WELL, THAT WOULD BE NICE: New battery technology could allow electric vehicles to recharge in two minutes. You’d need a heavy-duty cord to carry that much current, though.
Archive for 2011
March 24, 2011
MARK PERRY: Despite Recent “He-Covery,” It’s Still a Mancession. “Male employment is down by 4,932,000 jobs since the January 2008 peak, compared to female employment being 2.549 million jobs below the peak. Therefore, we can say that for every 100 jobs lost by women since the start of the recession, men have lost 193.5 jobs.” (Via Newsalert).
ENERGY COMPARISON: Death Rate Per Watts Produced. “For every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced.”
MICHELLE MALKIN is still looking for her missing cousin. If you can help, please do. (Bumped).
BEST AND WORST state pension funds.
PROTESTS: Thousands Shout For Freedom In Syria.
Related: At least 37 protesters killed by government. “Thousands marched in the funeral chanting calls for freedom, and — for the first time since protests broke out Friday — slogans against Iran and Lebanon’s armed Shi’ite movement Hezbollah.”
IN THE MAIL: From Sheldon Hirsch and Alan Hirsch, The Beauty of Short Hops: How Chance and Circumstance Confound the Moneyball Approach to Baseball.
STOPPING PRISON RAPE, with all deliberate speed: “Almost eight years after Congress unanimously approved the first-ever federal law to crack down on prison rape and nine months after the Department of Justice missed its initial deadline for issuing anti-prison rape policies, the new federal guidelines remain in limbo.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: COLLEGE’S HARSH LESSON: “In fact, setting aside the technical professions (medicine, engineering, etc.) the cost of a bachelor’s degree is exploding just as its value in the marketplace is declining.”
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Dear Reuters — You Must Be Kidding.
Sometimes, even judges suffer from the “CSI” effect. The district court judge in the case today may have missed a few important days of his genetics class in high school or in college. Perhaps they didn’t teach genetics in the late 1960′s?
Or maybe he wasn’t paying attention.
DISASTER PREPAREDNESS LESSONS FROM JAPAN: “Shops across Tokyo began rationing goods — milk, toilet paper, rice and water — as a run on bottled water coupled with delivery disruptions left shelves bare Thursday nearly two weeks after the earthquake and tsunami to the north.”
So one argument you see among prepper types is the importance of storing water vs. the importance of having a filter. Here, I’m pretty sure that storage wins — will even the fanciest Katadyn filter take out iodine? And, more generally, this supports the notion of having at least a couple of weeks worth of food stored as the U.S. government, et al., recommend.. (For the Japanese, with their cramped living spaces, that kind of preparedness would be much more difficult, of course.)
Anyway, if this kind of thing interests you, there’s lots of discussion over at Bill Quick’s forum, and here’s a list of disaster-preparation gear.
UPDATE: Reader Sean Neves writes:
On iodine in water, I just figured I’d ring to point out that “activated carbon” is the terminology to look for on a water filter. Usually, they are a post-filter element designed to remove iodine and chlorine from filtered water. Iodine and Chlorine are used to kill viruses and bacteria, while the filter removes cysts, protozoa and other nastiness that don’t get killed quickly by the chemicals. Perhaps it’s time for a water treatment thread? Lots of useful technology out there including various filtration and shortwave UV-C light technologies.
My knowledge of water treatment originates in my outdoor recreation pursuits, but has bled over into survival and emergency preparedness. Alas, there is a lot of shared technology between those fields.
Interesting.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE’D SEE CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS ELIMINATED IN THE NAME OF NATIONAL SECURITY. And they were right! “New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades. The move is one of the Obama administration’s most significant revisions to rules governing the investigation of terror suspects in the U.S. And it potentially opens a new political tussle over national security policy, as the administration marks another step back from pre-election criticism of unorthodox counterterror methods.”
That criticism was just for the benefit of the rubes, apparently. Hey, rube!
UPDATE: A reader emails:
And regarding rubes: yes, those on the right who supported Obama, and those on the far-left who believed in Obama’s campaign promises, were clearly rubes. But the rank and file Democrats who are now silent on Libya? I think it’s important we call them what they are: liars.
I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that many times over the last eight years, I would see the intensity of the moral outrage on the left over Iraq and say to myself, “Gee, these people sure do feel strongly about this. What if they’re right about it?” This caused me many times to reexamine my reasons for supporting the war, and my conscience. We now know, however, that it was all quite simply bullshit. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. I must admit, I’m feeling a bit like a rube myself.
Yes, taking them seriously was a mistake.
THERE’S THAT WORD AGAIN: U.S. Durable Goods Orders Unexpectedly Fell In February.
AMAZON NOW FEATURES An Android App Store. With a free app every day.
PATRICK MCILHERAN ON PARTISANSHIP IN THE WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT ELECTION:
JoAnne Kloppenburg says she ought to be on the state Supreme Court to end “personality and partisanship,” which is nice. Though if she wins, it will be largely because of voters who expect her to do some very partisan work, overturning the consequences of last fall’s election. . . . fter they lost in the Legislature, union rally organizers in Madison immediately switched to chanting Kloppenburg’s name. Kloppenburg backers worked the crowd, the Associated Press reported, adding that her Facebook page was “alive with comments from people trying to mobilize get-out-the-vote efforts for her.”
Kloppenburg does little to damp expectations. She impugns Prosser as partisan, offering no proof other than a boast made by his then-new campaign chief to a newspaper, one Prosser hadn’t approved and swiftly disavowed. She is careful to say her mind is made up on nothing, but she told a Madison newspaper that she’ll be a check “on overreaching by the executive and legislative branches. . . . What’s happened in the last three weeks has brought that home.”
If that wink-and-nudge doesn’t win you over, you surely want all the shouting to stop, and Kloppenburg promises that, too. The court, she told a TV interview, is “distracted by personalities and personal views. . . . New blood is needed.”
New public-employee-union-aligned blood, I guess.
“SMART DIPLOMACY,” CONT’D: “To all appearances, U.S. foreign policy in the Obama Administration has now definitively gone down the rabbit hole. It is intoxicated with an advanced form of Wilsonian madness, one shorn of all sensitivity to the consequences of the U.S. government’s behavior.”
This unexpected image of a cowboy president from Illinois is gaining traction in the public mind and late-night comedians’ monologues (“Three wars now,” Jay Leno said Wednesday night. “Can you imagine how many wars we’d be in if Pres. Obama hadn’t gotten the Nobel Peace Prize?”)
Heh.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jerry Pournelle:
As I said at the beginning of this affair, Libya’s fate won’t be decided in Libya. The West can’t seem to make up its mind about Gaddafi, which seems odd. If it’s legal and in the national interest to take him out, surely it would be better to send in a force to do it rather than merely smiting his minions for day, or weeks, or months, or… Gaddafi can’t fly. What next?
We may have a similar decision to make about Syria, where the regime is no more savory than in Libya. . . . The US needs a policy. That policy ought to be based on US abilities, not mere principle, but there ought to be principles and a clear policy. One principle might be “We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guardians only of our own.” A quite different one might spell out the conditions under which we will protect civilians from their own governments. Or perhaps we should not have a public policy. Doc Bussard used to say that the last thing America needed was a consistent foreign policy. Let everyone else wonder what the hell we are going to do. But that was at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when there was this strong pressure for the US to recognize that we were at the end of history and we ought to get on board.
Gaddafi is doomed if the West wants his doom; if left alone he will survive and rule.
Indeed.
MORE AUTHORS move toward self-publishing.
Did I mention that C.J. Burch has put his books on Kindle at the magic 99-cent price point? (Bumped).
UPDATE: Reader Peter Neal writes: “Just an interesting note – went out to look at the C J Burch .99 cent Kindle books – Amazon also showed your Army of Davids….at $9.39…..hmmmm. Regards and thanks for Instapundit – I buy stuff on Amazon thru your link in order to help contribute a little.”
Thanks for that. Well, C.J. controls the pricing on his backlist. I don’t. Maybe I should try to talk the publisher into putting Army of Davids out at 99 cents, though. Just because they don’t have to listen to me doesn’t mean they won’t, I guess.
WHO KILLED DETROIT? “Sure, a lot of the blame goes to a generation of bad management. But the main reason for Detroit’s decline is the greed of the industry’s main union, the UAW, which priced the Big Three out of the market.”
WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE, in Madison, Wisconsin. “Basically, our assemblyman has cut off access. The reason that’s interesting is that the protesters — to whom he gives super-access — have made a big deal about how the Republicans aren’t listening to them and how democracy requires legislators to listen to everyone, even those who are their vehement opponents, even when they are not from their district. But Hulsey is resisting a man who has sought politely to speak with him, who is in his district, and who even voted for him.”
Plus this: “I have spoken with a number of Democratic senators and assemblymen over the past month. More than one has described the budget repair controversy as ‘war.’ So, Brett, I want to ask you straight out: Do you see it as ‘war?’ And if you do – because I am in dissent with your position – do you see me as your enemy?”
UPDATE: Reader Leslie Eastman writes: “It’s not war. It’s ‘Kinetic Union Action.'” Ah, that makes sense.
TEA PARTY DOWN UNDER? SORT OF. Reader Martin Cope writes: “I’ve attached a picture from the worlds first anti-warmist rally – the Canberra No Carbon Tax protest. About 4000 of us extremists were in attendance. The MSM were offended by a few of our signs but it’s not like any of us can be controlled. It was all very good-natured, alot like the American tea party rallies and to be political you need a pretty thick skin anyway.” Indeed you do. And it does seem that we’re seeing popular movements against insider-rule springing up all over the world these days, doesn’t it?
