Tautology

1. The government should tell people how to eat, exercise, etc.
2. Why? Because unhealthy living choices drive up health care costs for everyone else.
3. Why? Because the government ends up forcing health care organizations to care for those who cannot afford it themselves.
4. Why? Because it would be cruel not to take care of them.
5. But since this impacts health care costs... GOTO 1.

Insanity.

And We're Not Even Trying!

On the way to work this morning, I heard three news stories in series - the first about a tanker truck explosion In Ford City, PA that killed one man; the second about a chemical plant explosion in Cumberland, WV that killed two brothers; and the third, about a car bomb in Baghdad that killed two people.

After that, my first thought was, "Holy cow... we blow up more people every day, by accident, and we aren't even trying. We're supposed to be scared of these amateurs?"

Naomi Wolf on the Tea Party

Via Aretae. A fascinating interview with Naomi Wolf. Much more positive than I expected.

Continuing to Fiddle

Bah. Formatting? What's that?

Blogger has apparently decided that my last two video links should be handled differently whether they are being shown on the main page or stand-alone. Which is still better than the original "we'll slop this around over whatever text happens to be on the page" theme I was using earlier... but not by much.

Let's see how smaller embedded clips fare:

Ah. Much better.

Shamus Young Rocks

As he himself describes it, this is a "... short bit about the internet history and technology, and how they're related to nuclear weapons."

It's short, sweet, and it explains how the internet as we know it today was "a really awesome accident".

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

Finally got annoyed enough at the old layout (primarily the main column width) that I went ahead and switched my template around.

Much happier now.

Convergence

Via Coyote, Hans Rossling's "200 Countries, 200 Years, Four Minutes":

Coyote calls it a "commercial for capitalism". I'm thinking about Aretae's assertions about economic growth, individual liberty, and wondering... which is the chicken, and which is the egg?

I'm not really sure it matters.

A Thousand Here, A Thousand There...

In the past month, the NYC Board of Elections has turned up almost 200,000 "found" votes.

Yeah. 200,000. 200k. A fifth of a million. There were 80,000 uncounted votes discovered in Queens alone, and the total number of "found" ballots was almost more than the total number of voters from the Bronx and Staten Island districts.

“After a 16-hour day there’s room for error,” said Valerie Vazquez, a spokeswoman for the Board of Elections. “Poll workers have to take the report that prints out after the polls close, manually input that to a Return of Canvass form, and then it goes to the Police Department where civilian employees punch it into computers.”

Really? Really? Nearly 200,000 missing votes, and the only public response from the Board of Elections is to try and blame transcription errors?

Riiiiiiiiight.

I suppose there's little or no reason to question why said votes are skewed 2:1 in favor of the Democratic candidate for mayor, then. Or, say - how about that Working Families Party managing to do well enough to change their ranking on future ballots?

“Unbelievable,” said Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party.

You know, I think Dan hit the nail right on the head, there.

Unbelievable.

Jonathan Coulton

Go. Listen.

Code monkey like fritos.

Coined

To quote Arlo Guthrie... "I'm not proud... or tired."

Well, maybe a little tired. A word this long takes it out of you.

Edit: of course, it should be spelled "enfunctionalizationisting". Same result. Let's call the first version the British spelling and be done with it.