WELL, THIS MAKES ME WANT TO TAKE UP SKIING: Manmade Snow From Recycled Sewer Water May Contain Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria.
Archive for 2012
October 17, 2012
AN AMUSING LACK OF PERCEPTION.
GO BIG. GO OBAMA: And don’t forget: Free stuff!!! My husband and I made a game out of the second presidential debate. Every time Obama talked about something that would cost billions of dollars (virtually every sentence out of his mouth), we made cash register sounds: “Cha-ching!” I could imagine this would make a really fun drinking game. Try it next Monday during the 3d debate!
REAL WRATH-OF-GOD STUFF: Detonating toilets have become a recent scourge in the American bathroom scene.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Transparency: “Prospective students who are considering colleges in Virginia can now use a Web tool to see how much money newly minted graduates of individual academic programs earn, with data that is broken out by college and major.”
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Astronomy & Space Science.
Also, today only: 40% Off Slippers for Women and Men. Winter is coming.
FOUR CALLS: from the Obama campaign, one after the other. Each answered in rude and obnoxious fashion (I’ve asked to be taken off their lists politely before.) In Colorado. Do you know what this reminds me of? The McCain campaign where they called us nonstop for days despite requests for them to stop. In contrast, Romney called once, I told them all voters in my house were voting Romney, don’t waste your time on us, and that was it. Ground game? Or running the game into the ground?
ILYA SOMIN: Yet Another Debate That Ignores Nominations. Given the media’s sympathies, you can pretty much assume that if a topic hasn’t come up in the debates, it’s because they think talking about it is bad for Obama.
PJTV ELECTION ROUNDTABLE: The Libya Debate Debacle and Why the Buck Does Not Stop with Obama. With John Phillips, Tammy Bruce, Richard Grenell, and Richard Baehr.
BIDEN OFF THE LEASH: [VIDEO] Biden Emerges, Demands ‘Every Single Operation’ for All Girls Er… including vasectomies?
A DEBATE-INSPIRED HYPOTHETICAL: “Say you’re a police investigator, and you find a dead body with no clear cause of death. It’s a high-profile case, and the public wants to know if there was foul play. You give a press conference in which you say, ‘One thing’s for sure: no act of murder will ever shake our resolve.’ By making that statement, have you announced that the person was definitely murdered?…”
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nanotechnology Education: Four Ways You Can Make A Contribution.
WHAT ABOUT IOWA? In full-page newspaper ad, 13 Iowa voters apologize for supporting Obama in 2008.
Hey, everybody makes mistakes. The important thing is not to repeat them.
PAUL RAHE: WHAT ABOUT MICHIGAN? “To comprehend what is going on in Michigan, one must begin with a simple observation: Michigan in 2012 is not what Michigan was in 2000. The state is changing and changing fast, and this election may determine its future for many years to come.”
YEAH, WE’RE IRRATIONAL: Experts: Dogs, Bathtubs Scarier than al Qaeda. Or as a (then) friend told me shortly after 9/11 “but I don’t understand why you’re so upset, more people die in car accidents every year.” I realized then I was in the presence of one of the world’s great nitwits, unable to distinguish between accident and purposeful attack. Apparently she’s not alone. Somehow that doesn’t make it better.
ANOTHER GREEN COMPANY GOES BELLY UP: “The news is unsurprising; electric cars simply aren’t selling as well as boosters promised. . . . A123 Systems is only the latest in the growing list of failures in Obama’s controversial green jobs agenda, which Republicans have been consistently attacking on the campaign trail. Whether or not the Administration pays a political price for these failures, it’s time for a change of direction before millions more dollars are wasted.” Since the dollars went to cronies, the Obama Administration doesn’t regard them as wasted.
Meanwhile, here’s A123 Video Shows President Obama, Top Politicians Praising Failed Green Company.
JUST WATCH OUT FOR COMPUTER VIRUSES: Robo-Doctors Signal the Rise of the Medical Machines. ” It won’t be long now before the “doctor” treating you for that nagging cold is a machine. There will be a flesh-and-blood doctor involved in the process, of course, but the robot will do his bidding remotely, perhaps through an iPad. This isn’t so crazy as you might think — Sun Microsystems co-founder and forward-thinker Vinod Khosla predicted the robotization of medicine earlier this summer in an interview with Wired executive editor Thomas Goetz. Four out of five doctors will be replaced by machines, he predicted. It’s starting to happen, in hundreds of hospitals worldwide.”
TERRIFYING WINDOWS INTO OBAMA’S THOUGHTS: Big Brother Reads Minority Report — I do think this debate, like the VP one will prove more and more of a loss for Obama as people look at what he actually said.
THIS MIRRORS MY EXPERIENCE: ‘Paul Ryan Girl’ Video Reveals Fear of Being Openly Conservative in Show Biz
Coming out of the political closet didn’t hurt her. It didn’t hurt me either. I blacklisted myself, but I’m still working. I don’t know how many of you know the first time I saw my name at Instapundit (turned out it was about the afterword for Heinlein’s Puppet Masters) I was terrified. I thought it would be the end of my career in publishing. All the same, I felt compelled to come out of the political closet more and more. Turned out I was right. As soon as I started working at PJM and being more vocal about my politics in books, all but one publisher dropped me. OTOH that publisher is allowing me greater freedom than ever and my indie efforts are starting to show signs of paying off. Also I seem to have more fans than ever. Perhaps there’s a lot to be said to being brave and admitting to your beliefs or as Pratchett calls it “Being yourself as hard as you can.” Say it after me “I am Spartacus!” Be Not Afraid.
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WHO WON ‘LAST NIGHT’S’ DEBATE?
Because we can’t all be Lewis Lapham — or…maybe we can!
THE OBAMANOMICS OF GAS PRICES: This was the dumbest comment I’ve ever heard out of anybody, anywhere, about our astronomically high gas prices. When Romney told the second debate audience that gas prices had climbed to over $4/gallon after having been less than $2/gal when Obama was elected, Obama incoherently replied:
Well, think about what the governor — think about what the governor just said. He said when I took office, the price of gasoline was $1.80, $1.86. Why is that? Because the economy was on the verge of collapse, because we were about to go through the worst recession since the Great Depression, as a consequence of some of the same policies that Governor Romney’s now promoting. So, it’s conceivable that Governor Romney could bring down gas prices because with his policies, we might be back in that same mess.
So Obama thinks high gas prices are due to a vigorous, recovering economy that’s supposedly no longer on the “verge of collapse”? There are so many fundamental errors in basic economics that it almost leaves one speechless.
Gas prices, like anything else, are a function of supply and demand. A recession or depression reduces demand. If supply stays constant, gas prices will fall. But if the supply side of the equation is also negatively affected/reduced– as, for example, the reduction of leases and drilling on federal land, as pointed out by Romney–gas prices should rise (as they have). The bottom line? Gas prices should have–probably would have– fallen in our current recession, due to decreased demand. But since the Obama Administration’s anti-carbon, anti-fossil fuel policies have taken hold, the negative impact on supply has outpaced the reduction in demand, leading to significantly higher prices.
Let’s also take Obama’s illogic straight on: If he’s right that an improved economy = higher gas prices, then isn’t he telling us that we can never expect to see gas prices fall again (because of course we all know his policies are causing a “huge recovery”)? That’s comforting– kind of like the statement of his Dep’t of Interior Secretary Steven Chu from Feb, 2012 that the Administration’s goal was “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” (around $8/gal.).
It isn’t so much what President Obama says (though that is bad enough), it is what he doesn’t say that one has to listen very closely to hear.
DISASTER PREPARATION: Can we escape the million-death earthquake? “A ‘rogue earthquake’ occurs on a fault that wasn’t identified as being particularly dangerous. That can happen in areas where earthquakes are very rare. You might get one every several thousands of years, so the last one was long before living memory.”
Here’s an earlier post on earthquake preparedness.