I was viewing a news video on CNN.com and the obligatory pre-commercial was for openings at the CIA.

What does it mean for our Men In Black if they need to advertise? There’s no waiting list, what with all the cool toys and mysterious women you meet?

Are you qualified?

The CIA has very high standards for hiring. Some suggestions they offer on their public website for people who may be interested in CIA jobs are:

• Be a U.S. citizen
• Strengthen verbal and written communication skills
• Keep a clean record-that means absolutely no involvement with illegal drugs and no criminal activity at all, because no one can work for the CIA without a security clearance
• Hone foreign language skills

Hey, wait a minute. The President of the United States doesn’t even need all that! U.S. Citizen? Pfffft!

Successful applicants must go through a rigorous background investigation (emphasis mine-JR) and physical and psychological testing.

Like the President? Ah, never mind.

Then I learned this piece of information that I am sure the Government doesn’t want you to know.

I was visiting the site www.c[CLICK]

Sanden Totten at the Loophole notes that some people do, indeed, have too much time on their hands, and spend some of it re-enactmenting their favorite Gary Larson “Far Side” panels.

Oh, make no mistake; they’re good.

Of course, for some of us, our entire life feels like a Gary Larsen cartoon…

Hugh Hewitt has shut down the comment section at HughHewitt.com, switching his user feedback entirely to Twitter. He’s using a “hash tag” (“#hhrs”),for those of you for whom that means anything.

Every message sent over Twitter –every “tweet”– that contains your hash tag will then show up when you search the hash tag at search.twitter.com. All the folks listening to your show who want to communicate with you but who don’t want to look up your e-mail or get to their computer can then do so, and also see what all other tweeting listeners are saying. Instant chat room about your show. It can go 24/7, but of course is most useful during the program. When Joel Kaplan was on today’s program, for example, the online comments were not very encouraging for Mr. Kaplan’s arguments.

Think of it as expanding your inbound lines by as many as you can comfortably read.

Or, alternately, think of it as “confusing the bejeebers out of people who just don’t get Twitter yet”.

And, oddly, I’m one of them.

But I’ll work on it, since I sorta kinda grabbed “#narn2” for Ed and I.

So someone ‘splain it to me, since I’m as clueless as can be about Twitter.

BUN (my daughter) sitting looking on at monitor as I write:  “Oh, my God: in this picture…

…Obama looks just like a black Richard Nixon!”

Discuss.

Since Barack Obama’s entry into the presidential horserace, and especially since the election, the number of legitimate reader comments winding up in my “moderation queue” – the place where my blog’s publishing software stacks up comments that have “questionable content” – has skyrocketed.

Now, if you include links in your comments, your comment automatically winds up in this blog’s moderation queue; many/most “spam” comments include links in an attempt to crank someone‘s traffic up.

But lately, there’ve been more link-less comments ending up in moderation – indeed, quite a few.

It has a lot to do with the fact that the economic philosophy that many on the right would accuse the President-Elect of espousing – socialism – has embedded within it the name of a rather common anti-impotence drug that is the subject of a hell of a lot of spam.  It’s one of the good-sized list of keywords that my blog filters just to make sure the comment is legit.
So if you plan to write comments about “socialists” and so on, either don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t get published until the next time I get online…

…or call it something like “fabian statism”.

Thanks.  That is all.

I always figured if anyone would open a zero-star hotel, it’d be me.

Sadly, I snoozed and I lost.

Consolation prize; I didn’t snooze at a zero-star hotel…

If you show this image around the world…

…of the “Avtomat Kalashnikov” model 1947 assault rifle, people think “marxism”, “revolution”…

…or “gangs of teenage thug “militiamen” here for your stuff”.

The AK47 is one of the iconic images of the past 100 years. More than 100 million AK-series rifles have been built – the vast majority of them serving the militaries of totalitarian dictatorships, he private guards of warlords and thugs, and “revolutionary” groups around the Second and Third Worlds from the 1950s to today. It’s the AK-series (colloquialized as the “AK-47” in the US, although it covers the vastly more-numerous AKM, the more modern AK-74 and others) that served everyone from the guards at Red Square to the Viet Cong to the militias of Mogadishu. The AK was romanticized by the American left (Che uses ’em!) and then, as the Cold War wound down, demonized (so do the Crips!).

It developed a substantial mythology that largely obscures the political and social aspects of its design; designed to be rugged and easily maintained by illiterate peasants, it is not an accurate rifle; it’s designed for badly-trained people to spray automatic fire in your general direction, to scare you away, or to keep your head down long enough for someone to throw a grenade at you. It is the very antithesis of the American tradition of marksmanship.
But I’m not going to write about the AK.

The west never developed a counter-icon with the counter-culture romance of the AK – indeed, since so much of the survival of the west involved refuting the idea of the romantic totalitarian hero, that’s completely appropriate.

But if the west did have a counter-icon, it’d likely be the FN-FAL:

D

Designed and built at Belgium’s Fabrique Nationale (FN), the Fusil Automatique Leger (“Light Automatic Rifle”), or “FAL” served the west from the mid-fifties until the present – although it’s been falling out of front-line service with the west’s militaries for the past 15 years or so. It’s big. It’s powerful – unlike the AK with its short 7.62x39mm “intermediate” round, it fires a full-powered 7.62x51mm round (known as “.308 Winchester” in the US).

The big difference? It’s accurate in a way the AK never could be. It’s a marksman’s rifle; while it could spray automatic fire (at least in its Belgian version; the British and Canadians adopted a semi-automatic only version, the “SLR”, from 1957 through the mid-eighties), it was way too light to use as a machine gun. It’s rugged like the AK, but it wasn’ “simple”; where the AK was a cheap specimen that could be manufactured in any third-world machine shop, the FAL was the product of old-world European craftsmanship, painstakingly machined to fairly tight tolerances.

And yet, in battle after battle around the world for fifty years, when the forces of “revolution” and thuggery took to the field with their AK47s, they were as often as not faced with troops with the FAL. As the USSR and NATO stared each other down from the fifties through the ’80s, many of the NATO troops that stared back across the border – the Dutch, the Belgians, the British and Canadians and many others – carried the FAL.
As did the US – almost:

[In US trials to replace the M1 Garand in the ’50s, the FAL prototype that the American procurement establishment called the “T48”] competed against the T44 rifle. The T44 was a heavily modified version of the earlier M1 Garand. Testing proved the T48 and the T44 comparable in performance, with no clear winner. However, the supposed ease of production of the T44 upon machinery already in place for the M1 Garand and the similarity in the manual of arms for the T44 and M1 ultimately swayed the decision in the direction of the T44, which was adopted as the M14 rifle.

The various civilianized semi-auto versions of the FAL are a joy to shoot, although they buck like mules, firing the full-power .308 cartridge from a frame that weighs only about eight or nine pounds.  Compared to heavier weapons firing the same cartridge (the similar German G-3, in its civilian incarnation as the HK91, which’ll be featured in an upcoming episode of HGF), or even the M-1 Garand with the slightly more powerful old American 30.06 round, the FAL series is a handful.

The FAL is falling out of front-line service with the world’s marquee armies; the Brits traded the SLR in for the space-age looking IW; the Dutch, Belgians and Canadians traded theirs in for more modern weapons using the lighter 5.56x45mm round developed for the American M16; the Australians, the Austrians and even the Irish traded theirs in for  the space-age looking 5.56mm Steyr AUG.  And yet the FAL soldiers on around the world, in places like India and Brazil and South Africa and, in places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, alongside its old nemesis, the AK.
One of the great regrets of my life; at a gun show in Saint Paul in the late eighties, I found a guy unloading a British SLR semi-auto version, in the case with all the original parts, for $595. I thought about it – hard – but took a pass. I figured “I need the money for other things – and hey, there’ll be other gun shows”.

As, indeed, there were. But in the intervening time, the Stockton Massacre – where an insane man shot up a California playground with, what else, an AK) led to talk of draconian restrictions on “assault weapons”, which led the price of most such weapons to nearly triple overnight.

One of these days.

A few years back, I had a contracting job in downtown Minneapolis – which was, as it happens, a long-time wanna-have of mine.  I’ve always loved the hustle and thrum of downtown Minneapolis, and after my harrowing year of gross underemployment in 2003, it felt good to not only get back into working, but get back into it in a place that throbbed with energy.

And one of my favorite places in the city, especially for lunch-hour decompression while working a fairly tense set of projects, was Peavey Plaza – a sunken water-garden down in the teens on Nicollet Mall.  The Plaza features concerts and street fairs for most of the summer and, almost better, is a relatively placid oasis in the middle of Minneapolis’ throbbing financial district the rest of the time (frequent approaches by bums and panhandlers notwithstanding).

Rumors for years have held that the Plaza was in danger – so, on the one hand, it’s good to hear that people are taking note…:

The sunken-plaza park, on the Nicollet Mall between 11th and 12th streets, was named one of the “Ten Most Endangered Historic Places” by the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota earlier this year.

…and, on the other hand, disconcerting to hear the kind of note being taken:

Now, it’s been included on the list of 12 modern landscapes — “Marvels of Modernism” — that are in danger of being lost, as selected by the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Ugh.

Oh, well.   “Modernist” label aside – I favor excising much “modernism” from our cities, and especially indiscriminate carpet-bombing of all Bauhaus architecture – I’m rooting for the Plaza.  Every little bit helps.

When I was a kid, I built a ton of models – plastic replica airplanes, cars, ships and tanks, mostly. 

One of the keys to building a good model was getting a thin coating of glue on the surfaces that were to be joined together; toluol-based model glue operates by chemically melting plastic surfaces to basically “weld” them together. 

This was back about the time that felt-tipped markers first came on the  market.  I thought “Hmmm – how about if you could put glue in a felt-tip marker to guarantee a super-thin coating of glue?”

Not being a chemical engineer, that was about as far as it went – but when I was in my mid-teens, I saw that someone had indeed invented the glue pen. 

I’ve had a few other such ideas – including, I have to say, this one:

“Two mobile applications, NMobile and Trapster, are providing drivers with up-to-date maps of speed-enforcement zones with live police traps, speed cameras or red-light cameras. Each application pulls up a map pinpointing the locations of speed traps within driving distance and an audio alert will sound as vehicles approach an area tagged as harboring a speed trap. Both applications rely on the wisdom of the crowds for their data with users reporting camera-rigged stop lights and areas heavily populated with radar-toting police officers via the iPhone or their web-based application…

So close, but yet so far, again.

…I missed National Ammunition Day yesterday.

On the other hand, now I get to cash in at all the “post-NAD” sales.

Score!

(Up next on the list; surplus 7.62×51 for the HK91 I just know Santa’s gonna bring me for Christmas).

(Alternatively – another box of .22LR).

It’s a meme.  This time, it’s from Rev Ma, over at Night Writer.

I can’t help myself.  It’s true.

55 Things
1. The phone rings; whom do you want it to be?
Mostly?  Friends.

At 3AM?  A manageable problem.

2. When shopping at the grocery store, do you return your cart?
To the little corral thing?  Absolutely.  I’d hate to make someone chase my cart around.

3. If you had to kiss the last person you kissed, would you?
Seems a safe bet.

4. Do you take compliments well?
Well?  Sure.  Often?  Not so much.

More below the fold.

(more…)

One of the dominant memes in GOP circles since November 5 has been “the need to use the internet better”. 

And while that’s a fairly big, amorphous concept, there is at least one empirical measure of the Obama and McCain campaign’s successes (other than online fundraising, although someone really should investigate all those millions in anonymous donations); someone has done a Usability Test comparing the two campaign’s websites:

A quick online usability study of the Obama and McCain websites was conducted on November 3rd and 4th, 2008. [Note:  Passive must be avoided – Ed.] Preparation for the study took about 2 hours and data analysis took about 4 hours.

I should point out that Usability Testing is a part of what I do for a living.  We’ll come back to this.

One of the key questions you have to ask when doing a usability test is “what is the user trying to accomplish?”   These tasks should, ideally, reflect things the the user actually would need to accomplish using your website, software, hardware, store design or whatever it is you’re testing: 

Participants were asked to do four tasks on one of the sites: find where to vote, find the candidate’s position on Social Security, find a photo of the candidate waving, and find the impact of the candidate’s tax plan on them.

I’m trying to picture someone trolling the web thinking “I need to find a picture of Barack Obama waving to a crowd.  Where, oh where…“.  But three out of four ain’t bad.

The next step is qualifying and quantifying your results:

Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two sites; 44 of them completed the tasks. Task success (self-reported), task times, and task ease ratings were collected, as were ratings on several scales, including the System Usability Scale (SUS).

Pay no attention to the terms of art among Usability geeks; let’s jump to the results: 

Overall, the users were successful with 78% of their tasks on the Obama site but only 47% on the McCain site. Users of the McCain site also took 28% longer and rated the tasks as 27% more difficult. Users rated the Obama site as being significantly easier to find information on and significantly more visually appealing. And the Obama site received a mean SUS score of 76% compared to 45% for the McCain site. Usability issues with both sites were identified from user comments. Overall, it was a landslide usability victory for the Obama website.

Just a quick note to whomever runs for President in 2012; the little things count.  And I know a few conservative usability geeks that’d love to lend a hand getting that particular problem solved.

Growing up as something of a wannabe rock star, my dreams as a teenager were probably more focused on guitar gear than on cars than for most teenage guys. 

And in fact they still are.

And the big mack daddy of ’em all, to a kid who grew up a Who fanatic and who played guitar for two years before he knew there was a way to strum the guitar other than windmilling, was the amp that Pete Townsend, more than anyone, made famous; the Hiwatt.

Famous largely for getting smashed during Townsend’s “destruction is art” phase from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, the Hiwatt was also famous for being clear, powerful, reliable and very, very loud.  It was part of the “big three” of Brit guitar amps of the sixties and seventies, along with Vox (which was the Fender of Brit amps) and Marshall (which was, hello, Marshall).

Of course, being all Brit and exotic and all, they were impossible to find in North Dakota.  Although rumors from travelling musicians had it that you could occasionally – rarely – see one at Marguerite’s Music in Moorhead.  And so, one day, when I was finally old enough to do road trips to Fargo/Moorhead with my friends, I made the pilgrimmage.  I walked into Marguerite’s…

…and found nothing.

So the second time I took a road trip to Fargo, I tried again.

And there it was.  No, not the stack, but the “Studio Stage” combo…

…which, truth be told, may or may not have been up to the standard of the original “stack”, with its two cabinets with eight 12 inch speakers and 100-120 watts of pure electonic meth.  It’s hard to say..

…and it prompts the question; if you’ve never tasted, say, scotch, and you walk into a bar and someone gives you a glass of six-week-old WalMart scotch and, next to it, a glass of 30-year-old LaPhraoig, do you think you could tell the difference?

I dunno.  The little combo was a joy to play, but then everything at Marguerite’s was.

Even if they’d had an honest-to-goodness stack, could I have cranked it to the stops to get any idea of its real performance, in the middle of a music store?  Probably not.  It would have blown half of Moorhead and all the topsoil in Clay County over the Red River into North Dakota.

Someday.  Someday.

It’s been a busy, crazy year at the Berg household.

Not all of it in a good way.  But it’s been one of those things with its upsides.

Due to a variety of issues dating back a few years, I was in a subprime adjustable rate mortgage that I was having a hard time getting out of, last winter.  And when I say “subprime”, I mean Slobodan Milosevic could have gotten a better loan that me, at the time.  It was pretty bad; it started adjusting about a year and a half ago, and by the time it was done it was eating up about 2/3 of my takehome pay (and I make decent, albeit not spectacular, money).  That, along with a few other family crises, made things a wee bit tight around the Berg house.

So along about last Christmas, when my car broke down, I gave it a long, hard think.  My employer pays for my “all you can ride” card on Metro Transit.  My kids’ schools are nearby.  Most of what I needed to do in my life was walking, biking or busing distance away.  The upshot; if I absolutely needed to get by without a car (and all of its attendant bills), I could.

And by that point, I absolutely needed it.  The savings on repairs, car insurance and gas alone, at that point, made it worth it (and this was back when gas was still at or around a mere $3 a gallon).  Not having those bills kept things on the level while I sorted out the rest of the mess.

My “experiment” ended up running about ten months.  I bused to work until mid-april, when I started biking – which I am still doing, although it’s getting more and more difficult as it get colder.  The kids bused to school.  We did a lot of getting around via bus, bike, and good old-fashioned shoe leather. 

And boy, do I have stuff to report!

On the upside:

• Pants: I fit into pants 2-4 sizes smaller than I did last winter.  My belts are all verging on too big.  Everything I own fits better, unless it fit perfectly before, in which case it’s gotten kinda loose and baggy.  I like that.
• Money: I can say honestly that I bought not one drop of $4/gallon gas.  That aside, I saved enough to help get the family through what was probably the nastiest financial hurdle I’ve had, except for my stretch of un/underemployment back in 2003.  In some ways it was worse; when you’ve got little to no income, there’s an ineluctible logic to it all; it just makes sense.  You stretch, you scrimp, you do what you have to.  When you’re working hard and making decent money and still feeling broke?  That sucks. 
• Party: When you take the bus or bike to Keegans (or,  y’know, wherever) and driving a car is not an option, and you’re one of those guys whose tolerance has dropped from 4.5 to 2.5 beers in the past decade, let’s just say it’s one less thing to worry about. 
• Hah:  Back when I was an adjunct instructor at a MNSCU university, I had the option of paying my “fair share” for collective bargaing or, for $8 more, joining the union.  I joined the union, because most of my liberal, “pro-labor” friends had never been in a union.  I figured this gave me bragging rights.  In the same way, while I see no empirical reason to believe in man-made global warming, I’ve rather enjoyed being able to hector my “liberal” friends and neighbors about their patrician “carbon footprints” and gas-guzzling Priuses.
• Good:  That’s how I feel, these days.  I feel  better, walking and biking and just being generally more active.  My attitude’s better (and believe me, I’ve needed it to be better).  And sailing past the Capitol, seeing the High Bridge over the Mississippi in the distance, and zipping into the canyon on Saint Peter between Babani’s and Saint Joe’s is a wonderful way to kick off a work day.

Of course, it’s not all hearts and flowers:

• Expectations: I want to laugh when I see some of the lefties – especially the transit-oriented leftybloggers – yapping about running their lives on transit.  I notice that not a single one of them seems to have kids; children are the big clinker in the “transit-oriented lifestyle”.  If you have to get kids to an after-school event, it’s a major expedition; if you have to take one to urgent care, it’s either miserable (hauling sick kids on the bus is a rotten feeling, although I never had to do it) or expensive (cabs in the Twin Cities are nothing to write home about). 
• Metro Transit Is A Black Hole of Suck: Although the stats show that the Twin Cities’ metro transit system is less of a money suck than many/most other major cities’ transit setups, it is not ready for prime time.  The part that bugged me the most?  Bus-driver acquaintances tell me that absenteeism is a problem – and when too many drivers call in sick, and they can’t find a replacement in time (which is not at all uncommon), MTC shaves routes.  They’ll skip a bus departure on some of the lower-traffic routes – including the one I use to get home.  I can’t tell the number of times (usually once or twice a month) where I’ve had to wait the extra half hour for the twenty-minute bus ride home, because the bus never comes.  Even the hideously-expensive Ventura Trolley often runs a few minutes late, and if you try to ride it on weekends (as I did on Saturdays for much of this past few months, getting to and from AM1280 on Saturdays when I didn’t have the legs to bike from Fort Snelling all the way down Highway 13), the line is staggeringly likely to be down for maintenance along one part of the route or another, replaced by “55” buses that make the half-hour train ride from downtown to the mall an hour-long ordeal. 
• Minnesotans Are Terrible Drivers: Being a bike commuter was a great experience; there is really very little in life better than blasting downhill on Shepard Road or Constitution on a beautiful summer morning; it’s a stunning way to kick off a day.  But you can only enjoy it so much, because so many Minnesota drivers are too busy putting on their makeup, changing their IPod settings, or nodding off to Willie and Jay to pay attention to things like, I dunno, bikers.
• Tote That Load: One of the reasons I lost so much weight was because I spent so much time hauling loads of groceries home from Rainbow – about a 3/5 mile walk.  Yes, I could have taken the bus, but hauling bags on the bus is a major hassle, and frankly the quiet time was often nice – unless I had to bring a couple of gallons of milk and stuff home.  Then, it just got heavy.  And no matter how much you haul, you still have to go shopping in a couple of days, again.  Which nullifies some of the savings from not paying for gas and such, I thought, muttering to myself as I trudged home more than once.   Much more than once.
• Government “Services” Demean and Degrade The Consumer: After a few of those missed buses, and bobbled schedules that left me standing for wasted half-hours at one bus stop or another, I found myself adopting the sullen, angry listlessness that PJ O’Rourke observed among anyone who has to sit and bark on command for government “services”, only to be implicitly told “you’ll take what we give you and you’ll like it”.  It’s not the better me.

So this past week or so I got my mortgage squared away.  It left me with a few extra bucks I wasn’t used to.  I fixed the car, bought insurance, and updated my tabs.  For the first time in ten months, I’m driving again.  I kinda like it.   I do not plan on going car-free again.  But then, who plans on these things? And I’ll still be biking (weather permitting) and busing to work, because as long as there’s an option, it’s cheaper, and I just flat-out enjoy it.

It was interesting doing it, and knowing that I can do it.  And with that said, I’m more than ready to relegate it to the “ephemeral anecdote” drawer. 

Really, really ready.

Car and Driver tests several Bond cars and is left underwhelmed. It turns out they may have actually used special effects in the production of these films! 

There are two ways James Bond’s cars are portrayed in film: seductively sitting still (often draped with beautiful women) or blazing across the screen in some of the most exciting car-chase sequences ever made for the big screen. But in many cases, there’s got to be some serious lens trickery going on: upon reviewing our test data for some of James Bond’s coolest cars, we found that not only are Bond’s rides seldom the fastest cars of their time, some of them couldn’t catch a bad guy on a bicycle. This could explain why some of those chase scenes take so long.

In any case, enjoy some of my favorites. The rest can be found here.

Aston Martin DB5 – Goldfinger (1964)

• 4.0-liter inline-6 (282 hp, 288 lb-ft)
• 0–60 mph: 8.1 seconds
• Quarter-mile: N/A

BMW 750iL – Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

• 5.4-liter V-12 (322 hp, 361 lb-ft)
• 0–60 mph: 6.3 seconds
• Quarter-mile: 14.8 @ 98 mph

BMW Z8 – The World is Not Enough (1999)

• 4.9-liter V-8 (394 hp, 369 lb-ft)
• 0–60 mph: 4.5 seconds
• Quarter-mile: 13.0 @ 111 mph

Aston Martin Vanquish – Die Another Day (2002)

• 5.9-liter V-12 (460 hp, 400 lb-ft)
• 0–60 mph: 4.4 seconds
• Quarter-mile: 12.9 @ 115 mph

One of my co-workers recently got his car – a relatively popular imported model – stolen.

A few days ago, he got a call.  The car’d been found.  He went to the salvage yard where it’d been delivered.

He came back to the office, perplexed; the car, which was in mint condition (it was a ’94, but my co-worker likes to tinker, apparently), was actually in better condition than when stolen.  More to the point, it’d been heavily modified; upgraded suspension, new wheels, all sorts of new, cool parts.

All of them stolen as well, naturally.

They’re still trying to figure out how to settle that one.

In 1940, war clouds were gathering on both horizons, as the nation struggled to shake off an epic downturn.  There were those that said socialism was the only way to defeat totalitarianism; that, perhaps, Hitler and Stalin had the right answer to difficult times.

Into that breach, on December 9, 1940, stepped the Chicago Bears.  Heavy underdogs to Sammy Baugh’s Washington Redskin juggernaut, Papa Bear George Halas and quarterback Sid Luckman led the plucky Monsters of the Midway to the most lopsided win in NFL Championship history; 73-0.

I’m not going to say the win ended the Depression and set the stage for victory in World War II – but the fact remains, we’ll never need to know if either would have happened otherwise.  The Bears came through.

And in 1985, as the nation rebounded from a deep recession but struggled with Soviet power around the world, there were those who believed the Cold War was as close to going “hot” as it would ever get.  This – in the days before Rejkjavik and the fall of The Wall, with Contras and Pershing Missiles and demonstrations against the US around the world – was a dire time for the US, and for democracy.

And when the nation needed it most, the Chicago Bears delivered; Jim MacMahon led the Bears to a victory that set the stage for the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the greatest period of prosperity in modern times.

Indeed, it could be said that the onset of the current electoral and economic troubles – the Dems’ win in ’06, the mortgage crisis – coincided with the Bears loss to the Baltimore Clots earlier in 2006.

So today – with times as fraught as they are – it’s good to know that The Bears are not only still there, but they are still beating up on the hated Vikings.

There is hope, my fellow Americans.  It is on the horizon.  And it wears Black really really dark Navy-Blue and Orange.

Courage.

I’ve got a bit of a first to report.

We’ll get back to that in a moment, here.

Jake Mohan has a piece in the Utne Reader about conservatives bicyclists…

…which was a concept that took a bit for Mr. Mohan to wrap his brain around:

But eventually a few needling questions penetrated my insulated sphere of thought: What if there are conservatives who ride bikes? What the hell do they look like? And where can I find them?

On the Internet, of course.

“I am a gun-owning, low-taxes, small-government, strong military, anti-baby murder, pro-big/small business, anti-social program, conservative Democrat,” wrote Maddyfish, a poster on Bike Forums, an Internet discussion forum where everyone from the casual hobbyist to the obsessive gearhead can discuss all things bike-related, from frame sizes to the best routes downtown. There are dozens such forums for bicyclists and I recently crashed three of them—Bike Forums, MPLS BikeLove, and Road Bike Review—with a simple question: Are there any conservative cyclists out there? Maddyfish (an online pseudonym) was one of the first to reply: “I find cycling to be a very conservative activity. It saves me money and time.”

And just like that, biking conservatives came out of the cyber-woodwork, offering their own mixtures of bike love and political philosophy.

My parents will be happy to know that I, their conservative Republican black-sheep son, has done the improbable; gotten written up in the Utne, that palimpsest of upper-midwest Liberalism:

Mitch Berg is a conservative talk-radio host whose blog, A Shot in the Dark, is divided between political content and chronicles if his experiences commuting by bicycle [Well – among a few other things – Ed.]. “I grew up in rural North Dakota, and biking was one of my escapes when I was in high school and college,” he told me. “It’s my favorite way to try to stay in shape. And if gas fell to 25 cents a gallon, I’d still bike every day.”

Berg doesn’t believe there’s anything inherently political about riding a bike. “But people on both sides of the political aisle do ascribe political significance to biking. The lifestyle-statement bikers, of course, see the act as a political and social statement. And there’s a certain strain of conservatism that sees conspicuous consumption—driving an SUV and chortling at paying more for gas—as a way to poke a finger in the eyes of the environmental left.”

Mohan and I had quite an exchange; read it at your leisure.  The piece covers a lot of ground – most notably, the non-biking conservatives:

Conservative cyclists don’t tend to get help from all their political allies, however. Some right-wing personalities know that biking is a hot-button issue and make pointed attacks on cyclists while reinforcing the liberal-cyclist stereotype. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s hard-right columnist Katherine Kersten earned the ire of the Twin Cities bike community in 2007 when she characterized Critical Mass as a mob of “serial lawbreakers” bent on ruining the lives of honorable citizen motorists. “Are you rushing to catch the last few innings of your son’s baseball game? Trying to get to the show you promised your wife for her birthday? Critical Mass doesn’t give a rip.”

I defended Kersten on that one, of course; I’ve attacked the arrogance of “Critical Mass” in the past.

Last fall, Twin Cities talk-radio host Jason Lewis made on-air remarks decrying the “bicycling crowd” as “just another liberal advocacy group.” He recycled a common anti-bike canard—that bicyclists have no rights to the roads because they don’t pay taxes to service those roads…

…and Lewis is wrong, and I have the property tax statements to prove it.  It’s not our fault that some previous legislature, in its infinite wisdom, chose to tie the state road budget to gasoline taxes which we bikers, largely, don’t use.

We disagree.  That’s nothing new; indeed, it’s stock in trade for conservatives, who do disagree on a lot of things, and still share a party pretty civilly.

Mohan’s conclusion:

Conservatives on bikes represent the breakdown of party-line stereotypes. They are heartening examples of crucial divergences from the lazy red/blue dichotomy the pundits are relentlessly hammering in these last frenzied days of campaign season. They are a microcosm in which a stereotype falls away to reveal an actual individual.

And that, to me, is the important part, not only of Mohan’s piece but a much larger lesson indeed.

Most of the “isms” that have made the past hundred-odd years such a miserable time in the history of the human race – racism, collectivism, Naziism, whatever – trace back to the big one, “We-ism“.  The best way to defend your group’s we-ism is to convince each other that those who are not part of “we” are less intelligent, less coherent, less human than “we” are.

The first step to true hatred is in finding a way to seeing your opponent as something – a set of cliches, stereotypes, abstract evils – other than human.

(Via this guy)

Financial system events of late provide only a glimpse of the worldwide economic collapse that will be brought on by a capitulation of global equity markets if Barack Obama realizes a successful Presidential bid and unleashes the full faith and credit of the Socialist Party. In anticipation, American automotive enthusiasts are encouraged to recalibrate their choice of daily conveyance.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Citroen 2CV.

The 2CV celebrates its 60th birthday during the Paris Motor Show, on 7 October 2008. To celebrate the event, Hermes has designed a made-to-measure outfit that highlights the vehicle’s ever-friendly and generous forms.

The 1989 2CV 6 Spécial, repainted in brown, gains a natural leather trim on the door facings, interior rearview mirror, gear knob, steering wheel and driver’s sun visor. For an even more elegant finish, the two seats are upholstered in Hermès grey-beige cotton canvas and natural leather. As a finishing touch, the bonnet and interior trim at the rear of the vehicle also feature Hermès cotton canvas.

Like the Automobile that marked the other end of America’s industrial and economic world dominance, Henry Ford’s Model T, the 2CV is available in any color you like. As long as, in this case, it is brown.

Exhilarating is one word that one might imagine could possibly come to mind considering the power under the bonnet. The little engine that could, a SOHC 602cc Twin, breathes easy through a twin-choke carburetor and churns out an adequate 29 horsepower at 6,750 rpm. The 2CV’s 5.3 Gallon gas tank allows for a full week’s ration!

Need to put on the binders? Sturdy drum brakes in the rear, and in a generous government factory upgrade since 1981, you’ll enjoy disc brakes in the front.

A comfortable but durable rear bench will allow for catnaps between your day job, wherewith you feed your children and pay the rent on your government-owned town home and your night job wherewith you pay your United Nations Income Tax, Grocery Loans and Global Warming Assessment.

Savor the nostalgia of a vehicle introduced to the world in 1948; your very own piece of history! Enroll now for subsidized 96-month financing offers and neighborhood Carshare Agreements via government lottery selection.

Citroen. The Car The People have been Waiting For^®

The wheels are coming off the credit system.  Times are uncertain.  The nation may be on the brink of electing an unqualified Democrat dillettante and demigogue who will likely be, on Inauguration Day, the worst president of my adult lifetime.  Things are just plain crazy out there.

And in situations like this, nothing takes the mind of ones’ troubles like seeing  what happens when money and end-stage spyrochaetal paresis mix.

I’ve been following the renewed interest in nuclear power.

While I (as a muttonheaded 16 year old who thought George McGovern had most of the right ideas) joined the herd in panicking about nuclear power after Three Mile Island, it’d seem rumors of the death of nuclear power were premature.  Word filtered back through the literature as far back as the late eighties about German and Swedish advances in nuclear physics that made meltdowns physically impossible – which sure sounded good.

Anyway, I thought about that when read this bit in Pop Mech a while ago.

As a result, the frontrunner for the initial $1.25 billion demonstration plant in Idaho is a helium-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor whose extremely high outlet temperature (1650 to 1830 F) would be ideal for efficiently producing hydrogen. There are a couple of designs that could run that hot, but the “pebble bed,” so named for the fuel pebble that Weaver holds, is attracting particularly intense interest.

A typical pebble-bed reactor would function somewhat like a giant gumball machine. The design calls for a core filled with about 360,000 of these fuel pebbles–“kernels” of uranium oxide wrapped in two layers of silicon carbide and one layer of pyrolytic carbon, and embedded in a graphite shell. Each day about 3000 pebbles are removed from the bottom as fuel becomes spent. Fresh pebbles are added to the top, eliminating the need to shut down the reactor for refueling. Helium gas flows through the spaces between the spheres, carrying away the heat of the reacting fuel. This hot gas–which is inert, so a leak wouldn’t be radioactive–can then be used to spin a turbine to generate electricity, or serve more exotic uses such as produce hydrogen, refine shale oil or desalinate water.

The pebbles are fireproof and almost impossible to use for weapons production. The spent fuel is easy to transport and store, though there still remains the long-term problem of where to store it. And the design of the nuclear reactor is inherently meltdown-proof. If the fuel gets too hot, it begins absorbing neutrons, shutting down the chain reaction. In 2004, the cooling gas and secondary safety controls were shut off at an experimental pebble-bed reactor in China–and no calamity followed, says MIT professor Andrew Kadak, who witnessed the test.

We should be cranking these things out like X-Boxes.

Naturally, read the whole fascinating thing.

And if that works, maybe we can go for one of these.

(And remember which party is still married to those thirty-year-old “No Nukes” shirts).

…I can see where things could improve even more:

Sam Whittingham is the fastest cyclist on the planet, having pedaled his sleek recumbent bicycle to a stunning 82.3 mph to claim the world record for a human-powered vehicle.

The bike-builder from British Columbia bested his previous record of 81.02 mph during a picture-perfect run through the desert during the World Human Powered Speed Challenge outside Battle Mountain, Nevada.

“On the one hand, it’s terrifying, but also completely exhilarating, Whittingham, who’s won the competition every year since its inception six years ago, told the Vancouver Sun after taking home the $26,748 deciMach Prize for Human-Powered Speed. “It’s like going down the steepest hill you can find on your bike, but you get to do that all the time.”

That bike plus Ramsey Hill = world of fun/hurt/whatever.

A new survey tried to analyze America’s personality, state-by-state.

The University of Cambridge (UK) measured 600,000 people for extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness – and found some interesting results.
I gotta say I didn’t see this bit coming:

And what of the unexpected finding that North Dakota is the most outgoing state in the union? Yes, North Dakota, the same state memorialized years ago in the movie “Fargo” as a frozen wasteland of taciturn souls. Turns out you can be a laconic extrovert, at least in the world of psychology. The trait is defined in part by strong social networks and tight community bonds, which are characteristic of small towns across the Great Plains. (Though not, apparently, small towns in New England, which ranks quite low on the extraversion scale.)

Hm. I must have come from the dour, taciturn corner of North Dakota.

Worth a read.

Because after two years of trying, I finally figured out a workaround to that whole “my css stylesheet stinks for embedding videos” thing.

And I gotta say…

…I’m still totally a kid in a candy store.

No, really: