hiester.com

Not quite, but  close enough.

Step right up! Step right up for some of P.T. Paulson’s magical elixir. It cures sluggish lending, bad debts, economic constipation, why it even pulls the tractor trailers right up to the back gate of the Treasury so we can clear it out by January 20th, 2009 when those other suckers get to take over this lousy job. Get ‘em while they’re hot boys! $10 billion here! $20 billion there! Banks, insurance companies, car companies, who cares?  You’re the CEO of Carpeteria? Well, all those folks who didn’t make their mortgage payments, but will still get to stay in their homes anyway–they are going to need new carpets sooner or later. We don’t want you to have an inventory crisis! Here’s $20 billion, how’ll that hold ya? It’s almost Christmas folks. Uncle Henry has got a little something for the stocking this year. How about $10 billion. That should let you take your gal out to a nice dinner and take in a movie, eh?

What’s this? Mayors looking to me for handouts?  So they can fix some bridges and roads and hospitals? Look, buddy, why don’t you go talk to a bank about taking out a loan for that type of thing. Can’t you just float a bond? Do you think I’m a miracle worker just because I have $700 billion to blow in less than two months and I can blow it any way I want?  My banker friends have to earn a living. How are they gonna keep their private jets flying when troublemakers like you want to butt in and take away their livelihood?

Incidentally, in case anyone interprets this as support for McCain/Palin, know this: I would sooner have my head chewed off by a gila monster than vote for McCain. I’m voting for Obama. I’m pissed off that he voted for that crazy unconstitutional FISA bill, but I also realize that he is doing what he needs to do politically to win. He said he was going to take his lumps for that vote, and I’m giving him his lumps. And while I think Biden will be a competent VP and has strong and well-earned foreign policy credentials, I also find him to be something of a blowhard and I really do think he is looking like that strange Agnew-Byrd morph.

It will be curious to see if President Obama is willing to give up any of the “unitary executive” power grabs that the Bush Administration has taken for the past 8 years. My guess is that he’ll keep as much power as possible in the executive branch. He’s never going to say, “Now that I’m the executive-in-chief, I’m going to reduce the power of the executive branch.”  That’s just the nature of Presidents. Some of it will also be payback.

Of Obama’s acceptance speech, Rove said he thought it was underwhelming given the venue. “I think that this was a speech that was not worthy of the venue, and an eminently memorable venue with an eminently forgettable speech,” said Rove.

I think that [Bush’s] was a [presidency] that was not worthy of the venue, and an eminently memorable venue [The White House] with an eminently [disgraceful presidency].

Justices Reject D.C. Ban On Handgun Ownership

Where do I sign up for my local militia? I’m very concerned about our nation being invaded and toppled because our weak, unarmed citizenry will not be able to mount a defense.

And to the guy holding up the sign that said, “If guns kill, do pens misspell words?” I reply: Ask any emergency room surgeon how many misspelled words victims they treated today, or ever.

If you’re going to make a list of heresies, you don’t put 10 items on it. You have to put 13 items on it. 13 is a heretical number. I don’t even want to spend much time on how naive and phony WIRED’s list is. They present a set of false choices, such as picking a hybrid versus buying an old used car (how about not having a car at all or at least cutting your driving by 80% or more–that would reduce carbon output more than anything WIRED recommends). Another bogus point is that air-conditioning emits less carbon than heating. Duh, WIRED, consider that most people in the USA have to both heat AND cool their homes. A better idea is to conserve as much as possible; insulate better, keep your house a little cooler in the winter and a little warmer in the summer. Why quibble over whether “organic” cows produce less beef and fart more than their “conventional” bovine brethren. The better suggestion is to STOP EATING BEEF or at least cut down a whole lot. Those aren’t provocative topics that can divert a person’s attention to a magazine on a newsstand (with content that is so weak that it requires a neon orange background), so WIRED dismisses the more commonsense and ultimately even less convenient truths about climate change. If we want to reduce carbon emissions, we’re going to have to give up our gigantic SUV’s, our bacon-double-cheeseburgers and our sprawling McMansions.

My true goal here, however, is to help WIRED fulfill its act of heresy against the green movement(actually, my goal is to poke fun at the numbskulls at WIRED who wrote the article, but play along) Hence, here are my three additional WIRED-style “green heresies” that will bring their number up to the very sinister total of 13.

11) Buy Lots of Cigarettes - Think about it. Tobacco is a plant. Plants absorb CO2. If thousands and thousands of additional acres of tobacco were planted, think of all the carbon that would be kept out of the atmosphere. What’s that you’re thinking? When you smoke the cigarette, it just puts the carbon right back in the atmosphere? Well, you wouldn’t actually smoke them, silly (I suppose you could and still be “carbon neutral”, and, hey, since curbing carbon is our number one goal, we’ll have to make a few sacrifices to our health to get there). Carbon-cutting citizens could put all those packs of cigarettes into crawl spaces and attics for insulation. Americans are accustomed to buying lots of stuff we don’t need (and that we’ll never use) and then letting it all sit around and clutter up our homes, so this won’t require any change in behavior and it would be great for the economy!

12) Be Even More of a Couch Potato - When you boil it all down, it’s human activity that is causing global warming. Want to cut carbon emissions? Then just stop doing so much. Every time you come up with something to do, you’re suddenly spewing out carbon like nobody’s business. You jump in your car and you buy stuff that had to be shipped halfway across the earth and it was made with oil and other natural resources that burned up tons of hydrocarbons to get to the store in your local strip mall. Here’s a better idea: sit on the floor in the dark. If you’re worried about obesity from lack of exercise, try a seaweed diet. Homegrown seaweed. There you have it, WIRED’s recipe for reversing carbon emissions: sit in the dark and eat seaweed that you grow in your swimming pool.

13) Cancel your subscription to WIRED.

• Broken spy satellite. Bought it in 2006, but it never really worked and I didn’t send in my warranty/registration card on time! Can be dropped at your approximate location in a few big pieces or disassembled and shipped in fragments. Great for target practice.
• Presidential Campaign paraphernalia: bumper stickers, lawn placards, hats, hoodies, web hosting plan prepaid through 2016, 30 minutes of prime time on the Hallmark Channel, 600 folding chairs, 8,000,000 frequent flyer miles. Pick them up at the Chappaqua town dump.
• 750,000 unused election ballots. Easily transferred from Kenya to your location in Florida or Ohio.
• 400,000 HD-DVD players. These make a pleasant night-light or clock. Easy to convert to a garage door opener if you have a soldering iron and a few gizmos from Radio Shack. One HD-DVD movie (Ishtar) and a case of Betamax tapes also available.
• Box of DVCAM tapes that I found in a dumpster near the NFL offices. Looks like guys on the sidelines of a football game making crazy hand and body gestures. Also offering a box containing old bloody gauze, beer cans, used hypodermic syringes and a pizza crust. Call 212-WE-CHEAT and ask for Roger (at Video Bargainville!).
• 13-year-old web portal, search and advertising business. Runs a little slow, backfires frequently, has rust and needs major engine repairs. With a little TLC and a one-time charge to cover severance packages, it could be a nice component in your business empire.

Good Morning Silicon Valley has been following the desperate efforts of various music recording industry groups to crack down on illegal music distribution. Groups such as the British Phonographic Industry are calling on Internet Service Providers to monitor their users online activities and punish or report those who share music illegally.

This week, the ISP’s shot back. MISPELL, the Multinational Internet Service Provider Education and Legislation League, issued the following press release:

Industry Groups around the world have been lobbying for legislation that will require ISPs to monitor our users’ activities and ban users who are found to share music files in violation of copyright laws. Our question is, why us? It would make just as much sense to require PC manufacturers to monitor their customers and punish those who steal music. Maybe they could make the violating computer melt into a useless smelly gray blob. That would be pretty good punishment, right?

Why not force hard disk manufacturers to detect suspicious music piracy-related disk activity and then send all the data to the authorities? What is music piracy if not the movement of data from one disk drive to another? Then again, disk drive companies would be correct in their assertion that data cannot be written to a disk without first being held in memory somewhere.

Memory chip vendors should add algorithms that sense illegal music distribution patterns in the silicon, then they should send the user’s biographical information directly to the BPI and the RIAA and display “Don’t copy that floppy” on the user’s screen.

Speaking of the screen, without a screen, it would be nearly impossible to pirate music. The bad guys have to be able to see what they’re doing in order to cripple the poor music recording industry by distributing music on P2P networks. Maybe display and peripheral device manufacturers need to speed up the artificial intelligence components in their devices so they can stop music piracy.

And how did the chip manufacturers come out of this smelling like a rose? Hello! You can’t be an Internet music thief without a computer and there is no computer without a processor. Intel and AMD really need to add some low-level music piracy detection machine code right into the chip. But wait! My Intel Core Duo is about as useful as an 8-track tape if I don’t have any electricity.

Utility companies must massage the power they distribute into a music piracy-detecting pattern in order to save the worldwide music recording industry from the crippling scourge of Internet crooks.

Not so fast there, young fella. Electricity doesn’t just get up and walk across the wires on its own. You’ve got to have some kind of fuel to burn to make heat to boil water to turn turbines to make electricity. What is the most common fuel used to make electricity? Coal. The coal industry has built itself on the theft of other people’s music. They should be ashamed of themselves! How can they sleep at night? We call on coal mining companies to start making “smart coal” that can burn in such a way as to make the electricity that it ultimately generates incapable of supporting intellectual theft. It would be nice, too, if they could alter its molecular structure so it doesn’t release carbon dioxide and speed up global warming, but that is a secondary concern to the music recording industry.

Roger Clemens tried to come out firing brush-back pitches to the House Committee on Oversight, Government Reform, Nannies and Seven Year-Old Hypodermic Syringes Stored in Beer Cans. Unfortunately he didn’t have his good stuff and got shelled for a grand-slam with nobody out in the first inning. My favorite moment was his plea of, “I’m guilty only of being too nice.” That’s chin music all right. Except it’s a coming from a violin under the Rocket’s chin.

Quite a few news outlets are making a big deal of the tense exchange between Clemens and Committee Chairman Henry Waxman at the conclusion of the hearing. I’ll replay it here for those who might have missed it.