Harrys Roamers Turkey Run

I'll promote this because I've always had fun on this. It's a chance to get on your motorcycle and enjoy the kind of weather we've come to expect in Colorado in mid-November.
Balmy weather. Note the chaps on the luggage rack.
I've ridden this event is everything from shirt-sleeve warmth to snow with ice on the pavement, which was, shall we say, challenging.
Note the bike-fu masters technique; Foot well to the rear, forks at full lock, bike leaning strongly to the near side. In his defense, we were pulling onto the roadway here at a twisty section that made seeing oncoming traffic from either direction difficult. The traffic tended to take the posted limit as only an advisory, too. We bikers, of course, were paragons of virtue at all times.

The event is November 15th, regardless of weather, starting at G.I. Jodys watering hole on the NE corner of Ken Caryl and Simms. Doors open at 9:30, registration starts at 10, first bike out at 11, everybody in by 3 PM.

Cost is $10/rider, $5/ passenger, or extra hand.

High-quality frozen turkeys are the prizes. This is a poker run format ride. If you don't know what a poker run is, come on out and find out. As W.C.Fields said, "This is not a game of chance. Not the way I play it, no."

09 Elections

All in all, not bad. Not as good as it could have been, Bloomberg joins Danny Ortega in getting term limits swept aside, and NY-23 didn't work out in spite of polls showing Hoffman leading easily right up to the end.

Considering that both the GOP and the Dems (but I repeat myself) were running against him up until 1 week before the election, I'd say Hoffman did quite well.

Of course we must remember that in politics, 2nd place is equivalent to a train ticket to Siberia.

Swine Flu Plot

I love a good conspiracy. Here at Right Wing News is a report in the comments that the Swine Flue vaccine, to be given to the detainees at Gitmo, is made from ..... Swine.

OK, it has now been reported in a usually* reliable source that the swine flu vaccine is made from pigs. If this post is referenced in another blog** then one could say that it has been widely reported that...

Rioting begins in 3,...2,...1,...

*I admit the original post is probably more reliable than the comments.

**This one, for example. Given the size of the internet, it doesn't take much to make a report "wide".

Quote of the Week

From Megan Mcardle at the Atlantic, in the comments:

"If Obama’s skin was any thinner, he’d have a reservoir tip on the top of his head."

I always thought of him as a bit of a bubblehead.

2012

It's way early to be naming candidates, but never too early to demonstrate why conservatives are generally happier than liberals. BigFurHat, over at I Own The World suggests this pair:

No, not the lottery. The 2012 presidential election. It’s Michelle Bachmann and the conservative celebrity Janine Turner. I have the campaign all laid out. It will be called Bachmann/Turner Overdrive. And the campaign song is Takin’ Care Of Business. Boom. Instant win.

We could do worse, and if we're not careful, we probably will. Frankly this rather fanciful ticket sounds better than one headed up by either Huckabee or Romney.

Pumpkin Season

Since 2 people have tipped me to this, I guess I need to weigh in on it. Seems the Cal State U at Fullerton, which is down in Orange county, held a punkin chunkin contest for the engineering students, and one team built an air cannon.
Impressive machine for something built in a hurry with a grade at stake.
The contest was held on the football field at about the 30 yard line, with targets set up somewhere near the goal line.

When we built our first air cannon, the barrel was 40 ft long. You do the math on these things, and the preliminary results are so fantastic you tend not to believe them. The math said that at 100 psi, the pumpkin would travel about 3 miles. Since that requires supersonic muzzle velocities, and that wasn't possible with an air gun, we wrote that off completely. The compressor we had available initially was capable of only putting 18 psi into the tanks, so our first shot was (empirically) predicted to just fall lamely out of the barrel. Instead it went about a block, fortunately hitting nothing breakable.

For our second effort, we arranged for 800 feet to the fence, and another 200 or so visible beyond it. I'm pretty sure we made 2200 feet that day, again, hitting nothing breakable. After that all our testing was done out at the gun range where we had over a mile.

Looking downrange at Fullerton:
You can see the "castles" used as targets on the right. Note the scoreboard, way back there. Now visit the link, and click up picture #4, a close-up of the scoreboard.

Air cannons are a lot of fun. I'll sell you mine for $1500 and you can terrorize your neighborhood for a half-mile radius.

Thanks to Jed and AKA Angrywhiteman for the tips on this one.

Sausage and Legislation

In the past, it was relatively easy for a legislator to slip an amendment into an otherwise unrelated bill to the benefit of his constituents or himself, and have the bit slip through unnoticed. All you had to do was apportion the available legislation among the legislators so that a declaration of support for the state trash haulers didn't contain $40Bn worth of pork divided among the legislators in amounts varying by seniority.

The internet has provided the taxpayers with (dare I say) an Army of Davids in their defense. While it is certain that a very large bill might well be whooped through before anyone, or even any 10 people could plausibly read it, it is increasingly unlikely that even a 1990 pg bill can be voted on before 1000 people read 2 pages each, and report the most egregious flaws.

You gotta love it when only 2 days after the thing is dropped on selected desks, Limbaugh is reading a long list of items sure to annoy the intended victims of the thing. You knew the lawyers wouldn't get left out, and sure enough, Brietbart discovers this from page 1431-1433 of the bill:

Section 2531, entitled “Medical Liability Alternatives,” establishes an incentive program for states to adopt and implement alternatives to medical liability litigation. [But]…… a state is not eligible for the incentive payments if that state puts a law on the books that limits attorneys’ fees or imposes caps on damages.

A politician is one who never sees a constituent problem that cannot be turned into a revenue source without actually fixing the problem.

Happy Halloween

There's a problem with the festivities in Clinton, N.J. with a haunted house called Asylum of Terror.

CLINTON -- Every fall, the Red Mill Museum here hosts a haunted house. But this year’s "Asylum of Terror," has angered mental health advocates who said the theme perpetuates ugly stereotypes.

Evidently the thought of an institution full of lunatics that lacks the marble columns out front and the big gold dome on the roof, drives advocates for the deranged, crazy.

DARPA Challenge

While humming the tune to "99 Red Ballons", find 10 of them in the shortest time.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways.

An interesting challenge, especially if you think a bit about what this will prove to DARPA. What we have here is an experiment to see if 20,000,000 geeks can find something faster than 2,000 intelligence analysts in windowless rooms with access to spy satellites. If you're interested, there's a picture of a sample balloon at the link above. I imagine that one found floating over a car dealership, apartment complex, or furniture store will probably not be the balloon you are looking for, although this suggests a great exercise in deception.

What makes this interesting to me is an effort I made a couple weeks ago to find an Iranian Nuke site located "SE of Qom, Iran". Using Google Earth, I found a suspicious looking site rather quickly, and when someone published a released picture shortly thereafter, sure enough, that was it. New construction shows up on satellite photos like a fly on a plate, and "new" means anything less than 1 or 2 years old, especially if no landscaping effort has gone along with it.

Voting

In next years elections several interesting things will be on the ballot, not leat of which is a chance to remove several State Supreme court justices. Clear the Bench has details. Regarding voting, Heinlein said:

1987 - from To Sail Beyond the Sunset
If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that a truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires.

I summarized this to my daughter as "when in doubt, vote against all the incumbents, vote NO on all the questions, and vote NO to retain all the judges." Do this, and you will seldom regret the way you voted.

Global Warming

They're saying that we got 23" of global warming in the last 2 days, with another couple inches expected overnight.
No, I do not have a camper on my truck.
Just the snow stacks up that high.

The Future of Transportation

Everybody is probably familiar with the local water works modus operendi of first telling us that there's a water shortage and asking us to use less, then telling us that water sales are down and a price increase is required.

Now the transportation bureaucracies have discovered the same trick, only with added improvements. First they tell us to use less gasoline and drive less, so we buy more efficient cars and perhaps even drive less. Then they tell us that revenue from the gasoline taxes are coming up short, and more money is needed, so the price of a registration is doubled, and maybe the gas tax is squeezed up a bit. Problem with this is that people notice this sort of thing, and sometimes remember who was in office when it happened.

The new solution, proposed in England, and now in D.C. is to fit everyones vehicle with a GPS unit, and tax the drivers by the mile. As an added bonus, there is now a complete record of everywhere you went, and when, stored in your car.

"Vehicles would be fitted with a GPS transponder device similar to an E-ZPass, perhaps as part of the registration process," Orr and Rivlin explained. "This device would record the type of vehicle, the distance traveled, and the time and location of travel."

Despite the privacy issues, DC officials insist that tolling is necessary for making up for the shortfall in gasoline tax revenues. The proposed mileage tax would solve this problem by increasing motorist taxation levels by a factor of ten. The additional revenue would be diverted to spending on buses and rail service.

Somehow this information is downloaded to a government bureau somewhere where it is securely (!) stored, and the data is crunched into a bill you get for using the roads. No word on what happens to the data afterword, but some interesting scenarios come to mind:

1. Postcards come in the mail; Dear Mr. Smith: We see your 2007 Toyota Camry is approaching its 30,000 mile service date. We at Fonebone Motors would be happy to perform this service at a reasonable price...

2. You sell your car. Notification must come quickly otherwise the buyer would be well advised to buy after 5 PM Friday in order to charge the 2000 mile trip to the coast to you before the bureaucrats can get back to work on Monday and note the change of ownership into the computer.

The possibilities are just endless. Glenn suggests tar and feathers.

The Workshop

This time it's a couple of suggestions. Why does no-one...

1. Put a bolt head on gas-powered stuff that can be engaged by a socket wrench in a cordless drill. Engage the bolt, push down to engage to the motor, and pull the trigger on your drill to start the gas-powered thingy. A rubber friction wheel would provide all the connection you need, and would disengage when the engine started. Voila! an affordable electric starter for mowers or snow blowers or whatever.

2. A nozzle for the can of engine starter fluid that wouldn't snap off when you drop the can from your wet, icy hands. Not that anyone needs engine starting fluid in the winter, say for use on a recalcitant snow blower or something.

Correction

Never let it be said that I'm unwilling to admit it when I make a mistake. Hell, it happens so seldom, I'm mildly surprised they don't declare a national holiday when it happens. Anyway in the piece I wrote a few days ago regarding a proposed new gun law, I mentioned a proposed tax on the unarmed in Vermont.

It seems the phenomenon of "too good to check" can affect almost anybody, as Jeff Soyer, of Vermont points out.

Fred Maslack did, in fact, while a State Representative, introduce such a bill — in 2000. This was during the run up to the vote to allow civil unions and Maslack wanted to be sure residents of Vermont understood the state’s Constitution. Although a Republican, Maslack was, like most Vermont elected officials, that quirky combination of libertarian values. He also supported a bill in 1996 to legalize medical marijuana.

Anyway, he is no longer serving in the State House.

Thus the story falls into the same category as anything you hear about SB-2099, which was also introduced around 2001, and died in committee. Google is your friend.

Respecting Their Rights

The UN is carping about the use by the US of UAVs to target specific people, saying that this looks too much like organized assassination, you know like the use of a suicide bomber to kill Ms. Bhutto, or renegade soldiers to kill Anwar Sadat.

Philip Alston said that unless the Obama administration explains the legal basis for targeting particular individuals and the measures it is taking to comply with international humanitarian law which prohibits arbitrary executions, “it will increasingly be perceived as carrying out indiscriminate killings in violation of international law.”

Alston, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s investigator on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, raised the issue of U.S. Predator drones in a report to the General Assembly’s human rights committee and at a news conference afterwards, saying he has become increasingly concerned at the dramatic increase in their use, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, since June.

Bummer, dude.

The simple and obvious solution is to make sure that the people targeted by the Hellfire missiles, increasingly Al-Q and Talib leaders, are fully informed of their rights first. This is easily accomplished by printing the famous admonition

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

on the nose of every Hellfire missile in current use. Of course, this will need to be translated into Arabic, Farsi, and 3 or 4 of the local dialects in use along the Afghan-Pakistan border.