Weather report: it's back! El Niño returns

El Niño aka the Southern Oscillation has returned. El Niño is Spanish for "the boy child" which refers to "the Christ child." It was given this name because it usually occurs around Christmas time. El Niño is associated with increased rainfall in regions east of the Pacific Ocean like the United States and Latin America and droughts to the west in countries like Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

In Australia:

The weather phenomenon, associated with warmer tropical waters in the Pacific, occurs about every two to five years and lasts about 12 months.

The [Australian] Bureau of Meteorology first warned early last month that an El Niño event appeared to be developing. "It's here," David Jones, the bureau's head of climate analysis, said yesterday. "The only question mark is how long does it last."

He said there had been a very rapid shift from a La Niña event in 2008 to neutral conditions in early 2009 before the latest "fairly classic" El Niño conditions appeared - sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific about 1 degree above average and trade winds weaker than normal.

Meanwhile, in Canada, El Niño could mean disaster for the Olympics:

The return of El Niño could wash out parts of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, weather forecasters say.

The global temperature fluctuation could result in warmer weather and a smaller snowfall, causing problems for the Games, which are set to kick off in February. Meteorologist Mark Madryga said the climate phenomenon could mean warmer temperatures for the mountains surrounding Vancouver.

In the southern states, it could mean a wetter and warmer winter:

A warm east Pacific (El Niño) translates to a stronger southern storm track over the U.S. and a wetter south.

A La Niña helps to provide drier weather with less available storm energy. Texas has been in a persistent drought for several years and La Niña is at least partly to blame.

NOAA forecasts this El Niño to gradually increase during the next several months. The event is expected to last through winter 2009-10.

And, in the northern states:

Typically, a warmer winter…

The most recent El Niño occurred back in 2006 providing southeastern Minnesota with the warmest January on record.

And during an intense El Niño episode back in 1998, southeastern Minnesota recorded its second warmest year ever!

Precipitation trends with El Niño aren't as clear, but with milder temperatures we may receive less snow, and more ice and rain.

Changes across the USA:

In the USA, look for more precipitation in the arid Southwest, less wintry weather across the North and a reduced risk of Florida wildfires. The downside can include damaging winter storms in California and increased storminess in the South.

...

The warming Pacific water's has an effect on the atmosphere. It causes pressure fields to change, which then changes the wind patterns.

Our sub-tropical jetstream is more zonal, meaning it is pretty much west to east and less amplified. It usually sets up across the southern part of the United States bringing plenty of tropical moisture.

Due to the flow of the jetstream, El Niño years have been found to cause less Atlantic hurricanes. At the same time they can cause damaging winter storms in California leading to flooding and mudslides.

El Niño may dampen hurricane season:

The waters are warming up in the tropical Pacific, and that may be good news for the residents of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Government scientists this morning announced that an El Niño - an anomalous warming of surface waters in the equatorial Pacific that spans thousands of square miles - was under way.

They said it would probably last through the winter. El Niño has widespread effects on weather in the United States, but its specific impacts around here are impossible to predict.

El Niño, however, is known to have a dampening effect on the U.S. hurricane season. El Nino generates powerful upper-air winds from the west that travel into the Atlantic Basin and can snuff out incipient storms before they grow into hurricanes.

El Niños reoccur roughly every two to five years, with the last one in 2006.

Its other positive effects can include drought-breaking rains in the Southwest and more rain in the Southeast, lowering the risk of wildfires in Florida.

But El Niños also have produced devastating storminess in California and Central and South America and disrupt marine life on the West Coast.

Return of El Nino Could Change Hawaii Weather:

According officials at the National Weather Service, Hawaii could be hit with some unwelcomed weather.

Hawaii's most powerful hurricanes hit during El Nino years. Another danger is the lack of rainfall during El Nino years.

"You're gonna see potentially monthly rainfall values of less than 50 percent of normal, across a lot of areas of the state and especially even wet places," said Ray Tanabe of the National Weather Service.

But weather forecasting is tricky. Major pattern changes take place over thousands of years and we have only been observing the weather scientifically for a few hundred years. (It amazes me how socalled scientists can so arrogantly predict global warming.) And this El Niño is different from those observed before.

In fact there may really be Los Niños:

El Nino, the seasonal Pacific Ocean warming that affects the world's weather, may not be just one little boy -- it seems to be two little boys.

Two distinct patterns of warming occur in the Pacific Ocean, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and their frequencies have been changing in recent decades.

But after poring over more than half a century's worth of atmospheric and oceanic data collected by national and international centers, the Georgia Tech researchers concluded that there are in fact two forms of Pacific Ocean warming, and that these have different effects on the frequency and paths of North Atlantic hurricanes.

One form, eastern Pacific warming, correlates with hurricane activity identical to that of the conventional El Nino.

"The nature of El Nino is changing, and there are lots of subtleties," Webster said. "We want to predict those variations in El Nino and work out what the implications are of this new type of Pacific Ocean warming."

For anyone who studies the weather, one thing is very obvious: "weather" is dominated by water and air. They both flow according to the effects on them of pressure and temperature. Weather is "fluid" and not easily predicted. In fact the biggest influence on earth's weather and climate is the sun which has been in a dormant phase.

Now apparently sunspots are forming for the first time in two years:

After nearly two years of an acne-free surface, the first sunspots are starting to pop up on the Sun. Sunspots are regions on the Sun where the magnetic field lines of our nearest star erupt through its surface, and are an indicator of the amount of magnetic activity going on inside the Sun. Unlike a simple bar magnet, the solar magnetic field activity increases and decreases on a roughly 11-year cycle, and the number of sunspots follows in response. When the magnetic activity starts to rise after the cycle bottoms out, sunspots start to appear at a solar latitude of 22 degrees, and spread north and south from there.

Right now we’re at the bottom of the cycle, and sunspots are rare. But this two-year lack of spots has been the longest such period for nearly a century, and it’s had solar astronomers scratching their heads. That’s not too surprising, as the Sun is a fiendishly and vastly complex system of churning gas, and it’s numbingly difficult to observe and model it.

But astronomers have just made an important breakthrough in solar observations that links the way the gas under the Sun’s surface behaves with the way sunspots form.

Of course I'm hoping for a wet winter after last season's warm dry winter.

Modern pop "music" - pure ugliness

When I get home from the office, I turn on the TV to watch the local weather report at 5pm. Usually it's not quite 5pm and Ellen DeGeneres is still on. I like Ellen but her taste in "music" stinks. I thought that the human race could not sink any lower when I first heard rap.

Well, it has. Modern honky pop "music" is even worse than rap. The worst part of it is that the "singers" can't sing. But even if they could hold a tune, it doesn't matter because there are no melodies. They all have total tin ears unless of course it's fashionable to be flat as a pancake.

That may the case because it's hard to believe that such evil-sounding whining happens by accident. I have a hunch that modern pop "musicians" deliberately strive for mediocrity (or worse - real ugliness.)

Ugliness does seem to be the new standard - and not only in "music." Modern clothing is hideous and those revolting spiky hairdos dyed in weird unnatural colors is even worse. There really does seem to be a cult of ugliness infecting our youth.

Outlaw public employee unions

Matt Welch:

During the last two decades, the Golden State has been transformed from what was once known as the nation’s most anti-labor outpost to a state essentially run by public-sector unions. Nearly three in five publicsector workers are unionized, compared to less than two in five public employees in other states. The Democratic Party, which is fully in hock to unions, has controlled the legislature and most statewide posts, with the notable exception of the governor’s mansion, for more than a decade. That means more government workers, higher salaries, and drastically higher pension costs.

According to Adam Summers—a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine—the state’s annual pension fund contribution vaulted from $321 million in 2000–01 to $7.3 billion last year. According to public databases, more than 5,000 people are drawing pensions in excess of $100,000 from the state of California each year.

So pervasive is the union influence that big labor doesn’t even try to defend its deleterious effects on California’s finances. Just before the special election, a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board asked Service Employees International Union chief Andy Stern to respond to charges that unions are the 21st-century equivalent of the railroads that were once all-powerful in California. Stern verbally shrugged: “I think democracy is an ugly thing at times.”

Conor Friedersdorff says "outlaw public employee unions":

I'll certainly acknowledge that California's public employee unions improve the well being of its members. The problem is that the outlandish compensation it wins workers comes at the expense of the common good. The most obvious example are public employee pensions. In California, a state worker can retire at age 50, do absolutely nothing all day, and collect 90 percent of their salary for the rest of their lives! 5,000 of these pensions amount to six figures incomes. Nor can the state afford the system it has. As the Matt Welch piece mentions, "the state's annual pension fund contribution vaulted from $321 million in 2000-01 to $7.3 billion last year." That is a rather alarming rate of growth, and an astonishing figure, don't you think? Given that the state is bankrupt and issuing IOUs to its creditors, it doesn't seem unreasonable to complain that public employee unions have extracted benefits that are both obviously unaffordable and far in excess of what is enjoyed by the taxpayers who finance them.

Absolutely! Let's outlaw public employee unions. They not only have destroyed the California economy but have a stranglehold on Oregon too - even in our otherwise conservative county.

I've never understood the purpose of public employee unions. Public employees work for us. The taxpayers are their employers. Supposedly public employees are there to serve the community but their unions are not concerned with the interests of the community. They're only interested in lining their own pockets and ripping off the taxpayers.

Only in Britain

Actually, having lived in both places for years, I can say that "Only in San Francisco" and "Only in Britain" are completely interchangeable. Both places are nuts.

Andrew Stuttaford:

Petty and not-so-petty authoritarianism has been a part of the Blair/Brown project for so long that this sleazy little development comes as no surprise:

The government is to single out Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, the British National party's two newly elected representatives in the European parliament, for special treatment, denying them some of the access and information afforded to all the other 70 UK MEPs.

Under new guidelines drafted in Whitehall and in the Foreign Office following the June elections to the European parliament, the two BNP leaders will be kept at arms' length from the kind of routine contacts and socialising that take place between British civil servants and MEPs in Brussels and Strasbourg.

And if the authoritarianism is nothing new, neither is the boneheadedness. Measures like this play into the hands of the BNP by allowing these distinctly unlikeable figures to portray themselves as victims, outsiders, and the only authentic representatives of a Britain that is despised by the country's arrogant, out-of-touch, and bullying elite. Idiotic move, idiotic government.

But the Brits are one step ahead of the San Franciscans. The BNP is a nationalist socialist political - yep Nazi - party but Michael Savage's - yep, the nut's SF- groupies aren't quite as organized as the BNP - yet.

Prince Charles has only 9 years left to live

From The Independent:

Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse, the Prince of Wales has warned in a grandstand speech which set out his concerns for the future of the planet.

The heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James's Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world.

And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the "age of convenience" was over.

Whenever I read about this cretin, I immediately think of Jethro in Beverley Hillbillies - too much inbreeding.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

John R. Graham:

The SEIU spent $85 million during the 2008 campaign season, largely to elect politicians favorable to its two key priorities: removing employees’ right to a secret ballot for workplace certification, and a federal take-over of health care. The latter is utterly critical to the survival of union power. Unions have lost private-sector members for decades and their strongholds lie in the government sector. Clearly, turning private-sector workplaces into public-sector workplaces would give union bosses a much needed boost, and health care (especially hospitals) is the only likely candidate.

If government were to become hospitals’ dominant source of revenue, the government could demand public-sector style pay and benefits — for non-medical workers. This is a key reason for rationing health care in Canada: Too much money is sucked out of the system by unionized non-medical workers. A 2002 survey showed that hospital jobs such as painter, cook, and payroll clerk earned one-third more than their counterparts in the private sector.

John R. Graham is director of Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute.

I know all about the SEIU in hospitals. They tried (and failed) again and again to recruit hospital pharmacists and technicians. Very persistent weasels.

Only in San Francisco?

I knew Newsome's cousin well so I'm not surprised.

Hit&Run, Reason.com editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie blogs about this San Diego Union-Tribune story about how the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, has ordered the "gardenification" of his town.

All city departments have six months to conduct an audit of unused land - including empty lots, rooftops, windowsills and median strips - that could be turned into community gardens or farms that could benefit residents, either by working at them or purchasing the fresh produce. Food vendors that contract with the city must offer healthy and sustainable food. All vending machines on city property must also offer healthy options, and farmers' markets must begin accepting food stamps, although some already do.

The mayor will send an ordinance to the Board of Supervisors within two months mandating that all food served in city jails, hospitals, homeless shelters and community centers be healthy.

And effective immediately, no more runs to the doughnut shop before meetings and conferences held by city workers. Instead, city employees must use guidelines created by the Health Department when ordering food for meetings.

Examples include cutting bagels into halves or quarters so people can take smaller portions and serving vegetables instead of potato chips.

Fast Company Magazine had a story about Newsom in its July/August issue pointing out that the mayor was eying the governor's mansion these days.

The Newsomes are very rich and very silly. Silly enough to be friends with the Pelosis. Let me be blunt: it's known as the "alcoholic Catholic connection" in San Francisco.

Warren Buffet takes Viagra

And thinks the first "stimulus package" was like half a pill:

I think that a second one may well be called for. It is not a panacea. A stimulus is the right thing[...]you hope it doesn't get watered down in many ways. Our first stimulus bill...was sort of like taking half a tablet of Viagra and having also a bunch of candy mixed in...as if everybody was putting in enough for their own constituents. It doesn't have really quite the wallop.

Well, I'm sure he's old enough to know what it's like to not have "quite the wallop."

I'm a prolapsed Catholic but not a Papist

Andrew comments on my post about the Pope's latest encyclical:

That's why I'm non-practicing.

Me too, Andrew. But most of the Catholics I know are non-practicing. That's because American Catholics (except for a few nerdy WASPS and Hispanic types like K-Lo) are not Papists. Who gives a flying fornication through a rolling wafer what the Bishop of Rome thinks? And that's all he really is. Or, as the Irish Catholic Tim Cavanaugh says:

I have no dogma in the fight over Pope Benedict XVI's new encyclical Caritas In Veritate, nor in the question of whether it's an anti-capitalist tract, nor in the question of whether it's a right-wing or a left-wing anti-capitalist tract. As long as the Vatican continues to sit on the real Third Secret of Fatima, we are under no obligation to care about any of its announcements.

...

A Gerard Manley Hopkins fan spoofs Weigel's argument from the left:

Justice and Peace was angry. Very angry. Skulking in the darkest corners of the Vatican, they plotted their revenge. With an evil cackle, they hatched their malicious plots. And when John Paul died and Benedict was elected pope, they saw their opening. "Your Holinessssss," they whispered, "don't you think you should issue a document to mark the anniversary of that great encyclical, Populorum Progressio? We could help you, you know, it would be your greatest achievement ever, Holinessss,". Pope Benedict saw the evil gleam in their eyes and he was most disturbed. They gave him a document, but he said no. He did not trust them. They hissed in frustration, but held back their anger. They handed him a second document, and he rejected it again. They tried a third time, and again the answer was no.

Ever the kind old man, the pope did not want to hurt their feelings. So he told a little white lie. "My friends," he said, "the world is going through the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. We need to reflect more on that before we write the document". Of course, there was no such "economic crisis" (these things cannot happen in capitalism after all, unless the evil government messes it up). But the advisers were not very bright, and they believed him. And so they kept plotting.

Both sides are in the right pew but the wrong church, or something like that. Populorum Progressio was written by an impostor pope, and its primary interest to free marketers is the sly use that uncuddly mother of Objectivism Ayn Rand made of it in her great essay "Of Living Death." Rand asserted that there was no essential difference between Paul VI's vaguely economic-justice-oriented Populorum Progressio (which pleased the left and displeased the right, in broad terms) and his more famous birth-control-and-abortion encyclical Humanae Vitae (which pleased the right and infuriated the left). Both documents proceed from the same worldview: a determination that people should be both poor and numerous, a rejection (by a self-described pro-life institution) of life in all but its most meager, pleasureless forms.

...

Real reason for this post: Can anybody tell me whether the Catholic Church makes encyclicals available in in Latin anymore? The Vatican site has Caritas In Veritate in several modern languages, but not the language of the Roman church. That's enough to make Mel Gibson get a divorce.

There's nothing quite like a prolapsed Catholic. Just think of them all: from Shakespeare to the poor queer psychologically tortured Gerard Manley Hopkins. They were all great poets and philosophers who grokked the grays between the blacks and whites like only a prolapsed Catholic can.

Nuff said: "Don’t make us pay for rich peoples' healthcare"

Max Borders:

The Right is floundering in the healthcare “reform” debate. It’s complicated, but it need not be. How do you make the water cooler case? Tell ‘em “before we let them do anything stupid, we could fix healthcare in 5 easy steps”:

1. Let people buy health insurance across state lines. I live in North Carolina. If folks in my state could buy insurance in Idaho, we would cut our premium almost in half. New Yorkers could reduce premiums by about 2/3 buying in other states. Everyone would have access to the lowest rates in the country. Competition would bring costs way down. Why won’t the government let us?

2. Give poor and working class people tax credits (vouchers) to buy insurance. It’s not hard. Help the poor. Keep the competitive market, too. But for goodness sake, don’t make us pay for rich people’s healthcare and bankrupt private insurance all at once. (A high-risk pool can help people with pre-existing conditions, btw.)

3. De-couple health insurance from our jobs. (Change the tax code.) This coupling is an artifact of WWII wage controls. When your company chooses your insurance, it limits competition and choices. It's very costly, but you don't see the cost. And under the current system, you lose your insurance if you lose your job. Wealthier, employed people get subsidized to get insurance. Unemployed or independent contractors get nothing.

4. Give greater access to health savings accounts for use on the small stuff. They can save money for old age, or purchase out-of-pocket healthcare. They’ll be more careful with their spending. We’ll eliminate much of the “split-the-check” effect where people over-consume and cost-shift. (For example: Prilosec OTC costs $15 at the store. Prescription Nexium costs a $15 copay (but $150 in reality). These drugs are almost identical. Yet people choose Nexium without a second thought. Why shouldn’t they? Still, $135 unseen gets dinged to the risk pool, so premiums go up.)

5. Stop driving up costs with regs and mandates. In some states, the government forces insurance companies to charge everyone the same rate whether they’re young and healthy, or sick and old. This is terribly costly. High rates mean young people go uninsured. Also, forcing companies to insure people after the fact is not “insurance” and drive up costs even more. Again, carrots for consumers to get insurance are far better than sticks against insurance companies and employers. Of course, consumers pay for those sticks, anyway.

On No 5, the Left has consciously been using these kinds of regulations to drive up costs. This limits people’s “access.” They don’t care. They want medical socialism no matter the cost. The plan is, and always has been, either to hasten the destruction of the insurance market and/or to drive up costs so we’ll cry uncle. Once we cry uncle, they’ll usher in the age of bureaucare. Functionaries will make our healthcare decisions. Bureaucrats will decide if and when you need a drug. You will wait in medical bread-lines for care. Innovation will dry up. Just go to a Cleveland hospital. Find Canadians getting MRIs because Canada has made them wait.

This says it all for me:

Prilosec OTC costs $15 at the store. Prescription Nexium costs a $15 copay (but $150 in reality). These drugs are almost identical. Yet people choose Nexium without a second thought. Why shouldn’t they? Still, $135 unseen gets dinged to the risk pool, so premiums go up.

If you'd been in the business for 30 years, as I was, you'd know precisely what Borders is getting at. He's on to something serious. Nuff said.

Thank God dinosaurs still walk on earth

Actually thank living fossil dinosaur Robert Byrd who opposes the cap and trade crap.

"Stimulus" Money Flows Twice as Much to Areas That Voted for Obama Than to Areas That Didn't

The Chicago Way.

[Obama's] thinking is thus: If only a small amount of extra money was flowing to Obama counties, like 10%, well then, that could possibly be due to political favoritism.

But when 100% more -- double! -- flows to Obama counties, obviously that can't be explained by political rigging.

That's like claiming that because the wife you hated was shot with six bullets rather than one you can't have been her killer. One bullet? Sure. Six? Overkill. No way you could be guilty. What kind of guy shoots a woman six times?

Obama: "Harassment will not be tolerated!"

"But her ass meant a lot to me. Drool! Even old Froggy Sarkozy understood completely. But then the Frogs get the whole drooling over ass thing. They're so civilized. Thank God it wasn't Pat Robertson who caught me drooling. We'd never hear the end of it."




















Ace points out the the lass who owns the ass is only 16 but the Community Organizer in chief also ogles grown women's tushes - and of course Sarkozy is there to smirk like a dirty French dog drooling at escargot again. Ace has a collection of captions:

He's even got "boner leg."

President Short-Eyes probably shouldn't gawk at girls not even allowed to vote yet.

On the plus side, everyone with the "No" bet in the Gay Pool just cleaned up at 9 to 1 odds. That'll help the economy.

He's got all the tact of a country-born wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon.

He eyes up ass like he's Indian Jones about to grab a golden Incan idol. I think he's got a half-filled sack of sand in the other hand.

The Rasmussen Passion index just went to +6 1/4.

He looks like a guy delivering a sausage pizza in a porno.

Larry Flynt just called. He wants his class and subtlety back.

He's staring at the ass like he's a Scanner with the unique power to psychically detonate the buttocks.

The Pope's new encyclical

I've been reading a lot of commentary about it by Catholics in the past two days. It's called "Caritas in Veritate" - Charity in Truth. This summed it up for me very well.

Andrew Stuttaford:

So far as I can discern, Benedict is basically doing little more than reiterate the "social market" view of political economy that has long been at the core of continental European Christian Democracy or, to put it another way, the "Rhineland-model" capitalism under which he spent most of his adult life. This is not a view I, or many, supporters of the "Anglo-Saxon" (to use the adjective often used to describe it) approach to the market economy, would share, but it's hardly new. As to the pope's (dreadful) idea that there should be some sort of "world political authority" to, in some respects, "manage" the global economy, that again should be no surprise. Of all the forms of Christianity, Roman Catholicism is traditionally probably the most "universalist" (in the sense of the lack of attention it pays to the nation-state) and the Vatican is, of course, no stranger to notions of either top-down government or, dare I say, it, the authoritarian. Under the circumstances the pope's support for this world authority may be thoroughly misguided, but it's hardly a shock.

The "White Man's Burden"

Michael Yon says it will take 100 years to fix Afghanistan:

It's not the troops; it's not the economy; it's not that it's mountainous and landlocked like Austria and Switzerland. It's the society. I write these words from Ghor province, and it's like the Jurassic Park in Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Nangahar ... keep going. A person can tool around in towns like Kabul, Jalalabad or Mazar-i-Sharif and build up hopes, but to extrapolate beyond the tangible is folly. Iraq is 1,000 years more advanced than Afghanistan. Nepal is far more connected to and cognizant of the outside world.

After nearly eight years of war and billions spent, there is not a single Afghan soldier in this entire province. There is not a meter of paved road. There is a single television station that operates for maybe four hours a night when it has fuel.

Meanwhile Ralph Peters asks where is the Afghani military?

Last week, 4,000 US Marines launched a major operation in Helmand, the poppy- queen province in southern Afghanistan. The Marines performed magnificently, reaching their objectives with minimal casualties -- mostly from the 110-degree heat. But something important was missing: Afghans in uniform.

It's reports like this that make me cynical about the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy and helping to build nations especially since the recipients of our generosity are usually ungrateful. I just wish that we could leave them to sink or swim on their own.

But then I think about the alternative. It's not for the barbarians that we are doing this. It's for ourselves; to protect Western civilization. It is in our own best interests to bring civilization to the barbarians but it will take hundreds of years and we cannot afford to despair.

A hundred years ago Rudyard Kipling called it the "White Man's Burden." And, no matter how politically incorrect that may be nowadays, it's still true a hundred years later and will be for at least another hundred years.

T. Boone Pickens blowin' in the wind

Oil baron's wind farm project hits doldrums:

Billionaire oil man T. Boone Pickens is shelving plans to build the world's largest wind farm.

The chairman of BP Capital Management announced Tuesday that his plans for the Pampa Wind Project, designed to generate 4,000 megawatts of electricity using thousands of wind turbines, is on hold.

"I had hoped that Pampa would be the starting point, but transmission issues and the problem with the capital markets make that unfeasible at this point," Pickens told CNN's Ali Velshi. "I expect to continue development of the Pampa project, but not at the pace that I originally expected."

"Transmission issues" simply means that the project was not thought out sufficiently which seems to be the case with most of these socalled "green energy" projects.

"Taken"

We watched this tonight. If you are a "Gunsmoke" fan like me and enjoy watching all the bad guys being mercilessly killed by a man motivated with righteous anger, you'll love this movie - especially since the bad guys are sleazy Muslim white slave traders. My only peeve was that it wasn't gory enough but then it's a lot more adult than the childish "24" so I won't complain.

Favorite line (after our hero shoots a crooked French cop's wife in the shoulder): "It's only a flesh wound. Now talk."

Maybe we should have sold GM to the Iranis

From the Gaily Gush:

A reader writes:

The stories you've been running about women in Iran are amazing. I had a similar eye-opening experience a few months back when I first heard about a female race car driver named Laleh Seddigh. She emerged during a relatively liberal period in Iran during the '90s and went on to compete not only against other women, but against men (and she won!) Unfortunately, she was banned from racing a couple of years ago and I haven't been able to find any current information on her status. But the two profiles below really capture a sense of a strong-willed, unstoppable personality, as well as the personality of her father, who clearly adores her.

From a 2005 NYT profile:

Ms. Seddigh loves speed. She also loves a challenge. Last fall, she petitioned the national auto racing federation in this male-dominated society for permission to compete against men. When it was granted, she became not only the first woman in Iran to race cars against the opposite sex, but also the first woman since the Islamic Revolution here to compete against men in any sport.

What's more, she beat them.

"I like competition in everything," the striking 28-year-old said after parking the car and going for tiramisù in a cafe in North Tehran. "I have to move whatever is movable in the world."

In March, she moved the nation when she won the national championship. State television refused to show the new champ on the victory dais elevated above the men, but photographers captured the moment. She stood quietly while receiving her medal, as she had promised the race organizers she would, with a scarf over her long black hair and a coat over her racing uniform.

And then there is the Teheran Camaro and Firebird Club:

A reader sends in the following photos and writes, "Tehran's Camaro and Firebird enthusiast club may come as a pleasant surprise!"

There are more photos at the link.

We need these people on our side.

"It was a dark and stormy night"

The Bulwer-Lytton winners were announced last week. It's a contest to write the worst first line of a novel:

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

...

The winner of 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington. A contest recidivist, he has formerly won the Western and Children's Literature categories.

David McKenzie is the 27th grand prize winner of the contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982.

...

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

David McKenzie
Federal Way, WA

The runner-up:

The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor—the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.

Actually I thought the runner-up was pretty good. I much prefer novels written in that breathless style to the long-winded nonsense that passes for literature nowadays.

Your Green House

Stephen Spruiell:

Jimmie Bise at the American Issues Project has a great follow-up on the cap-and-trade bill's onerous home-retrofit mandates, which Kevin Williamson and I wrote about last week. Get this:

Pay close attention to (iii), (iv), and (vi) because those hit you right where you live. What that's saying is the state will be empowered to inspect your home if you want to 1) renovate your house in any way that requires a building permit, 2) sell your house, or 3) change the name of the person responsible for any utility bill.

The bill enforces compliance by withholding tradable emissions allowances and other goodies from state governments until they crack down on the slackers. And once you comply with the directive to retrofit your home, the government reimburses you for no more than half of your expenses. Of course, the bill's authors could make the argument that the nation's biggest energy hogs don't need the money.

Our Founders took private property for granted but they did not regard it as a "God given right" therefore they did not include it as one of our "unalienable" rights. I just wish that they had foreseen Marxism and included it in the Bill of Rights - maybe as part of the Second Amendment?

"It is not enough for conservatives simply to be intelligent"

Anthony Dick:

In his “Why Palin Quit” column today, John Fund provides a balanced explanation. He also offers a few lines on the unfair treatment Palin has received from the national media:

“She made many mistakes after suddenly being thrust into the national spotlight last year, but hasn’t merited the sneering contempt visited upon her by national reporters. She simply was not their kind of feminist — and they disdained the politically incorrect life choices she had made.”

But it wasn’t just the choices she made; it was the way she presented herself in conformance with the stereotype of the red-state simpleton. The fact that this stereotype is unfair does not justify conservative politicians in ignoring its power.

WFB once remarked to me, in reference to the second-term plunge in popularity of the George W. Bush administration, that it is not enough for conservatives simply to be intelligent or sophisticated. They have to project these qualities, conspicuously and convincingly, in order to get past the visceral prejudices of elite opinion-makers, who generally regard conservative ideas as some combination of boobish, evil, backward, boring, dangerous, and simplistic. Overcoming these prejudices is, if not a prerequisite, at least a very helpful vehicle for receiving a fair hearing on the merits. Bill Buckley was, of course, a master at this project. Sarah Palin seems either completely oblivious to it, or else too indignant to play that game. This may be a principled decision, but it is not without consequences.

The media elites (both Right and Left) accused Palin of talking in platitudes. The trouble is that American conservatism aka classical liberalism is so obvious (it's been around since the Founders) that it sounds boring but Lincoln and Reagan knew exactly how to make boring platitudes and truisms seem fresh and new again.

Whether we like it or not, if we want to win elections, we have to wow the media elites. We don't have to win them over (hell will freeze over before that happens) but we do have take them into account and impress them - not deliberately alienate them from the get-go. Elections can't be won without a modicum of respect from the media.

Party affiliation by wealth and education

David Hume at Secular Right:

The posts below I used education as a proxy for class. This is obviously rough. There are many people without college degrees who are well off, and many with college degrees who are only marginally middle class, or lower. How about looking at both net wealth and education? Unfortunately the sample sizes get a bit smaller, and so I can’t go and look at issue by issue. But I can look at party identification. Limiting the sample to whites here are some interesting points:

1) The proportion of Democrats is highest for whites with the combination of college eduation or higher and net wealth of less than $150,000.

2) The proportion of Republicans is highest for whites with the combination of college eduation or higher and net wealth of greater than $150,000. But whereas the difference in Democratic orientation is 14.5 points for whites across the educational chasm below $150,000, those who are above the $150,000 threshold show only a 3.4 gap between Republican orientation for those who do, and don’t, have college degrees. In other words, education matters a great deal for Democratic affiliation for whites who are less well off, while for the well off Republican party affiliation has only a weak relationship to educational attainment.

3) Political party polarization is greatest among those with wealth and higher education. Only 5.3% were political Independents with no lean in this class. In contrast, 31.2% of whites with no college degree and below $150,000 in wealth were Independents with no lean.

Table below:

Comment by a reader:

To summarise: the wealthy care about their assets and the higher educated care about their status and/or are in tax-paid or other non-commercial jobs.

Hence the concentration of Republicans in higher assets, Democrats in lower assets but higher education and independents in low assets and low education.

Maybe; but the most obvious thing about these figures is that those who have worked hardest have the most to lose and don't vote Democrat. I don't regard Democrats taking fifteen years to get college degrees as "hard workers" and I've known plenty of them. Of course they always end up in non-profits or government sinecures - again not working much or doing something (like "community organizing") that most normal people treat as unpaid volunteer work. Fortunately they don't bet paid much - unless they're in teachers' or social workers' unions.

Daily chuckle

Ace:

You tell me how to read this:

A majority of young people still approve of Obama's job performance, but a majority of seniors over 64 now don't (54%). Maybe they'll die before the next election.

Maybe LATimes blogger Andrew Malcolm will die of AIDS-related pneumonia in six months. Just saying -- could happen.

Those revolting Uighurs in China

Radley Balko:

Over at The Corner, National Review's Andy McCarthy sees the Uighur uprising in China as vindication of the Bush administration's detainment of several Uighur Muslims in Guantanamo.

...

There was once a time when, if an ethnic minority was rising up against an oppressive communist regime, you could count on National Review to side with the rabble-rousers fighting for political freedom, not the commies. But I guess that was pre-September 11. Now it's apparently all about siding with whoever is killing Muslims.

McCarthy might want to look over this FBI report (PDF, via Obsidian Wings) about the Uighurs at Gitmo, whom even the Bush administration conceded were captured by mistake and never posed a threat to the United States.

The Uighurs are moderate Muslims who occupied East Turkestan, which was taken over by the Chinese and renamed the Xinjiang province of China. The Uighurs were offered land in Afghanistan in order to gather personnel opposing Chinese oppression. They were often inspired by Radio Free Asia, which [redacted] was often a broadcaster for. The Uighurs considered themselves to be fighting for democracy, and they idolized the United States. Although the Uighurs are Muslim their agenda did not appear to include Islamic radicalism. They claimed to have no political connection to Islamic terrorists or the Taliban. However, their camp in Afghanistan was bombed, and they fled to Pakistan. The Uighurs were captured by the Pakistanis, with half being transferred to US custody, and half being remanded directly to Chinese officials. It was alleged that the Uighurs who were transferred directly to the Chinese were immediately executed. At the time of my TDY, US officials were considering whether to return the Uighurs to the Chinese, possibly to gain support for anticipated US action in the Middle East.

McCarthy might also want to read this account of the Uighurs plight since China seized what was then called East Turkistan a half-century ago, although it was admittedly written for some crazy left-wing rag:

My homeland has been under Chinese Communist rule for the past 56 years. Uyghurs, like Buddhists in Tibet, are forbidden to pray or speak freely. When Western reporters talk about how China's political situation is improving alongside rapid economic growth, I know they have not visited East Turkistan. Where I grew up, people today are still being executed for speaking out against injustice. East Turkistan is the only province in the People's Republic of China where people are still being executed for political reasons. Of course, China no longer labels us "counter-revolutionaries" or "American running dogs." Now Beijing calls us terrorists, hoping to legitimize their oppression by describing it as part of China's war on terror.

...and what happened to them after September 11:

...the government seized the opportunity to advance its campaign to assimilate forcefully Uyghurs into the Chinese culture. Uyghur books were burned, and now we Uyghurs can no longer speak our language in universities (and an increasing number of high schools). It is hard to describe to someone who lives in a free society, particularly in America, which has never been occupied, how it feels not to be able to own and speak your language.

Our freedom to practice religion has turned into a privilege regulated by the CCP. Chinese officials recently bragged that three million births in East Turkistan were avoided, meaning that that unborn Uyghur children have been forcibly aborted. In short, the Chinese Communist Party's assault on the existence of the Uyghur nation has been intensified under the banner of China's own war on terror. Uyghurs who peacefully oppose this injustice are labeled as terrorists. Many who escaped to neighboring countries like Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were returned to China and executed. Uyghurs want peace, freedom, democracy, and human rights, including the right to be Muslim.

If the Uighur students are indeed "rampaging 'with big knives stabbing people' on the street," that's a regrettable form of protest. It's amusing, though, to see a National Review contributor quote a communist country's state-controlled media account of anti-government protests in order to make his point.

The Uighurs, like the Kurds, are Muslim and by no means perfect but, again like the Kurds, they are pro-American and lovers of freedom and independence.

A radical man-hating feminist utopia?

From the U.K.'s Independent:

Scientists create test-tube sperm

Breakthrough offers hope of finding cure for male infertility

Scientists have created human sperm in the laboratory for the first time. The extraordinary development, which until a few years ago belonged in the realms of science fiction, raises hopes that infertile men may one day be able to father their own biological children.

The sperm were created in a test tube, from stem cells derived from a five-day-old male embryo. The advance raises ethical questions over the safety of the procedure and the threat it poses to the future role of men. It was also challenged by experts who claimed the sperm-like cells produced in the experiment were not genuine sperm.

If the finding is confirmed, a single male embryo could, in theory, yield a stem-cell line which when stored could provide an unlimited supply of sperm. Once the stem-cell line was established, there would be no further reproductive need for men. In a briefing on the research, the scientists at Newcastle University and the NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute, led by Professor Karim Nayernia, raise the question of whether their discovery means "the end of men".

Finally the really radical man-hating feminists can say, "We don't need men."

"Preventive medicine" does not save money

Yuval Levin:

There are now literally decades of data on this question, and the answer is very clear: prevention does not save money. It does sometimes save lives, of course, it’s not bad medicine. It’s often very good medicine. But like a lot of good modern medicine, it’s very expensive. We can decide if it’s worth the cost or not, but let’s not ignore the cost, let alone imagine it will save us money.

The most recent serious scholarly review of the data on this question was an article in the journal Health Affairs earlier this year (here’s the link, but it requires a subscription). The author’s conclusion:

Over the four decades since cost-effectiveness analysis was first applied to health and medicine, hundreds of studies have shown that prevention usually adds to medical costs instead of reducing them. Medications for hypertension and elevated cholesterol, diet and exercise to prevent diabetes, and screening and early treatment for cancer all add more to medical costs than they save.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue preventive medicine, it just means we shouldn’t pretend it’s going to reduce health care costs.

One of the reasons that health-care costs more in the USA than anywhere else is because of our focus on "preventive medicine." Billions are spent on expensive tests designed to detect signs of disease and billions are spent on prophylactic drugs such as cholesterol-lowering statins and blood-pressure pills. Yes, as Yuval points out, it probably is good medicine but it makes our health-care the most expensive in the world.

YouTube - free stuff is very expensive

From Malcolm Gladwell's review of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free:

[H]ow does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

It sounds just like "free healthcare."

Wish I'd said that # 504 - "It's the economists, stupid!"

Mark Steyn:

Robert H. Franks argument is ingenious: The stimulus will work because enough economists are saying it will work that their prestigious postnominal credentials will impress enough of the masses into thinking it will work, which in turn will make it work. I can't wait to see him in The Music Man in summer stock telling the kiddies that if they just think lovely thoughts the band will sound great.

But, if enough pro-stimulus economists predicting the stimulus will work is enough to make it work, why don't the administration just go out and hire actors to play economists on NPR and CNN and whatnot? I mean, who would know the difference? And Newsweek would never check. And who knows? It might stimulate enough unemployed members of Equity that it actually does work . . .

Who knew it was this easy? It's the economists, stupid!

"My First Abortion Party" "infanticide fund-raiser."

Mark Hemingway:

Via Alternet:

"What are you going to do?" Unnecessary question, really — a conversational life vest, used when you’re sputtering for something to say. We knew the answer. Maggie, a 22-year-old college senior with no intention of bringing a child into the world yet, was going to have an abortion. She told us that she had already made up her mind; she had even determined the time, date and location. A better question might have been, "How are you going to pay for it?"

She answered that one before we had a chance to ask. "We’re having a party Friday to raise money," Maggie said. "You guys are obviously invited."

An abortion party. For the price of whatever we were willing to donate, she explained, we could partake of baked goods, beer and dancing. It was going to start at 10 p.m. at Maggie’s.

The Facebook invite came a day later, and it was settled. Ali and I were going to scrape together what donation money we could and join in the festivities.

It's shit like this that freaks out even secular libertarians like me. Bitches like this should have kept their legs closed until they were married and could have had a joyful baby shower instead of an "infanticide fund-raiser."

It's "hard to understand how people in Hamas and Hezbollah think. It’s alien"

Michael Totten talks with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg about The Real Quagmire in the Middle East.

MJT: You have talked to Hamas people. Should the Israelis or Americans talk to them?

Goldberg: I don’t know what they’d get out of it.

MJT: What did you get out of it when you did it?

Goldberg: A first-hand understanding of how they think. People in the United States find it hard to understand how people in Hamas and Hezbollah think. It’s alien. It’s alien to us. The feverish racism and conspiracy mongering, the obscurantism, the apocalyptic thinking – we can’t relate to that. Every so often, there’s an eruption of that in a place like Waco, Texas, but we’re not talking about 90 people in a compound. We’re talking about whole societies that are captive to this kind of absurdity.

So it’s very important – and you know this better than almost anyone – to go over there yourself and tape it, get it down on paper, and say “this is what they actually say.”

Yep, it's call Fascism - when the hoi-polloi is frothing at the mouth in a frenzy of racism, paranoid populism and xenophobic nationalism.

Okay - absolutely final final say on Palin's resignation

This is the way LGF's Palin poll looked like at 11pm when I voted:




















I voted "It neither hurt nor helped" and "Neutral."

"I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin"

David Kahane:

One of the most terrifying moments of my political life came last summer at the Republican convention in St. Paul. No, I don’t mean seeing John McCain careering around the Xcel Energy Center like Eyegore in Young Frankenstein, his face frozen in a Lon Chaney Sr. rictus grin as he reached across the aisle to his erstwhile friends in the media and got his hand bitten off. Rather, I’m referring to the aftermath of Sarah Palin’s outrageous acceptance speech, which whipped up the Rotary Club delegates into a frenzy of white-boy fury that not even heckling by a brave Code Pink embed could deter. Truly a fascist classic and one that sent shivers down our collectivist spines.

...

Not only were we offended at the sheer effrontery of McCain’s pick: How dare the Republicans proffer this déclassée piece of Wasilla trailer trash whose only claim to fame was that she didn’t exercise her right to choose? Where were her degrees from Smith or Barnard, her internships at PETA, the Brookings Institution, or the Young Pioneers? We were also outraged that the Stupid Party had just nominated a completely unqualified candidate nobody had ever heard of, a first-term governor of Alaska whose previous experience consisted of a small-town mayoralty. As opposed to our guy, Barry Soetoro of Mombasa, Djakarta, and Honolulu, a first-term senator nobody had ever heard of, whose previous experience had been as a state senator (D., Daley Machine) in Illinois. After eight long, illegitimate, lawless years of &*^%BUSH$#@! tyranny, how dare you contest this election?

And so the word went out, from that time and place: Eviscerate Sarah Palin like one of her field-dressed moose. Turn her life upside down. Attack her politics, her background, her educational history. Attack her family. Make fun of her husband, her children. Unleash the noted gynecologist Andrew Sullivan to prove that Palin’s fifth child was really her grandchild. Hit her with everything we have: Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, taking a beer-run break from her quixotic search for Mr. Right to drip venom on Sister Sarah; post-funny comic David Letterman, to joke about her and her daughters on national television; Katie Couric, the anchor nobody watches, to give this Alaskan interloper a taste of life in the big leagues; former New York Times hack Todd “Mr. Dee Dee Myers” Purdum, to act as an instrument of Graydon Carter’s wrath at Vanity Fair. Heck, we even burned her church down. Even after the teleological triumph of The One, the assault had to continue, each blow delivered with our Lefty SneerTM (viz.: Donny Deutsch yesterday on Morning Joe), until Sarah was finished.

Read the rest for sarcasm at it's finest.

Palin:Who would want to give this up for the White House?

I hope you noticed that I said below: "Final post on Palin's resignation." Neither this post not that one will be last thing I write about Palin. She's a phenomenon for me.

From that Time interview with Palin that I mentioned below:

The Palins were staying with Sarah's in-laws Bob and Blanche Kallstrom when the soon-to-be-ex-governor of Alaska sat down for an interview. The Kallstroms are two of the 2,500 full-time residents of Dillingham, Alaska, and owners of the Bristol Bay Inn and a hardware store. The town's population swells to 7,000 in the summer, as it's a magnet for sport fishermen. Todd Palin grew up in a house across the street from the hardware store — a building that has since been "moved," Blanche says, to make way for another building.

About 10 years ago, the Kallstroms moved into a two-story wooden house with a bright orange garage door. The house is modern with two octagonal windows (Blanche says the carpenter who built the place was "some hippie" who put in all the windows). They have two cottages — both also with bright orange doors — at the end of the driveway. One is a type of sauna with a wood-burning stove. The other is a smoke shack for fish. Their catch of the day is hanging from a clothing line strung from the shack to a tree. The driveway is littered with boots, gray-and-red-tipped fishing socks, waders, scooters, tricycles and a green yoga ball with bunny ears for kids to bounce on. On an opposite line, fishing gear is being hung out to dry. Two cars bear McCain/Palin stickers and faded "Palin for Governor" stickers.

Sarah Palin is in a long-sleeved blue T shirt that reads "Go Slam a Salmon, Peter Pan Seafood" on the back, brown drawstring Capri cargo pants and sneakers, with a ponytail and a beautiful French manicure. She looks tired under her TV makeup. Todd and their daughter Piper are both there, wearing T shirts. Todd is outside chopping wood and feeding it into the stove. Piper is in the driveway holding the Palins' youngest son, Trig. She will later bring him inside to put him to bed, on her mother's instructions.

Sarah Palin gives me a tour of the two shacks, starting with the sauna. "Usually you stay out there until the fish aren't hitting anymore, and then you come in," she says. "And here, especially in Native Alaskan culture, you come in and take a seat, and you sweat everything out." She asks Todd how hot it usually gets. "220 [degrees Fahrenheit] is too hot," he says. "190's good." "Too hot for me," she says. "But these guys do it. So, everybody comes in after fishing and gets buckets of water, and the steam lets you sweat everything out, and it's all guys and it's all gals. That's the tradition."

Then she shows me the smoke shack. "This is usually the subsistence catch," she says, gesturing to the gutted, smoked fish drying in the 10:45 p.m. sun, "which means it's just going to be for personal use." Todd hands me a frozen pack of smoked salmon from a freezer. "And it's the best-tasting stuff in the world after a couple of weeks of drying. People then store it away and eat it through the winter. But they smoke it there and dry it here."

For the interview, Sarah Palin sits down on a curved cement wall next to the shacks, moving some red rubber gloves to make room.

It sounds like heaven to me - the kind of earthly (maybe a bit rural redneck but mostly lower middle-class) wide-open - don't fence me in - Western paradise in which I live. Screw DC; screw politics; screw the media; screw celebrity, fame and power. Nothing compares with comfortable middle-class independence, good friends and family, fresh air, clean water and abundant fish and game.

Final post on Palin's resignation: this says it all for me

Did anyone else read this yesterday? Palin said:

"They're confused because they don't take what I said at face value."

Here's a snippet from today's Time magazine's interview with Sarah:

When you resigned from the AOGCC [Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission], that was a huge catapult for you. Do you think this might catapult you as well? Or do you see it as kind of a selfless move, more for the state than for you?

It's all for the state. For me personally, it's extremely tough to make a decision and an announcement like this because I love my job and I love Alaska. This is who I am. This is what I am. And serving the people of Alaska is the greatest honor. But when you know that you come to a point when you cannot effect the change because of circumstances that have so greatly changed, and that happened on Aug. 29, the day that I was tapped to run for VP. Circumstances have so drastically changed, I just have to be realistic about it and I have to be honest about it and say Alaska — certainly, Alaska, our state's fine without me at the governor's desk — but Alaska's going to be even better off in terms of progressing and reaching our potential and our destiny with Sean Parnell coming in, taking over the reins. Same agenda, same staff, but it turns down the volume on the distractions that had been ramped up on Aug. 29.

Could that be clearer? Palin's job integrity (her ability to concentrate on being governor) has been compromised by the national notoriety surrounding her. It is a distraction and it's making it hard for her to just be governor. End of story. That's why she resigned and any speculation as to her future plans is sheer vanity and ego-tripping. I'll wait and see. Last time I checked it was still a free country and she can do whatever she pleases as long as it doesn't scare the mooses - meese?

But seriously: the rest of the Time interview is meaty and worth reading.

Newspapers do not need a bail-out

Matt Welch:

The Next Time Someone Complains That Newspapers Are "Unprofitable" send them this Newsosaur link, derived from the latest Inland Press Association snapshot of the industry:

[T]he largest newspapers reported profits averaging 12% of sales at the end of 2008, according to the Inland study.

A 12% profit margin is more than double that achieved last year by Wal-Mart Stores, the largest of the Fortune 1,000 companies. A 12% pre-tax profit is just about a percentage point light of the margins run by Exxon and Chevron, the second and third largest corporations behind Wal-Mart on the Fortune list.

In the restaurant business, you're lucky to make a 6% profit.

When Disney met Dali

Dali and Disney's DESTINO completed:

In 1946 legendary surrealist Salvador Dali formed an unlikely friendship with Walt Disney, and they spent some time collaborating on a short film called Destino.

...

In 1999, Disney's nephew Roy Edward Disney was working on Fantasia 2000 and he decided to complete the Destino project, over 50 years after production began. 25 Disney artists worked from the original storyboards (with some input from Hench himself, and notes from the journals of Dali's widow) and finally completed Destino using a mix of hand-drawn and computer animation.

12% unemployment after July 24th?

That's when the new minimum wage increase kicks in.

The federal minimum wage will go to $7.25 an hour on July 24 from its current level of $6.55, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

...

Seven states already have laws mandating $7.25 minimum pay, while 14 states and Washington, D.C., exceed the new minimum. Employers are required to pay whichever is the highest: Federal or state.

The highest minimum wage is in Washington at $8.55. Next highest is Oregon at $8.40. Oregon's unemployment rate is 12.4%. Only Michigan has a higher unemployment rate at 14.1%.

Daily chuckle - TARP money for the Jackson funeral?

Should TARP pay the 2.5 million bucks that the Jackson circus is costing LA? According to Boortz: Yes.

Michael Jackson is a shovel-ready project.

I'm really tired of the Palintology

Even Ace is tired of it:

But there is a mentality in the nutroots that if you dare to post a poll showing republicans down and say "we're in trouble, we need a game-changer," well, that means you're secretly rooting against our side.

And if you say that Fred Thompson isn't catching on as hoped, well, you hate Fred Thomson.

And if you do not believe that Sarah Palin has some double-secret probation plan for the presidency, you must hate her too, and you're rooting against her, and cheering for the other side.

This is fucking insane and it must stop. I will not be bullied by this ludicrous magical thinking brigade who insists that only Nice and Positive Words must be uttered or else one is contributing one's Evil Energy to the Wrong Side.

It's insane.

I disagree with you. I have tried to do so pleasantly but I am tired of the imputation of bad motive simply because I am more realistic and less prone to flights of hopeful fancy than you.

If you think I'm wrong, say so. I do not mind being called wrong. I do, however, greatly mind being called a traitor, of harboring a secret agenda I hide from you in order to advance the MSM's interests, etc., and all the rest of this insane bullshit.

Someone can be wrong HONESTLY, without the need of claiming he's wrong dishonestly, wrong because he's actively intending to subvert the cause (so he can of course get invited to these famous DC dinner parties, etc.)

Stop jumping to claim some one is not just wrong but actively malicious.

It's insane. It's fruit fucking loops. and it's tiresome.

And I do think I am taking off the week. You guys only seem to want to talk about Sarah Palin and furthermore you only want to hear the same thing -- she's running, this is a great move, she's now perfectly poised for the race, etc.

It's nonsense. And I hardly need to blog about it, because you all seem to know the words to the song. So you don't need me as part of the chorus. You can sing the same words well enough without me.

I am really tired of this relentless nonsense and occasional nastiness whenever someone is believed to have departed from the conservativey correct line.

Most refreshing. Right now the comments on conservative blogs really are like an echo chamber in a loony bin which has suddenly withdrawn drugs from the inmates. It's time to take Palin's words at face value. The frenzied guessing game (actually wishful thinking) really is tiresome.

Emma Lazarus was a subversive commie

Mark Steyn:

The actual sculpture is called "Liberty Enlightening The World" and shows her holding a tablet marked "1776". In other words, it's not about importing people but about exporting American ideas. And, if you did that effectively, you wouldn't need to import huddled masses - or, at any rate, not on such a scale. Emma Lazarus has been used to subvert the Statue of Liberty.

Of course Emma Lazarus was a typical Jewish bleeding-heart Leftist and one of the forerunners of Zionism. (She argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before Herzl began to use the term Zionism.)

Yep, the early Zionists were socialists and their idea of Israel was a socialist utopia and had nothing to do with religion. Herzl was an atheist who hated Judaism and religious Jews and also believed that the end justified the means:

While Hertzel claimed that the establishment of a "Jewish" state would cure anti-Semitism, he also promoted anti-Semitism to further his cause.

Those "huddled masses" were welcomed as a means of subverting American exceptionalism.

The sheriff who went after the Brady bunch

Richard Mack gained a nationwide audience in 1994, when he challenged the Brady Bill because it forced an unfunded mandate on local government. Mack won the case.

He's coming to our neck of the woods:

A sheriff from Arizona will be the key speaker during a Constitution rally from 4 - 7p.m., Saturday, July 18, at the Douglas County Fairgrounds in Roseburg. Richard Mack has written books, produced videos, and speaks before crowds nationwide, delivering a message of state rights over federal mandates.

"There are a lot of laws on the books that are unlawful. And it's up to the people to know what their rights are, so that they can protect themselves," said rally co-organizer Loma Wharton.

"What the (U.S.) Supreme Court has said over and over again, is that if a law in unconstitutional, then it is null and void on its face. And the people need to understand this," said rally co-organizer Rae Copitka.

Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilbertson is among those who have already signed up RSVP to attend the Roseburg rally. Well known among those in the law enforcement community, Mack is holding the Roseburg rally to help educate local law enforcement professionals about their constitutional rights and obligations.

Here's Mack's website.

What led to the birth of human civilization?

It was Population Density:

A new paper by Adam Powell, et. al. argues that the crucial shift was increasing population density. The main evidence for this effect comes from genetic studies of the late Pleistocene, which demonstrate that "densities in early Upper Paleolithic Europe were similar to those in sub-Saharan Africa when modern behavior first appeared."

The larger implication is that the birth of human culture was triggered by a new kind of connectedness. For the first time, humans lived in dense clusters, and occasionally interacted with other clusters, which allowed their fragile innovations to persist and propagate. The end result was a positive feedback loop of new ideas.

Yep, I'm still bored with all the Palintology.

New dinosaurs discovered

In Australia:

“Banjo (carnivorous theropod) and Matilda and Clancy (giant plant-eating sauropods) were found in a vast geological deposit near Winton that dates from 98-95 million years ago.”

Bored with all the Palintology so how about a bit of paleontology?

HT LGF.

Levi Johnson vs the Palins

July 4, 2009 --

THE battle between Levi Johnston (above) and Sarah Palin isn't over yet. Johnston -- best known for impregnating the former vice-presidential candidate's daughter, Bristol -- "is shopping a book," his bodyguard/publicist, Tank, tells New York magazine. And it seems the book will focus on the Wasilla, Alaska, political family. "There are still many untold stories about the Palins," he said. Until the tell-all is released, though, Johnston is considering "a leading role" in a movie and a possible upcoming TV "docu-drama."

A "bodyguard/publicist" called Tank? Can anyone say ka-chink?

An immigrant's "Why I Love America"

Henry Fairlie was, like me, an immigrant. If P.J. O'Rourke is our Republican Party Reptile, then Fairlie was the British Tory Party Reptile.

From The Forgotten Masterpieces of Henry Fairlie by Jeremy McCarter:

Washington never knew what to make of Henry Fairlie. When he arrived in this city in the 1960s, he was already famous in his native England for having coined the term "the Establishment" during a meteoric rise on Fleet Street. Here was a staunch Tory who ridiculed Republicans, a leading journalist who relished pointing out the sins of journalists (particularly the ones who employed him), and a foreigner who praised America as rapturously as any native son.

...

This summer, Yale University Press and New Republic Books publishes Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations by Henry Fairlie, a revival of his timely arguments (both here and elsewhere) and his inimitable voice.

McCarter quotes from Fairlie's "Why I Love America":

I had been in the country about eight years, and was living in Houston, when a Texas friend asked me one evening: "Why do you like living in America? I don't mean why you find it interesting--why you want to write about it--but why you like living here so much." After only a moment's reflection, I replied, "It's the first time I've felt free." One spring day, shortly after my arrival in America, I was walking down the long, broad street of a suburb, with its sweeping front lawns (all that space), its tall trees (all that sky), and its clumps of azaleas (all that color). The only other person on the street was a small boy on a tricycle. As I passed him, he said, "Hi!"--just like that. No four-year-old boy had ever addressed me without an introduction before. Yet here was this one, with his cheerful "Hi!" Recovering from the culture shock, I tried to look down stonily at his flaxen head, but instead, involuntarily, I found myself saying in return: "Well--hi!" He pedaled off, apparently satisfied. He had begun my Americanization.

"Hi!" As I often say--for Americans do not realize it--the word is a democracy. (I come from a country where one can tell someone's class by how they say "Hallo!" or "Hello!" or "Hullo," or whether they say it at all.) But anyone can say "Hi!" Anyone does. Shortly after my encounter with the boy, I called on the then Suffragan Bishop of Washington. Did he greet me as the Archbishop of Canterbury would have done? No. He said, "Hi, Henry!" I put it down to an aberration, an excess of Episcopalian latitudinarianism. But what about my first meeting with Lyndon B. Johnson, the President of the United States, the Emperor of the Free World, before whom, like a Burgher of Calais, a halter round my neck, I would have sunk to my knees, pleading for a loan for my country? He held out the largest hand in Christendom, and said, "Hi, Henry!"

--July 4, 1983

Of course native-born Americans take the small "r" republican lack of class consciousness for granted and have no idea what a relief it is not to have the British consciousness of a person's status (or as James said: "respect of persons.")

"I Wish the Fourth of July Would Never End"

Jonah Goldberg:

I just returned from the annual 4th of July parade (and party) in my neighborhood. It's really becoming one of my favorite traditions, in part because it's one of the few times when DC feels like any other American town. My daughter loves to lunge for candy thrown from the amateurishly decorated cars and trucks. We all applaud the local swim team and the boy scouts and the "different drummer" marching band (complete with lavish gay patriotism), we even cheer — or at least smile — when Marion Barry comes up MacArthur blvd like an American general liberating some French town. The kids dance when the Bolivians come by, and they cheer when the DC horsemen (all African-American) trot past like cowboys heading home. There was a small scare at the fair when the moon bounce briefly deflated and the five-and-older kids nearly rioted. But otherwise, fun was had by all. The lines for the free hotdogs were too long and the balloon animal tent too. But everyone was in good cheer and parents did their best to keep kids from cutting in line. Lucy got an American flag painted on her face and chased bubbles from the bubble machines on the old fashioned fire engine. On the way home, I bought her a lemonade from a stand on someone's porch and told her we still had fireworks to look forward too, as well as the noisemakers we bought her. She squeezed my hand and said, "Daddy, I wish the Fourth of July would never end."

I squeezed her hand back, just a little, and said: "Me too."

Happy Independence Day

Human Statue of Liberty:

This picture was taken in 1918.

It is 18,000 men preparing for war in a training camp at Camp Dodge, in Iowa.

It's a big pic. Click to enlarge.