The Fast Food Gods Must Be Angry

Coincidence?   I think not.

Los Angeles has put a moratorium on building fast food restaurants in Low Income Areas – and today there was a 5.4 earthquake in the Los Angeles area.

The Fast Food Gods must be angry.  Why should only the Elite Meet For A Tasty Fast Food Treat in LA-Land?

Tis discrimination.   And everyone knows that’s BAD.

A Great Unifying Theory: Al Gore and The Blob

Last night, Fanboy and I watched the original version of The Blob featuring Steve McQueen. At the end, when the Blob has been immobilized (frozen with CO2), the nice policeman calls Washington D.C.:

I think you should send us the biggest transport plane you have, and take this thing to the Arctic or somewhere and drop it where it will never thaw.

And the very last lines of the movie are:

Lieutenant Dave: At least we’ve got it stopped.
Steve Andrews: Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold.

In a flash of insight, I realized that Al Gore, due to his past Vice Presidential access to classified UFO information, might believe that a Giant Flesh Eating Blob is imprisoned in the frozen wasteland of the Arctic. It would explain his hyper concern regarding Global Warming. (The recent news item about the former astronaut claiming that the Gubmint is covering up UFOs adds a bit more plausibility to this GUT.)

The Goracle seems to identify with Steve Andrews; perhaps this film was the seminal influence of his pre-pubescent years. The following line is a good summary of Algore’s life mission:

How do you get people to protect themselves from something they don’t believe in?

Poor Algore. So concerned and yet so hopeless misguided. Instead of reducing CO2, we should be making more of it in order to increase reserves of fire extinguishers to combat blobs. There’s also the increasing groundswell of Heretic Scientists challenging the Global Warming Doctine as well as the report that Anchorage is on track for its coolest summer in ages – indications that Global Warming may be naturally on the wane.

Despite all of this, the Goracle persists in his Anti-Blob Defense Mission. Perhaps this is all an epic psychological projection and exercise in self-avoidance. Algore’s inner Blob has manifested into his becoming a human blob. He distracts himself with the Arctic Blob Threat instead of eschewing junk food and getting exercise. Maybe we should start a fund to provide a physical trainer and diet coach for Algore. It would be cheaper than having him destroy the economy due to his VooDoo Ecologics

Things That Are Amusing Me Today: 7/27/08

Tis another day.

One is amused by a couple of oldie by goodie jokes:

Q) What do you get when you cross an agnostic with a dyslexic?

A) Someone who sits around wondering if there is a Dog.

and,

Q) What do you get when you cross a post-modernist with a Mafia Don?

A) An offer you can’t understand.

The Gospel of Obama

Real life has been real busy late, but this column caused me to perform a cappuccino angry dragon this morning (too too too funny):

He ventured forth to bring light to the world

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.

I’m taking this as a good sign that others are tiring of Obama’s Premature Inauguration Syndrome.

Obama’s World Tour ‘Splained

Fanboy and I have been having a recurring conversation regarding Obama’s web-based fundraising, in particular the inherent exposure for fraud and abuse.  Atlas Shrugs has an interesting post on this topic:

There are way too many overseas contributions and I find it hard to believe they are all American citizens. How does the FEC monitor that? Some of contributions appear to be “bundled” from one person as source to hide the contributions of many, and an example of one among many such “incidents” will clearly show why I arrive at such a conclusion..

A  red flag is a donor like Jeanne McCurdy. Look at the contribution excerpt below. It’s a compilation of a mere four pages of listings, pages 40-44,  approximately 9% of the pages of the total document I received, and it lists contributions made by a Jeanne McCurdy, who is always listed as unemployed, and who does not have an address at least as can be found in the files provided (and, as you might well expect, no phone number or email address either).

John did a computation of her contributions from roughly Aug. 07 through Feb/Mar of 08, and it is over $1200.  She ranges from a $15 to a $400 contribution, most running $25/35 to $50. Several of her separate contributions are listed on the same day, a very curious way to make campaign contributions, which are usually in response to mailed solicitations. (She should accumulate them, save on postage.)

This is a scam. It appears to us he is fronting the contributions to hide the contributors.  Now, why in the hell would he do that?  He doesn’t want people to know who his contributors are?  What an odd approach for a politician. Now, this woman, Jeanne Mccurdy (is she is a woman, a real or ficticious person?) appears to be mining a population of people who do not wish their identities known…..

Obama’s world tour is not to shore up his international cred – it’s a fund raising mission.  It’s time for the GOP operatives to comb through the filings and highlight fraud.  Tis only fitting.  Obama won his first elected office by challenging the signature on petitions for his competitors until all of them were removed from the election.  He won by default as the only candidate on the ballot.  He’s earned a Karmic Payback.

Karma Bitchslaps GOOG

GOOG shares are down over 9% today, (and 36% from it’s 52 week peak).   GOOG management is blaming the economy for a slowdown in clicks.  Yes, the economy is taking a toll – a large portion of ad volume in the past was real estate and mortgage related; the bubble has burst on that sector as a growth engine for GOOG.  But there are worse things under the covers.

As noted at FuckedGoogle, GOOG has manipulated earnings via adjustments to the quarterly tax rate.   Spending has been out of control on wistful thinking, poorly run initiatives with no resulting revenue.  And finally, the issue of high rates of click fraud has still not flushed out of the system.

At bottom, GOOG is a search engine with ads that has built an entitlement oriented (on the part of overpaid senior management), low productivity culture (as evidenced by the low hit rate of new initiatives), which is going to accelerate the downward spiral.  Just check out the recent Day Care Fracas:

Two months ago, Google held a series of secret focus groups with employees who have children in Google’s day care facilities. The purpose was to gauge their reaction to the company’s plan to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent.

Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500 — well above the market rate. For parents with toddlers and preschoolers, who were charged less, the price increases were equally eye-popping. Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000.

At the first of the three focus groups, parents wept openly. As word leaked out about the company’s plan, the Google parents began to fight back. They came up with ideas to save money, used the company’s T.G.I.F. sessions — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google’s top executives — to plead their case, and conducted surveys showing that most parents with children in Google day care would have to leave Google’s facilities and find less expensive child care.

Do you think you know how this story ends? You’re probably guessing that because it involves “do no evil” Google, Fortune magazine’s “Best Company to Work For” the past two years, this is a heart-warming tale of a good company reversing a dumb decision.

If only. Although Google is rolling back its price increase slightly and is phasing in the higher price over five quarters, the outline of the original decision remains largely unchanged. At a T.G.I.F. in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) On Monday, Google began the first phase of its new day care plan, letting go of the outside day care firm it had been using.

How telling.  To equate parents’ concern for the welfare of their children with free treats.  Yep, that certainly fits the “Don’t Be Evul” meme.

50,000 More Deniers

James Hansen is going to have to lobby for more jails to be built.  Nearly 50,000 physicists, members of the American Physical Society, have joined forces to combat the High Church of Global Warming.  Among the Neo-Heretics is Lord Monckton of Brenchley:

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling.   A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton’s paper an “expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and “extensive errors”

In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, “I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central ‘climate sensitivity’ question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method.”

According to Monckton, there is substantial support for his results, “in the peer-reviewed literature, most articles on climate sensitivity conclude, as I have done, that climate sensitivity must be harmlessly low.”

Monckton, who was the science advisor to Britain’s Thatcher administration, says natural variability is the cause of most of the Earth’s recent warming.   “In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years … Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth.”

DVR Killed The Video Store

RIP Global Entertainment

Bummer.

Global Entertainment has ceased to be.  It is no more.  It is an Ex-Video & DVD Rental Emporium.

Methinks is was done in by Tivo, Netflix, and Comcast On Demand.  As convenient as these services are, they lack the tactile gratification of finding a gem of an obscure, cult classic whilst perusing the shelves of a store with a huge back catalogue.

Again:  bummer.

Robbins and Sarandon Oppose Neighborhood Hospital

What a couple of hypocritical weenerific whining whingers: (From Page 6)

TIM Robbins’ and Susan Sarandon’s mission to protect the poor and needy doesn’t apply to their Greenwich Village neighborhood. The Oscar-winning liberals recently attended a Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing to oppose St. Vincent’s plea to build a new, larger hospital on West 12th Street, three blocks from their home. This despite their support of causes like UNICEF and Champions for Children. “The hospital provides $40 million in care to the indigent every year,” one proponent told us. “Robbins dismissed more than 100 people rallying in support of the hospital – low-income, union workers and veterans of the AIDS crisis – as ‘those people out there.’ ” Sarandon said in a statement: “Improving the hospital is a great idea. However, this can be accomplished without compromising the neighborhood. St. Vincent’s should consider the proposed alternative solutions.” Robbins declined to comment.

I’m quite sure they console themselves with the thought that the poor don’t have healthcare because the Evul Vast Rightwing Conspiracy opposes Socialized Medicine

Oil 2.0

Very Very Coolth, except for the scary bit about E Coli.  Hopefully, this won’t turn into an “I Am Legend” scenario for petroleum.

LS9 Inc has genetically modified E Coli so that when it consumes organic products like wood chips or wheat straw it excretes crude oil.

…

“Our Renewable Petroleum technology can dramatically change global carbon flow, and empower an agriculturally-based fuel economy,” said LS9 president Robert Walsh.

“It will decrease the political tensions posed by scarce fossil reserves, and accelerate the widespread adoption of renewable transportation fuels.”

The company was set up by Dr Chris Somerville, director of the Carnegie Institution and professor of plant biology at Stanford University, and Dr George Church, director of the MIT-Harvard US Department of Energy GTL Center and professor of genetics at Harvard.

“Thanks to rapid advances in industrial biotechnology and synthetic biology, along with the strength and talent of our scientific team, LS9 is uniquely suited to design, develop and commercialise the next generation of biofuels,” said Professor Somerville.

Professor Church added: “We have looked to nature to identify the required biological tools, redesigned them to function under industrial conditions and optimised their performance to meet our economic objectives.”

Naturally occurring E Coli produces fatty acids which are similar to crude oil. The genetic modification required is relatively simple, and the new organism produces crude oil which needs minimum refining.

The company claims that the final oil product, known as Oil 2.0, is actually carbon negative, since the carbon it produces is less than was extracted from the atmosphere by the growing medium.

This is a better kind of “grow your own” than burning up our food supply.