Thursday, July 9. 2009
 The first power generating nuke reactor (it was Russian).
Jeb Bush talks politics. Interesting. Definitely a likeable fellow.
Gone sane: Dr. Sanity goes offline
G8 promises to control world temperature. Ya can't make this stuff up.
Your mammogram by the lowest bidder
The second time we agree with the O: time to get rid of farm subsidies. Including ethanol, please.
Carlyle, Dickens, Adam Smith, slavery, and related topics: The Secret History of the Dismal Science. Part II. Brotherhood, Trade, and the Negro Question
Autopsy of the Fannie and Freddie debacle: Michelle
The White House is spending millions of your $ for media manipulation. Bush (obviously) did not do that. Perhaps he should have, but I think it would have been beneath his dignity - and his Connecticut Dad would have disapproved. Yankees frown on self-promotion.
Weak on Russia? The O seems to want to be limp-wristed to everybody except to us fellow Americans. Hmmm.
Dems: We do not intend to read any health care bill. He says that, laughing. Naturally, it does exempt federal employees, suckers.
Healthcare bill is packed with pork.
Waxman asks: Are you against America?
Imagine the press if Bush had gotten his daughter's age wrong
Newt: How team Obama hijacked Change
Sen Tom Udall: Ignoring the facts to scare you
Politics: Americans just want prosperity
The O's apparent soft spot for Marxist dictators
Failing. Unite us, Obama. I guess that was code for Get rid of the Repubs.
The demise of campaign finance "reform"? That might be a good thing.
Via Powerline:
Painting of a brig off Heligoland by F T Albinus, for sale here.
Wednesday, July 8. 2009
From a commenter on our abortion post yesterday:
That we live in a land in which one can go to prison for harming the egg of a piping plover yet enjoy a Constitutionally protected right to exterminate their unborn human child speaks only the unspeakable about our national legacy.
Plover eggs: Yum. (Kidding aside, I am all in favor of protecting the endangered Piping Plover.)
Via Protein:
Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as that from Hitler.
And via Tim Blair re Al Gore:
He’s getting rich from environmentalism, not just by being paid a whopping $US175,000 ($217,500) a speech but by using political pressure to force government policy in a direction that benefits his business interests.
Via Wilkinson:
I worry that today’s equivalent of Robert McNamara is Peter Orszag, who I fear is poised to do for our health care system what McNamara did for Vietnam.
Michael Jackson still dead, etc, at Outside the Beltway:
Ah . . . the public’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge. It never ceases to amaze.
Via Wiz re the Repubs:
It is looking more so everyday that the Republican congressional leadership (pardon the oxymoron) is going to stand by and watch the place burn down.
It's the Rope-a-Dope strategery.
Via Ace:
"I sure hope [Sarah Palin's] family recovers from what she has done to them."
- Andrew Sullivan, independent roving ad-hoc obstetrician-at-large to Sarah Palin, and unofficial "gonzo geneologist" of Trig Palin
Via Marginal Rev:
The economy of sub-Saharan Africa—including Nigeria and South Africa—is smaller than the economy of New York City.
Government medical care means the government has nationalized your body.
Mark Steyn, filling in for Rush today. Hate to say it, but I'd rather listen to Mark these days.
From a piece at Junk Science, The Vision of our Healthcare. These are the correct rates for docs as determined by the geniuses at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid:
 Emergency medicine is valued at $38.36/hour, while chiropractors are at $65.33/hour (even 31% higher than previously) and osteopathic manipulative therapy is valued at $53.93/hour. Endocrinology (think especially diabetes and obesity) was valued by the PPIS at nearly twice what the CMS had been using to determine physician payments, and is now at $84.39/hour. Family medicine saw a similar increase and is now valued at $90.15/hour. In contrast, for example, Cardiologists’ value was cut nearly in half to $88.04/hour. Allergy and Immunology care was increased to $162.68/hour and Dermatology was increased to $184.62/hour.
When you’re injured or have a real medical emergency, or actually develop a disease, which of the best doctors will you hope are available to care for you: emergency medical physician, cardiologist, family medicine doctor, chiropractor or dermatologist?
News to me that chiropractors are covered by government insurance but, for all I know, they may cover massage too. Anyway, are these numbers insane? No doc could pay his school debt and his malpractice insurance on those fees, plus office and staff overhead.
This is valuing ER docs lower than what I pay my part-time secretary. But my real comparisons are my excellent plumber ($125/hr) and the local electronics repairman ($175/hr).
Read the whole piece. Another interesting bit he has in there is about the quackery of "Lifestyle Medicine." He has it right:
The popular belief, rigorously spread by the growing lifestyle medicine movement, is that chronic diseases of aging; such as cancers, heart disease and diabetes; can be prevented and are to blame on unhealthy diets and lifestyles and failing to control health risk factors. The actual fact is that the best randomized controlled trials (the gold standards of medical evidence) continue to fail to support such premises behind lifestyle medicine, as we’ve seen time and again. The 64 percent drop in age-related deaths from heart disease over the past 50 years, for example, is largely attributed to our modern, advanced medical care and coupled with the survival advantage of a better fed, immunized and overall healthier population. Even mainstream medicine is finally realizing lifestyle medicine is more pseudoscience and ideology than sound, evidence-based science.
Fads and quackery have always abounded in Medicine. Who would expect government to be able to tell the difference?
Related, how they keep medical costs down in England
I shared a lunch table at Jimbos – great vegetarian dishes -- the other day with a young Israeli mother, living in the US now, her career being the dancing styles of India. We discussed our younger adventurous feelings of immortality when traveling to places we wouldn’t now, and how we naturally as parents protectively shelter our children from following – even knowing too much about – our younger selves. She’d served in the Israeli Defense Force, as most Israelis do, and wasn’t startled, as most American Jews are, when I told her I’d volunteered for the US Marine Corps and served in Vietnam.
At my, of course politically liberal, synagogue, to my knowledge there’s only one other former Marine, a Naval Academy grad, who served in Iraq. Otherwise, there’s a very small group who send packages to our troops serving in combat zones. There’s organizations within our faith who foster support for Jews currently serving, such as this one. But, the oldest veterans organization in America, the Jewish War Veterans, is primarily composed of ancient WWII vets. Jews who served of my generation haven’t joined the JWV, still stung by its turning against support during Vietnam, and otherwise feeling we have better things to do with our time.
Yet, this stirring site detailing of the over 1-million Jews who have served in our military, many earning the highest medals and commendations for valor (for example: General Douglas MacArthur in one of his speeches said, “I am proud to join in saluting the memory of fallen American heroes of Jewish faith.”), doesn’t mention how relatively few Jews serve today. An estimate has fewer than 15,000 Jews serving today in our 1.4-million armed services (about 1% versus our 2.1% of Americans who are Jewish), out of our US population of about 5.3-million. I think the number is an underestimate, but in order of magnitude not far off. Compare this photo of Jews in our WWI American Expeditionary Force celebrating the Passover Seder in Paris in 1919, with the size of this grouping at a Seder in Fallujah, Iraq.
Less the case here in San Diego than elsewhere, the ultra-liberal droning of most Rabbis from the Bimah (elevated platform) and anti-military/anti-war attitudes of most congregations alienates many Jews, about 25% of whom are politically conservative. Most American Jews, who once were one or two steps removed from knowing first-hand the need to fight oppressions abroad, are now risen to prominence and relative well-being and comforts. They vote overwhelmingly for candidates opposed to US efforts and sacrifices to fight the same jihadist and Iranian and Saudi funded existential enemies of the US and of Israel. They have little clue of the tough Jews who excelled, even as leading mobsters.
In Israel, where extraordinary concentrations of hard work and brilliance has created one of the world’s most advanced miracles, still our brothers and sisters serve for survival, even excelling at practicing heightened moral sensitivities in war (see this excellent review of the performance and issues by a British commander in Afghanistan speaking last month at Jerusalem’s Center for International Affairs on “Hamas, The Gaza War And Accountability Under International Law”). Yet, supposed guardians of international law practice a one-sided view when it comes to Israel, waging a “legal war” against Israel, Human Rights Watch even touting it to gain funding from Saudi Arabia. Today, in America, although a small minority among Jews, there’s well-funded Jewish “peace” groups, like J-Street, very secular but of Jewish heritage, who echo such slanderous and disastrous memes. Even Obama-endorsing Mort Zuckerman called it the “J Street Jive” and our most liberal Reform movement president Eric Yoffe, who says “I am a dove myself,” called its posture on the Gaza operations “morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve.”
In 1967’s deepest worry during the initial reversals in the then latest seemingly overwhelming attack upon Israel, at the heavily Jewish Brooklyn College, where anti-Vietnam sentiment was as widespread as elsewhere on American campuses, there was a long line at Hillel to volunteer to fight in the IDF. We were rejected as untrained and a likely hindrance. To my knowledge, I’m the only one who upon graduation the next year volunteered and joined the USMC and served in Vietnam.
Today, even among the staunchest American Christian allies of Israel, there’s increasingly widespread dismay, even sometimes oozing into disgust, at the unwillingness of so many prominent Jews and of so many Jewish voters to stand up to the weaker-willed and hostile within Obama’s administration who jeopardize Israel as willingly as they excuse Iran’s oppressors.
So, back to my lunch the other day. In my dotage, I have two young sons, who will ultimately make their own decisions in life, including whether to serve in our armed forces. My luncheon companion’s young daughter will not have that choice, should they return to Israel, and must serve in the IDF. In either case, whether here or there, Jews cannot avoid facing up to whether we will live up to the painful lessons of our forebears, and fight for what’s not only right but the survival and triumph of our deepest roots – now too often relegated by comforts earned and won by the blood of our older members of the faith – as Rabbi Hillel famously said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Or, are we to be “out to lunch”?
At the very least, when next lunching at a sports bar or such, if you see a young soldier, Marine or sailor, buy him a beer and say “thanks for serving.”
 It's the Codex Sinaiticus, a 1600 year-old Greek Bible.
The British Museum curator notes that it does raise some theological questions in its differences from modern versions.
The hand of God moves in mysterious ways, and, sometimes, we humans are His deeply flawed and inadequate agents - or wish to be.
Iran executes 5 Kurd students for "political activities". (Video - not a postcard - of the group hanging)
Related to the previous post on this site: An Abortion Party. I guess it's a sick variant of a baby shower?
Why does the US still have a bicameral legislature? Becker-Posner
Elegy found in a Seattle churchyard:
It seems to me that the hundreds of millions now addicted to "celebrity" are like those addicted to a heroin of the soul. Like heroin, "celebrity" must be taken in ever increasing doses to fill a hole in the user's soul. And just like heroin, "celebrity" doesn't fill anything but only increases the emptiness. Which, of course, only increases the need and requires an ever larger dose of the illusion; of the shrieking unquiet voices.
In my view, it's a misdirected striving for connection with God.
Is the economy headed for an iceberg? Debt and inflation.
England's new Green Cops. Good grief
Re oil prices: It Flabbergasts Me. Not me. It's politics.
Re cap and trade, at Q&O:
This is a massive attempt by government to take more control of the economy, based in shaky science at best, and as Anthony Watts claims, pure dogma. When warmers such as Paul Krugman are reduced to calling scientific skeptics “traitors to the planet”, you know they’ve essentially lost the argument and now have only emotional and populist rhetoric left to defend the indefensible.
Meanwhile, Al Gore says it's the war against the Nazis.
From IBD on the stimulus:
...there are only two possible conclusions: One, the stimulus has been the most inept public waste of money in history. Or two, it was a cynical attempt by the Democrats to vastly expand the scope of government during a time of crisis. Or maybe it's both.
Extend and Pretend, via SDA:
Bryan Marsal, CEO of Lehman Brothers Holdings (via Calculated Risk)
One of my partners said yesterday that we are going to call this phase the "extend and pretend" phase in our economy. Which is you extend someone's maturity - because they are going to default - and you pretend that business will come back or that leverage factor is going to come back.
Then we'll enter phase two, which he said is the request to extend or "amend".
Then "send". In other words send the keys.
That is the phases we are in right now. Everyone is trying to buy time, as opposed to dealing with the leverage, they are trying to buy time. Whether you are a banker or a company, they are all trying to buy time. I don't see the leverage coming back, and I don't see the consumption of good and services coming back.
Honduras in the WSJ: Why is the US not supporting the rule of law?
Musical beds and coed dorm rooms. How much studying would you get done?
Tuesday, July 7. 2009
America continues to take the subject of abortion seriously. That's a good thing, because it means we are morally and ethically still alive.
Hard cases make for bad law. Abortion is a mare's nest of conflicing considerations and motives: a Mom's right to control her fate vs. a baby human's right to life; individual freedom vs. group moral norms; a woman's instinctive striving for maternity vs. her wish for "freedom;" the human's (understandable) desire for consequence-free pleasure vs. the human and natural fact of moral limits, and others.
I don't know about other countries, but I have never seen a woman who did not carry some guilt about her abortion(s). I consider myself lucky in never having had one, because I did some dumb things when I was young.
The pro-abortion movement has done its best, for 30 years, to try to normalize abortion. They have done this with language, by de-humanizing the "fetus" (nobody is "with child" any more); by speaking of "choice," by speaking of a woman's ownership of her womb as if a child were a homeless squatter on her property, by terming it a "d and c," and so forth.
Despite their efforts, the inner voice still speaks: the inner voice of our Judeo-Christian foundation and conscience which considers human life to be the property of God and which deplores the taking of innocent life.
People hate to feel guilt - it's painful. And people hate to feel inner conflict - it's uncomfortably confusing. Our brains struggle to suppress one side of a conflict to relieve us of these discomforts.
I do not really want to tell anybody else that they shouldn't have one done, but I wouldn't perform one (I doubt whether it is consistent with the Hippocratic oath) and I sure wouldn't have one. However, I wouldn't be surprised if I would have if I had gotten myself knocked up at 18 - when I was a selfish and frivolous person.
Thus my views lack moral and intellectual consistency. And that makes for a headache.
This post was prompted by Dr. Clouthier's America's Abortion Headache.
 Global temps have crashed since Al Gore's movie (Photo: note health effects of our New England chill on one of our farm workers).
I think my main linking competitor in our square millimeter of the intertube kingdom isn't Insty - it's Larwyn at Doug Ross. He does a very good job, and he seems to have a similar notion of what needs to be put out there.
Always needs to be discussed: Negative and Positive Rights
Rep. Peter King goes after the Michael Jackson Dianafest.
The One. It's not a fairy tale, at Theo
Let the rich pay for my medical care. Why should I pay for it? And why should I have to be a grown-up, anyway?
Mayor Bloomberg as closet wussie. Malanga at City Journal
Mullah vs. Mullah in Iran. Sounds like civil war.
The ActBlue - Soros Complex
A piece at Am Thinker begins:
The health care debate in this country is an old story. It began in 1934 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to include government-funded health care in his "New Deal" as part of his comprehensive Social Security legislation. President Roosevelt was very concerned that the Supreme Court might rule parts of his "New Deal" unconstitutional. He tried to induce Congress to approve increasing the total number of justices on the Supreme Court to fifteen, attempting thereby to circumvent the judiciary and the Constitution by stacking the Court in his favor.
Subsequently, government funded health care has been debated in nearly every session of Congress since 1939.
It's an antique.
African delivers excellent put-down of liberal do-gooders.
Obama the student radical. Even the NYT wrote about it. Anchoress. However, we are all foolish in youth, because we haven't bumped into enough reality yet.
Billions in health care fraud and abuse? Where? What? The only medical abuse I am aware of is defensive medicine to avoid lawsuits.
Insty:
FABIUS MAXIMUS: Women dominating the ranks of college graduates – What’s the effect on America? I don’t know, but obviously we need to establish Men’s Centers and the like on campuses to help out a minority that seems to be doing poorly. Some earlier thoughts on the subject are here.
Economist needed. And it's a government job, too.
Why investment banks like Cap and Trade
As Moonbattery notes:
Imagine trying to explain to one of Obama's foot soldiers why food, housing, and medical care can't all be free.
Check out these deep thinkers:
People have stopped buying stuff. They are either paying off debt, or saving if they can. It's simple logic.
This from Surber's Saving our way into a recession:
This photo was on the morning of the 4th, before I got the rest of my hosed-down camo life jackets and my vast assortment of hosed-clean blaze-orange shooting stuff, some waxed and some not, hanging up on this thing to be dried and refreshed in the sunshine.
That basement flood was rough on my gear (much of which was on or near the floor), and it all needed a serious, high-powered hosing-down -not a washing machine. It got most of the mold and dirt out, but everything needed a good long sunshine treatment.
Maybe I need a real outdoor clothes line, like my Mom has. She hates to sleep on sheets that have not hung in the New England sun, summer or winter. That old Yankee gal believes that sun on your sheets gives you good dreams, and the thick scent of the Berkshire wild thyme helps.
Monday, July 6. 2009
If not, read this gloomy piece at Wizbang, and then break out the Prozac.
The Dems' twist on a GOP strategy: Spend now, tax later
Related at Am Thinker: How would you design a tax?
A radical feminist wonders why people hate Sarah Palin so much
Related, from Dr. Clouthier:
How many iconic images can one woman conjure? Well, that imagery links energetically to the common person’s hopes and fears. She brings out the clucking church ladies, yes, I’m talking about feminists, wanting to brand her with the scarlet letter for being powerful, sexual, female, beautiful and most of all, feminine. The fangs and claws are bared and it’s as transparent as the politics of a sixth grade dance. Make no mistake: If she were butch, we would not be having this discussion.
Related at Hugh Hewitt: Sarah is running a marathon
Daily sex with younger women helps men live longer.
Australian wine prices dropping lower than bottled water
From Spencer at Watts, re Cap&Trade:
...even if cap-and-trade does what is intended, the reduction in CO2 emissions as a fraction of global CO2 emissions will moderate future warming by, at most, around one tenth of a degree C by late in this century. That is probably not even measurable.
Of course, this whole discussion assumes that the climate system is very sensitive to our carbon dioxide emissions. But if the research we are doing is correct, then manmade global warming is being overestimated by about a factor of 5, and it is the climate system itself that causes climate change…not humans.
If that is the case, then nothing humanity does is going to substantially affect climate one way or the other. Indeed, given the fact that life on Earth depends upon the tiny amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, I continue to predict that more atmospheric CO2 will, in the end, be a good thing for life on Earth.
Yet, many politicians are so blinded by the additional political power and tax revenue that will come from a cap-and-trade system that they do not want to hear any good news from the science. For instance, in my most recent congressional testimony, the good news I presented was met with an ad hominem insult from Senator Barbara Boxer.
I can only conclude that some politicians actually want global warming to be a serious threat to humanity. I wonder why?
The NYT implicitly doesn't want Waxman-Markey. Too weak, they think. They'd rather keep the issue going.
FDR and Positive Rights, etc, at Villainous
"A common bias among the smart is to overestimate how smart everyone else is." Stupider than you might realize
Are you better off than you were 2 years ago, when the Dems took over Congress?
Seen a Christian martyr lately? Here's one.
From Bloomberg on government spending:
The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat.
It takes years and years to make a mess as terrible as the California debacle, but the recipe is simple. All that you need is two political parties that are always willing to offer easy government solutions for every need of the voters, but never willing to make the tough decisions necessary to finance the government largess that results. Voters will occasionally change their allegiance from one party to the other, but the bacchanal will continue regardless of the names on the office doors.
California has engaged in an orgy of spending, but, compared with our federal government, its legislators should feel chaste. The California deficit this year is now north of $26 billion. The U.S. federal deficit will be, according to the latest numbers, almost 70 times larger.
The federal picture is so bleak because the Obama administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of the U.S. I would imagine that he would be the intergalactic champion as well, if we could gather the data on deficits on other worlds. Obama has taken George W. Bush’s inattention to deficits and elevated it to an art form.
Robert Strange McNamara died today. The New York Times devotes thousands of words to justifying why McNamara should have been more a “dove” like today’s Times is on most issues. The Washington Post is only a bit more reserved in its thousands of words.
McNamara’s passing, however, in another take, does not end the Summer dreams that turned into national nightmares. Those nightmares are still being played out this Summer by President Obama and his advisors who recklessly pursue their lesson from Vietnam, to kiss up to our mortal enemies and to abandon our friends and those who rely upon the US as a bulwark of principled freedom.
In the Summer of 1964, we had incumbent President Johnson purposely downplaying the challenge in Vietnam of North Vietnam’s aggressions against the South, to further his election by gulling the electorate, while Barry Goldwater – painted as bringing on Armageddon in the Daisy political ad ranked as one of the vilest ever – spoke more plainly:
Make no bones of this. Don't try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the President, who is Commander-in-Chief of our forces, refuses to say - refuses to say, mind you, whether or not the objective over there is victory. And his Secretary of Defense continues to mislead and misinform the American people, and enough of it has gone by….
Continue reading "McNamara & Obama's Summer Of Love"
Who knew? Good grief. In fact, Toyota is the most American car company.
Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
Arthur C. Clarke (h/t, LGF)
From VDH on Our Chrysalis Stage, sounding like a number of our recent posts:
Obama has surrounded himself with legions of ‘fixers.’ Bright men and women who have Ivy League law degrees, business school credentials, PhDs in the social sciences, and academic pedigrees in science, humanities, and engineering. Quite impressive, these Platonic Guardians of the soon to be perfect state. But most of their careers in finance, government, business, and academia have been well paid jobs critiquing, administering, regulating, nuancing, writing about, and hectoring those who create things–builders, developers, industrialists, farmers, truckers, transportation execs, retailers, lenders and investors.
We are being run now by film critics not directors, book reviewers not writers, music columnists, not musicians. And it is far easier to fault than to birth, nuance rather than build. The irony is that the muscular classes carry the regulating and talking classes on their backs. They don’t mind being whipped occasionally and even bridled, but like any good mule will suddenly stop and no longer move when they feel the rider either does not know where he is going, or is going to kill the mule with his switch, spurs, and yanking on the bit.
Please take a minute to catch up on our posts from the past few days. Some of us have been working while others have been playing.
Cuba: the happy country. That's why so many are taking leaky boats to live there.
Megapussi! Why not?
In which Nicholas Kristoff proves himself to be a fad-chasing dope (like Thomas Friedman). How much science did Kristoff take in school? Does he really know how to skeptically analyse data - with the math?
Related, from Shrinkwrapped:
Once upon a time, MSM reporters, columnists, and editors mediated our information environment. Authoritative newspapers, such as the New York Times, and newsreaders, like Walter Cronkite, not only determined what the news of the day was but also established the acceptable parameters for discussing the news. The advent of the blogosphere introduced a complication to this structure. Suddenly, true experts in their fields could discuss what they considered to be the news in an unmediated fashion with their readers. One of the more interesting outcomes of such "contamination" of the once pristine MSM narrative was the spreading awareness that reporters, much of the time, are out of their depth talking about most technical subjects and that their biases blind them all too frequently to a full understanding of their subjects. This would be embarrassing and deflating to our MSM sages if they but noticed. Unfortunately, to a large extent, the MSM still determines what qualifies as "news" and continue to exercise their role as information gatekeepers in ways which damage our society.
The buggy-whip problem. What good is there in saving obsolete, union-controlled businesses?
Semi-related: regulations usually just protect the established, and inhibit the new. Just one of Washington's dirty secrets.
Stats show it was the no money down mortgages that were the real problem
Kaus: 'We'll raise your taxes and in exchange we're going to cut your treatments.' I mean, how could that not have widespread appeal?
How bad is Waxman-Markey? Read Betsy's link, and weep.
How bad is Dem dominance?
Sounds like an historic crack in Iran to me, too. We will see.
Tax Day Tea Party: Socialism is slavery. Of course it is. Our slaves were happy, weren't they? Free house, free food, guaranteed job, singing all day and strummin' on the ol' banjo in the evening?
Reminds me of Paul with his jailor: Convert the Atheist Game Show.
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