The Crime of Existence

Stephen Hawking’s Warped Moral Calculus | National Review Online:

The Jews have been a thorn in the side of much of the world for millennia. The original "chosen people" ... Jewish exceptionalism is very old.

Partially due to the innate nature of Jewishness, and partially due to the "Boy Named Sue" factor of being constantly hated, there is good reason for their difference and distinction.They learn multiple languages as part of a standard education to be able to read and understand their religious texts ... ancient and modern Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Yiddish, etc along with the multiple languages associated with being a "nation without a homeland" for nearly 2K years. Typical family members would have Russian, English, German, Spanish, etc language roots.

One of the best predictors of someone being good at writing software is being multi-lingual. It certainly helps in world commerce and general brain flexibility. On top of that, having a strong religious base for thousands of years has held the Jewish culture in good stead.

So people hate the Jews, and apparently Stephen Hawking is no exception.

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Stealth Ranger Black River Falls, Spooner

After being more tied down than a retired Moose ought be caring for dogs this past week, I flew the coop for a whirlwind tour over to Black River Falls in WI on Friday to see what the Ranger could do on some more extensive trails. It was so much fun Marla and I headed N for a Bona Casa feed with Dad and some Cherry Nut Cake, followed by a day of riding the "long straight trails" up N of Spooner as far as Gordon.

Impressions Positive:

1. It STILL rides like a dream
2. The suspension takes out all that old "don't let me hit a hole with one wheel" fight that I remember from driving the Jeep CJ-7 off the road. Very independent independent suspension, hitting something nasty with one wheel is a real "ho-hum". 
3. The Clark and Jackson County trail system in WI is INCREDIBLE. If you have UTV or an ATV, just get your butt over there! 
4. Whatever the manual says about "low range is the primary range", it doesn't cut it on trails like those ... primary speed 15-25MPH. It is too much RPM and howl at anything over 20 in low, so unless I'm going to poke along, it's HIGH!
5. AWD vs 2WD (turf mode) is a bit of a tough decision. Slightly more speed in 2WD and REALLY nice on blacktop since neither differential is locked. OTOH, in sandy banked corers where you want to be 
6. It will go very close to 50, but 30 is "happy cruise", 40 is "high speed cruise". It is easy understand how people keep going for more power, speed, comfort, etc ... but I mostly want to run things that are more twisty, so 15-25 is more my standard speed range. 
7. The Spooner and N area railroad bed trail system is like an interstate ... 3-400 mile days would be easy even in the 800, in a 900 or 1000 RZR, one could be screaming along at 80 and have a 500+ mile day ... providing you didn't hit anything or anyONE. 
8. WI certainly caters to ATVers! Lots of accessible watering holes, fuel stops and dining. 
9. Having a full cab and roll up windows + heat on cold rainy days tends to get a few "longing glances" from people on out in the open ATVs!

Impressions Neutral / Negative:

1. It is easy to understand why people complain about the heat and the noise in the 800s. In our case, the heat is really not an issue since if it really nice out, we will be using the boat or the motorcycles. The noise is "relative" ... these things are where sleds were in '90. Torque converters work extremely well and are efficient, but they have belt noise. I'm sure moving the running gear under the back like the 900 definitely helps. If I was going to primarily use this thing every day on roads or be a long straight trail rider, then  reducing noise would be a big deal. As it is, I'm happy with it. 
2. Turn signals are high on my list of things to add. Even if not required, I'm reaching for them all the time, and they ARE required in IA for road use, plus some other states, so I'll be going that way. 
3. The fuel gauge is paranoid. I carry a 2.5gal flatpack for reserve. We went on "blinking empty" about 40 mi before we got gas. Put in 7.4 gal in the 9.0 gal tank. I fueled at "a little less than half" indicated in BRF, put in a little under 3 gal. 

It was a fun weekend ... something like 200mi of riding, no problems. Lots of rain and cool, but it "keeps the riff raff off the trail!".

Reality, Politics, The Left

The Emerging Offer | National Review Online:

Good little article covering the current REAL negotiations between the House and Senate. Worth a read, some thoughts:

• POLITICS is part of the reality of a Democratically elected Republic. The budget is to be a MAJOR part of those politics. 
• The solution to politics is Dictatorship ... which is what BO, Reid, and the MSM want. A "Clean CR" simply writes the House out of the process. The people that voted to elect a Republican House would have NO VOICE, and according to the Constitution they ought to have at least a 25% voice ... 50% BO, 25% each for House and Senate ... SCOTUS being "the referee" 
• Most sane people hate politics ... it is like not wanting to be a mortician, or a sewer guy, or a used car salesman, etc. But diversity of thought being a reality, SOMEBODY wants to do every distasteful job  ... and in the back of our minds we know that dead bodies piling up or having a dictator are the outcomes of going with our collective "common sense" ... or at least we USED TO on the politics. 
• Were the House in Democrat hands and the WH in Republican, the media would be LOUDLY making the point that the Democrat Majority (in this example) was every bit as much elected as the President and in fact, since there were MORE OF THEM, and they were "the underdog", maybe a bit more! 

If people ever come to their senses, the kind of reporting in this column might be a good alternative to the current general drivel ... it is pretty much just reporting on what is happening. Doesn't tell you how to think about it, doesn't try to make it dramatic ... "just the facts" like old Joe Friday.

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Perspective: Thirty, Fourteen hundred, Four Hundred Thousand ...

The Meteorologist’s Meltdown: Eric Holthaus on Deciding to Quit Flying - The Daily Beast:

I grew up in a fundamentalist church that believed that the earth being 6K years or so old was pretty much a tenet of christian faith. Believe it or burn.

So in High School I got to do a lot deeper thinking on ice ages, continental drift, carbon dating, number of impact craters on the moon, etc. The mantra of the day from science was "human perspectives are WAY too short" ... Carl Sagan loved to do the "billions and billions" a few years later and the time that humans had been on the earth was a few seconds if the life of earth was compressed to a year.

My how "science" has changed. Now 30 years, or even 1,400 years are VERY significant. Really? We know that 500K years ago the south pole was at least very nearly ice free, since that is the extent of the Vostok Ice Cores.

Polar bears are supposed to be able to evolve from grizzly bears in something like 100-150K years ... so, they lived through the last really big warming period about 125K years ago, a couple degrees warmer than now.

As always, I'm more worried about what happens AFTER those temp spikes ... no matter what causes them! I have a hard time understanding the apocalyptic thought process that gets one to stop flying on the basis of cyclical planetary worming that happens every 100-150K years with or without man doing anything.

It seems to be a short term perspective that makes young earthers look positively "big picture" in comparison.

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Shutdown Theatre

http://touch.humanevents.com/humanevents/#!/entry/shutdown-theater-update,524da046da27f5d9d02cc3e4

Good little summary of just how stinky his Royal Highness BO really is. There was a damned good reason for checks and balances!

Maybe Presidents Are Supposed to Lead?

There Are Those Who Say Lord Obama Has No Responsibility for Gov't Shutdown - Hit & Run : Reason.com:

We know the actual algorithm used by the media is much simpler ... Republicans are at fault. When there were shutdowns in the '80s they were Reagan's fault, when there was near shutdown under HW Bush, it was his fault. When there was a shutdown under Clinton, it was Gingrich's fault ... and etc.

In the early 2Ks it was even very legitimate to hold the government hostage on the debt ceiling ... no less an authority than BO himself voted against raising the debt ceiling with a lot of sanctimony on the evils of deficits. It is fortunate that it is metaphysically impossible for Democrats to by hypocrites!

Converting the House of Representatives responsibility into mailing in "Clean CRs" would seem to grab more people as something rather odd, but apparently we have slipped a very long way.

Anyway, the column is worth a read.

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When Government Shutdowns Were Common

Shutdowns have been frequent tools of police. Just ask Reagan. - The Washington Post:

Ah yes, the roaring '80s, a time when government shutdowns happened very regularly due to the intransigence of the the evil Ronald Reagan.

Amazingly, the media somehow realized that the power of the purse was a very legitimate power of congress and never suggested that it was somehow petulant to use it to shape government policy. Imagine that!

Not covered in this article is "The Boland Amendment" a direct challenge to Reagan's right to conduct foreign policy! Wow, wouldn't doing something like that with BO in office be considered AWFUL ... I mean, he "won re-election".

Strangely, Reagan winning every state save losing MN by a small margin was never considered as a "mandate". The House had been in Democratic hands since the 50's and it was assumed would always be ... since "all politics were local" and people voted for Democrats to bring home the bacon and for Republicans to keep the pig alive. "The loyal opposition" was completely honorable in those days, and even manufacturing likely unconstitutional tactics like the Boland Amendment (they repealed it before it made it to the SCOTUS).

How far we have fallen.

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Why Help Kids With Cancer? There Are Union Gov Workers on Furlough!

Harry Reid, the Gift That Keeps On Giving | Power Line:

The PL guys forget that over 90% of Americans will ever see this.

"Why should the House get to pick and choose"? Why indeed ... because the House of Representatives by law has the main power of the purse if we operated under the Constitution, which we HAVEN'T been for four years now! Thus the "Continuing Resolution" and "Debt Ceiling" debacles. There IS a process to negotiate this ... it is just that his Highness BO and his Co-conspirators in the Senate have illegally failed to follow it.

Kid with cancer? Who the hell cares, there are government workers that are big Democrat supporters on furlough!! Let the damned kids die!

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Amoral Atheism

A Response to Richard Dawkins | RealClearPolitics:

Short, well reasoned, well supported and well written. Just read it.

My line has always been: If you have to be dropped on somebody's doorstep, naked, blindfolded and gagged with $10K taped all over your body, and you can pick one moral / religious aspect of the person owning the property, do you want to show up on an atheists doorstep, a gays, a democrat, an Amish? ... or do you have another brilliant idea?

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Only Republicans Were Harmed in This Propoganda

The American Spectator : Extremely Extreme Extremists:

And other myths. America is and will in the future pay a giant price for the total malfeasance of the current Democrat leadership and the compliance of the media.

Just read it ... no doubt you have heard PLENTY of the other side of the story.

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IPCC

Still More Climate Follies | Power Line:

I've been listening to the response to the report on MPR, the "95% confidence" is the lead story. Sub-stories are things like "Hurricane Sandy, Floods, Storms, big weather changes ..." are ALL now PROOF of "Global Warming". The climate elite is in the process of "doubling down" as it becomes completely clear that their predictions are and have been very wrong. In Science, one learns perhaps MORE by understanding that ALL Science is at best "true for the moment" due to the problems of induction, but without complete devotion to the requirement that DATA, not hypothesis, is king, it is just witchcraft, not science at all.

When the data fails to match your model, your model is what is wrong. Doubling down means that you are desperate, a gambler, a politician, an ideologue, a believer, a charlatan, but you are no longer a scientist. A scientist searches for Scientific Truth ... which requires very common admissions of defeat.

In the excellent book, "The Moon in the Nautilus Shell", Daniel Botkin points out a key phrase that fits so well with current Warmist thinking ... "in spite of appearances tot he contrary". When one who is supposed to be a scientist starts talking like that, they are on dangerous ground.

What isn't discussed or even generally reported are things like the huge North Polar ice cap growth in 2013 including 20 yachts frozen in as a result of trying make the NW passage. http://www.catholic.org/green/story.php?id=52333

As we see in the PL article, the Warmists have taken to pointing out that "30 years isn't climate" ... which makes one wonder why 1980-2K was such a big "trend"?  They are also starting to realize that "the map is not the territory" and "the model is not reality". Models help us understand things if we are careful to realize that a ship in a bottle and a ship at sea are two very different things.

We have now spent 15 years of reality failing to follow the models of the warmists, and in 2013 we fell outside the bottom range in which their models said there was "no chance" of happening relative to temperature projections.

In the words of Richard Feynman:

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."

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Ramirez Cartoon, The BOcare Shuttle!

Michael Ramirez Cartoon:

I'd have to say that the cartoon paints a more coherent picture than BOcare ... one can look at it and know what it is, but it gets the point across about as well as I've seen!

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BOcare, Shutdowns and Cruz

Cruz on cloture | Power Line:

My view on BOcare at this point is that if you enemy is digging a hole, it is best to just let him proceed in peace, if not to quietly arrange to give him a shovel.

The problem of course is that BOcare is part of the elaborate "progressive" grave system for Life, Liberty, and the US as we once knew it. It becomes hard for thinking and caring people to stand by and watch the extremely rapid decline of a once great nation before their eyes. Sadly we crossed that rubicon when the SCOTUS declared BOcare constitutional by saying the "Commerce Clause" gives the government absolute power, and the re-election of disaster.

So at this point, the nation is fast failing and the best that the opposition can really do is to make it clear that we are not in favor of the destruction and show clear alternatives.

That is my problem with the shutdown. In a sane universe, it might be quite wise to defund something that is devastating for the economy and liberty in general, but after two elections of BO, people ought to be able to realize that this is NOT a sane universe! A government shutdown will be seen as all due to the Republicans, and since our economy is about as solid right now as a 100 year old blind woman on ice in a rainstorm, it could give BO and the MSM one more chance to dodge their responsibility.

My view is that with the declining workforce participation, incomes, dis-incentives to work, loss of foreign stature, rampant corruption,  cultural breakdown and a host of other problems, the only way back from this point is it to get bad enough for people to realize that we really MUST value competition, value work, value family, value character, value the American system and regain the idea of identifying with some sort of "dream/outlook/philosophy" by which America IS (or at least was) "exceptional".

A nation dedicated to "getting by" is not long a nation.

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Understandable Hate and Attempted Christian Killing

Judge Richard Roberts’s Troubling Confusion | National Review Online:

I find the very idea of a "hate crime" to be an abomination. Either it is a crime or not. I certainly understand degrees of murder based on "intent", and the difficulty of determining that in some cases ... was it or was it not pre-meditated, was it REALLY accidental, etc, but given the human condition, we need to do our best with those things.

But hate? Effectively it turns out to be an extra penalty that can be selectively hauled out and used against certain people in certain cases. It is open discrimination at it's worst codified in law. Was the victim white? Well, then it can't be a "hate crime" ... unless they were gay.

So a guy goes into an organization with the admitted intent of killing as many supposed "anti-gay people" as possible and shoving Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in their mouths and is stopped.

Nobody even hints that it may be a "hate crime" -- the intended victims were in favor of the many thousand year old rule that marriage was a relationship between men and women, so, the fact that one would want to kill them has nothing to do with "hate".

In fact, they have no right to hold that position -- it makes THEM "haters".

The judge can side in with the views of the criminal in this case, shorten sentencing, and other than a very few right wing nut-jobs like me, nobody cares.

Wanna bet what would happen if the guy had wanted to kill blacks or gays and a judge had acted similarly what kind of media storm would ensue??

Do we STILL not understand what the path was to Germany eventually killing millions of Jews and nearly the whole population just looking away??

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BOcare for Government Employees, Slam Dunk?

Paul wants to end health care subsidies for chief justice | The Daily Caller:

I certainly don't agree with Rand Paul on a lot of issues, but I have a hard time understanding why this one isn't a 100% slam dunk for right, left, and all in between.

If BOcare is good, then they ought to be beating down the doors to be on it. If it is bad, then the government workers will raise holy hell to make it better or have it repealed ... which if it is bad, I'd assume that all but the total knee-jerk BO worshiper would agree with.

What are the arguments against this? I'd like to hear the liberal party line.

Here is all I can think of:

BOcare is only for those that can't afford better -- it still sucks to be them, it just sucks less than it does now according to us ... but the important part is that the healthy ones THINK they are better off. Hell, even if they die we still get their vote!

BOcare is like welfare and environmentalism. It never actually "helps" anything except making us the liberal elite feel better about ourselves than we already do! Man, it is GREAT to be left, in power, and beating those parochial old style jingoistic "americans" like a rented mule! Yo Mao, Che Guevara and Saul Alinsky! Go team Satan! If we could just gas the House of Representatives, this would be heaven on earth ... or Cuba, which is the same thing!

Hey stooge, BOcare is politics, just like the "stimulus". We pay off the voting blocks we want how we want to, and we punish those that don't vote for us. Government workers vote for us, so they get special treatment. Chicago way baby!

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