Eugene Volokh updated one of his blog entries with a comment of mine including a link back here to this site (so kind!). It is pretty neat because his site is the 110th most popular blog on the web according to Technorati.

What was it all about? Hillary Clinton was publicly complaining about “kids these days” (which is humorous in itself) and a number of commenters on VC were sticking to a similar trend (complaining, over-analyzing, and over-generalizing college students/recent grads to the extreme). I had this to say:

I’d just like to point out a simple fact that everyone else seems to have missed: One has only to point a finger at the preceding generation to find exactly who is to blame for “kids these days.”

Have a look. There’s some great comments.

I decided that it was time to upgrade wordpress and all my plugins to their latest versions. Everything went smoothly except for the WPG2 plugin and the gallery. Some sort of interaction between the two is broken and it could take a while to fix. Until then, I guess you’ll just have to enjoy the only working function: The random image on the sidebar =)

As far as I can tell, everything else on the site is working nominally.

Update: I fixed it. I trashed all the rewrite rules in the .htaccess file and told the WPG2 plugin to re-generate them.

Bush continues his Big Brother campaign…

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

So that gives away one way that government is abusing it’s power with the phone records. Did you know that they’re also performing social networking analysis? That’s right, you’re only three phone numbers away from a known terrorist. Turns out that your friend Bob knows Jakob who regularly calls Bin Laden. It is like the Kevin Bacon game, only evil.

This has inspired me to write an adaptation to Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem regarding his experience Nazi Germany:

First they came for the terrorists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a terrorist.
Then they came for the friends of terrorists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a friend of a terrorist.
When they came for me
there was no one left
who could speak out
no one is free

I was just perusing some of my comments in old digg posts when I came across a reply from two months ago…

Your article on your website on installing an electric tank is very useful, specifically on how to compare the cost of propane gas vs. electricity.
How do you compare cost of Natural Gas vs. electricity? In my area natural gas has skyrocketed 3 times when electricity seems to be a stable .10 to .098 per kw.

Good question, true (that’s his name)! Consider the following an addendum to my article on hot water heaters

• Natural gas water heaters are typically 83% efficient
• There’s 900 BTUs in 1 cu. ft of CNG (747@83% efficiency)
• 38.55 cu. ft. of CNG required to get a 50 gallon tank to 140 degrees (68 degrees in)
• As of this writing, CNG is about $16 per 1000 cu. ft.
• So it takes about $0.62 worth of natural gas to heat 50 gallons of water 68 degrees.

• Making natural gas slightly cheaper than electricity ($0.83) and a lot cheaper than propane ($1.08).

As some of you may know, I’m liberal. A firm believer in positive rights and social liberty, even. That is why I find it so refreshing to see that at least one liberal is as angry as I am:

I’m angry about the shredding of the constitution…illegal wiretaps…falsified intelligence…secret prisons… use of torture as an accepted means of interrogation…Terry Schiavo…the war on science…denial of Global Warming…the fascistic secrecy of our elected officials… presidential signings that declare the President above the law…the breakdown of the wall between church and state…the outing of a clandestine CIA agent for purely partisan political gain…the corrupting influence of K Street… the total sell-out of the legislative process to corporate interests… appointments of unqualified cronies at every level of government…Harriet Miers…Brownie…Abu Ghraib… Scooter …the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the lies about the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the grotesque budget deficits… the pathetic response to Katrina… a civil rights division dedicated to undermining civil rights…an environmental protection agency that refuses to protect the environment… (Take a breath, Angry Liberal Guy.)

It is from the same guy who wrote My Modest Proposal

You may have a confederate flag hanging outside your house next to a pickup truck, an enormous cross bursting from your front lawn, or a vast collection of guns in your basement… If you’re angry over even some of what is written above, you just might be an angry liberal too.

The big Internet backbone providers (the guys who run the lines on which we all communicate) want to start a racketeering group where if you publish content on the Internet you have to pay them a fee or “suffer the consequences”. There’s two petitions to sign if you think that is a very bad thing:

• This one

• And this one

  Here’s the details: AT&T, Verizon, and Bellsouth want the power to charge companies like Google, Yahoo, Movietickets.com, blog sites, etc, for “priority access” to their Internet backbones. It sounds OK in theory: If you want to guarantee the best speed/latency on their network, you can pay more. Only it doesn’t work like that. The problem lies in the fact that when you prioritize one kind of traffic, you de-prioritize it for everyone else.

  So lets assume the “big guys” start paying for this access. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. That means that if their packets are moving across the network, your packets will have to wait. It will degrade your Internet performance as well as any competitor to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. Also, there’s no limit to how much they can prioritize or discriminate. Not to mention the fact that the companies that pay for this access will pass on that cost to their customers creating a negative impact on the economy.

  So if Verizon starts offering voice-over-IP (VOIP) service, they could make it so that all Vonage packets moving in their network are slowed so much that they effectively make Vonage service useless. Since all three backbone providers in the U.S. plan to do this (yes, they really do) there isn’t even a competitor to switch to. If your ISP uses AT&T, Verizon, or Bellsouth for it’s backbone connection (or your traffic needs to go through their network) you must subscribe to their VOIP service or you won’t get VOIP at all.

  That is just one example. Others include slowing Internet traffic to competitors, or even censoring sites that they don’t like. Without Net Neutrality, there’s no limit to what they can’t cut you off from.

  So sign those petitions, or we could allow America to fall into a dark age of Internet access.

Just noticed this on Digg…

“Faulty evidence masquerading as science sent two men to death row for arson in Texas. One was executed based on the evidence. The other was declared innocent when the evidence was discredited.”

This is precisely why I don’t believe in the death penalty. No matter how damning the evidence, witnesses, and the past history of the accused is, there is always the possibility that they are innocent.

Then there’s the fact that I don’t think any government should have the power to execute its own citizens under any circumstances.

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Just noticed this on Digg:

The new federal study found that “there is no longer a discrepancy in the rate of global average temperature increase for the surface compared with higher levels in the atmosphere,” in the words of a news release issued by the Commerce Department and approved by the White House.

So that settles it! There are no remaining sources claiming global warming:

• Isn’t real

• Isn’t caused by human activity

  Well, I suppose the Cato Institute and Fox News could still spin this study into untruth somehow. They’ve been practicing for years at such tasks. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bush gave a speech tomorrow claiming that global warming isn’t real despite his own commissioned study. After all, this is the guy who “believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.” Stephen Colbert.

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I’d just like to send a big ol’ THANK YOU to Stephen Colbert for speaking the truth at the White House Correspondents Dinner. You made me laugh so hard while at the same time I was terrified for your life. Glad you made it out of the room without being whisked away to Guantanamo. You’re a real American hero.

I was just reading an article over at Seed Magazine where they interview some of the world’s leading climate scientists and ask the question, “What will happen to our weather patterns in the next century if carbon emissions continue unchecked?” Here’s an excerpt:

In what the geologists call the early Eocene, 55 million years ago, an accidental geological event released something on the order of one teratonne—that’s a million million tons—of carbon compound into the atmosphere. There’s good evidence from isotope analysis—very similar to that used with ice cores—that the temperature rose 8° C in the temperate and Arctic regions and about 5° C in the tropics, as a result of that event. We think there was much less life on the planet during the 200,000 years of the hot state, and most of it was up in the Arctic basins.

Now, we’ve put into the atmosphere more than half as much carbon dioxide as was released then. Not only that, but in the early Eocene, people weren’t around. We’ve taken an awful lot of the Earth’s surface for farming, so that it’s no longer available to cancel out the damage done by the amount of carbon dioxide we’ve put in. So that, and the fact that the sun is about half a percent hotter than it was then—it doesn’t sound like much, but it all adds up—makes it likely that we’re on the verge of jumping up to the same high temperature that occurred 55 million years ago.