A ray of hope for incandescents

A few brave congress persons have introduced a bill to repeal the incandescent light bulb ban. Powerline:

Representatives Joe Barton, Michael Burgess, and Marsha Blackburn have just introduced the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act (or BULB). The legislation would repeal the de facto ban on the incandescent light bulb contained in Subtitle B of Title III of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

It's H.R. 6144, for those who care about that sort of thing.

There is some vaguely scientific sounding noise being made in certain quarters about health hazards of compact fluorescent bulbs. For some reason that I don't understand, most of it seems to be in the form of videos rather than articles. A number of these are assembled for your viewing pleasure at CFL Impact.

I find it offensive that the ban has no justification other than that incandescents are inefficient. That's a matter of one's perspective. A CFL is terribly inefficient, in fact downright ineffective, in an Easy-Bake oven. And since when has mere inefficiency been a reason for legislation to outlaw anything? If something is inefficient enough, people will stop buying it. Non-radial tires have just about disappeared, without ever being banned. For instance. Even though radials are more expensive. The better product naturally supplants the worse. Yet bias-ply tires are still available, if you want them.

Now that there have been two failed attempts to repeal the 1099 madness in the health care bill, I do not have much hope for this first attempt to repeal another piece of lunacy. But hope springs eternal, I suppose. Hope for a change in direction. Yes, I'll have a cup of tea, thanks.

Added: Peg at "what if?" appreciates her incandescents.

Doctor Zero cuts through the claptrap: "No more control"

Everyone who gets elected thinks he or she is smart enough to run the system. In a free market, nobody runs the system. If somebody is running the system, it's not a free market. Doctor Zero at Hot Air:

Political control is what’s killing us. It is expressed in hundreds of ways: high tax rates with carefully tailored exceptions, massive bailouts, laws rigged to favor government-controlled industries, restrictions on resource development, and a vast poppy field of subsidies and penalties. The Democrats have added thousands of pages of fabulously expensive legislation since Obama took office. Two messages echo through those pages: Obey and be rewarded. Resist and be punished.

Hands off!

Can Republicans run on light bulbs?

An issue for the election coming up. Do people even know this is coming? I wonder how many do.

Discussion at Althouse, occasioned by the closing of GE's last US light bulb factory.

Obama's anti-colonial inspiration

Thanks to Neo-neocon, an important article by Dinesh D'Souza, How Obama Thinks.

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

This piece is a must-read.

Update: D'Souza talks about it some more.

"The Gravestone Carver"

John Benson, stonecarver, calligrapher, sculptor, singer, fiddler, friend, narrates a short video about himself and his work.

The stone-carving shop in the video is the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island.

John will be showing some of his work at Imago Gallery in Warren, Rhode Island, starting today, August 27.

Update, Sept 29: John's son, Nick Benson, who has run the John Stevens Shop since John retired a decade or so ago, has been named a MacArthur Fellow. He speaks about it in this video.

It seems I share a birthday ...

… with a poet. I have mentioned Gerard Manley Hopkins here before. For an appreciation, and another poem, go visit Sheila O'Malley. You won't regret it.

Seen on a hospital wall

Tomorrow is not promised us
So let us take today
And make the very most of it
The once we pass this way.

Just speak aloud the kindly thought
And do the kindly deed
And try to see and understand
Some other creature's need.

Tomorrow is not promised us
Nor any other day
So let us make the most of it
The once we pass this way.

On the wall of Four South at Wayne Memorial in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. There was no author or title given.

James Cameron thinks I'm a swine

Good to know, I guess.

Apparently Cameron invited a couple of AGW skeptics (and Andrew Breitbart) to debate with him on the topic of AGW, at an event called the American Renewable Energy Summit. At the last moment he rescinded the invitations.

Meanwhile, Cameron attended the event on Sunday and used the platform to say of those who question man-made global warming: “I think they are swine."

Insulting empty chairs is always a good debating strategy. Sharon Waxman has the story. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Neo-neocon is keeping a sharp eye on Obama

His grandiosity: Still not getting it about Obama.

His racial dog-whistling: Obama the great bamboozler.

"You were doing it wrong"

That's the title of a thread at AskMetafilter that has been keeping me entertained for days. The initial question:

What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along?

"Crap, I've been doing it wrong." We've all had those sudden epiphanies where we realize we've been doing something incorrectly, ineffectively or just suboptimally our whole lives, in domains from handicraft to human relations to technical stuff to personal grooming. What have you spent large portions of your life doing wrong?

The first answer: "Tying my shoes." Many people have problems with words such as segue and epitome. Another answer up near the top is "It took me until adulthood to realize that courage, tenacity, and hard work get you a lot farther than plain old smartness." So there are all kinds of things posted here. I was pleased to discover howjsay dot com, an English dictionary of pronunciations. Just pronunciations, no definitions, and it is English, so "balmy" is pronounced as "barmy," and so forth. Another discovery would be this video, demonstrating how to tell when the pan is hot enough.



That video is extracted from a post at Houseboat Eats which explains the whole thing much more fully.

Then there's this mirror trick:

Mirrors are a recurring theme in the thread.

I learned of this from Prof. Althouse, who learned of it from her son John Althouse Cohen.

Metafilter mods are not pleased with the thread and might have killed it, if they had not been distracted, as is revealed in another thread called Doing it right.

Lesson in maintenance

I've heard it said that one can save money by buying good stuff and taking care of it. Case in point: Irv Gordon, who recently turned 2,800,000 miles on his 1966 Volvo P1800.

In Wired:

Irv Gordon has some advice for keeping your car running forever: Follow the factory service manual, replace worn or broken parts immediately and don’t let anyone else drive your car.

Some say, "Run Your Car Into The Ground: It's Cheaper" when what they mean is that if you don't have to buy a car every few years, but can just do maintenance on the one you already have, you'll save money. You don't actually have to run it into the ground, if you can manage to keep it above the ground.

Here's another article about Irv Gordon and his Volvo, with emphasis on the numbers: Irv Gordon's Volvo Goes Metric at Four Million. For instance:

Four million kilometers is 2,485,484 miles, or put in a different way, Irv and his trusty Volvo P1800 have traveled the equivalent of ...

-  Almost 100 times around the world (via the equator).
-  Nearly five round-trips to the moon.
-  1,111.111* completions of the Tour de France (*recurring).
-  7,104 swims across the English Channel.
-  More than 114 Great Races (New York to Paris).

Impressive!

Via AoS HQ. I had a '64 Volvo 122-S Amazon for a while. (Purchased used, and fairly beat-up.) I got a fair amount of miles out of it. I don't know how many, because the speedometer cable broke the first or second year I had it, and I never repaired it. The Wikipedia articles on these cars told me things I had not already known: P1800, 122-S.

Happy motoring, Irv Gordon!

The ruling class are not the right people

But they are, you know, "the right people," as determined by themselves. The Ivy degrees, the social connections, the families that intermarry. Angelo M. Codevilla describes some of what's going on in America's Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution. Jerry Pournelle says the article is important, and goes on to say,

There have always been elites in America, and there have always been local ruling classes and aristocracies; but it is only comparatively recently that there has been "a ruling class" of the kind we have now. Codevilla traces its development and some of the consequences.

This development was predictable and predicted. The authors of The Bell Curve understood the phenomenon, and postulated some of the causes; of course the development of the ruling class was well under way when The Bell Curve was published, and interestingly enough the establishment, although created in large part by the process described in The Bell Curve, soundly and roundly rejected the book, its principles. and everything about it. That's because the authors of The Bell Curve were not part of the ruling class and never could be; and besides, part of their thesis was wrong. The US hasn't become a meritocracy; but the pretense of creating one did bring together the elements of the ruling class.

Some of this development was, if not predicted, at least strongly implied in some of my earlier papers on The Voodoo Sciences, all written long before the current crisis or indeed before "the global warming consensus." And of course there's The Iron Law. Codevilla's thesis isn't all that new (nor does he claim it to be) but this presentation is done well. It's particularly relevant on what has to be done.

The main thesis of Codevilla's article is that America's majority -- an overwhelming majority -- is not represented by the Ruling Class and is increasingly unhappy with it -- and the remedy is not merely turning the Democrats out in November. The storm clouds are gathering.

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg's tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences "undecided," "none of the above," or "tea party," these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well.

Sooner or later, well or badly, [the national] majority's demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace's taunt "there ain't a dime's worth of difference" between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans' conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.

Codevilla also agues that the ruling class is busily dumbing itself down. Having been created in theory as a meritocracy, it never really was that, and is less so now than ever. I might note that the collapse of the public school system works toward that end. We've discussed this in previous essays, and coincidentally there's relevant mail today. As to the consequences:

Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the American people's energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith's characterization of America as "private wealth amidst public squalor" (The Affluent Society, 1958) has ever encapsulated our best and brightest's complaint: left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary to use energy to transport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat as well as other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it. Americans think it justice to spend the money they earn to satisfy their private desires even though the ruling class knows that justice lies in improving the community and the planet. The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the ruling class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be improved (and, yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows).

There's a lot more, some of which you will have encountered here, such as Adorno's influential book that few have ever heard of, and other stuff from the Voodoo sciences, or our discussions of education.

The question is, what to do about it. A large majority of Americans rejects the current ruling class. Codevilla (who came to America from Italy unable to speak English as a youngster, and was thoroughly assimilated by the time he was a graduate student) summarizes the task for Americans this way:

[The] greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough.

Amen.

Ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are signs that the rulers fear and mistrust the people. The occasional victory for liberty, e.g. the Heller case, shines like a lantern in the darkness. And of course all the usual ruling class suspects are trying to extinguish that.

The story of John Kerry's failed attempt to dodge some Massachusetts taxes on his boat nicely illustrates the point that the ruling class is not a meritocracy. It only pretends to be one. Glenn Reynolds says:

TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE (CONT’D): Sen. John Kerry Docks Luxury Yacht In Rhode Island To Avoid High Massachusetts Taxes. A reader calls it “not-so-swift” boating. Yeah, you have to be grateful for John Kerry, who illustrates the problems with his class so well, and who isn’t bright enough to hide it.

UPDATE: Check out the Boston Herald front page, which is giving it the full Thurston Howell treatment.

There's more at the WBZ-TV website, with videos and comments. Kerry is doing that thing Obama does, where he says "It's not an issue." and expects that all who hear will obey.

By the way: in case you have not clicked those links yet, that's a $7 million yacht, making the Senator liable for close to half a million dollars in Massachusetts use tax. Will he pay the $70,000 annual property excise? I suspect not.

I wonder why a Massachusetts Senator would have a yacht designed in Rhode Island and built in New Zealand? Are there no yacht builders in Massachusetts or any nearby states? Has he been in Washington so long that he has forgotten that seven million dollars might make a difference to the economy of the state he represents? Represents in some sense. Local boosterism is so déclassé, isn't it. And it's all about the class. Ruling class, that is.

Tattoo news

At Reason. Katherine Mangu-Ward seems to have a series going on about

underworld tattoos—those useful inkblots that indicate to those in the know who you were in prison with, and why, and what kind of employment you might be seeking, all without the trouble of taking out an ad in the classified section.

Follow up with mad scientists.

Case to watch: Ike Brown

J. Christian Adams is writing about this case at PJ Media. How will the DOJ deal with this one?

This story hails from rural east Mississippi: majority black Noxubee County is home to Ike Brown, one of the most lawless purveyors of racial discrimination the nation has seen in decades. (I have written in greater detail about the racially motivated lawlessness Brown used to victimize minority white voters in the county.) Brown canceled ballots cast by white voters. He stuffed the ballot box with illegal ballots supporting his preferred black candidates. He deployed teams of notaries to roam the countryside and mark absentee ballots instead of voters. He allowed forced assistance in the voting booth, to the detriment of white voters. He threatened 174 white voters by declaring that if they tried to participate in an election, he might challenge them and not let them vote. He publicized the 174 names.

[…]

Brown’s overall behavior was so outrageous that the court stripped him of all authority to run elections until 2012, and gave the power to a former justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court as a special administrator. The remedy was unprecedented, but upheld on appeal because of the brazen lawlessness of Ike Brown.

Fast forward to 2010, to the Eric Holder Justice Department.

Every change in voting in Mississippi must be submitted for approval to the DOJ voting section — where I worked for five years — under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 gives the DOJ power to object to any change motivated by a discriminatory racial intent or with a discriminatory racial effect in nine states and portions of seven. Changes to the law in 2006 made it clear that any discrimination would suffice to trigger an objection under the act.

Right now, the Holder Justice Department has a submission from Ike Brown to allow him to do precisely the same thing he tried in 2003 — prevent people from voting based on their party loyalties.

The Department must decide this week if white victims are worth protecting, by imposing an objection to the same behavior a federal court has already ruled was motivated by an illegal racial intent. If the races were reversed in this submission, there is zero doubt the DOJ would object to the proposal.

Following up:

On July 12, it silently sent a “no determination” letter, effectively a cop-out against using Section 5 to protect the white minority in Noxubee County. I am told by a news outlet that the supposedly transparent administration played hide the ball for almost 24 hours, not providing the letter to the public.

There’s more. On July 13, it filed a motion to extend for a few years a remedy in the civil court case the Bush administration brought in 2005 and won in 2007. The order seeks to extend the remedy until after the next presidential election. This means the Department will never have to roll up their sleeves and monitor what Ike Brown, their political friend, is doing in Noxubee.

Amazingly, the Department is also seeking an order from the federal court to prevent Ike Brown, the discriminator, from making any more inconvenient submissions to the Obama Justice Department which might reveal the hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Simply put, they are asking the court to prohibit Brown from sending any more submissions under Section 5. Not only would this go beyond the powers of the court to order, it is a naked play to avoid facing the issue of unequal enforcement for the remainder of the first, and maybe last, term of the Obama administration. If Brown can’t file submissions to the DOJ, the DOJ won’t have to take the side of the white victims. This is unnecessary and shamefully transparent.

We'll see what happens.

Franken-Coleman recount continues

Sort of. Fox News:

The six-month election recount that turned former "Saturday Night Live" comedian Al Franken into a U.S. senator may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally in Minnesota's Twin Cities.

That's the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes -- fewer votes than the number of felons whose illegal ballots were counted, according to Minnesota Majority's newly released study, which matched publicly available conviction lists with voting records.

Via Althouse.

That whole thing was so transparently crooked ... The Democrats are utterly without shame at this point. Cash in the freezer, ballots in the trunk of the car, who cares.

Just like old times: Russians still spying

Ron Radosh at PJ Media:

It seems that some things never change. A few moments ago, this breaking story came in from the website of the New York Times. It seems, as this early report informs us, that ten Americans have been arrested for spying on behalf of Putin’s new Russia.

Via Reynolds.

Refined, erudite, nuanced BS at NY Times

J.M. Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City, goes on at considerable length to demonstrate that he has no idea what the Tea Party people are talking about, but he thinks they are just awful! Angry! Scary!

A type specimen of academic bafflegab. Many of the commenters say they agree with him, and herein lies the danger of this kind of claptrap. Bernstein presents his strawman in so persuasive a way that those leaning in his direction feel that they have been provided with logical, intellectual proof for the gut feelings they already had.

Part 1: The Very Angry Tea Party

Part 2: The Usefulness of Anger: A Response

Hey there, Professor Bernstein: who is it that's angry?



Tea Party people are upset about the spending. (This graphic is old; numbers are much bigger now, with Obamacare in the mix.)



Democrats are angry that anyone dares question their authoritah.

Instapundit:

ALEX LIGHTMAN ON FACEBOOK: “After researching the issue carefully and interviewing people in a position to know, I can now reveal that the current primary purpose of the United State government is to bankrupt the United States. It comes as a relief to know this. So many things now make sense.” Least hypothesis, and all that.

Doing everything possible to allow the oil blowout in the Gulf to go on fits right in with that. Golf on, Obama.

USA invaded, surrenders

Gateway Pundit:

The federal government is now telling American citizens to stay out of three southern Arizona counties.
It is too dangerous because of armed smugglers from Mexico.

Is anyone answering the phone at "Homeland Security?"

Thanks to commenter njartist49 at Neo-Neocon's place. Neo's post is "How hard can it be to be a competent president?" Read the whole thing.

Nuke the Gulf

See the update to the preceding post.

Perspective on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Oil has been spilling for 45 days. The estimated rate is between 500,000 and 1,000,000 gallons per day. That's a lot of oil. (And a pretty loose estimate.) So, that's somewhere between 22.5 million and 45 million gallons so far. Horrifying!

But ten times as much oil was deliberately spilled from Kuwaiti wells by retreating Iraqi forces in the 1991 Gulf War. Ixtoc I spilled 140 million gallons in 1979. The collision between Atlantic Empress and Aegean Captain, also in 1979, spilled nearly ninety million gallons. Those figures are taken from a slideshow at Popular Mechanics: 10 Biggest Oil Spills in History.

Meanwhile, in Alabama,

Gov. Bob Riley complained that there are hundreds of private boats ready to get out in the waters with skimmers to try to protect the shoreline from oil. But they're waiting on authorization from the U.S. Coast Guard to be able to do so.

And in the White House, a panicky Obama is shutting down much of the industry in the Gulf. He has no idea of what to do, but knows that he must be seen to be doing something, and if he can do something that will damage the economy even further, then that's the way he will go.

A dyspeptic observer might say: Change!… Bush Restored the Iraqi Marshes – Obama Destroyed the US Marshes.

On a personal note, I recall that when I was a kid in the 1950's, a visit to the beach always entailed removal of black stuff from the feet. Kerosene was the usual solvent. We didn't have sunblock in those days, either, so fun in the sun was always followed by painful peeling sunburn and tarry feet. We loved it anyway.

Update: 3 brilliant comments by Bruce Hayden at Althouse. Start with this one.

Another update: Nuke it. Dan Foster at NRO:

It was September of 1966, and gas was gushing uncontrollably from the wells in the Bukhara province of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. But the Reds, at the height of their industrial might, had a novel solution. They drilled nearly four miles into the sand and rock of the Kyzyl Kum Desert, and lowered a 30-kiloton nuclear warhead — more than half-again as large as “Little Boy,” the crude uranium bomb dropped over Hiroshima — to the depths beneath the wellhead. With the pull of a lever, a fistful of plutonium was introduced to itself under enormous pressure, setting off the chain reaction that starts with E = MC² and ends in Kaboom! The ensuing blast collapsed the drill channel in on itself, sealing off the well.

The Soviets repeated the trick four times between 1966 and 1979, using payloads as large as 60 kilotons to choke hydrocarbon leaks. Now, as the Obama administration stares into the abyss of the Deepwater Horizon spill, and a slicker of sweet, medium crude blankets the Gulf of Mexico, slouching its way toward American beaches and wetlands, Russia’s newspaper of record is calling on the president to consider this literal “nuclear option.”

In the NYT: Nuclear Option on Gulf Oil Spill? No Way, U.S. Says. Is it a crisis, or not? We can do some things, but we'll have to see environmental impact statements for those berms, and we can't have just anyone going out in boats with skimmers. Skimmer skippers and crew must be properly trained. That could take months.

More from Foster, at The Corner:

a properly-executed 20-30 kiloton detonation beneath a solid layer of impermeable rock would let virtually no fallout escape into the waters of the Gulf. I am surprised that Green, like Wonkette, is treating one itty-bitty A-bomb as Vishnu, Destroyer of Worlds. Bikini Atoll, which was nuked to the high heavens in the 40s and 50s (twenty times, all told) has some radioactive coconuts to be sure, but is even as we speak safely inhabitable, and the waters around it are no worse for wear. In the Gulf case, BP has a detailed knowledge of the stratigraphic situation down there, and already has two ideal delivery sites in the form of the relief wells. The U.S. government has 60-plus years expertise in sub-surface nuclear detonations. Put all that together and this isn't "crazy." This is workable.

I wonder if the nuclear option is off the table because our nuclear weapons have not been maintained. They have not been tested in decades. Who's to know? Maybe none of them work any more, and Deepwater Horizon is calling our bluff.

Generation gap

Evil mutant rises from the dead ...

… to threaten industry and prosperity. First, it was Waxman-Markey; then it was Boxer-Kerry; now it's Kerry-Lieberman; but it's all cap 'n' trade.



Left to right, Kerry, Obama, Lieberman. Al Gore is out of the frame.

If it passes, it will be the American economy that's the zombie. But the Chicago Carbon Exchange will be doing fine.

Monorail dog

While looking for LOLcats for the preceding post, I came across this:



which reminds me of someone.

Not opposed to immigration ...

... opposed to crime. Illegal immigration is illegal. Even LOLcats can do tautologies. Sneaky cat is sneaky:



Illegal alien is illegal. It's not hard to understand. I'm old enough to remember when legal aliens were required to register at the Post Office annually.

Jan Brewer tells Obama that it's no laughing matter:



We are unwilling to enforce our own immigration laws. The Mexican government has much stricter immigration laws, which they enforce. J. Michael Waller in 2006: Mexico's Immigration Law: Let's Try It Here at Home.

Twitter phishing on the phone

Cory Doctorow thought he had all his ducks in a row.

Even so.

Via Jerry Pournelle's mail.