Thursday, January 12, 2012

Does Obama have other children? Well, none to speak of

President Obama’s got sons? - In the Loop - The Washington Post:
What do you make of this, asks the Post:
President Obama, speaking last night in Chicago at a fundraiser at a private home, unloaded this bombshell:

Obama, according to the White House transcript, talked about “The first bill I signed — a bill that said that we’re going to have equal pay for equal work because I want my daughters treated the same way as my sons.”

Sons? What sons? How many? Where? Names? Do the girls know? (More importantly, does Michelle?)
Obama has sons? Who knew?

Reminds me of the old joke of a man boasting about his two kids with his wife standing nearby. He's asked whether he has any other kids. Flustered for a moment, he turns red in the face and leans to his interlocutor and replies, "Well, none to speak of."

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When seconds count, the cops are only a half-hour away

Woman Bound, Robbed When 911 Call Drops - Louisville News Story - WLKY Louisville
NEW ALBANY, Ind. -- A woman called 911 as her residence was broken into, but police didn't arrive at the house for more than a half-hour.

Police said the incident was a case of human error. It wasn't until a second call came in that the operator realized the mistake and immediately sent officers to the house.

"She was hysterical, saying that somebody was in the house, had a gun, was going to kill her. Then we lost our cell phone call," said Charles Conner.

Police said the New Albany house was broken into while a 23-year-old woman was home alone.

She needs to read this.

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How Solyndra would have worked, if it had worked

As you recall, Solyndra was a "green energy," Obama-led boondoggle that put the taxpayers in hock for more than $550 billion dollars. The company folded because it had no business plan worth the name, relied heavily (well, almost totally) on federal subsidies to begin with and, most importantly, did not have a marketable product (thin-film solar cells). That the failed companies were managed by Obama cronies - and they made millions no matter that the company flopped - is not beside the point. It is the point.

But let us suppose as a thought experiment that Solyndra had actually produced a useful product. How would it have gained a revenue stream? There is a real-world answer and it is provided by examining another famous government project, Goverment General Motors and its abortive attempt to produce a commercially viable hybrid auto, the Chevy Volt.

Commercial flop = government success
The Chevy Volt flops—Patrick Michaels - NYPOST.com:
By most accounts, “Government Motors” has stuck with the Volt mainly to please the Obama administration, which still owns a third of its stock in the wake of the 2009 government “rescue” of the company. But just how badly is the effort faring? Well, consider the 1,529 sold in December.

More than a third of those were fleet sales to corporations. None of these were the traditional large-fleet purchasers, i.e. Hertz, Avis and the other big rental companies. They were more like Verizon and General Electric — with GE having committed to buying 12,000 and having already purchased unspecified “hundreds,” with continued “daily” deliveries, as The Wall Street Journal reported recently.

Then there are the direct taxpayer buys. Fifty to New York City. The city of Deland, Fla., brags about buying five with an Energy Department grant. The federal General Services Administration has bought 101 so far, but President Obama has ordered it to procure only hybrid or high-mileage vehicles by 2015. (The taxpayers buy about 60,000 cars a year for GSA.
This is a textbook example of crony capitalism:

A. General Electric, of course, is Obama's pet corporation because its head, Jeffrey Immelt, is Obama's croniest of crony capitalists. So no wonder GE has "committed" to buying 12,000 Volts. They won't of course, but they'll find another way to scratch the backs of the robber barons in Washington.

B. "Then there are the direct taxpayer buys." I am sure you saw that municipal governments get federal money to buy Volts. Understand what this means: the government owns a third of GM, which makes it a truly major shareholder if not the largest shareholder. The government takes money (taxes) from you and me and then gives it to, say, Deland, Fla., so it can buy cars from a company the government controls. And Obama has ordered the GSA basically to buy nothing else until the end of his presumptive second term.

"Why didn't I think of that?"
Well, Obama said he wanted to spread the wealth around. The Mafia could not do it better.

But the whole "green" car racket is a scam, a gigantic corporate-welfare machine.

See also, "Buy A Honda, Kill a Polar Bear."

And today, this: "Bankrupt Solyndra seeking to pay bonuses."
Now seems an unlikely time for handing out bonuses at bankrupt Solyndra LLC, but that’s the plan of company attorneys intending to dole out up to a half-million dollars to persuade key employees to stay put.

Nearly two dozen Solyndra employees could receive bonuses ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 each under a proposal filed by Solyndra’s attorneys in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.
That means that you and I are paying those bonuses. The looting continues.

Related: "Detroit unsure over the future of green cars." "But the economics are not attractive yet for the average consumer." What?

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Monday, January 9, 2012

Answering the questions Glenn Reynolds won't!

Mr. Question
Seems Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame has become the shrinking violet of the blogosphere. Maybe it's because he's pork-barreling around the Cayman Islands ("giving a speech" - hahaha, Glenn, good one!), or maybe it's because he's just gotten old and lazy like me, but he sure seems to ask or repeat a lot of questions while leaving the answer dangling. So here we go with his questions-without-answers, followed by the answers supplied by me:

Glenn's Q: Which successes were those?
My Answer: Obama got to more than 90 rounds of golf played.

Q: They’re not really going to ask for an exemption for themselves, are they?
A: Of course they will. Sheese.

Q: Johnny Depp-Gate: What Did the Mainstream Media Know and When Did They Know It?
A: They knew everything from the beginning, natch.

And same place:

Q: Hmmmm…“Why don’t White House visitor logs report Hollywood Halloween guests?
A: Because they are Democrats and they don't have to. Who's going to call them on it? The press? See just above.

Q: What Does Keith Olbermann Have Against Bald People?
A: Same thing he has against everyone else: he hates them.

Same post:

Q: I wonder what his boss thinks of Olbermann’s tweets attacking the follicly challenged?
A: This assumes his boss even thinks much of Olberman at all.

Q: Why can’t their candidate do this?
A: Because. He. Is. Mitt. Romney.

Q: THE DRUG WAR — WHICH SIDE ARE WE ON AGAIN? (This, being is all-caps, is therefore REALLY URGENT!)
A: The drug lords, of course.

Q: Can Qatar bail out France’s banlieues?
A: And all the rest of France, too.

Q: POLITICAL WIVES: Do They Hold All The Power?
A: Why would political wives be any different?

Q: IS POP CULTURE IN PARALYSIS?
A: No, it's in rigor mortis.

Actually answered this one:
WANT TO SEE YOUR PREEMIES IN THE NICU? Not if Jay-Z and Beyonce Are In the House.

It won't do any good to point out that some of these unanswered Qs were actually posted my temp blogger Ed Driscoll. It's Glenn's site and the buck stops there.

Answers! We demand answers! And thanks to me, not Glenn, you got 'em!

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The future of aerial drones

Japan's ministry of defense has developed a spherical flying machine that can hover like a helicopter, fly forward like an airplane and can even roll along the ground.



Conceptually, this machine is similar to circular-winged aircraft that were developed decades ago. Aerodynamicists have long known that circular wings can be extremely efficient. They are part of the class of design known as non-planar wings.

The aerodynamics of nonplanar wing systems that form closed loops are very interesting. Such configurations include box-planes, ring wings, joined wings, and "spiroid-tip" devices. Wings that form closed loops, such as the ring-wing illustrated below, do not eliminate the "tip vortices" or trailing vortex wakes even though the wing has no tips. Still, the vortex drag of the circular ring wing is just 50% that of a planar wing with the same span and total lift and the concept has been studied at several organizations, including early aviation pioneers, a major aircraft manufacturer, as well as several toy companies.

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Sunday, January 8, 2012

Israel and the "land for peace" fiction

Caroline Glick :: The land-for-peace hoax:
Indeed the land-for-peace formula will be exposed as a twofold fiction. First, it is based on the false proposition that the peace process is a two-way street. Israel gives land, the Arabs give peace. But the inevitable death of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord under an Egyptian jihadist regime makes clear that the land-for-peace formula is a one-way street. Israeli land giveaways are permanent. Arab commitments to peace can be revoked at any time.

The conflict is not about land. 

The plain fact is that Hamas, Fatah/Palestinian Authority and Hezbollah are united in one goal: the elimination of Israel as an independent, Jewish state. This has also been Syria's goal since modern Israel was founded in 1948. Syria is an Iranian client and I am sure no pixels need be expended to explain Iran's hostility to the Jewish nation. Israel's enemies want to destroy the country as a political entity. Hamas has said bluntly, over and again, that all Jews must be expelled or killed.

The conflict is over Israel's very existence, not its "borders."

Read the rest.

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Saturday, January 7, 2012

The Left's only question: Who is to rule, that is all

The New Authoritarianism by Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin - City Journal
Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.
"Progressives" have no absolute belief but in themselves. Their purpose is power. Political power is their bread and meat. It is their religion, their overriding quest. As I explained in, "The Po-Mo Deconstructed Presidency,"
One of the basic tenets of postmodernist linguistic deconstructionism (which I learned how to do in my postgraduate studies at Vanderbilt) is that all text is tainted by bias and that objective points of view are impossible. Hence, the objective of expression is to exercise power.

Hence, there is no such as thing as objective truth and statements are never more than propositional in nature. A statement's truth content is never more than opinion, and opinions are nothing but expressions of power. Therefore, in a basic sense, all speech is power directed.

This is a fundamental world view of the Left and is derived directly from Marxism, as reworked by Leninism. Since Marx held that his communist theory was literally scientific, his economic-historical forecasts were not simply likely, they were certain. To understand and partner with this inevitability was to be "on the right side of history" (which is where that overused cliche comes from). As formulated by Lenin et. al., truth is therefore not statements of objective facts, but assertions that move the communist revolution and its fulfillment closer to reality. "Truth" is therefore pliable and impermanent, the concept of truth being only practical. In practice, all of language became subservient to the dominance of the party, a fact recognized by George Orwell in his novel 1984 and its concept of Newspeak.

As Orwell put it in 1984, "We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

Lewis Carroll understood this quite well in Through the looking Glass.
`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'
And that is the only question the Left is interested in. This explains why George W. Bush's policies were bad when he was president, but are good when continued by Barack Obama. Statements about policies are not really about the policies, but about getting or keeping power. That's all.

Update: The SF Chronicle's Deb Saunders explains how this has worked in the last few weeks, another example of when the Republicans did something, it was bad, but when the Democrats do it, it's good.

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Thursday, January 5, 2012

Why Obama should be called, "Your Excellency"

An Occupy leader in Iowa thinks that President Obama should be called, "Your Excellency."

Well, there is good reason.
In November 2008, shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, Valerie Jarrett, co-chair of his transition team, appeared on "Meet the Press." She told host Tom Brokaw that "Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one."

Shouldn't someone who had reached the political heights that Jarrett had reached know that kings rule but presidents are elected to serve and are accountable to Congress, the courts and the voters? ...

A little more than three years after Jarrett declared Obama's majesty, his spokesman Jay Carney warned on the day of the Iowa caucuses that "if Republicans choose the path of obstruction rather than cooperation, then the president is not going to sit here . .. he's going to take the actions that he can take using his executive authority." ...

Clearly our American arrangement of checks and balances written into the Constitution is an impediment to this president. Before Carney made his statement Tuesday, Obama himself said in October that "we can no longer wait for Congress to do its job. ... So where Congress won't act, I will."

As the Cato Institute's Roger Pilon notes, "All of Obama’s appointments yesterday are illegal under the Constitution." Why?
But clear beyond the slightest doubt is the language of the statute (itself unconstitutional on any number of grounds not relevant here). As my colleague Mark Calabria wrote yesterday, “authorities under the Act remain with the Treasury Secretary until the Director is ‘confirmed by the Senate.’” A recess appointment, even if it were constitutional, is not a Senate confirmation. There is simply no wiggle room in that language that gives Cordray any authority, as litigation will soon make plain.

Except, of course, that we have a "living" Constitution, which means that you can use it to justify whatever you want to do. So Obama's actions were illegal? Sez who? Congress, especially the Senate, whose delegated powers Obama just usurped? That is to laugh. Congress, especially the Reid-led Senate, will not raise a whimper.

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God's plan just fell apart, I guess

RealClearReligion - A Divine Call Won't Get You Votes

Michele Bachmann explained at the beginning of her campaign why she was running, "It means I have a sense of assurance about the direction I think that God is speaking into my heart that I should go."

And she is not the only one "called by God" to discover that apparently God didn't help her follow the call very well.

There is a certain way of speaking among evangelical Christians (not all, necessarily, but as a demographic) that uses divine call or revelation as a crutch to prop up what the speaker wants to do or persuade others to do.

Examples:

When I was a landlord, my last tenant told me that God had revealed to them that I was to allow them to break their lease early and with no penalty. My reminder to them that they had also told me when signing the lease that God had led them to rent my house was of no import. It's easy for God to change his mind when you change yours, yes?

A Baptist church member whom I have know for decades told me that one day the Sunday School superintendent walked up to him and said, "God has told me that you are going to teach our youth class!" To which the member replied, "God didn't send me that memo."

Which brings me back to presidential politics. The linked article also includes this nugget:
Herman Cain explained his call this way: "Whether that is ultimately to become the President of the United States or not, I don't know. I just know at this point I am following God's plan."
So Cain's campaign was a divine plan that apparently included public humiliation? (Actually, since the Lord "has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts," maybe so. The question for Cain is just where is he with the Lord now? And that's a question for all of us, too.)

There are three things I have learned about God's call:

1. I am not a messiah, only God is a redeemer, deliverer or savior. So I view very suspectly people who claim to be called by God to save the rest of us, whether religiously, politically or socially. The people whom I would say really are doing that, however slightly or greatly, have all been mortified that it they are God's instrument. Which leads to ...

2. The object God's call is to make more apparent the glory of God among people, not to exalt the hearer of the call. That means ...

3. God's call almost never corresponds, even remotely, with what you want to do. Hence, any specific desire that exists, however slightly, in your heart that a subsequent divine call seems so wonderfully to endorse is almost absolutely not the voice of God but of the Deceiver. God's will is rarely appealing, at first.

And so, at the cusp of this New Year, to be reminded of the Wesleyan Covenant of Commitment:
Commit yourselves to Christ as his servants. Give yourselves to him that you may belong to him. Christ has many services to be done. Some are more easy and honorable; others are more difficult and disgraceful. Some are suitable to our inclinations and interests, others are contrary to both.

In some we may please Christ and please ourselves. But then there are other works where we cannot please Christ except by denying ourselves. It is necessary, therefore, that we consider what it means to be a servant of Christ. Let us, therefore, go to Christ, and pray:
I am no longer my own but yours, O God.
Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing, put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you,
exalted for you or trodden underfoot for you;
let me be full, let me be empty,
let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and with a willing heart
yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours.
So be it. And let this covenant renewed on earth be fulfilled in heaven. Amen.
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Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Michele Bachmann Drops Out of Presidential Race

Michele Bachmann Drops Out of Presidential Race - ABC News
Rep. Michele Bachmann suspended her presidential campaign after placing sixth in Tuesday’s Iowa Republican caucuses, she announced today.
“Last night, the people of Iowa spoke with a very clear voice, so I have decided to stand aside,” Bachmann said at a news conference, flanked by her parents, husband and five children. “I have no regrets, none whatsoever. We never compromised our principles and we can leave this race knowing we ran it with the utmost integrity.”

The best news I've seen from the Iowa caucus.

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Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Apres L'America - les deluge!

After America - by Zbigniew Brzezinski | Foreign Policy:
Not so long ago, a high-ranking Chinese official, who obviously had concluded that America's decline and China's rise were both inevitable, noted in a burst of candor to a senior U.S. official: "But, please, let America not decline too quickly." Although the inevitability of the Chinese leader's expectation is still far from certain, he was right to be cautious when looking forward to America's demise.

For if America falters, the world is unlikely to be dominated by a single preeminent successor -- not even China. International uncertainty, increased tension among global competitors, and even outright chaos would be far more likely outcomes.

Good analysis, but the best one I have seen yet is this one:



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Actually, this is pretty much how Europe does it

Dave Barry’s 2011 Year in Review:
In Europe, the economic crisis continues to worsen, especially in Greece, which has been operating under a financial model in which the government spends approximately $150 billion a year while taking in revenues totaling $336.50 from the lone Greek taxpayer, an Athens businessman who plans to retire in April. Greece has been making up the shortfall by charging everything to a MasterCard account that the Greek government applied for — in what some critics consider a questionable financial practice — using the name “Germany.”

As succinct and accurate explanation as you are likely to find.

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If you don't fly a fighter jet ...

This is as close as you are likely to come. Click to full screen and select the HD version.



HT: Neptunus Lex

I was accepted into the naval flight training program my freshman year in college, but the Army stepped up and offered me an ROTC scholarship, so I became a soldier and not a naval aviator. Even so, I learned to fly while stationed at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1977. I was not yet married and was collecting TDY pay for the Artillery officer Basic Course. Flying was not expensive then - the Cessna 150 student pilots used rented "wet" (including fuel) for $14 per hour. Yes, you read right - fly an hour for $14, including gas. The instructor charged $7 on top of that, but after you soloed you didn't need the IP very much.

This was at the flying club there, of course. The only place you could learn to fly on the Army dime was at Fort Rucker, Ala.

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Sunday, January 1, 2012

British dhimmitude pushback

Frankly, I am surprised the Palace of Westminster had the cojones.

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Ah, to fisk like a Brit!

Only the British have retained enough elegance of expression to deliver a fisking like this.
Meanwhile, utterly lost in his own green dreamworld, the man supposedly in charge of energy policy, Chris Huhne (below), babbles about chequering thousands of square miles of our countryside and our coastal waters with a further 32,000 crazily expensive and useless windmills. It is a vision so insane that one cannot imagine why men in white coats have not already hauled him off – rather more expeditiously than the Essex police who, we are told, wish to see him prosecuted for perverting the course of justice over an alleged traffic offence.

Even if Huhne’s pipedream could be achieved (it is technically out of the question), he still has not grasped that it would be necessary to pay billions of pounds more to build dozens of grown-up gas-fired power stations, as essential back-up for those still days that render the energy contributions of windmills all too frequently derisory. Something that we can predict with certainty is not going to happen in 2012 is any trace of sanity on these matters entering this absurdly dangerous man’s charmless head.

It's good to see that the English have not lost the art of English.

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Hello, universe, anyone home? Hello?

The Fermi Paradox raises its head again, this time over at Outside the Beltway. Doug Mataconis posts, "Hey, Is Anyone Out There?" in which he tries to answer the paradox. The paradox, first formulated by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, is this:
The universe is many billions of years old.
Fermi calculated that an alien species smart enough to become spacefarers could reach any point in the galaxy in five million years.
But we we have no scientific evidence that aliens beings have been here.
So, Fermi asked, where is everybody?

Doug does a good job in laying out the premises of the paradox and offers some perspectives I haven't seen before, including that while the galaxy may be teeming with intelligent species, they have all become addicted to entertainment and simply are uninterested in space travel, a notion floated by Geoffrey Miller.
Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. ...

Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction. As a result, brains must evolve short-cuts: fitness-promoting tricks, cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on average, under ancestrally normal conditions.

The result is that we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.

Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves.
Behaviorally, this makes a lot of sense, but it falls into the same trap that pretty much all discussions about the commonality of intelligent life off earth do: the assumption that earth and humanity are typical examples of planets and life anywhere else in the universe. This is usually referred to as the Theory of Mediocrity, that earth and its creatures are just average, universally. Doug himself endorses this notion in a comment to his post: "it does seem hard to believe that we are the only intelligent form of life to ever evolve in our own universe." The problem is that Mediocrity is not a scientific conclusion but a presumption that is necessary for ETI searchers to do any work at all.

Last year I put together a slide presentation for the topic to discuss Fermi's Paradox at my church. You will probably be surprised at the conclusion. Here tis:



Fullscreen here.

Related:

Stephen Hawking, science fiction writer

This is pretty impressive, too.

Why We Matter (link was dead, fixed now.)

Let there be



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