And if he cannot take the hint that Bush-Obama bailout-and-spend economics are deeply and increasingly unpopular, …

Ouch.

Please read the whole thing.

If we stopped today, this legislative session would have been one of the most productive in a generation — if we just stopped.

Byron York elaborates.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds

iPad is iBad for freedom

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

Anthony Watts has put together a great discussion revolving around the temperature data from Darwin, Australia, and how it seems to have been manipulated. Read more at Watts Up With That?.

For reference, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies published its surface temperature analysis earlier this year. Now, I don’t claim this as anything other than idle pondering, but: I wonder what the GWS/m² (Global Warming Skeptic per square meter) density is in Scandinavia…

UPDATE: From WSJ.com, The Tip of the Climategate Iceberg. Open access to the data is a two-edged sword, but it’s the best way to get to the truth.

Linux has no ZFS support in the kernel because the Free Software Foundation doesn’t consider it free enough to be bundled with GPL software,[...]

ZFS is one of the more interesting developments in the *NIX world in this first decade of the 21st century. While efforts like the Linux ext4fs filesystem directly address very practical problems with its predecessors, ZFS instead tries to build an entirely new – and better – way of organizing storage. It’s hard to imagine any incentive for volunteers to invest the resources required to build something like ZFS from the ground up. Instead, continuing the previous thought,

… in Linux you have to mount the ZFS filesystem with Fuse as a filesystem in userland.

This sort of also-ran treatment of such a significant new technology seems to be representative of the status quo for Linux; that is, to see innovation and emulate, rather than to actually innovate. This will need to change at a fundamental level before Linux can be taken seriously.

On a personal note: isn’t this exactly what otherwise reasonable scientists do on a shockingly regular basis – throw out a preponderance of outliers because they don’t fit the model, rather than questioning the validity of the model itself?

My friends, I am lying to you.

I will tell you whatever it is that you want to hear that will get me elected to office.

I will lie about my opponents, I will lie about Iraq, I will lie about taxes, I will lie about the budget and the economy. In short, I will lie about anything that you let me lie about. And I will do it with your blessing, for my opponents are evil, stupid, unqualified, no different than what we have, and otherwise unfit for the position.

I’m sorry; I don’t mean to do this. You must understand that I’m walking a tightrope here. One misstep and I’m sunk. I don’t have time to really explain my positions, so I have to resort to canned phrases and responses to get my message across. It’s hard enough by itself, but it’s even worse when someone picks up on how these things don’t add up. And then there’s the distraction of trying to reconcile the constant yammering of my party and my advisors. Please forgive my foibles. I’m only human. I can only promise that I can and that I will do better.

… or something like that.

Who are you tell tell me
That it just isn’t fair?
Who are you to tell me
What is right? … what is wrong?
Does saying that you’d help if you could
Somehow excuse your failure?
Does your “world peace” make sense
If you hate those who disagree?
Who are you to tell me
That it just isn’t fair?

Who are you to tell me
That it’s all my fault?
Who are you to tell me
It’s not your philosophy to blame?
Does crying “the sky is falling”
Really mean it’s coming down?
Does crying “it’s a vast conspiracy”
Mean you’ve washed your hands of guilt?
Who are you to tell me
That it’s all my fault?

I am here to tell you
The world isn’t always so beautiful.
I am trying to tell you
The world sometimes is cruel and unkind
I am saying that we’re not always like that
But sometimes, we are
I am saying that I will help, when I can
But please, forgive me when I’m weak
I am here to tell you
That it just isn’t fair.

I’m sorry.

Let me start by saying that I am not fanatically devoted to the idea that people, in general, ought to be good (much less perfect) spellers. Nor do I believe that correct grammar is required to lead a wildly successful life.

Am I wrong in expecting that the news media should set the bar a little higher for themselves?

This is something that has long been a source of annoyance for me. It calls into question the very trustworthiness of the news media, especially when it not only quotes, but repeats without question that which they’ve been told. As it relates to the present, the thing that’s attracted my ire is the blind repetition of the term “carabineer” by media outlets in connection with the tragic incident at Lifest 2007. This is not so different than the phrase “bungee ride” that I had previously complained about.

I’m not a climber, and I’m certainly not a reporter, but let’s face it: “carabineer” is an unusual word. Even if it does pass an automated spelling check, one would think that it should at least trigger a quick peek into a favorite dictionary. Online versions are readily available if one is ever caught without a printed copy.

This isn’t the only inaccuracy I’ve seen in reports on the subject. You can lay a fair amount of blame on the Department of Commerce report, which is of course the source of the spelling error above. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s incumbent on reporters to check spelling and grammar just as well as they check the facts.

PS – Google is not a dictionary. I simply adore many things that Google has done, but beware of using standard screwdrivers to turn Torx™ heads.

Then, yesterday at about 4:40 p.m. the fun was interrupted by sirens. The first vehicle to arrive was a fire truck. My wife and I compared notes later and we both thought, “hey, carnival food, maybe a deep fryer caught fire”… and then we realized the truck was heading up toward the artist merchandise barn. Shortly after that, an ambulance arrived, and we knew something was terribly wrong. The obvious conclusion was that something had happened with the Air Glory ride near the barn.

I’m very, very upset by this tragedy. My heart grieves for the loss of this young woman; if the rumors are true, she wasn’t much older than my eldest. I can only imagine the pain that her family is suffering now, and I’m sure it’s worse than I can dream.

Here’s what UPI has to say:

A teenage girl was killed in a bungee-jumping accident Saturday at a Christian rock festival in Wisconsin.

United Press International – NewsTrack – Top News – Bungee jumper dies at Christian festival

The press coverage of this is very disturbing in a different way. This article is an example of how the press is propagating what appears to be one writer’s speculation. Air Glory is not a bungee jumping, or bungee-like, ride.

If you read the article, you’ll also be presented with some similarly uninformed “facts.” To clarify: The festival did not shut down for two hours. The festival did not simply resume scheduled events, either immediately or after some period of time.

I was there.

One problem with this reporting is that nobody bothered to understand what Air Glory was before putting pen to paper (or hands to keyboard). This amusement ride is a giant swing operated from a crane. Riders are suspended from the crane with cables, and when released, swing back and forth. They do not bounce, the cables do not stretch perceptibly, and there’s no jumping involved.

Another issue is with the reporting of what happened next. There simply wasn’t much scheduled around that time, so to say that the events shut down for two hours is misleading. Perhaps the reporters are trying to paint the image of event organizers “doing the right thing,” but all this does is give me the impression that they were more concerned about image than about what was going on. Artists were up on stage talking about what had happened, and on at least one stage they were soon singing songs of life and of hope; lest you think there were only “mellow worship songs” as reported you might consider checking out Red. Indeed, every artist and speaker I heard, including some while walking between events and eating dinner, took time during and between each event to express love and support for this girl and her family.

If I know the people who run Lifest – and I am acquainted with a number of them – they are directly and personally involved as much as they can be. They are not impersonal corporate suits. They are not there to make money (they’ve lost money on this festival every year). They love our youth, and it will be an even bigger tragedy if sloppy reporting like this makes anybody think otherwise.

UPDATE: At least one report in a local paper has correctly identified Air Glory as a “freefall swing ride.”

I’ve had the same thoughts for years. Please don’t understand this to be a claim to have thought of this first; as I read more, it seems to me that this is an obvious thought that I’d been taught to repress as heretical. At some point the sheer enormity of the problems with so-called “macro evolution” convinced me that it is at least a big of a leap of faith to believe in evolution as it is to believe in a creator God.

This leads me to another point that’s been on my mind lately. A friend quoted a bit from James Randi’s site – the guy with the $1 million paranormal challenge – and so I hopped on over there and read for a while. I must admit that I’ve always appreciated the guy’s brutally direct, honest approach to the supernatural. I must also admit that I don’t have nearly the same amount of faith in science as he clearly does. Simply put, my objection is thus: only perfect facts can be rendered by logic to produce perfect conclusions. Incomplete facts can lead to inaccurate assumptions; logic applied to this of course tends to result in plausible yet, to some degree or another, incorrect deductions.

Science is still discovering the nature of reality, an endeavor that requires as much objectivity as is possible. I applaud scientists who hold to this ideal; but while my faith in logic does not waver, my faith in the completeness of facts produced by scientific observation is on considerably less stable ground.

Does it bother you, dear reader, that the age of the universe is currently estimated to be only about 4.3 x 10^17 seconds? What does this mean when we consider the probability of the genetic mutations necessary and required in the evolutionary path from single-celled organisms to Homo sapiens, as it pertains to the amount of time required? [Note that I'm explicitly granting the (scientifically laughable) proposition that some form of life arrived from space. The Earth has reportedly only existed for about a quarter of that time.]

Call me a heretic if you like, or irrational, or a nutcase. I have to conclude that the answer laid out in Genesis 1 is a lot easier to accept than the alternative.