Though she hasn't posted anything lately, Karla has a blog and you should check it out. It's called That Crafty Karla. According to some, it's more interesting than this one. But then their biases are rather transparent. It certainly makes up for this blog's gross neglect of crafty things.
For the last few years this jackass has been at the vanguard of those alleging that the Bush administration is waging a “war on science” by “stifling” views on climate change counter to their own. He accused the Bush administration of threatening him through mysterious back channels and forcing NASA to deny him access to the media*:
He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry.
[…]
He said he was particularly incensed that the directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.
[…]
After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.
He also compared the White House to a “propaganda office” and said "It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States."
Inconvenient to this conspiracy narrative was a revelation yesterday that during the time period where Dr. Hansen alleges being “muzzled” he participated in over 1,400 (!!!) on the job interviews and that the real reason he was denied permission to give an interview to NPR (the only documented “muzzling” – he proceeded to give 15 more interviews later that month) was that NASA was sick of him giving interviews all the time without following procedure rather than doing his job.
Mr. Deutsch, who was 23 at the time, said Mr. Hansen was prohibited from doing the interview because of his prior refusal to notify NASA officials when he was granting interviews, not for political reasons. Citing what he called his "constitutional right" to give interviews, Mr. Hansen admitted violating NASA's press policy but defended his actions.
*Note how the NYTimes never questions Hansen’s version of events and treats them as fact despite there being no known evidence to support the allegations. In addition, prior to this article he was a paid advisor to Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and was given $250,000 by Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Heinz foundation. Nothing to see here…
Gavin Schmidt, one of the more odious advocates for radical political and economic solutions to the “Global Warming Crisis” before a recent debate on the subject:
It certainly appeared like quite the opportunity to preach to the choir: NPR hosted the event and produced an audience that agreed with his position nearly 2-1 (57-30%).
Except that by night’s end the previously friendly audience didn’t seem to find the Gavin’s arguments all that convincing with only 42% still agreeing (46% disagreeing) with his apocalyptic assessment.
Naturally the reaction to his poor showing has been to criticize the intelligence of the audience and lament that “Science isn’t a popularity contest”. However when considering that Gavin and his “scientific consensus” have the news media, Hollywood and the EU on their side one must begin to question if salesmanship is really the problem and conclude that they’re just peddling crap.
“Hardly a week goes by,” Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,” including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming. Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms. “Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.” In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change. Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.” Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.” Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming’s effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria. “For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,” Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts.”
So like those foreign exchange students in high school sporting the acid wash jeans it appears the Europeans have again bought heavily into a fad that has likely run its course.
This weekend in Selma Alabama while commemorating the Selma March Barack Obama, who is as southern as I am, increasingly picked up the cadences of a evangelist preacher. Hillary sounded like an alternating mix of Foghorn Leghorn, Rosanne and Nell. I was forced to relive this inexplicably asinine behavior repeatedly while listening to NPR gush at Hillary and Barak’s thoughtfulness and political acumen for using tragedy opportunistically while running errands this weekend. Over and over I wondered why southern black people don’t feel slighted when people who don’t typically talk like them start doing a bad MLK or Mammy impression. If Bush started talking like one of the Mario Brother’s when addressing the Order Sons of Italy in America, delivered a speech pronouncing his “W’s” as “V’s” when addressing Germans in Milwaukee or larding up a town hall meeting with “you betcha’s” with a clothes-pin on his nose in Brainerd would people hoot and holler in appreciation? Probably not. People would probably rationally assume the man was brain damaged or an unbelievable fraud.
This has been getting a lot of play on drudge and Instapundit but I still feel the need to share an observation. A friend of the family built a 7000sqft+ home in Wisconsin a few years ago. Despite being over 3 times larger than my house (2200sqft) his average monthly energy costs are only 60 percent more than mine ($200 vs $125). His house is well insulated, has good windows and I’m assuming a decent furnace/AC unit but it’s by no means a “green” home with the 3ft mud and straw walls and whatnot. For Gore’s home in much milder Nashville to be using over $1000 in natural gas and $1300 in electricity per month is absolute insanity however many carbon offsets, cfl’s and token solar panels he buys. This is the lifestyle of an energy company profiteer (he is!) seeking to assuage guilt over excess not the worlds most famous environmentalist. It reeks of the elitist hypocrisy: “rules are for the little people”.
I’ll recycle (come on, Kansas screams landfill) and get a Prius when Gore gives up the outdoor hot tubs and the dual Sub Z’s. Till then I’m going to continue pursuing my dreams of having 10 hp for every year I’m alive (I’ll make it). I’ll just plant a tree and get one of those solar cell phone charger thingies.
UPDATE: The Heinz-Kerry’s have also jumped onto the “save the earth” hypocrisy fad.They just wrote this book about:
The environment, and the movement that grew up to protect it, is under attack--concerted and purposeful [!!!].
But soon it was clear that maintaining Heinz's property would need more water. So she and her neighbor, Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn, applied for a permit to build a pipeline and take water from the BigWoodRiver, which is adjacent to her property, up the hill to water her lawn and maintain her landscaped greenery. But the county had just passed a new policy and ordinance preventing that type of transfer.
Marti Bridges, then-water policy head for Idaho Rivers United, told the Boston Herald at the time that the amount of water Heinz and Wynn wanted to divert would fill ten large municipal swimming pools each year, a volume that she said "could be the difference between a fish population making it through summer during spawning or rearing."
Mmm’kay maybe not…but of course Teresa Simões-Ferreira Heinz Kerry is more equal than the unwashed commoners this book is being marketed to.
Based on the leaders the educated left currently holds en vogue I secretly suspect that in their heart of hearts they do not believe in the workers-of-the-world-unite populism they evoke so readily.FDR, Kennedy, Gore, Kerry…Clinton was an aberration (and I’m not certain he’s that idolized). I think on some deep, dark, unacknowledged level they want to be courtesans of King Louis 14th where they can let live the fantasy there are betters to aspire to and where power is gained through cultural and political influence rather than merit.If the left had any real understanding of the wealthy in this country they’d see that it’s much more mundane and populist than anything they would find in academia or Hollywood.They reject this reality of course because it would mean they are owned by their intellectual and cultural inferiors.
UPDATE: To see just how unevenly the news media holds democrats and republicans accountable to charges of hypocrisy, in six months count how many stories there are about Al's house and compare it to the number of stories about Dick Cheney having lesbian daughter. As of today NPR alone has done 7 stories on this otherwise unremarkable person while right now Al is getting a pass.
Yes if everyone shared the genetic material of this unfortunate hipplet I’m confident the human race would end with his generation because there would be 8 billion angst ridden Starbucks baristas and no one to continue the ridiculous rate of technological improvement everyone who is allowed to watch channels other than PBS and ingest refined sugar is awestruck over. Anyone with an iota of perspective would realize that the human race did okay against an ice age, numerous plagues and a cold war. Is 5-6 degrees in 93 years really worth getting your sponge-bob skivvies in a knot?
Apparently the stable of typewriter-chained Corkys maintained by the Sulzberger family is becoming something of an embarrassment. NYTimes Ombudsman/part-time-censor Byron Calame writes the following after the Times publishes a ridiculous story purporting that the majority of women in the US are living single for the first time ever!....after including 15 year olds in their data:
It was discouraging to find yet another article with an unusual angle that didn’t seem to encounter many skeptical editors as it made its way to the front page.
As a result:
In the wake of this controversy, Bill Keller, the executive editor, has decided to meet with staffers with expertise in statistics and demographics to create a “vetting network to help with the editing of articles dealing with those subjects,” Craig R. Whitney, an assistant managing editor and the standards editor, said Thursday.
For anyone that’s read this blog it should not be a surprise that among the developed world I consider France to be the Pinnacle of leftist economic stupidity. It really seems as if they’re really on some suicidal mission to single handedly prove the superiority of the free market system.
The newest twist comes as the country considers Chirac’s replacement. Naturally the French consider the antidote to economic malaise resulting from crippling entitlements and regulation is even more entitlements and regulation. This idiocy is embodied in Ségolène Royal who among other things wishes to raise the French minimum wage to the equivalent of $2000 a month (that’s $24k a year if you’re a journalist). Considering that French per-capita GDP is $30,000 while the US is $43,500 that would translate into a US minimum annual income of nearly $35000 a year.
This is the only cost benefit analysis I've seen to date on Kyoto. If anyone else has different numbers I'd love to see them. I seriously doubt we'll get anything other than agitprop from the Boxer committee.
The sloppy logic of the Kyoto advocates is surprising. The protocol would demand the biggest international financial commitment in history, yet it rests on an elementary fallacy: it compares the total costs of potential damage with the marginal costs of slightly ameliorating the problem. Even if every industrial country met the Kyoto goals of reducing carbon emissions 30 percent by 2010, the impact would be tiny. By 2100 that would have postponed global warming by a mere six years. The guy in Bangladesh driven from his home by rising sea levels would have to move in 2106, instead of 2100.
This makes little sense. The best estimates of the cost of implementing Kyoto run between $150 billion and $350 billion a year. The best estimates of the damage from global warming reach about $500 billion annually in 2100. Proponents argue that paying $150 billion to avoid $500 billion in damages is a good deal. But that's not what's on offer. We still have to pay the $500 billion, only six years later. So the real offer is: we pay $150 billion each year for 100 years to postpone payment of $500 billion annually, starting in 2100. All economic models show this to be, as the Copenhagen Consensus put it, a "bad" deal.
In reporting how those noble French are teaching us about sacrifice by turning off the lights on the Eiffel Tower for 5 whole minutes Reuters reports the following:
7,000 Megawatt hours! Holy crap! That’s more power than is generated by all of Iraq and more than has ever been consumed by customers of Duke Energy – the largest energy provider in Indiana.
Most likely the sum total of the editors education on all things electric came from Back to the Future.
To make matters worse over 75% of electric generation in France comes from nuclear generation which has zero net effect on greenhouse gas emissions. So this entire action/story is meaningless.
UPDATE:According to this site, the lighting system at the tower is 120KW. Assuming the AP/Reuters article is correct in stating that lighting is 9% of total power usage then we can surmise that total consumption is 120KW(100 *.09) = 1.08MW. A bit lower than 7000.
UPDATE: CNN’s corrected the obvious mistake. Apparently assuming it was a simple order of magnitude issue (KW vs. MW – I’m not so sure. These dummies still have the original version.)
So in other words the process from which democrats begin crafting policy that could result in trillions of dollars of impact to the US economy is not one of fact finding or even the debate of “facts” but a forum to express feelings about climate change.
I realize that in order to pass policy that requires taking things away from Americans that they like requires adding a little sizzle to the steak but reducing what is inarguably a very complex engineering and economic problem into inflammatory vignettes is not how good policy gets made. Similar tactics of simplistic rhetorical bludgeoning were used to pass Johnson’s War on Poverty. How did that work out?
Somehow, this e-mail to Andrew Sullivan was diverted to me, so I'm publishing it. Because Andrew would.
Thank you so much, Andrew Sullivan. You are the light that illuminates the path to reason. You are, in fact, the reason that the light shineth at all. Because of you, I have come out of the closet. Because of you, I oppose outing. Because of you, I voted for Bush. Because of you, I voted for Kerry. Because of you, I supported the war in Iraq. Because of you, I oppose the war in Iraq. Because of you, I have sleep apnea. Because of you, I have cured my sleep apnea. Because of you, I believe in a conservatism of doubt — although because of you, I must of necessity doubt the conservatism of doubt that represents the doubtful provenance of my conservatism. Because of you, I have entirely jettisoned my sense of humor, as it gets in the way of my self-regard. I owe it all to you. Or, should I say, You.
Heh again: Here's a perfect example of Sullivan not letting facts interfere with his pre-existing perspective of a situation.
This surprised me, but it shouldn't have. Democrats have long and recently been sympathetic to leftist dictators. If they ever are to again become the dominant political force in this country they need to go back to Truman.
Commie hating + ditching the cynical populism could get me to vote democratic.
This is a pretty interesting article about Thorium being almost the ideal fissile material for nuclear power generation. (Yes I read Treehugger. It's the reason our house is down to 6 incandescents. A renaissance man am I...)
Basically the only reason nuclear energy is based on Uranium (and byproducts of Uranium) is because controllable nuclear fission technology was just a byproduct of the Manhattan Project. It's very possible in some parallel universe where WWII or the Cold War never happened some university developed a Thorium based fission process and they're fossil fuel free -- or very much reduced. The reason the Hippies would desist in the banner making is that the Thorium atom breaks apart much more gracefully than ol' #92:
In today's "once-through" uranium-fueled reactors, we mine uranium, enrich it a little in uranium-235, burn-up some of that U-235, and then throw it away, supposedly in Yucca Mountain. (very much in the model of a ‘throw away society’) When we start out with pure uranium oxide, (roughly 97% U-238 and 3% U-235) and run it though current methods we end up with three broad categories of "stuff" in the fuel. First, there’s the unburned uranium-238 and uranium-235. This uranium is no more dangerous after being in the reactor than it was before (except that now it’s mixed with other products). It has billion-year half-lives, which means it practically never decays (which is why it's still around to dig up five billion years after it formed in a supernova). So the uranium’s not a risk. Then second group of leftovers are the fission products (the actual waste of fission). These fission products are very radioactive, and give off dangerous radiation. We have to keep these fission products away from people and the environment. But because the fission products are so radioactive, they decay quickly. Most decay to stable elements in a few hours, some take days. And a very few take years or decades. But, if we leave the fission products alone for a few hundred years, they will decay to normal background levels of radiation (Safe enough we don’t need to worry about them as much). Finally, there are the transuranic isotopes. These are formed when uranium absorbs a neutron and doesn’t fission, and include some nasty elements like neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium. The transuranics are radioactive for hundreds to tens of thousands of years, and as they decay they give off different kinds of radiation. It's the transuranic waste that is the reason why you have to build a place like Yucca Mountain that must remain geologically isolated for tens of thousands of years.
In contrast Thorium byproducts are highly energetic with half-lives measured in human timescales:
Thorium is better because it has to absorb five neutrons before it will turn into a transuranic isotope, whereas common uranium only has to absorb one- a built in buffer. So by operating a reactor on pure thorium and uranium-233, you can avoid producing the kind of long-lived waste that needs a place like Yucca Mountain. Thorium is a great possibility- it could be a high density source of clean energy. The fluoride salt thorium reactor can produce nuclear wastes that consist only of fission products, which quickly decay to stable elements - in fact some elements like xenon or rhodium represent valuable commercial products after a few months 'cooling down'.
The best part is that Thorium is three times more common than than Uranium. Easily exploitable reserves could last for tens of thousands of years. Maybe instead of attempting to transform anthropogenic climate change from an engineering problem into a moral/religious issue the Pelosi posse could annouce reasearch into this.
When I was home in Indiana for the holidays my Dad talked a about an invasive species that he had read about called the Asian Carp which has been making its way up the Mississippi River and its tributaries, threatening to invade the Great Lakes. The only thing keeping the carp from making its way into Lake Michigan is an underwater electronic barrier that has to be re-funded every year. The bummer is that there is the ever-present threat that some short-sighted committee with revoke the funding which would be a disaster. Check out the following videos to get an idea of just how big of a disaster I'm talking about.
(The second part is much more entertaining/ridiculous.)
Part 1
Part 2
On the good side though, an emerging market for the fish has evolved that may take some of the urgency out of the problem. From Andrew's fav, NPR:
The fish weigh at least 15-to-25 pounds each, and some are much larger. They fetch about 14 cents a pound. That's not a lot, but Briney says the huge volume of carp he catches more than makes up for the low price-per-pound. Since he started fishing for carp, Briney says he's doubled his income.
Briney used to think carp were ugly. "But now, I think they look pretty good," he says, laughing, noting that they bring "about $4 a fish."
A Growing Market
On a recent day, Briney and his stepson, Jeremy Fisher, took in about 10,000 to 12,000 pounds of Asian carp from the Illinois River. Their catch ended up at Schafer Fisheries, a processing plant in Thomson, Ill.
Plant owner Mike Schafer has spent the last seven years developing a market for Asian carp. He says his company sells more than 2 million pounds each year -- mostly in Asian-American communities in California, New York and Chicago.
The carp now account for 20-30 percent of Schafer's business. He hopes that a new flash freezer he invested in will help him start selling to China and other Asian markets.
Illinois State Senator Mike Jacobs also wants to expand the market for Asian carp. For one thing, he'd like to see it on the menu in state prisons.
"Some people say that smoked, it's better than salmon," Jacobs says of Asian carp's taste. But the name "carp" is likely putting non-ethnic Americans off trying the fish, he says.
"Chilean Sea Bass wasn't always known as Chilean Sea Bass," Jacobs notes. "There was a time it was known as a Patagonian Toothfish, and people wouldn't eat it."
His suggested name-change? "I'm from Rock Island, so I'm thinking of 'Rock Island Sole,'" Jacobs muses. "Schafer Fisheries is near Savanna, [Ill.,] so Savanna Sole might work, too."
Update: If you have to see anything, scroll to minute 2:45 of the second video. It's worth it.
You may have noticed something different about insight-less. If so, great! At least you're looking at the thing. Something I haven't managed to do in quite some time. Anyway, this version is powered by Blogger instead of Blogger (beta). And I was just in the process of bragging about it when I tried to publish the post and got an error, hence I'm trying this again. It still seems pretty snappy and easy to make editorial changes 'n such, despite my misgiving but time will tell whether this will improve my posting regularity.
So if there's anything that seems stale and tired on this site, or if more regular posters have requests, comments etc., please let me know.
While perusing Newsweek’s International edition I ran across this sentence in a story about social and economic challenges in the EU.
“[The EU’s] economy is outperforming the United States.”
Holy tap-dancing Christ! What on earth is this based on?
So I looked and looked and looked and came across this article reporting on a business confidence survey that for the first time in five years showed Europeans more optimistic about their region’s future economic prospects than Americans over the same period. Oh if only believing made it so!
Here’s a reality check for ol’ Denis:
EU economic growth was only 2.8% in 2006. It was 3.3% in the US – the slowest since 2003.
EU unemployment was 7.7 percent. US unemployment remains steady at 4.5%
So I’m not sure how Denis can conclude that things are better on his side of the pond. The only thing I can think of to account for the inexplicable difference in optimism is the 2006 election media which spiked positive economic news and amplified the bad. Economically things in the US remain far ahead of the rest of the G-7.
