Sometimes the government isn't so stupid

Remember all the hub-bub about the commercials and letters that the Census Bureau paid for earlier in the year.  Well my unscientific anecdotal evidence indicates that they were necessary.

I am working as an enumerator (one of the guys who goes around house to house) and you would be surprised how many people tell me they threw away the census forms because they didn't know what they were for but are willing to answer my questions because they saw the commercials.  I guess even a stopped clock can be write twice a day.

Posted by: chad98036 at 07:16 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Paging Chris Hansen

If you get more than 30 seconds into this video without throwing up in your mouth, I question your proclivities.

Updated: link to video - I don't want to be looking at the screen cap for the video all day, it makes me sad for the little girls.

I pulled my daughter out of a dance school last year because the teenagers were out of control - telling the kids my daughter's age to "smack their butt", complaining in front of my daughter's class that their (the teenagers') costumes weren't sexy enough, when as far as I know my daughter had never heard the word 'sexy' before, and certainly wasn't thinking of it as something to aspire to. And this was a dance school that I'd specifically grilled before enrolling my daughter to make sure there weren't going to be revealing costumes and provocative dance.

Yeah, I'm a prude mom. But I'd rather be a prude mom and not be putting my daughter in a situation where she's learning things that preschool kids shouldn't know about. This is not 'blaming the rape victim', this is a simple matter of allowing my daughter to keep her innocence and not giving those pervs who would argue "she came on to me" any fuel for their sick minds.

Just for funsies, let's take a gander at some of the comments. Our three readers are smart people, youse guys are more than capable of realizing the sheer wrongness of the comments without me pointing it out.

more...

Posted by: Alice H at 08:33 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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Put me some knowledge

While I feel bad for all the otters, birds, and fish what are getting coated by oil from the leak in the Gulf, is there a way to recover the oil that's leaked out and turn it into fuel? If not, are there companies that are working on processes that could do so? Because that would seem like a good idea, if it's at all possible.

(And while I feel bad for all those critters, they don't currently power my car, so they're kind of a secondary concern for me.)

Posted by: Sean M. at 12:47 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Okay, which one of you morons is this?

Drunken woman steals a bottle of wine from a grocery store, then nearly rams into a Burger King with her Corvette...all this while being topless, while it was snowing.

Posted by: doubleplusundead at 10:46 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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I don't know why I was the first one to post this little story ...

... but, I am nevertheless happy to pass the information on.  You, uh, um, tech geek guys may be interested.  Yeah.

Posted by: Ember at 07:58 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The birth of the music video

It happened long before MTV was ever a twinkle in the eye of some douchebag cable teevee programming executive...



There's no real reason why I'm posting this, other than to get you to think about what it must have been like to be one of the Beatles back in the 60s.

You could have been Ringo Starr and still ordered anything you wanted that was available on this planet from room service. Or anything that was impossible.  Like a poached dodo egg.

(This is still most likely possible if you happen to be Ringo Starr.)

Posted by: Sean M. at 05:23 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Wow, you have great braids

This is kind of interesting, now that they can figure out DNA stuff, they're looking for what happened to the "Lost Colony" in Roanoke.
For those who don't know, it just disappeared. It was there one year and everybody was gone the next.
Quote
"What we now need is to establish if there are any living family descendants of those lost colonists living here in the U.K., and from them produce a reference library of DNA to match the American results against,"

That's cool, but I wonder if it'll tell them if it was via the mother or the father.
Because, since I have a low opinion of people, I figure the men lived long enough to be slow roasted and eaten while the women, the cute ones anyway, were kept around.

Maybe I'm being a romantic, but I figure the Roanoke Indians were smarter than their cousins to the north, the ones who let the white man "just take that land over their, really, that's all we want".

H/T, I forget, I emailed it to myself last week and forgot. Probably Drudge or Boortz since I didn't put that in the email and they don't need a link from me. At least I remembered to put the h/t in before I posted. So that's something.

Posted by: Veeshir at 08:41 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I want to throw a thought out

I was surfing this series of tubes this morning visiting the normal assortment of right wing blogs, newspapers, and other miscellaneous sites.  Everything is doom and gloom and I am getting majorly depressed and then a thought hit me:

The major problem with America is people who think there is a major problem with America.

I am not even going to try and pretend that we aren't facing some major issues, but they aren't anything that can't be overcome.  Seriously if you look at blogs like The Classic Liberal, Daily Pundit, and The Other McCain you would think that society is going to fail tomorrow and we will be thrust back into the dark ages where everyone will be relying on subsistence farming and fighting off roving bands of road warriors.

Given the experiences of the Great Depression, World War II, Watergate, etc.  I don't think that's likely.  Yes, times may be uncomfortable if there was a debt default but look at the Argentina experience.  They somehow managed to survive without resorting to cannibalism.

Don't get me wrong I don't think that we should continue on the current path,  it's unsustainable, but I also don't think that people should be on the verge of panic all the time either.

Just sayin' is all.

(two other offenders Glenn Beck, and Peter Schiff)

Posted by: chad98036 at 03:17 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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You ever listen to K-Billy's "Super Sounds of the Seventies" weekend? It's my personal favorite

Posted by: doubleplusundead at 09:46 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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Rolando was traveling light

Just in case there was any doubt in your mind that the new TSA body scanners were going to show off every inch of your naughty bits...

And just in case there was any doubt in your mind that beating up someone for making fun of you might result in your ridicule going national...

Rolando the-only-thing-saving-him-from-getting-pranked-to-death-is-that-MSNBC-is-too-incompetent-to-even-spell-his-name-consistently Negrin/Negron is here to put your mind at ease.

And now I'm wondering how piercings show up on the body scanner.  Just out of curiosity, of course, not because I'd ever have anything other than my ears pierced.  Never.

Posted by: Alice H at 08:22 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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I highly recommend Naked Economics

Finally finished the book. Overall I would give it an 8.5 out of 10. It takes a number of highly complex topics and boils them down to understandable chapters that I thought built on each other pretty well. There were a few things I disagreed with, for example Wheelan goes full retard in his support of Anthropogenic Global Warming, but reasonable people can disagree on that. I think he also understates the potential damage health care reform can do to our society. On the other hand he is fairly scathing about earmarks, subsidies, and entitlements and what they mean in regards to economic growth and the future of America's economic health:

Think about what that means. Going forward, somehow we have to raise enough revenue to (1) pay for whatever government we chose to have, which we aren't doing fully now; (2) pay the interest we've accumulated on past bills; and (3) pay for the new expenses associated with an aging population and expensive entitlement promises.

That's going to require serious political leadership and recognition by Americans that the status quo is not an option. Simon Johnson, who had plenty of experience with financial crises as the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, has noted, "Overborrowing always ends badly, whether for an individual, a company or a country." During the first decade of the new millennium, three parties borrowed heavily: consumers, financial firms, and the U.S. government. So far two have paid a huge price for that leverage. Is there another shoe to drop. (pg. 324)

Wheelan is also critical of some tax cuts, disputing the idea that the Reagan tax cuts actually ended up increasing treasury revenues (pg. 96, 97), again reasonable people can disagree on this one, and in fact this idea was echoed in National Review this week:

Some people are more sensible about that Laffer Curve talk. Laffer, for instance. Arthur Laffer, whose famous (and possibly apocryphal) back-of-the-napkin diagram launched supply-side tax policy, readily concedes that the growth effects of tax cuts are oversold in the political debate. “Does every tax cut pay for itself? No. I think Irving Kristol wrote that, once — and then did a pretty good job of arguing for it. But if some guy running for Congress in Clayton County, Texas, says all tax cuts pay for themselves, what do we want to do? Go after him with a shotgun? Sure, they’re going to cite me, and there’s very little I can do about it. But there’s the same amount of ignorance on the other side, ignoring the economic feedback effects of tax cuts.”

...

There is considerable debate among economists and federal legume-quantifiers about how large supply-side revenue effects are. The Congressional Budget Office did a study in 2005 of the effects of a theoretical 10 percent cut in income-tax rates. It ran a couple of different versions of the study, under different sets of economic assumptions. The conclusion the CBO came to was that the growth effects of such a tax cut could be expected to offset between 1 percent and 22 percent of the revenue loss in the first five years. In the second five years, the CBO calculated, feedback effects of tax-rate reductions might actually add 5 percent to the revenue loss — or offset as much as 32 percent of it.

Personally I would argue that the balancing of the budget in the 90's is proof that the Laffer curve is accurate and that those rates happened to be the ones at which economic growth and revenue growth matched in a sort of min -max curve, but I am not the PhD. so who cares what I think.

Anyway even if you don't agree with the guy the arguments are well made and worth considering. more...

Posted by: chad98036 at 01:21 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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If this had been done ten years ago, Grandma wouldn't be in jail now

Beat your children well, they'll know better than to tell nuns and Grandma to fuck off.  And maybe, just maybe, they'll be successfully graduating from a real high school instead of leeching off of you and pretending to do home schooling at the age of 18.

Posted by: Alice H at 08:57 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Bleg/Whine

Sonomabatch.
I don't shoot my Wildey too much because it's expensive, it was $2/shot a few years ago, and getting the ammo is a pain.

I'm down to one mag left so I wanted to order some more ammo, you never know when a biker gang is going to invade your neighborhood after all, and we all know you can't count on Ernest Borgnine and his M1919.

So I sent an email. It got bounced. I sent it to their other address. It got bounced.
I called, according to the message they've "suspended operations".
Itshay.
I kept putting off getting dies, I can use my buddy's reloading equipment.
They're about $100 on the Wildey page and that's how much Midway was charging.
Now Wildey isn't there and they're $300 at Midway.
Oubleday itshay.

Has anybody heard anything about Wildey going away?
A year ago or so they were fine. Heck, they've been fine for decades but all of a sudden they're gone and I haven't seen anything about it.
Google news has nothing. Google anything has nothing.
WTF?
Shooting that beauty just got really, really expensive, it'll delay my next gun purchase as I spend $500 getting dies, some more brass and bullets instead of being able to throw down $100 or so when I need ammo.

Posted by: Veeshir at 02:41 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Oh, dear God, why?

I'm no expert on advertising or anything, but this seems to me like it would actually drive people away from Six Flags...



Okay, so the "dancing" old man was creepy enough, but then they introduce "Little Six." What is he, exactly? A midget? A child with some sort of terrible genetic disorder? An Imp sent from the bowels of hell to ride roller coasters?

Jeesh.

Posted by: Sean M. at 08:46 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Saturday morning WTF

What kind of fucked up do you have to be to think it's worth it to cop a feel off your mom to get high?

Posted by: Alice H at 09:40 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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