Frost Heaters are godsends for VW TDi drivers

You heard it here, possibly not first, but if you did, listen up! The Frost Heater is a miraculous thing for northern-dwelilng VW TDi drivers. I got mine installed today, and it’s freaking amazing. Having your engine start like it’s the middle of summer and warm air blowing out in mid-January is a thing to behold. And then, it runs like it’s been on for an hour! It’s so worth it. It increases the lifetime of your whole car, from the starter to the engine to the glow-plugs, and everything in between. And hey — it makes warm air from the minute you start it up. You can’t get any better than that!

Until they make a Frost Heater equivalent that keeps your hands and face warm when you bike in the winter. That would be awesome. But for the price, an engine warmer like the Frost Heater can’t be beat for us petrol-consuming freaks.

Hide House Community Garden well under way

I hope to be able to eventually write that HOWTO!

As I wrote about in the latest issue of the Bay View Compass, the Bay View Hide House Community Garden will be the newest community garden in our southside Milwaukee neighborhood. It’s going to be on an empty lot on the grounds of the Hide House, a former animal hide tannery. We’ve got a three year lease on the land from the property owner, General Capital Group. They’re really enthusiastic about and supportive of this project, which helps tremendously.

So far we’ve got twenty-one plots reserved, out of a possible total of 140 plots. Most people are going for the 4×8 foot beds. (They’ll be foot high raised beds.)

With so many people doing specific tasks, I have a very good feeling that this will come together in a very good way. Mad props to Melissa Tashjian, who’s been leading this project. She rocks at this stuff!

Tommy! joins lucrative hedge fund advisory board

Congratulations! I hope it’s good for you.

That said, candidates don’t join hedge funds. Or did I not get the memo?

40 cent debt to UWM Bursar’s office did not hold my diploma back

Yup! It came in the mail last week. I’m officially a college graduate, sixteen years in the making. It’s a good feeling.

Paying my last forty cents to UWM will be about as anticlimactic as anything can be.

Now about a job…

The Thompson-Favre meme continues unabated

The great thing about the viral ideas known as memes is that once they’re started, they’re hard to stop. That’s great if you like them. And if it doesn’t mutate (into a malevolent form) as real viruses will do. Regardless, the Tommy Thompson/”BRENT 4EVER” meme has carried itself onto the pages of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

I can’t take credit for it any more than one could for spreading the swine flu. But it’s good to see that we’re giving the print press something to run with.

One notable portion of that article is the article talks about how the Republicans have yet to settle on a candidate to take on Feingold. While that’s what primary elections are for, I thought this was supposed to be a time of resurgence for the Republican Party. Or maybe that idea—itself a meme—will pass like a spring cold snap.

U.S., Russia move closer to new treaty

Link.

This would be a huge win, not just for President Obama, but for world security. We’ll still have far too many nuclear weapons in deployment and on reserve, but you have to start reduction somewhere.

The trick is to keep it going.

And think of this: it costs a lot of money to keep 1,600 nuclear submarines in active deployment. Cutting the number in half would ostensibly mean a big reduction in that part of the budget. That money can be put elsewhere, like making sure our national infrastructure doesn’t crumble.

The “Steve Jobs as Jesus” meme

With the years of rumors and flurry of last-minute hype about Apple’s newly announced iPad tablet computer, the “Jobs as Jesus” meme has seen renewed attention.

Here’s Chairman Steve and his newest toy:

Why, sir, what is that tablet you hold before us?

Yes, yes, thou shall not steal! DRM will ensure that…

Thou shalt not smite Steve! Not sure where I found this now. That’s Woz in the pink shirt. I’m not sure who they other men are.

This could have been Jobs in 2001, when he introduced the iPod. Jews for Jesus has something to say about this in a PDF file, by the way.But I’d rather line up a few pictures. It’s more fun that way. Heck, even The Economist is into it!

Moving away from Jobs as Jesus, and more into the field of Jobs as having magical powers to destroy Nintendos:

My droogs at The Register have my favorite picture. Gaze deep into the swirling orb of wonder that His Steve-iness holds before you…

So, is Jobs Jesus? No. He’s a brilliant executive. Given my very brief e-mail correspondence with him, I think he’s a nice guy. (I may be in the minority on that.) He’s very lucky to be alive, having survived a cancer and a liver transplant. He’s got an innate ability to reach into our modern mentalities and make us use his devices. Not many people can say that.

Keep up the great work, Steve. Just as General Debauchery has even more on the meme, it’s fun to watch and see what you are able to drive your army of ants to create.

President Obama knows his history

And the health care industry reforms he proposed, is most certainly not “a Bolshevik plot.”

The president described it as being “pretty similar to what Howard Baker, Bob Dale, and Tom Daschle proposed at the beginning of this debate last year,” whom he said were “not a radical bunch.” Not anything like “socialism,” of which he was accused. In fact, there is a talk happening over in Madison called “The Left & Obama,” in which I hope my dear comrades will be gently told that at no time did the man we elected president promise single payer health care. It’s right to ask why he’s clinging to many Bush policies. Yet he’s also helping bring long-overdue passenger rail (absent sixty years!) to Wisconsin and the Midwest. This news came just as many respected business leaders came together to say that effective transit is vital to the region’s long-term economic success.

While the Bolsheviks are a thing of the past, nuclear weapons are still very much with us. That legacy of the Cold War still drains billions of dollars each year. (The Iraq wars are also relics of the Cold War that drain billions of dollars per month, but that’s another story.) President Obama and Russian President Medvedev are very close to signing a new nuclear weapons reduction treaty. We would still have many hundreds of nukes on hand, but the closer we get that number to nil, the better.

The president has shown few, if any traits of socialist inklings. He’s a fairly moderate guy. But this second year of his administration is off to a very good start.

And you thought local politics was in-bred

President Obama and Massachusetts senator-elect Scott Brown are (very) distant cousins, according to the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

Makes me wonder who I’m related to!

Tommy for Senate is as Favre is for QB

As the honest and upright (if not slightly evasive) Terrence “Terry” Wall has dodged paying state income taxes, there’s been some mumbling (if not slurring) to get Tommy Thompson, the self-described man from “the great state of Wiscons” to run for Senator Feingold’s seat.

The future mayor of Elroy may want to pause before attempting to make himself into Wisconsin’s next Brett Favre.

Like the quarterback who can’t help but drag (or hurl) himself back in after one or two retirements, Thompson has tried to run for president, but was out in 2008 after the Iowa caucuses. (Tommy Thompson President Gifts still available through CafePress; act now!) Prior to that, he served as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under the George W. Bush administration. And he went to that job after setting up his home state of Wiscons’ to have a muddled morass of welfare “reform,” lower-quality schools, and a record budget deficit. In true politician style, he left town before the shit hit the fan, leaving his successor Scott McCallum to take the blame.

Tommy started to make big money while he was in D.C. Not all of it came from his post as Secretary of H.H.S. That didn’t pay too shabbily, earning just under $200,000 annually. But the real cash came from Thompson’s stock holdings in the VeriChip Corporation. Amid the destruction and overall corruption of the Bush II administration, Thompson’s dealings got little attention. Thompson had at least 150,000 shares of stock in Applied Digital, the one-time makers of the VeriChip, and oversaw FDA approval of their device. He would later join the company’s board of directors. Thompson demurred on his pledge to “absolutely” have an RFID chip implanted in his arm. Can’t blame him; there’s already enough ways to track people. And there are cancer concerns as well. Good stuff!

Tommy’s come a long way since being seen as a man of the people. His long record firmly argues against that sentiment. We have to remember that his administrations are responsible for leaving Wisconsin with its lowest bond rating ever and a $3.5 billion deficit. His time at HHS hardly seems to have been examined. And if he ran for the U.S. Senate, his financial disclosure forms would make for very interesting reading. His ties to the medical-legal-healthcare-industrial complex are deep. His résumé shows him now as a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld law firm, an “independent chairman” at the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, and president at Logistics Health. While the salaries at those firms are not known right now, you would hope that with all the cash he’s making there that he’s been able to find a few cents to contribute to the state of Wisconsin.

Stay in the private sector, Tommy. They’ve been very good to you. Don’t be another Favre.

And we’ll love you 4EVER Brent!