The Internet

We take for granted how much information is truly out there. From Googlegangers to String Theory, and everything in between. All there, at the click of a mouse and a few finger movements, for anyone to see.

Dangerous, Exciting, Terrifying. May you live in interesting times, indeed.

I love knowledge. Knowing is being prepared; even if it's just theoretical knowledge that you haven't put to the test, at least it's something you can go on.. a direction, if you will.

There's a great website I like to visit often: How to Make Everything. Sure, it's not much to look at graphic-wise, but I'm not looking for fancy pixels. I'm looking for information on a vast scale.. And, again, sure, some of the links are dead, but most work, and there's a lot of them. Mostly for the distribution to 3rd world countries (which, ironically, we may be one of those soon...), the site is free for the perusing and free downloads of all information within. The sister site is here, with over 13 Gigs of information. Agriculture, Metalworking, Macro and Micro Economics, you name it, it's in there.


Another great site is offered by NDSU (North Dakota State University) Extension Service. 

Full of plans ranging from outhouses to large houses, and all points in between. These are in .PDF format, so you'll have to save and open.

Hope this helps in preparing.

If knowledge is power, than What Hath God Wrought?

Erm... wait, no, that IS hilarious!

I caught Glenn Beck today, and I saw the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. It's funny 'cause it's true. We're so screwed it's hard not to laugh.

Deem This, You Crocodilian* Wench!

I saw someone anonymously comment on another blog a bunch of stuff, but I found this quip to be quite genius.

           "   ...Perhaps I'm confused here, but if they want to toss the rule book out the window, then they have no basis to turn to me and say, "Play by the rules.""

Indeed.

Madam Speaker, I deem you, and your crocodilian* cohorts, completely irrelevant henceforth.


*please note, this in no way references crazy talk about 'reptilians' or any other such nonsense of that particular scifi/conspiracy genre. I refer to her as a crocodile because, well, she looks a lot like a primal lizard, and I have no doubt she sounds and acts like one behind closed doors. Much like Stacy Keech's character in one Cheech and Chong movie, sans the mary jane. Furthermore, I will surmise that you probably can't read this, but if it so happens that you can, please feel free to do some photoshopping of Pelosi and send it to youtube marked "Reptilian Conspiracy Exposed!" or something of that nature. That stuff is hilarious!

Jeffersonian School of Government

Sorry I've been absent this week... it's been ratather hectic at work, and a guy who got hired with me put in his 2 weeks, so I'm preparing for a wicked time by myself. That's alright though... I live for this shit!

Anyhowl, I came across these quotes today, and I thought I'd pass them along.

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"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.

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Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

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Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

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I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.

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I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.

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I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

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I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

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If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

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It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

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It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

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It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

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Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.

Power is not alluring to pure minds.

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Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law” because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

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Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

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That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

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The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.

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The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.

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Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct."

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Hope you liked it.. I did.

Dude, Where's My Jar?

I. Want. Some. Of. This. Scotch.


Srsly.

Shackleton may have been a failure at that particular venture, and a few others, but aging whiskey he was not. Well Done, Shackleton, Well Done!

Quip:

Polar explorers of that era relied on their alcohol of choice to help them and their crews through the long Antarctic nights and insomnia-inducing days. And Shackleton knew a thing or two about being well prepared for an adventure. On a later trip to the continent he kept all 28 members of his crew alive during 15 harrowing months after their ship got marooned in and then slowly devoured by ice. So it's no surprise that he brought 25 crates of Scotch with him when he set off on an expedition to the South Pole in 1907.

The earlier trip didn't go well, either. Shackleton turned around 97 miles short of his destination, telling his wife, "I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion." When the ship arrived in 1909 to pick the men up, they left their supplies behind in their hut, including reindeer sleeping bags, tins of boiled mutton and bottled gooseberries. And, as we now know, they also abandoned two cases of Charles Mackinlay & Co. whisky.

That man had a li'l Captain in Him.

And there was a comment on this article that said:

Oh Boy, I hate to throw water all over the place here - but I just HAVE to ask... what sort of person/people find themselves in Antartica these days without an ice axe - or a dozen? They couldn't dig out the crates? Surely they have a better excuse.

FOOL! And ruin 2 crates of 100-year-old Scotch?! Are you mad?!

Two more comments made me chortle:

Haven't they heard of global warming? Just wait a bit and there will be plenty Arizona State sorority girls tanning and oiling on the sunny shore of Antarctica during spring break to share the booze with.

Retort:

RonnieB, we've all heard about global warming...ad nauseum. It's been downgraded officially now to "climate change". Hadn't you heard ? and as climate change it is likely to mean cooler temperatures. Too cool for sorority girls.

Interw3bz. Huzzah!

Digital Ants take on Digital Worms

Quip:

Scientists from Wake Forest University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have created an army of digital ants and their superior officers, digital sergeants and sentinels, to search out viruses, worms and other malware.

Well, that leaves my SimAnt software in the dust! Dude.. I always loved SimAnt.

Quip:

Like their biological counterparts, each individual ant is not very bright. A connection rate, CPU utilization or one of about 60 other technical details is all they can sense. When an ant detects something unusual, it leaves a digital pheromone, a tiny digital sense that says something unusual is going on here, and that other ants should check it out.

The digital ants report any suspicious activity to a digital sentinel, a program designed to watch over a set of computers in a network. The sentinel sorts through all the information the ants gather, and if its suspicious, passes the information on to a digital sergeant. The sergeant then alerts the human supervisor, who can the deal with the problem.

Ahah! Human Supervisor? We're all friggin' doomed, as the Mogambu Guru would tout (he's right!). As soon as the Human Supervisor get's his cheesy-poof-laden hands on the situation, I might as well kiss my software goodbye.

Quip:

If a particular kind of ant finds lots of problems then more of them are created to monitor the problem. The entire system is modeled off of a normal ant colony and uses "swarm intelligence" to find and diagnose problems.

Sweet, swarms! I love swarms, except swarms of Zombies, of course.

Final Quip:

The researchers created four digital ants of the 64 types then eventually want. To test their effectiveness, they set up a bank of computers and released three worms into the ant-infested Linux-based computers. The four digital ants in the computers had never seen the viruses before, yet identified the virus by only monitoring four very specific aspects of the computers.

Apparently, The Ants don't do typos. Too bad... we could all use that.

Linux FTW! BorePatch will be pleased!


SimAnt!

NATO: "Obama, you're an idiot."

Well, maybe not in so many words, but...

Quip:

“What we did today was to discuss General McChrystal’s overall assessment, his overall approach, and I have noted a broad support from all ministers of this overall counterinsurgency approach,” said NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Ha! So, Obama says to McC, "Meh..." And McC says to him, he says to him,. he says, "Blow it out yer ass, I'm goin' to Slovakia to pitch it to NATO"

But a fair assessment? This will not end well.. Obama has other plans for troops (Iran, maybe?).. if not, why hasn't he deployed them? After all, it's not like McC is playing the role of Philip from Braveheart, where he gets tossed out of the window for being an idiot. McC is far from it, but I got a feeling he's gonna end up on the receiving end of the King's wrath, so to speak. Maybe not out of an actual window, but out of a proverbial one, instead.

Yeah. That guy.

Glueball Wormening!!1!!1

Ok.. so I'm bored enough to paruse motifake today, and find this gem

Bruce Wayne was a Communist!

Ha!

Copenhagen Posted

So, I was driving last week, and heard this caller on Glenn Beck (I've been listening to him since he was a local guy here in the Tampa area, way back in '00, and not nearly as psychotic) start talking about BreakItApart.

The premise is, say, a 1000 page bill is broken down to 1 page. Your last 3 or 4 digits of your social security number will determine the page (or you can just pick one if you're uncomfortable) that you break down and put into regular words (not lawyerese) in a sentence or two what that page means; after every page has been done, you slap it together and read.

Anyhowl, they posted the Copenhagen treaty this morning, so head on over and get yerself a copy. I got it, and it is the real deal. 181 pages, so not that bad, but I can't read it until Friday, which puts me in a bind.

Rhodes, Potok and Mathews - Video!

Video!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Smack from the Future

I LOVE this stuff! Especially when an actual scientist comes out and says it, not some Trekkie.

Quip:

Large Hadron Collider 'Being Sabotaged from the Future'

Monday, October 19, 2009

Scientists claim the giant atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being jinxed from the future to save the world.

In a bizarre sci-fi theory, Danish physicist Dr Holger Bech Nielsen and Dr Masao Ninomiya from Japan claim nature is trying to prevent the LHC from finding the elusive Higgs boson. Called the "God particle," the theoretical boson could explain the origins of mass in the universe — if physicists can find the darn thing.

The scientists say their math proves nature will "ripple backward through time" to stop the LHC before it can create the God particle, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

“One could even almost say that we have a model for God,” Dr Nielsen says in an unpublished essay. “He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

"While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus," Dannis Overbye wrote in the New York Times.

"In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus."

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr Nielsen told the New York Times.

Ha! Take THAT, death machine!

Anyhowl, I've been reading a lot of science this morning, and just happened to come across this, which struck me as amusing.

Lord Monckton is his name...

...and Thatcher was his game... back in the day, anyway.

That's the guy from the video. I've heard him speak several times, but have never seen his face, and all you brits sound alike (I'm just kidding, of course, as I can imitate quite a few British accents, as well as Scottish, Irish, Australian, and, my favorite, Slack-Jawed Yokel).

A little background:

Wiki Quip:

Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (born 14 February 1952) is a British politician, business consultant, policy adviser, writer, columnist, inventor and hereditary peer. He served as an advisor to Margaret Thatcher's policy unit in the 1980s and invented the Eternity puzzle at the end of the 1990s. More recently, he has attracted controversy for his public opposition to the mainstream scientific consensus on global warming. He also announced a sequel to his original puzzle called Eternity II in 2007, and it is still unsolved.

And, in April of this year, we had this:

Washington, DC -- UK's Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington. Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday. Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon.

“The House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,” Monckton told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “They are cowards.”

So far, I like the guy. When I heard him denounce Global Warming as a total farce on the Glenn Beck show some 2 years ago, I was really interested, since the 'science' was not settled for me.

I'm still looking for the actual document (not the draft I posted yesterday) that states global governance. It may be in there, I haven't read the whole thing. But: The actual treaty is 200 some pages long, and the draft posted yesterday was only 78 or summat, so it's watered down nonsense unless I see the actual doc.

Kyoto Redux - Copenhagen Shenanegans

The Copenhagen Treaty is a Kyoto redux, to be sure. Here are some quips from the draft of the treaty:

The US and other Annex I non-ratifying parties should take on reduction targets
of a comparable nature and scale to Annex I parties that have ratified the Protocol as
well as be able to participate in the Kyoto Flexible Mechanisms, emissions trading
and be bound by the Kyoto compliance regime.

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All developed and newly industrialized countries should reduce their emissions,
as a group, by 23 % below 1990 levels in the 2013-2017 commitment period. This target
is consistent with an emissions reduction trajectory that yields a 40 % reduction
in emissions by 2020 and represents the annual average reduction for the commitment
period ( i.e. what the target in 2015 would be ).

-----------------

a ) T o assist in the development and implementation of a visionary long-term
plan for a low GHG emissions trajectory for each Party included in Annex B based
on the global carbon budget in 2050 and the interim targets for Parties
included in Annex B, as a group, in accordance with the provisions of Article 2 ;

b ) T o assist Parties in the identification and achievement of the timely
investments required for the economy-wide transformation needed to achieve
low carbon sustainable development in accordance with the provisions
of Article 2 ; and

c ) T o assist Parties in undertaking the necessary policies, measures and
actions to fulfill their support obligations in accordance with the provisions
of this Protocol.

----------

There. I'd advise at least a skim through the 78 page document before you set yourself on fire and dance through the streets screaming 'the world is ending!'

Again, you can get a copy here.

What's this guy babbling about?

To me, it doesn't sound that ludicrous, but I'm not hearing what the name of this 'treaty' is, nor do I know who this guy is. Something about Greenpeace was mentioned, but again, I got nuthin', so credibility is denied as far as I'm concerned. Until someone can enlighten me to who he is, what the name of the so-called treaty is, and why people feel inexplicably drawn to believe and trust a guy with a british accent.

Worth lookin' into, as is anything else, but I'm not losin' any sleep over it.






Remember, Given an infinite universe and infinite time, all things will happen. That means that every event is inevitable, including those that are impossible.

Do I believe this guy? Meh, as far as I'm concerned we lost our sovereignty a long time ago, so if this were true, we're just making it official.

When this turns out to be a bunch of nonsense? Quick, look surprised!

UPDATE:

I found the treaty, 'Copenhagen Treaty' and here're some facts, as per greenpeace website, no less.

The full legal text of the NGO Copenhagen Treaty - written by a team of 47 experts from environment and development groups across the world, including Greenpeace. Very serious legal text

And, if yer curious, cuz remember, Glueball Wormening and all, here's the link to get it via .pdf

I'll copy and paste some of the script as time allows. Should be an interesting read, I see it's getting a lot of buzz. I really should wake up more before posting, that way I can actually research something before looking like a tool. :P

This. Is. SPART.. .. ... SAN FRANCISCO!

Hilariousness. I love Gerard Butler (hey, I'm Scottish, so sue me..) and his sense of humor. here's a clip from SNL (which I rarely find funny anymore, even at the best of times). And, excuse the 30 second ad.. I'd take it off if I could. :)

Vegetarian Spider. No, Srsly.

I kid you not. Way cool.

Quip:

A tropical jumping spider that eats mostly plant buds has been identified, a new study says—making it the only known vegetarian out of some 40,000 spider species.

photo and story from National Geographic.

Vegetarians will be happy to quip this phenomena I have no doubt.

Quip:

  "It is utterly surreal," he said, "to see a spider use such effective hunting strategies to hunt a plant."

I can hear the lettuce screaming from my garden as I type this.

iPhone, ha!

BorePatch had a funny this morning, and it reminded me of my favorite Friday show (that I no longer watch because we cut the cable), the Soup.

Hilariousness.




And, of course, the original:

Federal Police?

...I stumbled upon this picture

Homeland Security

Federal Protective Services

Police

....ok, 'the hell does that mean? I was not aware of a Federal Police Force (well, you know what I mean). Not the FBI, CIA, or other alpha units.

If anyone can enlighten me on this, I would be much obliged. :)

PWNED! Transvestites Fight Back! FAIL at 11!

Mountain Dew spewed from my nose when I read this tale of, well... Total Awesomeness.

Thugs attack two transvestites... who turn out to be cage fighters wearing fancy dress

 

Gardener and Fender were left dazed and seen staggering to their feet after their failed attack.

Go to the link and watch the video report... apparently these guys attack super heroes too, because after this FAIL they went after Spider Man.

I guess the two would-be muggers couldn't see the Adams Apples on their selected targets, nor could they see the biceps that were bigger than their fool heads.

And, you know what? Eddie Izzard is somewhere laughing his british arse off.