A new game

BS Bingo! Gee, I wish I could figure out how to print up a few of these cards with government- rather than corporate-type BS, in time for tonight's ObamaCare infomercial.

Thanks to Dust Bunny Queen, commenting at Althouse.

Update: and see How to Stay Awake During Obama Speeches at Naked Capitalism (via Charlottesvillain at TigerHawk).

Barney Frank wants to roll the dice again

Barney Frank in 2003: "I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing…"

In the WSJ this morning: "After two years of telling us how lax lending standards drove up the market and led to loans that should never have been made, Mr. Frank wants Fannie and Freddie to take more risk in condo developments with high percentages of unsold units, high delinquency rates or high concentrations of ownership within the development."

That last one was so much fun, he wants to do it again.

Thanks to Veronique de Rugy at The Corner, who also links to some discussion at CNBC.

design classics only

Here. Elegance, occasional weirdness; things I'd seen before, things I hadn't. Cars, computers, telephones, china. Everything manufactured is designed.

Found this as a result of looking at this collection of East German artifacts, via Althouse.

ABC needs a new logo today

And Theo Spark has it.


Here's a collection of ObamaCare links from The Corner, ObamaCare Cometh.

And Rep. Paul Ryan, interviewed on CNBC this morning, talks about the tax hikes that will be needed to pay for it all. He mentions a VAT as a possibility. Thanks to Katherine Jean Lopez at The Corner, who also quotes this statement:

The House Democrats’ proposal is being sold as one that contains costs, gets a grip on our entitlement crisis, and allows those that like what they have to keep it. Yet again, the gap between what they are saying and what they are doing is nothing short of astounding, as what they’ve actually put forward would impose trillions of dollars in new spending, taxes, and debt, would create a new open-ended entitlement, and would force millions of Americans to lose the coverage they currently enjoy. Despite promises and pledges of fiscal responsibility, the Democrats don’t even pretend to level with the American people on who they plan to tax to pay for their proposals.

The Democrats’ proposal concludes that we are not spending enough on health care in America. We already spend over two-and-a-half times more on health care than any other country. Rather than add trillions more on top of that, let’s take the money we already spend on health care, and spend it more efficiently, more effectively. With the Patients’ Choice Act of 2009, my colleagues and I have proposed to do just that. We show that we can achieve universal access to quality, affordable health care in this country – regardless of preexisting conditions – without the government taking it over and without spending, taxing, or borrowing trillions more dollars.

While the Majority may wish to ignore these innovative, patient-centered solutions, the American people will begin looking for alternatives the more they learn about what Democrats are trying to rush through Congress.

"Democrats don’t even pretend to level with the American people …" Just what I was thinking while watching the President's press conference yesterday. There's some discussion of this at Althouse, kicked off by a question from Theo Boehm, "Is it possible to describe in a word or short phrase Obama's technique of pretend-reasonableness? I know what he's up to, and I'm sure most of you do too, and have encountered it in everyday life."

Waxman-Markey, evil mutant — can it be stopped?

It was evil all along, but now it's mutating at an incredible rate!

The bill is scheduled for a vote on Friday, that's in two days, and suddenly it has gained 250 pages! Sunlight Foundation: "Despite having a bill, H.R. 2454, that has been reported out of the Energy & Commerce Committee and discharged by eight other committees, there is now, suddenly, a new bill that is almost 300-pages longer — but it’s still being considered as H.R. 2454."

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

And at The Corner, Jim Manzi has posted a letter: Dear Member of Congress: Why You Should Vote Against Waxman-Markey. It's a concise 5-point summary, with links. RTWT.

Climatic homeostasis

Or, The Thermostat Hypothesis, a guest post by Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That.

Organisms employ homeostasis to regulate temperature, chemistry, everything else; IF Gaia is [like] an organism, THEN Gaia is a homeostatic system.

The idea of "Snowball Earth" is an example of what a non-homeostatic system would look like. Although recovery was possible even from the snowball glaciation, if indeed that ever occurred, else we would not be here now. But since the transition from reducing to oxidizing atmosphere, resulting from the evolution of photosynthesis (the real "green revolution"), the homeostasis we know and love today has provided the feedback buffers to keep another snowball from forming, or alternatively keep a runaway greenhouse from boiling the oceans.*

That chart is from Snowball Earth dot org. After we get to "life as we know it" and an atmosphere with free oxygen, the homeostasis sets in, and while we still can have Ice Ages, the best result of which are moderately amusing cartoons, we no longer get out-of-control climate feedbacks. We have a pretty good interglacial going here. What would it take to start another glaciation? Maybe some geoengineering, which need not even be internationally agreed on to have an effect. What the real precautionary principle says is "Don't mess with things you don't understand."

* Boiling the oceans: unlikely. Ian Schumacher has calculations showing that "The earth is operating very close to its maximum possible temperature."

Updated and corrected: FYI: ACORN is now COI, sort of

In a transparent attempt to confuse and distract, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has changed its name to “Community Organizations International.” No more bad news about ACORN! And if you hear some, well, it's old news. There is no more ACORN! ACORN does not exist any more! Move on, move on! Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Update: If there is no ACORN, that certainly explains why Rep. Conyers no longer plans to investigate it. More. "Powers that be?"

Update: The confusion and distraction started working on me right away. As Blake points out in the comments, there's more than one ACORN. This is "ACORN International" doing the name-changing. Your regular domestic ACORN will carry on as usual. And that was the group Rep. Conyers was going to investigate.

When Edward met Buffy

Edward Cullen and Buffy Summers, that is. Video.

Roger L. Simon on Walter Duranty

At PJTV. Part 2 of a series on the NY Times.

Nothing deliberate about Obama's speed

I have mentioned several times here that Obama is moving his programs as fast as he possibly can, to get them through before opposition can muster. Here is Neo-neocon, with an excellent group of commenters, on this topic: Captain Obama: full speed ahead. Gramsci is mentioned in the comments, with a link to the same Eric S. Raymond post that I linked a while back, Gramscian damage.

So many have forgotten, or never learned, that the level of peace, prosperity, and, particularly, freedom, that we in the US enjoy, is not the natural condition of humanity. It's not a ground state, to which we will revert if something goes wrong. It's metastable and dynamic, and enormous changes at the last minute, undertaken with little consideration, are more likely to wreck it than to enhance it. In every discussion of global warming, climate change, or whatever it's called today, lefties invoke the "precautionary principle." They never mention it when the subject is economics.

And from Van der Leun: Checklist for the Next 4 Years. Hyperbole? Humor? History will answer.

Handy rot-13 bookmarklet

Picked this up at Making Light some years back.

javascript:inText=window.getSelection()+'';if(inText=='')%7Bvoid(inText=prompt('Phrase...','')) %7D;if(!inText)%7BoutText='No%20text%20selected'%7Delse%7BoutText='';for(i=0;i%3CinText.length;i++) %7Bt=inText.charCodeAt(i);if((t%3E64&&t%3C78)%7C%7C(t%3E96&&t%3C110))%7Bt+=13%7Delse%7Bif ((t%3E77&&t%3C91)%7C%7C(t%3E109&&t%3C123))%7Bt-=13%7D%7DoutText+=String.fromCharCode(t)%7D%7Dalert(outText)

That's all one line.

Make a new bookmark and paste that in for the location. When you come across rot-13 text, select it, then click the bookmark. The decoded text shows up in one of those little javascript boxes. Try it on this: "Qevax hc, rirelobql. Gb gur arj cnegare naq gur byq barf. Jr fvzcyl unir gb trg n fxvashy gb fgnaq gung Xvnevna yhapurba." And of course it works the other way round, as well.

CPSIA even more unneeded than previously thought

Katherine Mangu-Ward at Hit & Run:

Mattel Gets Fined for Lead Toys, Three Years and One Terrible Law Too Late

… After years of hullabaloo, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has finally gotten around to levying a $2.3 million fine against Mattel and Fisher-Price for violating a perfectly good law that went into effect in 1978. That law, of course, already banned all of the stuff that freaked people out in 2007.

Some of the commenters get a little emotional, by which I mean, language warning! A good comment from Hazel Meade: "We've got so many laws and regulations on the books that it's easier for the political class to simply pass new ones than it is to figure out what the old ones are." Sure looks that way.

Freeman Dyson speaks on climate modeling ...

… in a recent interview: Freeman Dyson Takes On the Climate Establishment. Jerry Pournelle says this is important.

The interviewer is Michael Lemonick, not a scientist but a science journalist and teacher of science journalism. Judging from his latest at the same site, As Effects of Warming Grow, U.N. Report is Quickly Dated, he is firmly in the alarmist camp.

The whole interview is available at the site as a streaming sound file, which reveals that the transcript is heavily edited, with some sections transposed, some just cut. For instance, here is my transcription of what was said during the ellipsis between "That’s the crucial point: I don’t see the evidence..." and "And why should you imagine that the climate of the 18th century —"

Dyson: That's the crucial point: I don't see the evidence. I mean, about the Sahara, which is something they never discuss, which to me is one of the strong points that — I don't know if you're familiar with that —

Lemonick: No I'm not.

Dyson: Anyway, six thousand years ago, we know, absolutely for sure, there were people in the central Sahara drawing paintings on the rocks, and lots of them. There are lots of these paintings. They show people with herds of animals, giraffes and cows and such, apparently living there quite happily. We know at the same time, six thousand years ago, that there were forests in the north of Russia, much further north than they are today, so the climate was definitely warmer. There probably was ice-free Arctic. We don't know that for sure. It's very likely, since the climate was warmer, it's quite likely that the ocean was ice-free. What we do know for sure is there were trees in the valleys in Switzerland underneath where there are glaciers today. So the glaciers were even smaller then than they are now. So anyway, you put that all together, it implies that six thousand years ago there was a much warmer climate in the North, and there was a very much pleasanter climate in Africa. That seems to me to be a very strong argument that a warmer climate may be good for us. I can't imagine why you'd want to keep the Sahara a desert.

Lemonick: Right.

Dyson: So anyway, I mean, nobody ever discusses that.

Lemonick: I would guess the argument would be that if the Sahara became fertile again, or had a lot of rain again, and if Siberia became more hospitable, and Greenland became more hospitable, other changes might well — that you couldn't necessarily twist that dial without doing something else over here, because it's all interconnected, and that it's plausible at least that some of those changes could be very harmful to large numbers of people, so

Dyson: Yeah, that's possible, that certainly is possible, but it's pure speculation. Nobody knows. And why you should imagine that the climate of the 18th century, or whatever it is, what they call pre-industrial climate, is somehow the best possible, I can't imagine.

No idea why that would have been omitted. Why would anyone want to keep the Sahara a desert? Mr. Gore, speak up please.

Here earlier: Freeman Dyson on scientific attitudes toward "global warming."

Nuclear power for some

In the Jerusalem Post, May 21:

Obama OKs nuclear deal with United Arab Emirates

President Barack Obama agreed Wednesday to share US nuclear power technology with the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, giving his consent to a deal signed in the final days of George W. Bush's administration.

The pact now goes to Congress, which will have 90 days to amend or reject it.

The agreement creates a legal framework for the US to transfer sensitive nuclear items to the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven Middle Eastern states that wants nuclear power to satisfy growing demand for electricity.

Although flush with oil, the emirates imports 60 percent of the natural gas they use to generate electricity. The United Arab Emerates wants to break its dependence on outside sources for its energy needs and settled on nuclear power as the best option.

But the new head of the FERC says that here in the US we can make do with wind and solar.

At the art show

But is it art? If the committee says so.

Keeping it simple

I've had this book on my "one of these days" list for years, now. Coming across this just moved it a little closer to the top.

Metafilter: What are the simple concepts that have most helped you understand the world?

Via Jaltcoh, via Althouse.

Counterblaste

A big book, if you want it. Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

Mini-review at Power Line. The Amazon page has a few more reviews, all positive: 5 reviews, 5 stars each, that's nicely symmetrical. I suspect the usual battle of the reviewers will break out any time now. $154 for the paperback, which at this writing is out of stock anyway, but free for the reading or downloading at the NIPCC website. (Does any one else want to pronounce that "Nipsey?" So of course the first, Inter-Governmental IPCC would be "Ipsey," as in "Ipse dixit," or "Ipsy-Wipsy Institute.")

Just like old times

The State Department is still infested with spies. Communist spies, at that. Of course, they have to work cheap, now.

The Justice Department charged Friday that a former State Department analyst and his wife worked as spies for Cuba for nearly 30 years, using a short-wave radio to pass on secret diplomatic information to their Cuban handlers. Officials said the couple, Walter K. Myers, 72, and Gwendolyn S. Myers, 71, received little in the way of compensation from the Cubans except for the short-wave radio and some travel expenses. Rather, the officials said, the couple appears to have been driven by their strong affinity for Cuba and their bitterness toward “American imperialism.”

What, no cigars or rum? Communists do tend to be puritanical. Venona, Mitrokhin, nothing new here. This calls for an investigation into hiring and vetting, and a through screening of the remaining employees and appointees. Were I a betting man, I'd bet that we will not see one.

Spies, they're like cockroaches — where you find one, there are probably more that you did not find. As I said somewhere else a while ago, it's not too hard to confuse the vigilance that is necessary to maintain a country's — that would be our country's — security with an unseemly paranoia that does not go well with the nice clothes, polite talk and cucumber sandwiches.

CWCID (as TigerHawk would say) to Escort81, at TigerHawk's place, who links to this at Yahoo news.

More at Washington Post. They sound like standard-model academic lefties, thoroughly Gramsciated and demoralized*, like their neighbors. Good educations, elite backgrounds, accustomed for so long to the benefits of freedom and prosperity that they came to take those things for granted.

* Not demoralized in the usual sense of lacking morale, but in the sense of lacking a moral compass. To one with no compass, all directions are the same; to one with no moral compass, moral equivalence is the background of reasoning. The technical term used in this description of how a society is "demoralized."

Possible good news on light bulbs

Maybe we'll get to keep our incandescents after all.

An ultra-powerful laser can turn regular incandescent light bulbs into power-sippers, say optics researchers at the University of Rochester. The process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb while remaining far cheaper and radiating a more pleasant light than a fluorescent bulb can.

Lasers, how did we ever get along without them?

Via The Register, via Jerry Pournelle's mail. Here earlier: Energy policy: who let the loons out?

Radio waves erase pre-cancer cells in esophagus

How long before this becomes widely available? From Glenn Reynolds, a short item at PhysOrg:

In a study published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, lead authors at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill report that the technology completely wiped out pre-cancerous cells in 90.5 percent of patients with Barrett's esophagus who underwent the procedure. Only 1.2 percent of patients went on to develop cancer a year later.

Among patients who got a sham procedure, 9.3 percent developed cancer.

Tough for the sham patients.

Trivia time

Who said, "If you can write, get work." ?

Hemingway's mom?

It's an honest question. I don't know the answer, though I once did. It sounds kind of Dorothy Parker-ish. Maybe it was Dorothy Parker's mom. I feel so lost when Google does not have the answer, or more likely several thousand answers.

And what's the right way to punctuate a sentence like that?

"Dreams with Sharp Teeth"

That's the name of a biographical documentary film on and by Harlan Ellison. I just caught it on the Sundance Channel, and it will be shown a few more times in the coming week. The DVD will be released on May 29th. I would imagine the point of the multiple showings is to stir up some interest in the DVD. It worked; I have pre-ordered it from Amazon. It looks like there are enough extras on the DVD to make it worthwhile (as opposed to just saving the main film on the DVR). Full list at the Amazon page.

Plenty of Ellison talking; some partial readings; archive film of old interviews and appearances. Reminiscences of youth in Ohio, being a target of bullies. He describes how a child cannot explain the irrational to an adult: but there is no logic to bullies picking on someone. "Why you? Well, why in fact not me?" And the awful feeling, "like an icicle jammed into my chest," when his mother said, after one such attack, "You must have said something to get them angry." An early exposure to the problem of evil, and the futility of attempting to rationalize it.

All this and a lovely yet unobtrusive score, composed and performed by Richard Thompson on acoustic guitar, with some multitracking.

Update: Michael Totten, posting at Instapundit, has linked to an excerpt on YouTube. There are more.

Climate-Financial-Regulatory complex

At Climate Hell, Steven Milloy lays out a corrupt pattern of conflicts of interest.

President Obama’s so-called Economic Recovery Advisory Board held its first quarterly meeting today — it was a spectacle of the sort of self-dealing and corruption that we may rightly expect to become routine if cap-and-trade legislation passes.

After the meeting, CNBC’s Becky Quick interviewed ERAB board member John Doerr, head of the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins — that’s right, the very same Kleiner Perkins that has invested more than $1 billion in 40 cap-and-trade-dependent business ventures and that has Al Gore as a partner.

Doerr said that ERAB talked about the need for:
» Green technologies;
» Cap-and-trade; and
» Rewarding electric utilities for selling less electricity.

Doerr also told Quick that an EPA analysis showed that cap-and-trade would cost Americans less than $100 per year. (LOL!)

But we have no reason to believe that Doerr wouldn’t say and do absolutely anything to help ram through cap-and-trade legislation that would enable his firm to steal billions of dollars from consumers and taxpayers through bogus Al Gore-endorsed “green technologies.”

Names are named, interests are disclosed.

So of the 16 members of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, only one (Feldstein) opposes cap-and-trade. At least six (Immelt, Owens, Doerr, Ferguson, Wolf, Phillips) expect direct financial benefits from cap-and-trade. The remaining members are either Obama supporters/employees or union representatives. Taxpayers, consumers and non-rent-seeking businesses have been left out in the cold.

Thanks to Planet Gore. And see below, Lomborg on Climate-Industrial Complex.

Lomborg on Climate-Industrial Complex

Bjørn Lomborg had a piece in the WSJ last week that made some important points.

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers -- the Copenhagen Climate Council -- hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.

The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.

Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking." …

The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else.

Several pages of comments at Opinion Journal Forum.

This by way of Jerry Pournelle, who says:

The Climate Industrial Complex is the most dangerous organization in the world, and in my judgment is up there with Fascism and Marxism as dangers to Western Civilization. Those latter two are still around and still a danger -- indeed, some Greens use tactics they could well have learned from the Brown, Black, and Red terrors; and note that most of the Climate Industrial Complex program (which will transfer a trillion dollars and more to the Greens without any noticeable benefit to the civilization) is also the agenda of powerful factions of the US Congress and the Administration. It is hard to discern what Obama really believes, but he appears to be a convert to the "consensus".

Nature isn't cooperating and it's getting harder and harder to support parts of the "Climate Change" belief system, but the movement is so far advanced that it may not matter. When Roosevelt tried to end The Great Depression, one of his tools was TVA and the generation of energy. Without lower energy costs we will not climb out of our depression. It is important to make it clear that the debate is not over, there is no real scientific consensus on man-caused global warming, and destroying the economy in order to reduce CO2 output in the United States is all cost with almost no benefit. That debate must continue; and you may be certain, absolutely certain, that those who try to keep this a debate will be labeled "deniers" and denigrated as fools.

Typical of the effluent from Copenhagen is this from China:

China tells rich nations to cut emissions by 40 percent

BEIJING (Reuters) - Rich nations should cut their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels as part of a new global climate change pact, China said on Thursday, spelling out its stance ahead of negotiations.

The pact must ensure wealthy nations "take on quantified targets to drastically reduce emissions," said the statement, issued by the National Development and Reform Commission (www.ndrc.gov.cn), which steers Chinese climate change policy.

Developed countries should also give 0.5 to 1.0 percent of their annual economic worth to help other nations cope with global warming and curtail greenhouse gas emissions, China said in the document, laying down demands for a conference in Copenhagen in December meant to seal a new climate change pact.

Might as well ask for the moon even if all they want is a little piece of the green cheese. But with the watermelons currently in the government, they are likely to get all that and more. Somebody said, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact." But a treaty demanding a 40% reduction in carbon output, that is a suicide pact.

Al Gore is there, of course, sounding a Billy Mays-like note of urgency. "Buy now! Supplies are limited!" Actual quote:

“We have to do it this year. Not next year. This year,” Mr. Gore said. “The clock is ticking, because Mother Nature does not do bailouts.”

See what I mean? They want to ram this through before cooler heads (Hah! Cooler!) have a chance to get into the discussion.

Freedom of speech in Ireland ...

… is in the same kind of danger that it faces in Canada. Remember the hearings held by the Human Rights Tribunals against Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant last year, briefly mentioned here at the time, now recounted in Levant's book Shakedown.

Now Mark Steyn draws our attention to a similar case in Ireland, in a Corner post titled Cockles and Muzzles.

Kevin Myers, my old comrade from my Irish Times and Sunday Telegraph days, is undergoing an experience that sounds very familiar to yours truly.

Last year he wrote a column about Africa dissenting from the approved line that there's nothing wrong with the place that can't be solved by tossing a few more gazillion dollars into the dictators' Swiss bank accounts. It was a strong column and he might reasonably have expected an avalanche of outraged letters to the editor. Instead:

The National Migrant Council reported me to An Garda Siochana [that's Oirish for "the coppers"], demanding a criminal prosecution for incitement to hatred, with a no-jury court, and four years imprisonment the possible outcome. Hans Zomer of Dochas reported me to the National Press Council, on numerous grounds.

It is a sad day indeed when to speak your mind is to risk the wrath of the law, aided by the State-backed auxiliary bodies of intellectual conformism...

Tell me about it. What's at issue here is a sustained attempt to criminalize opinion — or, at any rate, opinion which dissents from liberal dinner-party orthodoxy.

RTWT.