ANOTHER VARIATION IN THOSE “Miss Me Yet?” billboards.
Archive for 2010
February 10, 2010
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: AP Story Breaks US Media Wall of Denial on IPCC Mess; Al Gore Still Silent.
GOT QUESTIONS? Ask Jim Treacher. I mean, he’s stuck in a hospital bed, so he’s got nothing better to do than answer them. Except when the nurse offers him a “sponge bath,” anyway . . . .
SALLY SATEL: The Limits Of Bioethics.
In the case of bioethicists, the nature of the subject about which they claim authority is up for debate. Traditionally, they have focused on the controversies surrounding biomedical technology, such as cloning, sex selection, in vitro fertilization, nanotechnology, research ethics, organ allocation, and so on. Now experts are calling for involvement in policy. Renee Fox and Judith P. Swazey, senior scholars who have studied the sociology and history of bioethics, urge a focus on “inequalities in health and in access to health care in America.” The field is too “narrowly American-ocentric,” they write in their 2008 book Observing Bioethics; it should become “more centrally and deeply involved with [global] suffering and issues of social justice.” In his new book The Future of Bioethics, Howard Brody, a physician and philosopher at the University of Texas Medical Branch, instructs bioethicists to gauge success by asking themselves if they are “speaking truth to power.” These prescriptions presume a moral authority that bioethicists cannot properly claim.
I’ve never been convinced that bioethicists have any particular expertise at all.
SNOW IN WASHINGTON: On the C-SPAN Capitol livecam.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: Angry Norwegians in scuba gear chase after Google Street View car.
GREEN JOB FAIL: New Wind Farms in the U.S. Do Not Bring Jobs. “Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C. . . . Even with the infusion of so much stimulus money, a recent report by American Wind Energy Association showed a drop in U.S. wind manufacturing jobs last year.”
UPDATE: A reader emails:
In the event you post this, please don’t use my name, but until last year I worked at a law firm that had a very strong wind power practice. One foreign client in particular has kept the wind power practice group very busy during a time when most lawyers have been surviving on a fraction of what they used to bill. Each deal to buy turbines and set them up and then sell the power results in lawyers and bankers in the US billing significant amounts of money to the foreign clients that manufacture the turbines. It’s not tens of thousands of jobs, nor is it blue collar employment, but the money spent in the US to expand wind power capabilities definitely has an effect on white collar jobs. I know that lawyers and bankers are not the ones Obama is trying to help with the green jobs stimuli, but the positive effects can’t be ignored.
Well, if it’s keeping lawyers employed, then it’s a big success! More wind subsidies, please!
HUFFINGTON POST: White House Moves Swiftly To Stem Fallout Of Obama Interview. “The White House is moving swiftly to stem the fallout from a potentially damaging interview President Obama gave on Tuesday, in which he was quoted saying that he did not ‘begrudge’ the multibillion-dollar bonuses of Wall Street executives.”
ANOTHER BATCH OF RUBES starts to get a clue.
HOW TO GET A DATE. Once again, the comments are the most interesting part.
Just don’t overthink things.
WHO IS BEHIND the persecution of Geert Wilders?
EVE ENSLER: Earthquakes are proof of global warming. Really, this is exceptionally stupid even by The View’s Joy Behar’s admittedly low standards.
UPDATE: More thoughts from Ed Driscoll.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Video here.
JANET ALBRECHTSEN: The Mad March Of The Thought Police.
SOME CARDINAL RULES for snow shoveling.
IRONY ABOUNDS: A reader emails: “Today, Michael Mann was scheduled to give a colloquium on climate change at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am a graduate student. As you may know, Philadelphia has been hit by multiple snowstorms in the past week. Today, for what I am told is the first time since the mid-1990s, the university suspended normal operations due to snow, and his colloquium on climate change has been postponed.”
IN THE MAIL: From Joshua Muravchik, Obama’s Radical Transformation of America: Year One.
REPORTING: “Fox has the list of donors, which comprises a set of interlocking slush-type funds that pay for the anti–Tea Party campaign. The largest of these is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME,) which has kicked in a total of $9.9M in a single year to two funds that provide the cash for the non-grassroots movement. Yes — government workers’ money is being used to fend off Tea Party protesters.”
MICHAEL BARONE: Team Obama Grows Stupid. “The same people who directed the campaign that defeated Hillary Clinton and routed John McCain, a campaign that raised far more money and attracted far more volunteers than any before it, have within a year come up with a legislative program that is crashing in ruins and that, to judge from recent polls, has left the Democratic party weaker than I have seen it in almost 50 years of closely following politics.”
FUDGING UNEMPLOYMENT STATISTICS? “No one will know what the error rate has been with the establishment survey from April to December 2009 until the numbers are revised again in February 2011, three months after the 2010 midterm elections. But a great deal of skepticism seems warranted. The establishment survey assumes that new firms generated almost a million new jobs over those nine months. At the same time, the household survey just happens to show that about a million more jobs were lost than the survey of firms indicates.”