By Steve Erbach on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 3:52 PM

The perfect answer to World Jump Day, the Green Hannukia Campaign, Gas Outs, and Earth Hour: Carbon Belch Day, June 12th!

Discover just how big a carbon footprint you can make by using the Carbon Belch Day Calculator.  I weighed in at 192 lbs. of carbon that I'll belch into the atmosphere on that glorious day.  (The American average is 41 lbs!)

Then sign the Carbon Belch Day petition.  Finally purchase a "Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Friday, May 16, 2008 4:42 AM

All you can do is laugh:

Obesity contributes to global warming: study

Thu May 15, 2008 7:03pm EDT
 
By Michael Kahn

GENEVA (Reuters) - Obesity contributes to global warming, too.

Obese and overweight people require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat, and the problem will worsen as the population literally swells in size, a team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine says.

This adds to food shortages and higher energy prices, the school's researchers Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts wrote in the journal Lancet on Friday.

"We are all becoming heavier and it is a global responsibilit ... Read More »

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By Steve Erbach on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 6:52 PM

This story made local news on Monday:

Boy suffers burns in blowtorch game

May 12, 2008

MANITOWOC — A 14-year-old boy was hospitalized Saturday with burns on more than a quarter of his body after a blowtorch game with another teenage boy, authorities said.

The injured boy, who was not named, was sent to Columbia St. Mary's Hospital in Milwaukee, said Capt. Mark Rusboldt of the Manitowoc Fire Department.

Rusboldt said firefighters found the boy in the garage of a residence with burns to his back, head, face, both arms and hands.

The injured boy and another teen apparently used spray cans as blowtorches and would use them on each other, Rusboldt said. The other teen was not injured.

When I heard that story on the radio Monday morning I got to thinking about how this kid is going to live the rest of his life.  Every ... Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Monday, May 12, 2008 9:12 PM

In keeping with The Town Crank's designation as part of the Read the Bills coalition, I'd like to present this latest offering by DownsizeDC.org, a bewildering account of behind-the-scenes budget maneuvering and CYA.

D o w n s i z e r - D i s p a t c h

---

In 2005 Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska championed a $10 million earmark for a highway interchange. The earmark appeared in an 835-page transportation bill called SAFETEA-LU. Rep. Young was the man behind Alaska's infamous $233 million "Bridge to Nowhere," so this sounds like nothing unusual for him, except that . . .

• The project wasn't in Alaska, but as far away as possible, in the Florida district of Republican Rep. Connie Mack.

•   Mack and other local ... Read More »
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By Steve Erbach on Monday, May 12, 2008 5:39 PM

I caught our son, Sam (on the left in the gray t-shirt), sparring -- well, posing as if he were sparring -- with his friend, Vinny.  They use weapons made from PVC pipe, foam insulation, and mucho duct tape.

I could not get on-camera our next-door neighbor, a retired Marine captain, who has sparred a few times with the boys.  He was retired out of the Marine Corps with severe bone cancer.  He now gets around with a cane, but he is a formidable sparring opponent nonetheless.  He uses an unpadded boken or bokken, a wooden sword used for practice in the martial arts.  You can try to outmaneuver him if you'd care to, but he's going to split you from chin to nether regions if you get cocky.

Just a fun time ... Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Sunday, May 11, 2008 7:03 AM

You'd think that federal programs (as Joseph Sobran says, anything called a "program" is unconstitutional) would at least be more carefully constructed than, say, a water plant in Appleton or a steam plant in Menasha.  Not so.

The federal student loan program was fiddled with last fall because the lenders were making too much money.  So, after the lenders decided to scale back their student loan offerings because they couldn't make as much money off of them, there were fewer student loans available.  Now we're being treated to the spectacle of the federal government "bailing out" the very same lenders it punished for making too much money.

This is how government works.  The Wall Street Journal has an excellent editorial on this topic:

Read More »

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By Steve Erbach on Saturday, May 10, 2008 9:44 AM

For the millions of programmers out there,
this book speaks to YOU!

Mr. Smolin's book isn't for the Sergei Brins or the Linus Torvalds of the world. If you think that the author is going to reveal the most sure-fire software development environment that will have the greatest chance of acceptance in the marketplace, you'd better look elsewhere. Actually, there IS no elsewhere because there is no such source that can deliver o ... Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Friday, May 09, 2008 5:37 AM

How concerned are you about food safety?

(published 12-May-2008, Appleton Post-Crescent -- published portions in bold-italics)

 

How concerned could I be when I've got all these wonderful, kind-hearted politicians and safety mavens who'll see to it that I never have even the remotest chance of putting anything unhealthful into my mouth?  Restaurant maitre-d's will have those little fat pincher doohickies that measure my body mass index, so after leaving a red welt on my love handles, they'll have Victor and Bruno show me the error of my ways while throwing me out on my ear.  I'll be prevented from eating anything that could possibly do me any harm if consumed in mass, lab-rat-gagging q ... Read More »

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By Steve Erbach on Thursday, May 08, 2008 4:43 PM

This message from DownsizeDC.org is important enough, I think, to re-publish in its entirety:

D o w n s i z e r - D i s p a t c h

---

Quote of the Day:

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves."
-- Harriet Tubman

Subject: A Day of Infamy & Inspiration

Saturday is an anniversary. May 10, 2005 was a day that will live in infamy. On that date the Senate passed the REAL ID Act.

No Senate majority ever intended this outcome. We had defeated REAL ID in the Senate twice before. After the second vote the Senate declined to vote again.

The White House and the House Republican leadership got around this by inserting the bill ... Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Monday, April 14, 2008 6:10 AM

That's how one wag put it in a comment to this story from Scientific American. I heartily agree with him (emphasis in article mine):

U.S. Will Approve New Nuclear Reactors

British official says she's been informed the U.S. will approve at least three new nuclear power plants

By David Biello

One of the U.K.'s top nuclear officials said today that she was told the U.S. will okay plans to build the first nuclear power plants since the accident at Three Mile Island nearly three decades ago. Lady Barbara Thomas Judge, chair of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, said that the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission informed her that the NRC w ... Read More »

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By Steve Erbach on Monday, April 14, 2008 5:26 AM

Reader Reaction Forum: Will gas prices cause you to curb summer travels?

(published 14-Apr-2008, Appleton Post-Crescent)

I hitchhike more, drive through yellow lights very fast, and I put the patron saint of increased gas mileage on the dash. Then I hear the E85 ads on the radio: "We're helping make a cleaner world for everyone." Oh, spare me! Without the subsidies, how many farmers do you think would grow corn for ethanol? How brilliant to subsidize corn for burning! Less food for everyone! You've noticed your grocery bills going up? The politicians natter on about helping the poor, while at the same time dishing out ethanol subsidies to get farmers to divert more of their crops to make ethanol because it's "better for the environment." Once it all goes to ethanol, the environment should be saved, right? Of course, we'll all die of starvation. But before that happens we'll re-subsidize corn for food ... but then ethanol prices ... Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Saturday, April 12, 2008 3:34 AM

From Downsize DC, this message from one of their frequent newsletters:

Did Congress ban wireless internet networks last week?

According to John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine, it did. He goes into detail in his article, Onerous New Law to Phase Out Wi-Fi:

• The bill, with the pretentious title Telecommunications Restructuring Act, passed with little or no debate.
• T ... Read More »
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By Steve Erbach on Tuesday, April 08, 2008 6:41 AM

By Steve Erbach on Friday, April 04, 2008 4:53 AM

That's Carla Howell, chairman of the Small Government Committee.

It's beginning again in Massachusetts, the site of the beginning of the American Revolution. Remember the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre, and Paul Revere's ride? The kind of people that threw off the shackles of the British in the 18^th century are rising up again in the 21^st.
... Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Monday, March 31, 2008 5:16 PM

I replied to a post on an Amazon "climate change forum" subtitled "What should we do to mitigate climate change?". Here's the original post:

Initial post: Mar 11, 2008 12:44 AM PDT
John Croft says:

Climate change is the biggest problem facing the world. March 29th is the time of "Earth Hour" where cities around the world are encouraged to draw attention to turning off lights for one hour. It began in Sydeny last year and 24 cities worldwide have officially signed on.

Does such changes reeally make a difference?

James Lovelock in Gaia's Revenge suggests that it is already too late to prevent a major disaster, and that by this time next ... Read More »

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By Steve Erbach on Thursday, March 06, 2008 5:57 AM

 

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

 

By Steve Erbach on Friday, February 22, 2008 10:44 AM

As you may have heard, the Aegis-class USS Lake Erie fired one missile at the "dying spy satellite" and scored a direct hit. That is pretty sharp gun-slinging. The squawking from the Chinese and the Russians only underscores how much of an achievement it was. I suppose that the Chinese have more cause to be chagrined as they already destroyed a satellite much higher up last year.

I was a bit bemused by the public statement of the spokesman for an outfit called the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance:

The factual reality of using deployed missile defenses to destroy a falling satellite or a ball ... Read More »

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By Steve Erbach on Sunday, February 17, 2008 12:17 PM

You've heard about the U.S. spy satellite that's headed towards the ground. As Edison Carter used to say in "Max Headroom", what I wanna know is this: why is it that news stories these days have all got to have a scary health threat angle? Here's what I'm talking about:

One shot. That's all the military hopes it will take to bring down a dying, out-of-control, school bus-sized U.S. spy satellite loaded with toxic fuel and on a collision course with Earth.

As if a school bus-sized satellite travelling at 17,000 miles an hour landing on your house isn't enough of a worry!

Military and administration officials said the satellite is carrying 1,000 pounds of hydrazine, a fuel that could injure or even kill people who are near it when it h ... Read More »

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By Steve Erbach on Friday, February 15, 2008 12:09 PM

(Letter to the editor, published 17-Feb-2008, Appleton Post-Crescent)

Presidential primaries are the only elections where you've really got a choice. Last fall, with 16 candidates, I knew that the candidate I preferred was someone I could vote for without holding my nose.

When my guy was asked a question during the TV debates, he answered it immediately and then went on to explain his answer. But highly trained TV interviewers pounce on a "Yes" or "No" answer. They had to have been pleased to be able to interrupt the explanation -- he gave his answer, didn't he? -- so that one of the "star" candidates could throw in his two cents. When thrown into the piranha tank of a televised debate, it's best to dissemble, hedge, demur, equivocate, back-and-fill, joke, divert, and dance rather than answer a question forthrightly.

TV producers aren't interested in substance. Their principal driving motiva ... Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 5:05 AM

"Dedicated to Peacefully Disarming Fuzzy Math", the web site called Weapons of Math Destruction Comics was founded in 2006. The site posts a new anti-Fuzzy-Math comic every week. Just the thing for reminding us that professional educators (ahem!) are only in business because of huge public subsidies for compulsory matriculation.

Here's the latest (6-Feb-2008) comic:

By Steve Erbach on Monday, February 04, 2008 6:11 AM

Several Israeli soldiers were suspended for being politically incorrect in the presence of Palestinian shepherds. The form their incorrectness took was mooning. The incorrectness was decried by an Arab-Israeli member of the Israeli parliament, Ahmed Tibi:"The soldiers frustrated with the failure of the Lebanon war could finally make a victory sign by showing their posteriors to unarmed Palestinians."

Somehow this doesn't move me. Perhaps I'm anti-Arab. My first thought, however, was that soldiers are trained to kill their enemies. Palestinians haven't exactly been friendly to the Israelis over the decades. Mooning seems like a quite non-violent way of showing disapprobation.

But now, I suppose, the Israeli army is reduced to performing cop-on-the-beat type functio ... Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Sunday, February 03, 2008 7:48 PM

This may seem like a joke – and the Smoking Gun article claims that it'll be "dead on arrival" – but you're going to see more and more of these attempts to control how we eat:

Mississippi Pols Seek To Ban Fats

New bill would make it illegal for restaurants to serve the obese

FEBRUARY 1--Mississippi legislators this week introduced a bill that would make it illegal for state-licensed restaurants to serve obese patrons. Bill No. 282, a copy of which you'll find below, is the brainchild of three members of the state's House of Representatives, Republicans W. T. Mayhall, Jr. and John Read, and Democrat Bobby Shows. The bill, which is likely dead on arrival, proposes that the state's Department of Health establish weight criteria after ... Read More »

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By Steve Erbach on Sunday, February 03, 2008 7:37 PM

This story today got me to thinking about an aspect of the imminent Universal Health Care I hadn't considered before:

Clinton health plan may mean tapping pay

By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer Sun Feb 3, 11:40 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday she might be willing to garnish the wages of workers who refuse to buy health insurance to achieve coverage for all Americans.

The New York senator has criticized presidential rival Barack Obama for pushing a health plan that would not require universal coverage. Clinton has not always specified the enforcement measures she would embrace, but when pressed on ABC's "This Week," she said: "I think there are a number of mec ... Read More »

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By Steve Erbach on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 5:53 PM

By Steve Erbach on Saturday, December 29, 2007 5:09 PM

I heard both from the local Fox Valley Ron Paul Meetup group and from Downsize DC that Ron Paul was to be excluded from the January 6th Republican debates:

According to the New Hampshire State Republican Party and an Associated Press report, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul will be excluded from an upcoming forum of Republican candidates to be broadcast by Fox News on January 6, 2008.

So, using the handy link provided to me by Downsize DC, I wrote to Mr. Chris Wallace, the moderator of the debate:

Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Wednesday, December 26, 2007 2:39 PM

More dialog on the 10-year-old girl arrested for using a steak knife on her lunch. I've corresponded with a group of friends on this topic and here's what's been said recently:

December 19

Steve,

100 incidents is a lot to research and a lot to read. But is the number significant? 100 by itself means little. You'd have to know if this represents 1%, 10%, or 90% of the times a student was caught on campus with a 'weapon' before you could say 100 is meaningful.

YMCA, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, I would think , being private organizations, would not be under the same proscriptions as a public entity, and could more easily disregard an absolute policy. So that comparison may not be fair.

Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Wednesday, December 19, 2007 7:48 PM

Should nativity scenes be displayed on government property during the Christmas season?

(published 24-Dec-2007, Appleton Post-Crescent)

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". The key phrase is "free exercise". Nothing prohibits, say, Skokie, IL, from erecting a huge menorah for Hanukkah. How lawyers figure that city governments shouldn't have "free exercise" is beyond me. The Green Bay nativity scene kerfuffle escalated when a Wiccan display was vandalized. (Personally I liked the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" idea, but that's just me.) Now the mayor wants only "legitimate" religions to erect displays. There's a Constitutional issue for you: How do you define a "legitimate" religion? Then came the standard over-reaction. Council VP, Chris ... Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 6:18 AM

I mean, enough of arresting 10-year-olds in public schools? This young girl brought leftover steak for lunch and a steak knife. She began to eat her lunch using the knife properly and ... I can't go on. Here's the story:

Knife At Lunch Gets 10-Year-Old Girl Arrested At School

OCALA, FL -- A 10-year old Ocala girl brought her lunch to school and a small kitchen knife to cut it. She now faces a felony charge after being arrested. The school and the sheriff's office disagree on the reason for the arrest.

School officials say the 5th grader was brown-bagging it. She brought a piece of steak for her lunch, but she also brought a steak knife. That's when deputies were called.

Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Thursday, December 13, 2007 6:30 AM

On Sunday, December 16th, tens of thousands of Ron Paul supporters will donate $100 each to raise another huge chunk of money for his campaign.

Vote for Ron Paul in the Republican primary in your state. Check Ron Paul's site for the date and requirements for voting.

By Steve Erbach on Wednesday, December 12, 2007 8:06 PM

Odd, no? But it's a site with all sorts of nifty items for web sites.

Read More »