#OCCUPYFAIL: Facts Are Not My Concern:

The sign at her feet read “For a nuclear free, carbon free future.” The one in her hands an equally predictable “Excessive wealth and consumption are dying paradigms. Renew American with a Green Revolution.”

Before her stood Alex Epstein, energy expert and frequent PJTV guest commentator. Noting the sign on the sidewalk, Epstein asked, “You’re opposed to nuclear power and [carbon dioxide] generating power?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Do you know what percentage of power in the world those generate right now?”

“That’s not my concern. My concern is the people that are profiting off of power that is unsustainable….”

Calm among the hubbub of Zuccotti Park, Epstein endured a lengthy non-response, then answered the question for her.

“We’re talking about something that’s producing 95% of the power in the world,” he stated flatly. “This is the power that’s keeping people’s lights on. It’s keeping the food going. And you’re saying we ought to dismantle that somehow. And I’m saying, if that happens, the entire world as we know it will collapse.”

It’s nice to see someone stand up to the green know-nothingism.

CHANGE: One in four American women take medication for a mental disorder.

NEWS FROM ACADEME: ‘Prima Donna’ Full Professors Lambasted for Failure to Mentor Junior Faculty.

IS IT WRONG TO CALL THE #OCCUPYWALLSTREET TYPES “HIPPIES?” Reader Jeff Orwick writes:

Real Hippies are independant, get off the grid, and are “leave me alone” types. My wife and I are meeting a lot of them in our quest to Go Galt. I feel the liberal ones have their politics considerably confused given what they say they want and how they live , but personally we have similar goals, even though the granola gets deep in some spots. These people in OWS are almost nothing like them. Maybe we just need a new term to distinguish between the two? Given the negative connotations, let the OWS crowd have “Hippies” – Call the rest of us Neo-Hippies.

Yeah, you’ve got your Stewart Brand hippies, who are very different from your Jerry Rubin hippies. Of course, just look how Jerry Rubin turned out.

AT AMAZON, warehouse deals on shoes.

THE GLOBAL BLACK MARKET as a “shadow superpower.”

CHANGE: Pentagon Successfully Tests Hypersonic Flying Bomb.

SCIENTIST PROVES THAT DRUNKS ARE SURPRISINGLY GOOD DRIVERS. Okay, that’s not the tenor of the piece. But what else to make of this bit?

Now, alcohol-related deaths from crashes are down to about 10,000 or 11,000 a year.

“There’s been a lot of progress, and I wouldn’t want to minimize that. But I saw a recent statistic put out by the CDC that suggested that there are least 110 million instances of drunk driving in this country still a year,” Lerner says.

Do the math: 11,000 deaths from 110 million instances is a 1-in-10,000 risk of death from an instance of drunk driving. That doesn’t sound so bad. But of course, an “alcohol-related crash” is just one in which someone has been drinking, not necessarily a crash in which drunk driving was the cause, so the risk is probably even lower. Hey, you can’t argue with science!

Maybe we should just abolish drunk driving laws. “Several studies, such as a 2005 paper in the British Medical Journal, have found that talking on a cell phone, even with a hands-free device, causes more driver impairment than a 0.08 BAC. A 2001 American Automobile Association study found several other in-car distractions that also caused more impairment, including eating, adjusting a radio or CD player, and having kids in the backseat. . . . Doing away with the specific charge of drunk driving sounds radical at first blush, but it would put the focus back on behavior, where it belongs. The punishable act should be violating road rules or causing an accident, not the factors that led to those offenses. Singling out alcohol impairment for extra punishment isn’t about making the roads safer. It’s about a lingering hostility toward demon rum.”

UPDATE: Reader Donald Stephens writes:

I’m a traffic engineer, so I ran the basic statistics for all fatalities and all vehicle trips to get a basis for comparison.

I used the 2009 fatality data (the most recent readily available) and historical trip data. There are about 813 million, more or less, trips in a typical year – 2009 may have been less because of the recession but I’ll ignore that for now. 2009 had about 33,800 total fatalities (rounded to three figures) and 10,900 alcohol involved crashes (BAC > .08).

Using the 110 million drunk-driving trip estimate the fatality rates are one in 10,200 for drunk-driving trips and one in 30,700 for non-drunk trips. The ratio is about three to one so it’s still an important concern. The economist’s question still comes into play: compared to what?

The really useful breakdown would be to cross-tab the fatalities, by BAC level, by total trips, by person. With that we could ask if habitual offenders and/or alcoholics more dangerous than occasional drunks. That would allow more effective enforcement and intervention than the current press-release-checkpoint system. (Bar stakeouts appear to be more efficient in producing arrests.) Unfortunately that data isn’t available.

Yes, the “compared to what?” question seldom gets asked. In addition, a rate of less than one fatality per 10,000 is comparatively low — at least, if they ran drunk-driving ads stressing a 1-in-10,000 risk of death, I don’t think it would make much of an impression.

AN SUV FOR THE 1%: 2012 Mercedes-Benz ML63 AMG offers all-weather, all-family rapid transit. Or maybe the 0.1%.

LONGEVITY UPDATE: The oldest old: Reaching 90 more likely than ever. That’s good, but we really need techniques to deal with aging itself.

GOOGLE MUSIC: A “complete letdown?”

SHOCKER: Number of hours students study varies by major.

OBAMA DELAYS OIL SHALE, KILLS 200,000 JOBS. “President Obama’s United States Department of Agriculture has delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio for up to six months by cancelling a mineral lease auction for Wayne National Forest (WNF). The move was taken in deference to environmentalists, on the pretext of studying the effects of hydraulic fracturing.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The World’s Most Popular Gun: The Long Road To The AK-47.

MAURICE STUCKE: Behavioral Antitrust and Monopolization.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Prospective Law Students Jeer Penn State’s Offer To Waive Application Fees.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: China’s Global Nightmare. “The real importance of this story does not, however, have much to do with Brazil’s jittery nerves about Chinese investment. It is to remind us about a key Chinese vulnerability that is often overlooked by pundits: China’s growing dependence on natural resources located far from its frontiers. Beijing’s chosen national strategy — to achieve great power status by becoming the industrial workshop of the world — locks it into a complex and difficult set of dependencies and relationships with countries and markets all over the world. Access to those resources traps China in complicated geopolitical tradeoffs that can blow up in unexpected ways — as when China had to scramble to protect its citizens in Libya. Chinese companies become the object of public anger if they are seen to be economically exploitative, unwelcoming to local labor, or environmentally destructive. And, of course, in the event of a confrontation with the United States, China’s entire supply chain and overseas investments are helpless hostages.”

SHIKHA DALMIA: Treasury Admits What Everybody Already Knew: Taxpayer Losses On GM Bailout Are Going to be Massive. “Am I allowed to say, I told you so?. . . . The $23.6 billion represents a 25 percent loss on the feds $60 billion direct “investment” in GM. But that’s not all that taxpayers are on the hook for. As I explained previously, Uncle Sam’s special GM bankruptcy package allowed the company to write off $45 billion in previous losses going forward. This could work out to as much as $15 billion in tax savings that GM wouldn’t have had had it gone through a normal bankruptcy. Why? Because after bankruptcy, the tax liabilities of companies increase since they have no more losses to write off. This means that the total hit to taxpayers, who still own about a quarter of the company, could add up to $38.6 billion. That’s even more that the $34 billion on the outside I had predicted in May.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Pelosi Leads List Of Conflict Of Interest Dems. “As Democrats demonize Wall Street CEOs as the ‘greedy’ fiends of the financial crisis, they’ve lined their own pockets — both before and after the crisis. Nancy Pelosi’s just the latest example. The former House speaker allegedly gamed financial reforms to boost her personal stock portfolio. The brewing scandal is complicated, but here’s the Reader’s Digest version.”

PROFESSOR’S PLEA TO LAW SCHOOLS: Spend Money On Students, Not Porn.

SHOCKER: On Tax Reform, Congress Says One Thing, But Does Another.

HOW CONGRESS OCCUPIED WALL STREET: Politicians who arrive in Washington as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires. Why?

Related: Spengler on Corzine: Republicans, Democrats and Wall Street Fraud or: Who’s the MF Now?

A SALE ON MEN’S SOCKS.

THE AUTHORITIES DO NOT HAVE YOUR INTERESTS AT HEART: “Whose side are you on? And whose side do you think the Massachusetts legal system is on?”