I am referring to Mr. Obama's speech recently given at Georgetown University where he promised to "protect America's Energy Security."Rarely, in my short 29 years on the mortal coil have I heard such delightfully grotesque pandering. Mr. Obama essentially promised a future for every energy-related special interest group, while using the snowclone of decreasing foreign oil imports. And by snowclone I mean "I'll cause more X, and ensure American prosperity by eliminating Y." Other examples are "I'll add more education funding, and ensure American...
Thursday, 31 March 2011
"What has been truly thrilling about the Arab Spring - as with the Green Revolution in Iran - was the irrelevance of America and the West." - Andrew SullivanSullivan is clearly forgetting the hundreds of times since as far back as 1953 that America has aided tyrants in Arab countries (usually under the auspices of their internally run anti-terrorism programs). America and the West are not irrelevant in the Arab Spring...we have been a roadblock to i...
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Today's bad ideas all come from one source. Bad Idea Number 4,361: Attempting to curb foreign oil dependence via increased domestic supply. It is widely known that America's oil potential is largely tapped. Remaining oil reserves require more expensive drilling techniques still in development. Increasing domestic production mean either higher oil prices or deep-water Gulf drilling.Bad Idea Number 4,362: Attempting to decrease foreign oil dependence by pushing large vehicles into using natural gas. Where do you propose we get this natural gas? 97%...
The level of misinformation in this article is atrocious - both intentional and unintentional. Let's get started.Alan Boyle, long-time editor at MSNBC, writes: Someday, your pulse could provide all the power you'll need for your iPod.If we base our calculations on the power consumption of an iPod Touch being 180 milliwatts (a number I remember reading somewhere but can't find now), then what Alan and others are clearly missing is that the human...
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
I feel I should go on, because one paragraph from the previous entry is almost certainly going to catch me some flak:The problem, dear readers, isn't the brain vacuum being swept across the carpet by the financial sector. No the problem is the culture of greed in this country where people say to each other "I'd like to make a lot of money in life." When did that become a serious goal? Was it always?I'm not so naive as to imagine that a world can exist where people actively don't want to be rich. In fact that is not at all what I am suggesting...
If this is true it is stunning:The financial sector, which includes lending, stock brokerage, complex securities and insurance, among many other services, derives enormous profits from collateralized debt obligations. These new products require such sophisticated engineering that the industry now focuses its recruiting on new master's- and doctoral-level graduates of science, engineering, math and physics, and pays them starting wages that are five times or more what they would have earned had they remained in their own fields."Because these new...
Monday, 28 March 2011
She keeps falling, and getting back up, and falling, and getting up again. She stands in line and distractedly watches the other, bigger kids swinging on bars or walking on the beams while she waits her turn to do a somersault down the wedge-mat. When she does it, she clumsily crashes, falling over forwards; "so that's why they call it tumbling" I think to myself with bemusement.I am sitting in the "observation deck" at McCracken's Gymnastics. Below me rougly 150 girls and boys from ages 3 (like The Abstracted Daughter) all they way up through...
Certainly, artificial photosynthesis would be really amazing. But calling this photosynthesis is laughable:Speaking at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in California, MIT professor Daniel Nocera claims to have created an artificial leaf made from stable and inexpensive materials that mimics nature’s photosynthesis process.The device is an advanced solar cell, no bigger than a typical playing card, which is left floating in a pool of water. Then, much like a natural leaf, it uses sunlight to split the water into its two...
Thursday, 24 March 2011
My first instinct tonight (before those three delighful Bud Lites) was to write about the growing income inequality gap, and point to Megan's article which suggests that a large part of income inequality in the last 20 years is a byproduct of a change in the tax code. You know, and not a byproduct of the rich absorbing all the wealth in this country intentionally and via intense and concerted efforts to lobby government.No, instead I want to wax optimistic. Tastefully named Alexis Madrigal points to an old journal written by a Russian surgeon,...
As I touched on before, Jonah Lehrer has a seemingly contradictory back and forth going with himself, in which he first argues for distracted creativity as a method of success then turns and argues that intense, long-duration focus (grit) is the real key to success. It certainly seems like "long term memory" is not a key to success...har har.In any case, this apparent contradiction begs the question: is it better to be an underachieving, irritatingly spastic but brilliant artist or a highly-capable, manager-pleasing, right-brained drone who relishes...
Wednesday, 23 March 2011
Last night while ranting I offended my father, a retired Colonel and Air Force fighter pilot. I was mentioning the $30 million F-15 now laying in a field in Libya. Things got heated, and dad declared "if you bash the military you won't get a lot of sympathy in this house!"For the record, I have nothing but respect for the United States military. Other than the army of Genghis Khan, I can think of no other fighting force as formidable in human history.It is how that fighting force is deployed that makes me rant. More than partially, this is because...
Scott Hodge, both in his Senate testimony and in his followup blog post, argues that America's "top decile" (that is, top 10%) pays an uneven amount of the tax burden compared to the decile income. That is, if you take the share of taxes of the richest decile and divide it by the share of income of the richest decile, you end up with "1.35," which means that decile is paying "more than their fair share."He then compares our top decile to the top decile in other countries to show how America's rich have a heavy burden compared to other countries.Several...
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Listen, y'all. Pert near every city slicker I done come across is tickled to death over this here new book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. While I can't claim to have done read it, I have done read a mighty collection of other people's articles about it. And as it happens to turn out, every dang one of those preachy articles was written by a city slicker.Meanwhile, y'all, out here in the fields...we don't particularly agree with Mr. Glaeser's thesis. Here in the backwoods,...
Monday, 21 March 2011
This weekend was pretty hard on Mr. Obama's chances of getting the lucrative TAE Presidential Endorsement in 2012. Mostly this was because of Libya. Here's then-Senator Obama remarking on Presidential power:"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."And then we have this gem from this weekend:"I am deeply aware of the risks of any military action, no matter what limits we place on it. I want the...
Thursday, 17 March 2011
Hot on the heels of the news that U.S. made weapons are being used against protesters in Bahrain comes a report from the Heritage Foundation that each and every American has directly aided terrorists by sharing air with them. From the report:Each American takes on average 1-2 liters of air per breath, nearly 11,000 liters a day. Combined, more than 300 million Americans are exhaling almost 3 trillion liters of breath every single day - most of which heads east on the wind.Carried across the Atlantic, this exhaled air is breathed in by much of Europe...
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Tuesday, 15 March 2011
Here's the wikipedia article on fusion reactor safety (notice I said "fusion" not "fission"):There is no possibility of a catastrophic accident in a fusion reactor resulting in major release of radioactivity to the environment or injury to non-staff, unlike modern fission reactors. The primary reason is that nuclear fusion requires precisely controlled temperature, pressure, and magnetic field parameters to generate net energy. If the reactor were damaged, these parameters would be disrupted and the heat generation in the reactor would rapidly...
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
I don't even need to see this movie to write a review of it. Here's what happens: UFOs are increasingly sighted. Suddenly the aliens emerge from where they were hiding amongst us this whole time. We fight a desperate battle and in the end win a bold, explosion-filled defiance of logic.Even if this doesn't happen...even if the aliens win...movies of alien invasions involving huge epic battles and explosions leave me bored and my eyes hurting from too much rolling.Imagine we were the aliens. What technologies would we need to reach another planet?...
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Imagine, if you will, that I am 18. I have a really nice car that I partially paid for through a labor-intensive part time job and partially paid for through the beneficence of my parents. The car is very fast and very good looking, possibly the nicest car at my high school.One day, a good friend of mine who is well known at school for "souping up" cars offers to take it to his house and modify it. He promises, based on his own relevant experience and research he's done on the internet that he can take my car and a small amount of my money for...
Friday, 4 March 2011
I think I should start a blog to counter this blog. I will call it "callous populist" and the premise will be:Having lost all interest in helping my fellow man because of the various social, cultural, and human flaws inherent in current society...I have created a place where we can discuss that life is so hopeless and awful that we might as well surrender our rights to The Man and become drones..."I think it would be a fun project. Or I could spend that same time trolling the comments of their blog, pointing out that liberaltarianism is a fantasy...
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
Here's the letter Warren Buffett sent to his shareholders this weekend. I particularly enjoyed this sensibility:Money will always flow toward opportunity, and there is an abundance of that in America.Commentators today often talk of “great uncertainty.” But think back, for example, to December 6,1941, October 18, 1987 and September 10, 2001. No matter how serene today may be, tomorrow is always uncertain.Don’t let that reality spook you. Throughout my lifetime, politicians and pundits have constantly moaned about terrifying problems facing America....
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