Hip,hip,hip,hypocrisy

The dogmatic character of the Church of Manmade Global Warming makes it apt that carbon credits are thought of as ecological indulgences. Flatulent twerps like Al Gore can buy these waivers for their own colossal carbon footprints and incentivise the construction of exceptionally filthy power plant elsewhere which is most cheaply able to supply the carbon offsets. Perverse moralising meets perverse incentives. But what is really needed is hypocrisy credits to induce a vast transfer of wealth from Edwards and Gore to deserving right-wing bloggers.

Inject! Inject! Inject!

I'm waiting to hear from NJ whether one of my children will be exempted from its compulsory vaccination programme. In NJ there is no philosophical exemption, so parents who have rational objections must cite specific supernatural tenets. In order of significance, what's at work here is:

1. The lust of the state to assume the rights of parents.
2. Vaccination is big business and big lobbiness.
3. Medical omniscience.
4. A superstition that mass vaccination improves overall immunity in affluent societies.

Reasoned discrimination is not a force in play. The vaccination lobby resembles the Manmade Global Warming lobby in its religious adherence to dogma, its anathemizing of 'deniers' and its 'greater good' propensity to lie thru its teeth and omit inconvenient truths.

The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that mass vaccination for chickenpox adversely re-shapes the disease's profile so that it is far more virulent. The answer is either to stop mass inoculation (not considered in the article) or to start mass repetitive boosters thru adulthood with at least one known result - sacks more tax for drugs to be shot into my younger children. My elder children caught measles, mumps, chickenpox etc when they were young and developed hardy immune systems.

The Oil Industry

I prefer wit, brevity, the quick dagger breezily slipped between the ribs of my enemies, but my elegant postures collapse in a heap before David Cameron, leader of the Cameroons and their hangers-on, aka the Conservative Party of Great Britain. This party leads the polls, so Cameron may well be Prime Minister in 2-3 years.

Cameron fuses my circuits, smoke seeps from my eyeballs, I can't speak, I gawp like a fish out of water. This,this,this Old-Etonian, ex PR man, slimy spiv; this oily chancer, this BBC nominee, this faux-conservative, nouveau-man; this,this,this is the successor to Margaret Thatcher. Woe. Is. Me.

There have been have been so many last straws with this, uh, scumbag is the mot juste, but this is the last, last straw. He's re-invented himself as an eco-fascist and invited Al Gore to address the Shadow Cabinet. Listen, friends in Utah, reserve a place for me in your country. I may need to tear up my passport and get one of yours. Just don't elect Gore, Clinton, Obama or McCain.

I have seen the future and it's...

Utah.

Why God made powers of 2

Daniel Tammett is an autistic savant 'whose brain somehow possesses an island of brilliance.' He appears to be unique as 'the first recorded savant to have no easily recognizable autism' and in that he can describe how he performs his feats of memory. Here is a decent video about him, but what will stay with me longer than the clip of Daniel reciting the first 22,514 digits of pi was the short segment titled 'Bullied'.

Media Studies

h/t John Hawkins

The 7th-largest French city

On Tuesday I'll fly back to London after 2 months in suburban New Jersey (and NYC, New Hampshire and the Virgin Islands). The mail will be piled up, I'll hobnob with my beloved elder children (except the one in Nicaragua) and I'll be in one energised city. There's a hum about London these days. The most international city is like a Star Wars bar where the galaxy's exotics mingle. I remember the thrill of my first visit to New York in 1979. Now the thrill's in London and I grew up there. Money's flooding in, energy too.

This breathless article points out :

A decade ago, it would have seemed fanciful that we could usurp New York as the world financial capital, when the smart money was predicting London's eclipse by Frankfurt..

My motto is 'things change'. Paris has potential. The ease of flitting by train between central London and central Paris means that these mythical cities are potentially fungible. Right now Paris is a dubious spot to locate a global business, but Sarkozy could change that. If so, a cost of living and lifestyle arbitrage with London may open. That could finish New York as a global finance centre as NyLon is a tougher commute than PariLon. The language barrier is no more; English jumped it.
I like London, but maybe one day I'll sell up and buy a modest spread in Escalante, Utah. There may be a little change left over. Go west, old man! There's coffee and wi-fi.

Let me not admit impediments..

Right Wing News discusses the correlation between social and fiscal conservatism. Here's my take:

Fiscal conservatism is a subset of social conservatism. Society should constrain the freedom to harm innocents while maximising the freedom to reap the rewards of one's own acts. Then criminalising abortion makes conservative sense as does criminalising drug trafficking if and when it impacts children. I honestly don't know if I'm libertarian about drugs and adults, but, legal or not, taxes should not be used to mitigate the suffering of voluntary adult drug users; charity, sure.

Homosexuals are already free to marry in any spiritually valid sense, but society should not be forced by law to punish, reward or endorse that spiritual contract. I'd go further and remove legal context from all marriage until children are involved. If a husband and wife want to make business arrangements, then use the law of contract. Marriage is properly valued by the unforced admiration of others and one's own self-definition, not by laws.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds..

Charming their pants off

If charm and good looks win elections, then Romney's in good shape, especially against H. Rodham-Clinton. This liberal cites

"former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers’ observation about Bill Clinton: He seduces women, he seduces men, he seduces pets.

Mitt Romney is Bill Clinton with his pants up. And he’ll very likely be cast in 2008 .. against Clinton’s wife, who has all the seductive qualities of John Kerry in a pants suit"

The sleek design of Mitt TV and the ease of linking and copying clips speak well of Romney's competence, a material attribute of a chief executive.

Contrast Hillary TV which has clunky design, blockier type, acres of wasted space, text which droops in my Firefox, and no obvious link and copy mechanism. I wonder what each implementation cost.

As for content, well lordy! If you can bring yourself to watch the Hillary in New Hampshire clip (not recommended and I don't see how to embed it separately)...what a herd of hand-wringing losers! "It's very seldom you get the opportunity to ask a potential President 'how can you change my life?'" Gadzooks! Were I American and the Village Pantsuit became President, then the air of passivity, make-Iraq-go-away-ness and what-can-my-country-do-for-me-ness would make me emigrate to Mexico as the Hollywood liberals slink back from Cantada. Attitudinise, moi ?

His funny Valentine

April's not the cruellest month.
It's February's phony signs
Of love by numbers, love for lunch,
Need setting where the sun don't shine.

'Men are fools' a wise man said
And women know it to their toes,
And that's ok, as in his head
She's fed his ego to the crows.

His funny kind of Valentine
Discards him every other month.
He buys her stuff to buy him time,
But time and stuff are not enough.

It's a funny kind of Valentine
To mislocate a wedding ring
'It isn't lost but do you mind
Replacing that symbolic thing?'

Then kiss the cobra's head. She smiles
At knowledge oh so serpentine.
He's snakebit and he's in denial
Of his funny kind of Valentine.

True minds may one day wed again,
That tricked themselves like fools of Time,
But better not to hold his breath
To hold his funny Valentine.

It makes no sense she's still around,
It makes no sense he's still supine,
But nonsense makes the world go round.
Funny ... she's his Valentine.

You read it here..

I now forecast that Steve Jobs will soon resign from Apple and Disney.

See this and this.