• Fever Swamp,  Immigration

    Lou Dobbs continues his fight against the brown peril…

    This time with verbal jousting against America’s other adulterous, Catholic mayor Gavin Newsom. It produced this little gem

    Dobbs, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration who hosts an opinionated evening news hour, criticized San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on Monday, saying he and immigrant protection advocates “might as well work for Hermann Goering. I mean, they’re running so much propaganda, trying to confuse the debate, the national dialogue, by talking about immigrants rather than illegal aliens and legal immigrants. It’s mindless beyond belief.

    Never mind that Goebbels was the propaganda minister, (Goering commanded the Luftwaffe), and never mind that the source of the gripe is that Newsom is refusing to allow local police to enforce immigration law. Never mind that the appropriate German/Nazi comparison to draw (if one must be drawn, Godwin’s law must be obeyed) is to Admiral Canaris (who helped hundreds of Jews escape the Nazis while he headed the Abwehr).

    But don’t think of that, just think of the huge social advances if we brought back dueling. Huge swathes of hacks, apparachiks and fashionable non-conformists would be removed from the gene pool at no cost to the taxpayer. Still others, when forced to put up or shut up, would shut up (or at least try).

    We could finally resolve all the pointless debates; is illegal immigration a huge problem that we’re not going to do anything about, or is it a charitable endeavor that we’re not going to do anything about. We would finally know!

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  • Climate Change,  Tech

    Interesting developments on carbon emissions

    It would seem that there has been some progress in developing an actually useful way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Essentially it’s a giant vacuum that sucks the CO2 out of the air. It gets around several problems, most notably geography (the devices can be anywhere). While there is energy expended in the proccess, the main guy has the interesting observation

    The real issue, says Lackner, is not the energy consumed but the CO2 emitted. He estimates that for every ton of CO2 he captures, he’ll generate another 0.4 ton. But because this process will take place at a plant, where emissions are concentrated relative to air, it will be easily captured.

    Pair it up with nuclear power and you’ve got an even bigger net decrease.

    One item not mentioned in the article is that it is possible to start this on a small scale without any public/government consensus on the topic. Any meaningful consensus, particularly an international one would most likely be ineffective, slow, corrupt in implementation and captured by special interests from the start.

    The above remedy is able to be done by quite a few people with little public input and delay. The Sierra Club, Richard Branson, Wal-Mart, whoever, could just set them up as much as they wanted. It doesn’t get around the free-rider problem, but it does allow private virtue to be accomplished.

    For the record, I’m still a skeptic on global warming, but the technology is fascinating.

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  • History,  Russia,  Soviet

    The Great Siberian Ice March

    Somehow I wound up on this page on WikiPedia and found it fascinating. During the Russian Civil War in the late teen and early 20s, the Red Army was chasing the White Army across Siberia, specifically Lake Baikal had to escape across the frozen lake in sub-zero temperatures.

    the Arctic winds that blow unobstructed across the lake froze many in the army and their families to death. The bodies remained frozen on the lake in a kind of tableau throughout the winter of 1919 until the arrival of summer, when the frozen figures and all their possessions disappeared in 8,000 feet of water.

    Does anyone know of a good history of the Russian Civil War? I don’t know of any notable works on the topic.

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  • Far Right,  Weirdness

    The weird far right makes an appearance

    We haven’t seen these people since the last administration

    Six arrested in ‘militia’ weapons raids; nearby school shut
    Federal and state agents arrested six men and seized an arsenal of homemade hand grenades and firearms in raids Thursday, including one that forced the shutdown of a school.

    The men, members of the self-styled “Alabama Free Militia,” had no apparent plans to use the weapons, but the leader was described as a federal fugitive, federal authorities said.

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  • Military,  Tech

    Snipers and robot armies

    After reading these two articles (here and here) about new forms of sniper scopes, I have to wonder, why aren’t robot armies in the field right now? Granted, all of the shooting must somehow involve a human, but I would imagine that remote operator could be anywhere. We’ve had unmanned aerial vehicles for years now, and those fly, which would seem to be much more complicated and expensive.

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  • Bluegrass,  Funny,  Music

    My funniest line from last night

    Was when I said “I’ve seen the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by Dave Mathews”, which got a good laugh from my fellow acoustic purists who were going over new material at the open mic last night.

    Which I won by the way. I could just barely hear myself in the monitors, but evidently is sounded good in the crowd. I got my guitar showpiece, Bonaparte’s Retreat (in Drop D tuning) mostly right, which is a rare thing.

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