NOVATOWNHALL

From past experience I have the impression our readership is not by and large a “techie” audience, unless the technology happens to go bang - in which case I think we have the top experts in the world this side of Janes.

But maybe the occasional Web or marketing person will drop by, so I am going to share a great blog I discovered in the course of researching my day-job Web overhaul project (which remains highly diffuse at this point). It’s honestly one of the best blogs I’ve ever read in any subject field, and I have read a whole lot of them.

Jeremiah Owyang is clearly the rare individual who has found an occupation which matches his personal enthusiasms, so that his online diary bears the depth and quantity of content of someone who pours 100% of himself into the subject matter. This is a pure blessing for anyone interested in learning about the information-intensive, jargon-rich, and opaque - for those who have fallen a bit behind on tech innovations - field that Owyang specializes in: Web strategy. Every minute spent on his blog is worth that minute of your life. His posts on User Experience could serve as a certificate program.

For instance, this post and comment thread on Content Management Systems arrived at a perfect time - when I am engaged precisely in researching CMS and social media solutions for our company. If you are behind the times on Internet trends, terms like Twitter and Technographics are greek to you, if you are responsible for making a strategic Web decision, and you want to get caught up, read this guy’s blog.

Sorry for the bleg but I am desperate:

My (day job) company is considering a Web software purchase which is a content management system that runs on Microsoft Server, and I need to get some information on Web site hosting companies. There are many Web sites that tout themselves as “Web hosting review” sites but a tiny bit of digging reveals the vast majority are simply advertising outlets that reprint each company’s promotional literature.

There is a special place in Hell for the guy who started that trend, believe you me.

The very few sites that actually do seem to be trying to provide reviews or compilations of customer ratings are either really outdated or - judging by other “reviews” for software and such that I happen to know about - don’t seem to have much going on between the ears, so I am not taking their word for anything.

The basic specs for the potential host would be dedicated (co-located) server, very powerful machine to pull the gargantuan pile of ore which is Microsoft software, and MS SQL Server. Backups and such, obviously. If anyone knows of any place on the Web or elsewhere where there are actual reviews or test center results for any hosting companies, that info would be greatly appreciated.

I am only going to give you this heads-up one time.  For those of us with ADD, ADHD and Altzeimers-too bad.  Staple a post-it to your forehead and look in the mirror often!  What?  Can’t read backwards either?  I have no other suggestions for you.

It seems that decisions made elsewhere and from middle-managment are about to give us a complete scenerio of how to kill a satellite; from beginning to end.  The interviews are still being made as I type this.  The program should include those people that made the decision, those people that implemented the decision, and those people that revamped everything to make it workable.  If we get really lucky (and I believe we will), there will be nose camera footage of the missle to target up to the last few seconds before impact.  Some things just have to remain classified as it should be.  Oh, stop crying and whinning.  If you want to see what missle impacts look like, google footage for the first Gulf War.

All this should come about around mid-June timeframe.  It is developed and brought to you by the Discovery Channel BUT will air on the Military Channel.  Get those VCR’s (or TiVO’s) ready.  Ought to be a good time!

The “environmental” movement jumped the whale shark long ago, and is in the process of jumping the Loch Ness Monster:

Sunspot activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that — far from warming — the globe is about to return to an Ice Age, says an Australian-American scientist…

“This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,” Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. “If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.”

The global cooling scam of the 1970s morphed into the global warming scam of the 1990s, which is now transitioning into the indeterminate environmental freak out scam of the current age.

The point is to make everyone susceptible to behavior modification.

And because the actual environment refuses to cooperate with the ideological framing, eco-freaks are now attempting to re-brand the ineffable threat under the more plausible rationale of “climate change.”

This is a pretty safe approach, given the established concept of “seasons,” which much of humanity is prone to accept, considering what happens all the time around us. The cleverness of this approach will be measured by the extent to which normal people can be convinced that the weather should serve as a reason to reverse the gains that technology has brought to human civilization.

This seems significant:

Skeptics have long questioned the value of diverting food crops for fuel, and the grocery and live- stock industries vehemently opposed an energy bill last fall, arguing it was driving up costs.

A fifth of the nation’s corn crop is now used to brew ethanol for motor fuel, and as farmers have planted more corn, they have cut acreage of other crops, particularly soybeans. That, in turn, has contributed to a global shortfall of cooking oil.

Spreading global dissatisfaction in recent months has intensified the food-versus-fuel debate. Last Friday, a European environment advisory panel urged the European Union to suspend its goal of having 10 percent of transportation fuel made from biofuels by 2020. Europe’s well-meaning rush to biofuels, the scientists concluded, had created a variety of harmful ripple effects, including deforestation in Southeast Asia and higher prices for grain.

Even if biofuels are not the primary reason for the increase in food costs, some experts say it is one area where a reversal of government policy could help take pressure off food prices.

Some studies have shown the amount of energy required to create ethanol (i.e., to grow and transport the crops) exceeds the amount of energy ethanol provides. In any case, this seems like as good a time as any to pull the plug on this feel-good experiment.

I am certain this makes sense because so many smart people, most of whom have degrees in science - wiccan science - are on board with it, but NPR is reporting that a very recently concluded study of the oceans shows that they have not exactly “warmed” in the past five years.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant,” Willis says…

Leaving aside the fact that NPR - god love’em - is compelled to frame this news in terms of what “global warming involves,” objective readers will be hard pressed to conclude anything other than that ‘global warming’ is going the way of blood-letting as far as hard science goes. So when we are confronted with flat-Earth ideologists who persist in trying to sell the global warming scam, it might be most appropriate to reply, “Groovy, dude,” or even “How now, Sirrah!”

Now this is interesting.

She commonly reported information about the relatives, household composition, family deaths and illnesses, etc., of members of our team, without ever having observed or been informed about them. As an example, she knew the personality and precise manner of death (i.e., the exact type of cancer) of a relative of a team member that no one could conceivably have guessed. She once spoke about the strange behavior of some inexplicably frenzied animals beyond her direct observation: Though residing in another city, she commented, “So those cats really went berserk last night, didn’t they?” the morning after two cats in a team member’s house uncharacteristically had violently attacked each other at about 2 AM….

You’re going to want to read all of that one - it leaves quite a lot to think about.

Mystical environmentalism is the disease. Stories like this one will be the cure:

According to my source, architect Mayne has stated that federal office workers do not get enough exercise. To address this, he installed elevators in the building that only stop at every third floor. This requires employees to walk up or down one or two flights of metal stairs.

Persons with physical disabilities who cannot use stairs can use a separate elevator that stops at every floor. The foreseeable result is that employees seeking to avoid stairs use the disabled access elevator, leaving this car crammed with people and making the ride to the top extremely slow…

That’s just a teaser - read and chuckle.

UPDATE: There will be a conference on this very topic on Monday in Williamsburg.

Now that the cat is out of the bag it will be useful to begin cataloguing the growing scientific evidence which for some time has been showing that our trucks are not, in fact, changing the weather.

David Deming had a hint of this story back in December.

Back in 2002 there were already reports of Antarctica’s cooling trend.

For the entertainment value: A mocking look at two Chinese scientists who discovered evidence of the trend, back when the “man-made global warming” scam still had the aura of credibility.

Let’s not neglect to give credit to the forward-thinking visionaries at Time magazine in 1974.

Kevin Tapping’s work is showing data suspiciously pointing to the Sun as a possible factor in the Earth’s actual temperature. Good luck selling that one.

Russian scientist Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin of the Oceanology Institute in a report from January also fingers the pesky Sun among other factors for the current cooling period.

Stay tuned for much more on this topic in the coming months, as it will eventually end up in the mainstream press where I predict not every editor is going to be willing to follow the “global warming” true believers over the cliff.

Speaking of which, man can Al Gore not catch a break! He loses the presidential election in a year when the country was at peace and prosperous and the corporate shenanigans which flourished under the Clinton White House had not yet been discovered - and most likely the loss was primarily attributable to his First in Command being a bit of a scalawag. That election should never have come down to 500 votes in Florida.

Then, for his next career move, he hitches his wagon to the man-made global warming hysteria and tours the country warning of bigger, badder hurricanes … right before the hurricanes went on a two-year hiatus. He suffers the indignity of having to defend with a straight face his heavy use of SUVs and private jets because via the carbon-offsets marketplace he has “purchased” exemptions from the rules he wishes to impose on others. He wins a Grammy Award for his amazing picture book (or was it a Golden Globe - I forget) which has now inconveniently been revealed as hogwash. It’s a pretty amazing run of public crashing and burning. Luckily, he is a young enough man to have time for one more act, and I do hope he gets to finish his public career with a Richard Nixon-like image rehabilitation.

At very least, he can start saving all that carbon offset cash and put it into something fun, like off-roading and potato guns.

Heh heh heh.

..The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year’s time.

Following this story could make what was looking like a grim year rather enjoyable. Although, as we’ve seen, it sure does freak out some of our visitors.

This is a bit of a downer, my friends:

In a few billion years, the Sun will fuse the last of its hydrogen into helium, turn into a red giant and expand to 250 times its current size. At first, the Sun’s loss of mass will loosen its gravitational pull on Earth, which will allow the planet to migrate to a wider orbit about 7.6 billion years from now.

This process has led some to speculate that the Earth might escape destruction – but survival now seems impossible…

And I, for one, am pissed.

My original plan called for a couple years of pure advocacy here in Loudoun County, followed by a statewide public education effort aimed at informing the citizens of Virginia about the substance of both American political and everyday culture - this ongoing for maybe five or so years. Beyond that, I envisioned a national effort to increase familiarity with the foundations and mores of “western” civilization, from the Magna Carta to the Mayflower Compact to “Wealth of Nations”: highlighting what we all know but no longer notice, which could take a decade or two of undoing the many years of really bad education in history that our nation has bequeathed to its upcoming generations. Next would be a few hundred thousand years of advocacy for the much more basic “human” values contributing to the endurance of our species: convincing people to have stronger families with more focus on having kids and gradually reverse the decadent liberal value system of the 1960s pop culture. Finally - and I’m not saying I would be around to witness this, but I’d hope in some small way those I know and love would benefit - I’d have hoped for eight or ten billion years of grassroots political activism to gradually reverse the problems wrought by television, and thereby convince my fellow Americans to eventually read more books and spend more time outdoors, hiking, doing their own landscaping, and generally things like picnicking, shooting guns evenings and weekends, and jarts.

But apparently it is not to be, as this lame-o planet of ours has so little self-sufficiency that in seven billion years we could all be at the mercy of the whims of the dying star we call our “sun.” Maybe if we had known this, we’d have been calling it our “lamp.” Because - WORD - lamps burn out, but “suns” supposedly give life to your planet.

If this so-called “life” the sun is giving us is suddenly going to be snuffed around 7,600,002,008 AD, I say please just pull the plug on it right now and don’t get our hopes up, ‘kay?

Turn it all dark so we can start looking for a terrestrial home with a little more backbone.

Crappy frickin’ planet we’ve ended up on, story of my life …

So, yes, I will be modifying the long-term plan. I’m thinking more emphasis on fundraising and paid workers rather than volunteers, since the “sunset” of our project might arrive earlier than we hoped and we will have to pay a price to speed up the process. The strategy will still be the same but these tactical changes are annoying.

Just a few hours ago an SM-3 missile hit a dying, fuel-filled satellite over the Pacific ocean. The paper of record reports:

The SM-3 missile was fired from the USS Lake Erie in the Pacific Ocean at about 10:26 EST and hit the bus-sized satellite about 133 nautical miles above the ocean, the Pentagon said in a statement.

“A network of land, air, sea and space-based sensors confirms that the U.S. military intercepted a nonfunctioning National Reconnaissance Office satellite, which was in its final orbits before entering the Earth’s atmosphere,” it said.

As far as educating the public about the importance of continuing to fund missile defense goes, it’s a start. Let’s hope we get some photos.

More on the SM-3 here.

UPDATE: Some great observations in the comments.

I had the thought some time back that one way George W. Bush might repair his legacy would be to pilot a jet fighter into the power plant of an attacking alien mother-ship, as Randy Quaid did in the movie Independence Day, sacrificing his life to save the planet. A lot can happen between now and next January, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, this is pretty cool:

A Navy cruiser in the Pacific Ocean will try an unprecedented shoot-down of an out-of-control, school-bus-size U.S. spy satellite loaded with a toxic fuel as it begins its plunge to Earth…

On a related note, depending on how this attempt fares, I wonder how the next round of budget proposals for missile defense will fare in Congress. I also wonder if certain political candidates will think to make this a campaign issue.

UPDATE: A good story on this is in the paper of record.

With fear-mongering faux science, everything is possible:

The recent cold wave sweeping across Mumbai and other parts of India could be attributed to global warming, experts said on Tuesday here at an environmental conference…

Prabhu said the cold wave that swept Maharashtra and other parts of India recently could be attributed to the phenomenon of global warming.

This is how, 1984-style, it happens. Facts are no impediment to ideology. The collectivist, anti-capitalist, war on personal freedom which is at the essence of the fake “science” ideology underlying the global warming scam will not be deterred by evidence. This is because it has been a lie from the outset and evidence was never part of the calculation.

Those promoting the snake oil of “global warming” are simply attempting to enact changes in public policy which would further the goals of the collectivists. Expanding the reach of the global warming lie gives more power to those who want to tell everyone else how to live.

While, incidentally, they continue to live however they want.

And now, as the facts in this sorry episode in false ideology come full circle, we are faced with the next step: Convincing the people that the ideologists know better than their own lying eyes.

This is known as the big lie.

It’s about time someone had the courage to say what we all know deep down in our hearts.

In some cases, violence is necessary, but there must be limits. Those “good human rights organizations” don’t make any exceptions in their solutions because their aim is to serve society. Will it be a better society once we see wives, mothers, sisters and daughters going from one police station and one court to another, complaining against their husbands, fathers, brothers and even sons?

I can answer that question for all of us: Good lord, NO!

While some may turn their noses up at a concept of society where such “politically incorrect” ideas still hold sway, let me remind everyone of a little thing called historical context: It’s 24 YEARS after 1984, people. When I was in high school I thought that by 2008 we’d all be zooming around with rocket packs and ingesting books in tablet form. But here we are: no bionic bodies, no time travel; just Viagra and Madden NFL ‘08. Talk about thin gruel … Thus compound the disappointments of the “modern” world.

But back in Yemen, they’ve suffered no such letdowns because they’ve been keepin’ it real all along. Smackin’ their women upside the head. Riding their flying carpets. And telling their story so eloquently.