Thoughts for the day

'We are not and never will be at war with Islam' - Barack Obama

'You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you' - Leon Trotsky

The Shard is going up fast

The Shard will be the tallest building in Britain and Europe. It's by London Bridge,  a few minutes walk from my London apartment. Here's an album.

Sola, perduta, abbandonata

Homosexual judge with long-term partner rules 'gay' marriage ban unconstitutional

So what we got here?

A judge nullifies a referendum.
A fed nullifies the law-making of a state.
An interested judge doesn't declare his interest.
A homosexual nullifies the assumptions of human society to date.

Government should have no role in marriage, but revolutions have started for less than this.

The world's longest bridge

Yesterday my wife and I walked across the world's longest bridge (in 1888):

Whose boot, whose throat?

Answer this multiple choice question:

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was most likely caused by -

A. BP who drilled and completed a nightmare well with unsafe techniques?

B. BP and Transocean who owned and operated the rig?

C. BP and Transocean and Cameron who made the blow-out preventer which failed?

D. The US government?

A report from the Center for Public Integrity suggests that the ultimate responsibility for the BP oil leak disaster lays with the Obama administration, mainly because of a botched response to the initial fire from the Coast Guard.
"The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.
"Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service's own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon's distress call to fight the blaze.
"An official maritime investigation led by Coast Guard Capt. Hung M. Nguyen in New Orleans is examining whether the salt water that was sprayed across the burning platform overran the ballast system that kept the rig upright, changing its weight distribution, and causing it to list."
Oil platform fires are generally fought using foam, which is a more effective fire suppressant. While the Coast Guard does not itself fight these kinds of fires, it is charged with coordinating fire-fighting activities at off-shore facilities like oil platforms.
The use of salt water rather than foam evidently led to the collapse of the oil platform. This is very important, because the oil leak did not occur until this happened.
"While investigators have zeroed in on a series of missteps and ignored safety warnings aboard the rig that preceded the fiery explosion April 20, the question of what caused the platform to collapse into the Gulf two days later remains unanswered and could prove vital to ongoing legal proceedings and congressional investigations.
"That is because the riser pipe from which the majority of BP's oil spewed did not start leaking until after the rig sank. Experts and some lawsuits have openly tied the sinking of the drilling vessel to the severity of the leak. "
While the Obama administration has received much criticism for its botched response to the BP oil leak disaster, it has, until now, evaded responsibility for having caused it to start with. This is not just a result of Coast Guard incompetence for which President Obama is ultimately responsible for as commander in chief, but, as an article in the Washington Examiner suggests, the direct result of Obama budget cuts that rendered the Coast Guard incapable of making a proper response:
"The crippling budget cuts President Obama proposed for the Coast Guard also deserve a closer examination. Obama's spending plan reduced the blue water fleet by a full one-third, slashed 1,000 personnel, five cutters, and several aircraft, including helicopters. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Coast Guard updated its official maritime rescue manual -- advising against firefighting aboard a rig -- just seven months before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. That change in policy came at a time when Adm. Thad Allen warned the budget cuts threatened to turn the Coast Guard into a 'hollow force.'"

Bye bye, mouse

It's just a larger, lovelier, portable version of the trackpad on Macbook Pros.

Let me re-phrase that - it's just a larger, lovelier, portable version of the trackpad on Macbook Pros that will up the productivity of a billion people.

I've used a Magic Trackpad at my desktop for a couple of days now. The killer gesture is the drag. Yes, it drags windows around, which is handy, but it moves anything around, such as image boundaries in 'crop' mode, and window corners to re-size the window, files or other objects from hither to thither.

Oh, oh, oh! I've just discovered the 3-finger backward-forward gesture. My life will never be the same.

Et in Acadia ego..

The Obama family is on vacation in Acadia, an island of Maine which is also a US National Park. Yesterday they ascended Mount Cadillac, 1530 feet, the high point of the island.

I visited Acadia in January 2001. In 4 days on the icy, rocky trails I saw 4 other hikers.
Here's a ditty I left in the visitors' book of the b and b to record the names of all the Acadian hills I hiked:

Acadia, Mansell, Bernard, Beech,
Sauveur, Penobscot, Valley Peak,
Pemetic, Sargent, Dorr, North Bubble,
Gorham, Champlain, Connor Nubble:
I banged my head on icy tracks
All for the sake of Cadillac.
Imagine my concussive shock-
We could have driven to the top.
Goddamn!

'Goddamn!' could as well read 'D'oh!' except that it echoes this parody by Ezra Pound:

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, tis why I am,
Goddamm.
So 'gainst the winter's balm
Sing Goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm
Sing Goddamm, sing Goddamm,
DAMM.

Music for a summer evening when the markets love you

Father:


Son:


Unholy ghost:


Zappa's hierarchy:

Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is the best.

My worst film of 2009

I watched Avatar last night. Hi-tech, low politics, lower art. Echt kitsch, ugh. Kitsch visuals, kitsch plot, kitsch pantheism. Ugh,ugh,ugh. Religion and morality for kiddies and liberals. It has value as insight to the shallow dreams and self-approval of the permanent adolescents who run much of the West.

My best film of 2009 is here. Low-tech, middle brow, high art.

Correlation is not causation, but...

Abortion 'triples breast cancer risk': Fourth study finds terminations linked to disease.

[In the UK] There has been an 80 per cent increase in the rate of breast cancer since 1971, when in the wake of the Abortion Act, the number of abortions rose from 18,000 to nearly 200,000 a year.

It's notable how often cultural marxism leads to health catastrophes. Abortion is a health catastrophe for the unborn baby, but also, quite possibly, for the mother who killed her baby. Homosexual libertinism is a health catastrophe for AIDS victims. Soft drugs are a health catastrophe for those rendered schizophrenic. Rampant vaccination through semi-coercion is a health catastrophe for attenuated immune systems. The sedation of disruptive boys through semi-coercion in a feminised and riskophobic public school system in America is a health catastrophe. God knows I'd have been Ritalined from an early age were I at school now.

As Margaret Thatcher said, the facts of life are conservative.

AC Chickadee comments:

I've never heard that abortions can cause breast cancer. I wonder if it has something to do with hormones? I believe Ritalin is oftentimes prescribed just to make it easier for teachers to handle unruly students, who are really just normal. Parents can refuse to do it, but they probably go along with it just to make it easier for them too. Sad.

Mark comments:

I recently spoke to a parent from New Hampshire whose school is threatening to bar his son unless he's medicated. His dad believes the boy, with whom I've vacationed, is normally disruptive in a setting which stigmatizes that and messes with the boy's mind, rather than discipline it. Principals are litigation averse social workers, who use non-fiction versions of 'soma'.

Whether or not our children are barred in NJ for not being 'adequately' vaccinated is essentially at the whim of a bureaucrat who decides whether I've used the correct form of lie in claiming a religious exemption.

Brave New World is here in America. How ironic, since Shakespeare used the phrase in The Tempest with a different Americas in mind. 'Oh brave new world that has such people in't' - coercive socialists who govern our children with drugs and pc brainwashing.

Think I'm exaggerating? Here's today's outrage:

The striking thing to me is the smug confidence with which the statist professionals commit these atrocities. They've captured the levers of social control while honest citizens are busy making money and raising families.