My reply to "What's Wrong With Warm Weather"
from the blog
A Few Things Ill Considered

This blog entry tells us that what's bad about global warming, is not the final temperature, but the rate of change of temperature. If the temp changes too fast, then all sorts of bad things happen.

This is essentially a truism. Anything that is too fast is not good, otherwise it wouldn't be "too" fast. Its pretty much impossible to argue with a truism as it is inherently true, but the problem with truisms, is that they also don't tell you anything of value.

The blog could have escaped its truism label if it only tells the point at which fast climate change becomes too fast.

I, on the other hand, will make the conjecture that any climate change rate that has occurred in the last 20,000 years of this planet is a safe climate change rate. We can see in their graph (shown below) that climate changes quite quickly and frequently. So if our current climate were to change with the same rate and frequency, there should be no concern, or do you presume that prehistoric man was altering the climate even then?


So let's look at a particular peak in the graph around 8000 years ago. If you look closely, you'll see that the rise in temperature is about 3 degrees Celsius. I blew up that peak and superimposed a ruler to show you just how wide (how long it lasted) the peak is here:Since each tick mark on the grey line represents 2000 years, I used a ruler that breaks that interval into 20 section. This make each of my ticks represent 100 years, or one century. As you can see the rising edge of the highest peak lasted one century. This equates to a 3 degree rise per century. So according to our planet, a 3 deg/century change is within expected operating parameters. Its not for us to decide whether or not this rate of change is good or bad. All we can say is that this has happened before so it is not out of the ordinary to see it happening again.

Now let's compare this to what's happening today. The IPCC's 4th report states that "Warming in the last 100 years has caused about a 0.74 °C increase in global average temperature." Then in its projection for the next 100 years, the IPCC states that the temperature rise will be from 1.8 °C to 4.0 °C based on its "low" and "high" estimates. Averaging the high and low estimates gives you 2.9 °C/century which is still within the norm. If you don't like my averaging methodology, then consider this: The IPCC lists 6 scenario families and a temperature rise predicition for each. Of the 6, only 2 of them have predicted temperatures over 2.9 °C. Couple this with the fact that world oil supplies are dwindling and that we could run out in less than 100 years means that the worst scenarios like A1F1 (4.0 °C) becomes increasingly less likely to occur (we won't really run out of oil, it'll just not be cost effective anymore).


Now let's look at the period 12,000-10,000 years ago. Doesn't it seem weird that temperature rise occurs before CO2 rise? Here's a closeup with some vertical lines put in to help you align everything.
Notice how the temperature increase starts occurring even before any CO2 increase. Also the temperature peaks before the CO2 peak. If there is a cause and effect relationship between temp and CO2 it must be concluded that temp change cause CO2 change and not the other way around. This also means that there is no historical evidence that CO2 change has caused temperature change on this planet (I'm not saying that it cannot, I'm just saying that it hasn't been shown to us so far in the past 20,000 years).

The proponents of anthropogenic global warming base their argument on two main points. First, historical measurements tell us that CO2 causes global climate change. Second, computer models show us how our temperature will rise if we don't control our carbon emissions. These models are validated against historical data to give them credibility. The problem I see, is that if the historical data doesn't show that CO2 causes climate change, then how can this model show it?

Global Warming: Round 2
It seems that as time goes on, more and more people are believing Al Gore's rendition of global warming. I believe there is a lot of psychology involved in this phenomenon. I say psychology because people's belief aren't grounded on reading actual scientific reports or conducting their own analysis, but on their perception of the people dishing out the information. We know not to trust studies sponsored by the tobacco company on the effects of smoking to lung cancer. We know that we should listen to our doctor when they tell us to eat a healthy diet and exercise. Do we feel the same way when we hear on the news "Researchers discovered..." or "Scientists found ..." on the news? Often times the news media will tell us which scientists are making the claim and how they came about doing it, but would you still believe the report if they didn't?

I'd like to point out the irony of skepticism. When we first heard about global warming we probably had some reservations, but eventually we accepted it because that's what mainstream media has accepted and surely, if most people accept it, then it must be true, right? We didn't really research the data that was out there, we demanded that news media digest it for us and provide us the Cliff's notes. Then when the skeptics voiced their concerns we branded them as heretics. "How dare they challenge mainstream perception!", "The opponents are just spokespersons of big oil". We were immediately skeptical of the skeptics, but we lost all skepticism of the topic at hand.

This brings me to the next point. If only Galileo was here. Galileo was an astronomer in the 1600's who was branded a heretic by the Church because he was a proponent of a solar system where the earth revolves around the sun instead of the sun going around the earth. The church couldn't challenge his theories with science so they would just say that his ideas were absurd and heretical. When people cannot challenge something logically or scientifically, they resort to name calling and non-scientific labellings like "that's stupid" or "only idiot's would believe..." without backing up their argument with any facts. The declaration of stupidity alone seems sufficient for the end of debate. I'm sure all of us are guilty of this phenomena. Haven't you called someone's idea "stupid" and marveled at how they could still keep talking about their idea? You would think to yourself "Why would they keep talking? I told him/her it was a stupid idea to begin with!". We thought the stupidity was so obvious that we did not have to justify that the idea was stupid. This is because we all have an intuitive sense for what is stupid, but our intuition is not always grounded in logical reasoning. Sometimes our intuition comes from what others tell us, like "the 5 second rule" where its okay to eat something that has fallen on the ground for less than 5 seconds. If you're a fan of Mythbusters, you'll know that the number of seconds something is left on the ground has almost no correlation to how many germs it picks up. So if you manage to rescue absorbent $100/lb black truffle mushrooms that fell onto the counter covered with salmonella infested chicken blood within a second, don't let your friends tell you you're stupid for throwing the truffles out. They would be hard pressed to come up with support for their case other than the "5 second rule". This leads me to the point that when people make unsupported claims that something is absurd or stupid, its because they don't really have anything to support their case.

What's my point?
1. Commonly accepted does not mean true.
2. If you have skeptics, be skeptical of what you are supporting. You can only make your case stronger by alleviating their concerns rather than shedding even more skepticism on the skeptics.
3. Challenge those who call you names to support their arguments and avoid the temptation to become a name caller by always supporting your own claims.

We can only progress the discussion on global warming once we can get past the psychology and get to the science of it.

Why Prof. John Searle is Wrong!
In Philosophy we talk about a lot of things like Do we exist? or How do we know that we're alive? At one point, Philosophy and Computer Science met and opened up a whole can of worms. People started asking questions like What is thinking?, Could we tell if our brains really are stuck in a Matrix like in the movie?, and Are we biological machines? The topic that most interested me was Can Machines Ever Think?

The Turing Test
We can't talk about thinking machines without first talking about Alan Turing. Alan Turing was British mathematician often cited as the Father of Computer Science. In fact, the computers we use today are called Turing Machines in computer science lingo. Turing also thought about whether machines would ever think, but before he could do that, he had to answer the question of How can we tell that a machine is thinking? To answer this question, Turing devised a test. Suppose that you had two rooms that you could not look into. In one room there was a person and in another room there was a machine that would try to answer questions like a human would. Then, without know who/what was in each room, another person (the tester) would write some questions on a piece of paper and slide it underneath each door, and whoever/whatever was in the room would try to answer the question in such a way as to seem as human as possible by writing the response on another piece of paper and sliding it back under the door. If the tester was unable to determine which room contained the machine after several rounds of questions then the machine passes the Turing Test and can be deemed intelligent by Turing's standards.

The Chinese Room Argument
John Searle is a Philosophy professor at the Univ. of California, Berkeley who came up with a mental experiment to show that even if you could make a program that would pass the Turing Test, it still couldn't be intelligent because the program is mindlessly following instructions. Searle says that the program would lack intentionality and cognitive states which he believes are requirements to demonstrating intelligence. Here is the original text The argument asks you to pretend that there is a non-Chinese speaker in a closed room. Someone can write a Chinese question, slip it under the door and the guy inside will lookup a bunch of rule books on how to process these symbols into Chinese answers and push them back out under the door.
You can read it yourself, but the main point of the argument is suppose the guy in the room becomes so efficient at processing those rules and producing Chinese answers that to people outside the room, he would appear to be a Chinese speaking person. The Chinese room would then pass the Turing Test, but since the person doesn't understand Chinese and rules by themselves cannot think, we must conclude that Strong AI (or machines that can think at the level that we do) cannot exist.

This, however, is a false conclusion. Whether or not the man inside the room understands Chinese has no bearing on whether the program executed by the man can understand Chinese.

Let me elaborate with a more simple example. Hopefully you still know how to do long multiplication. If you remember, skip to the next paragraph. If you don't remember, you stack the two numbers that you want to multiply on top of one another, then you take the right most digit of the bottom number and multiply that with all the digits of the top number whilst doing the appropriate carry over. This partial product is written below the numbers to be multiplied. Once you're done with the bottom right most digit, you repeat the process with the digit next to it, but write down the partial product offset one digit to the left of the previous partial product. Then when all thats done, you add up all the partial products assuming you consider all the offset digits in the partial products are zero. This sum is the product of the two original numbers... whew!!!

Okay, now you know how to do long multiplication, but do you understand long multiplication? Do you know what the partial products are for or why you got to offset them. Do you know why you have to carry over when multiplying by a single digit? If you can't answer these questions, then you don't understand long multiplication, you only know how to follow the instructions. What if you got really good at following those instructions and were able to do long multiplication in your head, would you be any better at understanding long multiplication? No.

Now here's the pseudo-paradox that Searle wants to convince you of. Let me apply Searle's argument to long multiplication: Suppose you could exhibit the same behavior of someone who understands long multiplication by simply showing that you can compute the answer, but although, you appear to understand long mulitplication, you don't actually understand it, therefore the long multiplication process can never understand long multiplication.

Unfortunately, we know that people are able to do long multiplication without understanding it so this cannot be a paradox. If this is not a paradox, we must conclude that the process does understand long multiplication. Thus, Searle's argument proves nothing.

You're probably saying "Huh? That doesn't make sense" right about now, right? Let me explain how I can compare long multiplication to real human thought.

Cult of the Elitist
The other night when I was watching the Colbert Report, he had on the author of the book Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture, Andrew Keen. Usually I like the authors that come on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report but this time I couldn't help getting exceptionally ticked off about this author.
Keen theorizes that because the Internet allows anyone to produce content and anyone to access that content for free, real art is being trivialized. Real artists cant make money so they get wiped out. Objective internet journalism is thrown out the door because of lying, cherry picking facts, and corporate sponsored bloggers. Additionally, pirating over the internet is preventing traditional content creators from making money.
Despite the flaws in his argument, what really annoyed me was that Keen also believes that we need well-educated people to provide us with the content with which to form our culture. Us pig farmers shouldn't be allowed to define our culture. Does Keen suppose that there's a committee out there carefully mitigating the deluge of media that gets into our heads so that minds don't implode and we all de-evolve into a bunch of monkeys, and that the internet is somehow circumventing this process?
Since the beginning of culture, culture has always and will always be built upon the democratization of ideas. Video killed the radio star, not because people were making videos, but because the people were willing to watch it en masse. Thus, the age of video was born. Did our culture die with MTV and America's Funniest Home Video? Some would say yes, but if that were true the internet wouldn't be able to kill a dead culture now, right? Did the automobile kill our horse-drawn carriage culture? Yes, but it didn't destroy our culture. Our culture has always evolved to accommodate the technologies that we embrace. Even today [despite its environmental effects] the American car culture has become one of the defining aspects of life in the US.
To further prove my point, that culture is essentially the democratization of ideas, lets examine the only times when a culture has successfully been killed. Take for example the ancient Mayans and the Incans. Their cultures were not destroyed until the Spanish annihilated the people's of those cultures. When a society is decimated like various the Native American tribes, the ones that are still alive keep their culture going regardless of their social status or education. If they all start running Indian casinos, then casinos will become part of their culture, even at the dismay of their ancestors nonetheless.
Perhaps Keen isn't really saying that the internet is killing our culture. Maybe he's saying that it's killing traditional media. Of course, how are you gonna sell a book entitled How the Internet Killed Traditional Media? Everybody already knows how. No... you'd have to cast a wider net to make book more evocative so somebody will buy it. So let's say that the internet is killing culture, but really write a book about the internet killing traditional media.

BTW, you can buy Keen's book on the culture killing internet from his own very webpage here:
http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/2006/10/my_book_now_not.html


See the Colbert Report interview below:

Frets on Fire

In the world of Geekdom, there's one phenomenon that's sweeping the nation like the opening of another George Lucas film. The phenomenon is Guitar Hero. A game where even the nerdiest of nerds can play out their rockstar fantasies. The game even includes a controller in the form of a guitar with buttons for frets and a rocking switch that you strum to play the notes. Similar to games like Dance Dance Revolution, you have to hit the right notes as colored markers run down the screen indicating what fret buttons to hold down.

So what's the big deal?
I think everyone is born with an innate desire to be a rocker. Haven't we all seen that rockstar on stage whaling on his guitar with fingers as fast as lightning and then say to yourself, "Damn, I wish I could do that!". The game is allows anyone to experience the joy of hitting that climactic riff without the years of practice needed to learn a real guitar. And unlike a real guitar, you get instant gratification with just a modicum of practice.

Then I realized I had a wife.
Obviously, buying another gadget the size of a guitar that was going to live in the living room isn't an easy sell. I pretty much gave up on my rockstar dreams until one day I saw some YouTube videos of guys playing this Guitar Hero clone called Frets on Fire. The people who made this ingeniously figured out that if you held your keyboard upside-down like a guitar, the F1-F5 keys would be in the perfect position to be used as fret buttons. Plus, the program is open-source (ie free) and you can download a bunch of songs for it and even import the songs from the Guitar Hero game. So now I don't need to keep around a plastic guitar and I can try out hundreds more songs than ever could with the Guitar Hero version. And again,... its free so why not give it a shot.

I finished the Habenaro burger...Again!

and I got to show for it was this lousy bumper sticker.



Man, that was crazy hot.


As part of my company's ritual for welcoming new hires we all go out to a local British pub that serves these ridiculously hot burgers. They gave us a choice between the 'X' and the triple 'X' burger. Being a relative veteran there, I had to go for the XXX.

The burgers came looking innocently enough. Just an open face burger with a little red sauce on the patty and a side of fries. Looks couldn't be more deceiving.

The general suggestion for downing one of these pieces of lava on a bun is to get it down as quickly as possible. However, as soon as I swallow the first bite, my stomach starts flipping out and now I'm fighting an upchuck reflex whilst trying to cram more magma down my throat. 10 seconds in, I've only now started to get into the real saucy parts of the burger. I'm sweating like mad, my throat's starting to constrict, but I'm still trying to swallow big bites. 30 seconds in, I manage to get down half the burger until my pace really slows down. I have to chew each bite a lot more before I can swallow and now the burn is really kicking in. Drinking beer gives only momentary relief otherwise its making me feel a bit fuller with every gulp making it that much harder to force the next bite down. 2 minutes in, i've only managed to get another quarter down. I'm feeling a bit delirious now as the pain is somewhere between unbearable and numb. Its like my tongue has started to give up on telling me this is HOT! The rest of my mouth is still burning and my guts are at a constant state of upset. 5 minutes in and two more bites left. Seeing the end in sight, I shove the remaining bites down as I whip my head left and right to help it go down... Ahhhh, the burn, still intense, but at least I can concentrate on drinking beer from now on.

All in all, it was an entertaining experience. The next day wasn't so bad for me, but one of our newbies had to come in late due to having something diabolical in his gut.

How to do Dr. Phil's job for him
Today I was watching this show where an obsessive husband tries to compensate for a lack of control in his life by maintaining absolute control over his wife. He gets panic attacks when he can't get in touch with her and if she ever speaks to a guy, the husband gets consumed with jealousy. The problem is that this guy is pretty smart, but he's delusional. He seems to be able to convince himself that his compulsive behavior is okay when panic overwhelms him.
The problem is that Dr. Phil wants him to go to a treatment facility that doesn't force him to stay or prevents him from doing any compulsive activity. I don't know what really goes on in there but it appears that he's somehow supposed to just refrain from his compulsive behavior. The guy probably convinces himself that this place is a farce and gets right back into his routine. I don't understand why people like Dr. Phil think they can talk some sense into him. Perhaps, Dr. Phil doesn't think he can either, but boy it sure does make good television to try! The guy thinks he's smarter than most people so if he thinks that he's smarter than the psychiatrists he's not gonna listen to a word they are saying. Then when he does encounter someone more intelligent, his delusions will set in and he'll just convince himself that he's smarter and justify leaving the program.
What I'm trying to say is that help can't really come from outside his head. People can only communicate with the rational side of his head. The problems lie in the irrational side, his irrational fears of losing control, a phobia! Do we ever see this guy treated as if his illness is a phobia? No! The most effective treatment for phobia to keep exposing him to his fears and keep restricting his compulsive behavior, yet they keep letting him believe that his wife will come back to him and they don't keep him from stalking her.
If I was Dr. Phil, I would have given him 2 choices for treatment. One would be faster, but would be increadibly difficult and painful (mentally), but would offer the best chance for saving his marriage or he can take the slow and easy approach that they gave him in the show. Then I say that if he really wanted to change he should take the first option, if he only wanted to do lip-service and jump right back into his old ways, then take the 2nd (What do you think he would agree to on national television?).
What's the first option? I have to warn you that this will sound quite draconian, but with intensity we get faster more direct results. This will involve plunging him into his worst fears. I would have him stripped of all control. He would be put in a straight jacket and tied to a bed. We'd play mind games on him, trying to convince him that his wife has left him, changed her identity and that it would be impossible for him to find her again. They would convince him that he signed away all his legal rights and now they could keep him here as long as they wanted, and that now nobody cares that he's in there. It would be horrendous mental torture to him. His body would probably go into convulsions and maybe even a heart attack and they might have to sedate him several times, but eventually his mind will stop making his body self-destruct and it will realize that the only "control" he really needs is control over his mind.

The Global Warming Myth
Like many of you, I watched Al Gore's presentation An Inconvienent Truth and felt the impending doom that man made greenhouse gases have brought us to. I was all ready to buy a Prius and install some solar panels until I discovered some other documentaries that takes a rigorous look at the evidence used to connect global warming to man made CO2.
Now I don't deny that global warming is happening, I'm saying that man didn't cause global warming. The proponents of man made global warming have egregiously twisted their evidence and cherry-picked their data to lead you to their desired conclusion.

Unfortunately, convincing skeptics is almost impossible in a single blog entry, but I promise if you watch this video in its entirety you will be thoroughly convinced that global warming is a fraud. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6031514559084805348
You can also download the slides for this video which also contains the links to the source of this data for you own verification. Some of the claims that are made in the beginning of this seem dubious (like banning CFC's caused thousands of Europeans to die in a heatwave b/c they couldn't afford the more expensive AC units), but I urge you to get past these initial claims since they do not contribute to the heart of the argument. The video answered all the questions that I could have had, but if you still have some please leave a comment and perhaps I or somebody else will be able to answer it.

Imus the Bigot
As you might have heard on the news, Don Imus, a radio talkshow host, was punished with a two week suspension for calling the Rutger's women basketball team "a bunch of nappy headed hos". Let's face it, America is upset about the "nappy". If he had just said "hos" there wouldn't have been any dilemma. It's pretty interesting how America has gotten all upset over racial related to African Americans. Look at all the anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racial comments he made before this. He certainly used more biggoted comments then, but how dare he use the word "nappy" now?

Don't get me wrong, I agree with most people that say he shouldn't be on the air. I just don't get why this is the tipping point for public outrage. Why should African American racial slurs carry more weight than other racial slurs? Are we racial slur racists?

I think one of the factors is Rev. Al Sharpton. Lately, it seems like he's got nothing better to do than to scour the media looking for something racial that he can spearhead into a riot or something. I believe he'll do pretty much anything that will draw attention to himself from the media, perhaps for another run at the presidency. Yet the irony is that he doesn't have to look very hard to find racial slurs and imagery depicting black people as a negative part of society, he can just pick up a copy of 50 cent's CD. Some people would object to my reasoning with "...but, 50 cent's black, so that's ok". I would counter by saying that by being black, and by being the self appointed representative of black people, he should have the most influence and the most reason to straighten his people first. If racial epithets shouldn't be used to refer to his people then his people should be to first ones to stop using them. Is it not hypocritical to preach one thing to one group of people, and sit idly by while the people you represent make a mockery of your preachings? To drive my point home let me share with you an interesting quote: "Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail". Here, Dr. King is saying that you can't make laws that don't apply to everyone, especially yourselves. Although he's referring to legal laws, does this not apply to social laws too?


I like to talk about Sharpton because I see him as such a waste of valuable potential to the African American civil rights cause. No person, race, or civilization has ever risen up by the continued guilting or pleaing for reparations from a dominating person, race, or civilization. The last thing that anyone who cares about his people would do, would be to foster an attitude of "the white man needs to give me something because I've been oppressed". African Americans will never be judged fairly if they don't pull themselves up with their own drive to become successful. You simply cant end stereotypes that hold true more often than not.

Sharpton should be advocating an ethos of self-reliance, pride in one's culture, the willingness to support your brothers, and a passion for true justice regardless of race. Then again, I can see why Sharpton doesn't want to elevate the status of black people in America. Without a suffering race, you cant claim that you're oppressed. If your race is not oppressed Sharpton can't incite anger and place himself as their liberator. I wonder, if God presented Sharpton with a secret choice (1) racisim would be eliminated in the world, but he would be unknown in the media forever or (2) racisim would continue status quo, but he would depose Jesse Jackson as the sole leader of the African American civil rights leader, ...I think he would pick the later choice. If you read this additional research that I did on him you'll be convinced why.

In my opinion the biggest No-No that Sharpton has done was to pull out the racial card at every court case/police beating where race wasn't even a factor and still try to support the black guy despite the enormous evidence to the contrary. A true leader would be the first chastise a criminal as a disgrace to their people, not make wild accusations in an attempt to bring attention to yourself and sow increased racial discontent while drawing attention away from the facts in hand.

Step 1 to becoming a cheap bastard

My townhome community has its own yahoo group and an interesting post appeared the other day. One of the members was complaining that after setting her trash out on the curb the night before trash pickup day, she would find her trash can would be overflowing with more trash the following morning. It seems like some of the residents won't spend the $25/mo and would rather let their neighbors pick up the tab.

My future workbench

I'm planning to move my hobbies down to the garage (apparently the dining room table is for eat on) so I starting scoping out a place in the garage to fit a workbench. Shopping online didn't turn up anything that would make good use of the space I had so, I figured, why not build my own?
First things first, I had to design it. Most engineers would immediately start up their CAD program, but I didn't want the fork over a couple grand on a overly complicated program that would take me a week to use. Luckily it turns out that Google makes a program thats FREE called
SketchUp that does exactly what I want. One of the neat features is that you can upload your models to share them with all the other SketchUp users. Here's the file for my workbench. Notice that I have casters on the outside. There's a hinge on the wooden flap attached to the casters that allows the wheels to flip up when the table is lifted. This makes the casters extend below the legs of the table, hence movable. When you're done, flip the wheels back and you got 4 sturdy legs to stand on again.

Social Commentary
Leave it to the Brits to show us just how intolerant the south can be.

Shifting the Blame
If you've been following the news, you've probably heard about the issue with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wanting a bigger plane to go from Washington DC to her constituent state of California. Half the nation seems to be in an uproar about this, which is pretty ridiculous to me.
To show just how ridiculouse this is, lets play "Devil's Advocate" for a moment. Let's assume the worst, that Pelosi directly asked for the luxurious C-32 plane they had and wanted to jetset around the country with her campaign financers and her family. Let's assume that she's taking advantage of this so much that the plane is constantly running 24hrs/day, 365 days a year, for the rest of her reign as Speaker of the House of a conservative 40 more years. At $22k/hr thats a lot of money right? Well, despite all that money, it still doesn't match the $8.8 BILLION of CASH that's still unaccounted for in Iraq (<-- this is Military.com not just some liberal website).

Here's an analogy. If my wife came home and said that she wanted to take the $22 toll bridge everyday instead of spending an extra half hour driving around the bay, I would get a little upset. But if I told her that I let $8.8 million go missing in our account, I'm pretty sure that she'll have impunity to use that bridge as often as she would like. This is the exact same ratio that I'm talking about.

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Guess who said that? ...That's right, Jesus himself. It's ironic how the "moral right" are so quick to forget this quote when the opportunity presents itself. I encourage anyone who hasn't asked for something that is better that what they absolutely need to get by to "cast their stone" by putting their comments on this blog (start your comment with "Casting my Stone" so we don't get mixed up with other comments).

If you haven't figured it out by now, the Republican's are lashing out at anything that will take the focus off of themselves. It ridiculous that the same people who are complaining about Pelosi are dead silent when it comes to this $8.8 BILLION. Obviously, they don't really care about the money, they just care about bashing a Democrat/Liberal.

So I say, stop wasting time now and let Pelosi have her plane. First, figure out where the money in Iraq went and how we can get it back, then when that's done have your free-for all with Pelosi. You literally have 40 years to find the money before you need to chastize her.

Nintendo Wii Claims its first victim
A woman participating in a radio contest for a Nintendo Wii died Saturday due to water intoxication (link). The contest entitled "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" involved drinking a cup of water every 15 minutes until without taking a whiz. Whoever is last to go to the bathroom wins.
Apparently, neither the radio station nor the contestants knew how dangerous this could be. They even dismissed a nurse who phoned in her concerns about large water intake. Drinking too much water can dilute the vital sodium/potasium levels in the body to the point where some of your organs cease to work. The woman who died was found dead in her home a few hours after the contest. She said that she did the contest for her children.
I have to say that this is the tragic result of stupidity. Am I being a bit too harsh? Maybe, but people have to realize that anything, taken at high enough doses is pretty much lethal to the human body. That includes H20, which, despite the fact that it makes up 60% of your body is more lethal than a bowl of jalapeno peppers. Maybe if this country put more focus on science instead of "intelligent design" we wouldn't have so many recipients of the Darwin Award.