The 2011 Durango is looking really nice:
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For all the music aficionado’s out there… beer bottle labels that indicate the note of the sound the bottle makes when you blow across the bottle top.
ON FIRE… Mark Levin: We Must Take Back Our Country, Stay Engaged & Fight for Liberty (video)
Take this with a grain of salt (it is from Politics Daily), but it is interesting : After Alaska Loss, GOP Gets Aggressive Against Tea Party Candidate in Delaware
Delaware GOP officials are wasting no opportunity to attack Christine O’Donnell ahead of the Sept. 14 Republican primary, preparing a slew of negative ads and accusing her of inflating her resume and making false statements about the moderate Castle, The Associated Press reported.
“She’s not a viable candidate for any office in the state of Delaware,” state party chairman Tom Ross, who is backing Castle, told the AP. “She could not be elected dog catcher.”
Obama was for the war before he voted against it…
Blindsided: Why the left doesn’t see it coming
Say NO to Michigan Constitutional Convention:
I’m sure glad Michigan has Rick Snyder as our Republican candidate for Governor. If we are fortunate enough to have the ‘Tough Nerd’ at the helm of the State, we can make a clean break from the failed economic policies of the worst Governor in America, Jennifer Granholm…
Well….Actually Snyder is planning on continuing Granhom’s flawed policy of advocating ‘advance battery’ manufacturing over other industries. Via MLive:
Bayer’s 400-acre chemical park development is the future home of fortu PowerCell, a $623 million, 734-job advanced battery plant planned by a Swiss-German startup company. Groundbreaking for the initial 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility is expected in April 2011.
“Batteries are important to our future,” said the Republican candidate, who faces the Democratic nominee, Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, in the Nov. 2 general election. “Our automotive industry is critical to the state.”
The fortu PowerCell development was brought to Muskegon Township in part by a special $100 million state battery tax credit that was supported earlier this year by Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm, the Republican-led Michigan Senate and Democratic-led House of Representatives.
Several of the candidates in the Republican primary for governor opposed special tax breaks for certain industries as “picking winners and losers.”
Snyder’s plan to “reinvent Michigan” includes reform of the Michigan Economic Development Corp., which hands out special incentives such as the battery tax credits.
Snyder’s campaign platform says such assistance needs to be results-oriented, transparent and in conjunction with general business-climate improvements in tax policy and state regulation. (emphasis added)
For a supposed business expert, the “tough nerd” should understand that a government bureaucracy advocating one business over another is a recipe for economic disaster. You know, like the one we are in now. Furthermore, according to research the Mackinac Center has pulled together, the Michigan Economic Development Corp. has a poor track record creating jobs. Really poor.
One other crucial question about those batteries, who is Snyder planing on selling those new advanced batteries to? I hope its not Toyota, because they are having a tough time selling the Prius in Japan due to the ending of their government’s subsidies for hybrid vehicles.
The Prius hybrid has spearheaded sales growth for Toyota Motor Corp. in Japan for more than a year, helped by government subsidies. The model will likely bear the brunt of plunging demand as the support ends.
“A collapse in sales is unavoidable,” said Hiromi Inoue, the new-car sales chief for Tokyo Toyopet Motor Sales Co. “The daily pace of orders for the Prius is already dropping. We are bracing ourselves for the coming crisis.”
The number of customers signing up to buy a Prius at Tokyo Toyopet’s 66 showrooms has dropped to about eight a day from 20 in June, Inoue said. Industrywide, car sales in Japan are expected to plunge 23 percent in the six months beginning in October from a year earlier, according to the Japan Automobile Dealers Association.
Demand for the Prius surged after the third-generation model went on sale in May 2009 and the government introduced the incentive plan a month later. Under the program, consumers can apply for a 250,000 yen ($2,963) subsidy if they scrap a car more than 13 years old to buy a more fuel- efficient one, or 100,000 yen for a new car bought without scrapping the older one. (emphasis added)
It seems the “Tough Nerd” should rethink the whole government advocating one business over another idea. It is a recipe for economic disaster.
And, by the way, the Prius is not the only eco-car that has rough looking sales forecast numbers.
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
Rahm Emanuel
Commodity speculators are driving grain prices higher and globalists are not about to let a crises go to waste. Via Spiegel Online:
SPIEGEL: Are you saying that someone who buys a life insurance policy is ultimately supporting speculation in wheat or cocoa?
Braun: That needs to be qualified. In a crisis like the current one, speculative behavior pervades the entire population. The millions of mothers who are now keeping 20 kilograms instead of 5 kilograms of rice in their pantries are also speculators, in a sense, because they are essentially stockpiling. Speculators involved in real grain trading fulfill an important function, because their activities signal to the market whether a given commodity is scarce and expensive or cheap and therefore available in abundance. The speculation driven by financial markets is different, because it has decoupled itself from the real market and is distorting prices.
There are several macroeconomic issues at play that investors (speculators) are factoring in. It appears that institutional investors are looking at the sideways movement in the stock market and the war on capitalism taking place in western economies and shifting their money to commodities, driving prices up. Also, the declines in value (inflation) of reserve currencies are driving prices up as well.
Sunday Morning Quick Hits: Car Lashes?
For these people, there are products like Turbo Style Products’ CarLashes. That’s right, someone has invented fake eyelashes for your car!
The CarLashes can be cut to fit nearly any vehicle and are simply attached to the vehicle using 3M automotive grade adhesive. The manufacturer recommends that you affix the lashes to the glass of the headlight or the underside of the hood, but claims the adhesive tape will not react with or damage the vehicle’s paint. People who want to add even more bling can grab the optional Crystal Eyeliner, a sparkly, faux-jeweled strip that adheres to the base to the lashes.
28 August 1963: “I have a dream”
Political Cartoon of the Week: Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard Vacation
Great pictures from the 8-28 rally @ Right Scoop-
click on pic for larger version
Glenn Beck’s restoring honor rally
Devote your life to replicating a Star Wars lightsaber
Since we now have government run health care and they are making it their business what we eat, you know this idea will be discussed in Washington:
Fast food outlets could provide statin drugs free of charge so that customers can neutralise the heart disease dangers of fatty food, researchers at Imperial College London suggest in a new study published this week.
Statins reduce the amount of unhealthy “LDL” cholesterol in the blood. A wealth of trial data has proven them to be highly effective at lowering a person’s heart attack risk.
In a paper published in the Sunday 15 August issue of the American Journal of Cardiology, Dr Darrel Francis and colleagues calculate that the reduction in cardiovascular risk offered by a statin is enough to offset the increase in heart attack risk from eating a cheeseburger and a milkshake.
Dr Francis, from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, who is the senior author of the study, said: “Statins don’t cut out all of the unhealthy effects of burgers and fries. It’s better to avoid fatty food altogether. But we’ve worked out that in terms of your likelihood of having a heart attack, taking a statin can reduce your risk to more or less the same degree as a fast food meal increases it.”
One statin, simvastatin, is already available in low doses (10mg) over the counter at pharmacies without a prescription. Other statins are so far only prescribed by doctors, and limited by cost to patients at particular risk of heart attack or stroke. However, the cost of the tablets has fallen sharply in recent years (from ~£40/month to ~£1.50/month), such that the cost to the NHS of seeing a doctor is much greater than the cost of the tablet. (emphasis added)
It is only a small risk, and you know, it is for your own good.
Statins have among the best safety profiles of any medication. A very small proportion of regular statin users experience significant side effects, with problems in the liver and kidneys reported in between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 10,000 people.
“Everybody knows that fast food is bad for you, but people continue to eat it because it tastes good. We’re genetically programmed to prefer high-calorie foods, and sadly fast food chains will continue to sell unhealthy foods because it earns them a living.
“It makes sense to make risk-reducing supplements available just as easily as the unhealthy condiments that are provided free of charge. It would cost less than 5p per customer – not much different to a sachet of ketchup.
“When people engage in risky behaviours like driving or smoking, they’re encouraged to take measures that minimise their risk, like wearing a seatbelt or choosing cigarettes with filters. Taking a statin is a rational way of lowering some of the risks of eating a fatty meal.” (emphasis added)
I have a new computer for the most part and need to do a few more adjustment (nothing big, they can wait for the weekend). I’ve made the switchover to Ubuntu and so far so good. I need to do a little more customization to my set up, but everything is working great.
And now that I’m back up and running here are a few quick hits:
Rolling shutter is a method of image acquisition in which each frame is recorded not from a snapshot of a single point in time, but rather by scanning across the frame either vertically or horizontally. In other words, not all parts of the image are recorded at exactly the same time.
Voter Fraud Alert: ACORN Members Plead Guilty, Funny Business in Texas
This is really cool: a reciprocating laser cutter
Indicators like the “yield curve” are only valuable when you first understand its components in terms of real world human activity. You need to know why certain data correlates and why those correlations might fail. Economics is not physics. It is a science of deduction.
The economy is not, as Keynesians believe, a mechanistic construct that can be manipulated by adjusting their mathematical formulae. Because humans are not machines, you “cannot quantify human action.”Empirical data is only good for finding deductive reasons that explain the correlations and failures in terms of real human action. So unlike physics, there are no empirical constants in economics. In fact, to provide any worthwhile meaning, your correlation has to fail at least once.
Cruiser cam catches 100 mph crash (extra big tip O’ the hat to Lee):
If you are a frequent visitor to motorcitytimes, you have probably noticed that posting has been light around these parts lately. Real life has encroached on me a bit.
A few days ago, my main PC starts running r e a l l y slow. It was an old installation of Windows XP on a old PC, so I decided it would be a good idea to back the system up and start planning for a clean install of Windows.
After the back up of the the main PC was finished, my wife hands me my three month old laptop running Windows 7 with a ridiculous virus rendering the computer unusable. I have that sorted out now.
The laptop virus combined with the need to do a clean install on my main PC convinced me to give Linux a try. I’ve played with Linux in the past and thought this would be a good time to ‘make the switch.’ I decided to pick up a new hard drive and store the old XP drive (in case I really didn’t back EVERYTHING up). Hard drives are cheap. Right?
My PC is old and the shiny new 1TB drive is a SATA model that wasn’t compatible with my old power supply (7 pin edge card style power connection). I picked up a new power supply and installed it. Now my old motherboard isn’t playing nice with the SATA drive. I’m running a Linux live CD for an operating system until I can get to Micro Center to pick up a new motherboard. I’ll need a new CPU as well, because I know the old one won’t be compatible.
Oh, by the way did you see that you can make VoIP calls for free (for the time being) on Gmail?
Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”
Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.
Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.
Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.
Regular posting will resume tomorrow.
Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.
Richard M. Nixon
The EPA has always been a powerful agency in the Executive branch. They have deployed a myriad of draconian regulations which have eroded property rights and have adversely impacted our economy.
We need clean air and water, this is not in dispute. The issue is the EPA, as presently constructed and operating, is exactly the wrong way to achieve a healthy and clean environment.
One example of the EPA’s draconian overreach is its recent draft of the Clean Water Strategy (CWS). The CWS includes plans for community initiatives and inter-agency coordination within the Federal Government that flow nicely into its Environmental Justice Plan “EJ 2014″. The CWS also includes provisions that expand its reach using the global warming fraud.
Build for the Future – Enhance Watershed Resiliency and Revitalize Communities
In order to maximize clean water protection under current authorities, EPA is making a substantial shift in our programmatic approaches to identify and implement multi-benefit solutions that will help communities plan and be more responsive to changing factors such as population growth, increased urbanization and climate change. A more holistic and systemic approach will facilitate capitalizing on existing programs, tools, policies and available funding to achieve measurable results. A collaborative approach to community-based programs – within as well as beyond EPA – will achieve multiple objectives, break down traditionally stovepipe divisions, and broadly engage local communities in decisions that impact local and state waters. For example, capitalizing on green infrastructure, water/energy synergies and integrated water management are key features in this new approach.
The global warming (or climate change, you know, if it cooler than normal outside) theory can trace its roots to the political and social philosophy of the radical environmentalism. The movement was in search of a scientific theory to aid it its implementation of their agenda and found it in global warming.
Continue reading ‘EPA Is Combating Global Warming Through Clean Water Act’
It seems more and more adults in their 20′s (a.k.a. 20 somethings) don’t want to grow up. Via the NYT:
The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.
We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s.
It’s like the 60′s all over again.
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