Archive for 2012
November 8, 2012
SO WHILE HELEN AND I WERE OUT IN CALIFORNIA, WE DID A PHOTO SHOOT. Here’s one of the outtakes. I liked it.
LEFTIES SHOULD LOVE IT, RIGHT? Digital Socialism.
We can promise the have-nots ALL the movies for FREE.
We can promise them ALL the video games for FREE.
We can promise them a copy of EVERY song for FREE.
We can promise them a copy of EVERY single college course taught at an Ivy League school for FREE.
I think it’s better for everyone when you spread the intellectual property around.
HUGH HEWITT: Advice to Grieving Conservatives.
Ann Coulter: Don’t Blame Romney.
Investor’s Business Daily: Conservatives Don’t Panic: U.S. Is Still Center-Right. “In fact, the share of voters who say the government is doing too much climbed from 43% in 2008 to 51% in 2012, back to where it was in 1996, just before Bill Clinton declared the era of big government was over.” I predict those sentiments will grow more pronounced. Time to gear up for the midterms and take the Senate.
Also: They kicked our butts in the ground game.
Finally: I keep hearing demographic deepthink about population shifts and how if Romney had gotten as many Latinos as George W. Bush he’d have won. Maybe so. But if Romney had gotten as many Republicans as John McCain he’d have won, too. I kept going on and on about the importance of showing up, and that seems to have been what mattered. Why didn’t people show up? Good question. Was it undercover anti-Mormonism? Or was it simply that Romney — who campaigned for independents and deliberately distanced himself from the Tea Party — didn’t pay enough attention to the base? Maybe the numbers will answer this, but obviously the Obama people thought this was a base-turnout election and Romney’s people didn’t. Obama’s people were right.
UPDATE: Prof. Jacobson warns: Beware of Operation Demoralize. Absolutely. Infighting and demoralization is what they want.
Related: Evangelicals turned out for Romney: “Evangelicals turned out in record numbers and voted as heavily for Mitt Romney yesterday as they did for George W. Bush in 2004. That is an astonishing outcome that few would have predicted even a few months ago. But Romney underperformed with younger voters and minorities and that in the end made the difference for Obama.”
Meanwhile, reader Richard Allen comments: “I will note than in 2008 it wasn’t so much John McCain that fired up the base as Sarah Palin. Yet the Romney campaign went out of its way to dis her. Same thing with Ron Paul who generated much of the actual enthusiasm this time.” I don’t think Ron Paul could have pulled a Palin-sized crowd. But he might have been a good surrogate on campuses, if that could have been worked out. I don’t know if he would have done it or not, but I’d be surprised if he were asked.
More thoughts from Bob Krumm.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, maybe Ron Paul would have done it.
Also: Disquieting Thought: “Maybe we should have just run McCain/Palin again.”
ERSKINE BOWLES: Make A Deficit Deal Now.
BENGHAZI UPDATE: House panel to hold hearing on Libya attack with top Obama intelligence advisers. Too bad they couldn’t have managed this a couple of weeks ago.
HMM: Statins May Lower Risk of Cancer Death. “A report published in Thursday’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine is one of a number of recent papers suggesting that statins not only limit the growth of cancer cells but also make them more vulnerable to certain therapies.” Well, good. Hope this pans out.
ANGELA MERKEL: “Christianity is the most persecuted religion worldwide.” Walter Russell Mead comments: “The critics have howled over Merkel’s comments and will no doubt continue to do so, but she’s right.”
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Power Tools.
Also, today only, The Mel Brooks Collection on Blu-Ray, $25.99. Last time this was on special, I bought it, and sent another copy to my brother.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Howard Lovy: Training U.S. Workers for Nanotech Revolution Is No Small Thing. “The United States produces a great number of nanotech Ph.D.s, but these researchers are not the ones who are going to run the equipment at these new nanotech companies that spin out of the research.”
I QUESTION THE TIMING: Boeing Telegraphs Layoffs in Defense, Space & Security Unit. “Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA) did pretty much what we expect other aerospace and defense companies to do. The company waited for the outcome of the presidential election, and now it is outlining how it will deal with the coming Fiscal Cliff.”
KYLE SMITH: Finita La Commedia.
Read the whole thing.
(On an infinitely lighter note, a big thanks to Glenn both for allowing me to be part of the gang of co-bloggers for the last several weeks, and to stay on for another week. And a healthy round of applause to my co-bloggers for their superb job.)
RIPPED APART BY FINANCIAL CRISIS, GREEK SOCIETY IN FREE FALL: “A sign taped to a wall in an Athens hospital appealed for civility from patients. ‘The doctors on duty have been unpaid since May,’ it read, ‘Please respect their work.'” I suspect having some hard currency or gold to slip them might help, too.
DISASTER PREPAREDNESS: Reader Kathleen Wallace writes:
I have been an Insta-addict for three years. I appreciated, among others, the recurrent theme of disaster preparedness during Hurricane Irene, and was struck particularly by the role of inverters.
So, when we saw Sandy on the way, we finally got our inverter, set it up, and tested it here in our home in New Jersey. As predicted, our power went out.
We ran the inverter off the car periodically each day, an hour in the morning and the evening. We ran the fridge, the furnace, the modem, charged the phones, and caught up with the Instapundit. We were conservative (of course), and at the end of 5 days, we had well over half a tank left in our Ford Escape, were warm, and knew what was happening. The car ran quietly, cleanly, and safely, unlike the many loud, smelly generators in the neighborhood.
We never needed to wait hours in line with several red plastic containers. The candles and transistor radio made the evenings enjoyable.
I thank you for your blog, and especially for helping us rethink disaster preparedness.
Inverters are pretty cheap, too. You’ll want extension cords, too.
UPDATE: Say, here’s a question: How much power does a gas pump consume? Could you power one with a big (2000-3000 watt) inverter?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Marcoux writes:
I second what your reader Kathleen wrote about using inverters instead of a generator. Followed some of your links to arrive at that conclusion. Fortunately, I haven’t had to use anything yet.
One obvious reason to go this route: fridge, a big concern, doesn’t have to be on all the time to maintain, per what Kathleen is doing. I wish she had written what inverters she has.
Yeah. I assume she has her furnace wired with a pigtail connection, too. You can splice into the furnace, of course, but not everyone would want to do that.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Alan Gray writes: “How about some rules of thumb on the right size inverter? And can any size be run off a car?” Pretty much — up to 2000-3000 watts pretty easily. There are bigger ones, but they’re best hardwired. Of course, you can run low-power stuff off the battery, but if you’re running more than a few hundred watts you really want the engine running. You want to keep the inverter close to the car — no 12-volt extension cables — and then run an extension cord into the house. You lose a surprising amount of power in cabling, though, so you want to keep things as short as possible.
MORE: Reader Curtis Franklin writes: “If you’re going to try to serve circuits in your house through a generator/inverter (rather than simply plugging appliances directly into the outlets on the power source), then it’s critical to have a transfer switch wired into your main breaker box. They’re not all that expensive (thought they’re a definite licensed electrician job) and they prevent power from your house from back-feeding into the local power lines — a situation that is dangerous for the people trying to restore power and can delay that restoration for hours while they track down the homeowner working so hard to kill them.” That’s true. Not many inverters big enough people would plug them into their house, but yeah.
And reader Allan Pierce writes: “A quick search on Fuel Dispenser Electrical Requirements turned up a gas pump mfr’s brochure, which suggests a gas station pump has one or two 1 horsepower pump motors. Figure about 1000 watts per motor, so the answer is yes. Big issue is safety: wiring the gas station with a power inlet and cutover switch for each pump near its electrical panel. Could be done under disaster-recovery conditions by electricians certified for hazardous area (explosion-proof) work. It’s better not to wait, but gas stations are low-margin businesses so this is unlikely to be done in advance of need unless required by law or encouraged by economic incentive for all stations in the most-vulnerable areas (hint to people doing post-disaster ‘lessons learned’ reviews).”
UNDER THE RADAR: The Hill: US helps advance UN arms treaty. “The U.S. Mission to the United Nations helped move a controversial arms trade treaty on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after President Obama won reelection.” After the election, he has more flexibility.
UPDATE: Reader Daniel Wachs writes:
Thank you for all the work you do on your site. I wanted to make a point regarding the UN Arms treaty that Obama is now pursuing again.
Remember, in the parlance of the UN, Human Rights means “anti-Israel”. Is this the start of Obama’s method to stop arms support to the Jewish State?
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE8A627J20121107?irpc=932
“Brian Wood of Amnesty International said: “After today’s resounding vote, if the larger arms trading countries show real political will in the negotiations, we’re only months away from securing a new global deal that has the potential to stop weapons reaching those who seriously abuse human rights.”
The treaty would require states to make respecting human rights a criterion for allowing arms exports.”
It seems that as a Jewish person, all of my fears for the future have a way of coming true lately. FLEXIBILITY? How about betrayal? But then I take a step back and remember that my liberal friends and family have reminded me that he’s Israel’s greatest friend. I guess there’s nothing to worry about.
If you mention this, feel free to use my name.
My question is, can we get a UN investigation of Fast & Furious?
THE ENTITLEMENT MENTALITY OF THE GOVERNING CLASS: Gov. Cuomo fires chief of Emergency Management after selfish Sandy clean-up order. “Gov. Cuomo fired his chief of Emergency Management after the aide ordered clean-up crews to remove a tree from his Long Island property ahead of more serious problems following Hurricane Sandy, sources told The Post.”
IN THE LAND OF HOPEY-CHANGEY: Empire of the In-Between. “As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it’s all tidy and digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay. There’s Newark and Trenton and the heroic wreckage in parts of Philadelphia, block after block of hulking edifices covered in graffiti, the boarded-up ghost neighborhoods of Baltimore made familiar by ‘The Wire’ — all on the line that connects America’s financial center and its booming capital city.” Kinda like the Hunger Games. Plus: “In the case of those areas surrounding the capital, wealth has gravitated to the exact spot where government regulation is created. Why? Because many businesses discovered that renegotiating the terms between government and the private sector can be extraordinarily lucrative. A few remarkable books by professors at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business argue that a primary source of profit for Wall Street over the past 15 to 20 years could be what I call the Acela Strategy: making money by exploiting regulation rather than by creating more effective ways to finance the rest of the economy.”
UPDATE: A critique from Andrew Hofer:
First of all, it is ridiculous to make judgements about policy and country by looking out the window of a passing train. I lived in Japan for a while in 1983-1984 and the train views were awful. Next to the tracks is not prime real estate anywhere.
Furthermore, as someone who started his career as a lender in the mid-Atlantic, I suggest another reason for the burnout of the Amtrak Corridor – environmental overzealousness. This was prime manufacturing territory in the past, but the NJ Department of Environmental Protection (and the EPA) have made it ridiculously difficult to buy, improve and operate manufacturing facilities there. I had a client in NJ years ago who figured out how to HALVE their VOC emissions through dynamic temperature control in their stack. This required putting *trace* amounts of inert gas (N2O) up the stack for measurement purposes. They showed it off to NJDEP and what happened? They were fined heavily for the N2O installation and told to install a much more expensive stack that left more VOCs in their emissions than their current system. They aren’t there anymore, of course. Also, the amount of property liability anybody takes in NJ to buy an old manufacturing plant in NJ (and elsewhere in the country) is prohibitive. So they sit abandoned. Environmental is only one form of regulation that effectively taxes small business around here. Everyone likes to blame labor costs, but that is only a small part of the reason nobody makes stuff in the Mid-Atlantic anymore.
Then there is urban policy. After all, even non-manufacturing inner city areas experience this kind of blight. Trenton is, of course, the worst. The city was left to the government and organized crime for decades.
To the extent there is a difference. . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes:
You’ve noted the fact that Romney drew fewer votes than McCain and now have noted that TV ratings were down from ’08. Just as people have given up the search for a paying job, I wonder how many have simply given up on the system. Read this piece by Brendan O’Neill and the piece by Kotkin to which he refers. Many people may simply no longer wish to take part in a game which they feel is rigged against them, and I’m inclined to that point of view myself frankly. Of course that brings to mind the Heinlein quote, “Of course the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you–if you don’t play, you can’t win.”
However, the system we currently have is deeply immoral. In the vain pursuit of creating a heaven-on-earth today, all parties, and the electorate generally, collaborate in the enslavement – and the word is appropriate – of generations too young to vote and those not yet born. The trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities that we have created will fall on precisely these generations without their consent. They have been disenfranchised and are being fitted with chains that will bind as surely as those applied to generations stolen from Africa centuries ago. This mocks the sacrifice made in blood and treasure of current and past generations who thought they were striving for something far different. When I wrote last evening suggesting that Obama and Reid’s bluff be called in the standoff over the looming fiscal cliff, it was with this in mind.
Given the general goodness of the man that his biography portrays, I thought that Romney could have been the man to make precisely this case. It is a case that resonates with history of his party and it is a stark and fitting indictment of our society.
True enough, but that doesn’t let us off the hook in terms of trying to make it better.
IT’S NOT JUST VOTER TURNOUT: Election Night TV Ratings Down From 2008.
GUATEMALAN MAYANS have had it up to here with doomsday myth.
I WONDER IF SHE’LL GET A MIDNIGHT VISIT FROM THE COPS AND A YEAR IN JAIL? Former Member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns Breaks Probation. “That’s right, Bloomberg’s gun control project had him working with a mayor who stole gifts for families in poverty, and even when the court allowed her probation, she still couldn’t keep herself out of trouble.”