1. Political Hubris #4587
Note to Sen. Scott Brown. When you are the junior Senator from Massachusetts, you probably should not be bloviating about how you secretly meet with royalty. It makes you look like a desperate boasting little twerp. It also leads to you being satirized. And if you or your campaign lies about it, it makes you look, well, like a liar.
2. The Real Reason why censorious religious asshats hate Teh Gay
Short answer: Follow the money Slightly Longer Answer: Scare-mongering opens wallets.
Certainly, the rather unpleasant little dipshit Eugene Delgaudio, who causes me monthly mirth with his email screeds, does very well out of fear-mongering (short Delgaudio email summary: "Help! The Gays Are Destroying Civilization! Donate To Me!"). Delgaudio is a very small fish; his revenues from fear-mongering are chump change compared to other organizations, yet according to public documents, he has raised over $1m a year in the recent past. Clearly, bigoted fear-mongering sells.
3. Viral Internet Power #897 - Scottish school dinner picture censorship
Update to an earlier story - Martha Payne, the schoolgirl whose school district attempted to prevent her from taking and posting pictures of her school meals, has now raised a LOT of money for charity online as a result of interest in her story.
4. Infrastructure in the modern USA
I found a posting from a FB friend at lunchtime:

Power is off, Energy said over 500 without power, estimated time to have it back on is 4 pm, I may go postal.

This got me thinking (dangerous I know). In the UK, from where I moved in 1998, power cuts were very infrequent. It would take some catastrophic weather event such as a major freeze to cause generation companies to have to cut cupplies to certain areas. In all of the time that I lived in the UK, the only power cuts I can remember were rolling blackouts in 1979 due to power station staff strikes.
It did not take me long from arriving in the USA to notice that there are power cuts all the time. Most of them are only 15-30 minutes in duration, but they are very common compared to the UK. Quite often we get up in the morning and find that our timing devices have reset themselves, and my home server is dead and ready for a reboot.
When I drive around, I often look at power delivery infrastructure. It is easy to see that the standard of delivery infrastructure engineering here is lower than in Europe. Part of this is to do with the lower voltages in the distribution chain than in Europe. However, that is a problem in itself. Power losses due to the length of the supply chain are less if the voltage is higher. The power supply companies here are losing proportionately more power in the distribution system than Europe, partly because voltages are lower, but also because power transmission distances are greater. This is actually an argument in favor of local micropower systems, but those do not seem to be taking off. Based on what has happened in the UK since privatization, I am of the opinion that this kind of infrastructure cannot be left to private enterprise to totally control, if that policy continues, then the infrastructure will become progressively more creaky, as power supply companies try simply to avoid pissing off too many consumers while at the same time spending as little money as possible.
In the meantime, consumers here can look forward to more outages, especially as it heats up here in Texas.
5. The Dynamic, proactive California Bar (not)
As you may or may not know, dentist-turned-lawyer Orly Taitz has been flying all over the country, along with other lawyers and associated pro se litigants, filing lawsuits to try and get Barack Obama removed from State Democratic primary elections. So far, the score in those lawsuits is 0-134, and another 2 were dismissed this week.
Orly Taitz does not take rejection well, as this blog posting summarizes. She is basically engaging in threats against members of the judiciary. This begs the question: where is the California Bar in all of this? I would have thought that a Bar association would be anxious to sanction somebody engaging in this kind of blustering bloviation and threat-mongering. However, the CA bar is stunningly silent, despite numerous emails sent to them pointing out that Orly Taitz is behaving like a complete horse's ass (she has already been sanctioned by the court system for frivolous filings in a lawsuit also related to the eligibility of President Obama).