Saturday, January 23. 2010
At the New Atlantis. Isn't ordinary nuclear good enough as a free lunch?
At the OC Register. One quote:
At one point late in the 2008 campaign, when someone suggested that if Gov. Palin was "unqualified" then surely he was, too, Obama pointed to as evidence to the contrary his ability to run such an effective campaign. In other words, running for president was his main qualification for being president.
That was the story of his life: Wow! Look at this guy! Wouldn't it be great to have him ...as community organizer, as state representative, as state senator, as United States senator. He was wafted ever upwards, staying just long enough in each "job" to get another notch on the escutcheon, but never long enough to leave any trace.
He says:
For a little project, I am putting together a taxonomy of attacks on business and enterprise through history and thought that the blogosphere might make a useful contribution. In this post ( http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2010/01/help-tigerhawk-who-have-been-enemies-of.html), to which I hope you will consider linking, I ask readers to suggest the types of people from history (including the present day) who have attacked business (physically, through the state or regulatory apparatus, or politically) and the tactics they have used to do so. It would delight me if you would send your no doubt brilliant readers in the direction of this post.
Let's try to give him a hand.
That's supper for our friend the ex-blogger Hog on Ice (I like that raw sweet onion on the plate) whose book we'd like to plug.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is more attuned to popular political winds than President Obama, and her speaking out on Internet freedom is welcome across the political spectrum. Nonetheless, there are other forces at play. Her motives aren’t pure, not startling in a politician, but bear examination.
Her recent speech favoring Internet freedom, in the wake of Google’s resistance to Chinese Internet repression and hacking, is in stark contrast to the Obama administration’s ignoring human rights to now, including in Iran where internal regime change possibly offers a best hope for averting catastrophe. Her speech is hoped to really signal a turn.
Importantly, Sec. Clinton made it clear that the Obama Administration is ready to commit significant resources to this effort. She said that, over the next year, the State Department plans to work with others to establish a standing effort to promote technology and will invite technologists to help advance the cause through a new “innovation competition” that will promote circumvention technologies and other technologies of freedom. Sec. Clinton also challenged private companies to stand up to censorship globally and challenge foreign governments when they demand controls on the free flow of information or digital technology.
We haven’t heard any support yet directly from President Obama. In light of her diminished bulb within his administration, is Hillary trying to brighten it and to position herself for his possible 2012 implosion?
Other forces at play include riding the positive publicity that Google received for its resistance to Chinese muzzling of the Internet, that seems more aimed at helping Google to compete elsewhere, and hacking into Western companies’ software codes, which threatens their future profits. (See my previous post.)
Another factor at play is that the Obama administration is more protectionist than prior administrations, a sop to his labor union backers. Protectionism is a recurring populist theme. But, Obama is still teetering as US multinational companies, who have also contributed heavily to gain entre to his chambers, favor continuing free trade policies. Still, for example in Vietnam, where Western investment is critical to regime stability, "investors have largely avoided [it] over the past year as reform momentum stalls." The Wall Street Journal notes the wider arena: “It's been said that Vietnam aims to copy China's economic development model. Trying to frighten foreign investors into line, a la Beijing and Rio Tinto [Brazil], isn't a lesson worth copying, especially for a poor country trying to join the league of middle-income nations.” Using “human rights” leverage to increase US multinationals’ access to less fettered investing may be more a pressure tactic to open markets than to open minds. The Obama administration gains support from the unions and big business by now highlighting Internet freedom concerns.
More attention to Internet freedom, also, serves to ameliorate scathing criticism from such needed major media players as the Washington Post, which editorialized on December 31, 2009 about increased repression in China and Vietnam:
Some Vietnam analysts believe the government's crackdown is intended to set the stage for a ruling party congress scheduled for 2011. Yet surely Vietnam, like China, has taken note of the Obama administration's relaxed attitude toward supporting dissidents and its public proclamations that human rights issues must be balanced against other interests. While the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam has criticized the crackdown, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said nothing in public about the arrests when she met Vietnam's foreign minister in October. Instead she focused attention on the "tenfold" increase in bilateral trade she said had taken place since 2001.
That trade boom makes Vietnam sensitive to Western criticism of its human rights record. So the staging of trials of pro-democracy activists during the holiday season is almost certainly not a coincidence. The tactic just might be working: A State Department spokesman said Wednesday that no public statement had been made about Mr. Kim's case, because "no one asked." He then e-mailed us a statement saying "the United States is disappointed in the results of the trial" and noting that Mr. Kim's case was among those raised during a U.S.-Vietnam dialogue on human rights in November. No doubt Hanoi regards such talk as perfunctory; certainly, the Obama administration has done nothing that would suggest otherwise.
The Obama administration has demonstrated that foreign policy is secondary to its radical domestic priorities, and thus is more flexible in tamping down concerns about its fundamental fecklessness in facing up to threats abroad. Hillary Clinton’s speech is therefore an easy sop.
OK, all said aside, if the Obama administration actually follows through with more than words, energetically, that is very welcome despite ulterior motivations. As Human Rights Watch just reported, "Rights-respecting governments should speak up to protect peaceful activists and rights defenders in Vietnam and insist that the government abide by its international commitments," Adams [Asia director] said. "Donors have been far too quiet about rights in recent years, but Vietnamese activists say that they will never succeed without consistent support from influential governments." The same goes for elsewhere among despotic regimes.
China has rejected Hillary’s appeal to more openness, calling it “information imperialism.” Russia, Vietnam, Iran, Arab states, Venezuela, Bolivia express similar scorn.
Will the Obama administration actually show real spine on Internet freedom, or continue on its path of hollow words. Despots are betting on the latter.
Fortuna
The wind blows east, the wind blows west,
And the frost falls and the rain:
A weary heart went thankful to rest,
And must rise to toil again, 'gain,
And must rise to toil again.
The wind blows east, the wind blows west,
And there comes good luck and bad;
The thriftiest man is the cheerfulest;
'Tis a thriftless thing to be sad, sad,
'Tis a thriftless thing to be sad.
The wind blows east, the wind blows west;
Ye shall know a tree by its fruit:
This world, they say, is worst to the best; --
But a dastard has evil to boot, boot,
But a dastard has evil to boot.
The wind blows east, the wind blows west;
What skills it to mourn or to talk?
A journey I have, and far ere I rest;
I must bundle my wallets and walk, walk,
I must bundle my wallets and walk.
The wind does blow as it lists alway;
Canst thou change this world to thy mind?
The world will wander its own wise way;
I also will wander mine, mine,
I also will wander mine.
Friday, January 22. 2010
Outdoor Life magazine, “The source for hunting and fishing adventure”, brings us celebrities who enjoy these sports. Here’s some of my favorites. Comments are excerpted from the magazine.
“Palin can make moose chili for us anytime.”
Lorrie Morgan: “legendary country crooner cutie…[has] ‘always been good with a gun,’ she says.” [Let’s have a shoot-out.]
Jewel: “blond, beautiful, and a talented singer and performer [roped] her husband and former rodeo cowboy Ty Murray.” [Well tie me up!]
Miranda Lambert says “I’ve got some trophy mounts.” [I’ve got the horns!] 
Natalie Gulbis “lamented catching nothing. We bet she won’t have a problem finding a better fishing guide.” [My rod is ready.]
Check the link above for others, men. And this link.
Avril Lavigne: “"My brother used to be like, 'You're a girl. You can't go hunting or fishing. I'd be like, 'You're stupid.' And we'd get into a huge fight." Alrighty then!” [Love to wrassle!]
Eva Longoria: “"I can skin a deer and a pig and a snake- and rabbits." If there is a more perfect woman, someone please tell us- like, now!”
OK guys, get hunting and angling if you want to be skinned.
Tiger Woods “makes frequent angling trips.”
Heading up north today for some skiing, thanks to golbal climatistical instability.
Hopenchangen. It was a joke. Nobody took it seriously as other than as virtuous posturing - except possibly the O, who is already beginning to resemble a lame duck.
Related: The CRU was just the tip of the iceberg. One quote:
NOAA stands accused by the two researchers of strategically deleting cherry-picked, cooler-reporting weather observation stations from the temperature data it provides the world through its National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). D’Aleo explained to show host and Weather Channel founder John Coleman that while the Hadley Center in the U.K. has been the subject of recent scrutiny, “[w]e think NOAA is complicit, if not the real ground zero for the issue.”
And their primary accomplices are the scientists at GISS, who put the altered data through an even more biased regimen of alterations, including intentionally replacing the dropped NOAA readings with those of stations located in much warmer locales.
As you’ll soon see, the ultimate effects of these statistical transgressions on the reports which influence climate alarm and subsequently world energy policy are nothing short of staggering.
The details of the giant hoax just keep emerging, don't they? Not to worry - somebody will find new reasons to need global governance by our betters.
Hugo Chavez accuses U.S. of using weapon to cause Haiti quake. Of course. Who wouldn't want to damage Haiti? Or own it? What a prize.
Dept. of Schadenfreude: Weeping into their cappucinos in Amherst. "Send them all to Amherst" he says where, presumably, any enemy of Americans and freedom will be welcome. Hasn't radical murderous sociopathic chic gone a bit stale yet?
The Krautman addresses the proletarian uprising, He begins:
You would think lefties could discern a proletarian vanguard when they see one. Yet they kept denying the reality of the rising opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda when summer turned to fall and Virginia and New Jersey turned Republican in the year's two gubernatorial elections.
The evidence was unmistakable...
NJ's new governor: “I’m Gonna Govern Like A One-Termer”
Three excellent Maggie's-type links at Thompson
The world is getting richer. Must be due to climate change.
Obama Seen as Anti-Business by 77% of U.S. Investors. So who is supposed to create the wealth they want to redistribute? Or are we all supposed to be poor and stupid?
Re the banks, at Dino:
President Obama is part of that portion of during their lives, the business world where most of life takes place. the US that has had little or no contact with the private sectorHe is anti-business and he knows almost nothing about business. In a sense he lives in an alternate reality. Not good news for the rest of us.
Via Legal Insurrection in April:
What history shows us is that a liberal, blame-America-first Democratic President, urged on by a liberal, blame-America-first Democratic Congress, is a prescription for political self-destruction. Leave Democrats to their own devices, and they will screw themselves politically, just when they are at the height of power.
Re the Supremes' decision, Althouse is good: Hillary Clinton was promoting free speech on the internet...On the day that the Supreme Court struck down a U.S. statute as a violation of free speech.
Related, Surber reminds us:
The ACLU is a corporation.
Common Cause is a corporation.
The New York Times is a corporation.
Stick the hand-wringing over corporate speech already. Americans know better.
And Maggie's Farm, I suppose, is an informal corporation. Oh, I almost forgot. We are a not for profit "commune," so I guess we're OK with free speech either way.
 If you live in a Royal Barry Wills (1895-1962) house in New England, you are lucky.
Wills was a Boston architect who specialized in accurate reproductions of Capes, Saltboxes, and Colonial houses - the sorts of homes which might be bungalows, ranches, split-levels or God-knows-what elsewhere in the country.
This site discusses his architecture.
I was interested to learn that the firm Royal Barry Wills Associates is still in business.
 Image on right borrowed from Chicago Boyz
Too much free speech? The NYT freaks out. Why, I ask myself, should some businesses be gagged when media corporations, unions, and George Soros is not? The Times Corporation, a de facto arm of the Left wing of the Dem party and clearly enamoured of their own political speech, beclowns itself with pure partisanship masked as sanctimonious purity.
Not an elite. From Brown:
"If you were to tell me growing up that a guy whose mom was on welfare and parents had some marital troubles, and I had some issues growing up, that a guy from Wrentham would be here standing before you right now and going to Washington, D.C., are you kidding me?" Brown said at a postelection news conference.
News from the Middle East: Giant Hummus Plate Astonishes World. And from Betsy, Why doesn't the world community get upset about Saudi Arabia?
New Republic: Ram it through
Harsanyi:
Fifty-eight percent of those polled by The Washington Post recently claimed they preferred smaller government with fewer services, with only 38 percent favoring a larger government with more services (and, yes, it is a terrific struggle not to place ironic quotations marks around the word services).
This is the highest number for the “smaller government” category since 2002. And a full year into President Barack Obama’s term, most polls, and state elections, tell us that the electorate is walking — maybe sprinting? — back from the progressive economic policies that now dominate Washington.
From the new face of organized labor at NRO:
*A majority of union members in America (52 percent) now work for the government. This is up sharply from 49 percent in 2008. Put another way, Sherk finds, three times more union members now work in the Post Office than in the auto industry.
Union membership in the productive sector of our economy continued its long-term downward spiral, falling from 20.1 percent in 1980 to a mere 7.2 percent in 2009.
A full 37.4 percent of government employees now belong to unions in 2009, up 0.6 percentage points from 2008.
* Private-sector unions lost 834,000 members in 2009. Public-sector unions, in contrast, actually gained 64,000 members.
Thursday, January 21. 2010
A few midtown NYC snaps from last week, with brief comments.
First snap - the #1 reason to get a degree from Yale: it gives you a clean civilized place to pee in midtown with CNBC running in all the bathrooms if you join the Yale Club. Also, a very nice place to stay in the city for cheap, a cozy hang-out, pretty good dining, and top-notch meeting and reading rooms. The giant hall on the second floor is a good place to hold your memorial service when you croak.
More below the fold -
Continue reading "Midtown snapshots"
I cannot explain why this is, but it's been like this for quite a while. Maybe some readers can splain it to me:
Story here, with the Supremes' decision.
I agree with a commenter there who said "The scary part is that four justices think that this does NOT violate the First Amendment." What are those justices reading that I am missing?
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) says that “"every state is now in play” in November, even heavily liberal California, as the upset in bluest Massachusetts demonstrates. I think able politician Boxer doth protest too much and is actually trying to get California Democrats revved up early, which Coakley failed to do in Massachusetts.
Boxer’s seat is, actually, safer than the “Ted Kennedy” seat proved to be. The percentage of Independent registrations is much lower than in Massachusetts, and the percent of Democrat registrations much higher -- 44% Dem, 31% Rep, 20% Indep vs about 50% registered Independent in Mass.
The percentage of safe Democrat voters among Hispanics is higher in California than Mass.,32% versus 6.8%. Although Israel was not a prominent issue in the Massachusetts election, it may be in California due to the presently leading Rep primary contender, Tom Campbell, having an unfriendly attitude toward Israel, which will sway pro-Israel moderates away from him.
Boxer has already amassed a much bigger warchest than the Republican contenders, and the one Republican – Carly Fiorina -- whose personal wealth may offset that is currently less favored among Reps in early polls. Boxer now has $7-million and Fiorina has only $2.5 million mostly “loaned” from herself. In 2004, Boxer raised about $20 million, her well thought of Rep opponent about $6 million. Her re-election victory margin, 20%, was double Kerry’s in California. 2010 will be a much more expensive election race.
Lastly, the national media and wireservices, which are given prominence in even the more moderate San Diego and Sacramento newspapers, and certain featuring in the liberal L.A. and San Francisco newspapers which have much larger populations, will be highlighting every sign of economic rebound in 2010 and downplaying Obama national security blunders, compared to downplaying economic portents and pounding the successful Bush measures on national security when Republican incumbents seek re-election.
None of this is to say that Boxer can’t be beat. But, it is very premature and overly optimistic to bet on it. The San Diego Union-Tribune editorial this morning paints a positive calculation. It’ll take much more than that, tremendous focus with a terrific candidate backed by big money, none of which seems in prospect, for California next November to turn out the Senate’s most liberal and obnoxious member from California.
Some good news: Today's US Supreme Court decision striking down some limitations in campaign finance laws are predicted to help corporations to contribute more; unions already are pretty maxed out. But, corporations are not as partisan as unions, and more leery in making contributions due to fears of being attacked in the press and by unions.
From Roger Kimball's excellent Obama Gets It Right on the core political issues:
What are those issues? One concerns the proper role of government in American life. The Constitution was primarily an effort to define, to set limits, to the power of the state. The Founders understood both the need for federalism and the dangers of statism. In their effort to “form a more perfect Union” and “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” they were everywhere at pains to circumscribe the reach of state power. Having tasted tyranny first hand, and having pondered the melancholy lessons of history, they understood the awful metabolism of servitude. President Obama was quite right when, way back in 2001, he described the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties.” What he did not understand then — and what he clearly still cannot get his mind around — is that fact that this “negative,” “merely formal” quality of the Constitution is one of its great strengths, not a weakness. In 2001, Senator Obama complained that the Constitution only told you what the state and federal government “can’t do to you,” not what it must do for you. As I noted at the time,
For a couple thousand years, people were desperately eager to frame constraints that would apply to their governments, that would limit, for example, the government’s ability to expropriate their property, to force them to educate their children in a certain way, or subscribe to certain government-mandated beliefs.
That sort of traditional political freedom is not enough for left-wingers. Ever since Marx decried bourgeois freedom as merely “formal,” the left has set out not to preserve freedom but to remake society according to a utopian scheme.
This is exactly what Obama wants to do. The “tragedy” of the civil-rights movement, he said, is that in focusing on “negative” freedom, it tended to “lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”
Bringing about “redistributive change” is what the Obama administration is all about.
 Breaking: Pelosi announces that she can’t pass Senate ObamaCare bill.
Maybe, in time, Congress can come up with some reasonable fixes, like interstate insurance competition, some subsidies for the poor, encouragement of major medical policies, tort reform, disconnect insurance from employment, etc. But this monstrosity of a government takeover seems dead for now.
Thank you, Scott Brown - and thank you, Massachusetts.
 It's Paul Mole on Lexington, in operation since 1912. There are still guys who get a straight razor shave there every morning on their way to work - hot towels etc. I am told many guys get a weekly trim. Not me.
And yes, they have a shoeshine guy there too.
She wonders what her kids should study in college, and considers what women used to learn in school. The daily Military Drill sounds good - like the IDF:
 Good luck with that: Voters-Be-Damned… Obama Plows Ahead With Radical Agenda- Will Nationalize Student Loan Industry
When will Sen. Brown be called a RINO?
Politico: Dazed Democrats rethink entire strategy
Canada Free Press: Saying No to Emperor Obama
Big Journalism: Behold the Face of the Tolerant Left: Keith Olbermann, Unplugged and Unhinged
John Kerry's next?
Bush: One year out of office
Thinking more about a Repub health plan
Barone: Liberals still want to pass health care - but not the ones who have to face voters in November
George Will on the health care bills:
In their joyless, tawdry slog toward passage of their increasingly ludicrous bill, Democrats cling grimly to Robert Frost's axiom that "the best way out is always through." Their sole remaining reason for completing the damn thing is that they started it.
Why does the press always interpret "anger" when Conservatives win elections? Especially given things like this: Far left has taken over Democratic Party, Sen. Bayh says.
And things like this: Barney Frank Deals Potential Death Blow to Obamacare
And this: Lanny Davis says Blame the Left for MA
Walking back climate change claims
Q&O:
I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the left are closet authoritarians who, at the drop of a hat, would resort to what this blogger describes if they could get away with it, always with the naive belief that this dictator would be “a benevolent despot”. Of course, as pointed out previously, definitions mean little to the left who apparently don’t realize that “benevolent despot” is an oxymoron of the first degree.
Kimball: “Massive profits and obscene bonuses”: more populist nonsense from Obama
Wednesday, January 20. 2010
“Marxism is my hustle.”
One of the New Left’s favorite black criminals, Soledad Prison inmate George Jackson, as quoted from a Sol Stern piece via Driscoll. It was true back then, and still true today.
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UN climate change expert: there could be more errors in report