Historical origin of Danny Boy

For St. Patrick's Day, The Origin of Danny Boy. Briefly: an ancient Irish air, transcribed from the playing of a blind fiddler, was found by a lawyer/songwriter to match a lyric already written; the result endures. At greater length, at the link. Thanks (indirectly) to The Phantom at A Tangled Web.

Geography survives

A while back, I wrote this:

It's highly likely that there will be an island off the shore of France for a good long time to come, but it's looking less likely all the time that there will always be an England.

Today, Mark Steyn posts at The Corner:

In The Wall Street Journal, Michael Boskin writes:

Mr. Obama's $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents — from George Washington to George W. Bush — combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.

What emerges from such a blueprint will not be America. The United States will survive as a geographical designation, a collection of zip codes, but what goes on within them will be a Euro-Canadian form of societal arrangement (I write more on this in the new NR, out today, I do believe).

Go read the rest.

While I'm on this topic, blake at The Bit Maelstrom has put up a couple of beauties in the last week, "Everything You Need To Know About Socialism...and Communism" for one, "An Observation Regarding Free Markets And Socialism" for another. Much smarter and pleasanter reading than anything you'll find around here. Also, he uses complete sentences. Not these crappy little fragments. (But I got such a good deal on them!)

For something very smart indeed, but less pleasant, Charles Krauthammer: "The Great Non Sequitur: The Sleight of Hand Behind Obama's Agenda." Thanks to commenter rhhardin in today's hot Althouse thread, "Never waste a good crisis..."

Arrows, daggers, whatever it takes

A little while ago, this:

Browner appointment is "an arrow aimed at the heart of the American economy"

Now, this:

Cap-and-trade plan will sink Michigan

President Barack Obama's proposed cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gas emissions is a giant economic dagger aimed at the nation's heartland -- particularly Michigan. It is a multibillion-dollar tax hike on everything that Michigan does, including making things, driving cars and burning coal.…

The goal, according to the president's budget outline, is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide to 14 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

Doing so will drive up the cost of nearly everything and will amount to a major tax increase for American consumers.

But Gaia will be happy.

Keeping an old smear alive

Jim Macdonald, at Making Light, has seen fit to revive the "Sarah Palin made rape victims pay for their rape kits" smear from last year. Lest it fade from memory.

I'm very fond of Making Light, have been reading it for years, have commented there a few times, but not lately, and certainly not lately on a political thread. So I'll post this here, for my own future reference.

Macdonald, in the main post:

I have a rape kit right here. Let’s look at it…

The first thing I notice is that its official name, printed right on the cover of the box, is “Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit.” Hmmm… nothing there about patient care or treatment. “Evidence Collection” sounds more like a police function.

Macdonald, at comment #4:

A Rape Kit is normally performed by a SANE nurse (that's Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner). An RN with additional specialized training.

Right. And it's usually done at a hospital, not at a police station. By a nurse, not a police officer. Macdonald is an EMT, not quite a doctor or nurse, not quite a policeman, but a little of both, which might account for his blurring of the distinctions.

Since the rape kit is customarily administered at a hospital, by a nurse, rather than at the police station, by a policeman, the hospital administration is going to be involved, and would like to bill someone for the time and effort. Hospitals usually try to bill a patient's insurance company. That was exactly what the police chief in Wasilla took as standard procedure; what he wanted to do was to obtain restitution from the perpetrator. The Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman article from 2000 is a little incoherent, but after the first wild charge, quotes the police chief saying some sensible things:

While the Alaska State Troopers and most municipal police agencies have covered the cost of exams, which cost between $300 to $1,200 apiece, the Wasilla police department does charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests.

Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon does not agree with the new legislation, saying the law will require the city and communities to come up with more funds to cover the costs of the forensic exams.

In the past weve charged the cost of exams to the victims insurance company when possible. I just dont want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer, Fannon said.

According to Fannon, the new law will cost the Wasilla Police Department approximately $5,000 to $14,000 a year to collect evidence for sexual assault cases.

Ultimately it is the criminal who should bear the burden of the added costs, Fannon said.

The forensic exam is just one part of the equation. Id like to see the courts make these people pay restitution for these things, Fannon said.

Fannon said he intends to include the cost of exams required to collect evidence in a restitution request as a part of a criminals sentencing.

[Sic, sic, sic.]

Some states have a fund to pay for rape kits, some do not. In North Carolina, for instance, from Feb. 13, 2008:

N.C. hospitals bill rape victims

Rape victims across the state are paying for their ill fortune in the most tangible of ways: a bill for the evidence kit needed to lock up the rapist.

The vast majority of the 3,000 or so emergency room patients examined for sexual assaults each year shoulder some of the cost of a rape kit test, according to state records and victim advocates. For some, it's as little as a $50 insurance co-payment. For those without insurance, it's hundreds of dollars left when a state program designed to help reaches its limit.

From August 2008, the situation seems to have improved:

Rape victims won't face exam bills

Victims of sexual violence in North Carolina will no longer be forced to pay for the forensic exams needed to help capture their attackers.

The N.C. General Assembly approved more than $1 million this summer to revamp a program designed to help cover the cost of rape kit exams for uninsured victims. The exams are used to collect bodily evidence of an attacker and are standard in the prosecution of sex crimes.

Now, hospitals will settle directly with the state, sparing victims of sexual assault the aggravation and trauma of receiving a bill.

Billing for rape kits was also standard procedure in other places, until quite recently:

Rape Victims Can Be Hurt Financially, Too

"It's been a problem for a long time," says Ilse Knecht, deputy director of public policy at the National Center for Victims of Crime. "We've heard so many stories of victims paying for their exams, or not being able to and then creditors coming after them." In order to qualify for federal grants under the Violence Against Women Act, states have to assume the full out-of-pocket costs for forensic medical exams, as the rape kits are called. But according to a 2004 bulletin published by the NCVC, "[F]eedback from the field indicates that sexual assault victims are still being billed." Knecht says she's recently heard from caseworkers in Illinois, Georgia, and Arkansas reporting that rape victims continue to be charged for their forensic exams.

The rape kit itself generally contains bags to collect clothing, test tubes for collecting blood, swabs for fluid, and a comb to collect pubic hair. Small-change stuff. But exams also involve administering tests for pregnancy, HIV, gonorrhea, and syphilis, and that's where the costs add up, says Randall Brown, medical director for the Baton Rouge Rape Crisis Center in Louisiana.

How forensic exam costs are handled varies. In some locations, hospitals bill patients' insurance and absorb whatever the insurers don't pay or bill patients for the balance. Some states have special funds to cover a portion of the costs. Others require convicted offenders to pay into a fund to reimburse the costs of the exams.

Also Missouri: In 2006, State Sen. Michael Gibbons introduced an amendment to a crime bill that

would require the Department of Health and Senior Services to make payments to medical providers to cover the charges of forensic examinations for victims of sexual offenses. Victims would also be able to seek “out-of-pocket” losses from the Crime Victims Compensation Fund to cover the cost of personal property that is seized as part of the investigation.

The legislative database says the last action on the bill was that it was "in conference," this in 2007.

A NOW press release from 2002 says

NOW's local activists report that in many jurisdictions the victim must pay for the processing of the "rape kit" evidence – an absurdly unfair proposition. Is there any other assault in which survivors are required to pay the cost of investigating the crimes against them? These expenses can reach $1,500 for DNA analysis, and $5,000 or more for extra costs such as evidence collection and medical care.

So it wasn't only Wasilla, it wasn't only Sarah Palin, it was standard procedure in lots of places. More from Rachael Larimore at Slate.

I guess there is still some concern on the Left that Palin is not quite finished, politically, so it will be necessary to keep the old smears alive. Like zombies!

FDIC in trouble?

Feb. 25: FDIC Chair(person) Sheila Bair laughs, says "your money, if you're below our insured deposit limits, you're absolutely safe, no matter what." (1:36 into the video.) How jolly.

March 4: Bloomberg: Bair Says Insurance Fund Could Be Insolvent This Year. So they'll have to raise the rates they charge the banks. AP:

The head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has warned that the fund insuring Americans' bank deposits could be wiped out this year without the money the agency is seeking in new fees from U.S. banks and thrifts.

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair acknowledged, in a letter to bank CEOs, that the new increased fees and hefty emergency premium the agency voted to levy last week will bring a "significant expense" to banks, especially amid a recession and financial crisis when their earnings are under pressure.

"We also recognize that assessments reduce the funds that banks can lend in their communities to help revitalize the economy," Bair wrote.

But given the accelerating bank failures that have been depleting the deposit insurance fund, she said, it "could become insolvent this year."

"Without substantial amounts of additional assessment revenue in the near future, current projections indicate that the fund balance will approach zero or even become negative," Bair wrote in the letter dated Monday to the chief executives of the nation's 8,305 federally insured banks and thrifts.…

March 5: Bloomberg: FDIC May Cut Emergency Fee on Banks, Group Says. Raise the fee one day, lower it the next; does anyone have any idea what they are doing? They're winging it.

Senator Dodd, known for his financial acuity, has introduced legislation to "increase the FDIC’s borrowing authority from $30 billion to $100 billion." Given this expansion in borrowing authority, the agency will be able to cut back on the one-time emergency fee to be charged the participating banks. (As far as most people are concerned, that's all of them.)

The House may vote today on legislation to expand the FDIC’s borrowing authority from $30 billion to $100 billion and make permanent a $250,000 deposit-insurance limit authorized under the financial bailout legislation Congress approved in October.

Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, plans to introduce a companion measure that will also raise the borrowing authority to a permanent level of $100 billion and temporarily increase it to $500 billion through Dec. 31, 2010.

Oh yes, just a few more billions, there's nothing out of the ordinary here. Billions and billions, all coming from the newly bottomless US Treasury.

What's going on here? Bair appears to be angling for a higher post in the Obama administration. Is that why she's trying to start a run on the banks? As part of an administration plan for Planned Impoverishment? Or as Doug Ross asks, "Did Obama intentionally nuke the economy?"

Update, only a few minutes later: Bill Quick says

Once the obvious implications of this sink into the markets and the media, I expect all hell to be out for lunch. If an appendage of the banking industry like Chris Dodd is being instructed by his owners to increase their credit line by 1700% (!!!), it’s a dead (pardon the term) giveaway as to what shape the bankers think their businesses are in.

And once the general public understands this, bank runs wouldn’t surprise the hell out of me.

Irony is deeper than the snow

Snowed in here in New England, watching the streaming video of the civil disobedience at the Capitol Power Plant.

A little while ago, they were being addressed by a "scientist" from India who said, "Coal, like all the fossil fuels, should stay under" the ground. A quick click over to Instapundit showed this headline:

LOSING CARBON ENTHUSIASM: India Sends Tough Signal To West. “India will continue to resist pressure to accept legally-binding cuts in its emissions of earth-warming greenhouse gases (GHG) at key climate change talks later this year, the country’s chief climate change negotiator has said.”

Now the mob is chanting, "This is what democracy looks like." If democracy = mob rule. Well, that's why Franklin said, "A Republic, if you can keep it."

Now the chant is "Support the workers, not the plants." Like the way the Left can support the troops but not their mission. I hear that as "Shut down the mines, shut down the plants, put the workers on welfare."

I'm tempted to give this a "tools" label.

More from Tipler

At PJ Media:

‘Stimulating’ Scientists Into Proving Global Warming

The trillion-dollar plus porkapalooza Wreak-America Bill just passed by Congress will throw a huge amount of money into scientific research. This will be a good thing for certain scientists, but a very, very bad thing for science.

Young scientists do most of the great science. Einstein was 26 when he published his relativity theory. In 1980, when I got my first government research grant at the age of 33, some 22 percent of National Institute of Health (NIH) grants were given to scientists under the age of 35. In 2005, only three percent of NIH grants went to those under 35, while the percentage given to those over 45 increased from 22 to 77.

Increasingly, government grants are used to defend dogma, not discover new truth: 28 percent of the scientists supported by NIH admitted recently to cooking data to support establishment theory, and 66 percent admitted to cutting corners to achieve the same end. I myself no longer trust the data claims appearing in the leading science journals.…

Maybe he'll become a PJ Media regular.

Andy Cohen

While looking around for a YouTube of "Green Rocky Road" for that other post, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my old guitar-pickin' pal Andy Cohen has a whole batch of performances up on YouTube. Here's one of my favorites, "Sailin' Down the Chesapeake Bay:"



Here's Andy's "Green Rocky Road:"



Here's Andy playing the Marxophone:



And the Dolceola:



Great stuff, Andy. As always.

Transparensea

We have not had a critter for a while. So:

Macropinna microstoma, the fish with the see-through head!


Thank goodness it's only about 3 to 4 inches long. More on its anatomy here and here. The things that look like its eyes are actually its nostrils; the greenish hemispheres are the lenses of its eyes.

The Latin name, well, a pinna is a feather, or wing, or external ear, and fish don't have any of those, maybe big fin; and tiny mouth.

Who does it look like? Peter Lorre? Wallace Shawn? I'm sure I've seen that face somewhere, though without the transparent braincase.

Althouse has video, and comments that plumb the depths of not safe for work or for anyone. So don't read those comments.

Biden gaffes again, again

I hope someone is collecting these.

Glenn Reynolds (bless him) links to yet another, at KLSA in Shreveport:

Wednesday morning on the CBS Early Show, Vice President Joe Biden asked, "But what I don't understand from Governor Jindal is what would he do? In Louisiana, there's 400 people a day losing their jobs. What's he doing?"

But that claim is wrong if you look at the numbers from the Louisiana Workforce Commission.

"In December, Louisiana was the only state in the nation besides the District of Columbia, according to the national press release, that added employment over the month," said Patty Granier with the Louisiana Workforce Commission.

"The state gained 3,700 jobs for the seasonally adjusted employment," Granier said of the most recent figures.

Those numbers are available on Louisiana's employment website, laworks.net.

Also available on the site are the state's latest unemployment statistics, statistics that appear to directly contradict what the vice president said Wednesday morning.…

A call to the White House on the source of Mr. Biden's information has not been returned.

Video at the link. In which you can hear the Vice President refer to "Governor Jindell."

Let's see, now. 400 people a day, that would be 2,000 people per 5-day work week, or 2,800 people per calendar week. For a 30-day month, assuming calendar weeks, 12,000 people. You'd think that would make the news.

Keep talking, Joe. While you are administering the biggest spending program in the history of the world.

Mundus vult decipi

A smart comment by madawaskan at Althouse reminded me of this:
which is the emblem of Dom Manuel, the central figure of "The Biography of the Life of Manuel," a series of novels by James Branch Cabell. The Latin means "The world wants to be deceived."

Or as Joni Mitchell said,

The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68,
And he told me: "All romantics meet the same fate someday.
"Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe.
"You laugh," he said, "You think you're immune,
"Go look at your eyes, they're full of moon.
"You like roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you
"All those pretty lies, pretty lies.
"When are you gonna realize they're only pretty lies?
"Only pretty lies, just pretty lies?"

We've elected a sweet-talkin' ladies' man, and have to hope it does not "come down to smoke and ash."

Literary notes: Jurgen, the best-remembered volume of the Biography, is available on line, with illustrations, from the University of Virginia. Figures of Earth, in which Manuel is the protagonist, is available from Project Gutenberg, as is Jurgen, in Gutenberg's usual text-only format. Some more Cabell links at Virginia Commonwealth University.

This post gets an "SF" tag because I don't want to have separate tags for fantasy and science fiction. Cabell is not a science-fiction writer.

Hey, Joe, I think it's 867-5309

Where you goin' with that cellphone in your hand?

I cannot, will not, try to collect all the Bidenisms here. But this one's a beauty (video at the link):

While discussing Recovery.gov, the taxpayer's stimulus guide The Ticket wrote about this morning, on CBS' "Early Show" today, Biden was asked what the address for the website was.

His clueless response undoubtedly put a smile on the faces of tech-savvy viewers.

"You know, I'm embarrassed," Biden said. Turning to someone off screen, he asked, "Do you know the website number?"

Oh, I know, it's pretty trivial, compared to some of his other silly bits. But it's just one thing after another.

And after that speech from Obama last night, in which he mentioned "energy" 14 times, and "nuclear" only once, and then in the phrase "nuclear proliferation," which as you know, Bob, always refers to weapons, I am beginning to doubt that the Obama team is quite as savvy as they would like people to think. Winging it. They're winging it.

Green, green, rocky road. Promenade in green. Who do you love?

Thanks as so often to the indispensable Instapundit, who says, "I mean, it’s not as if you’d put Biden in charge of something you wanted to succeed . . . ."

Gleanings

The mystery of Ireland's worst driver. (via)

25 things you may not know about Robert Burns.

How in the world did Ted Rall get to be the president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists?

Kate at small dead animals beat me to both of these, and put them in one post: The Reagan vs. Obama debate, and Michael Ledeen's "We Are All Fascists Now."

Santelli update

There are a couple more Santelli clips at Liberty Maven, via Instapundit.

(I would have added this to the other Santelli post, but that has now become uneditable. I now have two posts with embedded MSNBC videos, and both of them are uneditable. This might be a pattern. I'll add a "Santelli" label, to bring these up together.)

Santelli speaks up

Someone, Rick Santelli of CNBC, is trying to speak truth to power. Of course power does not like hearing it. Let's get all the clips together. I dare say there will be more.

His initial outburst, on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange:



For comments, Althouse.

Robert Gibbs does some spinning, in a distressingly condescending tone, for a sympathetic and appreciative White House press corps:



Matt Lauer and Steve Liesman try to trivialize Santelli on the Today show:

Those are from Hot Air, where there are many comments.

And Chris Matthews, who thinks that people are facing "disclosure." (2:36 into the video.) Maybe he is thinking of all those Cabinet nominees who had trouble with disclosure of, say, tax records. Matthews has already disclosed the thrill he gets from hearing Obama speak, so his objectivity is not in question, that is, his bias is on his sleeve. (Or his pants!)


By way of Gateway Pundit, who has comments.

Santelli: "In America, contract law should be sacred." Makes sense to me. Matthews calls him "Ebenezer Scrooge," and says "You're up there with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity." That's enough to make me wonder if Matthews has a contract with MSNBC, or if he does this TV work out of the goodness of his heart and whatever spare change he can find under the sofa cushions in the green room.

I enjoy listening to Santelli's Chicago vowels, as he speaks for truth, justice, and the American way. There's a website promoting the Chicago Tea Party (they plan to throw derivatives into the lake), and a Santelli for Senate campaign button. Roland Burris is looking likely to have a very short Senate term of service. Governor Quinn could establish his independence from the Chicago mob by appointing Santelli. He will not do that, of course, but he could, and it's entertaining to think about.

Update: Roger Kimball has a couple of comments at PJ Media: On the Gibbs remarks, My favorite American; On the Lauer-Liesman interview, Reinventing liberal guilt.

Sea ice and "sensor drift"

The National Snow and Ice Data Center lost track of sea ice amounting to 500,000 square kilometers, or 193,000 square miles, because of "sensor drift." That's a little more than nine-eighths of California. But:

Sensor drift is a perfect but unfortunate example of the problems encountered in near-real-time analysis. We stress, however, that this error in no way changes the scientific conclusions about the long-term decline of Arctic sea ice, which is based on the the consistent, quality-controlled data archive discussed above.

Pay attention to the narrative, never mind the pesky data. From Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Investment report from Dr. Boli

Defying sluggish economy, existential despair up 285%

Stimulate with one hand, strangle with the other

Of course you need two left hands. Calling all Moties! Oh, that's it — we've been infiltrated by space aliens from beyond the Coalsack Nebula! (Oh, all right, the Moties have two right hands. So they are mirror Moties, from a parallel universe.)

Regulating industry does not serve to stimulate the economy. If we had people in government with any real-world experience at all, they would realize this.

NY Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials.

The decision, which most likely would play out in stages over a period of months, would have a profound impact on transportation, manufacturing costs and how utilities generate power. It could accelerate the progress of energy and climate change legislation in Congress and form a basis for the United States’ negotiating position at United Nations climate talks set for December in Copenhagen.

That would be a profound negative impact. Where are the nukes? Has anyone explained to these people that while plants take in CO2 and give out O2 during the day, they do the reverse at night? Maybe if we put grow-lights in the forests to keep the plants awake, they could do photosynthesis all the time. No, the Democrats would not like that either. Sleep deprivation is torture. And the electricity would have to come from somewhere. No, wait, we don't need grow-lights — we need space mirrors! No more night! That's the answer. Hope, change, and light. Oh, well, anything to get the space program re-activated. Though I'd rather see a bunch of private enterprise space projects.

If California and Florida weren't already full, I'd be thinking about moving to a warmer climate. Rather than waiting for it to come to me.

Derbyshire on Monkey, Zen, stimulus

Compare my Presidents' Day post on Coolidge with this by John Derbyshire at The Corner:

In his press conference last week the President chided "a set of folks who … just believe that we should do nothing." This got loud protests from various quarters on the right that, no, there are no such folks. We all want the government to do something.

Well, I'm for nothing. Perhaps not quite nothing: If Congress were just to go on a 12-month vacation, that would be a good thing; but even better would be if they were to spend 12 months doing nothing but repeal bad, stupid laws. (Repealing the CPSIA would be a good warm-up exercise.)

Like Monkey, they just can't sit still. This preposterous "stimulus" package is just one particularly big and obnoxious instance of a malign phenomenon — too much government action. Don't just do something, guys, sit there. But that, of course, is the one thing they can't do.

Monkey? What monkey? You'll have to read the whole thing to find out. It's short.

One of Derbyshire's readers responds, with a suggestion for another $150 billion of "stimulus."

I mentioned "Yes, Minister" syndrome a while ago.

Politics of warming, again

At PJ Media, physicist Frank Tipler discusses the attitudes of the alarmist scientists in What The Caine Mutiny Can Teach Us about Global Warming Scientists: Climate change advocates often argue from "authority" as opposed to examining the facts.

In the Boston Herald, by way of the AP, Harrison Schmitt (who not only walked on the Moon, but also served in the US Senate longer than Barack Obama) says, among other things, "It’s one of the few times you’ve seen a sizable portion of scientists who ought to be objective take a political position and it’s coloring their objectivity." [Here's another link for the same AP story, at Heartland Institute this time, for backup.]

In a response in the HuffPo to Schmitt, Bill Chameides, dean of Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, deploys powerful weapons of argument from authority and sarcasm to demolish the hapless astronaut, or Senator. In combination with disingenuous argumentation and faux naïveté, these are deadly.

Humorous side note: A Herald commenter says

This global warming thing reminds me of the flood of cars with California plates that came into Prescott, AZ when I was a kid back in the 60s. When folks actually believed they knew the exact date of when California was going to fall into the Pacific ocean. Guess we all saw how that turned out. This time around, same people, different topic of doom. These are all subscribers to "It Could Happen Magazine". You know, the one that has all the same junk science stories the Discovery Channel plays every day. Just think how cool it'd be if we could get global warming, a giant comet impact, a super hurricane, and a 1,000 ft. tall mega tsunami to all happen on the same day that Wizard of Oz monkeys fly out of Al Gore's butt. Now that would be something I'd certainly be impressed by!

which reminded me of Free Zone by Charles Platt. In that book, Platt tries to include every sf cliché he could think of. He can't help but miss a few that have been invented since the book came out in 1988; he claims 71. The aliens are invading from space, the robots have time travel, the barbarian hollow-earth dwellers are emerging, the undersea city is rising and it's filled with hostile, intelligent dinosaurs. All at once!

Update: Moldbug weighs in on the attitudes of the alarmist scientists:

The incentive of all federally-funded science is the same: keep your funding, and try to get more. It is not that most scientists are "in it for the money." It is that you cannot be a successful scientist, in this era, without being a successful bureaucrat. As such you respond to bureaucratic incentives, such as the feelings of your NSF program manager.

His mom makes an appearance.

Keeping track of Obama's promises

Nicholas Guariglia at PJ Media says that Obama’s Broken Promises Were Entirely Predictable.

The St. Petersburg Times is keeping track with the Obameter.

Presidents' Day

Which Presidents, though? In light of the last couple of posts about the CPSIA, which might have to get a tag, Calvin Coolidge, who said, "It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones," seems an appealing President for today. Another line, "I am convinced that the larger incomes of the country would actually yield more revenue to the government if the basis of taxation were scientifically revised downward," sounds like an anticipation of the Laffer curve. John J. Miller, at The Corner, points to his own Reason piece from 1998, in which he reviews three books that were new at that time.

I've mentioned Coolidge favorably here a few times before, but I have never read a full-length biography. I certainly did not know until I read the Miller article that he had translated Dante's Inferno into English.

I can't help wondering what would have been the alternate history had Coolidge run and been re-elected in 1928. Hoover and Roosevelt were both tinkerers, experimentalists, activists; Coolidge knew how to leave something alone.

Another U-verse update

at that post.

We don't burn books, we landfill them. It's different. It's for the children!

Move over, Montag. Don't you realize that burning those books could give off toxic fumes?

From Overlawyered:

[T]he Consumer Product Safety Commission yesterday advised thrift stores and other resellers and distributors of used goods to discard (unless they wished to test for lead or take other typically unpractical steps such as contacting manufacturers) children’s books printed before 1985 and a very wide range of other children’s products, including apparel and playthings.

Just a small part of the results of a law called the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, passed as a Congressional overreaction to the toxic toys from China scare last year. I had not even heard of this law until Roland Dobbins sent Jerry Pournelle a link to the Overlawyered piece above. Which shows that I don't read Overlawyered as regularly as I should. There's a whole series there about this misguided, misbegotten, outrageous, foolish law. Letters to Congressmen and Senators are required, though probably will be useless. The Common Room, also with many posts on CPSIA, links to the House committee where bills to modify the CPSIA are under consideration. Since it is the same committee that the bill came out of in the first place, my hopes are not high. This law needs repeal, not amendments.

Speaking of useless, one of those posts deals with the question, "How useful is Snopes.com for figuring out the truth about something?" The answer seems to be that it's about as useful as any other site on the Internet: to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes careless, possibly deliberately deceptive. Oh well, you knew that all the time, anyway. I hope I'm not going to find out that there are mistakes at The Straight Dope, next.

Seriously, that whole series on CPSIA is worth reading. It's not just books, there's much, much more involved. For instance, the law puts Gepetto out of business, closes thrift and consignment shops, and stops kids from buying youth motorbikes or parts for the ones they have.

This is what happens when Congress passes these bloated bills that nobody reads, and the President signs them, and then we start to find out what was in there. Oh dear, what did they just do last week!

Related: The legal system.

Nursing home patient goes outside for a smoke, dies of hypothermia

I thought the purpose of these smoking bans was to benefit people's health, not to kill them. Myles Patterson was 65 years old. "Mr. Patterson had been forgotten outside in temperatures which witnesses told the court dropped to -20 Celsius. Mr. Patterson, who was wheelchair-bound after a recent health setback, had gone outside to smoke."

Hypothermia is putting it mildly; I'd be inclined to say he froze to death. "The death of Mr. Patterson was contributed to by hypothermia resulting from being left outside in temperatures ranging between -16 and -20 Celsius on January 16, 2007. When rescued by nursing home worker Tanya James, Mr. Patterson was described as being drooped over with spittle frozen to his face. His jacket was partially zipped up and he was wearing no gloves or hat."

Roundup here.

All part and parcel of the "liberal" way of thinking, which sees only classes and masses, never individuals. (Except for the Great Leader, who is doing the seeing.) Individuals are collateral damage. It's all for the greater good, don't you know.