Archive for 2009

A ONE-WOMAN STREETCORNER PROTEST AGAINST OBAMACARE gets a lot bigger.

L.A. FIRES: Jerry Pournelle had to cancel a book-signing. Plus, a threat to Mt. Wilson. Here’s a link to the Mt. Wilson Webcam. And below is what it’s showing at the moment.

towercam

READER PAUL HARPER WRITES:

I strongly recommend that you promote the hell out of the Shea-Porter video because nothing says ‘you don’t count’ like watching a hale, but older, tax-payer thrown out of a meeting by his elected rep and the cops he pays while a smirking SEIU thug smirks for the camera.

Nice people? Not so much.

Cops and firefighters are being laid-off.

Get your hands off me? Indeed.

Okay, here it is again.

DOUBLE-REVERSE-WACK-A-MOLE.

HOT AIR: Video: Shea-Porter has constituent arrested at town-hall forum. “This is a curious re-election strategy, especially for a Representative who made her name by bird-dogging her former Congressman at his town-hall forums. Consistency isn’t Carol Shea-Porter’s strong suit, apparently, as she demonstrates in this clip from the meeting she finally held with constituents after dodging them for most of the month. When one of her constituents challenges the presence of union enforcers in the crowd, Shea-Porter asks for police intervention.”

They can dish it out, but they can’t take it. And until now, they haven’t had to . . . .

THE EQUUS: Hyundai’s new Lexus-competitor luxury sedan. I was afraid it would make me want to scratch my eyes out, but it actually doesn’t look bad at all.

UPDATE: Denver reader Matt Dupree writes: “Speak of the devil, I saw the Equus doing high altitude testing on Mt Evans today. It’s a much better looking car in person than those pictures suggest. It is a very substantial car. Toyota should be a little worried, because these seem to be great cars for a good price that carry gobs of ‘luxury’ for buyers who don’t care about performance; in other words, Lexus customers.”

POPULAR SCIENCE: Singularity University Grads Plan to Help a Billion People in 10 Years.

I’ve been getting a lot of singularity-related email lately, and it’s reminded me of two quotes from Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, describing the state of the world in 2025. First the upside: An Army of Davids success in fighting disease:

The first bit of dumb luck came disguised as a public embarrassment for the European Center for Defense Against Disease. On July 23, schoolchildren in Algiers claimed that a respiratory epidemic was spreading across the Mediterranean. The claim was based on a clever analysis of antibody data from the mass-transit systems of Algiers and Naples.

CDD had no immediate comment, but in less than three hours, public-health hobbyists reported similar results in other cities, complete with contagion maps. The epidemic was at least one week old, probably originating in Central Africa, beyond the scope of hobbyist surveillance.

But there’s a downside:

Every year, the civilized world grew and the reach of lawlessness and poverty shrank. Many people thought that the world was becoming a safer place . . . Nowadays Grand Terror technology was so cheap that cults and criminal gangs could acquire it. . . . In all innocence, the marvelous creativity of humankind continued to generate unintended consequences. There were a dozen research trends that could ultimately put world-killer weapons in the hands of anyone having a bad hair day.

That’s looking like our future, all right.

GEORGE WILL: After the Governator, the Calculator. “Because California’s calamitous present — creative accounting as a rickety bridge to the next budget crisis, coming soon — might prefigure the nation’s future, next year’s gubernatorial election is portentous. An especially intriguing candidate in a colorful field is Tom Campbell. . . . If Campbell is nominated, he can win, but if Californians were sufficiently rational to nominate him, their state would not be shambolic.” Well, the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully.

MARK STEYN on airbrushing.