Alkahest

So maybe in my last post, I was a bit hard on Louisiana because it’s the state I’ve left.  It’s not like we don’t have our own wackos in NC.  Two examples:

One of NC’s representatives, Patrick McHenry (R) has proposed that we put Reagan’s face on the $50 bill.  Maybe for his work on voodoo [...]

Every once in a while, something from Louisiana will catch the national attention, or at least the political bits that I care about, and I’m once again reminded of why I’m happy to have left.  The latest?  Apparently, the Bossier Parish sheriff is creating himself a militia.  No really.  It’s called “Operation Exodus,” which according [...]

Speaking of Festivus, I should note a recent sighting of a genuine Festivus miracle… they still had a quart of Maple View Farms eggnog at the grocery store!
Er, actually, a better Festivus miracle is that today the senate democratic caucus reached the 60 votes needed for their final cloture vote and will vote on healthcare [...]

In the most awesome [1] display of legislative ineptitude since they presented a budget with no numbers on April Fool’s Day, the republicans have released their plan for health care reform.  Now, keep in mind that as scored by the CBO, the democratic plan will increase coverage from 83% to 96% of the legal population [...]

A while back I mentioned that K, some associates and I had started up a new non-profit.  Things are going reasonably well.  People have been more supportive than I had thought.  We’ve had about 70 patients so far and we’ve got the systems set up so that patients entered into the database post up to [...]

I’m not a big baseball fan.  For that matter, there are few ball sports that interest me.  But, this is important.  If you recall, a few years ago (2004), there was a big furor over steroids in baseball.  The government searched BALCO and found evidence of rampant steroid use by baseball players.  Now I hadn’t [...]

In computer security, one of the most difficult and annoying problems is the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).  The idea behind a DDoS attack is straight forward: the attacker tries to prevent legitimate use of the service by using a large number of other computers.  Usually these other computers have been compromised (hacked) and [...]

Tomorrow is April 15th, tax day.  And in case you’ve missed it, republicans, flat taxers, gold fetishists, racists, defense nuts and other extreme conservatives are planning to host tea parties tomorrow.  Tea parties?  Yep.  Protests, harkening back to the days of the Boston Tea Party when proto-American patriots dumped tea into Boston harbor to protest [...]

I wasn’t originally going to write about the Michael Gerson piece from the other week where he talks about the “hidden virtues” of a recession.  Leaving aside the irony of a relatively well off speech writer for George W. Bush telling us how the recession caused by his boss’s policies will be good for us, [...]

Can anyone please explain to me, what the hell is John Boener doing on my TV and in my newspapers talking about the stimulus plan?  For 8 years, we liberal types were told that “elections had consequences” and that we should STFU and clap louder.  Fine, now that republicans have been repudiated in a full [...]