Pressure

One British newspaper referred to Jennifer Hudson as a true professional.

I agree but I think she showed so much more. I think she showed courage for coming forward to even attempt that performance.  Think about it, has any major star ever passed away roughly 24 hours before their industries major award show? Let alone someone relatively young for a occupation that has seen many divas performing into their eighties. Even with the sad history of drug abuse this was not expected. Because of this, this years Grammy’s could expect a huge, even record audience. The focus of all that would climax with the vocal tribute near the end of the evening.

I don’t know Ms. Hudson’s history with Whitney Houston, though I understand she was friends with her. Many people with nothing more in common than her music were deeply moved emotionally.  Ms. Hudson surely had that to work pass. The other performers and acts that went on that night have had days or weeks to rehearse. Ms. Hudson had less than 24 hours. I know very little about music but I know that even for one song that she may have sung before, to sing it well and to the standard set by Whitney Houston on that same stage, hours of rehearsal would be needed.

If she had declined to attempt it, was there someone else who could or would have stepped in? Was a video montage being prepared? Someday I’d be interested in hearing the story behind the decisions that had to be made during those 24 hours. But Ms. Hudson attempted it, she stood up in front of the whole world and she did it. Perfectly.

Bravo.

All my respect.

Posted in High Tide, News and opinion | Leave a comment

Osama gets it, Christian Religion,911.

Tom & Ray Magliozzi / Car Talk

Like bread and milk, you now have to make sure your tires are “fresh.”

How Medicare Price Controls Have Contributed to Drug Shortages

Medicare’s Disastrous Drug Pricing

As shown, consequences of decades of government price controls have caused this crisis. As we add more government control we will add more undesirable consequences.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali:The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World

Actually its a War that has never ended.

We got it right the first time.

Osama Bin Laden’s extraordinary instructions to his young children

Osama Bin Laden told his children to live peacefully in the West where they would get a good education, his brother-in-law has revealed.

Zakaria al-Sadah, whose sister is the fifth wife of the Al-Qaeda leader, said Bin Laden did not want his children and grandchildren following in the same path of terrorism like him.

Terror: Osama Bin Laden wanted his children to live in west where they would get a good education

I guess he knew a paradise on earth when he saw it. (Couldn’t find 72 Virgins though).

She Dialed 911. The Cop Who Came to Help Raped Her.

A young woman in Milwaukee called the cops when someone threw a brick through her window. One of the cops who came to help raped her.

When she tried to tell the other police officers, she was arrested. She spent four days in jail without being charged, afterwards the effects of what happened and the strain of not being able to get the officer charged, even after a positive rape test, included two attempts at suicide.

In the end she found a lawyer who was willing to help who got the FBI involved and Officer Cates was finally charged, and convicted. It turned out that he was a serial offender and previous cases involving other young women had been treated the same way, ignored by his superiors. This officer now faces life in prison.

No cop should be allowed to get away with what Officer Cates got away with, nor for as long as he got away with it. Just because he was a police officer.

Above is unrelated to the previous story, but it should be.

Posted in 2012, Foreign Newspapers, Islam, News and opinion | Tagged | Leave a comment

Power to the people!

Understanding the Global Warming Debate

…In a similar way, we need to ask ourselves what actual proposition do the 97% of climate scientists agree with.  And, we need to understand what it is, exactly,  that the deniers are denying.

It turns out that the propositions that are “settled” and the propositions to which some like me are skeptical are NOT the same propositions.  Understanding that mismatch will help explain a lot of the climate debate.

Warren Meyer, otherwise known to these pages as Coyote.

Understanding is a high wall, for some a locked gate. Mr. Meyer does an excellent job of taking us there and giving us a better frame of mind with which to confront the “believers”.

Himalayan glaciers have lost no ice in the past 10 years, new study reveals

By itself this means nothing, What does or doesn’t happen to one spot on earth can have many explanations. What is of note, the authors of the U.N.’s climate policy guide had inaccurately forecast that the Himalayan glaciers would melt completely in 25 years, vanishing by the year 2035. And then they demanded that the world destroy it own economy.

New nuclear reactors will be first in three decades

US approves construction of two reactors designed to avoid repeat of Fukushima

Just let me say this, the only thing unsafe about Nuclear Energy is the Green Religion Movement. For the last thirty years the nuclear industry  has been hiding in their holes like frightened rabbits. Afraid to put forth proposals for new plants, to re-engineer existing plants, to make any changes. When even the necessary process of re-licensing  takes five times as long and is ten times as expensive as it should for facilities that have never released one rem of harmful radiation. The plans for these new reactors, that answer every weakness and have a design that corrects all the faults of the Japanese plants didn’t get written in less than a year. They have been on the shelf for decades, but the industry couldn’t bring them out until the Chinese put the orders in and started building.

Why have we allowed ourselves to be bullied by fools and idiots? Who gave them the power to control our energy future? For the billions of dollars wasted on (dead wind facility’s)    we could have built up to five Gen III Nuclear Plants producing not the Kilowatts of wind or solar, not even Megawatts, but Gigawatts of power in a relatively small footprint. And without covering thousands of acres of desert, not including the corridors hundreds of miles long to get the power to where its needed.

Seriously? Who gave them that power, and why?

And a late entry from England…

National Trust comes out against ‘public menace’ of wind farms

But in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Sir Simon Jenkins warned that wind was the “least efficient” form of green power, and risked blighting the British landscape.

He said “not a week goes by” without the charity having to fight plans for wind farms that threaten the more than 700 miles of coastline, 28,500 acres of countryside and more than 500 properties owned by the Trust.

“Broadly speaking the National Trust is deeply sceptical of this form of renewable energy,” he said.

This is important because in England, the National Trust has more members than any of the political parties.

 

Posted in Blogbits, Foreign Newspapers, Global Warming Hoax, Tech | Leave a comment

Flash, non-political stealing in Chicago, National Velvet (2012), New poll_young forced to work to earn a living.

Thieves pull off stunning gem heist in Chicago

A Chicago jewelry store owner says a heist that resulted in her store being robbed of $500,000 in precious gems was “definitely straight out of Ocean’s Eleven.”

Thieves broke into Steve Quick Jewelers in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago on Tuesday night by cutting through a common wall in the sushi restaurant next door straight into the back corner of the jeweler’s office, right behind the safe — the only part of the store not covered by an elaborate security system of cameras and motion detectors.

I think I’ll wait for the movie. Remember the movie that photo came from?

Rabbit Jumping Reaches for New Heights

Cherie, a two-year-old Swedish bunny, and owner Magdalena Åhsblom competed at the Rabbit Grand National Jan. 28 in Harrogate, England. Rabbit jumping is a new rage among young women in England, but they are no match for the Swedes who have perfected the sport.

I will NOT be waiting for the movie! National Velvet (2012), gack!

OMG, We Have Really Hit Bottom – Young People Forced to Work to Support Themselves

https://i0.wp.com/www.coyoteblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/2012-youth-and-economy-20.png

Obviously the economy sucks and it would be great for everyone for it to improve, but in most other times and even in many other countries in the world today, a significant bar in bad times would have been “I starved to death.”

Coyote looks at this chart and is struck by how wealthy it shows the USA is. Numbers two and three on that chart especially, to go back to school or taking a job with no pay for experience requires that someone else have the disposable income available to support you. I agree.

I’d say that I spent four years at jobs I didn’t like but paid the bills before I found something that I was good at and could succeed. Why so many young people can’t find any jobs to do that much may have to do with the minimum wage, its to high, and they aren’t worth it, yet.

Posted in All the News not fit to print., Blogbits, Cartoons, Crime | Tagged | Leave a comment

Personal: Mom’s 84th Birthday.

The Perfect Card…

Inside…

For our family and friends, a few pictures of Elaine Cahill’s 84 birthday at Quans Kitchen in Hanover (New).

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Posted in Personal, Photos | 2 Comments

Doug: The Aral Sea (Updated)

From a colleague in South Africa

Have you ever wanted to walk across the bottom of a river, lake or ocean to see all the ships that have sunk?

Well… The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest saline body of water. It has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s, after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet Union irrigation projects. And now it’s almost gone, leaving a desert full of old shipwrecks…

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

In the 1960s, the Soviet Union undertook a major water diversion project on the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The region’s two major rivers, fed from snowmelt and precipitation in faraway mountains, were used to transform the desert into fields for cotton and other crops. Before the project, the two rivers left the mountains, cut northwest through the Kyzylkum Desert—the Syr Darya to the north and the Amu Darya to the south—and finally pooled together in the lowest part of the desert basin. The lake they made, the Aral Sea, was once the fourth largest lake in the world. Continue reading

Posted in Blogbits, Doug, Low Tide, Updated | Leave a comment

Sad Saab, bad tax…redux, TNEF is enough.

Tom & Ray Magliozzi / Car Talk

No parts for discontinued car? Time to improvise

Poor old guy with a 2003 Saab, I don’t understand why the parts shortage on Saab’s could be upon us to quickly. They just went bankrupt in December, this guy brought them the car then. Had Saab ceased operations and manufacturing months previously, let go all their mechanics, had the dealers ship all unused stock back immediately?

Very curious.

The job-killing med-tech tax

In November, citing the new tax, Stryker Corp., whose products include artificial hips and knees, announced that it would let go about 1,000 of its workers.

Earlier last year, Covidien, maker of surgical instruments, said it would lay off 200 workers in the United States and move production to Costa Rica and Mexico. It, too, cited the tax.

A tax on SALES, not PROFITS.

The tax will change these numbers for the worse. It will be levied at 2.3 percent of sales; on average, profits make up less than 4 percent of sales in the industry. The AdvaMed study concludes, “The new 2.3 percent excise tax will roughly double their total tax bill and raise the average effective corporate income tax rate to one of the highest effective tax rates faced by any industry in the world.”

Listen, (which is a forlorn hope from Congress) NEXT TIME trying reading the damn bills before you vote for them!

Visit this site to be informed of the new Federal Regulations that have been created for your benefit, remember, We are the Federal Government, we are here to help you.

It’s about time the federal government gave us Regulations.gov, a helpful Internet portal that indexes the hundreds of thousands of pages of laws, regulations, and dictates that we’re expected to know.

The Problem: Microsoft Outlook sometimes sends a non-standard format (TNEF)

Several people, not mentioning any names, send me stuff with links, picture files and so-forth included. What I see is sometime odd placeholder lines or strange strings of letters and under attachments; Winmail.dat, or Win.dat or *.eml. But mostly its winmail.dat.

Now on the old laptop I used to do this blog on, I had a program that could decipher and separate the files, though it added several extra steps. That program doesn’t work on Win7.

Mostly the problem comes up when the email comes from within the corporate world through a nailed down mail server that doesn’t allow user access to the mail setup tabs. What that means to non-techies is that the “dicks” in IT prefer to have their users (read: field hands) open IT support tickets  instead of allowing them to make minor tweaks to correct the problem themselves.

One way around the problem is to cut and paste the material into another document, preferably in Open Source/Open Office format. Save it and then attach the document to the email.

[Meat loaf night, update this later]

Posted in 2012, All the News not fit to print., Blogbits, News and opinion, Tech | Leave a comment

Doug: Who’s on First?

At last a GOP debate that makes sense

 

 

Posted in 2012, All the News not fit to print. | Tagged | Leave a comment

Political Robo-Calls, Venice Ice Breaker, Terrorist groups & PETA.

Move over robo-calls, states sell email addresses for campaigns to reach voters

A Fox News study has found 19 states plus the District of Columbia, now ask for an email address on voter registration cards. In nine of those states, email addresses from the cards are then sold to political parties, organizing groups, lawmakers and campaigns who can use them to send unsolicited emails.

If it were a Viagra ad, it be considered a crime in some states. But a political message, that’s all perfectly legal…

I’m shocked, shocked! This so violates my trust and faith in government…NOT.

Frozen Venice: the lagoon and canals ice over as Europe’s big freeze continues

A small boat makes its way along a partly frozen canal in Venice

A small boat makes its way along a partly frozen canal in Venice. The city’s lagoon has frozen for the first time in more than two decades

Looks like those folks could use some Global Warming.

Animal charity [PETA] sues SeaWorld on behalf of five ‘slave’ whales

PETA said a ruling in its favour would only help to protect the orcas in the entertainment industry and other cases involving animals would have to be decided on their own merits.

Kerr said Sea World employees are in violation of the 13th amendment because their conduct is enslaving an intelligent, highly social species that suffers from its confinements in ways similar to what humans would experience.

Brushing animals off as property is the same argument that was used against African-Americans and women before their constitutional rights were protected, PETA says.

Shaw pointed out that argument does not translate because both women and African-Americans are people for which the Constitution was written to protect.

Last nights pork chops filed a “cease and desist” order.

Seriously, bring up this case if anyone tries telling you that PETA is not a radical organization. The arguments they have advanced in this case are insulting to the efforts of those “Human Beings” who gave their lives ending slavery.

Contributions to PETA can and will be funneled to its more violent and illegal groups for which it is just a front.

PETA supports Terrorism by donating your money to groups know as The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF).

This has been documented by examining IRS forms submitted over the years. Millions of dollars to burn down Condos, set deadly traps for lumberman and hunters, destroy labs and important medical research intended to save human life. (No, they don’t actually itemize those activities, even on the long form). ALF & ELF have proudly boasted of doing just that.

Been to a Circus as a kid?  I have, (well I was a forty year old kid at the time) I took my wife to see the circus in Boston. She had never been to one and she loved it. Lions and tigers and bears, “Smile Please!”.  The harassment and legal expense are already causing many animal acts to shut down. And when they shut down a animal act, the animals don’t go on unemployment. They are mostly killed. And in the future support for breeding many exotic “wild” animals will disappear if they cannot be shown. (You think Zoo’s are going to be exempt?). Many of these animals are endangered in the disappearing “wild” that they originated in. Especialy in Africa, there is very little sentiment about large, undomesticated animals in Africa. (Think about the BJ wholesale institutional size BBQ sauce emptied in one sitting.)

PETA is comprised of idiots, who support murderers and arsonists, and too many people are supporting them. Especially with money.

STOP IT, just stop doing that, please.

Posted in 2012, All the News not fit to print., Blogbits, Foreign Newspapers, Global Warming Hoax, News and opinion, When Progressives Attack | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Liberals, Progressives and tigers…Oh My!

A Battle the President Can’t Win

But the big political news of the week isn’t Mr. Romney’s gaffe, or even his victory in Florida. The big story took place in Washington. That’s where a bomb went off that not many in the political class heard, or understood.

But President Obama just may have lost the election.

What will 77 Million Catholics do now that the Obama administration has made it illegal for them to not support abortion?

How do you feel about abortion on demand, what will you do?

Don’t look at me, I couldn’t be more opposed to this anti-American, anti-Western Civilization, Socialist SOB if I tried all day and all night.

Halftime America! Clint Eastwood Makes It All Better! Ugh.

I don’t follow football, but I follow the ads. Particularly those made by Union dominated companies with bail-out money with a sub-text meaning only one thing.

Sacrificing the desert to save the Earth

Even if only a few of the proposed projects are built, hundreds of square miles of wild land will be scraped clear. Several thousand miles of power transmission corridors will be created.
The desert will be scarred well beyond a human life span, and no amount of mitigation will repair it, according to scores of federal and state environmental reviews.

More…

Rare Truth-Telling Piece at L.A. Times Skewers Radical Left’s Hypocrisy on Protecting the Environment

The development of a solar power plant in the Mojave will decimate large swaths of the desert — all in the name of creating alternative energy sources and driven by global warming hysteria. Both the Bush and Obama administrations share the blame. Tens of billions of dollars have been made available for the development of non-fossil fuel burning energy sources, and the costs to the consumer will be substantially higher than that of traditional sources — and that’s to say nothing of the costs to taxpayers in the subsidies going to fund this boondoggle.

It’s pretty messed up all around, but the inevitable result of a regulatory state that would make the old Soviet bureaucrats proud.

Am I nuts? Wouldn’t the Envio’s and the Greenies be screaming and marching, marching and screaming if this were the same sized petrochemical operation?

Have you ever wondered where your Flying Car is, now that you live in the Age of the Jetson’

Follow the link to the ever intelligent American Digest and his commentary on (original article).

Weep.

Posted in 2012, All the News not fit to print., Blogbits, Global Warming Hoax, News and opinion, When Progressives Attack | Tagged | Leave a comment