XDA

Recent UVA grad Jamelle Bouie has a piece at the Nation called The Tea Parties (sic) Distant Cousin. He thinks that the 20th Century version of the Ku Klux Klan is the cousin.

Here is his partial nod at true history:

Any honest historian will readily acknowledge the extent to which the Klan was entwined with the Democratic politicians in the early part of the twentieth century. Although both parties had largely abandoned civil rights by the beginning of the twentieth century, it’s fair to say that up until the 1940s, the Democratic Party was the unambiguous party of white supremacy in the United States, particularly in the South.

Not just during the 20th Century but from its inception Klan members were as universally Democrats as they were white. And wait, wait a minute--through the 1940s? To what party did the Senator and Governor segregationists in the 50s and 60's--Al Gore, Sr., William Fulbright, Orval Faubus, George Wallace, etc.--belong? Not a soul was a Republican. Who voted as a block in '64 to defeat the Civil Rights Act of that year? Well, that would be the southern Democrats again. Even when Bouie's admitting the truth, he's not telling the truth.

Here is his thesis of the relationship of the Tea Party with the Klan:

And while the Tea Party isn’t an anti-black terrorist group, it’s hard to deny the extent to which the movement is motivated by the same constellation of reactionary forces...—conservative Christianity, nativism, white populism, hyper-patriotism and racial prejudice...

Is that the complete list of what motivates the Tea Party? Are those its raison d'être? Populist? The Tea Party? What regarding its desire for less government is populist? Little off the mark there.

And here's his so-called proof:

According to a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, 47 percent of Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement also identify with the religious right, and 75 percent of those who identify with the Tea Party label themselves Christian conservatives. Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly white, more likely to see immigration as a problem, and more likely to harbor racial resentment toward African-Americans.

OK, let's take this one at a time.

100% of the Klan's members were humans and 100% of the Tea Party members are human. QED, man. They are clearly the same. That's as valid as Bouie's reasoning.

America is overwhelmingly a Christian nation. Most members of the every political party are Christian. Most of the African-Americans are Christian. That certainly doesn't mean that the Klan is a distant cousin to them, does it? This conjunction of religious and political belief is a meaningless correlation. The anti-Klan forces were overwhelmingly Christian too and a majority Republican, as well.

The members of both the ever more irrelevant OWS and the Tea Party are nearly all persons of pallor. But most Americans are white. And most African-Americans are Democrats, while most Tea Party members are Republicans. What does a concentration of the majority race in any particular group have to do with an alleged lineal tie to the KKK, albeit distantly? I say nothing, but then I don't see everything in America as a result of racial antipathy.

Bouie conveniently leaves out a word regarding the Tea Party's so-called problem with immigration. Can you guess it? Illegal immigration. The only questions asked about immigration in the link he gives are about illegal immigration. This is common practice on the left but none the less a serious lie of omission. Being against illegal immigration is not nativism and to imply it, as Mr. Bouie clearly has, is a calumny. He should be ashamed of himself.

It gets worse, however, regarding the so-called racial prejudice the Tea Party harbors. What's the proof of that (its members' overwhelming support for Herman Cain?--nah, that can't be it)? First let me ask, what is 'racial resentment'? Is it the same as 'racial prejudice'? Is it the same as the straight-up racial hatred of the Klan, or is it some distant cousin of that murderous hatred? At the link the so-called support for a charge of racial animus of some degree is very tenuous.

Regarding what the study's authors call racial stereotypes, questions were asked about blacks' and hispanics' work ethic, intelligence and trustworthiness, but the only answers possible were, for example, somewhat hard working, very hard working and extremely hard working. The allowed answers were only good opinions of the entire group's work ethic, etc. There was no answer allowed for having no opinion; none allowed for thinking the question was worthless or thinking blacks were not hard working, for that matter. What if you felt that some African-Americans are extremely hard working, some very hard working, some somewhat hard working, some not that hard working and some not hard working at all, that is, you thought there was no one-size-fits-all answer about all of the members of the group? What if you thought, rather, there was a range within the group and so you didn't pick any of the slanted answers (as did at least some of 65% of the "true believer" Tea Party members who did not put any of the three allowed answers)? What happened then? Well the survey takers said that "only 35% believe Blacks to be hardworking." Mother of God. Thinking the question is bullshit because there is no valid racial stereotype for all blacks regarding a work ethic is counted the same as thinking all blacks are not hard working. This is the worst sort of slanted polling. A complete disgrace. It measures racial antipathy as a thermometer measures wind direction.

Here are the racial antipathy questions: 1) Irish, Italians, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors.
2) Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class. 3) Over the past few years blacks have gotten less than they deserve. and 4) It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.

The Tea Party members agreed or disagreed with these statements more than opponents of the Tea Party. OK, but how does that conflict of vision and sense of history equal racial animus? It doesn't. Calling principled differences in attitude "racial resentment" tells us more about the people formulating these questions and analyzing the answers than it does about the Tea Party.

As I said: Shame on you Mr. Bouie. Shame on you.

Labels: Janelle Bouie; Tea Party--calumny regarding racial antipathy

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Labels: a lifetime ago; Chile

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Labels: Truth in Retail

The idea that an atmosphere of right-wing hate somehow inspired a Marxist radical to murder a famously hawkish cold war president is even more implausible than the widespread suggestion that the schizophrenic Jared Lee Loughner shot his congresswoman because Sarah Palin put some targets on an online political map.

This last example suggests why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today. We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with genuine achievement. We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape the blame.

Ross Douthat

Labels: Ross Douthat quote

Labels: Occupy Whatever

What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?

Newly released E-Mail asks the ultimate scientific question regarding the so called anthropogenic global warming crisis, to which the answer, I believe, is already known. That's exactly what it is and about as frightening as an episode of Modern Family.

The final aria is beginning to be sung.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Truth Telling E-Mails

The Warmies' seven stages of grief -- 'Stage 1: They aren't real emails. Stage 2: They are real emails but they aren't in context. Stage 3: They are in context, but that's how scientists work. Stage 4: OK this isn't really science, but you guys stole the emails! Stage 5: This is old stuff. Stage 6: This is nothing. Stage 7: Look everyone! Winter storm! See, we have proof of our theories now.'

Start here, if your interested in learning the truth about the anthropogenic global warming hoax.

I've got to say that the release of their E-Mail seems to have set back the cause a bit.

(h/t Climate Depo)

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

Labels: 2012 Election; Candidate Poster

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Labels: Fear and Loathing on Tatooine

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Although he's left the New York Times, former theater critic and leftie loon Frank Rich is still writing crap. Here is a recent piece. It is titled: What Killed JFK

I know, I know. Ooh, teacher call me, cal me!

Leftie, murderous hate.

Communist Lee Harvey Oswald hated Kennedy for his staunch anti-communism (part of what we on the right like him for) and shot him in the neck and head.

I could stop there, but I won't.

The left in America has never been able to accept the stark fact that a lone Communist shot the King of Camelot and it has been trying for decades to blame anyone else. The prime method of blame shifting has been the huge cottage industry of conspiracy theorists. The other front for blame shifting has been citing the right wing hatred in Texas generally and Dallas specifically of President Kennedy. It's all bunk.

In the aftermath of Rep. Giffords (D-Ariz. 8) being shot in the head, Frank Rich and his ilk blamed right wing hate speech for the shooting. The facts that the shooter was: 1) A leftie; 2) Just plain nuts; and, 3) Certainly was not influenced by Sarah Palin's web site nor any other phony claim of incitement by the right, have only silenced them (or nearly silenced them); but to my knowledge there have been no retractions. Think of this Kennedy article as Rich doubling down on his position regarding Loughner (Money quote from the earlier piece: "Did Loughner see Palin’s own most notorious contribution to the rancorous tone — her March 2010 Web graphic targeting Congressional districts? We have no idea — nor does it matter." ) It doesn't matter?

Lee Harvey Oswald was a leftie loon, a communist. He defected to the USSR. Mr. Rich puts the cart before the horse regarding that inconvenient fact:

Immediately after the assassination and ever since, the right has tried to deflect any connection between its fevered Kennedy hatred and Oswald’s addled psyche with the fact that the assassin had briefly defected to the Soviet Union.

The left has tried to make the "fevered Kennedy hatred" by the right the reason for his assassination rather than face the truth about Oswald's politics. Since when has responding with the truth to smears become deflecting? Mr. Rich does at least cite the Warren Commission's findings about the lack of effect on Oswald of the fabled hatred here, but then spends a third of the article saying the Warren Commission was wrong about that. It is apparently hard to get out of the unofficial leftie paradigm regarding the Kennedy assassination.

Now let's cite a few vapid shots:

At least in 1963, polling showed that only 5 percent of the country—a fringe—subscribed to the radical anti-government views championed by the John Birch Society and other militants of the right. These days, that fringe, whether in the form of birthers or the tea party or the hosts of Fox & Friends, gives marching orders to a major political party.

The Republicans banished the Birchers from their ranks more than 40 years ago. We embrace the Tea Party now because its message regarding smaller, less powerful, less profligate government is the same as the Republicans. It's hardly a fringe, as I hope Mr. Rich learns again in November, 2012. The idea that the Republicans take marching orders at all is a leftie projection (recall Journolist). We certainly don't listen to the Birthers or anyone at Fox news for talking points. I'll make a deal with the left--we'll banish the Birthers when they banish the Truthers. Never happen. What is it about the wholly innocuous hosts of the barely watchable Fox morning news show that causes Mr. Rich to single them out as thought masters? Alternative reality is the best I can come up with. It is certainly alternate reality to call the majority of Americans a fringe. To Mr. Rich, it's not that the right has a different political vision, they are a militant fringe; that is, as opposed to the calm, learned, wise, moderate members of the Democratic Party I'm thinking about anyone we've seen camping out at the hippie squat called Occupy Wall Street as perhaps a more representative counter-example.

Oh and speaking of Occupy Whatever, here is Frank Rich's big finish

...the vitriol that was aimed at Kennedy in life seems as immediate as today. It’s as startling as that “You lie!” piercing the solemnity of a presidential address like a gunshot—or the actual gunshots fired at the White House last week by another wretched waif. In the end, that political backdrop is what our 44th and 35th presidents may have most in common. The tragedy of the Kennedy cult is that even as it fades, the hothouse brand of American malice that stalked its hero stalks our country still.

What?

The hothouse brand of American malice is primarily on the left (Tim McVeigh notwithstanding).
I boldly predict the 'another wretched waif' alluded to will turn out to be as crazy and as apolitical as Loughner. And to defend the substance of what Rep. Joe Wilson said (but not the method), in denying that health care legislation would provide free coverage for illegal immigrants, President Obama did indeed lie. He lies a lot. But our free speech is not in the slightest like the gunshot of a Carcano M1891/38 rifle, or of a .44-caliber handgun , or of a Iver Johnson Cadet .22 revolver or even of a Rohm RG14 .22 handgun. Nothing like them at all. The likeness exists only the the mind of Frank Rich, and his ilk.

Labels: Frank Rich; Blaming Anyone But Oswald

The hidden ecological costs of photovoltaic panels are in their manufacture, and once they give up the ghost after 20 to 25 years in the sun, in disposing of them. They don't actively during their useful life harm the wildlife. Wind Generators, on the other hand, while providing useless, intermittent power at a very high price in an effort to solve a supposed existential crisis that is not even a problem, chop up birds and implode bats. Any real ecologist would work to shut down all the wind generators right now. Although I don't advocate actually doing it, I think, in theory, a single, well placed, armor piercing incendiary .50 BMG round per unit would do the World a lot of good.

With the president and many state legislatures advocating wasting tons of taxpayer and electric bill payer money putting up more of these useless eyesores, I had despaired for the future of our endangered birds and bats. But help may be on the horizon, or so reports Don Suber here.

Music to my ears:

...in the last 30 years, the United States has had 14,000 wind turbines abandoned. Apparently, once the subsidies and the wind run out, these 20-story high Cuisinarts are de-bladed and retired.

So maybe we won't have to go all Monkey Wrench gang on the horrible things. Just cut the wasteful spending of government subsidies to them and the problem goes away. Ha. Two birds with one stone.

As the Democrats say, we can't wait.

Labels: No Energy Economy; Wind Generators

In 2008, Obama said Bush’s deficit of $9 trillion was “unpatriotic.” Now he questions the patriotism of those who think the Obama deficit of $15 trillion argues against spending even more money we don’t have.

Jonah Goldberg

Labels: Jonah Goldberg quote

Labels: New Zealand; Earthquake

Especially the underpants.

Labels: Alien; Sigourney Weaver; good looking underwear

Some things that people write makes me wonder how they manage to feed themselves. Of course this moronic mistake is almost certainly the fault of the reporter, Suzanne Goldenberg. Here is the source of the mistake I'm writing about. She wrote:

By the mid-2020s, sea level rise around Manhattan and Long Island could be up to 10 inches, assuming the rapid melting of polar sea ice continues. By 2050, sea-rise could reach 2.5ft and more than 4.5ft by 2080 under the same conditions.

(Emphasis added).

Sea ice floats on the ocean (distinct from ice shelves (kinda) and land based glaciers). It already displaces almost all of its volume so if the ice turns to water (i.e. melts) sea level is no higher. The melting of sea ice has NO measurable effect on sea level. There are 5th graders who know this.

But that's not the end of the nonsense in that paragraph.

According to an on line calculator, 10 inches is 254 mm, and 30 inches (the mid century prediction) is 762 mm, and the 54 inch prediction for 2080 (69 years away) is 1372 mm. So all those predictions put the necessary yearly rise north of 18 mm, nearly 20mm/yr. for the 2080 hysterical prediction. (And these predictions are accurately reported by Ms. Goldenberg).

What's the sea level been doing lately?


The very latest info from the most sophisticated satellite shows a rate of sea level rise just a third of a mm/yr. At that rate it will be July of the year 6168 before we get a 4 and a half feet rise of the ocean's level. Even if we accept the data from the University of Colorado at Boulder (and there are plenty of reasons not to accept it) the rate is no more than 3.3 mm/yr. which means it will be November of 2426 before we get to 4 and a half feet above where we are now.

This level of run-for-the-hills, false data is not a good thing in scientific circles. Getting caught hyping the non-problem destroys the credibility of the whole alarmist crew.

(h/t Steven Goddard at Real Science--he got it from Marc Morano)

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Suzanne Goldenberg; Sea Level Falls

The tiny quake last summer centered at Mineral, VA (a place I have actually visited) caused some damage in DC to the Cathedral and the Washington Monument et al., but it was still a tiny earthquake as this photo and droll caption bring home.

In the four years I spent in California I was only in one earthquake which felt like a truck going by and indeed could have been a truck going by.

Labels: DC, Earthquake, Virginia

Labels: Wreath of Snakes

Remember when the Democrats were all up in arms about how badly the economy was doing after the start-of-his-term Bush recession, compounded by the 9-11 terror attack a few months later? Ubi sunt nunc?

The popular notion is that FDR ended the Great Depression by superb leadership. That's 180 degrees wrong. The leadership of both Hoover and FDR, and the Democratic House and Senate after 1933, was so abysmal that a little recession was prolonged and unemployment sunk to 18% or worse for the better part of a decade.

Looks like the hope and change policies of the current administration are looking to beat the government induced misery record set by Hoover and FDR. I'm not betting against it happening, at least for length of recovery.

Labels: Great Depression; Hoover; FDR; Obama

Labels: Shakespeare; Bad Advice

I'm technically a luke-warmer rather than a Denier, as I believe that the fossil fuel CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere has some effect on temperature (a tiny, barely measurable effect) but I'm squarely in the Denier camp in thinking that we can't stop pumping out CO2 without causing death and misery on a scale formerly never seen. Still, I have always focused on the science of climate change and not on what a concerted effort to stop CO2 (and thus energy) production would actually mean.

Sorry for putting on some blinders. I'll look, with the help of James Delingpole, to a broader horizon. Naomi Klein's recent War and Peace length piece in the Nation was a catalyst here. I read Ms. Klein looking only at her treatment of the first few questions, is it warming unprecedentedly, and are we causing it? (on which she offers no real examination); but she reveals a lot about the later questions belief in anthropogenic global warming cause, namely, can we do anything to stop it and what would such an effort cost us as a species?

I'll let the professional writer frame the issue regarding her "solution" to global warming:

punitive taxation; massive wealth re-distribution; the abolition of free trade and free markets; a state-enforced end to to the "cult of shopping"; the whole to be supervised by a New World Order of selfless illuminati (who presumably resemble Naomi Klein).

Ms. Klein's admits straight up that Delingpole was right to say that the global warming hoax advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation. In response to her call for a return state planning of all commerce, Delingpole advances this snark, asking if Ms. Klein has found:

Surprising new data showing that, contrary to the false consciousness promoted by the running dog lackey capitalist pigs who write our history books, totalitarian planning regimes of the kind you advocate in fact brought nothing but bounty, happiness and environmental loveliness to Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Kim Il Sung's North Korea?

Klein wants massive government spending on subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.

Like we can afford that.

She wants governmental planning. Lots and lots of planning. And not just at the national and international levels. Every community in the world needs a plan for how it is going to transition away from fossil fuels,

She wants a shift to fascist like control of corporations including imposing strict caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, banning new coal-fired power plants, cracking down on industrial feedlots, to shutting down dirty-energy extraction projects like the Alberta tar sands (starting with pipelines like Keystone XL that lock in expansion plans).

All energy is equal but some energy is more equal than others.

She wants an end to trade as we know it, with the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive.

So we here in the temperate zones can still drink coffee and eat bananas but forget winter fruit and vegetables. Das ist verboten.

She wants totalitarian world economic control with a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning (government control) so that economic growth would be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty. The industrial world would be hamstrung with regulation to prevent any growth.

Our current weak recovery from the last recession (largely government caused) is but a taste of the future economic landscape Ms. Klein seeks to impose.

She wants to tax carbon, as well as financial speculation and higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy and cuts to bloated military budgets and elimination of absurd subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Most of all, she wants to go after the profits of the corporations which provide fossil energy.

She appears oblivious to the fact that corporations don't pay taxes they merely collect them from the purchasers of their goods and services. The economically ignorant left always wants to stick it to consumers to teach those evil corporations a lesson they won't soon forget.

She wants to overturn Citizens United, which recognized the right of corporations to engage in political speech (So much for championing free speech rights).

(It's a bitch when the Supremes rule against your world view, huh, Naomi?)

She lastly wants her vision to be more popular. And she's perfectly willing to empower the governments of the world to impose it on those evil, free-thinking right wingers who disagree.

It is a truly frightening piece in its honest admission of a desire to reintroduce the Soviet Union world wide under the guise of fighting anthropogenic global warming. Thanks for the heads up.

Labels: Totalitarian Movements; Naomi Klein; James Delingpole

Asian rice fields (or paddies) in the right light. Most of these are wonders of water flow engineering.

Other amazing examples here.

Labels: Rice Paddies

I used to call these science fiction and comic book fan gatherings Geek Festivals, even though I have discovered that they can be some fun. Good to see that the promoters of the biggest one are able not to take themselves too seriously.

You don't have to attend one to get this, but it helps.

Labels: Geek Festivals; Self-deprecating Humor

This Oakland shooting brought this week's nationwide Obamaville [Occupy Whatever] death toll to four.
[...]
The disconnect between the liberal media's cheerleading and Obamavilles' descent into disease, disorder and destruction is as striking as was the disconnect between the media's slanders against the Tea Party and that movement's actual peaceful and civic-minded nature.

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal online might be a little sensitive to the target of the original Occupy Wall Street, given his employer, but that hasn't stopped him from excellent analysis of the pointless activities at the far lefty tent cities which he calls Obamavilles hearkening back to the Hoovervilles during the Great Depression. He was particularly pointed today.

Labels: Occupy Whatever; Violence

Labels: Pluto; Downgrade

Labels: Calvin and Hobbs

Labels: Hipsters; Hats

Labels: B-17

And Orwell’s six rules hold good:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

John Rentoul's blogpost The Banned List

Labels: Jean Rentoul; Eric Blair

Here is the New York Times' worst columnist on Solar Energy.


Money quote from Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman:

In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

Reality:

Solar panels largely built in China are indeed cheaper than the ones produced, say, by Solyndra, but they don't give them away and they last only about 20 to 25 years, and you have to use a converter (because Tesla won against Edison) which are expensive and last on average about 16 years. Also the solar panels don't work at night, in the morning, in the afternoon on cloudy, rainy, or snowy days, and they don't work well unless you clean them about once a week. There is no economically effective way to store the electricity produced intermittently as battery technology is really no better than it was 100 years ago. And the amount produced at mid-day on a clear, cloudless June day from a hundred square feet of panels is about 2% to 9% of what a normal house uses so you can run some lights and maybe a television or computer but not a dryer, oven, space heater, or even a blow dryer (that's a deal killer with my wife). Yeah, let's all get on that bandwagon.

People 40 years ago used to say that fusion energy was just around the corner, too, maybe 20 years from now. Now they say that it's just around the corner, maybe 20 years from now.

Lie upon lie upon lie:

Fracking — injecting high-pressure fluid into rocks deep underground, inducing the release of fossil fuels — is an impressive technology. But it’s also a technology that imposes large costs on the public. We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water; there is reason to suspect, despite industry denials, that it also contaminates groundwater; and the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads.

Reality:

98 plus % of the fluid injected into the gas wells is pure H2O and sand. Much of the water comes back up and is re-used or is recycled like other waste waters. There is little toxic and even less radioactive waste water. Your new granite counter-tops are more radioactive than used frac fluid. Although there have been a few, very few, surface spills, there has never been any proof of any groundwater contamination from fracing. Indeed, most drillers put down around the gas well a couple of dozen test wells before drilling to monitor any effect they have on groundwater. Of several thousand wells drilled and fraced, none with the monitoring wells around have shown any effect on groundwater. I'm not sure where Krugman gets his "reason to suspect" (probably from here) but he's often rather loose with the truth. Also everyone knows about the trucks, and part of the permitting process in many states is to assess and collect liquidated road damages before the well gets drilled or fraced. Hidden costs, my ass.

UPDATE: The Baron agrees with me: It's not the cost of the solar panels, it's that it is unreliable at best and only available at mid day which makes solar, that is, photovoltaic panels a worthless power source.

UPDATE 2: Robert Bryce at the NRO today agrees and says that in the roughly one million uses of fracing technology in gas and oil wells in the United States, one well, in 1986 may have contaminated ground water but the same study which found that one exception says: "Drilling technology and safeguards in well design have improved significantly since then" and in general, another study found: “The physical realities of the fracturing process, combined with the lack of reports from the many wells to date of fracture fluid contamination of groundwater, supports the assertion that fracturing itself does not create environmental concerns.”

Labels: Paul Krugman; Solar Energy; Lies about fracing

If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.

Curtis LeMay

Labels: Curtis LeMay quote

Labels: Hipsters; Hats

Labels: Star Wars Philosophy

I love the smell of income inequality in the morning.... it smells like freedom.

Labels: Income Inequality

If education is so great, after all, why are so many educated people unemployed and camping out in public parks?

Labels: Glenn Reynolds quote

America is seizing up before our eyes: The decrepit airports, the underwater property market, the education racket, the hyper-regulated business environment. Yet curiously the best example of this sclerosis is the alleged “revolutionary” movement itself. It’s the voice of youth, yet everything about it is cobwebbed. It’s more like an open-mike karaoke night of a revolution than the real thing. I don’t mean just the placards with the same old portable quotes by Lenin et al., but also, say, the photograph in Forbes of Rachel, a 20-year-old “unemployed cosmetologist” with remarkably uncosmetological complexion, dressed in pink hair and nose ring as if it’s London, 1977, and she’s killing time at Camden Lock before the Pistols gig. Except that that’s three and a half decades ago, so it would be like the Sex Pistols dressing like the Andrews Sisters. Are America’s revolting youth so totally pathetically moribund they can’t even invent their own hideous fashion statements? Last weekend, the nonagenarian Commie Pete Seeger was wheeled out at Zuccotti Park to serenade the oppressed masses with “If I Had a Hammer.” As it happens, I do have a hammer. Pace Mr. Seeger, they’re not that difficult to acquire, even in a recession. But, if I took it to Zuccotti Park, I doubt very much anyone would know how to use it, or be able to muster the energy to do so.

Mark Steyn on Occupy Oakland specifically and the decline of the West generally

Labels: Mark Steyn quote, Occupy Oakland

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Labels: Grammar

The 1930s had the greatest most widespread heat and drought, the 1930s to 1950s the most hurricanes, the 1950s to 1970s the most significant tornado outbreaks. There have always been floods and droughts - no trend has been found in either. A new study conducted by federal scientists found no evidence that climate change has caused more severe flooding in the United States during the last century. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study - titled “Has the magnitude of floods across the USA changed with global CO2 levels” - found no clear relationship between the increase in greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change and the severity of flooding in three of four regions of the United States.

A draft UN report three years in the making concludes that man-made climate change has boosted the frequency or intensity of heat waves, wildfires, floods and cyclones and that such disasters are likely to increase in the future.

Never mind that all the previous model based forecasts are failing. Temperatures instead of accelerating have flatlined, sea level is falling not rising, snow is increasing not diminishing, the winters are becoming colder not warmer, the global hurricane ACE index is near a 30 year low and on and on.

Joseph D'Aleo

Labels: Josehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifph D'Aleo quote

On this day in 1918 twenty-five-year-old English poet Wilfred Owen died in France, killed by machine-gun fire while leading his men across a canal by raft. The armistice came one week later. England tended to lose poets in the Great War (Rupert Brook for example) while Germany lost painters--August Macke on the Champagne front in 1914 and Franz Marc at Verdun in 1916. I don't know what happened to French artists in the war but mainly because I don't care. We lost a poet, a minor one, Joyce Kilmer, in the second battle of the Marne in 1918. War is Hell.

Labels: Death of Artists: Wilfred Owen

Here's a little trip back to reality.


Bodies of 35 people, murdered by drug gangs, dumped on a highway in Veracruz, Mexico.

Perspective is important.

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Labels: Perspective

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Labels: OWS; Mockery

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Labels: I got your occupy, right here

(h/t Goods**t)

Labels: Photoshop Marilyn Monroe

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Thank God.

The tax hike solely to benefit the teachers union went down to a solid defeat, 63 plus versus 35 plus. It will take a lot of stupidity to try that again.

Labels: Prop 103

Labels: Waterfall Nebula