XDA

Childlike Thinking at The Nation

2012-01-26T09:46:00.004-07:00

Here is an editorial at The Nation magazine about what it calls the "disastrous" Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010). The editors of the extreme left wing magazine cheer on the recent, foolish Montana Supreme Court's decision to rule opposite of the U. S. Supreme Court. The Nation also calls for an amendment to the Constitution to reverse the Citizens United decision of "corporate personhood rights." The amendment is titled: "Corporations are not people."

Of course, there is nothing in Citizens United which declared corporations anything other than a business organization chartered by the state and granted many legal rights to an undying entity separate from its owners and organizers.

Here is what the Court actually wrote:

The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations. Bellotti, supra, at 778, n. 14 (citing Linmark Associates, Inc.v.Willingboro, 431 U. S.85 (1977); Time, Inc.v.Firestone, 424 U. S. 448 (1976); Doran v.Salem Inn, Inc., 422 U. S. 922 (1975); Southeastern Promotions, Ltd.v.Conrad, 420 U. S. 546 (1975); Cox Broadcasting Corp.v.Cohn, 420 U. S. 469 (1975); Miami Herald Publishing Co.v.Tornillo, 418 U. S. 241 (1974); New York Times Co.v.United States, 403 U. S. 713 (1971)(per curiam); Time, Inc.v.Hill, 385 U. S. 374 (1967); New York Times Co.v.Sullivan,376 U. S. 254; Kingsley Int’l Pictures Corp.v.Regents of Univ. of N. Y., 360 U. S. 684 (1959); Joseph Burstyn, Inc.v.Wilson, 343 U. S. 495 (1952)); see,e.g., Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.v.FCC, 520 U.S. 180 (1997); Denver Area Ed. Telecommunications Consortium, Inc.v.FCC , 518 U. S. 727 (1996); Turner, 512 U. S. 62; Simon & Schuster, 502 U. S. 105; Sable Communications of Cal., Inc.v.FCC , 492 U. S. 115 (1989); Florida Starv. B. J. F., 491 U. S. 524 (1989); Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc.v.Hepps, 475 U. S. 767 (1986); Landmark Communications, Inc.v.Virginia, 435 U. S. 829 (1978); Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U. S. 50 (1976); Gertz v.Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U. S. 323 (1974); Greenbelt Cooperative Publishing Assn., Inc.v. Bresler, 398 U. S. 6 (1970). This protection has been extended by explicit holdings to the context of political speech. See, e.g., Button, 371 U. S.,at 428–429; Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U. S. 233,244 (1936).

It wasn't that the Supreme Court suddenly and out of the blue found "personhood" for corporations, you mental midgets; it's that the court stayed with nearly 80 years of precedent and found, yet again, that people who organize their business interest as a corporation do not lose their individual right of free speech protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Here's more from Justice Kennedy:

Under the rationale of these precedents, political speech does not lose First Amendment protection “simply because its source is a corporation.” (The identity of the speaker is not decisive in determining whether speech is protected. Corporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas' that the First Amendment seeks to foster”). The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.” (Citations omitted).

So, let's follow The Nation's thinking here to its rational conclusion. If corporations can be stripped of their First Amendment rights regarding political speech because they are not natural persons, then the New York Times Corporation and Time, Inc., to name but a few examples, would have no First Amendment rights at all. Congress could then pass any law abridging the hell out of any corporations' First Amendment rights. I am led to believe that The Nation is itself a non-profit corporation (since 1943) and so if it gets what it says it wants it will necessarily forfeit its First Amendment rights as well.

Is this what passes for rational thinking on the left?

Oh, and regarding your proposed Amendment to the Constitution. Good luck with that. Please expend a lot of money and energy chasing that dream.

Second Thoght of the Day

2012-01-25T07:38:00.003-07:00

We’ve come too far to turn back now.

President Obama during the 2012 State of the Union Address.

He's right, we should push on to Greek levels of national debt. What could go wrong?

Thought of the Day

2012-01-25T06:21:00.002-07:00

....a more fundamental political reality: Voters simply will not be taxed to cover the costs of blue government, and in most cases they will vote out of office anyone who suggests otherwise.² That, at base, is what the Tea Party movement is all about. Voters with insecure job tenure and, at best, defined-contribution rather than defined-benefit pensions simply refuse to pay higher taxes so that bureaucrats can enjoy lifetime tenure and secure pensions.

Second, voters will not accept the shoddy services that blue government provides.

[...]

Third, government must reconcile itself to its declining ability to manage a post-blue economy with regulatory models and instincts rooted in the past. We need to be thinking about structural changes based on properly aligned incentive architecture, not regulatory systems based on command protocols.

The collapse of a social model is a complicated, drawn out and often painful affair. The blue model has been declining for thirty years, and the final bell has not yet tolled. But toll it will, and as the remaining supports of the system erode, slow decline and decay is increasingly likely to give way to headlong crash.

Walter Russell Mead

The State of the Union

2012-01-25T05:00:00.004-07:00

If you missed the campaign speech, here is a transcript. President Obama wants to:

Set up new bureaucracy called a Trade Enforcement Unit.
Train 2 Million for new jobs.
Give more money to teachers and require High School students to stay in school.
Create a lot more complex tax code.
Double down on supporting useless wind and solar energy.
Use the money from downsizing the military to 'nation build' here in the US.
Subsidize mortgage refinancing.
Write more regulations.
Create a new bureaucracy called a Financial Crimes Unit.
Raise taxes on the highest earners and continue to underfund Social Security and Medicare without any reform to those programs' unsustainable spending.
Create a new bureaucracy called the Veterans Jobs Corps.

Doesn't the President know that we don't have any money left?

Self-Authenticating Details

2012-01-21T06:26:00.004-07:00

Diomedes and I have been having a series of discussions regarding God and he's used the 'finding the watch' example (the existence of which implies a designer/builder and in a larger sense the existence of a watch designer/builder implies the existence of a designer/creator of the mind and body of the watch designer/builder). That brought to mind the 'finding the fork on Mars' opinion piece I read a long time ago. I have since thought of examples of simple actions the details of which in context reveal not a greater truth but the authenticity of the action itself. One that came to mind was in Tom Cruise's movie a few years ago, Valkyrie, about an unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler. In the movie, he's Col. von Stauffenberg, who has lost his right hand and two fingers of his left. When he has to charge his pistol, I think it's a Walther PP, he does it by pushing the slide open on the edge of a desk. That has to be the way the real von Stauffenberg did it, because there is no other way to do it one handed. The detail, if one knows about von Stauffenberg's physical condition, the necessity of opening and closing the slide to put a bullet in the chamber and the force it takes to push open a Walther PP slide, authenticates itself. I find these details supremely satisfying. I have embedded the trailer for the movie on the blog and the detail I'm talking about comes at 1:40. It takes less than a second.

Truth, it seems, can come in very discrete packages.

This might seem a very tiny thing to post about, but it resonates with me as we approach Holocaust Remembrance day and I've posted a longer thing about some movies about WWII.

"Valkyrie" Official Trailer [HQ]

2012-01-21T06:25:00.000-07:00

Seeing the Holocaust Through Movie Prisims

2012-01-21T06:11:00.004-07:00

There are four films that say a lot about the national madness which overtook Germany beginning in the mid 1930s. All of them are set during the war which resulted from this madness, mainly towards the end of that war. If you watch these films, you will think differently about the Holocaust and the European Theater of WWII than you did before you watched them. They are, in the main, tough movies, but who doesn't want to shake up one's sense of history?

They are: Conspiracy, The Grey Zone, Downfall and Sophie Scholl.

Conspiracy is an HBO movie, one of that network's best efforts from its salad days, with Kenneth Branagh as SS Lt. General Reinhard Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Karl Adolph Eichmann in a generally accurate recreation of the Wannsee Convention in January, 1942, where it was decided that the answer to the "Jewish Question" was to be murder on an industrial scale. All the actors were excellent and the script razor sharp. Even though it's just a meeting in a nice home in a Berlin suburb, it packs a serious punch; although what I took away was not Hannah Arendt's banality of evil, but the seriously capricious nature of justice.

Downfall is the last days in the Fuhrer bunker in Berlin (now a shopping mall) with a superb performance by Bruno Ganz as Hitler. They've taken his "Der Krieg ist verloren" rant here and changed the subtitles into contemporary American political content generally to hilarious effect, but here is the deadly serious original. There is also a lot of pitch perfect detail, my favorite is the palsy in his left hand (a symptom of Parkenson's?) as he congratulates some Hitler Youth (also captured on film at the time--view here). If you like to see Nazis shooting themselves in the head (and who doesn't?) this is your movie. My lasting take away was the die hard enthusiasm of the Goebbels family, well, of the mother and father.

All my adult life, I've heard about the White Rose, the German resistance to the Nazis, and in my ignorance I had imagined a pervasive, effective underground movement. Sophie Scholl disabused me of my fantasies. You start with the pathetic, little, ineffectual movement it was and end with a despairing respect for the steely ruthlessness the Nazis used to crush any resistance and reduce it to absolute insignificance. You're not thankful for the lesson.

The Grey Zone is about a later Sonderkommando at Birkenau, when the largely Hungarian trustee Jews staged a short, ineffectual revolt in October, 1944. The performances, other than Keitel's, are excellent (even David Arquette's) and the dialog is so hard you could cut diamonds with it. This is an unrelentingly harsh view of one of the nadirs of human interaction. It makes Schindler's List look like a Disney film in comparison and is a necessary antidote to the slop we were force fed in Inglourious Basterds.

Leading From Behind, Way Behind

2012-01-19T07:41:00.004-07:00

The New York Times, here, has praise for President Obama's monstrously stupid idea to kill the Keystone XL pipeline (quelle suprise!) as does well know energy expert Robert Redford here. The gist of the NYT opinion piece is that there hasn't been enough time to prepare a through environmental study. We wouldn't want to be hasty with a decision this important.

What?

The Canadian company building the pipeline (and it will be built--where is the only remaining question) proposed it February 9, 2005. The longer extension was proposed in 2008. The average time it takes to get a permit for a gas or oil pipeline like this is 20 months. We're over 40 months for the extension, nearly 84 months for the first part of the pipeline (which was actually built in Canada). How much time do we need? There already is an EIS from the State Department. Do we need 2 of them?

Nothing built by man is perfectly safe but pipelines are the safest, most efficient way to transport oil and gas there are. There are tens of thousands of miles of pipelines already in America and many along the general route the Keystone XL should be proceeding. Their environmental impact is none to minimal.

Here's the rationalization for the President's singular inability to lead from the NYT:

The extraction and production of tar sands oil in the fields of northern Alberta would also cause far more greenhouse gas emissions than drilling for conventional crude.

Ah, we're saving the planet by foregoing Canadian tar sand oil. How freakin' noble. But, of course this is merely Warmie propaganda. The effect on world temperature of this decision is nothing as China will take the oil and use it if we don't. Indeed, the world is proving to be very resistant to CO2 warming no matter what the simple computer programs say.

It gets worse:

Far more important to the nation’s energy and environmental future is the development of renewable and alternative energy sources. This is the winning case that Mr. Obama should make to voters in rejecting the Republicans’ craven indulgence of Big Oil.

I see, supporting the creation of American jobs is "craven". Caving in to the elitist environmental hysterics is bold leadership. Of course. In lefty logic, if we don't develop our real and available sources of energy, we'll have to develop very expensive and intermittent at best alternative energy, if we can. But at least we prevented American corporations from providing us with reasonably priced energy with the finished product produced by working Americans. That'll teach Big Oil a lesson it will not soon forget.

Besides, who would want a large, stable supply of oil, through the safest method possible, from a friendly neighbor when we can get much more expensive oil through more hazardous methods of transport from distant foreign nations who hate us and who cut off the supply from time to time? I mean the decision makes itself.

Mr. Redford writes:

President Obama has just rejected a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline -- a project that promised riches for the oil giants and an environmental disaster for the rest of us.

His decision represents a victory of historic proportions for people from throughout the pipeline path and all across America who have waged an uphill, years-long fight against one of the most nightmarish fossil fuel projects of our time.

Nightmarish, environmental disaster? Please.

I, for one, am getting a little sick of rich people, who will obtain their extravagant energy needs with nary a ripple in their bank accounts, pretending to protect the planet by making gasoline, et al., more expensive for the bulk of Americans for whom paying more for necessary energy means they actually have to give up something else. I think the self-righteous pretending is the toughest thing to stomach.

Make better movies, Bob, yours lately have been pretty unwatchable; and leave energy policy to non-hysterical types who actually know something. Energy is essential to civilization. We will obtain and use all the fossil fuels there are and when they are gone, we'll move on to the more expensive types whose time has not yet come. That's an inconvenient fact that makes this celebration by liberals of an extreme and cynical political decision ring a little hollow.

Thought of the Day

2012-01-16T09:39:00.001-07:00

If Bain Capital had taken a look at Solyndra, would they have invested $500 million in that mess?

Neal Boortz

Monkeying With the Numbers

2012-01-16T07:32:00.004-07:00

Steven Goddard catches extremist Warmie True Believer James Hansen, et al. changing the historical record regarding temperatures, again. Goddard then explains why the changes are hooie.

I seem to remember a book where there were government employees whose job it was to change all the records to reflect the current political meme. Anyone remember the title of that?

The HadCRU record is suspect because its raw data has been lost or purged so that it can never be checked for accuracy.

The GISS has demonstrably been corrupted by scientists changing the distant past for no other reason than to make the record support their cause.

No one should rely on these temperature records. GOGO.

This One Made Me Laugh

2012-01-14T07:47:00.002-07:00

Gary Younge's Decoder Ring Is Working

2012-01-13T07:32:00.008-07:00

My first reaction to Mr. Younge's piece in the Nation titled: The GOP's Blatant Racism was to read it again looking harder for the promised examples of blatant racism. Then I wanted to send Mr. Younge a definition of the word 'blatant' (I know he may not have written the headline of his piece). But on third thought, that act, implying a black man did not know the definition of a word would be just another subtle example of racism on my part, at least in his eyes and in the eyes of the sort that routinely reads the Nation.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that a subset of Americans harbor a rarely expressed racial animus against fellow Americans of different race, but it is impossible for me to believe, as I have a solid grounding in history, such animus exists only or even primarily in the anti-slavery party. It is a nasty smear made none the less nasty by the fact that many Democrats embrace it merely for political advantage rather than actual belief, the main political advantage being keeping African-Americans on the Democratic plantation. Oh, no, there I go again with the code. Let's look at Younge's "blatant" examples.

Rick Perry's father, a Democrat, did indeed buy a property in the 80s (not precisely a current example) which was known as "Niggerhead" but whether that's evidence of the elder Perry's racial animus is in some doubt (as he did not name it that) but, even if so, it certainly is not evidence of Republican racism.

Here's his first recent example from Rick Santorum:

"I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”

“Right,” said one audience member, as another woman nodded.

“And provide for themselves and their families,” Santorum added, to applause. “The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling again.”

Mr. Younge points out that where Mr. Santorum was speaking the black population was 2.9 %. OK, but Santorum is running for national office and certainly his words are not meant to apply only to the place he is talking, but nation wide. Santorum probably should have used the word 'poor' instead of 'black' but my strong suspicion is that Mr. Younge would have still accused him of racism while using code had he done that.

His next example, under the same criteria:

Just a few days later, in Plymouth, New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich told a crowd, “I will go to the NAACP convention and explain to the African-American community why they should demand paychecks…[instead of] food stamps.” African-Americans make up 0.8 percent of Plymouth’s population. Food stamp use in Grafton County is 6 percent—a 48 percent increase since 2007.

Again, Newt is running a national campaign and referred to the national NAACP convention not the branch in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Who actually cares where he says it in his attempt to become the president of our entire nation by talking about things of national interest?

After two outstanding uses of apophasis, Mr. Young points out that: "According to the Agriculture Department, more whites use food stamps than blacks and Latinos combined." True that. But of course both blacks and Latinos are minorities in this nation, with 12.8% and 16.3% of the population respectively. Whites are 72.4%. One would expect white use to be more than other minorities combined. Is that the end of the inquiry?

According to the 2000 Census (Sup Survey PUMS Data set) white use of food stamps was 3.7% while blacks use was 15.3% and Hispanic use was 10.6% (Food stamp use has gone up a lot since then both under President Bush and President Obama so those percentages are certainly higher now but I don't know the specific ones now. Sorry I could not find current info).

Back to the smear of Republicans. Next example of current racism:

Oh, there is none. Mr. Younge talks about an old Ron Paul newsletter and trots out the smears of the past--Nixon's southern strategy to Willie Horton-- and then has this weird statement:

Today it seems as though Republicans who might be put off by racist rhetoric are in short supply, as though the presence of a black president has left them blind to their own sophism.

What?

Just as counter-examples, here are some actual blatant racist statements from non-Republicans. Perhaps you'll recognize some of the sources and catch the racism without having to use dog ears or a decoder ring:

The Negro is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.

Che Guevara

Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV)

I turned the fire hoses on those niggers.

Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor

Anyone see the difference between those examples and the serial smears of Mr. Younge? Anyone think Mr. Younge can see it?

Anyone else wholly underwhelmed by Younge's examples of recent "blatant" Republican racism?

Urinating on the Dead

2012-01-12T10:36:00.005-07:00

Here is the story which has even normally pro-Marine Hugh Hewitt saying this sort of behavior is ripe for punishment.

Are you freakin' kidding me?

Can we get any more wimpy as a nation? This story is on the extreme side of nothing in a nothing-burger faux outrage.

UPDATE: Diomedes thinks they Marine (snipers, it turns out) should be punished. Each should have to do ten push-ups as penance.

UPDATE 2: Here is a good piece on the subject in the New York Post. Money quote:

Still, as wartime atrocities go, this is pretty mild stuff. My Lai, for sure, it ain’t.

And, again, the Taliban sure ain’t — excuse the metaphor — choirboys.

Maybe somebody should ask Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl about it.

Oh, wait: The Islamists beheaded him — on videotape.

Perspective, folks. Perspective.

I Watched Full Metal Jacket, Again

2012-01-12T09:41:00.003-07:00

I still think the first part (of three in the book it's based on, The Short-Timers by the late Gustav Hasford) is about the best filmmaking Kubrick ever did. Introducing us to R. Lee Ermey and Vincent D'Onofrio with prominent roles for both was no small matter either. But what struck me again was the cadence chants during the training runs. Here's part of one:

I don't know but I've been told
Eskimo pussy is mighty cold.

You just have to admire the epistemological honesty.

Tebowing Has a Famous Historical Precedent

2012-01-12T08:08:00.003-07:00

Not a classic example of tebowing but no doubt an example.

61 Years and a Month Ago

2012-01-11T14:19:00.004-07:00

A normal lifetime ago, UN forces (almost all of them American--1st Marine Division, 3rd and 7th Infantry Divisions--with a few British Royal Marines and ROK policemen) were stopped in their ~~retreat~~* advance out of what we call the Chosin Reservoir by Chinese sappers' demolition of the only road out (at least 16 feet of it). It looked bad for a while; but we dropped in bridging materials, spanned the gap, and most of our guys ~~escaped~~ * advanced to Hungnam, where we loaded them on boats and got the puck out of there.

*I keep having trouble using General Smith's preferred vocabulary.

Bouncing Along Between Joy and Despair

2012-01-10T18:01:00.004-07:00

I am very thankful that now there is no pervasive sense of an underlying inevitablility of re-election that was present when Bill Clinton went for a second term; but one recent poll or another, one current story or another, fills me with joy at the contemplation of Obama losing huge or despair at the prospect of his squeeking across the electoral finish line. He's over 50% and growing at Intrade. That ain't so good.

But with the near desertion of white voters, who put him in office just over 3 years ago, and other things he's doing wrong or failing to do well, I begin to feel better. Here's a little tidbit from The Hill which causes my heart to soar--as much as it can; it's his choice of how to campaign just now. The Quote I like:

It has become increasingly clear over the last several months that Obama has little interest in tacking to the political middle to improve his standing with the broad center of the country.

He has decided that he wants his presidency to mean something different, and he has made the fateful decision that he will govern as a left-wing political populist. That is why he has embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement, why he keeps using class-warfare rhetoric, why he has given up on deal-cutting, why he has decided to run against Congress rather than on his accomplishments.

(Emphasis added).

I certainly think first: What accomplishments? But let's look at the "running against Congress meme" closely. Lots of people say he's doing it, comparing it to Truman's run against a do-nothing Congress in 1948. But it's not a do-nothing House (they're doing their jobs), it's a do-nothing Senate (no budget for 3 years, very few consents to nominations, no oversight of agencies, etc.). And the Senate is Democrat controlled. So he's running against his own party? He's running against do-nothing Democrat Senators? Really? He thinks this is the road to a second term?

Wermo Alice Pateesa

2012-01-10T09:08:00.003-07:00

(h/t This Isn't Happiness)

Thought of the Day

2012-01-10T08:46:00.002-07:00

In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people’s home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!

Woody Allen

Edvard Munch - Vampire

2012-01-09T16:13:00.006-07:00

The popular conception is that when Republicans are in political power Zombies (actually Ghouls--but that's a different posting) are popular and when Democrats are in political power, Vampires are popular.

Could be.

Twilight is raking in a billion dollars while Zombies are relegated to a boring (in the main) TV show. The first really influential Zombie film (Night of the Living Dead) opened just a month before Richard Nixon won the presedency the first time. Close...

Second Thought of the Day

2012-01-09T15:58:00.001-07:00

What happened to fantasy for me is what also happened to rock and roll. It found a common denominator for making maximum money. As a result, it lost its tensions, its anger, its edginess and turned into one big cup of cocoa.

Michael Moorcock

Thought of the Day

2012-01-09T15:48:00.000-07:00

I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

Rebecca West

Thought of the Day

2012-01-08T05:15:00.003-07:00

Many of us were pleasantly surprised that our leading scientific societies have recently adopted such strong statements as to the reality and seriousness of anthropogenic climate change. There really is a scientific consensus, and it cannot be refuted or disproved by attacking any single data set.

I also think people need to come to understand that the scientific uncertainties work both ways. We don't understand cloud feedbacks. We don't understand air-sea interactions. We don't understand aerosol indirect effects. The list is long. Singer will say that uncertainties like these mean models lack veracity and can safely be ignored.

Warmie True Believer Richard Somerville in e-mail 1107 from 2004 (bold added by Tom Nelson)

The Warmie climate models do lack veracity and can safely be ignored. They are not evidence.

Thought of the Day

2012-01-04T11:46:00.005-07:00

In his column posted last night, New York Times editor Andrew Rosenthal asserts: “There is a racist undertone to many of the Republican attacks leveled against President Obama for the last three years.” Rosenthal maintains “you can detect the undertone in the level of disrespect for this president that would be unthinkable were he not African-American.”

Apparently, Mr. Rosenthal was out of the country during the Bush presidency.

Nonetheless, Rosenthal’s charge concerning the unthinkable “level of disrespect” resonates. Republicans haven’t comported themselves well around someone who is “sort of a god” and can lower oceans and heal the planet. For someone like that, anything short of uncritical support is necessarily disrespectful, and probably treasonous.

Peter Kirsanow

As usual with these sorts of smears, Mr. Rosenthal's evidentiary suport for his assertion of racism in the anti-slavery party is pathetic. And I'm being kind to Mr. Rosenthal. The only thing that keeps the 'Republicans are racists' meme going is projection from the pro-slavery, Jim Crow law passing, Ku Klux Klan joining, party.

UPDATE: Former Congressman Artur Davis (D-AL 7th) has a similar take at the NRO. Money quote and classic example of Democratic racism:

I do wish Rosenthal had remembered the most bald-faced use of race to win a recent election. It was 2003; the candidate was a man belonging to a racial minority who was surprisingly leading in the polls in a governor’s race in a southern state, Louisiana. His opponents produced flyers with an artificially darkened photograph of the candidate taken when he was in college, with unkempt hair, which they circulated to the rural areas that had had once been enraptured by George Wallace. The stunt worked, and in that cycle, the candidate came up short. It was a blunt, hard racism that didn’t bother with code. The injured candidate was an Indian-American Republican named Bobby Jindal, and the people who knee-capped him were neither conservatives nor Republicans.

Hysterical Wailing of the Unreasoning Damned at the NYT

2012-01-03T16:19:00.005-07:00

This nothing burger of an editorial at the ever declining NYT might have passed through my memory like a ghost fart had it not been for law professor Bradley A. Smith at the NRO, whose focus and writing make the editorial seem the hysterical wail of the unreasoning damned (lefties) it actually is.

Here is the professor's history of righting the constitutional wrong done by McClain-Feingold's limitation on political speech:

Within just a few years, the Supreme Court and lower federal courts were rolling back not merely McCain-Feingold, but portions of FECA. Probably the two most important decisions were Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that corporations and unions could spend money independently on political speech; and SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, not appealed by the FEC, that held that individuals and others could combine their funds to engage in independent speech. Although campaigns remain, in many ways, more heavily regulated than at any time in U.S. history prior to 1974, the results of the court-ordered deregulation since 2009 have been quite good: The elections of 2010 saw more competitive seats than any election within most Americans’ memory; the campaigns were also the most issue-oriented in a generation; turnout was up, and is expected to be up again this year; Americans are having the most serious debate about the course of the nation’s politics since the debate over civil rights 50 years ago (before FECA was passed, we might note).

Here are examples of Smith's reasoned snark:

So this week, the Old Gray Lady’s editorial page cries out about “an unrelenting arctic blast of campaign ads stunning in volume and ferocity.” .... What, exactly, does the Times see as the problem?
Well, mainly, it’s that the campaign is just too rowdy. Meeting its burden of proof by claiming that some undetermined number of unnamed “residents” supposedly “say they have never seen anything like the constant negativity,” the Times assures us that the end of democracy is just around the corner. The Times notes with concern that “only a third” of ad dollars are “spent by the candidates themselves.” The Times refers to the groups of citizens who have the effrontery to speak out directly about candidates as “septic tanks.”

He then resorts to historical sleight-of-hand:

For example, one ad actually says, “Rick Perry is a blind, bald, toothless man who wants to start a war with France.” Another says that “Newt Gingrich is a hideous hermaphroditic character.” Yet another says that “if Ron Paul wins, rape, adultery and incest will be openly practiced. Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames, female chastity violated?” No, wait a minute. I’m sorry, those comments were actually about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, from the campaign of 1800. No, things are now much worse. The Times is worked up because one ad actually says that “Mr. Gingrich and Rick Perry [are] ‘too liberal on immigration, [and have] too much baggage on ethics.’” Another ad, moans the Times, “urg[es] viewers not to let ‘the liberal Republican establishment pick our candidate.’” Really — those are the two examples the Times provides of the campaign being “stunning in its ferocity.” Oh, the horror of it all! Don’t let your children near the TV.

Good, but here's the big finish:

So let’s sum up: The Times is concerned that 1) there is more political speech than there would be if not for the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and the appeals-court decision in SpeechNow.org v. FEC; 2) groups of citizens are running their own ads, rather than relying solely on the candidates to run ads; 3) the ads are saying awful things, accusing candidates of “being too liberal on immigration,” or having “ethics baggage,” something the Times would never discuss, except in its news stories on Newt Gingrich’s “ethics” “baggage” on November 28, December 8, December 9, December 14, and December 31; 4) stories about a candidate’s ethics or positions on immigration should be off limits in an “accountable” campaign; and 5) all this citizen speech informing voters about various candidates’ positions, ethics, and endorsements, coming not only from the candidates but from other sources, can be blamed on Citizens United and SpeechNow.org.

These two articles are a good example of hypothesis plus antithesis equals synthesis. Here it was vapid venting (NYT editorial) plus historical context (regular NRO) reveals the first was merely hysterical wailing of the unreasoning damned.

Some Thngs are Funny Because They are True, but Inconveniently So

2012-01-03T13:24:00.005-07:00

My favorite is No. 12. I'm OK with storing and sharing, for a fee, things on 'the cloud', what ever that is--just don't make me buy the new only very slightly better physical strorage system of the movies and music I like.

I think it all goes back to my decision to go with Beta.

(h/t This Isn't Happiness)

The Worst Chart of the Year

2012-01-03T13:21:00.003-07:00

For me, the ratio seems a little generous on the 'actually hand out' side, but still fairly accurate.

(h/t This Isn't Happiness)

Thought of the Day

2011-12-31T08:18:00.001-07:00

Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks. So, for example, a pipeline delivering Canadian energy from Alberta to Texas is blocked by the president on no grounds whatsoever except that the very thought of it is an aesthetic affront to the moneyed Sierra Club types who infest his fundraisers. The offending energy, of course, does not simply get mothballed in the Canadian attic: The Dominion’s prime minister has already pointed out that they’ll sell it to the Chinese, whose Politburo lacks our exquisitely refined revulsion at economic dynamism, and indeed seems increasingly amused by it. Pace the ecopalyptics, the planet will be just fine: Would it kill you to try saving your country, or state, or municipality?

Mark Steyn

Why Government is the Problem

2011-12-23T08:45:00.005-07:00

Mike Rosen often trots out the essence of economics, saying, you don't ask: "What do you want?" you ask: "What do you want more?"

The National Environmental Policy Act, which passed virtually unopposed in Congress in the very late 60s, was a needed thing. Our air and water were too dirty then. The EPA is another thing entirely. Cleaning up 80% at a reasonable cost is good. Cleaning up the last 20% at a prohibitive cost is irrefutably bad. Our air and water are cleaner now than they were in the early 1900s, despite a tripling of the population and an ever increasing, intensive use of fossil fuels.

One of the many problem with powerful federal agencies is that they willingly put on blinders and can only see the last 20% as worth any price to clean up. We clearly want relatively clean water and air but we want a viable economy more. Sometimes the blinders the EPA puts on causes actual cognitive dissonance. Like this obvious to anyone with a few seconds of thought example from Investors Business Daily. Money quotes:

The EPA thinks it's worth spending billions of dollars each year to reduce already minuscule amounts of mercury in the outside air. So why is it trying to shove mercury-laced fluorescent bulbs into everyone's homes?

[...]

[Justifying the crippling new rules] Administrator Lisa Jackson blogged that:

"Mercury is a neurotoxin that is particularly harmful to children, and emissions of mercury and other air toxics have been linked to damage to developing nervous systems, respiratory illnesses and other diseases."
At $10 billion a year, complying with the new rules won't come cheap, and that assumes the EPA's low-ball estimate comes true.

[...]

In a pamphlet extolling the virtues of the looming federal ban on traditional incandescent light bulbs, the EPA says it's a "myth" that the mercury used in compact fluorescent lights is "dangerous in your home."
"There's no evidence," the brochure says, that "brief exposure to the mercury in a broken bulb presents a health risk to you or your family."

[...]

Truth is there's no meaningful health risk from either the bulbs or the power plants. As a 2004 paper published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution noted, "mercury exposure at current levels is unlikely to be causing harm."

The risk to the nation now is not the harmless traces of mercury, but in the shut down (or at least a steep price rise) the EPA seeks to cause many coal fired power plants particularly in the East.

Remember when the lights went off during the recent NFL game between Pittsburgh and San Francisco? That's our future if the EPA, indeed all the federal government, continues its cancer like growth.

Why the Showtime Series Homeland Sucks

2011-12-21T10:11:00.004-07:00

Almost all the vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are very positive about their service there and few if any disparage their fellow soldiers' actions there. They know they did a good job there and they're proud of it.

Homeland is a series on Showtime which just finished its first (and last?) season. It's a copy, with liberties, of an Israeli series I have not seen.

I liked it for many episodes. Then the lead guy, Marine Sgt. Brody --now a confirmed traitor/terrorist --(played by Damian Lewis, who was so good as Captain Winters in Band of Brothers) complained to his best friend/fellow marine about their service in Iraq. One could forgive Brody for being bitter, as he was captured and tortured for 8 freakin' years. But his bud just nodded his head in agreement. Wrong. We have done a good job in both places--meeting and defeating the enemy at nearly every engagement. The top leadership, particularly in Iraq, has been uneven, but these were not grunts complaining about the brass and REMFs as is usual and even healthy, this was criticism of the grunts. Bad. Bad.

Then in the finale, it got a lot worse. Here's the background. Our attempt to kill Abu Nidal (here Nazir) with a drone strike went wrong and hit a nearby madrassa and killed a lot of young boys. One of the boys was Nizar's son who was also beloved (platonically) by Brody. The American prisoner was then not being tortured and was actually under 'house arrest' with Nazir and part of his family in an effort to turn him against his country. The son's death caused Brody to vow to kill the man responsible for the strike--now the American Vice President. Then the facile and decidedly unequal moral equivalence begins and never stops.

First, the perpetrators of the botched strike feel so guilty about it that they erase nearly all traces of it. What? Have we put any of our deadly drone strikes in Afghanistan down the memory hole? No, we boldly own up to our few mistakes and our less rare but still regrettable collateral damage; but we also don't apologize for the latter. If the terrorists would seclude themselves from their families and other innocents, then those people would not be killed in drone strikes. Who's putting the innocents at risk? Both of us. By way of historical context--during WWII, we put German and Japanese citizens not in the military at risk with our strategic bombing campaigns (and thereby we killed 600,000 German non-combatants --as many as starved to death in WWI because of the British blockade-- and 900,000 Japanese non-combatants (at least) were killed in city incendiary bombings, including the two nuke strikes in Agust 1945). We won that war.

The central tragedy of war is that during it, you don't do what you should, you do what you can to win. But back to the show.

I'll take a rough equivalence between the fault of the terrorists for surrounding themselves with innocents and our willingness to cause collateral damage when when we drone strike terrorists. I will not take more of the blame as Homeland, through its Jewish Jiminy Cricket, Saul, made clear we deserved. That non-equivalence is just total BS.

But in getting the information of the boy killing drone strike out of the CIA minion, Saul put CDs of our interrogation of certain captured terrorists on the table to blackmail the CIA guy in the know to spill his guts about the "horrible" drone strike. Saul implied that the tapes showed torture. I doubt it. I don't believe short bouts of water boarding is torture (otherwise the late Christopher Hitchens would never have agreed to try it (for about 3 seconds) and thousands of American servicemen would not undergo it during SERE training). There is nothing damning on the CDs (except to the America hating left). Saul says that the tapes, if he turned them over to the NYT (who clearly are America hating enough to publish them) "would be the greatest recruiting tool since Abu Graib." This is another stupid lefty meme. The Muslim extremists did not need the fraternity hazing at the infamous Iraqi prison to recruit hundreds of ground kamikazis before 2003. The day to day actions of Saddam Hussein in the same place before we properly finished Gulf War I make the "horrors" of Abu Graib seem like next to nothing to anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge and common sense. Back to the show.

Part of Brody's torture was being beaten with a stout table leg with its end wrapped in barbed wire. Compare that to the safe waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who later thanked his interrogators for doing it so he could talk with a clean conscious. Which of the two is actual torture?

Saul doesn't seem aware of the huge discrepancy between deliberately targeting innocents and targeting enemies who surround themselves with innocents for safety and/or propaganda gains. He can't see the difference between the real torture Brody received and the harsh but less than torture interrogation we have employed a whole three times. His and the show's equivalence of the real evil of the Muslim aggressors and our regrettably necessary response is morally bankrupt and factually wrong.

The show has lost me as a fan. It should lose you too.

Thought of the Day

2011-12-21T10:08:00.001-07:00

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

Nobel laureate physicist Richard P. Feynman

What Passes for a Victory Celebration at the NYT

2011-12-17T07:25:00.007-07:00

Here are the generally historically incorrect comments in the NYT today on our withdrawal from Iraq after victory in Gulf War II, the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. Read it and weep.

After grudgingly allowing that removal of Saddam was good the editorial retreats to America bashing:

But the list of errors and horrors in this war is inexcusably long, starting with a rush to invasion based on manipulated intelligence.

The left can't let go of lying about our nation's and the world's apparent intelligence failure in Iraq. Wrong but not manipulated. Did we also manipulate the spy shops in all the rest of the west who came to the same conclusion? The NYT is again wrong and absurdly so here. Also, when did any war go perfectly? In stunning victories over really tough opponents (Germany and Japan) we screwed the pooch in big ways-- the entire Italian campaign was one long ClusterF; as was the invasion of Palau, not to mention our defeats in the Philippines in the first place.

The NYT editors celebrate our victory by focusing on the mistakes we made, those proud patriots, and serve up this old chestnut:

America’s reputation has yet to fully recover from the horrors of Abu Ghraib.

Aw, the horror, the horror. Abu Ghraib must be just below Bergen Belsen in crimes against humanity, or just above initiations into Greek letter organizations every year at colleges all across America; it depends on actually putting the "horror" in context. There's more misguided finger pointing.

The country is still paying a huge price for President George W. Bush’s decision to shortchange the war in Afghanistan. American policy makers, for generations to come, must study these mistakes carefully and ensure that they are not repeated.

The good war versus the bad. After our near American casualty free ass-kicking of the Taliban in 2001, there was no more war to fight for a long time as the foe had fled the field to sanctuary in our putative ally, Pakistan. From that haven the Muslim extremists have launched recently increased efforts against the NATO coalition and it has become the major front of the Long War we're fighting because the extremists attacked us. Only someone with absolutely no idea of the real history of the war in Afghanistan could say we neglected it or say our efforts in Iraq caused shortages of anything there (other than an active enemy to fight).

The editors gloss over the total failure of the Obama administration to broker a deal to keep a few thousand American troops in Iraq (something even the Iraqis want) and then there's the big finish:

We celebrate [the troops'] return. But this country must never forget the intolerable costs of a war started on arrogance and lies.

We should forget the victory but remember our arrogance and lies.

Madre de Dios! There were no lies. And arrogance?

Liberating 25 million people from a brutal, Hitler-lite dictator is not arrogant or misguided.

Soundly defeating the extremists' efforts called al Qaeda in Iraq and showing the Muslim world who indeed was the weak horse and who the strong was not arrogant or misguided.

The very fact that we spent American lives to liberate strangers from an intolerable dictatorship makes the cost tolerable and the victory worth celebrating. The editors are 180 degrees wrong.

My good friend on the left is similarly sour on our victory and has bet me that there will be a new dictator in Iraq within two years of us leaving. OK, 728 days and counting. No dictator yet.

Resons to Take Up Yoga

2011-12-08T11:37:00.004-07:00

(h/t The Chive, probably the best site in the world)

Thought of the Day

2011-12-08T06:32:00.001-07:00

But a fundamental question has never been answered: why in the world did the Obama administration not just allow AK-47s and other weapons to be shipped across the border to Mexican drug gangs, but encourage and even finance such transactions, over the objections of jittery gun shop owners and its own veteran agents? If the Obama administration wasn’t trying to set up an argument for more gun control, then what was it trying to do? That question has never been answered.

If the Obama administration did arrange for the shipment of arms to Mexican drug gangs, not for any legitimate public purpose but in order to advance a left-wing political agenda, and those guns were used to murder hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American border agent–which they were–then we are looking at a scandal that dwarfs any in modern American history.

John Hinderaker

Government Subsidies

2011-12-06T16:38:00.009-07:00

Regarding outflow of revenue by the government, I make a distinction between revenue foregone (tax breaks) and direct payment (actual check from the government). I'm almost always for revenue foregone because I'd almost always rather people keep and spend their own money instead of sending it to the government to spend it, sometimes wastefully, indeed often wastefully. These two are very different things vis a vis actual outflow of revenue. For example, by static analysis, a cut in the tax rates would seem to "cost" the government the revenue it would have received were the tax rates left where they had been. People and economies are not static, however, and react to stimuli with different behavior. As such, most tax rate cuts (by Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan and Bush (son), for example) have actually resulted in more revenue to the government, not less.

So I discount talk of a tax break being a cost to the government. Maybe it is, but maybe it isn't. I also think that clearly it is not spending. Writing a check from the treasury is spending. Not collecting taxes one theoretically might receive is not spending. We generally create a tax break to encourage behavior the majority feels creates a civic good.

Sorry for the preamble.

Here is a Boston Globe editorial from yesterday entitled: Clean-energy policies create jobs, and Congress should take note. (Yeah, they help the bankruptcy attorneys expand their staffs).

Most of the stimulus money spent on "green" energy has been a total waste. Solar and wind energy are worthless. But that's not what the editors of Boston's moribund daily paper think. They think we should send more.

And here is one of the things they use to justify it. Fossil fuel, they claim, is subsidized too. They write:

Between 2002 and 2008, the Environmental Law Institute has estimated, the US government spent $70 billion to subsidize traditional energy sources and $17 billion to subsidize corn ethanol.

Actually the Environmental Law Institute says it's $70.2 Billion to coal, oil and gas, $16.8 Billion to ethanol, and $12.2 Billion to "green" energy. I'll stipulate ethanol from corn for fuel is a big waste and we should stop that nonsense; but let's look closer at the numbers in this report from the ELI.

Forget the tax breaks. I'm only interested in the direct spending, the checks from the government.

For the "green" energy, they really don't account for the numbers they use in the website's graphic, but we know, independently, about the direct payments, the loan guarantees and the like, that have been expended (and, starting recently, that have been lost, wasted). Think Solyndra, Evergreen Energy and the dozens to come.

Here's what the ELI ilk call direct payments to the big oil, coal and gas, which they say totals over $18 Billion:

1) The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (which accounts for over a third of the so called direct payments--over $6 Billion). What? They admit that: "The purpose of LIHEAP is to prevent home energy shut-offs, rather than to intervene in energy markets." Let me translate that. This government program is not a direct payment to big oil, coal and gas but direct payments to state governments who in turn give it to poor people who can't pay the heat bill during winter and might well freeze to death without this help. This is charity to poor people, not a direct payment to big oil, coal and gas. Without these charity payments, the utilities would either cut off the deadbeats (and risk hypothermia for those in the cold household) or eat the deadbeats' unpaid bills and spread the loss around as much as they could to the paying customers. Under no rational structure of thought could this be called support for energy producers by the government, like the direct payments to wind and solar, etc. They must think we're morons.

2) The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (which accounts for another third, again more than $6 Billion). What? The idea is to have enough oil on hand to weather a cut off by the Middle East producers like what happened in the 70s. This is not support of big oil. It's just what it says it is, a storage of oil for a "rainy day."It is worse than a childlike pretending to say this storage of reserves is the same as the direct payment to Solyndra, etc. to keep the "green" producer in business. It gets worse.

3) The Black Lung Disability Trust Fund ($1. Billion). Oh, come on now. This is a fund for miners who have developed a disability; it is not in any way a payment to big coal. It is like the fund for asbestos related illnesses and is really just a specialized workers' compensation program. Only if the workers' compensation programs, which are mainly funded by the employers, are counted as a subsidy for each employer's field of endeavor, which no one ever does, could you count this as a subsidy for big coal. The miners got an extra largess from the feds for the disability above and beyond the state workers' compensation benefits, but it is again just charity from the government and there is no way the miners could have sued their employers successfully for their black lung (I'm from Appalachia and you'd be surprised by the number of people who have never been down a mine yet who claim to be suffering from black lung--but that's a different posting). The government is not paying off the sick miners as a way of shielding the coal companies from having to do so. The coal companies don't have to do so beyond getting workers' compensation insurance.

And then it just gets silly.

Not a single one of these so-called subsidies was even remotely a government payoff to the big oil, coal or gas companies. They are government programs to do other than pay money to big oil, coal or gas. At best, this is a through the looking glass sort of delusion to compare them to the $ Billions in direct payments to "green" energy. At worst, it is a knowing lie.

So there appears to be even less a reason to spend taxpayer and borrowed money of worthless wind turbines and solar panels because the actual energy producers in this country don't get a dime from the feds, not a dime!

Snarky Chart of the Month

2011-12-06T06:22:00.003-07:00

As you can see, the natural warming is completely different from the man-made warming. And this is the Phil Jones data set, which should not be used due to the fact, inter alia, that Jones has "lost" the original data and no one can check to see if it's accurate. And it's generally higher than the recent satellite data.

(h/t Steven Goddard)

How The Elephant Got a Trunk

2011-12-05T14:35:00.001-07:00

Looks pretty painful. I hope the elephant is OK (like most humans I am a mammal chauvinist).

Depressing Chart of the Week

2011-12-05T11:16:00.002-07:00

Thought of the Day

2011-12-03T09:04:00.003-07:00

In 1923, its finance minister was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a member of parliament, and a Jew. Couldn’t happen today. Mr. Cattaui’s grandson wrote to me recently from France, where the family now lives. In the unlikely event the forthcoming Muslim Brotherhood government wish to appoint a Jew as finance minister, there are very few left available. Indeed, Jews are so thin on the ground that those youthful idealists in Tahrir Square looking for Jews to club to a pulp have been forced to make do with sexually assaulting hapless gentiles like the CBS News reporter Lara Logan. It doesn’t fit the narrative, so even Miss Logan’s network colleagues preferred to look away. We have got used to the fact that Egypt is now a land without Jews. Soon it will be a land without Copts. We’ll get used to that, too.

Mark Steyn, being even more gloomy than usual, if that were possible.

Local Corruption

2011-12-02T16:01:00.003-07:00

Here is a link (from Diomedes) which puts you at the good parts (for Coloradoans) of Throw Them All Out, a tell-all book about Congressional inside trading and conflicts of interest. The subject is Jared Polis (D--2nd Dist. CO).

Funny how no one in Colorado seems to want to talk about these allegations. What's up with that?

Hometown Lawyers Make the Sketchy List

2011-12-02T13:50:00.005-07:00

From a link at Goodsh*t, here are the two Denver lawyers who make the Sketchy Lawyer Billboards gallery of shame.

At least these are the two I recognize.

Growing Old is Hard, Man

2011-12-02T09:56:00.003-07:00

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Getting a Pound of Lie Out of an Ounce of Truth

2011-11-30T15:44:00.009-07:00

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.

It's a Beautiful World

2011-11-29T15:42:00.002-07:00

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Truth in Retail

2011-11-29T15:26:00.002-07:00

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Thought of the Day

2011-11-28T06:39:00.002-07:00

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

Every Picture Tells a Story

2011-11-24T07:40:00.002-07:00

Hitting the Nail on the Head

2011-11-24T07:30:00.004-07:00

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.

Whistle Blower Releases New Cache of Warmie True Believer E-Mail

2011-11-23T08:13:00.004-07:00

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)

Exagerated, but Funny Cause It's True, 2012 Election Poster

2011-11-22T09:36:00.002-07:00

How to Make good Movies Bad

2011-11-21T15:40:00.003-07:00

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Vandalism

2011-11-21T15:38:00.001-07:00

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Answering Frank Rich

2011-11-21T10:49:00.004-07:00

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.

Why I'm Anti-Wind Generator

2011-11-21T06:46:00.007-07:00

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.

Thought of the Day

2011-11-18T08:20:00.001-07:00

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

Earthquake Damage Photographs

2011-11-17T17:17:00.002-07:00

I Hope Ridley's Right About the Future

2011-11-17T16:42:00.001-07:00

Especially the underpants.

And the Rest of the World Needs Bifocals

2011-11-17T10:03:00.005-07:00

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)

Earthquake Damage Photographs

2011-11-16T09:01:00.003-07:00

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.

Not Your Ordinary Holiday Wreath

2011-11-15T10:30:00.003-07:00

Apoplexy Inducing Chart of the Month

2011-11-15T10:07:00.005-07:00

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.

We Know Who They Are

2011-11-14T13:16:00.001-07:00

Coming Full Circle

2011-11-13T08:39:00.009-07:00

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.

Our Planet is Pretty, Pretty Spectacular

2011-11-11T16:34:00.004-07:00

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

Other amazing examples here.

A Sign of the Times

2011-11-11T16:27:00.004-07:00

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.

But It's the Tea Partiers Who Are the Domestic Terrorists

2011-11-11T15:55:00.005-07:00

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.

Mickey is a Little Miffed

2011-11-10T17:06:00.000-07:00

I Miss Calvin and Hobbs

2011-11-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

Hipsters and Old Hats--Part Deux

2011-11-09T16:34:00.001-07:00

One Less B-17

2011-11-08T11:58:00.000-07:00

Thought of the Day

2011-11-08T11:53:00.003-07:00

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

Tunnel Vision

2011-11-07T16:02:00.007-07:00

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.”

Thought of the Day

2011-11-07T15:53:00.002-07:00

If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.

Curtis LeMay

Hipsters and Old Hats

2011-11-07T11:44:00.002-07:00

Manichaean Pie Chart

2011-11-07T09:29:00.001-07:00

Channeling Col. Kilgore

2011-11-06T10:06:00.001-07:00

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

Thought of the Day

2011-11-06T09:56:00.002-07:00

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

Glenn Reynolds

Thought of the Day

2011-11-05T17:52:00.002-07:00

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

Second Thought of the Day

2011-11-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Thought of the Day

2011-11-04T08:53:00.001-07:00

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

This Day in the History of the Deaths of Artists

2011-11-04T08:39:00.003-07:00

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.

For Those Embroiled in the Herman Cain Kerfuffle

2011-11-03T10:21:00.004-07:00

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)

Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

2011-11-03T09:35:00.002-07:00

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Second Thought of the Day

2011-11-02T10:14:00.004-07:00

(h/t this isn't happiness)

Thought of the Day

2011-11-02T09:26:00.003-07:00

(h/t Goods**t)

My Thoughts on the Defeat of Proposition 103

2011-11-02T09:13:00.003-07:00

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.

Some Nebulae Are Well Named

2011-11-02T09:10:00.001-07:00

Frame of Reference

2011-10-20T16:26:00.005-06:00

It all depends on the Frame.

(h/t Small Dead Animals)

Answering Obama

2011-10-18T15:24:00.003-06:00

Here is the text of the permanently campaigning President in Asheville, NC yesterday. Here are some quotes with my responses thereto:

So, those are the choice that members of Congress are gonna face in the coming weeks. And if they vote against these proposals again; Like I said maybe they didn’t understand the whole thing. [Yeah, it's the Republicans who are the stupid ones. Who don't know that?] So we are breaking up into little pieces. If they vote against taking steps that we know will put Americans back to work right now. [We know no such thing. The pitiful few jobs the near trillion dollar Stimulus created were too costly. We just don't have the money to waste anymore] Right Now. Then they are not going to have to answer to me; they are going to have to answer to you. [I'm ready to answer]

They are going to have to come down to North Carolina and tell kids why they can’t have their teachers back. [We don't have any money] They are going to have to come down to North Carolina and look at those construction workers in the eye and tell them why they can’t get to work doing the work that America needs done. [Because we don't have any money] They are going to have to come down here and explain to working families why their taxes are going up [The only people wanting to raise taxes are Obama's Democrats--this is projection] while the richest Americans and largest corporations keep getting sweet deals in the tax codes. [You mean like the deal Solyndra got?]

They are going to have to come down and explain to you why they don’t have an answer as to how we are putting Americans to work right now. [Number of Americans employed when Obama was inaugurated: 142,201,000. Number of Americans employed now: 139,627,000. Who's putting Americans to work right now?] And if they support the Republican plan, if they were to support the Republican Plan they will have to explain to you why {they'd} rather deny healthcare to millions of Americans [Not deny, just not pay for those who choose not to get it. Because we don't have any money for that] and let corporations and banks write their own rules [At least those rules would allow businesses to prosper and hire more people] instead of supporting proposals that we know will create jobs right now. [Businesses create real jobs not the Government, the only thing the Government can do is help to create a business climate conducive to hiring, something Obama and his advisers know nothing about].

This is pathetic stuff from the President. And sad.

Imagine No Possessions

2011-10-18T14:59:00.004-06:00

It seems all is not sweetness and light at the Occupy Wall Street compound. There are those among them who do not respect property rights. Just imagine!

Occupy Wall Street protesters said yesterday that packs of brazen crooks within their ranks have been robbing their fellow demonstrators blind, making off with pricey cameras, phones and laptops--and even a hefty bundle of donated cash and food.

"Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment," said Nan Terrie, 18, a kitchen and legal-team volunteer from Fort Lauderdale.

"I had my Mac stolen--that was like $5,500. Every night, something else is gone. Last night, our entire [kitchen] budget for the day was stolen, so the first thing I had to do was . . . get the message out to our supporters that we needed food!"

It's not as much fun when someone spreads your wealth around to others.

(h/t Best of the Webb)

Taking the Rough with the Smooth

2011-10-18T07:28:00.004-06:00

IDF member, Gilad Shalit has been freed from 5 years of captivity through a "prisoner exchange" where 1027 Arab criminals were released for one Jewish soldier.

I'm generally against these exchanges, as it rewards what amounts to the kidnapping of Israelis by their enemies. It is negotiating with terrorists--a bad idea per se. Criminals released early also have a horrible effect on the releasing society in that justice is not served here hundreds of times (a thousand plus times) over.

The one ray of silver lining is that we now have a concrete example of the relative worth of Jews versus Arabs.

UPDATE: Scott Johnson at Powerline feels the same way.

Thought of the Day

2011-10-14T04:01:00.002-06:00

The latest article in Joe Romm's Climate Progress reaches a new intellectual low which is difficult with all the competition on that site for the title. The claim is made that if the US was foolish enough to install solar at the same rate as the Germans then it would be a 100% solar utopia by 2026 with everyone's home completely powered by renewables except on cloudy days and at night and in the mornings and late afternoons. We could all pretend that the new fossil fueled power stations running 24/7 as backup don't exist in this Romantic Green wonderland of the future. We could also pretend that the crippling cost of this part-time energy is OK because it is "green" and anyway the US can borrow heaps more dollars from China for such a good cause and avoid using all that cheap coal like the silly Chinese are doing. (Emphasis added).

Baron

Springtime for Hitler - The Producers(1968)

2011-10-11T16:37:00.002-06:00

Today we're singing: Springtime for Arabs in Middle East, Winter for Coptics and Jews....

Brevity is the Soul of Wit

2011-10-10T14:57:00.003-06:00

Apparent past winner of the All-England Summarize Proust Competition, John E, is also this year's winner of the contest to give as concise a history of the Obama Administration as possible. Ready?

Unthinkable corruption executed with criminal incompetence.

Actually he's probably only talking about Operation Fast and Furious.

Thought of the Day

2011-10-06T10:18:00.001-06:00

Indeed, the very women’s groups most exercised about [Justice] Thomas’s alleged misconduct were notably, shamefully silent when it came to Clinton’s behavior with a White House intern and his false statements under oath.

Ruth Marcus

Obama Presidency by the Numbers

2011-10-05T16:59:00.000-06:00

Putting Two and Two Together

2011-10-04T18:17:00.007-06:00

Here is an account by young Ben Shapiro about what the real reason was for Operation Fast and Furious (and a "straight" report on if from CBS).

Mr. Shapiro writes:

According to the Congressional report, "ATFs Phoenix Field Division began allowing suspects to walk away with illegally purchased guns .... This shift in strategy was known and authorized at the highest levels of the Justice Department." One goal was to identify "straw purchasers" -- legal gun purchasers who hand off those guns to illegal owners. Instead of arresting the straw purchasers and their contacts, however, ATF was to allow the guns to continue to flow to the Mexican drug cartels. "ATF and DOJ leadership were interested in seeing where these guns would ultimately end up," the report states. "ATF would only see these guns again after they turned up at a crime scene."

That's exactly what happened. The entire operation ended with only 20 indictments of straw purchasers -- indictments that could have happened immediately upon transfer of the weapons, stopping the flow. In fact, the straw purchasers, at issue, were known to be straw purchasers from the get-go. The indictments only took place at all because U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered using the weapons authorized for free flow by ATF and DOJ. Terry wasn't the only person killed because of Fast and Furious -- the weapons OK'd by the DOJ and ATF were used in three murders, four kidnappings and an attempted murder in Mexico. They've been identified at 11 other crime scenes in the United States.

So what was the real goal of the DOJ and ATF? It certainly wasn't to shut down access to arms for the cartels -- the ATF was agreeing to such access. It wasn't to stop straw purchasers -- the ATF was signing off on the straw purchasers. It wasn't to track the movements of the cartel -- there was no way to do that. It was, very simply, to establish for political reasons that American guns were being used in crimes by foreign cartels.

This was the Reichstag fire of the Second Amendment. By authorizing the passage of weapons to America's enemies, President Obama and his administration clearly wanted to set up a narrative that America's lax gun laws were killing American troops and law enforcement officers. They wanted their misuse of law enforcement authority to create the impetus for a crackdown on gun sales in the United States.

Now here is a report from May of this year:

On March 30, the 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, Jim Brady, who sustained a debilitating head wound in the attack, and his wife, Sarah, came to Capitol Hill to push for a ban on the controversial "large magazines." Brady, for whom the law requiring background checks on handgun purchasers is named, then met with White House press secretary Jay Carney. During the meeting, President Obama dropped in and, according to Sarah Brady, brought up the issue of gun control, "to fill us in that it was very much on his agenda," she said.

"I just want you to know that we are working on it," Brady recalled the president telling them. "We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar."

(emphasis added).

What's that phrase? oh, yeah, What did the President know and when did he know it? God, I miss those dark, dark days of Watergate which resulted in death and injury to zero people. So far the death toll for this idiotic scheme by the BATFE, etc., includes several Americans, some in law enforcement and an unknown amount of murdered Mexican citizens. Of course, Watergate was much more important, a clear and present danger to the viability of our Constitutional Republic as a nations of laws, not men.

Under Pressure

2011-09-30T12:38:00.007-06:00

It is the established, scientific consensus that the greenhouse gasses warm our fair planet by about 33 degrees C. These gasses are primarily H2O, as a vapor, but also the relatively important trace gas CO2 and the others, N2O, CH4, etc., that are not important at all and are in fact measured in parts per Billion. That 33 number was obtained many decades ago by scientists calculating the energy in from the sun and comparing it to the average ambient temperature that exists (at the surface) and noting that something must be heating up the atmosphere because it is 33 degrees hotter than it should be. (It should be -18, not the on the average 15 we now enjoy). They reasoned that the additional energy (heat) must be from the capture of outward going heat and the only thing that could possibly do that was greenhouse gasses. (And these gasses do have the ability to "capture" infrared energy, just not very much, especially given their tiny concentrations in the atmosphere). Thus the greenhouse effect must warm the planet 33 degrees. QED.

I had never doubted that consensus. I was a believer even when I learned that Venus was very hot (at the surface) not because of the CO2 (per se) in its atmosphere but because of the very weight of the atmosphere. (Rebuttal here). The dense Venusian atmosphere compressed itself at the surface and it was hot, like the air in a diesel cylinder gets hot enough to ignite fuel, or a bicycle pump gets hot enough to burn your hand, or refrigeration compressor, etc. These things get hot not from any captured energy but merely from mechanical compression. I learned the truth of the Venusian atmosphere (still used by ignorant Warmie propagandists as "proof" that CO2 can superheat an atmosphere) but I was still in the box. I did not apply that lesson to Earth's atmosphere.

It's time to.

Here is a careful and convincing tape on what really causes the 33 degree difference. Compare it to the junior mythbusters tape. Is the one degree difference in the latter, compared to the 6 degree difference in the former, because they have soft sided containers? I sure think so.

I don't compare it to the recent Al Gore experiment as that appears to be completely fabricated through editing alone.

So here is the executive summary: The High School experiment of two jars, one with air and one with added CO2, has the CO2 filled jar get hotter because of the pressure of the CO2 not because the CO2 itself captures heat. If the jars can't get pressurized when they heat (a simple hole in the jar top) then there is no difference in the temperatures of the two jars. As we know, it gets colder the higher up you go. That's why mountains remain snow capped well into the Summer. Our atmosphere (the liveable part, the Troposphere) is only about 10 km thick and it's warmest at the bottom (the surface) and coldest at the top. The scientists measuring the heat coming in made the mistake of measuring the heat of the atmosphere at the surface. They should have measured it at center mass, which is about 5 km up, to get the average heating of the atmosphere from the Sun. There the temperature of the atmosphere is almost precisely what it should be, -18 C. The warmer temperature of the atmosphere at the surface of the earth is, as on Venus, merely the product of air pressure. There is no 33 degrees of mysterious warming. There is no measurable greenhouse effect. QED.

How does it feel to remove the blinders?

If only the Warmie true believers would learn to question authority.

This Day in the History of Evil

2011-09-30T10:31:00.007-06:00

On this day in 1938, Hitler, Mussolini, French Premier Edouard Daladier, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sign the Munich Pact, which seals the fate of Czechoslovakia, virtually handing it over to Germany in the name of peace. Upon return to Britain, Chamberlain would declare that the meeting had achieved "peace in our time."

Although the agreement was to give into Hitler's hands only the Sudentenland, that part of Czechoslovakia where 3 million ethnic Germans lived, it also handed over to the Nazi war machine 66 percent of Czechoslovakia's coal, 70 percent of its iron and steel, and 70 percent of its electrical power. It also left the Czech nation open to complete domination by Germany. In short, the Munich Pact sacrificed the autonomy of Czechoslovakia on the altar of short-term peace-very short term. The terrorized Czech government was eventually forced to surrender the western provinces of Bohemia and Moravia [the modern Czech Republic] (which became a protectorate of Germany) and finally Slovakia and the Carpathian Ukraine. In each of these partitioned regions, Germany set up puppet, pro-Nazi regimes that served the military and political ends of Adolf Hitler. By the time of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the nation called "Czechoslovakia" no longer existed.

And by this last day of September a year later, with Poland conquered and carved up between the two socialist powers of Germany and the USSR, the real human suffering, the direct result of horrible decisions by the capitalist powers' leadership, had begun in earnest. France and then Great Britain were next for punishment.

(h/t History.com)

Where I Don't Criticize Solar Power Generation

2011-09-28T14:10:00.006-06:00

The feds just authorized a $737 Million loan guarantee for a (small) solar power plant in Tonopah, Nev. Oh great, you say, another Solyndra debacle. No, I say, this is a horse of another color. It's not worthless old intermittent photovoltaic power cells but a concentrating solar power (field of mirrors aimed at a central tower) outfit using the very latest in molten salt technology. So not intermittent at all. Seems a little pricey for 50 full time jobs, but I'm OK with this technology. (I'm particularly interested in the base power output, operating costs and longevity of the power plant, all things we don't fully know yet, despite other plants of this type around the world).

The criticism that Nancy Pelosi (not Speaker of the House, D--Haight Asbury)'s bro-in-law is connected to the project rolls off my back like water off a duck. Is there any evidence that her relationship to him got the solar collectors the loan or made it easier? I've heard none. Are companies who have some, any, connection to one of the 535 federal legislators forbidden from dealing with the government?

I like it that one of this sort of new energy economy plants is getting built. Deal with it, purists.

And I've been from Tuscon to Tucumcari, Tahachapi to Tonopah.