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Wednesday, June 2. 2010

It's one of the questions we are always asking: How much is enough for the Welfare State?

Goldberg: In a welfare state, how much is 'enough'?

A quote:

Governments do not generate wealth; they can merely distribute it. The challenge for both liberals and conservatives is simply to define how much distribution is "enough." What would an acceptable safety net look like? Who should be taken care of by taxpayers and for how long? Paul Ryan offered an answer to that question, and liberals scoffed because they reject the question. There's no such thing as enough. That's what the Greeks thought.

That's what the Greeks thought until Mr. Reality in the form of the Bond Market appeared to them.

There is no such thing as "enough" as long as there is one more vote to be bought.

Posted by The Barrister in Our Essays, Politics at 10:08 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Weds morning links

The real picture of the O at the Louisiana beach, above. That's a real news photo, but the widely-distributed image was just a posed propaganda shot for the sycophantic media. "Message: I care."

Soaring costs force Canada to reassess health model

Their clout in peril, public employee unions push back

Tapscott: Will journalists wake up in time to save journalism from Obama's FTC? Coyote opines, in Creating the American Pravda, that this was the information missing from the FTC report:

�The New York Times and Newsweek can�t figure out a profitable business model in the Internet age. We propose the government step in with all means at its disposal to limit competition to these print media companies and create new government subsidies for their business. Once their companies� profitability is absolutely dependent on these government mandates and subsidies, the Federal government will have a powerful source of leverage to protect itself from criticism in these outlets. Once we have this situation in place, we will have a strong inventive to quash more independent outlets and maximize the market share of media companies beholden to the government. In a large sense, our recommendations build off the success of the tobacco settlement experiment, where a few large companies agreed to pay the government large percentages of their future profits, and then the government worked diligently to quash new tobacco competitors to maximize the market share of those companies paying it settlement money.�

Chinese electric vehicles will dramatically increase emissions

Gallup's Pro-Life America

Krauthammer on Gaza:

If these people had wanted humanitarian aid, Israel offered to take the ships into Haifa, peacefully, unload all the stuff inside and to allow all the humanitarian aid immediately into Gaza, all the food and medicine. And it was refused because it was meant to be a provocation and to create an incident.

Shocker. Arrested Gaza Flotilla �Peace Activists� Are Al-Qaeda Members. Also,

Useful Idiots Condemn Israel

Liberal Arts majors and the adults who lie to them. h/t SDA.

White House can't get its Sestak story straight

Marginal Rev: When does large-scale public ownership work?

Postrel on health care and why it's always political once government gets involved

Theocracy in America: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says she believes she must pursue public policies "in keeping with the values" of Jesus Christ

Posted by The News Junkie in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 05:35 | Comments (2) | Trackback (1)

Tuesday, June 1. 2010

A remarkable duck blind

Five or six more months until duck season. A friend sent me these photos of a splendid, if surrealistically overblown, duck blind. It has to be in Arkansas.

Posted by Bird Dog in Hunting, Fishing, Dogs, Guns, etc., Our Essays at 18:25 | Comments (10) | Trackbacks (0)

The Higher Ed bubble

At Insty. Certainly the costs might indicate a bubble.

Posted by The Barrister in Education at 15:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Oil spills and other messes: Are there contradictions?

Conservatives claim that government is incompetent, inefficient, and intrinsically corrupt (eg vote buying), and therefore can be trusted to do very little.

Libs and Lefties seem to believe that government is smarter and possessed of superior motives to those of the private sector.

When governments fail to demonstrate effectiveness (as in the IRS' failure to make money on a Nevada whorehouse, or the oil spill, or managing money, or border control, or Fannie and Freddie, or...), many Conservatives complain that government isn't doing its job with all our dough. Libs and Lefties complain that the failure will damage the notion of big government's omni-competence and virtue and thus their claim to our hard-earned dollars and pennies.

Readers know my view: Much of government is a legal racket, a special interest in itself devoted to its own interests of power and money and ego. Government has limited power against reality, and disproportionately more power over people's lives. Obama can no more control the oil spill than he can legislate the weather or the economy.

I am entirely in agreement with Steyn who we quoted this morning, "Almost every problem we face today arises from the vanity of Big Government."

I do not blame Obama for the oil (or the weather). I never rush to blame anybody for anything. Shit happens. However, government worshippers like Obama cannot say so because it would undermine the vision, which they market, of governmental godlike omnicompetence and virtue leading towards Progress and Worry-Free Life and General Wonderfulness. The Achilles' Heel of taking that position is that you must accept blame for almost anything that goes wrong.

Reality is relentless. Even if you control the media, reality wins in the end.

Posted by The Barrister in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects, Our Essays, Politics at 12:05 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Blowout

Our Capt. Tom, an ex-Schlumberger oil rig engineer, offers this explanation in reaction to our photo of a blowout preventer:

Just in case anybody is interested, a blow out preventer of the type used on Deepwater Horizon relies on three major methods of stopping the flow - two hydraulic and one manual which, in theory, is supposed to be done with ROVs. The reason is that oil is under pressure at all times from either natural gas or pressure from the surrounding rock or salt strata (normal depth pressures). Pressure on land can reach as high as 6,000 psi, under water (at the depth of Deepwater Horizon's well head) it can reach as much as 3,800 psi. Remember the old films of "oil gushers"? That's why the oil was spraying everywhere.

There are two basic types of valves - one called a ram valve and the other is called an annular valve. The ram valve is exactly that - a ram powered by hydraulics or mechanically that shuts off the flow of oil. Think of these as "pinchers". The annular valve is a rubber/steel device that is actuated in the same fashion as the ram valve, but creates a better seal. They can be set for different operating pressures.

In the case of the Deepwater Horizon's well head, the preventer worked partially meaning that the ram/annular system hydrauics worked, but some as yet unknown reason, didn't close all the way. The manual systems were rendered inoperative when the rig collapsed.

There is a fourth way to close a preventer which is usually required on all deep water projects - an acoustic actuator on one of the mechanical valves. When this preventer was built, the Mineral Materials Service waived the requirement for an acoustic actuator which it has for quite a while under pressure from the oil industry. The acoustic actuator is required by most other oil producing countries.

In the picture of the preventer, what you are seeing with all those pipes and valves are the various types of ram/annular actuators.

The problem with Deepwater Horizon is that the pipe leading to the surface collapsed when the rig collapsed. On the videos where you see the leak, that is actually at the top of the preventer - the pipe that leads to the surface.

Posted by Bird Dog at 11:56 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

Global Cooling Warnings

Global Cold Wave May Be Looming � This Time, the Science Is Good

Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 10:07 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Yikes

Posted by Bird Dog at 07:21 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Tuesday morning links

Photo: Thought you might want to see what a blowout preventer looks like. These are around 5 stories high, resemble space aliens, and cost around $10 million.

What is Feminism about nowadays? Not equality

Samuelson: US poverty rates are meaningless

Glum prospects for Law grads

Kagan's Odd Harvard Reform

A student loan crisis. Crisis?

Why Faculty Unions Could Destroy Our Universities

Why Kristof is a jerk. Powerline

Stossel: What if going green is a bunch of BS? - link fixed

Why a mosque next to the WTC? Gates

Via Volokh:

�Israel appears to have stepped directly into a trap of a carefully planned suicide mission dressed up in the clothing of a humanitarian effort.�

Good summary from Dr. C. of America at the Crossroads. Them are the core issues.

Prager: The World Is a Cruel Place -- and If America Weakens, It Will Get Crueler

What America wants re illegal immigration

Driscoll's quote of the day the other day:

�Wow, three people who spend their lives opining about things and who have never run anything in their career fell for a guy who spent his life opining about things and who has never run anything in his career. Who�d a thunk it?�

The flow of oil may soon end, but the political and environmental fallout is just getting started. Newsweek

Steyn:

Almost every problem we face today arises from the vanity of Big Government.

Greece urged to give up euro. It would not surprise me if they do.

Spanking Thad McCotter

Mead:

Virtually everywhere in the world outside the EU and Islamic countries which forbid Christian proselytization, Christianity is on the biggest roll in its 2000 year history. Both in absolute numbers of adherents and in terms of its global �market share� (the percentage of the world�s population that professes the Christian faith), Christianity is at an all time high. In the last fifty years it has surpassed Islam both as the most popular religion in sub-Saharan Africa and as the leading Abrahamic religion in China. The Roman Catholic Church alone claims almost as many members as the total number of Sunni Muslims in the world; all told, Christianity claims almost twice as many adherents as Islam worldwide.

Photo below from The Other McCain's "indigenous Mexicans"

Also, I advise scrolling down a bit to see what goodies you might have missed over the holiday weekend - I did.

Posted by The News Junkie in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 05:47 | Comments (16) | Trackbacks (0)

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