Aug 19 2011
The previous post in this series is here.
Powerline has a brilliant article by Professor Malcolm from George Mason University Law School. Normally, in these series, I don’t merely link, and I try to provide some original content and analysis.
But this article so perfectly captures the supine British attitude towards evil that I had to include it here.
Aug 14 2011
Two days ago, I posted a piece on the similarity in views and style between Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia and Bill Cosby. Maybe the AP has reporters who read my blog, since they’ve now finally gotten around to reporting that Philly mayor chides black parents over teen mobs
The painful images and graphic stories of repeated violent assaults and vandalism by mobs of black teenagers had gotten to be too much for Mayor Michael Nutter.
As an elected official and a “proud black man” in the nation’s fifth-largest city, Nutter felt he had to go a step beyond ordering a law enforcement crackdown.
So he channeled the spirit of another straight-talking Philadelphian: Bill Cosby. Nutter took to the pulpit at his church last weekend and gave an impassioned, old-fashioned talking-to directed at the swarms of teens who have been using social networks to arrange violent sprees downtown, injuring victims and damaging property. Moreover, he called out parents for not doing a better job raising their children.
Exit question: would a white mayor who said the things reported here and on my blog be called a racist?
Aug 10 2011
This video is really scary. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Angelic faces and voices, selling pure poison.
Aug 09 2011
UK PM recalls Parliament for London riot crisis
British Prime Minister David Cameron recalled Parliament from its summer recess Tuesday and nearly tripled the number of police on the streets after three days of rioting in London blossomed into a full-blown political crisis.
Cameron described the scenes of burning buildings and smashed windows in London and several other British cities as “sickening,” but refrained from more extreme measures such as calling in the military to help beleaguered police restore order.
Instead, he said 16,000 officers would be on the streets of the capital Tuesday night, almost tripling the number that were out Monday night.
“People should be in no doubt that we will do everything necessary to restore order to Britain’s streets and to make them safe for the law-abiding,” Cameron told reporters after rushing home from an Italian vacation to chair a crisis meeting at his Downing Street office.
A wave of violence and looting has raged across London since Saturday, as authorities struggled to contain the country’s worst unrest since race riots set the capital ablaze in the 1980s.
Some 525 arrests have been made in London alone and dozens were arrested in other cities. Police announced Tuesday that plastic bullets would be “one of the tactics” available to officers to quell the riots.
The riots also claimed their first death — a 26-year-old found shot dead in a car.
Parliament will return to duty on Thursday, as the political fallout from the rampage takes hold. The crisis is a major test for Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government, which includes Liberal Democrats who had long suspected its program of harsh budget restraints could provoke popular dissent.
Is this our future in the USA? Will the people who’ve been taught that society owes them a living rise up and demand their “rights”?
Jul 10 2011
This is just a bit of an excellent article that I commend to you on Government and God’s People
I want to be careful not to make policy pronouncements on specific issues that the Bible does not address. I think sometimes Christians simply have to make decisions based on the results of one policy or another. People can evaluate the factual data in the world in different ways; evaluating the results of different tax policies and things like that. However, on unemployment, there are at least two principles that come into play. One is that we are to care for the poor and those in need, and the Bible frequently talks about the need to care for the poor. I think government has a legitimate role in providing a safety net for those who are in genuine need of food, clothing and shelter.
There is also a strong strand of biblical teaching that emphasizes the importance of work to earn a living. Paul commands people to work with their own hands and gain the respect of outsiders, be dependent on no one. He says if anyone will not work, he should not eat. In the book of Proverbs, it says a worker’s appetite works for him. The longer that unemployment benefits are continued, the more we contribute to the idea that some people should not have to work in order to earn a living, but we should just continue to have government support them. That creates a culture of dependency, which is unhealthy for the nation and unhealthy for the people who are dependent, year after year, on government handouts.
In the book The Battle, Arthur Brooks says that what people need is not money, but “earned success.” The example that comes to my mind is a student at the seminary here who told me that a number of years ago, he had been in jail. He was arrested for the sale of drugs and other crimes, and his life was just a mess. Later, he finally got a job at a fast food restaurant and one day his manager told him he was doing a good job of keeping the French fries hot. All of a sudden, this young man had a sense of “earned success.” That is, he was doing well at something and he felt great about it and it spurred him on to work harder, to seek to receive more managerial responsibility at the fast food restaurant, and now he is a straight-A student at the seminary and has had a number of years of successful Christian ministry already.
So we need to be asking the important questions about how we can we get the economy growing so that more jobs are available.
Jul 08 2011
You may recall an earlier post where I described the humiliation of trying to get a decent photo for another website, to accompany an article I had written for that site. The article is now up at Renewing American Leadership, or ReAL.
BTW, after the debacle of trying to get a decent headshot photo for ReAL, my daughter finally came over with her professional SLR camera and her knowledge of light, shadow, exposure and (certainly not least) her skill at touching up afterwards, to get the picture of me that appears at ReAL. At least she didn’t make me look like I’d just finished the perp walk.
Jul 07 2011
In yet another case of life imitating satire, we have the US warning of airline plot to implant bombs in people (what a clumsy headline…. sounds like the airlines are implanting bombs in passengers)
The White House said Wednesday there was no danger of an imminent attack on airplanes after reports that terror groups were mulling implanting bombs into the bodies of passengers.
The assurances came after news that the US administration warned airlines that extremist groups were considering surgically implanting explosives into people to try to beat tight airport security measures.
Passengers flying to the United States could now face even tougher screening measures, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, Nicholas Kimball, told the Los Angeles Times.
“These measures are designed to be unpredictable, so passengers should not expect to see the same activity at every international airport,” Kimball said, adding existing methods could not detect plastic explosives under the skin.
“Measures may include interaction with passengers, in addition to the use of other screening methods such as pat-downs and the use of enhanced tools and technologies.”
I warned about this possibility here around 18 months ago. The salient points:
In the meantime, ever more restrictive airport boarding regulations seem a certainty, and ever more intrusive searches, until we figure out that we have no choice but to identify who is more likely to have evil intent, and give them more scrutiny, because we surely don’t have the resources or the time to give the necessary scrutiny to everyone, including your grandmother in a wheelchair from Peoria, or Trenton, who may choose not to visit you next Christmas due to a distaste for body cavity searches and x-ray glasses (like the ones they used to sell in D.C. Comics, except these will work) in the hands of prurient security types.
Sooner or later, someone is going to figure out how to make high-explosive dentures and hip/knee replacements. While Christian “fundamentalists” will be getting only fluoride treatments, young adult male Islamic fanatics will be lining up to have all their teeth pulled and get dental implants made of enamel coated plastique. I predict an influx of wealthy foreign nationals, of Islamic extraction, into European schools of orthopedic surgery, particularly focusing on lower extremity joint replacements. Our too-faithful recent oral surgery patients, who will not have flossed much, will enter airplanes with a slight limp. It’s tough to recover from double knee/double hip transplants, especially when it hurts to eat.
The other passengers will feel sorry for them, briefly.
Eventually, the only people on airplanes will be strip-searched people with no scars, who just endured body cavity searches and had their stomachs pumped. But they will be very, very safe, wearing their airline-issued flying uniforms. When they land at their destinations, they will report to the changing room/luggage area, where they’ll get their clothing back, which was sent in a transport plane. Cost of a ticket from L.A. to Phoenix? About $1,000.
Coming up next: explosive hair.
There has already been at least one other report of terrorist plans to implant bombs.
We’re moving way past having to look for bombs in your Nikes and Fruits of the Loom.
So what can we do about this? Will we carry the no-profiling policy to such a ludicrous extreme that random strip searches are going to be made to look for recent surgical scars, and then require CT Scans in the indicated area (and if that isn’t revealing, we can always have a team standing by for exploratory surgery, just to be sure…. brought to you by Obamacare, of course)?
Should we just reject anyone with recent surgical scars? That’ll be tough on the envirobabe groupies with recently acquired, uh, enhancements to the gifts of nature. Instead of flying first class to the next climate change seminar so they can mingle with rich Goreaphiles (in search of suitable husband material among the ecopagan intelligentsia, of course), they’ll have to stay home and watch it all on Skype… or worse yet, on Youtube. But hey…. that’s better for the environment anyway. And who knows what the nice Egyptian surgeon with the funny name inserted besides a little silicon… Maybe there’s a reason something felt a bit lumpy (did he show you the photos from his relaxing summer vacation in the mountains of Pakistan?). We’d better keep all well-endowed ladies off the planes, just in case… unless, of course, some self-sacrificing TSA official wants to check them all, one at a time.
I think I have an idea. We can’t profile for ethnicity/nationality/religious background, so says the great Ozbama from behind the curtain (he’s just clandestinely checking up on those TSA officers, his version of Undercover Boss). But here’s what we can do, and indeed there is a tie-in with Obamacare’s plan to computerize all medical records for “efficiency.” Let’s just have everyone fill out a questionaire at the airport on all recent medical procedures. Let’s get a new generation of scanners going that can detect surgical scars. And let’s have computer software that compares the results of the questionaire, the scan, and the complete medical/surgical record that will be online for everyone (obviously, this will give the Obama administration the pretext it needs to extend Obamacare into the entire middle east, parts of Africa, Indonesia, and other Islamic regions. Hope and change.). If there is a scar or a mention of a procedure that isn’t on the “universal medical record” for each individual, we yank the offender out of the queue for “special processing.” Allah alone knows what that might entail. I think I don’t want to know.
I was intrigued by this line from the news report above:
“Measures may include interaction with passengers, in addition to the use of other screening methods such as pat-downs and the use of enhanced tools and technologies.”
“Interaction with passengers,” eh? How will a “pat down” locate a surgically implanted bomb? I’m guessing the terrorists have already done dry runs by inserting passengers with recent surgical work (maybe even something benign implanted internally), just to see how well it works.
“Enhanced tools and technologies”? Hmm…. maybe TSA has developed the tricorder.
Staying home is looking better and better. With Skype, Youtube, Netflix and satellite TV, what else do you need? International travel is over-rated, anyway. You can only tolerate being referred to as the “ugly American” so many times, and everyone knows the world hates America…. that’s why they all want to come here.
Jun 17 2011
They’re going to have a Breakthrough Dialogue
Breakthrough Institute is hosting its Breakthrough Dialogue to discuss the challenge of modernizing liberalism in the wider context of human development and new risks. Breakthrough is hosting this small, private gathering of intellectuals with the purpose of gaining clarity and building community among important thought leaders.
……………….
The Dialogue will take place at the spectacular Cavallo Point resort near Sausalito, California. Our dining and meeting rooms overlook the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco. The resort consists of a horseshoe of former Army officer houses, the insides of which were recently remodeled. There is a spa and massage center on-site, and the resort’s restaurant, Murray Circle, won a Michelin star last year. We are encouraging participants and speakers to bring their families to enjoy this special place.
I suggest that if the conference planners really want participants to see the fruit of liberalism, they should hold it in a public school auditorium in East Los Angeles, or Oakland, or maybe South Los Angeles, with lodging at nearby motels. That would be an object lesson in the results of the domination of public policy by liberals in California, and in California cities.
Bring your spouse for a romantic evening walk in the neighborhood.
Liberalism needs a breakthrough alright. But it needs to be the sort of breakthrough experienced by drug addicts who finally hit bottom and renounce everything that got them there.
Apr 04 2011
This is from New Scientist. I’m not sure how long the link will be good, so I copied the whole thing here for your perusal.
Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all
“The sun is our only truly renewable energy source“
Build enough wind farms to replace fossil fuels and we could do as much damage to the climate as greenhouse global warming
WITNESS a howling gale or an ocean storm, and it’s hard to believe that humans could make a dent in the awesome natural forces that created them. Yet that is the provocative suggestion of one physicist who has done the sums.
He concludes that it is a mistake to assume that energy sources like wind and waves are truly renewable. Build enough wind farms to replace fossil fuels, he says, and we could seriously deplete the energy available in the atmosphere, with consequences as dire as severe climate change.
Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, says that efforts to satisfy a large proportion of our energy needs from the wind and waves will sap a significant proportion of the usable energy available from the sun. In effect, he says, we will be depleting green energy sources. His logic rests on the laws of thermodynamics, which point inescapably to the fact that only a fraction of the solar energy reaching Earth can be exploited to generate energy we can use.
When energy from the sun reaches our atmosphere, some of it drives the winds and ocean currents, and evaporates water from the ground, raising it high into the air. Much of the rest is dissipated as heat, which we cannot harness.
At present, humans use only about 1 part in 10,000 of the total energy that comes to Earth from the sun. But this ratio is misleading, Kleidon says. Instead, we should be looking at how much useful energy – called “free” energy in the parlance of thermodynamics – is available from the global system, and our impact on that.
Humans currently use energy at the rate of 47 terawatts (TW) or trillions of watts, mostly by burning fossil fuels and harvesting farmed plants, Kleidon calculates in a paper to be published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This corresponds to roughly 5 to 10 per cent of the free energy generated by the global system.
“It’s hard to put a precise number on the fraction,” he says, “but we certainly use more of the free energy than [is used by] all geological processes.” In other words, we have a greater effect on Earth’s energy balance than all the earthquakes, volcanoes and tectonic plate movements put together.
Radical as his thesis sounds, it is being taken seriously. “Kleidon is at the forefront of a new wave of research, and the potential prize is huge,” says Peter Cox, who studies climate system dynamics at the University of Exeter, UK. “A theory of the thermodynamics of the Earth system could help us understand the constraints on humankind’s sustainable use of resources.” Indeed, Kleidon’s calculations have profound implications for attempts to transform our energy supply.
Of the 47 TW of energy that we use, about 17 TW comes from burning fossil fuels. So to replace this, we would need to build enough sustainable energy installations to generate at least 17 TW. And because no technology can ever be perfectly efficient, some of the free energy harnessed by wind and wave generators will be lost as heat. So by setting up wind and wave farms, we convert part of the sun’s useful energy into unusable heat.
“Large-scale exploitation of wind energy will inevitably leave an imprint in the atmosphere,” says Kleidon. “Because we use so much free energy, and more every year, we’ll deplete the reservoir of energy.” He says this would probably show up first in wind farms themselves, where the gains expected from massive facilities just won’t pan out as the energy of the Earth system is depleted.
Using a model of global circulation, Kleidon found that the amount of energy which we can expect to harness from the wind is reduced by a factor of 100 if you take into account the depletion of free energy by wind farms. It remains theoretically possible to extract up to 70 TW globally, but doing so would have serious consequences.
Although the winds will not die, sucking that much energy out of the atmosphere in Kleidon’s model changed precipitation, turbulence and the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface. The magnitude of the changes was comparable to the changes to the climate caused by doubling atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (Earth System Dynamics, DOI: 10.5194/esd-2-1-2011).
“This is an intriguing point of view and potentially very important,” says meteorologist Maarten Ambaum of the University of Reading, UK. “Human consumption of energy is substantial when compared to free energy production in the Earth system. If we don’t think in terms of free energy, we may be a bit misled by the potential for using natural energy resources.”
This by no means spells the end for renewable energy, however. Photosynthesis also generates free energy, but without producing waste heat. Increasing the fraction of the Earth covered by light-harvesting vegetation – for example, through projects aimed at “greening the deserts” – would mean more free energy would get stored. Photovoltaic solar cells can also increase the amount of free energy gathered from incoming radiation, though there are still major obstacles to doing this sustainably (see “Is solar electricity the answer?”).
In any event, says Kleidon, we are going to need to think about these fundamental principles much more clearly than we have in the past. “We have a hard time convincing engineers working on wind power that the ultimate limitation isn’t how efficient an engine or wind farm is, but how much useful energy nature can generate.” As Kleidon sees it, the idea that we can harvest unlimited amounts of renewable energy from our environment is as much of a fantasy as a perpetual motion machine.
Is solar electricity the answer?
A solar energy industry large enough to make a real impact will require cheap and efficient solar cells. Unfortunately, many of the most efficient of today’s thin-film solar cells require rare elements such as indium and tellurium, whose global supplies could be depleted within decades.
For photovoltaic technology to be sustainable, it will have to be based on cheaper and more readily available materials such as zinc and copper, says Kasturi Chopra of the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.
Researchers at IBM showed last year that they could produce solar cells from these elements along with tin, sulphur and the relatively rare element selenium. These “kesterite” cells already have an efficiency comparable with commercially competitive cells, and it may one day be possible to do without the selenium.
Even if solar cells like this are eventually built and put to work, they will still contribute to global warming. That is because they convert only a small fraction of the light that hits them, and absorb most of the rest, converting it to heat that spills into the environment. Sustainable solar energy may therefore require cells that reflect the light they cannot use.
Apr 02 2011
This from Power Line
Government workers are everywhere proliferating, even as private sector employment flags. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore notes this astonishing fact:
Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined.
To borrow an analogy from biology, if the parasites overwhelm the host, it is catastrophic for both the host and the parasites. (Which is why viruses aren’t really trying to kill you, at least not quickly.) That analogy may be unfair; certainly not all government workers are parasites. Let’s try this one: if the cowboy gets bigger than the horse, both the horse and the cowboy are in trouble.
There are many reasons for pessimism these days, but first on the list is the prospect that the growth of the public sector at the expense of the private may have become irreversible.
The analogy of government as rider on the private citizen is too true. And as one of the founding fathers pointed out, none of us was born fitted out with stirrups, nor were any of us obviously designed to be ridden.
