A CONTROVERSY over whether nuclear explosives are the best way to stop an asteroid. I suspect that the answer is “It depends.” Meanwhile, does NASA really have a “nefarious” agenda of putting nuclear weapons in space? I’ve seen no sign of that.
WELL, THIS MAKES MORE SENSE than that “hated Christians” report, though I suppose the two aren’t mutually inconsistent or anything: Police: Accused shooter hated liberals, expected to be killed.
UPDATE: A rather mean-spirited response at Knoxviews; I respond in the comments.
NO LOVE FOR THE E.U. AMONG THE IRISH:
Almost three-quarters of Irish voters are opposed to a second referendum on the EU’s new reform treaty, a new poll published yesterday (27 July) revealed, dealing a blow to EU leaders’ hopes of rescuing the text. . . . Of those who voiced an opinion, 62% said they would vote no in a second referendum, while 34% said they would back the treaty, which aims to overhaul the Union’s institutions and procedures.
The new figures would mean that, compared to the first run on 12 June, where 53.4% of the Irish rejected the text (EurActiv 13/06/08), the no camp could further increase its lead by 6 percentage points to a commanding 24-point lead in a rerun.
I’d be interested to see how this would poll elsewhere in Europe/
MEASURING PICOMETERS to advance nanotechnology.
IN THE MAIL: Newt Gingrich & William R. Forstchen’s Days of Infamy.
Knoxville, Tennessee. At the Farmer’s Market.
OBAMA MOVES AHEAD IN THE POLLS. Meanwhile, McCain serves up red meat to his conservative base by . . . well, no:
Republican presidential candidate John McCain is pledging support for a proposal to expand protections for disabled people under an 18-year-old landmark civil rights law. The Supreme Court generally has exempted from the law‘s protection people with partial physical disabilities, as well as people with physical impairments that can be treated with medication or devices such as hearing aids.
A month ago, the House passed a bill to extend protections to people who take medicine to control epilepsy, diabetes or cancer, or use prosthetic limbs. McCain, a co-sponsor of the 1990 law, said he intends to support a similar bill in the Senate.
Obama supports the measure, too. So love it or hate it, there’s no reason to vote for McCain based on this stance.
VIRGIN GALACTIC WILL unveil the White Knight Two this morning.
WANT TO REDO YOUR DECK? Here’s a guide to the five materials that get used. “Five basic types, each with their own aesthetics, maintenance and price range, have emerged. We take a detailed look at each.”
POPULAR SCIENCE: Global Warming: Not so bad? “Birds and power companies adapt to climate change; scientists downgrade its role in hurricane formation.” I dunno. But maybe we should figure this out before we turn our economy upside down?
WASHINGTON POST: McCain Says Obama Plays Politics on Iraq.
BRENDAN LOY: Stop complaining about “hurricane hype.”
On the other hand, I remember being right at Alberto’s landfall, and watching some loon on CNN trying to make a big deal as the 18-inch waves rolled in. But there was this awful damage. . . .
POST-HELLER, gun-rights advocates are on the offensive.
Meanwhile, Morton Grove is dropping its gun ban.
HMM: Neighbors: Accused shooter everyone’s friend, hated Christianity. “The man accused of a mass church shooting this morning was described by his Powell neighbors as a helpful and kind man, but one who had issues with Christianity.”
SECRET diplomacy. Hey, you can’t please everybody. And it’s usually a mistake to try.
THREE NEW science fiction books from Tor.
GLOBAL WARMING: Good for Greenland?
Yet for the residents of the frozen island, the early stages of climate change promise more good, in at least one important sense, than bad. A Danish protectorate since 1721, Greenland has long sought to cut its ties with its colonizer. But while proponents of complete independence face little opposition at home or in Copenhagen, they haven’t been able to overcome one crucial calculation: the country depends on Danish assistance for more than 40 percent of its gross domestic product. “The independence wish has always been there,†says Aleqa Hammond, Greenland’s minister for finance and foreign affairs. “The reason we have never realized it is because of the economics.†. . .
But the real promise lies in what may be found under the ice. Near the town of Uummannaq, about halfway up Greenland’s coast, retreating glaciers have uncovered pockets of lead and zinc. Gold and diamond prospectors have flooded the island’s south. Alcoa is preparing to build a large aluminum smelter. The island’s minerals are becoming more accessible even as global commodity prices are soaring. And with more than 80 percent of the land currently iced over, the hope is that the island has just begun to reveal its riches.
Offshore, where the Arctic Ocean is rapidly thawing, expectations are even higher. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that Greenland’s northeastern waters could contain 31 billion barrels of undiscovered oil and gas.
Divine Providence is unveiling these resources just as we need them the most! Though if you’re really looking for miracles, the Greenlanders’ desire to live without subsidies from Danish taxpayers should probably take top billing . . . .
TOM MAGUIRE: Keep on believing!
THE REAL ESTATE SLUMP, in one photo.
DAVID BERNSTEIN LOOKS AT attacks on Jewish and black conservatives.
A SHOOTING IN KNOXVILLE: I’m in Florida, but Michael Silence has the roundup.
UPDATE: A “total hero.”
10 GREAT family DVDs for summer. They’ve got to be better than the one the Insta-Daughter and her cousin watched yesterday — December Boys, which — despite featuring Daniel Radcliffe, on whom the Insta-Daughter is crushing — was something of a disappointment, if not quite the Plan 9 From Outer Space of this decade.
JOHN LEO on campus free speech. Or, rather, the lack thereof.
VIRGINIA: Sitting on the energy mother lode! “In Pittsylvania County, just north of the North Carolina border, the largest undeveloped uranium deposit in the United States — and the seventh largest in the world, according to industry monitor UX Consulting — sits on land owned by neighbors Henry Bowen and Walter Coles. Large uranium deposits close to the surface are virtually unknown in the U.S. east of the Mississippi River. And that may be the problem. Virginia is one of just four states that ban uranium mining. . . . Yet it is not as if we have no experience with uranium mining, which is in fact relatively harmless.”
SOME WIDE-ANGLE canal-boat photography, from K.T. Lindsay.
THE CARNIVAL OF CARS is up!
Knoxville, Tennessee. She says she’s Tennessee’s only licensed raw-milk cheesemaker. I bought some sheep’s-milk Cumberland. It was excellent. Blessed are the cheesemakers! Er, and all dairy workers, of course. . . .
MICKEY KAUS continues his victory lap.
WHO VALERIE JARRETT IS TEXTING. Ready for subprime-time!
REMEMBERING THE 1980S, though somewhat rose-colored glasses.
And a different kind of 1980s nostalgia, at LikeTotally80s.com.
BAN COMPOUND INTEREST TO SAVE THE PLANET? Prof. Kenneth Anderson is not impressed.
PETER HUBER LOOKS behind the carbon curtain:
To judge by actions, not words, the carbon-warming view hasn’t come close to persuading a political majority even in nations considered far more environmentally enlightened than China and India. Europe’s coal consumption is rising, not falling, and the Continent won’t come close to meeting the Kyoto targets for carbon reduction. Australia is selling coal to all comers.
On the far side of the environmental curtain China already mines and burns more coal than any other country. Together, China and India control more than one-fifth of the planet’s vast coal reserves. Dar predicts–very plausibly, in my view–that the two countries may fire up a new coal plant as often as once a week for the next 25 years, adding about twice as much coal-fired generating capacity as the U.S. has today. Persian Gulf states are planning significant coal imports, because coal generates much cheaper electricity than oil or gas.
In developing countries the political survival of the people at the top depends on providing affordable fuel for kitchens, farms, fertilizer plants, steel mills, highways and power plants. Oil and coal are the only practical fuels at hand.
Read the whole thing.
MORE FARC/NGO HANKY-PANKY:
Spanish police say they have arrested the representative of the left-wing Colombian rebel group Farc in Spain. Maria Remedios Garcia Albert, a Spanish national, was detained near Madrid, as part of a joint operation by the Spanish and Colombian authorities. She faces charges of being part of an armed group and managing the rebel group’s finances in Europe. . . .
The BBC’s Steve Kingstone in Madrid says it is alleged that under the cover of her job with a non-governmental organisation, Ms Garcia provided organisational support and funds to the Farc.
The NGO sector could probably use a bit more scrutiny.
WANT CHEAPER OIL? Support Speculation, Don’t Curtail It.
AUSTIN BAY SAID A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO that Moqtada al-Sadr was going to die the death of a thousand cuts. And now even the New York Times is noticing that that’s what’s happpened.
On the other hand, some diehards haven’t given up on a U.S. defeat . . . .
IS HAYEK STILL RELEVANT? Ilya Somin says “yes.”
SEXIST PATRIARCHAL OPPRESSION.
(Via the Insta-Wife).
FINALLY, AN IRAQ POLICY THAT MAKES SENSE: McCain Backs Timeline to Get Obama Out of Iraq.
A SOCIAL POLICY hindsight thought experiment. I regard the sexual revolution as a success, though like all revolutions it did some damage along the way. A sexual counterrevolution would, of course, do its own share of damage, something proponents should consider, but usually don’t.
ANOTHER MEMO TO BLOGGERS ABOUT THE EDWARDS/HUNTER AFFAIR at the L.A. Times.
I’ll just note that the L.A. Times didn’t have the same concern for propriety when it published what Larry Lessig described as “a baseless smear” against Judge Kozinski just last month. Conveniently flexible, those journalistic “standards.”
UPDATE: In the London Times: Sleaze Scuppers Democrat Golden Boy. “The New York Times has not deigned to touch the story, although it recently ran thousands of words on a relationship between McCain and a female lobbyist, which appeared to be based more on innuendo than fact.” As I say, flexible standards.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Richard Fernandez: “The irony is that the John Edwards legend and all of its props were created by artful manipulation of the media. Nobody objected to that. But when the National Enquirer threatened to introduce the legend to its opposite there was a hue and cry about their lack of professionalism, etc. It may be pertinent to point out the Enquirer’s offense wasn’t entirely against the privacy of three people. Their real crime was to threaten to expose the facade built up with the help of parts of the press itself; to destroy the accepted narrative with an inconvenient fact. The news wasn’t that two people were having an affair at the Beverly Hilton; the real headline was that a carefully contrived myth was in danger of being exploded.”
MORE: Reader James Ruhland emails: “You say they have ‘conveniently flexible’ standards. But that’s not true. They are very consistent in applying two standards: One for the Left, and one for everyone else. The standards aren’t flexible at all, but very rigidly consistent when recognized, and are employed not just by journalists but across the board by the elect in this brave new world in which we live in.” I stand corrected. And I appreciate the subtle James Bond/Paul McCartney reference, which is very appropriate.
MORE STILL: “Keep Rockin’!” And a reader suggests that we should be grateful to the British press for doing the jobs Americans won’t do.
THIS IS NOT THE BAGHDAD THAT BARACK OBAMA KNEW: A.P. Declares Victory in Iraq.
The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost.
Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace — a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago. . . .
Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press this past week there are early indications that senior leaders of al-Qaida may be considering shifting their main focus from Iraq to the war in Afghanistan.
(Via Protein Wisdom).
UPDATE: Tom Maguire weighs in.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Totten on defining victory in Iraq.
TIM CAVANAUGH on the Seventies and the sexual revolution. “I always suspect that what was driving the suburban swingers who (at least in popular imagination) hit the key party circuit a few years later was a sense of having missed the party, that great opening up of consciousness and legs that marked the blessed-out sixties. Everybody has been plagued by the sense that somebody somewhere is getting laid in ecstatic new ways while you’re slaving over a hot stove. But suburbanites in the early seventies had actual reason to believe it.”
MOVIE: An Inconvenient Tax. “Should Congress try to repair the tax code’s inequities by moving towards a broader based income tax similar to that of 1986 or should it pursue a consumption-based system such as a flat tax, VAT or national retail sales tax? Also, can America’s schizophrenic desires for lower taxes and increased social programs be reconciled? An Inconvenient Tax explores the answers to these questions and more through interviews with world renowned economists, U.S. congressmen and average citizens across the nation.”
If somebody offered us our current income tax system for the first time, would we buy it? I don’t think so.
BUILDING FLEXIBLE ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS from networks of carbon nanotubes.
MAPPING THE HUMAN MIND.
MICHAEL S. MALONE: “At age 54, I’ve just started two companies. And what I’ve already learned from the experience is that not only am I more suited for the task now than I was at 27 or 38, but that the world of entrepreneurial start-ups is now much more suited for me. And for you.”
EGGS: They’re not just for breakfast! True.
MICHAEL BARONE: “Sometimes public opinion doesn’t flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn’t change anybody’s mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. . . . In a country with less in the way of checks and balances, which can be gamed by adroit lobbyists and litigators, we would be building more nuclear plants, and would be drilling offshore and in ANWR. We would be phasing out the corn ethanol subsidies that are enriching Iowa farmers and impoverishing Mexican tortilla eaters, and we would be repealing the 54-cent tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol (the sugar for which would be produced not in defoliated Amazon rainforests but in the desolate and currently unused certao).”
THE DANGERS OF CrackBerry addiction. And that’s before you even get to the ruined thumb-joints.
BUSINESS WEEK: Why is The New York Times worth so little? Asset values don’t matter, if management is bad: A lousy cook can turn wholesome ingredients, valuable in themselves, into an inedible mess.
MICHAEL YON REPORTS FROM NEPAL.
WHY YOUR HDTV ISN’T HI-DEF ENOUGH: The Real Story of HDTV Standards—There Aren’t Any.
In order to qualify as hi-def, a signal must have either 720 horizontal lines of progressively scanned pixels (720p), 1080 lines of interlaced pixels (1080i) or 1080 lines of progressively scanned pixels (1080p, which nobody even broadcasts yet.) But there’s a whole lot more to the quality of digital television than the number of pixels present. After all, 1080 lines of poor-quality pixels may technically be “high-definition,” but that doesn’t mean it looks very good.
One of the most important factors in determining picture quality is bit rate, or how much video and audio data is being sent down the pipe for each program. The technology behind digital television relies heavily on digital compression, and the ATSC specifies that digital TV use the MPEG-2 compression standard, which is also utilized by DVDs, although some satellite broadcasters use the more efficient MPEG-4 advanced video coding (AVC) standard. These compression technologies are necessary in order to deliver a large number of channels to consumers. Without these codecs, an uncompressed HD video stream could require as much as 1 gigabit per second of data capacity—that’s 52 times the capacity of the average broadcast channel. With compression, the same stream can be shrunk almost infinitely. But compression is often used overzealously, and picture quality suffers as a result.
Many people are already familiar with this data-size/fidelity tradeoff from their experiences with digital music: MP3 files with high levels of compression may take up less hard drive space, but they sound muffled and unsatisfying. The same is true for video. When an HD signal is over-compressed, it may have the same number of total pixels, ensuring it’s still technically HD, but the picture is often tainted with blocky, pixelated noise and image artifacts.
Read the whole thing.
IT’S THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FBI, and the folks at Cato look at the Bureau’s actual record as opposed to the Eliot Ness Melvyn Purvis mythology.
IN THE MAIL: Matthew Randazzo’s Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit and the Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry. With a dramatic cover photo.
Knoxville, Tennessee. Across the street from the Rescue Mission.
A BIG SCI-FI DVD SALE at Amazon.
ILYA SOMIN ON the libertarian law and economics of Batman. Plus, from the comments: “Superman seems like more of a cultural conservative superhero, someone who has supernatural powers in whom to grant authoritarian trust. Batman seems libertarian, a private party using his skills and intelligence to overcome wrong, outside the government.” Plus: “The only villains Batman goes after are those who have themselves violated the harm principle (usually by killing innocent people). He doesn’t go after perpetrators of purely victimless crimes or people he dislikes because disapproves of the way they live their private lives.”
On the other hand, what about the minority shareholders?
WEBLOGS — The New Political Battleground? I’d have more confidence in this story if the headline didn’t invoke “Web-Blogs.”
JOHN FUND: A war on democracy? Well, that “voice of the people” stuff is hard on elites.
FIGHTING DEPRESSION with electrical brain stimulation: “People with otherwise untreatable depression improved in a small clinical trial after receiving electrical stimulation of a part of the brain that scientists believe regulates sadness. A report this week in the journal Biological Psychiatry said 12 of 20 patients with chronic major depression benefited from the electronic device — including seven whose disease went into remission. The benefits were sustained over the course of the one-year study, researchers said.”
GASSING UP WITH GARBAGE:
After years of false starts, a new industry selling motor fuel made from waste is getting a big push in the United States, with the first commercial sales possible within months.
Many companies have announced plans to build plants that would take in material like wood chips, garbage or crop waste and turn out motor fuels. About 28 small plants are in advanced planning, under construction or, in a handful of cases, already up and running in test mode.
For decades scientists have known it was possible to convert waste to fuel, but in an era of cheap oil, it made little sense. With oil now trading around $125 a barrel and gasoline above $4 a gallon, the potential economics of a waste-to-fuel industry have shifted radically, setting off a frenzy to be first to market.
If I were, say, the Saudis, I’d try to push prices down just long enough to bankrupt all these new alternative-energy schemes. Then, back over $100 a barrel again.
“RUDE TRUTHS” on Fannie Mae.
WHEN REPORTERS fall in love.
Plus, beware of “Jewish neocons.”
NOAH POLLAK: Nicholas Kristof’s moral tourism.
MICKEY KAUS: “At this point, does Barack Obama want John Edwards to even show up in Denver, much less give a prime time speech? . . . If you’re an Obama strategist, mightn’t you conclude that the best thing for your candidate would be if the press weighs in quickly and definitively concludes that Edwards is guilty, with the result that he and his whole sordid story go away until after November?” If so, just pass the word and the L.A. Times will be all over the story. With memos to bloggers encouraging them to cover it!
OBAMA TALKS ABOUT LIFTING A CHILD IN BANGLADESH FROM POVERTY: But John McCain actually did it: John and Cindy McCain adopted Bridget McCain… From Bangladesh.
OOPS: Anti-Patriot Act Poster Boy Kidnaps Own Kids. “The crushing reality, however, is that all of the legal maneuvers, media advocacy, and political grandstanding surrounding Al-Jailani’s case were predicated on a lie. And the Gordian knot of the matter is rent asunder by the inescapable truth that the three most innocent and helpless victims in this story, Amina (12), Layla (10), and Sami (8) Al-Jailani, are now imprisoned under their father’s control in Yemen — the very man that had served as the anti-Patriot Act poster boy. Adding to this tragedy is the fact that the same parties who championed Ashraf Al-Jailani’s cause are nowhere to be found concerning the ongoing plight of the abducted Al-Jailani children.”
THE THUG ECONOMY in Russia.
TELLING BLOGGERS TO ignore the elephant in the room.
UPDATE: Related thoughts from Dodd Harris. “Now, the only thing about the Hunter story that actually interests me is the inside baseball: The fact that it might have the beneficial side effect of preventing Edwards from being appointed to an Attorney General position for which he is supremely unqualified in an Obama Administration. . . . No, the reason I mention this ban is to point out that the Times was not hobbled by any such scruples when John McCain was accused — on much thinner evidence — of having possibly, maybe, sort of having had an inappropriate relationship with Vicki Iseman almost a decade earlier. In fact, a search of the Times website for her name brings up 101 results. Doubtless they’d argue that the Enquirer isn’t a credible source. But the same could be (and was) said of the two anonymous and admittedly disgruntled former aides who were peddling the Iseman story. One needn’t leap to any conclusions here; one need only take a small step and there conclusions are.”
As usual, journalists’ concerns about “ethics” are self-serving.
MILBLOGS TV: Anbar Rising.
IN SEARCH OF SUBSTANCE.
MCCAIN HITS HARD.
HOMELAND SECURITY meets The Sopranos.
I think my early misgivings have been borne out. Related item here.
UPDATE: Stewart Baker, whom I’m inclined to trust — our podcast interview with him is here — is “calling bullshit” on this story. Stay tuned. I note, however, that my earlier misgivings remain, regardless.
HAPPY HOT FUDGE SUNDAE DAY. But why is Sundae day on a Fridae?
WELL, GOOD: Oil’s 2-week nosedive shows up at the pump. “In the trading pits, oil continued on a two-week sell-off. Light, sweet crude for September delivery fell $2.23 to settle at $123.26 a barrel in on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Earlier the contract dropped as far as $122.50, its lowest point since June 5.”
UPDATE: Reader Spec Bowers emails:
Is there nobody who will point out that oil’s 2-week nosedive began almost precisely when Bush lifted the executive order on offshore drilling?
Opponents of drilling argue that it will take 5-10 years for that oil to become available. What they ignore is that current prices are affected by the perception of future prices. If sellers of oil begin to think that oil will be priced at say $90 per barrel 5 years from now, they realize that they are better off selling now at $80 instead of leaving the oil in the ground.
If the world becomes convinced that the U.S. will indeed drill offshore, drill in ANWR, drill for shale oil in the Rockies, start building nuclear plants, then the price will drop even lower – just as soon as sellers become convinced, not just 5-10 years later.
Well, you just did!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO LOUISE BROWN, the first test-tube baby. My old band in college, Etc., wrote a song in response to this event, which was well-received around the Strip — years later, the drummer, Doug Weinstein, is the father of two boys conceived via IVF.
REPORTING FROM THE London Motor Show.
ECO-FRIENDLY CLUBBING: Including “a piezoelectric floor that captures dancers’ energy to power the club.” Video at the link.
WHAT BATMAN HAS IN COMMON WITH . . . George W. Bush?
STUCK WITH AIRPORT CNN: My sympathies. Plus, a good point in the comments: “All these TVs in airports are contributing to global warming.”
FUN WITH TONY PIERCE, from Marc Danziger. Yeah, who ever thought that Rev. Tony would wind up as The Man, keeping the bloggers in line?
ILYA SOMIN on secession, ignorance, and stupidity.
JOEL JOHNSON: How to Unlock DVD Regions on Your Mac and PC.
HELPFUL ADVICE: How to look good on TV.
LAW DEANS REACT to a call for a U.S. News rankings boycott.
HOMELAND SECURITY meets The Sopranos?
Plus, How Horrible Will Airlines Have to Become Before We Stop Flying? Not much worse.
THE LATEST CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES IS UP!
IN THE MAIL: Patrick Oden’s It’s a Dance: Moving with the Holy Spirit. The cover letter invokes An Army of Davids, and the back cover reads, “Get a new grasp of the Holy Spirit by listening to this conversation in a pub.”
Knoxville, Tennessee. At the Farmer’s Market.
A COOL volcano light show.
BURT RUTAN on the future of space flight. (Via Dale Amon). Related thoughts here.
EXPLAINING the Northern Lights.
