it because they think its the right thing to do, not because they are really convinced.

It’s like the ‘60s when most people smoked because it was perceived as a way to gain acceptance with others. Many people jump on the AGW bandwagon so they will not be ostracized. Most people are desperate to fit in.

Fortunately, some of us don’t give a damn about that and aren’t afraid to point out the Emperor’s Sartorial Splendor is lacking.

AGW is the establishment line. The skeptics are anti-establishment. The AGW crowd likes to claim they’re liberals. But they take an authoritarian stance.

I guess that makes us skeptics the true liberals because we’re questioning authority. And we’re the true radicals because we’re going against the orthodoxy.

And let’s face it, when you drill down into this ideology you find what it’s really about. It’s all about diminishing Capitalism and advancing Socialism. They want to empower the state but weaken corporations. They rail against growth. They demonize companies. They talk about how people should get used to less and making sacrifices. It sounds like something out of the Karl Marx play book. So it should come as no surprise that the biggest proponents of this nonsense are lefties. 

They failed to sell the rich nations on Socialism. And Socialism was a dismal failure for any country that seriously adopted it. So, how else do you get people to buy into a failed idea? How about fraud? How about tricking people using an elaborate scam where you scare them with claims of calamity, knowing full well that nature will regularly provide disasters that you can claim were the result of your scam. Then you get some “cool people” to spread the word. You get some scientists to say it’s all true and you get a socialist-loving bureaucracy like the UN to endorse it all.

There you go.

This is also a good read.