New Year's Eve

Congratulations!

If you are reading this you have (or nearly have) successfully completed the calendar year 2008. Tonight will be the time-honored tradition of celebrating the new year in hopes of it being better than the previous one, or something like that. Then the traditional fireworks, followed by some more partying and then the drunk dodge home (The night of the 31st/morning of the 1st is considered the most dangerous time to be on the roads as it has the highest number of drunk-driving related accidents, therefore the effort to dodge all these drunks).

I’m off to go pick some stuff from my fireworks stash to blow up tonight. Happy New Year!

Congratulations!

If you can read this I should probably congratulate you on surviving 2007. Since my last post of substance we’ve had quite a lot of news:

A report by the United States Senate Committee on Environment & Public (a mouthful isn’t it?) about “global warming” gave a list of over 400 well respected climatologists and other scientists who decry the so-called consensus on the issue of “man-made global warming”. Many of these scientists were or are on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and disagreed with the findings. If you have a ton of free time and interest here’s a link to the report itself. It is over 160 pages long. Anyone who claims consensus on ANYTHING in science is obviously ignorant or lying. There’s never consensus on anything. Everything is constantly questioned and retested in new ways to create new theories. Scientists who disagree with the current models of gravity can present their hypotheses and receive funding to test their models with the latest tools to try to prove or disprove their original claims; this is how real science works. Scientists who disagree with the popular claims on “global warming” are shouted down and called puppets of the oil companies;
this is dogma.

The government has once again decided to get into my bedroom saying what I can and can’t use to illuminate it.  Incandescent light-bulbs with light outputs between 310 and 2600 lumens (so generally 40-150W) will be illegal to buy or sell starting 2014.  It doesn’t matter that there are incandescent bulbs that are 4x more efficient than standard bulbs; research funding is going to completely dry up for these new bulbs since they now have a very limited time before they’re made illegal too.  They want us to use the TOXIC compact fluorescent bulbs instead.  I refuse to use those because the color temperature is ugly, they rarely last more than a few months in my house before burning out, and they contain mercury vapor.  They claim you don’t have to worry though, since small quantities of mercury are only dangerous if inhaled.  Since this mercury is in vapor form is just scatters into the air…where it can be inhaled…
I think I should try calling the ACLU to ask them to fight to keep the government out of my bedroom when it comes to my illumination choices. They didn't do anything to protect my right to privacy in the bathroom when the government decided it could regulate how much water got flushed down the toilet so I really don't expect the ACLU to do anything to protect my liberties.