born live love die

I have been looking for a Mopar minivan with the seats that fold into the floor.  This is a feature that debuted in the 2005 model year.  I have set up a search on Craigslist and I run the RSS feed to Google Reader.  Last week I saw a van where the owner wanted someone to take over payments.  The book value of the vehicle was in the $6000 – $7000 range.  The number of miles driven is important because these vehicles weigh over 4000 lbs. and that tends to use up running system components, e.g., brakes, steering gear.  The van last week was high in mileage and the owner owed more than $14000 on the loan principal.  I got that number by multiplying the loan payment by the number of payments outstanding.  I have no idea what the owner paid for the van a year and a half ago.  Today I saw this one:

Excellent condition, well maintained, new tires & very clean (no smoking & no pets)
Stow and go, cd & lifetime Sirius satelite radio

Please reply with only serious offers and intent to buy. I LOVE this van but, must sell.

Dear God if you are Reading Craigslist then you know that I am only selling for what it’s worth and what I need. In fact you know I am going to take a loss at his price. Please help to take this burden from me.

The thing that is hard is that some of these vehicles were purchased with a bundle of options, e.g., Sirius radio, for which the owner paid a high price, and they are of no value to me.  I think that some people will think they are being taken advantage of when you tell them that the thing that they paid a lot of money for, and for which they expect to be compensated, is of little value to the prospective purchaser.

The person who posted that advert may be taking a loss, but the loss has already occurred.  The true value of that van is around $7000.  They may find someone to’help take the burden’, but the seller is asking someone to absolve them of their financial responsibility.

Look for more of these to come.

I watch her carry her plate into the kitchen and I am overcome with a mixture of awe and love.  So tall, so straight.  She comes back to the table and leans against me, I wrap an arm around her, she hugs my shoulder and she says, “I love you, Dad.”  I tell her I love her too and it all hits me.

The times she lives in, the times she will mature in, the times she will live in.  I got a letter from an old friend and, by reading between the lines, I could see that the story he was telling about his child was one of drug abuse.  A nephew of mine is also teetering on the brink of that abyss, and his parents don’t know.  I need to tell them, but I don’t know how.

My friend took his son to ball games and did a lot of things with him.  They went across the country one summer, sleeping in the camper on the back of my friend’s pickup and watching ball games in the minor leagues.  I thought it was a wonderful thing to do with your son.  I will not be able to do that with my son.

Bookzilla walks away and I marvel at this wonderful daughter I have, and I wonder how I will keep her safe until she is able to stand on her own.  She is tremendously capable now, but she isn’t ready yet.  It will take time, time that we live in.

This is amazing work.

From Stink Digital.

Troy Patterson nails it with regard to Beck.  The setup:

The CNN tenure was most notable for a segment in which he told Rep. Keith Ellison to prove that he was not, in his Mohammedanism, a traitor to his country, “no offense.” A logician would call that a fallacious argumentum ad ignorantiam.

Money line:

With Beck, there’s always a lot of ignorantiam to go circum.

I think I have a better understanding about logic now.  Here is how it works:

This is my work desk.  If I am here, I am working because it is my work desk.  It may look like I’m goofing off, but I can’t be doing that because this is my work desk.

That is the logic the Bush administration used.  The United States doesn’t torture.  Therefore, whatever we do isn’t torture.

There are two kinds of truths in the world.  Those things which we define to be true, e.g., there are 12 inches in a foot, and those things that we determine to be true, e.g., a quarter is one inch in diameter, or the earth travels around the sun.  For those things we determine to be true, we use either direct measurement or logical inference to make the determination.  In the first case, we can qualify the measurement with certainty.  In the latter case, we are guided by axioms, things were are incontrovertably true and easily observed.

The Bush team started with a determined truth as their axiom.  That doesn’t work.

When I first saw it, I thought it was chivalry.  That is funny.

Chirality relates to the way molecules are organized:

The technique the team has developed for detecting life elsewhere in the universe will not spot aliens directly. Rather, it could allow spaceborne instruments to see a telltale sign that life may have influenced a landscape: a preponderance of molecules that have a certain “chirality,” or handedness. A right-handed molecule has the same composition as its left-handed cousin, but their chemical behavior differs. Because many substances critical to life favor a particular handedness, Thom Germer and his colleagues think chirality might reveal life’s presence at great distances, and have built a device to detect it.

“You don’t want to limit yourself to looking for specific materials like oxygen that Earth creatures use, because that makes assumptions about what life is,” says Germer, a physicist at NIST. “But amino acids, sugars, DNA—each of these substances is either right- or left-handed in every living thing.”

Many molecules not associated with life exhibit handedness as well. But when organisms reproduce, their offspring possess chiral molecules that have the same handedness as those in their parents’ bodies. As life spreads, the team theorizes, the landscape will eventually have a large amount of molecules that favor one handedness.

“If the surface had just a collection of random chiral molecules, half would go left, half right,” Germer says. “But life’s self-assembly means they all would go one way. It’s hard to imagine a planet’s surface exhibiting handedness without the presence of self assembly, which is an essential component of life.”

Oh yeah, the plan is to use this as a way to look for planets with life.

Is there any one who doubts that Obama is a Jedi?  I have proof.

Game on!

The NY Times editorial board finally gets to the heart of the matter.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

These memos were written with the understanding that they would never see the light of day.  The authors thought that ordinary Americans would never read them.  They were mostly right.

At least Mr. Obama is not following Mr. Bush’s example of showy trials for the small fry — like Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib notoriety. But he has an obligation to pursue what is clear evidence of a government policy sanctioning the torture and abuse of prisoners — in violation of international law and the Constitution.

That investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos, including John Yoo, who now teaches law in California; Steven Bradbury, who was job-hunting when we last heard; and Mr. Bybee, who holds the lifetime seat on the federal appeals court that Mr. Bush rewarded him with.

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him.

I don’t know what it would take, but the first step is to after the law licences of these people.

Jill Santopietro is cute like from-central-casting cute.  I’m linking this because I want to try that pizza recipe.

Watch this video.

If he is saying ‘yes’ to this pile of crap, what is Eddie Murphy saying ‘no’ to?