Prop 16 - PG&E's Monoploy Protection Act

Funny, I never got a chance to vote on whether I wanted PG&E to monopolize my power options.

Pretending to be a "Tax-Payers Right to Vote Act" PG&E has launched a California initiative (Prop 16) in the June election that will further $olidify their monopoly control, disingenuously calling it a "right to vote act" that raises the bar upon entry, and allows them to u$e divide-and-conquer tactic$ to prevent any local municipality from competing with them. It's a Trojan Horse operation by the people who are bringing you - whether you like it or not (H/T Borepatch) - "Smart Meters" that aren't smart or even the slightest bit secure from hacking. "Smart Meters" that can increase their revenue at the touch of a button.
From the Fresno Bee:

How badly does PG&E want you and 15 million other Californians as customers?

Not badly enough to roll back its rates -- which are among the highest in the nation -- by cutting bureaucracy and trimming its chief executive's $5 million annual compensation.

Not badly enough to do something about the frequent blackouts endured by ratepayers.

But PG&E is willing to spend tens of millions of dollars, skirt fair-play regulations and deceive voters. And it created Proposition 16 in the hope of using a constitutional hammer to nail you down once and for all.

They hate the fact that some cities (Palo Alto famously did this years ago with both electric and water) buy energy in bulk at discounted rates and re-sell it to residents without a markup, so PG&E is sending $25 million to $35 million this year to convince voters to have fewer choices - and if it passes the initiative would require two-thirds of the voters in an area to approve an alternative energy option, raising the threshold for cities and municipalities to compete against them.

It's already causing Berkeley Leftists to become violent and display their latent racist tendencies!

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates used physical force yesterday to remove Mark Toney, Executive Director of The Utility Reform Network, who interrupted a PG&;E-sponsored meeting at the David Brower Center to protest Proposition 16, a PG&E-sponsored statewide measure on the June ballot.
(Photos by Luke Thomas)

Why are Leftists always so violent and deranged?

California 2nd Amendment Support

#1 why I can't vote for Meg Whitman: Second Amendment Rights.

Poizner Supports An Individual’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, and opposes any attempts to chip away at the right that every Californian has to keep and bear arms.

Steve believes that the Founders of the Constitution were crystal clear when establishing that people have the right to own guns for both recreational and defensive purposes. Steve opposes any new gun laws and will closely examine existing gun laws. He also opposes California’s recently passed ammunition registration law (AB 962), and will seek its repeal as governor.

Steve has also issued a statement regarding the pivotal gun rights case of McDonald v. City of Chicago, saying a proper decision in McDonald would clarify and strengthen the Second Amendment’s application to the states. Such a decision would be a victory for liberty and a powerful reaffirmation of the United States Constitution.

Yeh it's political hackery but that's better than eBay chief and anti-gun Algore fan Meg Whitman right there. Then there's her whole Van Jones (*urrp!*) luv-shtick.

.22LR semi-auto AK or PPSh

Bad photos, sorry.
CA legal 10-round removable magazines - made in Germany.

The thing on the left side is a com-bloc style scope-mount thing.


What's in your Buy-A-Gun-Day wallet?
Available at my local: Bay Area Gun Vault, where you get a free brick of .22LR with purchase of any .22LR firearm.
Or a .22LR PPSh copy:

Flying Saucer Moon Nazis Attack!

Thanks to Linoge, now I've got to see this...

Check it out.

Maybe this is why the Soviets built the Kraken!

Climate Hootenanny Redux

H/T Borepatch and with heartfelt thanks to "geoffchambers" in comments at Bishop Hill Blog regarding the tyrrany of Greenthinking in the post Milibandias,

(with apologies to WS Gilbert:)

I am the very model of a modern climatologist
I’m partly statistian, partly palaeo-phrenologist
I’ve temperature readings from thermometers coniferous
my data are the same (or not, well, maybe) as Keith Briffa has
I bought them from a bloke who brought them hotfoot from Siberia
and mixed them with some algae from the mud in Lake Superior.
When counting different isotopes I’m really in my element
and sucking up to journalists from Guardian Environment
I know what makes the treerings from Siberia to the Rockies tick
And I can make spaghetti and transform it to a hockeystick.
My data’s got dark matter that would shatter a cosmologist
I am the very model of a modern climatologist.

Brilliant!
And what started it: Reader Dreadnought has been moved to poetry:

I met a traveller from a distant shire
Who said: A vast and pointless shaft of steel
Stands on a hill top… Near it, in the mire,
Half sunk, a shattered turbine lies, whose wheels
And riven blades and snarls of coloured wire
Tell that its owners well their mission read
Which did not last nor, nowhere to be seen,
The hand that paid them and the empty head.
And scrawled around the base these lines are clear:
‘My name is Millibandias, greenest Green.
Look on my works, ye doubters, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round this display
Of reckless cost and loss, blotless and fair,
The green and pleasant landscape rolls away.

There's hope for Blighty yet.

Leeteg Tahiti Copy

No Tiki Bar can be without at least even a fake - but even the fakes are a bit expensive.  They used to cost a LOT more than they are now however.
And it's an official fake-copy by Leeteg's own marketing Kahuna, the Davis Gallery, so they used the right motifs - especially the red sarong with white aloha print flowers. The Davis Gallery was Barney Davis - who was also known as "Aloha Barney." He was a heavily tattooed former WWII Submariner who could goldbrick and pull a hustle with the best of them, he became Edgar's Leeteg's Colonel Tom Parker, working the art-hustle out of his growing trinket shop in Honolulu, he branded Leeteg The "American Gaugin." Leeteg himself didn't cotton to the latest claptrap out of Manhattan.

...The so-called fine arts have been on the skids since the turn of the century, when impressionism was aborted into the birth of all "isms" of abstract painting. Art is, always has been and, if it is to survive, always must be emotional. To make it coldly intellectual by abstractionism and impressionism is to destroy it or mold it into a monstrosity that is better kept locked up in musty museums. I frankly would rather prefer to have my paintings displayed in a gin-mill rather than buried in a repository together with the rest of the dead art, which is where this modern crap will end up.

God I hat cat-fur, it's hell on black velvet.

Advances in Photography

I started taking pictures when I was about six years old and we went on a family trip up to Yosemite. On that trip I used my grandmother's (Dad's mom) old box-camera which produced pretty good shots on the 120 paper-backed film.  It was neat because with two view-finders you could flip it one way for Portrait shots and the other for Landscape. When we went overseas in Dad got us all (my older sister and brother included) Instamatic 104's in Hong Kong, and wile overseas I probably shot more film than my brother or sister combined. In High School I finally saved enough for a Canon SLR with a built-in light meter.

I didn't go digital until just a few years ago and haven't really kept up with advances. It seemed like for many years it was just a huge race of piling more pixels onto the sensor, a race in which I didn't feel like competing. My copy of Photoshop was old when I got it in '03.

Nowdays I understand there's an effort to improve the quality of pixels, not just quantity. Lately I've been reading up on Photoshop Lightroom, using RAW files, and on the High Dynamic Range phenomenon.  It's not for everybody and a close friend who's a photographer hates it - but he's a complete Zone System purist.

They're a total turn-off to me. Too perfect in a direction of perfect that feels like it takes away from the shot.

For me I can see how it would be useful to capture the tone in a bunch of old slides that I took in the late 70's - like those shot on my visit to East Berlin.

Meanwhile here's a neat photo showing good latitude and dynamic range.
By Bill Roggio, April 2, 2010 4:53 PM

The guided missile destroyer USS Farragut passes by smoke from a pirate skiff it had just disabled in the Indian Ocean on March 31, 2010. The Farragut sunk the pirate mother ship after it attacked an oil tanker off the coast of the Seychelles. The Farragut is part of Combined Task Force 151, a multinational task force established to conduct anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. Photo by US Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Cassandra Thompson.

Hey, they have photographer-chicks in the Navy?? Is this a great country or what?! Anchors away!

But damn all this mouse-and-computer stuff hurts with a rotator cuff injury and tennis elbow...

Muskeln der Rotatorenmanschette -or- Le Cuff Rotateur

Too much overhead tree-pruning with the 14-foot pole. Injuries to the subscapularis and infraspinatous are a bitch - ow, this is painful.  The axillary nerves get all buggered and my right deltoid is pinching.  It hurts to type and I have to mouse with my left hand/arm - maybe this is why Twitter was invented, but I'm still not going there.
My anatomy coloring-book shows the muscles that hold it all together.  There should be more, we were swinging from trees long enough it should be a better design.  Oh well, more ice-packs - and beer.