Jerry Brown for Governor, Part II

Today's San Diego Union-Tribune features interviews with both Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman. These interviews tell you why we should elect Jerry Brown. There's not a single thing in the interview with Brown that makes even the slightest mathematical sense. Dig this one.

Q: If you are elected governor, how would you create jobs?

A: There’s nothing more important than jobs...My plan is very precise: 20,000 megawatts of new renewable energy, and to do that by 2020. That will create 500,000 jobs. I’m not talking just about a few jobs in the desert; I’m talking about retrofitting all the buildings in California, putting young people to work.

This is lunacy on so many levels. Renewable energy is more expensive than coal, gas or oil. Building more of it will cost more with the difference made up by ... unicorns and fairies and sprites and pixies and ...

There's nothing Meg can accomplish given the childlike legislature we have, one that believes in the aforementioned unicorns, et al. Here's an example.

Q: How do you fix the budget?

A: ...Number two is reform public employee pension benefits. We have gone from spending $300 million a year on public employee pensions in 2000 to $3.9 billion. We cannot have civil servants retire at 55 with much of their salary and health care benefits to the day they die. The third is welfare reform. We have 12 percent of the population of the United States and 32 percent of the welfare cases. We have the longest benefits and welfare practically in the country.

You can just see it now. Resistance in the legislature, the media, the entertainment industry and the hipsters in Silicon Valley will center around Meg's heartless, racist attempts to roll back the clock and stop progress. The hipsters and opinion makers won't have to examine any of their core beliefs. She'll get nothing done and be the perfect punching bag.

Our choice is clear: California must remain the liberal petri dish so we can see and compare its festering mess with other states.

Jerry Brown for governor. Science dictates we must elect him.

Stewart And Colbert Reveal Their Racism

Just look at the predominantly white crowd at their rally. If that doesn't make them racist, nothing does.

Why I'm Voting for Jerry Brown

... because he will give us the fastest path to societal change in California. Here's why.

1. There is a limit to the damage he can do. The state is already near the bottom in most categories - education, cost of education, debt ratings, unemployment, etc. The only thing left to lose is the entertainment industry and Silicon Valley. More on them later.


2. There is a limit to the new idiocies he can enact. With a $20B deficit, no mechanism to declare bankruptcy and a Republican Congress who isn't going to bail him out, we won't be seeing Sacramento subsidies for windmills on all of our rooftops any time soon.


3. The next governor will preside over a bloodbath. We've used up all of our one-time budget gimmicks and borrowing schemes. The chickens, as a racist lunatic mentor of our president once said, are coming home to roost.


4. California needs a cultural wake-up call. As long as there's a Republican governor, the opinion makers in Hollywood and Silicon Valley can delude themselves that our problems are political, not cultural. The monolithic, secular, debased view of the world held by our entertainment industry and the hipster-geeks in San Jose needs to collapse under its own leaders so a real debate about our society can begin.


5. The governor in California has very little power. The legislature has most of the power and that will remain in the hands of the progressives. Meanwhile, whatever party holds the governor's seat gets the blame.


6. Our desperately needed soul-searching can't begin under Meg Whitman. California conservatives need to acknowledge that we are a small and impotent minority. We're not going to lead a change. Just as only Nixon could go to China, only the liberal opinion makers in Hollywood and Silicon Valley can change the state. There needs to be an intellectual civil war on the left in California in order for things to change. The fastest way to that is to elect one of their own to preside over California's Götterdämmerung.

Jerry Brown for governor. He deserves it.
Elsewhere: B-Daddy disagrees with me.

Link of the Day

 American Thinker: Paul Krugman Gives Up 

Martha Stewart at Adobe MAX

Dig what happens on the magazine cover around 2:30. Definitely watch this in hi-def.

Cheezburger of the Day

Blame the Teacher's Unions? I Think Not

I'm going to disagree with most of my conservative friends on this one, but I'm not blaming the teacher's unions for the expensive mess our schools have become. Secular Apostate posted the video expose shown below about the New Jersey teacher's union. They key part for me starts at 3:30 and describes a padded classroom built expressly for K-2 students who are completely out of control.

What is the bargain we are making with our teachers? To me, it sounds like this:

Us: We are not responsible for teaching our children the basics of civilized behavior. We are not responsible for giving them stable homes where they aren't exposed to violence and drug abuse. We are not responsible for giving them fathers. We will send our kids to your classroom in any condition we choose.

Teachers: You must educate them. You cannot get rid of them, no matter what they do.

After a few decades of this, what is it that you expect the teachers to do? In a sense, there is a Parents Union that has banded together to remove all responsibility from themselves. Why is it so unjust that the teachers have done the same?

What They Know In Arizona That They Don't In DC

From the Borderland Beat:

In the third mass homicide to jolt Mexico in less than one week at least 15 people were killed in an attack by a group of assassins Wednesday morning in the west coast city of Tepic, Nayarit.

According to witnesses the heavily armed and masked gunmen arrived in 3 SUV’s and shot everyone inside the establishment. A fruit vendor at a kiosk outside of the establishment and a rider on a motorcycle were also shot and killed.

According to the Tepic chief of police, Secretario de Seguridad Publica Fernando Carvajal Cazola, there were three survivors of the attack that are currently hospitalized. The survivors were not identified. It is not uncommon for organized crime assassins to invade hospitals and finish off survivors of execution attempts.

Here's video from the scene:

If you can't control the border, this stuff will cross it.

Cheezburger of the Day

Flash as a Game Platform

At Adobe MAX, Kevin Lynch, Adobe's CTO, demonstrated this game during his day one keynote.

It's written in Flash and, as I understand it, is making use of low-level graphics acceleration. Kevin claimed it was capable of rendering millions of polygons per second.

The bash on Flash as a game engine has been it's slow speed and the resultant poor quality of graphics due to insufficient polygon rendering. If they've really got a solution to this, then programming games in Flash becomes much more attractive as Flash-enabled TV sets and TV interface boxes like Google TV become more commonplace. It won't replace the high-end gaming consoles or the monstrous PCs built for high-fidelity gaming, but it could significantly erode the low- to mid-range game market from these systems and that's a big deal.

Game success isn't about physics or polygons nearly as much as it is about fun. There are lots and lots of games out there for the i-platforms, but the big hit these days is a graphically trivial one called Angry Birds.

If you're trying to develop the next Angry Birds and you want to be able to market it to the widest customer base possible, you could do a lot worse than program it in Flash. Everyone but Apple is enabling Flash on their systems. And which mobile OS is growing the fastest? Flash-enabled Android.

Google's (GOOG) Android was the most popular operating system in the U.S. among customers who purchased smartphones within the past six months, according to the Nielsen Company's August survey.

More smartphones were sold using the Android OS in the last 6 months than any other OS.
Rumors of Flash's death seem to have been greatly exaggerated.

Adobe MAX Report Out

I'm at Adobe MAX yesterday and today to see what's new in the world of professional content creation. In a word: Wow.

Yesterday I went to a session on the new workflows in DreamWeaver CS5 that allow you to simultaneously create websites for a wide variety of platforms - phone, tablet, PC. The audience loudly oohed and aahed as the new features were shown doing what they were meant to do. A roomful of designers sat there and repeatedly mumbled, "Dude. That's going to make my life soooo much easier." Adobe really has their act together.

The theme of the show, just as it is with Google's vision of the future, is how mobile devices are changing the way we consume the web and information in general. Charts and graphs were shown displaying how tablets and phones are overtaking laptop and desktop machines as the primary tool to view the web. Adobe has recognized this and CS5 is designed to let you create sites and graphics for consumption on all devices simultaneously. One of the coolest things yesterday in the DreamWeaver session was CSS code that recognized the user's screen resolution and adaptively used the right layout.

On a side note, I got a chance to play with the Samsung Galaxy. I liked it a lot. iPad users have sneered at its small screen, but the universal reaction to it was, "I can fit it in my pocket or purse. I can't do that with an iPad." I didn't think that would be a big deal, but it was. The screen resolution was great, too.

Gotta run. It's more about tablets this morning and then InDesign this afternoon.

Caterpillar of Unknown Type

Maybe Tim can help us with this little guy. We found him in our garden as we were closing it down for the Fall. He's definitely worth clicking on the top image.

If We Nationalized Exxon

... we could see scenes like this in our future:

Ignore the "Those crazy Frenchies are striking again" meme and consider this: every time they nationalize an industry, its problems become political, not economic. That is, there is an upper limit on what unions working for a private firm can demand because they don't want to bankrupt the company. When you work for a government that can print money, that limit is practically unimaginable.

The reason the French are striking against the plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 is not because they're crazy, it's because they're supported by the entire nation of France and they can legitimately claim that their pensions amount to only a few Euros a week for each citizen. Surely you can afford that, can't you?

Why Isn't This Considered Racist?

Why are Britons taking spending cuts stoically while the French storm the barricades? - By Anne Applebaum - Slate Magazine

Link of the Day

B-Daddy posts something rather surprising comparing the US to the UK. It's a sad day when sclerotic England has its act together and dynamic America doesn't.

Momma Daisy Update

She's clean! No scale at all as far as I can see. The reconstruction of the Catican PC has cut way back on my photography as that's where I usually process my photos, so I don't have any good shots of Momma Daisy's stems, but other than a snail infestation which is easily fought, she's back in the green of health!

On Twitter

Twitter just informed me that Warren Whitlock is following me. Warren seems like a great guy, but he's following over 62,000 people. What does that even mean? What's the point? Do you think he's got relationships with 62,000 people? Does he read their tweets? I follow less than 100 people and I can't keep up.

What if you follow just a few people, but you have hordes following you. What do you do when they tweet at you? Ignore them? What kind of relationship is that?

Changing Minds

... happens gradually. Here's what former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder said recently:

Oct. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve policy makers are improvising as they debate embarking on a second round of unconventional monetary stimulus, said Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the U.S. central bank.

“They are making it up as they go along,” Blinder, a Princeton University economist, said in an interview with Bloomberg television’s “Surveillance Midday” with Tom Keene.

After lowering interest rates almost to zero and buying $1.7 trillion of securities, the Fed is considering expanding its balance sheet further by purchasing more Treasury securities, as well as strategies to boost inflation expectations, according to the minutes of its Sept. 21 Federal Open Market Committee meeting.

Blinder said he doesn’t project the central bank will undertake a “shock and awe” approach after its Nov. 2-3 meeting, or one designed to quickly influence the market through big asset purchases. Instead, the Fed will “dribble it out” by buying in smaller increments, he said.

I suspect that they're recalibrating their mental models. What conventional wisdom said would work to arrest and reverse the recession - Keynesian stimuloids - didn't work at all. Dribbling out their purchases of government debt with printed money I think indicates uncertainty in their minds. I'm sure they're watching Japan continue to flounder despite monstrous debt and stimuloids and Japanese Central Bank purchases of debt. Maybe a new economic consensus, one built around savings rather than debt, will come out of all of this.

Video of the Day

Hilarious!

Call Me Senator from RightChange on Vimeo.

Why Juan Was Fired

In short, Juan Williams humanized Fox News. Here's part of what he had to say about the firing.

They (NPR management) loathe the fact that I appear on Fox News. They don’t notice that I am challenging Bill O’Reilly and trading ideas with Sean Hannity. In their hubris they think by talking with O’Reilly or Hannity I am lending them legitimacy. Believe me, Bill O’Reilly (and Sean, too) is a major force in American culture and politics whether or not I appear on his show.

Juan treated his ideological opponents as if they were rational people with valid arguments. He went on Fox News to convert intelligent people, not to slay infidels. For that apostasy, he was fired. After all, only crazy people would do what he did.