Nothing's wrong with it. That'll be a hundred bucks.

The Beast and the Blessing

Well, I got the car back from the dealer. It cost me $130 overall for them to say, "We don't know what's going on." The mechanic said that ran it with diagnostics on and the computer recorded "thousands of misfires," but nothing else within the car seemed to wrong; it ran smoothly for a car with 130,000 miles on it and he was impressed that I'm still get 30MPG out of the sucker.

They reset the computer and told me to put a better quality of gas into it, along with gas cleaner. "Maybe the valves are just dirty. If they're not, you might need a head rebuild, but probably not. Not at 130,000 miles." Great. The Philips 76 next to the airport, the one closest to Norwescon, notorious for being obscenely expensive already, is at $3.83 a gallon. They also did the oil change and inspection, and even changed out the nitrogen in the tires for regular air. And they gave me a $20 break on labor costs even though I forgot to bring in the coupon.

(As an aside, did you hear Bush say yesterday, "If you're worried about three dollar gasoline," and when one of the reporters told him it was closer to $4, he said he'd heard it was high but not that it was getting that bad. Must be nice to have that motorcade. His spokesperson, Dana Perino, you know, the one who'd never heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, insisted the President was in touch with reality. Thoth and Osiris, what kind of country do we have when a White House flack has to come out and insist to the press that the President is in touch with reality?)

This morning, though, Gladys The Goddess of Parking Spaces smiled upon me, giving me one of the five free parking spaces in front of my company offices. What luck! This is the second time I've gotten a free space in the five years I've been at this darned company. Admittedy, I drive only once or twice a week, but it feels like a blessing anyway.

(I fully expect to receive a nastygram from Ford Motors. The look and feel of a Ford is Ford's intellectual property, and they have asserted that showing a photo of your own car on your blog is a violation of their trademark.)

If I had all the time in the world...

Things the campaigns won't discuss:

• The collapsing dollar
• The collapsing Arctic ice sheet
• The collapse of commercial fishing
• The collapse of world biodiversity
• The pending collapse of industrial agriculture, which relies on petrochemicals for its efficiency
• The coming resource wars
• The coming mass migrations due to those wars

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Singularity Alert: Craig Venter's lab works to scale production of octane-producing bacteria.

Venter has announced that he expects, within two years, to have a carbon-fixing sunlight-fueled bacteria that produces methane or octane, two critical components of common fuels like gasoline, in commercial quantities. "We are a ways away from designing people. Our goal is just to make sure they survive long enough to do that."

Maybe we get to keep those high-performance farm machines and petrofertilizers after all. What was Brad DeLong's point in yesterday's "From Malthus to the Singularity?" Oh, yeah, Malthus was wrong because we've been very good about inventing our ways out of disaster. Let's hope we keep being very good at it. Craig Venter sounds like he's very good at it.

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Silly alert: American Family Association utterly shocked to discover gays and lesbians are seeking political office and influence.

The article goes into absurd, hand-wringing detail, claiming to have uncovered "Teh Gay Agenda." The most laughable comment? "Members of the homosexual lobby have done a masterful job of equating their chosen, changeable sexual behavior with immutable characteristics such as skin color."

Tell me your Christianity wasn't a choice. Go ahead.

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More silly: Texas Governor Rick Perry says heterosexuals must be sex-obsessed monsters..

Well, no, actually what he claims is that homosexuals are that. But his reasoning equates to the subject:

INTERVIEWER: But don't you think that homosexuals might also be interested in being loyal and thrifty?

PERRY: The argument that gets made is that homosexuality is about sex. Do you agree?

INTERVIEWER: No.

PERRY: Well, then why don't they call it something else?

Arrgh! The Stupid, It Burns!

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Sarah Connor Alert: DARPA proposes componentized satellite network.

Way cool, the idea of having communication, routing (and power?), and so forth in hub satellites and then making microsatellites that outsource the bulk of their brains to the hubs. Bluetooth in space, sorta. (Come to think of it, this is exactly the way the Pendorian exploratory space fleets operate; for every manned ship, there are four or five automated outriders with engineering and rescue capability, all run by the AI-- and sufficient space in each for the AI to keep running if necessary.)

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William F. Buckley explains the current era:

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.