Looks like 2/3rds to me!
This Repeal Amendment, which lets the states repeal Federal legislation is a good idea.
Other good amendment ideas… Balanced Budget, Flat Tax, and No Anchor Babies.
Or just have one Big amendment, called the “Fixing stupid ideas from the past Amendment”.
I’d also favor a part-time Congress. And not permitting serial holding of political offices.
I suspect that 80% of the population would like these ideas, and 0% of the political class.
Occasionally, I’ll watch this video of “Man of Constant Sorry” just to get some snippets of the movie “O’ Brother Where Art Thou”.
If you haven’t seen the movie, rent, borrow, or buy it. It is one of the all time greats. At my company, lines are quoted often in meetings, at lunch, or just as situations occur. Classics like “pater familias” or “we’ze thougt you’ze was a toad”.
George Clooney picked well in choosing this movie, and he does a great job. He has such potential if he would just keep his mouth shut off screen. The entire cast did a great job, as did the costuming and set design folks. It looked like the Depressions era south.
And of course… the song. Man of Constant Sorrow. I was a fan of Alison Krauss and the Union Station before the movie, mainly for their bluegrass. They did the song, with Dan Tyminski, their guitarist singing it with his unique bluegrass tang.
If you play guitar and want to learn to play it… this is a good lesson.
They really should MAKE THIS MOVIE!
Just so you know…. the trailer is a fan trailer made from other movies but following the story of Ender’s Game – one of the best scifi novels ever written.
It is a small thing, but Google finally recognizes Veterans Day as it does other days of importance:
Competition brings price and niche specialization – a win for everybody!
It’s a race to the “bottom” – no pun intended – in the online diaper game:
Isn’t competition sweet?
Now… if Amazon gets too big and has no competition, then we will have to have words with them. But until then… c’est le guerre!
If you didn’t join us for our go to lunch and vote early soiree last week (thanks for all the write-in votes for dog catcher BTW), then go vote. You have my permission for the FREE no personal time/vacation time away from work. You can even fib and tell me the LINES were SO LONG (-: I’ll never know, I’m in an airport biding my time anyway (-:
So go vote…
And if you care about my recommends…
Philpot for Congress.
The libertarian for Governor ( I dislike Herbert and can’t vote for a Democrat)
Republican slate for the various local offices.
”Cal” Hurley for School Board (my wife recommended this one)
For the first two amendments, against the last two.
Oh…. and feel free to write me in for anything you like, as long as it isn’t the Philpot race – we will need every vote possible to eject Matheson from a seat he has despoiled.
A SleepBox would be nice in airports or even just at rest areas on the highway. I don’t know how they could be kept reasonably clean.
If only they could be programmed with destinations, and then picked up and taken there, with moi in it. Perhaps trailers full of them going to different towns.
I have 3 Gmail / Google App accounts that I manage now. MultiG is an app on the iPhone/iPad that lets me read all three easily without having to log in over and over. Simple, but useful.
http://multig.nicholasschlueter.com/
Useful! As I read last night with the Kindle app, I could occasionally pop over to MultiG and check all my work and personal e-mails. Slick!
In the category of “faster please”…. Google is working on a car that drives itself. And it seems to work pretty well:
With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation.
Since I’ve driven probably 12,000 miles in the last 6 months, I’d ready for a computer to take over!
Google, with a market capitalization of $170 billion, is a fraction of the size of the government. But… wouldn’t you say that Google has made your life better over the last decade? Now… how do you feel about government during that time?
It just highlights the benefits of letting people innovate and be rewarded rather than letting the government handle everything. Just imagine if this had been NASA doing this project… it would be hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of people and the car wouldn’t have left the lab yet.
And it involves zipper ties:
Amazing! I’m able to wear a excellent looking tie, with a perfect full windsor knot, that doesn’t stick out under my shirt, that snugs up to my collar without being too tight, and that is always the right length. Amazing!
I bought two.
I used to “approximate this” back in the day by tying a perfect windsor, and then taking it off very carefully. If used cautiously I could get a few months out of one knot.
A suspend button for humans
I just read a book where injured space soldiers were shot with “Suspend” which suspended their bodily functions, permitting months or years doctors to work on them. Now, in today’s Telegraph Science Fiction joins real life…:
Researchers are now set to begin the first human trials of the technique, which involves replacing a patient’s blood with a cold solution to rapidly chill body temperatures.
Apparently it works really well in animals, and they expect it to work well in humans too. But suspending cellular operations you stop the build up of toxins that the blood stream would normally clear away – and that are what kills the brain in traumatic injury situations:
At normal body temperatures, brain death typically occurs in around four or five minutes as, at low oxygen levels, cells start to produce toxins that ultimately kill them.
By cooling the body so much, the cells are essentially put into a state of suspended animation that prevents this from happening.
They do it by replacing blood with a chilly solution that drops the body’s temperature to 10c (50 degrees F). They then have time to operate and fix injuries, who if not frozen would have died quickly from lack of circulation. Then they warm them up and they have no apparent damage from the cooling.
I wonder if you can use this to kill cancer cells? Anyway, as Instapundit says… Faster Please.
He seems very grounded that he was fortunate to be selected, for what he believes many others have also done, and appreciative of the significance of the award. I like him, as I do most Staff Sergeants I’ve met in my day. Congratulations SSG Giunta. Well done!
The real problem
You wouldn’t know it from the main stream press, but the United States doesn’t supply 90% of the guns Mexicans use in crimes. It supplies 90% of the guns they can TRACK the origins of:
OF COURSE AMERICA IS THE ONLY ONE WHO APPEARS IN THE PAPERWORK YOU BOURGEOIS BOOB! We’re the only ones who keep paperwork! Mexican gangs get their guns from South Korea, China, Spain, Israel, Russia, South America, Guatemala and yes, The Mexican Army. Good luck tracing anything back to any of those groups. When all the untraceable guns are factored into the total, America’s input goes down to a whopping 17%.
My source for the above is an interesting article on the drug war in Taki’s Magazine. The author describes two ways to end the violence in the Mexican drug trade – legalize drugs or just let them fight it out. He says we will accept the default of let them fight it out. I suspect he is right. But there is another way that he hasn’t considered, probably because he doesn’t mind drug use.
We could punish drug users. They are, after all, the ones causing the problem. The dealers are just servicing a market, not making it.
For instance, we could require drug testing for a drivers license, including random checks throughout the 5 year validity for the license. We could require drug testing before any benefit from the government.
There are lots of things we could do to not have to fight a drug war. I favor legalization generally, but would gladly accept a mix of legalization of marijuana and aggressive testing for more dangerous drugs.
The default, of continuing to create American police forces that look and act like military forces, and the continuing erosion of rights is something I’d prefer to avoid.
The terrifying part is that the President is promising to do something about it. Mr. President? Please. Just. Stop.
Ace of Spades on the new 9.6% August unemployment data
Online physics
Bill Gates and his son use the Khan Academy – and you should too!
"This guy is amazing," he wrote. "It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources." Gates and his 11-year-old son, Rory, began soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. Then, several weeks ago, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave the 33-year-old Khan a shout-out that any entrepreneur would kill for. Ruminating on what he called the "mind-blowing misallocation" of resources away from education, Gates touted the "unbelievable" 10- to 15-minute Khan Academy tutorials "I’ve been using with my kids."
I’m not exactly a fan of Bill Gates’ allocation of Microsoft investments or his own personal philanthropy. Tens of billions of dollars wasted. But I do think he is correct here about the Khan Academy.
I’m going threw Physics now so I can be refreshed to address topics with my kids, who are enrolled in a high school physics class online. I was just going to re-read Asimov’s “Understanding Physics” but I’m not sure where it is after the Nelson flood of 2010.
