Rest in Peace

Brian Jacques just died.

I didn't read a lot of his books, but about third grade I bought Salamandastron and read that thing until it fell apart. I'm still half in love with the Badger lord-- just a very strong character.

Saving The GOP: A Big Tent Strategy

First, we have to stop our opposition to abortion.  This will make women join us.

Second, we need to stop our opposition to race-based discrimination, AKA "equal outcomes, not equal opportunity."  This will make blacks join us.

Third, we need to stop our opposition to illegal immigration.  This will make hispanics join us.

Fourth, we need to stop our support of socially conservative morality.  This will make homosexuals, young people and alternative religion folks join us.

Fifth, we need to stop supporting gun rights.  This will make criminals and Hollywood join us.

Sixth, we need to stop talking about being fiscally conservative.  If we give poor people money, they will join us.

Seventh, we need to stop considering the US military as a military unit, and focus on making it social works with awesome outfits.  Then everyone will join us!

It's fool proof!

(Sadly, only #6 and #7 have I not seriously heard a variation of among 'solid' conservatives-- and both of those I've hear from moderates.)

UPDATE:

I can't believe I forgot education, public sector unions and environmental power grabs!

Federal level education because that will help America be strong, public sector unions because they are powerful, and anything that's labeled as for the environment either to be on the safe side, or for the children!

BMI Required

Gee, that didn't take long.

If you don't know about the BMI, it's a rather inaccurate measure of "who is fat" that got started off of an English guy trying to figure out what the totally average man would be like, and figure out what the relation between a person being a foot shorter and their weight might be.

You know that lovely electronic health record that Porkulus'09 gives the government?

The obesity-rating regulation states that every American's electronic health record must: “Calculate body mass index. Automatically calculate and display body mass index (BMI) based on a patient’s height and weight.”

The law also requires that these electronic health records be available--with appropriate security measures--on a national exchange.

From Common Sense Political Thought.

I've heard BMI defended as being fairly accurate for people of average build who are sedentary-- no sports, physical activity or regular exercise. I don't know anyone that fits that category, so I don't know. I do know that my uncles on one side were all considered "obese" by the BMI when they were dense enough that they literally had trouble floating with their face above water in a still pool. (All went Navy, all did farm work from age 14 or so, sports, look like extras from LotR, etc.)

Similar Notion, Different Direction

Darwin Catholic has a very nice post about the issues with ethnic nationalism-- a lot of the stuff sounds similar to thoughts I've had and posted about back on the sleep-musing post.

Example:

Thus, for instance, those who oppose the state of Israel often point out that Jews were a minority in the Holy Land prior to 1948, as if the question of the ethnic make-up of the region at that particular moment in history should settle the question of who controls the land in perpetuity. But, of course, the history of nearly any region is the history various cultural and ethnic groups moving in, gaining dominance, and fading in their turn. England, for instance, was invaded by Romans, by the Angles, Jutes and Saxons, by the Danes, by the Normans. Greece and Asia Minor have a long history of back-and-forth stretching back into mythology with the Trojan War, and ending with the mutual expulsion by modern Greece and Turkey of each other's ethnic groups in the '20s -- ending at least 2800 years of Aegean polyglot history with the stroke of a modern border-drawing pen.

(Almost everything he writes is this good....)

Re-Use! It's Better Than Recycling!

K, this is just an excuse to share some nifty things, even if reuse is more effective than recycling.

22 Manly Ways to Reuse Altoid tins.

Less manly:

Emergency sewing kit

assorted hand needles
silk thread around paper/cardboard or a few spare bobbins
folding scissors
velcro sticky-backs
a selection of the most common buttons (like the spare ones from new shirts)
tiny tube of super glue.

Female Emergency kit

Tampons (the new small ones like the pearl can fit a few)
Panty-liner
selection of pain killers

Toddler Distraction Kit

Have several of the small Altoids tins, put different kinds of dry cereal in them. Hand them to the toddler one at a time.

To make up for the unmanly ones, here's the fire video from the article at the start that you really should look at:

The Power Of Water Is Great

-and by "great" I don't mean "nifty," I mean "freaking terrifying."

One spring my family drove to town, a pretty short trip-- at one point, there's a ditch above the road.  When we went in, there was no water spilling, no indication of trouble, it was fine.

We hit the grocery store, visited a little, and drove back-- but the blacktop was 75% gone when we came around a corner, and in the five minutes it took us to get out, station folks to stop anyone from rear ending us and back up to the top of the hill so we could turn around, it was entirely gone.  The ditch got plugged.

Not a "lot" of water, if you picture an oil barrel on its side, it might fill the bottom quarter and a leaf on top might go a foot every second or two, but it went over the blacktop, dug out the rocky soil under it, and collapsed the road under their combined weight in a gash that was five feet at the narrowest point.

I also grew up around a lot of dams (Shasta dam was COOL!-- I don't remember where it was, but I also remember being told about places where my uncles had boated out and gotten pictures of houses under the water as children) so I got in the habit of trying to figure out what the area looked like before the dam was their, see where weak points were, that kind of thing.

All of this to get the point of saying: this visual is incredibly terrifying.

Nasser, in his great wisdom, decided to build a high dam across the Nile River at Aswan. The lake behind it holds 111 cubic kilometers of water.

Now, most of the population of Egypt lives in a rather narrow valley on the banks of the Nile. This valley is actually a canyon for a good part of its length.

In a war, the Aswan Dam would be an obvious target: it supplies much of Egypt's water and power.

What happens if someone drops the dam suddenly? Well, all of that 111 cubic-kilometer lake that happens to be above the level of the main river surges downstream, a mighty hydraulic ram, erasing everything for many, many kilometers downstream. Villages, towns, cities, people ... millions would perish. The only parts of the river that would be mostly safe would be in the Delta, where the terrain fans out, and even there the surge of water would probably do some damage.

From Jordan179.