March 2009 – Page 15 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Polar Bears May Kill the Economy

Those damn polar bears are up to no good. You think they are all cute, but then they go and screw us. Or rather, US Senators are up to no good in the name of polar bears – no good that will very likely get in the way of economic recovery and any efforts to encourage more energy independence.

Last year, the Bush Administration put the polar bear on the threatened species list. We interviewed NRA-ILA’s Darren LaSorte at the Blog Bash about the issue since he works on hunting policy.

As part of the listing, they Administration also said that federal permits could not be held up to lawsuits seeking to stop projects based on their potential threats to polar bears. Now, the Senate has voted to repeal that protection. You want more power plants? Sorry, that might kill a polar bear which might be threatened at some point in the future. You want more oil exploration? Lawsuits won’t be about the actual impact on animals around the exploration site, now they will be about the potential impact on animals thousands of miles away. This should be fun.

Nice Article from the Lancaster Papers

I like this article because it gets the message out to hunters that they are under threat from many of the proposals too.Â Whether Angel Cruz or Bobby Rush realize it or not, they are tremendously useful to the cause, because they introduce bills that go nowhere, but serve as examples that hunters and shooters will not find rescue if they throw high-power competitors and “self-defense whackos” off the lifeboat.

UFO Sightings on the Rise

According to the local news radio station:

Bucks County is the focus of world wide interest in unidentified flying object sightings. That’s according to local UFO enthusiasts who meet monthly in Philadelphia’s Fishtown section.

Bob Gardner is state section director of the Mutual UFO Network — or MUFON. He’s an expert on the Bucks County UFO sightings and a regular attendee of the UFO discussion group at the Germ bookshop on Frankford Avenue.

I think I know who they may be looking for.

Autos Autos Everywhere, and Not a Car to Drive

This is a pretty good pictoral reprentation of the economic downturn as far as auto manufacturers are concerned.Â Lots of cars piling up that no one wants to buy, and the automakers have been churning them out because of the expense involved in shutting down and restarting production lines.

The Danger of Modeling Complex Systems

This is an excellent article from a few weeks ago that describes one of the proximate causes of the current financial crisis.

For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

Read the whole thing.Â I am by no means a mathematician, but I work for a company that does mathematical modeling of a complex system (ligands binding to proteins), so I have some experience with the benefits and deficiencies of such systems, as well as some experience with what happens when the uninitiated try to understand these models.Â Let’s just say there’s a strong tendency to celebrate the benefits and fail to appreciate the limitations.

I think there’s a lot of this when it comes to global warming, too, which is another complex system that people have attempted to model.Â It’s always a good idea that when anyone claims to have a mathematical model of a complex system that is simply revolutionary, without any significant limitation of caveat, drag him into the nearest bathroom and beat him senseless, before he destroys civilization as we know it.Â Entire industries have been ruined by such people, who are seldom the people who actually developed the models, and understand the limitations.Â Finance is not the only industry, just the latest.

Putting Obama in Perspective

Karl Rove has a very interesting graph posted over on his web site, which shows that in terms of approval rating, Obama isn’t actually doing that particularly well compared to other presidents.

TD’s Wood

Ruger got TD’s brand new No.1 back to him, and I have to agree, his wood is fine.Â This is the gun he bought with the proceeds from selling me his FAL.Â It was bought through a local gun shop here, in fact.Â I talked him down in price a little bit, and in exchange for the favor, Bitter agreed to go to the local dealer and pre-inspect TD’s wood.Â What wasn’t apparent was the hairline fracture.Â Bitter, sadly, is not an expert wood inspector.

So good on Ruger for replacing with such a fine specimen.Â We do sincerely wish TD enjoys many days of quality big bore action with his new toy.

Commie Hordes At Bay (For Now)

Last night I moved the Blog Bash, The Bitch Girls, PAGunRights and soon to be Countertop’s blog off of Dreamhost and onto my server.Â I am unimpressed by Dreamhost’s lack of concern about a security breech on one of their systems.Â They were unable to help me track down how the hackers got in, because they only keep logs going back five days, and they dumped their shell kit in there a week and a half ago.Â Was it a weakness in WordPress?Â One of the plugins?Â A PHP weakness?Â Apache vulnerability?Â I’ll never know.

Dreamhost only charges like ten dollars a month, which means if they have to spend a few hours to help you with a security problem or a technical problem, they aren’t making any money off you.Â Bad incentives.Â One reason I’ve been self-hosted from the beginning is that I have total control over my server and security environment.Â I can make sure everything is set up securely, that the versions are all current, that mod-security is running on Apache, and that my logs go back a month instead of five days.

Quality hosting is expensive, and it you want to have an environment that’s difficult for hackers, you either have to do it yourself, or pay good money for someone who knows what they are doing to do it for you.

Obama Voters Kicked Out of Hunters Ed

Obama voters are exactly the people we need to reach, which makes this unfortunate:

Thirteen-year-old Lane Dunkley just wanted to go hunting with his grandfather.
What he got was a lecture on politics.

[…]

But when father and son arrived at the lesson, the volunteer instructor, Kell Wolf, asked if any of the students voted for President Barack Obama.

Reddy, a transplanted Californian â€” and former Marine â€” raised his hand.

According to Reddy and others in the room, Wolf called Obama “the next thing to the Antichrist” and ordered Reddy and Dunkley from the room. When Reddy refused, Wolf said he would not teach “liberals” and would cancel the course if Reddy didn’t leave.

So Reddy and Dunkley left, as did a few others.

I can sympathize.Â People who fled California because because the state has been made difficult to live or do business in, who vote for a guy who wants to make every corner of America just like California?Â It’s frustrating.Â There’s dozens of places today that are facing this phenomenon, and the natives are the ones who suffer for it.

But what if Lane Dunkley discovered he really enjoyed hunting with Grandad.Â What if Grandad, likely being a native Oklahoman, could have perhaps talked some sense into the boy on a hunting trip?Â The only way to make people interested in preserving your way of life is to make them understand it, and you can’t do that by excluding outsiders from it.Â I understand how Kell Wolf is feeling, but he’s being short sighted.Â The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation did the right thing.

It’s Raining Canadian Geese in Pennsylvania

As if we don’t have enough of them, we don’t really need the sky to open up, and Canadian Geese fall from it.Â Next thing you know, it’ll rain fish.