Category Archives: Business

The Clinton Foundation And Hillary

Yes, she’s very likely guilty of the bribery statutes.

But as Professor Foley notes, don’t expect Clinton-appointed prosecutors to do anything about it. We’re turning into a banana republic without the bananas.

[Sunday-morning update]

The Clintons’ favorite way of lying:

I need not dwell on the implausibility of roving bands of ninja-like naughty toddlers — or lone-wolf munchkins — breaking into nice homes to scribble on the upstairs walls and then depart leaving no other trace of their schemes. I simply bring this up to say that my daughter’s “a bad girl did it” gambit is a wildly more powerful and resolute claim of innocence than “you have no smoking gun.”

Yes. “You can’t prove it, copper” isn’t much of a defense in the face of the obvious, but the media continues to perversely admire them for how adroitly they can get away with corruption and lies. In a way, of course, they never would if the Clintons were Republicans.

[Bumped]

[Update a couple minutes later]

I should note, as a bonus, there is more disquisition on the merits of a President SMOD over a President Cthulthu at that last link. Including arguments over electability:

For starters, Cthulhu will never get the Evangelical vote. As a demonic beast who claims, if not sovereignty over, then at least co-equal status with the Almighty, Biblical conservatives will never pull a lever for some squid-faced Baal-wannabe. I can see Ralph Reed’s attack ads now.

Indeed.

My New Kickstarter

I’m having trouble uploading the video to the Kickstarter page (they’re figuring out what the problem is, hopefully), but meanwhile, here’s a higher-quality version of it on Youtube. I’m not thrilled with audio quality (it sounds sort of like I’m in an echoey lecture hall), but I don’t have a sound studio, just a Sennheiser headset.

[Update a few minutes later]

Oops. Just noticed, it looks like I lost the end credits. Have to look into what happened there.

[Update a while later]

For some reason, I hadn’t included the final credits in the build. Here’s the new version.

[Update a while later]

Sorry transitions are so choppy. I’m sure it has something to do with Youtube’s post-processing.

[Monday-morning update]

Medical Health Records

Another ObamaCare failure:

Let’s force doctors to spend a lot of money to become technology dependent and adopt electronic health records when the old way of doing things was working just fine. And hey–as a bonus, our health information is now more vulnerable to hacking and we can lose some privacy along the way! Electronic health records haven’t saved a single life or a single dollar, but they have created a lot of expense, confusion, and tremendous demoralization for our health care providers. It wasn’t broken, and it shouldn’t have been “fixed.” If the Republican Congress was smart, it would repeal this onerous, useless provision of Obamacare.

There are a lot of things the Republicans would do if they were smart. On the other hand, I can understand why they don’t want to repeal this abomination piece meal. They need to scrap the whole thing and start over, but it won’t happen until we get someone in the White House who actually understands markets and actually gives a damn about others.

Global Cooling

A study predicts decades of it ahead.

Cold is much more deadly than heat, by an order of magnitude.

I have no more confidence in this prediction than I do of predictions for warming (and particularly predictions of catastrophic climate change). The lesson is a) the climate can always be counted on to change, b) we don’t really know what the future holds for climate, c) we need to be prepared for anything, which means maximizing economic growth and d) (related) we need to stop fantasizing that carbon dioxide is a magical climate-control knob.

Video Issues

OK, Linux people. Blender will let me make to edit and export a video as an AVI JPEG, but it refuses to export the synched audio to it. However, it will export the audio by itself as a .flac.

Does anyone know any separate tools that would allow me to synch that audio file with the video?

[Update a while later]

OK, VLC sort of works. Problem is that for some reason it really messes up the title when I add audio. If I were to post the MP4 and .flac files, could someone else try to synch them?

[Update late afternoon]

OK, I tried this:ffmpeg -i RoadToMars.wav -i 0001-9000.avi RoadToMarsAudio.avi
Continue reading Video Issues