Al Gore’s energy con­sump­tion hypocrisy. AN OSCAR FOR HYPOCRISY? So asked Simon Jester as he sent along this story about Al Gore’s home energy use. Of course it’s no sur­prise that Gore, that famous liar and scion of a polit­i­cal fam­ily, lives a “do as I say, don’t do as I do” lifestyle. But this is pretty funny, com­ing the day after his hot-air doc­u­men­tary won the Acad­emy Award: The aver­age house­hold in Amer­ica con­sumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, accord­ing to the Depart­ment of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national aver­age. Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the elec­tric­ity in one month than an aver­age Amer­i­can fam­ily uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy con­sump­tion, Gore’s aver­age monthly elec­tric bill topped $1,359. Since the release of An Incon­ve­nient Truth, Gore’s energy con­sump­tion has increased from an aver­age of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006. [Wolfes­blog]

And that’s not even men­tion­ing how many times Gore trav­els by air in a given month. From a post on the Mag­num Pho­tos Blog:

Right now, by occu­py­ing this one coach class seat, I am per­son­ally account­able for the release of about eight met­ric tons of Car­bon Diox­ide (CO2) into the atmos­phere. That is roughly the same amount as the total CO2 emis­sions if I drove a Hum­mer H2 SUV every day for an entire year, based on the Amer­i­can sub­ur­ban annual aver­age of 19,300km.

I’d be will­ing to bet that if you took into account their homes, air travel, and gen­eral lifestyle, you’d find that the Hol­ly­wood ecof­reaks who voted for Gore’s pro­pa­ganda film are respon­si­ble for more car­bon diox­ide emis­sions than at least half of the pop­u­la­tion of the Earth–and even half of the US population.

How Fair­Play Works: Apple’s iTunes DRM Dilemma. Under­stand­ing how Apple’s Fair­Play DRM works helps to answer a lot of ques­tions: why it hasn’t been replaced with an open, inter­op­er­a­ble DRM that any­one can use, why Apple isn’t broadly licens­ing Fair­Play, and why the com­pany hasn’t jumped to add DRM-free con­tent from indie artists to iTunes. [Rough­ly­Drafted Mag­a­zine]

A good arti­cle which addresses not only how Fair­Play works, but also why Apple cre­ated it and why Apple would get rid of it if they could.

News: Vista’s inter­face a ‘step back,’ ana­lyst says. The inter­face of Microsoft’s Vista is a step back, espe­cially when com­pared to OS X, user inter­face ana­lyst Andreas Pfeif­fer says.

[Mac­Cen­tral]

That’s not good, con­sid­er­ing that OS X’s inter­face was a step back com­pared to Win­dows XP (to say noth­ing of the Mac OS). I have noticed that soft­ware in gen­eral has a ten­dency to get worse with each new version.

Chim­panzees ‘hunt using spears’. Chim­panzees in Sene­gal have been observed mak­ing and using wooden spears to hunt other pri­mates, accord­ing to a study in the jour­nal Cur­rent Biology.

Researchers doc­u­mented 22 cases of chimps fash­ion­ing tools to jab at smaller pri­mates shel­ter­ing in cav­i­ties of hol­low branches or tree trunks.

The report’s authors, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani, said the find­ing could have impli­ca­tions for human evolution.

Chimps had not been pre­vi­ously observed hunt­ing other ani­mals with tools. [BBC News]

Very inter­est­ing! My first ques­tion (and I sus­pect the researches will be ask­ing it too) is whether they chimps thought this up by them­selves, or got the idea from watch­ing human hunters.

The Scofflaw Demo­graphic. What scofflaws need now, and what the major­ity of our pop­u­la­tion will wish for in the future, prob­a­bly at the point where the gov­ern­ment finally does try to seize every hand­gun or require every cit­i­zen be fin­ger­printed and have his or her DNA sequenced and recorded in a per­ma­nent data­base, or when every finan­cial trans­ac­tion, no mat­ter how triv­ial, must by law be processed elec­tron­i­cally, by a credit card com­pany, or when traf­fic at lighted inter­sec­tions is tracked by remote cam­eras, or when our employ­ers begin forc­ing us to piss in cups as a con­di­tion for keep­ing our jobs (wait a minute…), is a refuge from the unre­lent­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal, polit­i­cal, legal, reli­gious, eco­nomic and phys­i­cal coer­cion we are daily sub­ject to at the hands of our employ­ers, our gov­ern­ments and every­body in-between, and from the over-politicization of every facet of our lives. And the only place to find this refuge will be far from our cities.

Scofflaws, like their pre­de­ces­sors dur­ing the pre­vi­ous pro­hi­bi­tion, believe the drug war is a big mis­take, as are the extreme mea­sures law enforce­ment is tak­ing to pros­e­cute it. They would like to see the Park Ser­vice and For­est Ser­vice and BLM acknowl­edge that there is a seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion which can­not enjoy our pub­lic lands with a ranger look­ing over their shoul­der. They would also like to see the RAT stomped dead, and legit­i­mate roads left open.

So why should the great well-adjusted, sophis­ti­cated, domes­ti­cated, citi­fied major­ity care what becomes of scofflaws, who are beyond the nor­mal dis­tri­b­u­tion curve for non-conformity? Because the scofflaws are the canaries in the coal mine. Every day there’s news about the police tan­gling with extrem­ists of one kind or another—home-grown ter­ror­ists, reli­gious fanat­ics, hard­ened crim­i­nals and racists. But scofflaws, for the most part, don’t have an eco­nomic or ide­o­log­i­cal agenda beyond just want­ing to be left alone. And when the author­i­ties start going after scofflaws with as much zeal as they do these other classes of crim­i­nals, the sim­ple desire not to be molested by our own gov­ern­ment will have become crim­i­nal­ized, for all of us. [New West Net­work]

Paul Purged from Paja­mas Poll.

Com­menter “jf” notes in the post below that Paja­mas Media has elim­i­nated Ron Paul from its weekly online straw poll. This is odd, con­sid­er­ing that Paul had a 2–1 lead over his near­est com­peti­tor in last week’s poll, and came in the sec­ond the week before.

Paja­mas Media says it’s imple­ment­ing a new pol­icy where only can­di­dates who gar­ner one per­cent or more of the vote in the pre­vi­ous month’s Gallup poll are eli­gi­ble for its online poll. But Paul wasn’t listed as an option in Gallup’s last poll. I don’t know Gallup’s rea­son for not includ­ing him. But even if Gallup’s peo­ple don’t find Paul cred­i­ble, he obvi­ously does have quite a bit of cred­i­bil­ity with Paja­mas Media’s readership.

The only other can­di­date elim­i­nated from the Repub­li­can field by the new pol­icy is for­mer sen­a­tor Fred Thomp­son, who hasn’t even announced.

Seems like a strange pol­icy that elim­i­nates the pre­vi­ous week’s top vote-getter. It’s even stranger when you con­sider the fact that the only real use of a straw poll from Paja­mas Media would be to deter­mine which can­di­dates might be res­onat­ing with the blo­gos­phere. On the right, the blo­gos­phere skews lib­er­tar­ian. So Paul’s ascen­dancy makes per­fect sense. Hid­ing the fact that he’s pop­u­lar with the Inter­net right robs the poll of its only real utility.

Tak­ing Paul off the list of options I guess makes the unsci­en­tific poll look more cred­i­ble, in that its results are vaguely sim­i­lar to those of national, more sci­en­tific polls. But you have to won­der why PM’s edi­tors would even bother with an online poll if they’re just going to switch poli­cies when they get results they don’t like.

NOTE: Some com­menters have noted that some Paul sup­port­ers had cheated the poll with bots and arti­fi­cial vot­ing. True. But accord­ing to the PM post on the “bal­lot stuff­ing,” those votes were deducted from the can­di­date totals, and Paul still did very well. What’s more, it isn’t as if PM purged Paul from the poll to pun­ish his sup­port­ers for their malfea­sance. Sup­port­ers of Barack Obama and Mitt Rom­ney did the same thing, and both of those names are still in the poll.

[Hit and Run]

The best com­ment on this comes from Jim Henley:

By utter and absolute coin­ci­dence the famously prowar PJM banned the only strongly anti­war Repub­li­can from their straw poll after he won it. Who knows how such a thing could happen.

I received a let­ter today from some gov­ern­ment agency called the “Depart­ment of Alco­holic Bev­er­age Con­trol” stat­ing that a nearby busi­ness had applied for a per­mit to sell alco­hol, and giv­ing me an address where I could request more infor­ma­tion or send a protest. How­ever, the let­ter omit­ted any address I could write to protest­ing the exis­tence of the Depart­ment of Alco­holic Bev­er­age Control.

Heli­copter crashes in Afghanistan. The US-led coali­tion says one of its heli­copters has crashed in south-east Afghanistan after report­ing engine fail­ure. [BBC News]

Accord­ing to the arti­cle an Impe­r­ial Stormtrooper claimed that it was “not enemy fire related,” but given the fre­quency with which the Evil Empire has been lying about “crashes” recently I won­der if we’ll soon be dis­cov­er­ing that the “engine fail­ure” was induced by a heat-seeking missile.

When I read about that shoot­ing in the mall in Utah, I thought it was odd that there was no men­tion of any mall patrons shoot­ing back, but at the time I fig­ured some had and the main­stream media had ignored it (as has hap­pened in other cases). Later, when it became clear that there really wasn’t any­one shoot­ing back except two cops, I thought it was really weird that there could be a mall full of peo­ple in Utah and none of them was armed (I have a Utah con­cealed weapon per­mit myself).

Today I came across this photo of a sign at the entrance to the mall in ques­tion (no idea where the photo comes from)–note in par­tic­u­lar the restric­tion that I’ve cir­cled in red. Well, that explains it. I cer­tainly hope that the rel­a­tives of the peo­ple who were killed sue the mall’s own­ers for every­thing they’ve got.

A Pooka Is a Some­times Food. As you’ve prob­a­bly heard by now, North Korea hopes to solve its lit­tle mass star­va­tion prob­lem by breed­ing enor­mous rab­bits. Tom Palmer explains why it won’t work:

they’re not very eco­nom­i­cal as a food source. Huge rab­bits require huge amounts of food to make them so big. The social­ist plan­ner wants a big rab­bit. The entre­pre­neur asks whether there is a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence between the cost of feed­ing the rab­bit and the value of the rab­bit. For the giant ones, it seems that the dif­fer­ence is neg­a­tive. But that wouldn’t stop a good social­ist. After all, if you have a giant hunger prob­lem, the answer must be giant foods.

On a hap­pier note, North Korea claims it’s will­ing to kill its nuclear weapons pro­gram. In exchange it wants fuel aid — and per­haps, in a secret side agree­ment, some enor­mous pel­lets for the bunnies.

“He went miss­ing on patrol near Young­dungpo in 1951. I fear the worst.”

[Hit and Run]

Per­haps the story about food is actu­ally a clever bit of mis­di­rec­tion. Embar­rassed by the fiz­zle of his nuke test, Kim Jong-Il is now plan­ning to raise giant car­niv­o­rous rab­bits instead.