IN THE WORKS: A Toyota Prius V Plug-In Hybrid?
Archive for 2011
June 28, 2011
GUNWALKER: What Will Happen When Ken Melson Testifies?
BIKE SADDLES AND ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION: “I’ve spent much of my journalistic career debunking health scares, but the bike-saddle menace struck me as a no-brainer when I first heard about it. Why, if you had an easy alternative, would you take any risk with that part of the anatomy? Even if you didn’t feel any symptoms, even if you didn’t believe the researchers’ warnings, even if you thought it was perfectly healthy to feel numb during a ride — why not switch just for comfort’s sake? Why go on crushing your crotch?”
Plus this: “There’s as much penis inside the body as outside . . . When you sit on a regular bike saddle, you’re sitting on your penis.” It’s not any better for women, either, it turns out. “In another study, Dr. Marsha Guess and Dr. Kathleen Connell, who are urogynecologists at Yale, found that that more than 60 percent of female cyclists using nosed saddles reported symptoms of genital pain, numbness and tingling. Lab tests recorded lower levels of genital sensation in the cyclists than in a control group of runners.”
So give up that traditional bike seat.
Well, there’s always the emergency sex.
ATF GUNRUNNING SCANDAL UPDATE: Assault weapons linked to ATF strategy turn up in U.S. neighborhoods.
ARE AIRLINES bribing politicians with super-elite status?
UNEXPECTEDLY! U.S. Consumer Confidence Hits Seven-Month Low. “Confidence among U.S. consumers unexpectedly fell in June to a seven-month low, indicating that slowing employment gains are weighing on Americans’ outlooks. . . . Joblessness hovering around 9 percent, rising inflation and falling share prices may keep household sentiment in check, raising the risk that the biggest part of the economy will stagnate. Employers last month added the fewest workers since September, and spending, adjusted for inflation, dropped for a second consecutive time, figures from the Labor and Commerce Departments showed.” With all that being the case, it’s funny that the drop was so . . . unexpected.
UPDATE: Reader Michael Long writes:
Too funny, it is no longer “unexpectedly!”
Professor Reynolds, Please tell me you have a screen-shot shot of Bloomberg’s “unexpectedly”… I just followed your link and they no longer think it is so unexpected.
As a matter of fact, I do. Here’s the story lede as it was when I blogged it. Just for the record.
So I guess I can scratch this off my Bloomberg gift list — they’ve obviously already got one. . . .
IN THE MAIL: Henry Clay: The Essential American.
THREE THINGS you can’t say about Social Security. Key bit: “While Social Security’s shortfall is manageable, it is also real. The long-run deficit can be eliminated only by putting more money into the system or by cutting benefits. There is no silver bullet. . . . But you need adult politicians to have an adult conversation about Social Security. And where are they?”
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Failure of Al Gore: Part Deux.
It is a measure of how far Gore has fallen that almost all the scanty attention the piece received focused on Gore’s criticism of what he sees as President Obama’s failure to lead on climate change. Gore, like the global green movement he champions, has fallen by the wayside. Despite terrible weather, despite tornadoes, droughts, food crises and high oil prices, the world conversation has moved on. The question is why. . . .
The global green treaty movement to outlaw climate change is the most egregious folly to seize the world’s imagination since the Kellog-Briand Pact outlawed war in the late 1920s. The idea that the nations of the earth could agree on an enforceable treaty mandating deep cuts in their output of all greenhouse gasses is absurd. A global treaty to meet Mr. Gore’s policy goals isn’t a treaty: the changes such a treaty requires are so broad and so sweeping that a GGCT is less a treaty than a constitution for global government. Worse, it is a constitution for a global welfare state with trillions of dollars ultimately sent by the taxpayers of rich countries to governments (however feckless, inept, corrupt or tyrannical) in poor ones.
For this treaty to work, China, India, Nigeria and Brazil and scores of other developing countries must in effect accept limits on their economic growth. The United States must commit through treaty to policies that cannot get simple majorities in Congress — like sending billions of dollars in climate aid to countries like Iran, North Korea, Syria and Pakistan, even as we adopt intrusive and expensive energy controls here at home.
To some, of course, that’s not a bug, but a feature. But not to enough.
Plus this: “Mr. Gore’s work up to and including his latest Rolling Stone essay has taken a demagogic rather than intellectual approach.” Yes. As he’s gotten older and fatter — even “jowlier” — Gore has come to resemble Jerry Falwell in many ways, including but not limited to the physical, though it appears he is less intellectually and politically sophisticated.
IN SOUTHWEST CHINA, nostalgia and a “Red” revival. “The local satellite television station recently stopped broadcasting sitcoms and now shows only ‘revolutionary’ programs and news. Government workers and students have been told to spend time working in the countryside. The local propaganda department launched a ‘red Twitter’ micro-blogging site, blasting out short patriotic slogans. And in what seems like a throwback to the days of the Cultural Revolution, residents have been encouraged — or told — to read revolutionary books and poetry and to gather regularly in parks to sing old songs extolling the Communist revolution. A recent Sunday gathering, including a colorful, choreographed stage pageant, attracted an estimated 10,000 flag-waving people, many in uniforms and red caps and mostly organized by the party chiefs in their schools and factories.” Pardon me if I’m less than impressed. But if I were a Chinese leader in Beijing, I’d be a bit worried that some sort of purification movement might be springing up.
UPDATE: Several readers say that Beijing likes this, but I repeat — if it gets out of control, it could easily become a “purification movement” that would mean the end of all the lucrative deals for Party officials and their kids, and possibly those officials and their kids hanging from lampposts. When you’ve spent the last ten years profiting off of state-crony capitalism, this is dangerous stuff. Perhaps they’re pushing this now because they expect the economic bubble to burst and want people to take solace in ideology instead of wealth. Good luck with that. China’s overdue for one of its cyclical convulsions already . . .
WEINER THRUSTS HIMSELF INTO choice of his successor. What a putz.
SUPREME COURT: Brown v. EMA casts doubt on the “weapons effect” justification for gun control. “In examining the legislative history of anti-gun laws, courts will not have to look far to find the ‘weapons effect’ as a crucial motive for many of the laws which aim to reduce gun ownership or accessibility by ordinary citizens (rather than merely keeping guns away from actually dangerous people). Legislative animus against the exercise of constitutional rights can be, in itself, an important reason to find a law unconstitutional. When that animus is based on the same type of social science which the Supreme Court has recently dismissed as unrelated to any serious state interest, then courts have especially good reason to recognize the unconstitutionality of the legislation.”
TODAY ONLY: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm on sale.
ON WEDNESDAY, John Kurtz will go on trial for taping Orlando police, and faces 6 years in prison. No one should be prosecuted for recording the actions of public employees on the public dime.
Here’s a video of the case.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: “For people serious about security, the entire TSA is a joke.” Plus this: “As long as it’s easier for Whitey Bulger to bring illegal prescription drugs across the border from Mexico than it is for an elderly leukemia patient to go home to Michigan, forget it.”
WHAT ABOUT THE CARBON FOOTPRINT? Obama admin political appointee takes heat for trips home on taxpayers’ dime. “Obama political appointee Ron Sims is under scrutiny for trips he made to Seattle during the first several months after his appointment. Sims made 13 trips to Seattle, his home city, as Obama’s Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) between early May 2009 and late August 2010.” Worries about carbon emissions are for the little people. And worries about misuse of tax money are for . . . nobody much, it seems.
BOB OWENS: Pravda on the Potomac: Washington Post Again Covers for Gov’t on Gunwalker. “The increasingly shameless Post runs an editorial trying to shift the blame for Gunwalker to … the National Rifle Association.” Personally, I blame Sarah Palin. And the Koch Brothers. Also, Halliburton. [Forget the Halliburton, that’s so pre-2009. — ed Sorry, need to run an update on my List Of Approved Villains.]
SUPREME COURT TO REVIEW whether GPS tracking requires a warrant.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: The Dems’ Unbalanced Debt Plan. “The implicit message, of course, is that Republicans want an unbalanced approach, one that favors the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class. Biden went so far as to say that the GOP’s refusal to consider tax hikes ‘borders on the immoral.’ But even if raising taxes on business and the most productive elements of society makes sense at a time when the economy is still struggling to find its feet — which it most emphatically doesn’t — the simple fact is tax hikes fail to address the real cause of the debt crisis: out-of-control federal spending.”
Which doesn’t just border on the immoral.