SnarkyBytes

Tilt-Shift. There’s an app for that.

Yesterday I received a letter (first class mail) from the United States Census 2010.

Dear Resident:

About one week from now, you will receive a 2010 Census form in the mail.

Your taxpayer dollars at work, sending me mail telling me they’re going to send me mail.

Judge Jim Grey on the winners and losers of the war on some drugs.

Michael Barone on why Texas kicks California’s ass.

Texas has been teaching some lessons to which the rest of the nation should pay heed.

They are lessons that are particularly vivid when you contrast Texas, the nation’s second most populous state, with the most populous, California. Both were once Mexican territory, secured for the United States in the 1840s. Both have grown prodigiously over the past half-century. Both have populations that today are about one-third Hispanic.

But they differ vividly in public policy and in their economic progress — or lack of it — over the last decade. California has gone in for big government in a big way. Democrats hold big margins in the legislature largely because affluent voters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area favor their liberal positions on cultural issues.

Texas is a different story. Texas has low taxes — and no state income taxes — and a much smaller government. Its legislature meets for only 90 days every two years, compared with California’s year-round legislature. Its fiscal condition is sound. Public employee unions are weak or nonexistent.

But Texas seems to be delivering superior services. Its teachers are paid less than California’s. But its test scores — and with a demographically similar school population — are higher. California’s once fabled freeways are crumbling and crowded. Texas has built gleaming new highways in metro Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.

In the meantime, Texas’ economy has been booming. Unemployment rates have been below the national average for more than a decade, as companies small and large generate new jobs.

More than anything else I think it’s the part time legislature that prevented Texas from being another California. Texas congresscritters have to live in the real world and have real jobs. That helps keep them from passing stupid laws like the ones that have turned California into another socialist hell hole.

Imagine how much better off we would be if the US Senate and House Of Representatives only met for 90 days every two years.

Steven Hayward in the Weekly Standard:

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

A great review of the Climategate meltdown.

Today, in 1836, the Alamo fell to the Mexican Army.

The Battle of the Alamo (February 23 – March 6, 1836) was a pivotal event in the Texas Revolution. Following a 13-day siege, Mexican troops under President General Antonio López de Santa Anna launched an assault on the Alamo Mission in San Antonio de Béxar (modern-day San Antonio, Texas). All but two of the Texian defenders were killed. Santa Anna’s cruelty during the battle inspired many Texians—both Texas settlers and adventurers from the United States—to join the Texian Army. Buoyed by a desire for revenge, the Texians defeated the Mexican Army at the Battle of San Jacinto, on April 21, 1836, ending the revolution.

Obama administration encouraged by steady unemployment rate

Steady has become the new success as the national unemployment rate remained constant in what the Obama administration on Friday called an encouraging sign of economic improvement.

The unemployment rate held at 9.7% in February, but employers shed a net of 36,000 jobs, according to the Labor Department. The loss was less than what had been expected.

Hmmmm… Someone explain to me how loosing 36,000 more jobs equals steady unemployment.

Must be more of that new Obama Math.

One of the world’s leading economists said Wednesday that the very structure of the Federal Reserve system is so fraught with conflicts that it’s “corrupt.”

Normally, I wouldn’t bother with anything in the Huffington Post, and I’m certainly no big fan of Joseph Stigliz, but a blind squirrel…

The Federal Reserve is hopelessly corrupt.

The AIG deal stinks to high heaven, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

How to get out of this mess? I have no idea.

America, Fuck Yeah!

USA Gun Owners Buy 14 Million Plus Guns In 2009 – More Than 21 of the Worlds Standing Armies Combined

Data released by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for the year reported 14,033,824 NICS Checks for the year of 2009, a 10 percent increase in gun purchases from the 12,709,023 reported in 2008.

So far that is roughly 14,000,000+ guns bought last year!
The total is probably more as many NICS background checks cover the purchase of more than one gun at a time by individuals.

Since November of 1998, over 110 million guns have been purchased in the US. Over 26 million in the last two years.

Damn, I love this country!

Einstein

The current version of the program is widely seen as providing meager protection against attack, but a new version being built will be more robust–largely because it’s rooted in NSA technology. The program is designed to look for indicators of cyber attacks by digging into all Internet communications, including the contents of emails, according to the declassified summary.

Designed to do something and actually doing something are two entirely different things. NSA boogyman aside, the government’s track record in doing ANYTHING computer related is abysmal. I predict this system, if it ever even goes operational, will be overwhelmed with false positives that will make it completely ineffective.

That said, it’s still a privacy nightmare.

Homeland Security will then strip out identifying information and pass along data on new threats to NSA. It will also use threat information from NSA to better identify emerging cyber attacks.

Yeah, sure. Anyone else believe that? Me neither.

Nice to see the New York Times wake up and smell the Climategate stench but you can tell their hearts aren’t in it.

The unauthorized release last fall of hundreds of e-mail messages from a major climate research center in England, and more recent revelations of a handful of errors in a supposedly authoritative United Nations report on climate change, have created what a number of top scientists say is a major breach of faith in their research. They say the uproar threatens to undermine decades of work and has badly damaged public trust in the scientific enterprise.

Yes, it was the “unauthorized release” and “recent revelations” that caused the problem, not the lying fuckwads, that damaged that public trust.

This is nice too:

“We need to acknowledge the errors and help turn attention from what’s happening in the blogosphere to what’s happening in the atmosphere.”

“If it wasn’t for you meddling kids, we’d have gotten away with it!

But that’s redundant isn’t it?

John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., Anti-Bush Truther, decided to commit suicide by cop yesterday at one of the entrances to The Pentagon.

Want to bet he was anti-gun too?

UPDATE: The Christian Science Monitor tried to claim he was “right-wing”, fortunately Newbius set them straight

.

Is Here

Popular Science has announced that all 137 years of the magazine is now online.

We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. And today we’re excited to announce you can browse the full archive right here on PopSci.com.

One of the joys of a university library is the archived periodicals section. I used to spend house sometimes reading magazines from 100 years ago.

THIS is the future of publishing on the Internet.

Microsoft lost me decades ago.

Apple may be next.

Apple this week has continued its crackdown against what it feels are substandard applications in its App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch, this time removing Wi-Fi scanners and software it said has “minimum user functionality.”

WTF? What the hell is wrong with a WiFi scanner?

According to the development studio Three Jacks Software, Apple removed its application, called “WiFi-Where,” due to its alleged use of unpublished APIs within the iPhone OS software development kit. The developer noted that other applications, including WifiTrak, WiFiFoFum, yFy Network Finder, WiFi Get, eWifi, and WiFi Analyzer were also removed.

I happen to use WiFiFoFum a lot. It’s handy to get a quick sweep of frequencies in use when I set up an AP, or to find interference problems. Not as good as a spectrum analyzer, but it’s cheap (free) and I always have it with me.

I REALLY like my iPhone and I’ve had one since the day they came out in 2007. But I’m really getting tired of Apple’s heavy handed approach to the app store.

According to Microsoft, there are 3.8 million infected botnet computers worldwide, 1 million of which are in the U.S. They are used to steal sensitive information and send spam, and were a launching point for 190,000 distributed denial-of-service attacks in 2008.

ALL of which run some version of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

So what is Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney’s proposed cure?

“I actually think the health care model … might be an interesting way to think about the problem,” Charney said. With medical diseases, there are education programs, but there are also social programs to inspect people and quarantine the sick.

This model could work to fight computer viruses too, he said. When a computer user allows malware to run on his computer, “you’re not just accepting it for yourself, you’re contaminating everyone around you,” he said.

Oh, I see. It’s the user’s fault. Uh huh.

The idea that Internet service providers might somehow step up in the fight against malware is not new. The problem, however, is cost.

Yes, Microsoft has ALWAYS wanted someone else to pay the price for their shitty OS.

Customer calls already eat into service provider profits. Adding quarantine and malware-fixing costs to that would be prohibitive, said Danny McPherson, chief research officer with Arbor Networks, via instant message. “They have no incentive to do anything today.”

Oops, look like you made a mistake.

“Customer calls already eat into Microsoft’s profits. Adding quarantine and malware-fixing costs to that would be prohibitive, said Danny McPherson, chief research officer with Arbor Networks, via instant message. They have no incentive to do anything today.”

There, I fixed it for you.

So who would foot the bill? “Maybe markets will make it work,” Charney said. But an Internet usage tax might be the way to go. “You could say it’s a public safety issue and do it with general taxation,” he said.

So, the botnets and viruses exploit the shoddy Windows OS and instead of fixing the problem (because they can’t) they want Internet users to “pay for it”.

How about Microsoft pays for it since they created the problem?

I don’t think we’re on the verge of collapse, but I can predict that unless we turn away from empty political discourse, we are in for more airplanes — The Last Psychiatrist

But there is so much more… Go read it all.

A complete turnover of Congress would be awesome, I’ll admit, but don’t think for a second that anything can change just because you change your representatives. The problem isn’t the government, the problem is you. It is always you.

As in, we have the government we want. If we wanted something else, we’d have it.

You can’t imagine how you, one guy, can be the problem– the government is much bigger than you, isn’t it? But there are millions of people exactly like you. One byproduct of modern narcissism’s reliance on finite media is that countless other people are modeling their lives on the same template you are. You think you are unique in your thoughts and identity, turns out you are a clone. You think you’re the only guy for whom X was transformative? The only guy with an iphone?

Oops. I have an iPhone.

Most of you are huddled around the same directors feeding you the same lines which you regurgitate with sufficient passion you think you came up with it. I’ll bet you’re sure that “tax and spend Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are running this country,” or that we need “renewable sources of energy that will also help create new jobs”– all of which might even be true except that the exact same contentless words are being thought by millions of other people who are all sure they know it. That doesn’t make you pause?

It would be awesome, awesome, if these sound bites were being fed to you with an intent to deceive- as part of a Hearstian conspiracy to make the cattle think one thing so the Elites could do another; in short, awesome if, after all, there was some organized effort leading to a clear goal, no matter how nefarious. But there isn’t. It’s a battle royal, every man and company and politician fighting to eat and not be eaten. Even families operate at cross purposes, kids trying to leave, parents holding on to nothing, everyone looking for a “moment to myself.” This isn’t a war of ideals, it’s cannibalism.

All I can say is thank goodness we are so inefficient. The thought of an efficient government with clear goals scares the crap out of me.

Still think government health care is a good idea?

The Chemist’s War, in Slate

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Governments kill. The more power they have, the more people they kill.

It’s a simple equation.

“Justice Sotomayor, States may have grown accustomed to violating the rights of American citizens, but that does not bootstrap those violations into something that is constitutional”. –Alan Gura, Before the Supreme Court, March 2nd, 2010

You REALLY need to read the transcript. Gura wasn’t just arguing for the 2nd amendment. He was arguing for freedom and the Supreme Court just wasn’t interested.

Robert reminded me that today is Texas Independence Day.

If Texas had remained an independent nation it would look like this:

Not just the state we know today, but a big hunk of New Mexico and pieces of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming. I’m sure things would have been different.

Happy Independence Day, Texas!