Unofficial state mottos

Tonight's unofficial state mottos:

Alabama: Yes, We Have Electricity

Alaska: Jeez, it’s cold.

Arizona: But It’s A Dry Heat

Arkansas: Literacy Ain’t Everything

California: By 30, Our Women Have More Plastic Than Your Honda

Colorado: If You Don’t Ski, Don’t Bother

Connecticut: Like Massachusetts, Only The Kennedys Don’t Own It Yet

Delaware: We Really Do Like The Chemicals In Our Water

Florida: Ask Us About Our Grandkids

Georgia: We Put The “Fun” In Fundamentalist Extremism

Hawaii: Haka Tiki Mou Sha’ami Leeki Toru (Death To Mainland Scum, But Leave Your Money)

Idaho: More Than Just Potatoes. Well Okay, Not Really, But The Potatoes Sure Are Real Good

Illinois: Please Don’t Pronounce the “S”

Indiana: 2 Billion Years Tidal Wave Free

Iowa: We Do Amazing Things With Corn

Kansas: First Of The Rectangle States

Kentucky: Five Million People; Fifteen Last Names

Louisiana: We’re Not ALL Drunk Cajun Wackos, But That’s Our Tourism Campaign

Maine: We’re Really Cold, But We Have Cheap Lobster

Maryland: If You Can Dream It, We Can Tax It

Massachusetts: Our Taxes Are Lower Than Sweden’s (For Most Tax Brackets)

Michigan: First Line Of Defense From The Canadians

Minnesota: 10,000 Lakes And 10,000,000,000,000 Mosquitoes

Mississippi: Come And Feel Better About Your Own State

Missouri: Your Federal Flood Relief Tax Dollars At Work

Montana: Land Of The Big Sky, The Unabomber, Right-Wing Crazies, And Very Little Else

Nebraska: Ask Us About Our State Motto Contest

Nevada: Whores and Poker!

New Hampshire: Go Away And Leave Us Alone

New Jersey: You Want A ##$%##! Motto? I Got Yer ##$%##! Motto Right Here!

New Mexico: Lizards Make Excellent Pets

New York: You Have The Right To Remain Silent, You Have The Right To An Attorney

North Carolina: Tobacco Is A Vegetable

North Dakota: We Really Are One Of The 50 States!

Ohio: Where one of your dad’s friends lives

Oklahoma: Like The Play, Only No Singing

Oregon: Spotted Owl – It’s What’s For Dinner

Pennsylvania: Cook With Coal

Rhode Island: We’re Not REALLY An Island

South Carolina: Remember The Civil War? We Didn’t Actually Surrender

South Dakota: Closer Than North Dakota

Tennessee: The Educashun State

Texas: Si’ Hablo Ing’les (Yes, I Speak English)

Utah: Our Jesus Is Better Than Your Jesus

Vermont: Yep

Virginia: Who Says Big Government Stiffs And Slackjaw Yokels Don’t Mix?

Washington: Help! We’re Overrun By Nerds And Slackers!

Washington, D.C.: Wanna Be Mayor?

West Virginia: One Big Happy Family – Really!

Wisconsin: Come Cut The Cheese

Wisconsin: Come Smell our Dairy Air

Wyoming: Where Men Are Men (And the Sheep Are Scared)

:)

Retirements push Social Security to brink

From USA Today, on the looming Social Security crisis:

WASHINGTON — Social Security's annual surplus nearly evaporated in 2009 for the first time in 25 years as the recession led hundreds of thousands of workers to retire or claim disability.

The impact of the recession is likely to hit the giant retirement system even harder this year and next. The Congressional Budget Office had projected it would operate in the red in 2010 and 2011, but a deeper economic slump could make those losses larger than anticipated.

"Things are a little bit worse than had been expected," says Stephen Goss, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration. "Clearly, we're going to be negative for a year or two."

Since 1984, Social Security has raked in more in payroll taxes than it has paid in benefits, accumulating a $2.5 trillion trust fund. But because the government uses the trust fund to pay for other programs, tax increases, spending cuts or new borrowing will be required to make up the difference between taxes collected and benefits owed.

Experts say the trend points to a more basic problem for Social Security: looming retirements by Baby Boomers will create annual losses beginning in 2016 or 2017. ...

Read the rest here. If Social Security was barely cash flow positive in 2009, and likely cash flow negative this year or next, just think what shape it will be in when the wave of Baby Boomers start retiring in a few years. Given that the only thing in the Social Security "trust fund" is a bunch of IOUs from the federal government (said FedGov having gleefully spent the actual money), anyone who thinks existing benefit levels are sustainable or will be honored is delusional.

Counting cash

Tonight's cultural anthropology lesson, fiat currency edition:

Obama the Prayerful

Kinda, sorta. Or maybe not. S.E. Cupp discusses the President's Prayer Breakfast catastrophe:

... Never mind that the president skipped last year’s National Day of Prayer, covered up religious insignia at Georgetown, canceled the flyover at “God & Country Day,” and gives regular shout-outs to atheists whenever it is, in fact, least appropriate.

Like today. During his speech at the Prayer Breakfast the president was sure to point out – again – that not everyone in America believes in God. He’s right, of course, but wouldn’t you think that at a prayer breakfast, he’d direct his remarks primarily to the population that prays? The humanist salute to solstice does not, in fact, count as a “prayer.”

While today’s speech was perhaps the president’s most muscular discussion of faith to date, it was rife with incongruities and contradictions that reveal just how incomplete his understanding of American faith actually is, regardless of what Ms. Kornblut tells us an unnamed adviser said.

The worst misstep of today’s speech? When the president said that “God’s grace” is expressed “by Americans of every faith, and no faith, uniting around a common purpose, a higher purpose.”

Uh, no it isn't -- unless my definition of atheism is different than his. Most atheists insist that God’s grace most certainly is not expressed through them, and that there are no “higher” purposes. While we may all come together for “a purpose” – like relief work in Haiti, poverty, AIDS, or world hunger – no atheist I know would consider this God's work.

It’s time the president end this hooey, and give up on his obsessive need to equate belief and non-belief. They are apples and oranges, and every time he does this he sounds less like the scholar he’s supposed to be and more like a petulant child.

But wait, there were other bizarre moments today:

Christ is nowhere to be found: The president is supposedly a Christian, yet there wasn’t a single mention of Christ or Jesus in today’s speech. ...

Read the rest at the link above.

Cubic illusion

Tonight's illusion - a cube made with blue painters masking tape:

Of solar storms and the electric grid

From a New Scientist article published last year discussing a NASA-funded study by the National Academy of Sciences of the effects of a severe solar storm on the electrical grid:

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. "We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster," says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see "When hell comes to Earth"). If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating. ...

Read the rest here.

More reasons to homeschool

Go read this post over at Gun Rights For Us All for more examples of your tax dollars either not so hard at work, or else busy destroying America. Got homeschool?

Digital guitar

Tonight's unusual musical instrument - a digital guitar, from Misa Digital. According to the video's description, it runs on Linux:

Hunting licenses up 3.5% in 2009

From Buckeye Firearms Association:

In a year when one word, "fewer," described life in America -- fewer jobs, fewer home sales, fewer purchases -- hunters were responsible for generating a welcome "more" category, as hunting license sales rose by 3.5 percent in 2009 in states that make up NSSF's Hunting License Sales Index.

The 12-state index comprises several states from four main regions of the United States. Nine of those states recorded hunting license sales increases from January through December of 2009 over the previous year, according to Southwick Associates, a research firm that monitored the license sales information.

"Many factors such as weather and the economy affect hunting license sales in any given year, but in 2009 the economy likely had a more significant effect," said Jim Curcuruto, NSSF's director of industry research and analysis. "While the reasons for the 3.5 percent increase are speculative, past research shows that during slowdowns in the nation's economy it is possible that people have more time to hunt and that hunters take the opportunity to fill their freezers with nutritious, high-protein meat acquired at lower cost than if a similar amount was purchased at the supermarket." ...

Read it here. I think the increased sense of self-reliance that comes with hunting is also a factor, as well as the potential to fill your freezer with meat more cheaply than store-bought meat. For similar reasons, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the number of those buying fishing licenses is also up.

More Zero Intelligence from school administrators, New York edition

From the NY Daily News:

An irate Staten Island mom blasted a grade school principal Wednesday for treating her son like a pint-sized Plaxico Burress after he brought a 2-inch-long toy gun to school.

(Patrick Timoney, 9, with plastic gun - barely 2 inches long - that nearly got him suspended after PS 52 Principal Evelyn Mastroianni (below) took action. Photo: NY Daily News)

"This principal is a bully and a coward, and needs to be held accountable," said Laura Timoney, 44, after her teary fourth-grader was nearly suspended for playing with the tiny toy at lunch.

"The school should be embarrassed. This is a common-sense issue."

Patrick Timoney, 9, was terrified when he was yanked into the principal's office to discuss the teeny-weeny plastic "weapon."

"The gun was so little," the boy said. "I don't understand why the principal got so upset. I was a little nervous. They made me sign a statement."

Patrick and a friend were playing with Lego figures in the school cafeteria on Tuesday when he pulled out the faux machine gun and stuck it in the hands of his plastic police officer.

Boom! Trouble ensued, with Patrick's mom getting a phone call from Public School 52 Principal Evelyn Mastroianni saying her son had somehow gone from straight A's to the NRA. ...

Read it here. As you can see from the photo, it doesn't take much to incur the wrath of a public school principal. I'm surprised the principal didn't call for the SWAT team. Remember, these hoplophobic school administrators are the same idiots in charge of educating your children. Got homeschool?

Taleb says 'every human' should short U.S. Treasuries

From Bloomberg:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” said “every single human being” should bet U.S. Treasury bonds will decline, citing the policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and the Obama administration.

It’s “a no brainer” to sell short Treasuries, Taleb, a principal at Universa Investments LP in Santa Monica, California, said at a conference in Moscow today. “Every single human being should have that trade.”

Taleb said investors should bet on a rise in long-term U.S. Treasury yields, which move inversely to prices, as long as Bernanke and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers are in office, without being more specific. Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who predicted the credit crisis, also said at the conference that the U.S. dollar will weaken against Asian and “commodity” currencies such as the Brazilian real over the next two or three years.

The Fed and U.S. agencies have lent, spent or guaranteed $9.66 trillion to lift the economy from the worst recession since the Great Depression, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bernanke, who in December 2008 slashed the central bank’s target rate for overnight loans between banks to virtually zero, flooded the economy with more than $1 trillion in the largest monetary expansion in U.S. history.

In a short sale, an investor borrows a security and sells it, expecting to profit from a decline by repurchasing it later at a lower price.

“Dynamite in the Hands of Children”

President Barack Obama has increased the U.S. marketable debt to a record $7.27 trillion as he tries to sustain the recovery from last year’s recession. The Obama administration projects the U.S. budget deficit will rise to a record $1.6 trillion in the 2011 fiscal year.

“Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children,” Taleb said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “They can get out of control very quickly.” ...

Article here.

The Creditor and the Plastic Duck Junkie

Today's balance of trade fable:




Got tangible assets?

Penny shooter business card

Tonight's fun business card:

Utah Senate gives initial approval to Firearms Freedom Act

From the Beehive State:

SALT LAKE CITY — Guns made and kept in Utah would be exempt from federal regulations under a measure the Utah Senate gave its initial approval to Tuesday, despite concerns it could lead to a costly legal fight in a lean budget year.

Senate Bill 11 mirrors one signed into law in Montana last year that's intended to trigger a federal court battle.

Both are intended to allow guns made in their respective states to be exempt from rules on federal gun registration, background checks and dealer-licensing.

The goal is to circumvent federal authority over interstate commerce, which is the legal basis for most gun regulation in the United States.

In the process, it could lead to small arms dealers in the state operating with little to no oversight.

Sen. Margaret Dayton, R-Orem, said her bill is part of a broader effort to send a message to Congress that the federal government is overstepping its bounds.

"This is about our state's immutable right to establish control of our own rules and laws in our state," she said.

The Senate approved Dayton's bill 19-10. It needs one more formal vote before advancing to the House. ...

Article here.

U.K. home owners average violent burglar attack every 30 minutes

Thank goodness those enlightened Brits banned guns. Now, they ought to ban burglary:

A householder is attacked by a violent burglar every 30 minutes.

The shocking statistic exposes for the first time the epidemic of terrifying intruder confrontations taking place in Britain.

It will intensify demands for householders to be given greater protection if they use force to protect themselves and their family against a burglar.

In the wake of the case of Munir Hussain, who was jailed and later freed for beating a raider, ministers insisted it was extremely rare for a person to find themselves in trouble with the police for fighting back against a burglar.

But with householders suffering violence on 23,000 occasions last year, campaigners say the case for a change to the law is growing ever stronger. ...

The Yike Bike

Tonight's curious transportation -- the YikeBike, designed by a New Zealand company and billed as the world's smallest, lightest folding electric bicycle, weighing in at about 10 Kg (22 lbs):




And here's a video showing its maneuverability:

The tax man looking for a few good shotguns

The FedGov tax men really want you to pay your "fair share". Or else:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intends to purchase sixty Remington Model 870 Police RAMAC #24587 12 gauge pump-action shotguns for the Criminal Investigation Division. The Remington parkerized shotguns, with fourteen inch barrel, modified choke, Wilson Combat Ghost Ring rear sight and XS4 Contour Bead front sight, Knoxx Reduced Recoil Adjustable Stock, and Speedfeed ribbed black forend, are designated as the only shotguns authorized for IRS duty based on compatibility with IRS existing shotgun inventory, certified armorer and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.

Submit quotes including 11% Firearms and Ammunition Excise Tax (FAET) and shipping to Washington DC. ...

Blog template updated

I've updated the column widths on the blog template (finally!) to fix the annoying clipping of wide-format videos (typically YouTube vids). I think the wider columns also enhance text readability a little.

Why did it take me so long to fix this? Well, the previous version of Firefox 3.5.x simply placed oversized videos into the sidebar area, so they were still fully viewable, even if the sidebar got obscured temporarily (until new posts pushed the offending videos down); the current version of Firefox (v3.6) seems to truncate the video if it's too wide. So the wider columns fix this -- no more truncated videos!

Obviously, this shouldn't affect those readers who use RSS readers like Google Reader to read the posts. If any readers have problems with the new format, however, let me know either via a comment to this post, or via the email address on the (now unobscured) sidebar.

Let's get cracking

Tonight's accidental nudity, bobsled edition - British bobsledder Gillian Cooke displays her, uh, assets on the two woman bobsled course at the world championships in Switzerland last month:

In defense of drunken sailors

Mish gets taken to task for likening out-of-control spending politicians to drunken sailors:

Mish,

I can’t take it anymore. I need to take a stand. Right here. Right now. Lately, so much hate and vitriol has been directed at drunken sailors.

Why has it become so chic in the blogosphere to make the analogy that the Congress, the States, the Municipalities all spend like drunken sailors? Why the sudden urge to besmirch, dare I say libel, drunken sailors?

I assure you, a drunken sailor is a harmless creature. I speak from experience. I have been a drunken sailor. Many of my best friends have been drunken sailors.

Whereas from my perspective, all flavors of government inflict great harm. To infer a resemblance between a politician and a drunken sailor should be actionable!

When pulling into a foreign port after many weeks or months at sea with the world’s finest navy, I always looked forward to sampling the native’s libations. Yes, I got hammered.

However, when I ran out of money I STOPPED DRINKING! I didn’t club the patron on the bar stool next to me over the head and rob him so I could continue drinking. I didn’t call me wife and ask her to cash in the kids college funds so I could continue drinking. I didn’t write my unborn grandkids an IOU so I could continue drinking. I just stopped and stumbled back to the liberty launch for a cheeseburger. I knew I’d have some cash next payday and I could hit the bars and clubs in the next liberty port. [emphasis added]

So please, no more comparisons of deficit spending politicians to harmless drunken sailors. Drunken sailors have feelings too.

I guess we could liken politicians to whores, but the whores, er, "sex workers" could probably make a similarly good argument against such a comparison.

Solar Flares and EMP

From Clifford May, writing in National Review:

... The EMP commission also reported that Iran — which is feverishly working to acquire nuclear weapons — has conducted tests in which it launched missiles and exploded warheads at high altitudes. The CIA has translated Iranian military journals in which EMP attacks against the U.S. are explicitly discussed.

Might Iran’s rulers orchestrate such an attack if and when they acquire nuclear capability? That is a heated debate among defense experts. But what is almost never discussed is the threat of a naturally occurring EMP event.

I first learned about this possibility a few months ago at a conference organized by Empact America, a bipartisan, non-profit organization concerned exclusively with the EMP challenge. Scientists there explained “severe space weather” — in particular, storms on the surface of the sun that could trigger an EMP event.

The strongest solar storm on record is the Carrington Event of 1859, named after Richard Carrington, an astronomer who witnessed the super solar flare that set off the event as he was projecting an image of the sun onto a white screen. In those days, of course, there was nothing much to damage. A high-intensity burst of electromagnetic energy shot through telegraph lines, disrupting communications, shocking technicians, and setting their papers on fire. Northern Lights were visible as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. But otherwise life went on as normal.

The same would not be true were a solar storm of similar magnitude to erupt today. Instead, the infrastructure we depend on would be wiped out. Most of us would not adapt well to this sudden return to a pre-industrial age. ...

Article here.

Unconventional condom uses

Tonight's condom versatility video:

This is too easy

From Finem Respice, comes these observations [occasional profanity at link]:

... What faces the Legislature, the Executive (and perhaps even the Judiciary) in the months and years to come is going to be anything but easy. The days of pouring deficit spending into housing, public employees, defined benefit plans, state subsidies and any other problem that manages to show its head above water for a sufficient interval are numbered. Someone is going to have to face the sorry task of explaining to the American people that, when you actually add it all up, the debt comes to almost $550,000 for each and every household in the United States, and that successive Comptroller Generals of the United States have been trying to get people to pay attention for five or ten years.

In an environment where even discussing shifting social security age eligibility by a few months can bring down the angry fist of voter wrath with such violence that even the CBO looks for cover, how are leaders today going to break the news that there is simply no water-boarding procedure severe enough to torture Social Security math past the point where it gives up enough money to pay for even a substantial fraction baby boomers? When something as trivial as a $1 trillion dollar health plan results in the forfeiture of god-given progressive birthrights like "The Kennedy Seat," what sort of effect might $30+ trillion in unfunded Medicare have when the bill comes due and remains unpaid?

Sure, it is nice to fantasize that the latest "republican revolution" means something in the grand scheme of things, but if American politics are "played inside of the 40 yard lines," then neither party is anywhere close to possessing the testicular fortitude to handle real fiscal reform. Balancing the budget today (which does nothing except stop the hemorrhaging for a while) would require no less than 35% across-the-board cuts in government spending- and this totally ignores the massive off-budget items that have become so fashionable to spin off. To say that Obama, who despite his Chicago machine pedigree couldn't seem to fix the Olympics RFP even with Oprah batting clean-up, isn't up to the task is stating the matter mildly. ...

War movie making on a budget

Tonight's the-power-of-editing video - a shoestring recreation of the storming of Omaha Beach for a scene in a BBC documentary. The music's kinda crappy, but the video's interesting:

From the video's description:

Bloody omaha was created by Colin Thornton, Neil Wilson and Steven Flynn who run the graphics company Compost Creatuve . www.Compostcreative.com

The music used Is Two Tribes by Frankie goes to Hollywood.

Team Compost headed out to Omaha Beach for 4 days armed with a Z1 camera, a pop up greenscreen, some soldier uniforms and 2 rubber rifles (we couldnt afford 3), and begun the process of covering the beach (with camera on the cliff top), and re-enacting the veterans moving accounts. When back in London (and back in our real day job) we began to piece together all wed shot using adobe after effects, (and a little 3d modelling in maya) turning the 3 of us into the invading U.S. army.
6 Weeks later the work was completed and provides a moving insight to the U.S veterans memories of storming Omaha beach, for BBC 2's Timewatch: Bloody Omaha.

More Washington, all the time

Mark Steyn gives us his acerbic take on The Mighty Kenyan's State of the Union address:

The world turns.

In Indonesia, the principal of a Muslim boarding school in Tangerang who is accused of impregnating a 15-year-old student says the DNA test will prove that a malevolent genie is the real father.

In New Zealand, a German tourist, Herr Hans Kurt Kubus, has been jailed for attempting to board a plane at Christchurch with 44 live lizards in his underpants.

In Britain, a research team at King’s College, London, has declared that the female “G-spot” does not, in fact, exist.

In France a group of top gynecologists led by M. Sylvain Mimoun has dismissed the findings, and said what do you expect if you ask a group of Englishmen to try to find a woman’s erogenous zone.

But in America Barack Obama is talking.

Talking, talking, talking. He talked for 70 minutes at the State of the Union. No matter how many geckos you shoveled down your briefs, you still lost all feeling in your legs. And still he talked. If you had an erogenous zone before he started, by the end it was undetectable even to Frenchmen. But on he talked. As respected poverty advocate Sen. John Edwards commented, “After the first hour, even my malevolent genie was back in the bottle.”

Like any gifted orator, the president knows how to vary the talk with a little light and shade. Sometimes he hectors, sometimes he whines, sometimes he demands. He hectored the Supreme Court. He whined about all the problems he inherited. He demanded Congress put a jobs bill on his desk. Or was it a desk job on his bill? No matter. He does Nixon impressions, too: “We do not quit,” he said.

Boy, you can say that again!

So he did: “We don’t quit. I don’t quit,” he said. Throughout the chamber, Democrats were quitting. “I quit,” says Rep. Marion Berry of Arkanas, declining to run this November. “I quit,” says Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, doing likewise. “I quit,” says Beau Biden of Delaware, son of Vice President Joe Biden, choosing not to succeed to his father’s seat in America’s House of Lords.

But not Barack Obama: “I don’t quit.” So on he went. As my colleague Rich Lowry put it after the Massachusetts vote, the public thinks Obama doesn’t get it, and Obama thinks the public doesn’t get it. And as he’s got the microphone, he’s gonna keep talking at you until you do get it. ...

Read the rest here.

A girl and her ball

Tonight's Rhythmic Gymnastics video - Boyanka Angelova performs at the 2008 European Championships in Turin:

Survival is a mom's job

So says The Survival Mom, interviewed by Fox News in Phoenix: