…and then there’s Chris Van Hollen. Here’s the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, on why he expects the voters to agree that Martha Coakley should take Teddy Kennedy’s place in the Senate:

"Why would you hand the keys to the car back to the same guys whose policies drove the economy into the ditch and then walked away from the scene of the accident?"

No, seriously.

All I can do to help is send money, which I have. Fortunately, one of the few things the American government reliably does well is disaster relief.

I’ll refrain from partisan sniping, unless some jackass tries to use this as justification for passing the healthcare bill…

Update: this is what I’m talking about:

...Four large Coast Guard ships—a 210-foot Reliance-class cutter and three 270-foot medium Endurance-class cutters—left Miami today, bound for Haiti....

...A C-130 cargo airplane also flew into Haiti from Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater in Florida....

...Next to arrive will be urban rescue teams from Florida, Virginia and California...

...The crew of the Comfort, one of the Navy's two 894-foot-long hospital ships, is now rushing to the ship, ported in Baltimore, to sail for Haiti.

The Navy hospital ship will be joined in Haiti by the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson. The carrier's crew of more than 3000 had been at sea for just hours, leaving Norfolk, Va., for its new home port in San Diego, when the call came to reroute to Haiti. The massive craft can launch helicopters loaded with supplies, make and deliver fresh water and, if need be, augment hospital space by pitching aid tents on its flight deck.

Yesterday, a massive, peaceful protest of 100,000 people – the largest demonstration for climate justice in world history – was met with a heavy-handed response by the Danish police.

Emphasis mine. 100,000 concerned activists can’t be wrong, say the folks at itsgettinghotinhere.org.

If the reporting is more honest than the science, it does sound like these assclowns were badly mistreated, but perhaps a few of them will reevaluate their religious beliefs after being “forced to sit in rows for hours, as the temperatures dipped below freezing”.

Many years ago, my college roommate had a job in the Physics department as a tape monkey. The department had a Large Grant to process data from Fermilab. Each run filled a 9-track tape, and the analysis required roughly 11 hours of uninterrupted runtime on their Vaxen. The average uptime on the server was a hair over 11 hours, and with very little slack in their schedule, someone had to be available any time day or night to make sure their delivery date didn’t slip.

My friend was a biochemistry major, and appreciated the importance of delivering high-quality analysis of experimental data, so he was a bit concerned by the fact that the programs used to perform that analysis were in a constant state of flux, a mess of Fortran hacked on by an ever-changing team of grad students. Not wanting to waste precious time, he got into the habit of running it on a small test dataset each day, to make sure it still worked before kicking off an 11-hour run.

The test output was frequently different, in ways that it shouldn’t have been. Ways that very well could have made all of their analysis completely useless to Fermilab. Ways that no one planned, expected, or kept track of. When he raised his concerns, well, their exact words are lost to time, but I remember them sounding an awful lot like, “just load the tapes, kid”.

I think of those words whenever I hear about a computer model that proves something significant that’s tied to the modeler’s funding. And I think that’s all that I need to say about the rapidly-unfolding saga of ClimateGate.

Something about this story just seems a bit, shall we say, “over-hyped”:

In the space of 11 days this year, seven people were murdered in Salinas. Each killing, like the record 25 homicides the previous year, spilled from the gang warfare that this summer pushed the homicide rate in the city of 140,000 to three times that of Los Angeles. Residents retreated indoors at night, and Mayor Dennis Donohue affirmed his decision to seek help from an unlikely source: the U.S. military.

...

"Obviously, there are restrictions," said Salinas Deputy Police Chief Kelly McMillin. "Not only the constitutional part of it, but just the idea we are going to have choppers fast-roping onto Alisal Street."

As far as I can tell, it boils down to: “not many jobs right now for young male unskilled workers who don’t speak much English, so joining a gang seems like a good idea; at least, until you get used as cannon fodder in a fight against another gang”.

And, of course, when the total number of homicides is so low, it’s easy for one or two serious incidents to dramatically alter the rate, creating a dramatic “worse than LA” comparison.

Not to imply that there are no problems. It’s quite clear from the statistical data that, taken as a whole, the Salinas SMSA has crime rates comparable to much larger cities; it’s just highly concentrated geographically. The warzone they paint in the article is nothing like the kid-friendly neighborhood where I handed out big handfuls of candy on Halloween night to roving bands of (often unescorted) little monsters.

[Update: a quick bit of math to show the rate swing: in 2006, the homicide rate was only 82% of the national average (4.7 versus 5.7), while in 2008 it was three times higher (17.4 versus 5.8). Since these are numbers per 100,000, and the current population is 148,350, that’s a difference of 11 homicides. The rate was also significantly lower than the national average from 1987 to 1991, which happens to be a period with low unemployment and lots of construction.]

Sloppiest. Blow job. Ever.

Fight global warming with wolves!

"We urge Senators Udall and McCain to take immediate action to restore wolves to Rocky Mountain National Park, as part of their climate change initiative"