“May I remind you that the Red Cross visited inmates in Nazi concentration camps?”
Y2Venezuela: The Hockey Stick, Pt2
via KevinB
Y2Venezuela: The Hockey Stick Graph
Is there nothing that socialism can’t do?
Related: New home sales plunge 33 pct with tax credits gone
In The Mail
| A new offering by Saskatchewan author (and SDA supporter) Terry Anderson. |  |
The Time For “No”
The federal government is shutting down the dredging that was being done to create protective sand berms in the Gulf of Mexico.
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
“This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?“
Reader Tips
Tonight’s featured amusement is a clip of what is arguably the single most intense piece of acting in the history of moving pictures. There have certainly been some colossal moments of scenery-chewing over the years – Robert Shaw’s “I’ll catch him, I’ll kill him” speech in Jaws comes to mind, as does Charlton Heston’s display in Planet Of The Apes when he sees the top of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand, and rages “Damn you! God damn you all to hell!” – but in terms of creating sheer dramatic intensity with just a single look, nothing could ever top this scorching moment from the late great C.J. Prairie Dog. He’s the best damned actor I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure.
Your Reader Tips are welcome, as always, in the comments.
Y2Kyoto: The Enemies List
Your tax dollars at work;
A new paper is out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (which I’ll call APHS10 after the author’s initials) that segregates climate scientists into the “convinced” and the “unconvinced” — two relatively ambiguous categories — and then seeks to compare the credentials of the two groups. The paper is based on the tireless efforts of a climate blogger, self-described as “not an academic,” who has been frustrated by those who don’t share his views on climate change:
I’ve also grown all too familiar with the tiny minority of ‘climate skeptics’ or ‘deniers’ who try to minimize the problem, absolve humans of any major impact, or suggest there is no need to take any action. I’ve gotten pretty fed up with the undue weight given to the skeptics in the media and online.
What qualifies one to be on the APHS10 list of skeptics, which I’ll just call the “black list”? Well, you get there for being perceived to have certain views on climate science or politics.
Here it is: http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/skeptic_authors_table.html
And, here he is: James W Prall Office: GB254D . . . Campus phone: ext. 65760 . . . Off campus dial (416) 946-5760 . . . email: jim.prall@utoronto.ca
Drill Baby Drill!
A federal judge in New Orleans has blocked a six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling projects that was imposed in response to the massive Gulf oil spill.
Several companies that ferry people and supplies and provide other services to offshore drilling rigs had asked U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans to overturn the moratorium.
President Barack Obama’s administration has halted the approval of any new permits for deepwater drilling and suspended drilling at 33 exploratory wells in the Gulf.
Feldman says in his ruling that the Interior Department failed to provide adequate reasoning for the moratorium. He says it seems to assume that because one rig failed, all companies and rigs doing deepwater drilling pose an imminent danger.
More at the Washington Times. How much play do you think this will receive in the tingling leg media?
“Much to the government’s discomfort and this Court’s uneasiness, the summary also states that ‘the recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.’ As the plaintiffs, and the experts themselves, pointedly observe, this statement was misleading,” Judge Feldman said in his 22-page ruling.
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Tire Of?
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Carol Platt Liebau, March 2009 – [W]hen he was at the [Harvard Law Review] you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.
Roger Simon, June 2010 – Ever since viewing his depressing and disconnected “energy” speech last week, I have been mulling whether Barack Obama actually wants to be president anymore. That was an address given by a man who looked very much like he didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to continue.
Commander-in-Grief
Still want us to stay in Afghanistan?
McChrystal and some of his senior advisers are quoted criticizing top administration officials, at times in starkly derisive terms. An anonymous McChrystal aide is quoted as calling national security adviser James L. Jones a “clown,” who remains “stuck in 1985.”
Referring to Richard C. Holbrooke, Obama’s senior envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, one McChrystal aide is quoted as saying: “The Boss says he’s like a wounded animal. Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous.”
On one occasion, McChrystal appears to react with exasperation when he receives an e-mail from Holbrooke. “Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke,” McChrystal says, according to the article. “I don’t even want to read it.”
U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired three-star general, isn’t spared. Referring to a leaked cable from Eikenberry that expressed concerns about the trustworthiness of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, McChrystal is quoted as having said: “Here’s one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”
Another take: “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force,” the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that’s like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won’t have to make arrests. “Does that make any f–king sense?” Pfc. Jared Pautsch. “We should just drop a f–king bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?”
And another – “…the punchy tone of the McChrystal quotes, coupled with Gen. Petraeus’ collapse in front of Congress last week, suggests that these guys are close to worn out. That’s not a good thing, and it’s an unfortunate contrast to our golf-and-politics-as-usual political class in DC.
Daniel Foster;
Which makes me wonder whether we are witnessing McChrystal falling on his sword to get the word out on the Obama administration’s folly in Afghanistan. I’m not 100 percent convinced of it, but it is a real possibility.
I also very much agree with Rich that the president would be well within his rights to dismiss McChrystal over this. I just don’t think he can. The fact is that McChrystal has more credibility on Afghanistan than Obama does. And to the extent that Obama has credibility there at all (and higher approval ratings for his Afghanistan policy than his presidency generally) it is credibility imported from McChrystal. As such, I figure that firing the general would be disastrous for Obama, not just on substance but politically. Fairly or unfairly, it would make his administration look petty and prideful, willing to let an (admittedly serious) breach in decorum set back our best chance for success in the longest war in American history.
UPDATE: the article that sparked it all is now available. Stanley McChrystal: The runaway general
Via Drudge.
Inspiring The Quote Of The Week
Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?
“I fired off a speech
But the British kept a-spillin’
Twice as many barrels as there was a month ago
I fired off a speech
But the British kept a-spillin’
Up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico…”
h/t Robert O.
This Is My Brother Mohammed, And This Is My Other Brother Michael
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, May 2010; – “If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that, somebody …. Home-grown, maybe a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.”
“Faisal Shahzad, June 2010 – “I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attacks,”
Reader Tips
In commemoration of this year’s summer solstice, tonight’s featured music comes in the form of a thoroughly summer-drenched song by American musician Jonathan Richman.
You can almost smell the lawn as he sings. Richman’s earnest, almost child-like narrative stands him in stark contrast to the prevalent faux-countercultural ‘tude that grasps for credibility through attachment to large-scale political concerns and the appropriation of the corporeal suffering of others. Richman’s unapologetic invocation of life as it was actually lived, by people who were neither impoverished nor troubled, approaches the level of poetry; when he recalls the salad days of this window in time, it’s an incantation, a palpable, almost limbic recreation of a feeling that is familiar to anyone who grew up in the suburbs in the post-war era.
The song is a celebration of the sights, sounds, and smells of summers past; even when he sounds a note of warning in the bridges that these memories of lost youthful freedom will become mildly tormenting with the passage of time, it only serves to redouble the bittersweet pleasures he conjures up. From the 1992 album I, Jonathan, here’s Massachusetts native Jonathan Richman summoning up That Summer Feeling.
Happy summer solstice, everybody!
You are invited to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.
Canadian News Aggregator: Not Fossil Fueled Enough!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Bourque Newswatch snarkism, June 21st;
Bourque Newswatch notes, June 7th;
Scratch A Labour Union
Find an anti-Semite;
Today’s blockade of the Port of Oakland by anti-Israel forces, in collaboration with the Longshoremen’s Union (ILWU), is the opening of another front in the war on Israel — economic, politcal, propagandistic, and military — which escalates week by week. Will it ever end? Not according to the masterminds of the flotilla:
Meanwhile, Yasser Kashlak, a Syrian businessman of Palestinian descent who heads the “Free Palestine Organization” and is funding this boat, as well as another that is to carry journalists and parliamentarians, said over the weekend on Hizbullah’s al-Manar television station that he was more and more optimistic that one day these same boats would take “Europe’s refuse [the Jews] that came to my homeland back to their homelands.
“Gilad Schalit should go back to Paris and those murderers go back to Poland, and after that we will chase them until the ends of the earth to bring them to justice for their acts of slaughter from Deir Yassin until today.” Kashlak, a fervent Hizbullah supporter, called Israel a “rabid dog sent to the region to frighten the Arabs. He said he had a message for Israelis: ‘Get on the ships we are sending you and go back to your lands. Don’t let the moderate Arab leaders delude you, [you] cannot make peace with us. Our children will return to Palestine, you have no reason for coexistence. Even if our leaders will sign a peace agreement, we will not sign.’”
Y2Kyoto: Cracker In The Coal Mine
| For all the media victory dances claiming widespread public support for enviromarxism, there’s nothing quite like a trip down to the grocery store to restore one’s sense of reality. |  |
Because, so long as consumer demand keeps this Reigning Queen of Supermarket Super-Packaging on the shelves, I contend there’s
little to worry about.
As the numbers show, vehicles with a rating of 30-plus miles per gallon have suffered a dramatic drop in sales. For the first five months of 2010, sales of vehicles with that 30-plus MPG rating have dropped by 10 percent compared to the same period in 2009. Overall, these high-efficiency cars accounted for four percent of the market in 2009, but now only hold a three percent share.
Heh. We’re winning.
AHA! Where’s The Swimming Pool Chlorine?
From the comments…
“OK, so what’s Essential Humanitarian Products?”
A truck load of abortion, or so says the LPC.
A Lucky Start To My Day
For the first time in many years, I decided to skip the shows in Billings, MT which start tomorrow.
That was our show venue.
Had it hit 24 hours later, the parking lot would have been filled with wall to wall RV’s and campers – including me.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
Small wonder Britain is nearly bankrupt;
Energy firms will receive thousands of pounds a day per wind farm to turn off their turbines because the National Grid cannot use the power they are producing.
[…]
The first successful test shut down of wind farms took place three weeks ago. Scottish Power received £13,000 for closing down two farms for a little over an hour on 30 May at about five in the morning.
Whereas coal and gas power stations often pay the National Grid £15 to £20 per megawatt hour they do not supply, Scottish Power was paid £180 per megawatt hour during the test to switch off its turbines.
…’cause that ain’t how they do things in Texas!
During these negative price periods, suppliers are paying [Electric Reliability Council of Texas] to take their power. Consumers (at least at the wholesale level) are getting paid for using power, and the more power consumers use the more they get paid. These prices are a big anti-conservation incentive. You could, as a correspondent put it to me, build a giant toaster in West Texas and be paid by generators to operate it.
Infrequently, a power plant might choose to bid below the short term marginal price in order to stay in the market and avoid shutting down. It can be economically rational for operators of less responsive generation units to offer negative prices in order for it to avoid the costs of shutting down for just a few hours and then start up again when load increases – think coal-fueled or natural gas steam turbine. When energy load is very low, near zero or negative prices can result.
This isn’t the cast in West Texas. Instead, the negative prices appear to be the result of the large installed capacity of wind generation. Wind generators face very small costs of shutting down and starting back up, but they do face another cost when shutting down: loss of the Production Tax Credit and state Renewable Energy Credit revenue which depend upon generator output. It is economically rational for wind power producers to operate as long as the subsidy exceeds their operating costs plus the negative price they have to pay the market. Even if the market value of the power is zero or negative, the subsidies encourage wind power producers to keep churning the megawatts out.
The world is being run by crazy people.
h/t Larry
