Back in April, I noted that some advocates of the theory of global warming had modified their theory to allow for climate to actually cool for up to a decade (after which the ostensible warming trend would resume). There has been a further adjustment:

(Underscore mine.) So, now, for at least the next thirty years, no matter what the temperature data say, the theory of global warming isn’t to be taken as falsified.

1. The First Step is admitting that one has a problem.
2. The Second Step is recognizing that there is a power greater than oneself.
3. The Third Step is to make the decision to turn oneself over to that power.
4. The Fourth Step is to make a searching and fearless inventory of the vehicle.
5. The Fifth Step is to admit to God, to oneself, and to the telephone representative the exact nature of the problem.
6. The Sixth Step is to be entirely ready to have the Club correct all these defects of the vehicle.
7. The Seventh Step is humbly to ask the Club to remove these shortcomings.
8. …

As the story has evolved, a significant amount of the power of the Batman came to be in his wealth as Bruce Wayne — as with the later Iron Man, there had to be a way to pay for the stuff.

As most or all of you have read or heard by now, the economic news for the the last quarter of 2008 was quite bad

and the news from the stock market has grown worse

Now the New York Times frets

Of course, if they believed the naïve Keynesian rhetoric that has come back into political fashion, then the claim would be that Obama's aggressive spending plans were insufficiently ambitious.

I'm wondering whether it's merely the so-far unpassed budget that is under threat. As I noted earlier, the stimulus bill is an enormous blow to the economy, and was passed only as a result of some combination of willful blindness, knavish exploitation of a crisis in which politicians did not actually believe, and desire to worsen things on the expectation that even greater expansion of state power could be achieved. In the case of all three of these motivations, one could expect some politicians to now regret what they have done in passing the bill; what seemed like a bearable amount of plunder may now seem like a grave miscalculation. I don't think that it's politically possible that the legislature would overtly repeal the stimulus bill, let alone that the Obama Administration would openly reverse itself. But subsequent legislation might implicitly pare some of the programmes, and a formula might even be found for the Administration to suspend some programmes without legislative action.

Of course, the Administration and the Democrats in Congress know that, if they repealed a significant share of the stimulus bill even obliquely, then their opponents would pounce on how this repeal demonstrated that it were not a stimulus bill. So those who supported the bill may have a tiger by the tail.

It occurs to me that, amongst other things, the basilisk and the Gorgon correspond to two distinct theories of vision. The basilisk kills with its gaze, and thus represents eyes as transmitters. The Gorgon kills with its appearance, and thus treats eyes as receivers.

(These two theories aren't necessarily rival. It was once believed that eyes both transmitted and received in the process of vision.)

(Underscore mine.) Not much point in preparing for things that have already taken place or are happening now.

In The Eco Gentleman's Shaving Kit: Back to Basics by Rob Knox at Greenopia, there is a reference to a shave brush made of cruelty-free badger hair, linked to a listing at drugstore.com for a shaving kit from Baxter of California, which listing describes the kit as Environmentally Friendly and Cruelty Free.

However, a Google search for cruelty free at baxterofcalifornia.com produces no hits, and Baxter's own description of their travel brush (in that kit), and that of their other shave brush simply don't report how the badger bristles are harvested. It is hardly plausible that Baxter of California would fail to mention that the badger were spared death or injury, as this would repel few-if-any customers, while attracting many of those who would otherwise purchase high-end synthetic brushes.

(Mr Knox also declares old [straight] razors from junk and antique shops are perfectly suitable once cleaned and sharpened, but this is only true in cases where the straight razors were of high quality before they got dirty and dull. There are plenty of new straight razors, such as those from Zeepk, which aren't suitable, because they are badly manufactured.)

The Windows partition on my computer has its own Linux .Trash folder for each account, which folder is not cleared when I select the Empty Trash option of the Trash icon of my Linux desktop. So I thought, Eh, I'll created some symbolic links in my home-folder, so that I can quickly access the /mnt/WindowsXP/.Trash-root and /mnt/WindowsXP/.Trash-daniel.

An amusing thing occurred when I tried to delete files from one of the .Trash folders with the GUI by opening the folder by way of the symbolic link, selecting the files to be deleted, and then using the Delete key.

The file is deleted, but it's replaced with a copy. Delete x.y, and it is replaced by x (copy).y; delete that and it's replaced by x (another copy).jpg, which would be replaced by x (3rd copy).y, and so forth.

(The same results obtain if one selects Move to Trash, but the result is a little less bizarre since one is then plainly telling the computer to move the file to a directory in which it is already listed.)

Convenient work-arounds are easy enough when I want to empty the whole .Trash folder by way of the GUI, but these symbolic links aren't nearly as useful as I'd hoped.