Unless the blades of this airplane propellor can defy gravity and float, the iPhone's camera totally distorted reality with this picture. How did this happen?
I favor the concept of the IPhone warping space myself. There's probably an app for that...

J.

No way.

Besides, isn't there some law stating that you've got to be dead before you can be on a stamp or bank note?

J.

I always wondered how the USB symbol came about...

J.

EPA Considering Banning Lead Ammunition | Snowflakes in Hell

Are the gloves coming off? The Obama Administration has, until now, been reluctant to antagonize gun owners. Perhaps now that his popularity is reaching new lows, he’s looking to appeal to an important part of his green base by beating up on gun owners and shooters. Having utterly failed to eliminate the Second Amendment by hook, now it would seem he’s proceeding to do it by crook; by demonizing gun owners and the shooting sports as environmental devils. Let’s hope this is about as successful as the President’s other endeavors.

Yeah. Right....

J.

World's Largest Amateur Space Rocket Set To Launch

Serious awesome going on there...

J.

Went to see this a couple of years back with the little guy - VERY impressive, even on a gray November day. I'm not surprised it's showing problems with corrosion - though I would have thought they'd be paying attention to that since day one.

Metal, water, time... what could possibly go wrong?

J.

Not that anyone ever has a problem with THAT, he said, whistling and looking around guiltily...

J.

How did we get to the point where many people feel that the America they have known is being replaced by a very different kind of country, with not only different kinds of policies but also very different values and ways of governing?

Something of this magnitude does not happen all at once or in just one administration in Washington. What we are seeing is the culmination of many trends in many aspects of American life that go back for years. In pretty much every system there's excess items that don't directly affect the functioning of the system, but may impact how well that system performs its primary purpose.

For example - a 747. You don't really need all that stuff in the seatback pockets, do you? It's just a slight impact on the customer - and can save weight with its removal. And how about the interior furnishings? They're weight that can be discarded, all the plastics used to cover the walls, and provide overhead bins for luggage and stuff. And who really needs padded seats? Go for military-style webbing. Sure, it's not as comfortable, but think of the weight you'll save. Galley? Who needs that? It's just excess weight. Give each passenger a bottle of water and a bag of nuts on boarding. And why so many lavatories? One should be enough - the extra weight should be eliminated. Yes, it'll be hard to take care of 300 passengers with it - but they're still getting to their destinations, aren't they?

Sure. But you've taken something relatively luxurious and comfortable and turned it into an austere, unpleasant experience. (Not that flying commercial these days is any great thing in the first place...) About the only way you could make it worse would be to strip out the seats and make people sit on the floor, then turn the heating down to conserve fuel. (Yes, I know the airco systems run off engine bleed air and provide the pressurization needed to keep the passengers alive. Work with me here...)

But there comes a tipping point where people refuse to cooperate with what's being done to them. Would YOU routinely fly on an airline that treated its customers as above? Likely not - if you didn't have to.

Seems like for decades the left's done what it can to cast a pall over the notion that the US is a fine, exceptional place. Where their policies are implemented on a large scale, disaster seems to follow. (See Detroit, and California.) But it's never THEIR fault - that California has power problems, or Detroit's essentially collapsed as a functional city, or that the programs designed to 'help' the urban poor have created an almost permanent underclass of people for whom 'social justice' seems to demand that everyone out of that level be reduced to it.

It's almost like they see something great that they didn't build - and have to destroy it.

What strange times we live in. I think we'll survive it - but it's not going to be fun, and there's going to be people fighting every step of the way to keep improvements from happening.

But I think there's going to be more who are looking at the 'progressive' movement and seeing it for what it is - simply another power-hungry group that doesn't give a damn about the consequences of their desired programs, as long as they can lord it over the vast unwashed peasantry that doesn't have the power and influence they do.

J.

Looks like they're determined to be peaceful, all right. They're going to want a piece of Iraq, a piece of Afghanistan, and just maybe a piece of the Sudatenland... that's how it starts, and we know the ending of it, don't we?

J.

Let me know if you're interested, and we'll work out the details. I'm working on an overall outline now...

J.

$50 Barbie Video-Girl camera... with duracells in the thigh muscles for power (and get your mind out of the gutter when it comes to the USB connection)

Versus

The Canon 7D.

Actually, the $50 cam isn't anywhere near as bad as you might think...

And the hot shoes were stylin...

J.

Forewarned is four-armed, or something like that....

Haven't run across anything like this myself, but it's good to know what to look for.

J.

MILWAUKEE (AP) - For students entering college this fall, e-mail is too slow, phones have never had cords and the computers they played with as kids are now in museums.
The Class of 2014 thinks of Clint Eastwood more as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry urging punks to "go ahead, make my day." Few incoming freshmen know how to write in cursive or have ever worn a wristwatch.
These are among the 75 items on this year's Beloit College Mindset List. The compilation, released Tuesday, is assembled each year by two officials at this private school of about 1,400 students in Beloit, Wis.
The list is meant to remind teachers that cultural references familiar to them might draw blank stares from college freshmen born mostly in 1992.Sigh. Ain't it the truth?

J.

(CNN) -- New York's Staten Island was broiling under a life-threatening heat wave and borough President James Molinaro was seriously concerned about the area's Little League baseball players.

It was last July's Eastern heat wave and Consolidated Edison was responding to scattered power outages as electricity usage neared record highs.
So, authorities followed Molinaro's suggestion to cancel that night's Little League games, which were to be played under electricity-sucking stadium lights.
"Number one, it was a danger to the children that were playing out there in that heat, and secondly it would save electricity that people would need for air conditioning in their homes," said Molinaro, who'd been forced to sleep at his office that night because of a blackout in his own neighborhood.Why don't we build more POWER PLANTS?

Oh, wait - we can't do that because we're parasitical life forms on the earth, and should all just get by with what Mother Gaia gives us.

(Look how well that's working for California...)

If you have a shortage of something, you make more of it if you can. What's so darn hard about this?

J.

Recently, though, the dream has been evaporating. Between 2003 and 2007, California state and local government spending grew 31 percent, even as the state’s population grew just 5 percent. The overall tax burden as a percentage of state income, once middling among the states, has risen to the sixth-highest in the nation, says the Tax Foundation. Since 1990, according to an analysis by California Lutheran University, the state’s share of overall U.S. employment has dropped a remarkable 10 percent. When the state economy has done well, it has usually been the result of asset inflation—first during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, and then during the housing boom, which was responsible for nearly half of all jobs created earlier in this decade.

Since the financial crisis began in 2008, the state has fared even worse. Last year, California personal income fell 2.5 percent, the first such fall since the Great Depression and well below the 1.7 percent drop for the rest of the country. Unemployment may be starting to ebb nationwide, but not in California, where it approaches 13 percent, among the highest rates in the nation. Between 2008 and 2009, not one of California’s biggest cities outperformed such traditional laggards as New York, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia in employment growth, and four cities—Los Angeles, Oakland, Santa Ana, and San Bernardino–Riverside—sit very close to the bottom among the nation’s largest metro areas, just slightly ahead of basket cases like Detroit. Long a global exemplar, California is in danger of becoming, as historian Kevin Starr has warned, a “failed state.”One of the things that's puzzled me is how, when the projections of economic planners don't seem to materialize and the anticipated benefits of 'ecologically minded' changes don't appear the first thought isn't to go "Okay, this isn't working, let's change back to how things were and start changing things slowly to see what works and what doesn't" but instead is "Okay, we've got to do MORE to get the anticipated benefits."

The second engine that could supposedly keep California humming was the so-called green economy. Michael Grunwald recently wrote in Time, for example, that venture capital, high tech, and, above all, “green” technology were already laying the foundation of a miraculous economic turnaround in California. Though there are certainly opportunities in new energy-saving technologies, this is an enthusiasm that requires some serious curbing. One recent study hailing the new industry found that California was creating some 10,000 green jobs annually before the recession. But that won’t heal a state that has lost 700,000 jobs since then.

At the same time, green promoters underestimate the impact of California’s draconian environmental rules on the economy as a whole. Take the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, which will force any new development to meet standards for being “carbon-neutral.” It requires the state to reduce its carbon-emissions levels by 30 percent between 1990 and 2020, virtually assuring that California’s energy costs, already among the nation’s highest, will climb still higher. Aided by the nominally Republican governor, the legislation seems certain to slow any future recovery in the suffering housing, industrial, and warehousing sectors and to make California less competitive with other states. Costs of the act to small businesses alone, according to a report by California State University professors Sanjay Varshney and Dennis Tootelian, will likely cut gross state product by $182 billion over the next decade and cost some 1.1 million jobs.

It’s sad to consider the greens such an impediment to social and economic health. Historically, California did an enviable job in traditional approaches to conservation—protecting its coastline, preserving water and air resources, and turning large tracts of land into state parks. But much like the public-sector unions, California’s environmental movement has become so powerful that it feels free to push its agenda without regard for collateral damage done to the state’s economy and people. With productive industry in decline and the business community in disarray, even the harshest regulatory policies often meet little resistance in Sacramento.

The Greens, for all their insistance on a clean environment, ignore the fact that people have to be able to EXIST in that environment. There may be sections of Detroit, for example, which are quite green and lovely - but unsafe for human habitation. And it looks like California is headed in the same direction...

It's an interesting problem - balancing the needs of an economy with the needs of an ecology. When either takes over, it causes problems for the other. It's got to be a working symbiosis - but so far, it looks like the green ideology is ascendant... which will likely kill the host it's dependent on.

That's a shame, really. I'd like to visit Disneyland again sometime... good lord, has it really been over 40 years?

J.