Can Republicans run on light bulbs?

An issue for the election coming up. Do people even know this is coming? I wonder how many do.

Discussion at Althouse, occasioned by the closing of GE's last US light bulb factory.

QuickTime is a pain in the neck. What do you do?

Sooner or later you find this page: How do I stop QuickTime from playing audio files in my browser? Follow the instructions, and then, ahhh, the sigh of relief.

I was about ready to go to California, find Steve Jobs, and, well, I won't continue with that. Programs should not highjack file associations. I say that unequivocally. Furthermore, QuickTime is not a good player of mp3 files. It stutters too much. And what good is that, I ask you?

Apple, mend your ways. And your software.

A couple of petty domestic gripes

Gripe number one:

The kitchen sink would not stop smelling of mold. Washing the dishcloths, liberal applications of bleach, nothing helped. Months of this. Finally nailed it down:
Do you see that knurled cap on the bottom? It's made of some kind of soft plastic that mold loves to grow on. This pic is of a Scotch-Brite dishwand, but I have seen the same thing marketed under the O-Cel-O name, also. (Both from 3M, so no surprise there.) It never occurred to me that mold would be growing on plastic. Replaced it with another brand with a hard plastic endcap, and no more mold stink in the sink.

Gripe number two:

I do like a big, shallow skillet. A 12" or 12.5" skillet is just right for a three-egg omelet, which can then be split between oneself and one's companion, at about 1.75 egg for one and 1.25 egg for the other. A French company called T-fal, or Tefal, makes skillets that seem like they would really fill the bill for this job. I have owned three of them. Why three? Because they start to warp right away. They get high in the center, so that if what you are cooking is more or less liquid, it takes on a ring shape, like this:

I dropped that egg in the middle of the skillet. It did not stay there. If you do omelets the right way, with the back-and-forth shake to distribute the egg, this warp produces voids in the middle, so that you have to turn the skillet so far on its side that you risk spilling the whole thing on the cooktop. The next big, shallow skillet will not be a T-fal.

Disclaimer: I have not been paid in cash or in kind to endorse these products.

Opera users beware

The new version, Opera 10.51, is called a security and stability upgrade. But it's more like an entirely different program. Menus are relocated, controls are missing; bookmarks are missing! It is not an incremental point upgrade, it's a radical departure. And it's odd that the Norwegians would go in the direction of removing controls and options. Opera, until this release, has always been the most tweakable browser around.

I have been using Opera since version 3 point something, back when you actually had to pay for it. I thought it was worth the price.

I do not like this new version.

The good news: if the automatic update thing automatically updates you, and you find the new version to be undesirable, you can revert to Opera 10.10 by reinstalling that version right over the new one. At least, it worked all right for me to do it that way. My bookmarks are back. I tried to get back to 10.10 using Windows XP's System Restore, but that was a miserable failure. The reinstall worked fine.

This 10.5 (10.51, whatever) upgrade seems to be an inadequately-tested beta release. The Opera forums are clogged with messages from users with problems.

Caveats: I'm on Windows XP, not Vista or Windows 7, and I like to be able to find menu items where I am used to finding them. Firefox point releases are good about this. This new Opera release, not so good.

Update: from the Opera forums, I glean that the way to stop the automatic updates is Tools > Preferences > Advanced tab > Security, where at the bottom of the window is a field called Auto-update, with a dropdown. Select "Do not check for updates" to avoid having to hit the "Cancel" button on the installer as soon as Opera starts up.

I think I'll stick with 10.10 for a while. One of the things missing in the new release is "Duplicate tab." Very useful, and not the same thing as copying the address and pasting it into a new tab. "Duplicate tab" preserves the tab's history. When a search gets to have many branches, some of which you might want to come back to, this is just the thing. Why lose it?

Early snowfall

3 pm in Connecticut, 38°, snow mixed with rain and freezing rain, all falling at once. It seems a little early for this.

4 pm and it's all snow now. The report at Weather Underground dot com from a nearby weather station says "Rain Mist," but I know snow when I see it.

Who is going to have the last laugh after the US bankrupts itself trying to cut CO2 emissions to 1875 levels? (England looks like taking a stab at this too.) What nations are paying the least attention to this pseudo-scientific power grab? Who benefits?

Since more than half the world (Russia, China, India, Africa, Muslim nations in general) are ignoring the panic that is making Al Gore rich and looks like making most Americans poorer, at least we need not worry about the possibility that taking radical measures to avoid warming, if there is an actual cooling trend going on, could lead to another Ice Age. The whole US could revert to the Paleolithic (without the fire, of course) and it would make no discernible difference to the climate or temperature if we were the only ones doing it.

More nukes now! Humanity needs energy! (That's a chant.) Repeat ad lib.

Humanity resembles a pulsating mass of maggots

Oh yeah? I think we're a lot more like a writhing mass of maggots. If we're going to be maggots at all, we should writhe.

Michelle Malkin has been keeping up with looking into John Holdren. Read them all. The "maggots" business comes from this article, "The Challenge of Man's Future," by Harrison Brown (PDF).

[A] substantial fraction of humanity today is behaving as if it would like to create such a world. It is behaving as if it were engaged in a contest to test nature's willingness to support humanity and, if it had its way, it would not rest content until the earth were covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.

Writhing mass, dammit. Or perhaps we could pullulate.

What our masters think of us. In their rare candid moments.

Human beings are a resource, not a liability. Affluence is a goal, not a problem. People who tell you that affluence is a problem — those people are a problem.

Added, after commenting here: Holdren's plenary address to the AAAS in 2007 can be heard here, or downloaded as PowerPoint. It is dedicated to Brown: "My pre-occupation with the great problems at the intersection of science and technology with the human condition – and with the interconnectedness of these problems with each other – began when I read The Challenge of Man’s Future in high school. I later worked with Harrison Brown at Caltech."

Update: On rereading, I see that I was so irked by the pulsating that I missed the writhing, which was indeed mentioned. So that's better? Anti-humanists ought not to be in government. It's like hiring a vegetarian chef at a steakhouse.

Here earlier: Let's take a closer look at that book.

Keeping an old smear alive

Jim Macdonald, at Making Light, has seen fit to revive the "Sarah Palin made rape victims pay for their rape kits" smear from last year. Lest it fade from memory.

I'm very fond of Making Light, have been reading it for years, have commented there a few times, but not lately, and certainly not lately on a political thread. So I'll post this here, for my own future reference.

Macdonald, in the main post:

I have a rape kit right here. Let’s look at it…

The first thing I notice is that its official name, printed right on the cover of the box, is “Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit.” Hmmm… nothing there about patient care or treatment. “Evidence Collection” sounds more like a police function.

Macdonald, at comment #4:

A Rape Kit is normally performed by a SANE nurse (that's Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner). An RN with additional specialized training.

Right. And it's usually done at a hospital, not at a police station. By a nurse, not a police officer. Macdonald is an EMT, not quite a doctor or nurse, not quite a policeman, but a little of both, which might account for his blurring of the distinctions.

Since the rape kit is customarily administered at a hospital, by a nurse, rather than at the police station, by a policeman, the hospital administration is going to be involved, and would like to bill someone for the time and effort. Hospitals usually try to bill a patient's insurance company. That was exactly what the police chief in Wasilla took as standard procedure; what he wanted to do was to obtain restitution from the perpetrator. The Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman article from 2000 is a little incoherent, but after the first wild charge, quotes the police chief saying some sensible things:

While the Alaska State Troopers and most municipal police agencies have covered the cost of exams, which cost between $300 to $1,200 apiece, the Wasilla police department does charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests.

Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon does not agree with the new legislation, saying the law will require the city and communities to come up with more funds to cover the costs of the forensic exams.

In the past weve charged the cost of exams to the victims insurance company when possible. I just dont want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer, Fannon said.

According to Fannon, the new law will cost the Wasilla Police Department approximately $5,000 to $14,000 a year to collect evidence for sexual assault cases.

Ultimately it is the criminal who should bear the burden of the added costs, Fannon said.

The forensic exam is just one part of the equation. Id like to see the courts make these people pay restitution for these things, Fannon said.

Fannon said he intends to include the cost of exams required to collect evidence in a restitution request as a part of a criminals sentencing.

[Sic, sic, sic.]

Some states have a fund to pay for rape kits, some do not. In North Carolina, for instance, from Feb. 13, 2008:

N.C. hospitals bill rape victims

Rape victims across the state are paying for their ill fortune in the most tangible of ways: a bill for the evidence kit needed to lock up the rapist.

The vast majority of the 3,000 or so emergency room patients examined for sexual assaults each year shoulder some of the cost of a rape kit test, according to state records and victim advocates. For some, it's as little as a $50 insurance co-payment. For those without insurance, it's hundreds of dollars left when a state program designed to help reaches its limit.

From August 2008, the situation seems to have improved:

Rape victims won't face exam bills

Victims of sexual violence in North Carolina will no longer be forced to pay for the forensic exams needed to help capture their attackers.

The N.C. General Assembly approved more than $1 million this summer to revamp a program designed to help cover the cost of rape kit exams for uninsured victims. The exams are used to collect bodily evidence of an attacker and are standard in the prosecution of sex crimes.

Now, hospitals will settle directly with the state, sparing victims of sexual assault the aggravation and trauma of receiving a bill.

Billing for rape kits was also standard procedure in other places, until quite recently:

Rape Victims Can Be Hurt Financially, Too

"It's been a problem for a long time," says Ilse Knecht, deputy director of public policy at the National Center for Victims of Crime. "We've heard so many stories of victims paying for their exams, or not being able to and then creditors coming after them." In order to qualify for federal grants under the Violence Against Women Act, states have to assume the full out-of-pocket costs for forensic medical exams, as the rape kits are called. But according to a 2004 bulletin published by the NCVC, "[F]eedback from the field indicates that sexual assault victims are still being billed." Knecht says she's recently heard from caseworkers in Illinois, Georgia, and Arkansas reporting that rape victims continue to be charged for their forensic exams.

The rape kit itself generally contains bags to collect clothing, test tubes for collecting blood, swabs for fluid, and a comb to collect pubic hair. Small-change stuff. But exams also involve administering tests for pregnancy, HIV, gonorrhea, and syphilis, and that's where the costs add up, says Randall Brown, medical director for the Baton Rouge Rape Crisis Center in Louisiana.

How forensic exam costs are handled varies. In some locations, hospitals bill patients' insurance and absorb whatever the insurers don't pay or bill patients for the balance. Some states have special funds to cover a portion of the costs. Others require convicted offenders to pay into a fund to reimburse the costs of the exams.

Also Missouri: In 2006, State Sen. Michael Gibbons introduced an amendment to a crime bill that

would require the Department of Health and Senior Services to make payments to medical providers to cover the charges of forensic examinations for victims of sexual offenses. Victims would also be able to seek “out-of-pocket” losses from the Crime Victims Compensation Fund to cover the cost of personal property that is seized as part of the investigation.

The legislative database says the last action on the bill was that it was "in conference," this in 2007.

A NOW press release from 2002 says

NOW's local activists report that in many jurisdictions the victim must pay for the processing of the "rape kit" evidence – an absurdly unfair proposition. Is there any other assault in which survivors are required to pay the cost of investigating the crimes against them? These expenses can reach $1,500 for DNA analysis, and $5,000 or more for extra costs such as evidence collection and medical care.

So it wasn't only Wasilla, it wasn't only Sarah Palin, it was standard procedure in lots of places. More from Rachael Larimore at Slate.

I guess there is still some concern on the Left that Palin is not quite finished, politically, so it will be necessary to keep the old smears alive. Like zombies!

Wowsers are ever with us

Richard Miniter describes Why L.A. Should Be Pushed Into The Sea. Smoking, this time. Members of the anti-fun brigade are present in the comments.

John Lott says: "Nonsmokers may feel better off because of bans, but what they gain is less than what smokers lose. If the opposite were true, it wouldn’t be necessary to impose the bans."

In Gram Parsons' Sin City (almost 40 years ago!), the singer is resigned to the earthquake that will come to clean up the town, so to speak. Looks like the more puritanical segment among the bien-pensant would like to enforce righteous behavior lest the city be smitten. But since many of them would recoil at the notion that God would (or could!) smite a city for the behavior of its people, then the motivation must be be something else. What could it be? And what accounts for their inability to view other human beings and fellow-citizens as people like themselves, to be respected rather than to be controlled? Some kind of philosophical immaturity similar to what we see from the plaintiffs who sue over anything or nothing, I suppose.

A nation-wide smoking ban would be a lot like a return to Prohibition. Of course, we already have the "Son of Prohibition" going on, in the form of the War on Drugs; and MADD and their supporters and sycophants in the legislatures are working on the alcohol part of it. I'd like to see the pendulum swing back in the Dionysian direction in my lifetime. Less regulation, more freedom, please.

Al Gore's new boat

My word, I'm getting tired of this "Al Gore and the Global Warming" nonsense. It's pretty clear that even Gore does not take his gospel at all seriously, but is just putting one over on the rubes who will bite on his hook. I dare say he'll be trolling for a few fish in the new boat.

B.-S. One. I doubt it will ever leave Center Hill Lake.

It's smaller than David Geffen's yacht, that's true, but for a lake boat, it's pretty darn big. The Mayflower was smaller, and used no diesel fuel, bio- or otherwise.

Socialist spammers

Just got an ebay phishing spam with the usual "click here to resolve this problem" link. This time the link goes back to "www.partido-socialista.pt": the Socialist Party of Portugal! This is the dominant party over there, so it's probably a rogue user, or a sign of a hacked system, rather than a systematic effort at sharing the wealth by stealth, but then you never know with socialists. If the ends justify the means, no means is too mean.

Another wowser heard from

Why am I not surprised that someone writing in the NY Times wants to raise taxes? This time on booze. David Leonhardt cites a load of specious reasons for raising taxes on the anodyne of the poor in his mendaciously titled Let’s Raise a Glass to Fairness, inspired by a book, Paying the Tab, by Peter Cook, a Duke University economist. This economist can't tell the difference between a tax and a subsidy:

Each of the three taxes is now effectively 33 percent lower than it was in 1992. Since 1970, the federal beer tax has plummeted 63 percent. Many states taxes have also been falling.

At first blush, this sounds like good news: who likes to pay taxes, right? But taxes serve a purpose beyond merely raising general government revenue. Taxes on a given activity are also supposed to pay the costs that activity imposes on society. And for all that is wonderful about wine, beer and liquor, they clearly bring some heavy costs.

Right now, the patchwork of alcohol taxes isn’t coming close to covering those costs — the costs of drunken-driving checkpoints, of hospital bills for alcohol-related accidents and child abuse, and of the economic loss caused by death and injury. Last year, some 17,000 Americans, or almost 50 a day, died in alcohol-related car accidents. An additional 65,000 people a year die from other accidents, assaults or illnesses in which alcohol plays a major role.

Mr. Cook, besides being a wine lover, has been thinking about the costs and benefits of alcohol for much of his career, and he has come up with a blunt way of describing the problem. “Do you think we should be subsidizing alcohol?” he asks. “Because that’s what we’re doing.”

"We" subsidize drunkenness to the extent that some recipients of disability payments spend the money on booze. To say that not taxing something is the same as subsidizing it is to fall into the same sort of Newspeakery that makes it a "budget cut" when a government agency's budget is increased less than someone (administrator, legislator) had asked for. A smaller increase is still an increase. If you can pass through Sherwood Forest without being robbed, Robin Hood has not given you a subsidy. Low taxes do not "cost" the government money that it never had to begin with.

I'll dissect this phony "reasoning" further in a while; right now I need a couple of drinks. In the meantime, go read what Glenn Reynolds has to say about it.

Later: The call for an increase in taxes sounds to me like "Let them eat cake." The Times writer, the Duke professor, what is a couple of dollars increase in the price of a bottle of Champagne to them? I am reminded of the sort of billionaire Democrats who think everyone's taxes should be increased. There's another post in that: in the days of ancient Rome, as now, wealthy politicians ran for office, promising everything under the sun to the voters; but in those days, if elected, they paid for the bread and circuses themselves!

The article, like the book, is a call for a regressive taxation scheme, based on phony numbers, with social engineering as its goal.
• Regressive: Good booze is too good for the poor; if the manufacturers won't raise the prices enough to keep the stuff the writer likes out of the hands of those not in his socio-economic class, well then, the tax power of the government can be used for that purpose.
• Phony numbers: Old stuff, but the MADD propaganda machine doesn't quit. The expression "alcohol-related" is the tip-off. If a passenger in the car not at fault was tipsy, that counts as alcohol-related. Links: National Motorists Association. Responsibility In DUI Laws. (Ugly formatting, interesting numbers:) GetMADD: Real Numbers. A business writer ought to have better grasp of numbers … oh never mind, it's the Times.
• "Taxes on a given activity are supposed to pay the costs …" Supposed to? Where is that in the Constitution? Taxes are "supposed to" raise revenue. How about a tax on newspapers to pay for recycling? The Times is in a bad place to be talking about tax fairness, considering the combination of eminent domain abuse and tax breaks involved in clearing the ground for its new HQ.

This is the Times' business section. If this is the kind of wisdom they can muster over there, it's no wonder the paper's own stock is down as far as it is.

Update: Bill Quick has a post on this.
More on wowsers, with quotes from Candace Lightner, founder of MADD, who does not like what that organization has become: Prohibition Returns!

Happy Repeal Day!

It is the anniversary of December 5, 1933, happy ending of an unhappy experiment. The evils inflicted upon the nation, and the world for that matter, by Prohibition, continue, but now our gangsters, politicians and G-Men quarrel over different kinds of contraband. We know from history that anodynes need not be outlawed; there is just too much profit in misery for the current version of Prohibition to be ended. Volstead and Anslinger have worked much evil in the world. Thanks to The Wine Commonsewer at Hit & Run for this lovely bit of nostalgia: But today let us be joyful, within the limits imposed by the current bunch of wowsers.

Mark Steyn's Thanksgiving address

Blessings close to home.

Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays.

Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: In Continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from Dec. 22 to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world.

But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. "What's it about?" an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. "Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?"

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for.

[…]

Three hundred and 14 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.

Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.

Prosperity, democracy, liberty: these are not normal conditions of humanity. They are rare and usually fleeting. Take them for granted, cease to guard them, and they will soon be gone. RTWT and give thanks.

More on biofuels

Glenn Reynolds, linking to George Monbiot at the Grauniad, says "BIOFUELS are now officially evil." Monbiot (rhymes with moonbat), a leader among the global warmingists, has been writing to this effect about biofuels for a while. A few months, anyway. Which shows that a stopped clock, and so on.

Now Jerry Pournelle's readers enter the fray. Dr. Pournelle says, "We don't need the ethanol in the first place. Better we produce gallons and gallons and make every Senator and Member of Congress drink two quarts a day of absolute alcohol diluted however they like. They couldn't do worse, could they?"

Sounds like a plan.

It's starting to get confusing: since pollution cools the Earth, the Greens ought to be in favor of burning more stuff, but they don't want to burn stuff, since that liberates carbon, making more CO2, which warms the Earth, which is bad; but pollution is bad, and so is drilling for oil, which results in burning stuff, which would cool the Earth, which would alleviate Global Warming™, which would be good, except for the pollution, which defiles Mother Gaia. Maybe I'll try to diagram this. Not right now. It's important (isn't it?) to avoid the Fallen Angels scenario.

By the way, I'm seriously tired of seeing Walt Kelly's line "We have met the enemy, and he is us" used about all kinds of things that have nothing to do with littering! Pogo the possum was talking about littering! Tires in the creek, and that sort of thing. Dammit. Carelessness, not evil or subversion.

Here previously: Biofuel problems, Progress on biofuels, Ethanol scam at Rolling Stone.

John Stossel on global warming, 10/19/07

The report from last Friday's 20-20. The kids are being frightened by having An Inconvenient Truth forced upon them by their teachers. How many neuroses will this lead to? At least the Russian bombs that frightened my generation were real. Anybody recognize the creep with the English accent who says, "We have Holocaust deniers, we have climate change deniers, and to be honest, I don't think there's a great deal of difference." at 6:55 in (1:11 remaining, if you see a countdown)?

A shorter written version at the ABC News site.

Update: Russell Seitz thinks that Tom Yulsman has called Stossel's "attempt to bluff on some bad bets in climate science." Yulsman's Prometheus site is sponsored by NOAA, which is heavily invested in the AGW "consensus." The way I read the post, it sounds like Yulsman is the one bluffing. "Flat-earthers?" Really? See what you think.

Left lane cruisers

Left lane cruisers should be shot. If you're not going to pass, get back in the right hand lane.

Google's code of conduct runs afoul of DRM

A Wired article from 2003:

Most major companies refer to a detailed code of corporate conduct when considering such policy decisions. General Electric devotes 15 pages on its Web site to an integrity policy. Nortel's site has 34 pages of guidelines. Google's code of conduct can be boiled down to a mere three words: Don't be evil.

More recently, in BoingBoing:

Google Video robs customers of the videos they "own"

Samuel sez, "Hey guys. Several months ago, I bought an episode of Star Trek on Google Video, just out of curiosity to see how it worked. Today I got an email letting me know my videos would stop working in five days."

If you "own" any of these videos, take a look, and follow the link at the bottom to Google Video DRM: Why is Hollywood more important than customers?

They tell us that downloaded video is the wave of the future. DRM is the dead hand of the past. (I see a hand, waving me on; but it's a dead hand on a stick, held by a predator, luring me into ambush! Yikes, I better stop now. "When mixed metaphors go bad.") Seriously though, the whole computer/software business has been troubled by ridiculous, barely-legal EULAs and things like the the DMCA for all its short life. Downloadable video that expires? Bad, but par for the course.