FROM SKIN-CELL to neuron.
Archive for 2008
August 6, 2008
ANOTHER HOTDOG OF DOOM: It’s called the “Homewrecker,” and if I ate one I think I’d definitely be sleeping in the guestroom. Er, if I could sleep.
QUESTIONS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST FROM AMANDA CARPENTER: “Here’s the rub. I can’t find three out of these four donors on opensecrets.com, the online clearinghouse for donor information.”
UPDATE: Ouch: “Note that this was a front-page story with names and dates and a picture of John McCain. And all of the operative facts were completely false. This is inexcusable.”
WELL, HE IS RUNNING AGAINST HIM: Nader disses Obama.
A VERDICT IN THE HAMDAN CASE: “A jury of six military officers at Guantanamo Bay reached a split verdict Wednesday in the war crimes trial of a former driver for Osama bin Laden, clearing him of some charges but convicting him of others that could send him to prison for life.”
I RESPOND to charges of “cultural relativism.”
THE NISSAN ECO-PEDAL: A cool force-feedback accelerator device for producing more efficient driving. As I’ve said before, I wish my Highlander Hybrid had something like this, so you’d know when you were about to light up the gas engine. If — as seems to be the case — Toyota’s anxious to make the hybrid driving experience as seamlessly like driving a gasoline vehicle as possible, it could be switchable. I’d like an “economy mode” that would run it as an electric vehicle as much as possible, toggleable to a normal mode where it would be, as it is now, seamless. They’re a bit less enthusiastic about this approach, though, over at Autoblog.
THE WASHINGTON POST DOESN’T THINK MUCH of Obama’s tax-the-oil-companies energy policy:
Mr. Obama wants a surtax on net oil company profits above a “reasonable” level. The tax would be set high enough to raise $65 billion over the next five years, and the revenue would fund a one-shot tax rebate that Mr. Obama would like to give to families and individuals this year.
Making Exxon surrender money that is now falling into its lap would not necessarily affect its longer-term plans or incentives. Indeed, some of Big Oil’s “windfall” already will go to the government: The more profit the companies earn, the more corporate income tax they pay. But to add a five-year tax increase on top of that to pay for a one-year gift to voters would, indeed, increase the cost of doing business. That cost would be passed along in forgone investment in new production, lower dividends for pension funds and other shareholders, and higher prices at the pump — thus socking it to the consumers whom the plan is supposed to help.
Yes, it’s a case of robbing Peter to pay. . . er, Peter. Meanwhile, Obama remains stalled in the polls. Is there a connection? Just possibly.
AL GORE IS SAVING THE PLANET with a massive new houseboat! Thanks, Al!
ALEXA: A while back, I wrote: “Various readers complain about Henke’s reliance on Alexa.com ratings. That’s a fair criticism, to a degree — the numbers are based on the rather thin network of people who’ve downloaded the Alexa toolbar to their browsers. If even a few dozen InstaPundit readers added the Alexa toolbar it would probably produce a noticeable upswing in the rankings of InstaPundit and the blogs I link to.” I don’t know how many people did this — I got emails from a few — but since then InstaPundit has gone up from 38,000+ to 19,000+, roughly doubling its Alexa position. This may demonstrate that Alexa is iffy, but thanks for boosting my ranking in the process of proving it!
RIGHT ON SCHEDULE: Pundits Begin to Worry About Obama.
IN THE MAIL: Professor Lewis Solomon’s The Privatization of Space Exploration: Business, Technology, Law and Policy. An important topic!
PLUG-IN HYBRIDS AND THE GRID: In response to yesterday’s mammoth post on the subject, a reader emails that there’s a company working on this right in my backyard. Cool.
MORE ON ANTI-SCIENCE TERRORISM: After Attacks on Researchers, Caution and Steadfastness.
In many ways, the University of California at Santa Cruz was already prepared when firebombs ignited the house of one researcher and the car of another at nearly the same time early Saturday morning.
After all, it wasn’t the first attack against a Santa Cruz faculty member whose research involves experimentation on animals. Since that last incident in February, and more broadly over the past year, research universities, including the University of California system, have made more concerted efforts to coordinate their responses to threats, harassment and vandalism from self-styled animal liberation activists who many agree may be escalating their campaign.
Chris Mooney should write a book about this “war on science.” Since it involves, you know, actual bombs and stuff . . . . And note that groups like PETA are trying to get information on researchers made public, almost as if they approved.
25 REASONS you may be a racist. And the “may be” part is really just being polite.
TIME FOR AN INSTAPUNDIT ELECTION POLL:
UPDATE: Michael Silence asks, What has this Presidential race come to? The same thing they all do, only sooner, I guess . . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Results seem a bit McCain-heavy, but I see that RedState has linked.
MORE: Donald Sensing comments: “And what I think is really funny is how many respondents actually took the poll seriously and clicked for McCain. I wish I knew the ratio of Obama’s supporters to McCain’s who voted for Paris rather than their own candidate.”
“NOTHING BUT EMPTY IDEAS:” Bad marks for both McCain and Obama on energy.
ARIANNE BALSOM is blogging from Antarctica.
AN ELECTRIC AIRPLANE FLIES at the Oshkosh Air Show.
FREE SPEECH UPDATE: You still can’t write about Muhammad. Will other religious groups take the lesson that violence works? Because, in a world of the spineless, it does, and at very low cost. Thanks, guys, for establishing this incentive structure.
UPDATE: I am charged with “cultural relativism.”
Part of the Islamic belief-system is the proposition that one who insults Muhammad should be killed. That is why Muslims so easily resort to threats of violence against those who say things about Muhammad that they don’t like. No sect of Christianity teaches that the one who insults Jesus should be killed. In fact, they all teach that one should be patient and charitable with opponents. That is why Christians do not generally resort to threats of violence against those who say things about Jesus that they don’t like. There are nuts in every group, of course, and that’s why I say “generally,” but there is no sanction in the core teachings of the religion for such behavior. And that’s why Reynolds’s earlier assertion that “sooner or later, you know, fundamentalist Christians are going to pick up on this lesson, engage in similar behavior, and make similar demands” is almost certainly false. The most virulently fundamentalist Christian can find no sanction in Jesus’ teaching for the murder of his opponents any more than anyone else can.
It does not make every Muslim a terrorist to point this out, and it isn’t bigoted to do so, either. It is simply to state a series of facts — and if anyone wishes to try to prove that the facts I have asserted here are false, I welcome the challenge. Meanwhile, the relativism of Glenn Reynolds and so many others continues to hinder our response to the jihad threat.
Well, I believe in evolution, memetic as well as physical, and I think that if violence works, more people will use it, and the religious doctrine to justify that will follow. Am I right, or is Robert Spencer right? The world had better hope that Spencer is, since our spineless powers-that-be seem determined to conduct the experiment. . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts here.
MORE: Reader Dave Warner emails:
Robert Spencer writes:
“The most virulently fundamentalist Christian can find no sanction in Jesus’ teaching for the murder of his opponents any more than anyone else can.”
Maybe no one expected the Spanish Inquisition, but I would certainly hope that someone might remember it.
Yes, I get arguments that “no true Christian” would do this sort of thing but these seem like variants of the “no true Scotsman” line.
HOUSE REPUBLICAN LEADER RIPS BUSH:
A House Republican leader is lambasting President Bush on his decision not to call Congress back into session to deal with the energy crisis.
In a legislative update sent to GOP members and staff on Tuesday, Republican House Policy Committee Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) accused “Beijing George” Bush of throwing House Republicans “under the bone-dry bus” on his way to the Olympics in China.
Ouch.
WE STILL HAVE Eliot Spitzer to kick around.
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (AP) — Democratic candidate Barack Obama criticized Republican John McCain on Tuesday for taking a page out of “the Cheney playbook” on energy, overlooking his own support of oil-friendly policies that the unpopular vice president helped to craft.
Vice President Dick Cheney, a former oilman, early in the Bush administration helped draft an energy policy that Obama asserted is biased in favor of tax breaks and favorable treatment for big oil. Obama’s remarks were an attempt to capitalize on Cheney’s unpopularity. . . .
However, Obama himself voted for a 2005 energy bill backed by Bush that included billions in subsidies for oil and natural gas production, a measure Cheney played a major role in developing. McCain opposed the bill on grounds it included billions in unnecessary tax breaks for the oil industry.
So is Obama more Cheneyesque than McCain? Well, probably not, but it’s yet another campaign gaffe — with the difference that this stuff is starting to get reported.
STEWART BAKER: Setting the Record Straight On Terror Watch Lists:
Pajamas Media recently posted a story in which CNN reporter Drew Griffin claimed that he was put on a TSA watch list as retaliation for a story he did on TSA. A lot of readers found it credible, judging by the comments. That’s unfortunate, since the story is quite simply false.
He had emailed me about that story when I linked it; I suggested that he write a response, and he has done so.