NATALIE SOLENT: Don’t Worry: Be Happy! “Pernickety people might argue that once the ‘right’ to demonstrate is dependent on your organisation falling within the authorities’ definition of a ‘community organisation’, then it is no longer a right. Really, though, who can be bothered with such far-fetched ideas? We have the assurance of a local politician that good sense will prevail.”
TAR AND FEATHERS, AT LEAST: Parents of seven told: Your children are too fat, so you will never see them again.
Though if it were my kids, I’d at least consider necklacing. But that’s probably only appropriate for a second offense. But tarring and feathering? Frankly, that’s a mild punishment for this degree of overreach. The state does not own your children, and taking them for such absurdities is piracy.
UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark emails: “I’m will to bet that the majority of those who think that obesity justifies the removal of children from their parents would also agree with the usual pieties expressed concerning all the detrimental effects of poverty: Should parenthood be means tested? To be consistent, they should argue so. I’ll wait….”
PUSHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Gibson goes on the offensive: Guitar maker’s CEO vows fight, says feds’ raids went too far.
CLIMATE MCCARTHYISM strikes again. “Not content with attacking Spencer and Braswell for their heresy, the Climate Inquisition has forced the resignation of the editor of the Journal of Remote Sensing. Better still, they seem to have given him the full Rubashov treatment and forced a confession . . . ‘Should not have been published.’ Even though it passed peer review, and finds lots of company among scientists and other journal articles.”
This sort of behavior doesn’t make the whole global-warming position more convincing.
UPDATE: The real problem, via the BBC: “Dr Spencer is a committed Christian as well as a professional scientist.” Obviously untrustworthy, then.
DON SURBER: Media Controversy Backfires: “The Pima County Republican Party of Tucson, Arizona, should thank the local news media for making their gun raffle a success — by misidentifying what the gun was and just what the event was. The controversy was stirred by a media that does not know the difference between a Glock 19 and a Glock 23 or for that matter, an auction from a raffle. The news media made it seem as though Republicans were selling the very gun Jared Loughner used to shoot Gabrielle Giffords in a rampage in which he killed six people and wounded 13 others.” No agenda there.
Plus this: “People in Arizona own guns. People in New York City do not understand. Arizona’s homicide rate in 2009 was 5.4 per 100,000 residents. New York City’s was 6.3.”
UPDATE: “Thanks, Brady folks!”
AUDIO: Gibson CEO on Federal Raids.
THE BEATINGS REGIME UNCERTAINTY WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES THE RECOVERY TAKES PLACE: Maxine Waters Threatens To “Tax Banks Out Of Business.”
UPDATE: From the comments: “The most corrupt member of the House forgot to add, ‘Except for banks my husband invests in.’”
SO, WHERE EXACTLY ARE all those “green jobs” we were promised?
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UPDATE: Reader Bill Rickords emails:
Glenn, your readers should know that there are two kinds of output from these devices. If you have something that is delicate or needs clean current they need to get a PURE SINE WAVE inverter. Otherwise the cheaper ones put out a SQUARE WAVE and it’s a bit noisy and some motors may not run well with it.
I have some medical issues and have to use an oxygen concentrator to provide additional oxygen to help breathing. The device manufacturer said if I use it in the car to get a PURE SINE WAVE version. Anything delicate or electronic controlled will likely need such.
I have a 1000 watt one in my car to power various 110 volt devices while traveling etc. Works great.
Yeah, we’ve discussed that here before but it bears repeating.
LIBYA REBEL LEADER admits to Al Qaeda ties.
FRANK TIPLER TO NEAL GABLER: I gotcher “big ideas” right here.
UPDATE: Reader Matthew Akin writes:
I hope the futurists realize that the single biggest threat to future longevity and freedom from disease right now is government involvement in medicine. It would be an interesting exercise to graph the the percentage of medical accounts receivable paid for by government programs vs. the innovation in drugs and devices. I am willing to bet that they are inversely proportional. (Also, the graph shouldn’t just be limited to the US, I’d like to see one for each country and then for the world as a whole.) We are already in a dystopian future as far as medical devices and drug innovation goes. It is coming to a standstill. This might just put the dates back a bit for when we conquer aging and disease. People are always talking about the big ideas, like conquering aging. Well, that goal will only to come pass after a lot of smaller, less sexy victories that just aren’t being done anymore.
Indeed. I wrote about that very problem in this column.
WELL, THAT’S HELPFUL: Exercise Tells Stem Cells To Become Bone, Not Fat.
IMPORTANT ROMANTIC ADVICE: “If you like someone, for the love of God, don’t hook up with his twin!”
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE’D BE WAGING UNDERCOVER WARFARE AROUND THE WORLD. And they were right! “When Obama came into office, he cottoned to the organization immediately. (It didn’t hurt that his CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, has a son who, as a naval reservist, had deployed with JSOC.) Soon Obama was using JSOC even more than his predecessor. In 2010, for example, he secretly directed JSOC troops to Yemen to kill the leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”
GAUGING HURRICANE RECOVERY with the “Waffle House Index.” “Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions. . . . During Hurricane Irene, Waffle House lost power to 22 restaurants in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. By Wednesday evening, all but one in hard-hit coastal Virginia were back in business.”
PENELOPE TRUNK: Voices of the defenders of grad school. And me crushing them.
ANN ALTHOUSE: Did a 24-year-old Cincinnati man die of a toothache because he didn’t have health insurance? No.
“Let’s be honest. It’s sad that he died, but let’s be clear about why he died and not demagogue it.”
DON’T MESS WITH . . . TUNISIA?
A BLOG REPORT FROM RICK PERRY’S SPEECH IN NEW HAMPSHIRE: “I attended that event, stood about 15 feet from where he delivered those remarks and never heard an ‘angry shout’. Either the AP is making it up or it wasn’t much of a shout. Perhaps they can supply the audio.”
Maybe it was a reporter in the back who was doing the shouting. But after the 2004 bogus-boos incident, I encourage bloggers and others attending these events to record audio and video. You never know what’ll happen — or what people will report happened, even if it didn’t.
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JAMES TARANTO: New Jobs: Zero. Good Thing The Stimulus Is Working!
BUT NOT THE POLITICIANS WHO LOANED THEM $535 MILLION OF TAXPAYER MONEY: Industry analysts have been questioning Solyndra business plan for years.
THE RISE AND FALL of the wine-rating system.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONSULTANTS GOING AFTER NETANYAHU IN ISRAEL? Report: ‘Clinton Adviser Greenberg is Behind Israeli Protests.’ “According to an investigative report by Maariv’s Kalman Libeskind, the protests were engineered by a group of media strategists who are directed by prominent Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, John Kerry and others. Greenberg directed the strategists to create a protest that was not led by one specific group, in order to create social ferment. An unnamed left-wing leader would eventually step into this ferment and take the reins, Greenberg predicted. The Israeli strategists reportedly include Boaz Gaon, Moshe Gaon and Eldad Yaniv, who worked in Ehud Barak’s successful race for Prime Minister in 1999, also in cooperation with Greenberg.”
PAUL HSIEH ON salvation by iPad:
I’ve been a happy iPad2 owner since March 2011, but I never fully appreciated its value until I recently broke my hip in a bad fall and required subsequent hospitalization.
I am a physician, so I had already been using my iPad for my work, reading PDFs of medical articles, communicating with my colleagues via e-mail, etc. But when I broke my hip in an accident a few days ago, the iPad became my lifeline to the outside world:
Because I had my iPad with me at the time of the accident, I was able to immediately notify my friends and family of what had happened once I arrived in the ER. . . . I did briefly leave my iPad with my wife during the surgery itself, but she gave it back to me immediately after the surgery. Other than that, it did not leave my side while in the hospital.
While in the hospital after my surgery, I used the iPad to read eBooks, check my e-mail, surf the internet, and keep up my regular blogging. It was a real morale booster to be able to continue as much of my regular online routine as possible, despite my impaired physical condition.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Black unemployment: Highest in 27 years.
MICHAEL BARONE: Obama Speech Fiasco Shows “Audacity Of Weakness.”
I can’t remember a more stunning rebuke of a president by a congressional leader than Speaker John Boehner’s refusal to agree to Barack Obama’s demand — er, request — that he summon a joint session of Congress to hear the president’s latest speech on the economy at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 7.
Obama’s request was regarded as a clever move by some wise guys in the left blogosphere since that was the exact time of a long-scheduled Republican presidential candidate debate at the Reagan Library. Take that, you guys!
But Boehner smoothly responded that, with Congress reconvening late that afternoon, the security sweep necessary for a presidential visit would be impossible, and invited the president to speak on Thursday. White House officials quickly agreed, scheduling the speech at 7 p.m. Eastern to avoid overlap with the first game of the National Football League season.
Not such a big deal, some people are saying. I disagree. I think it illustrates several of the weaknesses of this presidency.
Which Barone then spells out.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
If Obama is angry that Congress didn’t defer to him, isn’t it a problem of his own making? He’s established a pattern of deferring to Congress. First, he deferred to Congress to come up with his $1 trillion stimulus package. Then he outsourced Obamacare to Congress. Lastly, he fiddled while Congress came up on the debt ceiling “crisis” without him. Why would he now expect Congress to answer his beck and call? His entire presidency has been devoted to the notion that we are in another “Gilded Age” where Congress is the predominant federal power, coupled with a weak executive.
Interesting point.
PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE on prudential concerns and religious disclosures.
UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE WORKFORCE: Workers Giving Up Hope Keep Obama’s Re-Election Hopes Alive. “Workers giving up hope, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low, is keeping Obama’s reelection hopes alive. If the headlines screamed that unemployment was 11.4%, even I might begin to believe.”
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MARK STEYN: A Tale Of Two Declines: Even if the economy were to fix itself overnight, we’d still face sincere cultural challenges. “So think of our culture as one almighty muffin shot, with America as a giant navel filled with the cheap tequila of our rising debt and#… #no, wait, this metaphor’s getting way out of hand. . . . If there is a common theme in the various rubble of cultural ruin, it’s the urge to enter adolescence ever earlier and leave it later and later, if at all.”
CAYMAN ISLANDS UPDATE: U.S. Government Warns Citizens of Cayman Crime.
Related: Casanova Restaurant Hit By Robbers. This is pretty shocking, actually. I’ve been going there since the mid-80s and there’s no question that crime — once almost nonexistent — is worse. The Islands’ strict gun-control policy doesn’t seem to be keeping guns out of the hands of the criminal element, either, which should come as no surprise, of course. . . .
STORM SHUTS DOWN 60% of Gulf Of Mexico Oil Output.
THE UNTAPPED POWER OF “EROTIC CAPITAL?” “Being attractive and likeable are key assets in the workplace—and not just for the beautiful few.”
I STILL THINK HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN CONFIRMED TO THE SUPREME COURT: D.C. Circuit Judge Douglas Ginsburg to take Senior Status, join NYU Law Faculty Full Time.
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WHY ARE USUALLY-CAUTIOUS PSYCHOLOGISTS so quick to call business leaders “psychopaths?”
A. BARTON HINKLE: Obama’s approval of the American public slips to an all-time low. Unlike the American public’s regard for him, it was never that high. But like the American public’s regard for him, it’s likely to drop further over the coming year. . . .
THIS WEEK in the future.
HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN APPS for smartphones and tablets.
DUDE, WHERE’S MY AK-47? “I’ll go out on a limb here and assume you’re aware that the economy’s not so hot. And that the likelihood of college grads snagging full-time employment that doesn’t require wearing a paper hat is pretty slim. One tried and true way for undergrads to improve their chances of getting hired after they’re handed a diploma is a summer internship. Sure, you probably won’t be paid, but at least you’re getting some real world experience, right? Chris Jeon, being the proactive type he is, decided to create his own internship fighting with Libyan rebels as his summer vacay wound down.”
MORE ON THE SEMI-FAILURE OF Blue Origins’ rocket test.
NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY: Apple Investigators Allegedly Posed as Cops in iPhone Prototype Hunt. If someone shows up at your house or office claiming to be a cop, you might want to call the police (or FBI office, or wherever they claim to be from) and independently verify their identity.
UPDATE: Reader Brian Smiley writes:
According to an article from CNN (posted today) CNN is reporting that the SF Police said they helped Apple search someone’s home for a missing item… which kind of goes against what you posted from Wired. Ooops.
“In the statement sent to CNN and other news media late Friday, police did not describe what ‘lost item’ Apple was looking for. However, the file name of that news release is ‘iphone5.doc,’ as Reuters pointed out. Lt. Troy Dangerfield gave an interview to SF Weekly Friday afternoon confirming the police’s involvement with Apple in the investigation.”
So I guess this means that the Wired article is not correct?
Well, if CNN is right, I think that means Wired has to be wrong.
ORBITAL DEBRIS UPDATE: Space junk reaching “tipping point,” report warns. “The amount of debris orbiting the Earth has reached ‘a tipping point’ for collisions, which would in turn generate more of the debris that threatens astronauts and satellites, according to a U.S. study released on Thursday. NASA needs a new strategic plan for mitigating the hazards posed by spent rocket bodies, discarded satellites and thousands of other pieces of junk flying around the planet at speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, the National Research Council said in the study.”
Here’s a piece that Rob Merges and I wrote for the Environmental Law Reporter last year on the subject.
HAPPY International Bacon Day!
CHANGE: It’s getting much more difficult to join, or stay in, the U.S. Army. “The military is now a club that many want to join, but only few are good enough to get in.”
UPDATE: A reader emails:
As a loan guy who does mostly VA loans for active duty military members, I have seen something twice in the last 90 days that I had never seen before. Enlisted people summarily returned to civilian life with time still left on their enlistment, and without warning. One of them the day we were supposed to close on her home loan. An honorable discharge, so no harm to them, but the one commonality I saw was that they had both been “in rank” a little too long. Aside from the tighter recruiting, there is clearly an “up or out” criteria being implemented as well.
Interesting.
SAD: Kelo v. New London: An Ignominous End for One of the Supreme Court’s Worst Decisions. “Connecticut taxpayers have thus been soaked tens of millions of dollars, not just for nothing, but for making things worse — for transforming a nice local neighborhood into a dump.”
IN THE MAIL: From Roy F. Baumeister & John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: A new Afterburner from Bill Whittle.
THE LESS-BORING SIDE OF THE PROFESSORIATE: Professor is accused of being a biker-gang leader and drug dealer. I wonder what his student evaluations look like.
Best bit: “To have an associate professor who is a member of the Devils Diciples and allegedly dealing methamphetamine is quite alarming. I mean, it’s unusual to say the least.” One hopes.
MICKEY KAUS: OBAMA AND CONGRESS:
If the Democrats who ran both houses of Congress and the White House before then didn’t focus on “what the American people need them to be focused on,” whose fault is that? Is Obama running against Nancy Pelosi too? … P.S.: In this situation, do voters want a candidate who is “frustrated”–or one who’s contrite? …
Obama doesn’t do contrite, so the Democrats had better hope for alternative one.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Zero Jobs 101 — the Psychology of Alienating Employers. “Zero jobs last month — a net change of zero job growth? It was just announced that last month’s unemployment is still above 9% — despite the nearly five trillion dollars in Keynesian pump-priming, the near zero interest rates, the expanded unemployment and food stamp support, and the government takeovers and subsidies of businesses. There is a scary sort of deer-in-the-headlights look about Obama and Biden that is quite disturbing. . . . In the last 30 months, the Obama administration has created a psychological landscape that finally just seemed, whether fairly or not, too hostile to most employers to risk new hiring and buying. Each act, in and of itself, was irrelevant. Together they are proving catastrophic and doing the near impossible of turning a brief recovery into another recession. . . . Highly publicized visits to bankrupt subsidized green plants, blaming George Bush, new racially-driven invective from some congresspeople against the Tea Party, sermons about the sensitivities of illegal aliens, politically-correct tutorials about Islam — all that might rally the base or in isolation be understandable, but again fairly or not, such liberal rhetoric simply adds to the problem from yet another dimension: confirming perceptions that employers are about the last people in the world that this administration is worried about.”
GOOD QUESTION: Inquiring minds want to know: Why did green-jobs bust Solyndra get a gigantic federal loan? “The White House insists it didn’t intervene with DOE on Solyndra’s behalf, but — go figure — the company’s key investor was a foundation headed by George Kaiser, a billionaire known for raising boatloads of money for Barack Obama.”
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MESSAGE TO DOUG MATACONIS: I haven’t called for the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment. In fact, the very post of mine that you link — which I had actually forgotten, but hey, it’s not bad! — says this:
It’s even enough to get some people calling for a repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment, which required direct popular election of Senators, whose selection was previously left in the hands of state legislatures.
I don’t know what I think of this idea — you want to think that anything would be an improvement over what we’ve got now, but heck, that’s probably what people thought when we ratified the Seventeenth Amendment — but I have heard it proposed more than once recently. (Some somewhat more serious criticism of the Seventeenth Amendment can be found here.) And this is surely a bad reflection on the Senate as it exists now.
My own proposal for reform would be a bit different: Make anyone who serves in the Senate ineligible to run for President. That wouldn’t be much of a loss, really — Senators do very badly in the Presidential election business anyway. But while legislatively selected Senators might have been smart guys, or at least politically wise men, Senators elected in statewide races are likely to be ambitious politicians who see the Senate as a stepping stone. My proposal would steer those people elsewhere, which might improve the Senate.
See, that’s not really the same thing as repealing the Seventeenth Amendment at all. But I’m happy to put it out there again. Mataconis’ point, however, is that favoring such a repeal is not really a radical position, and that’s certainly true.
UPDATE: A swift correction. Thanks!
JOHN HINDERAKER: “The Obama administration has turned out to be a bitter disappointment, and Democrats aren’t taking it well.” Plus, the secret heart of Face The Nation.
STUDENT LOANS AND DEBT-TO-SALARY RATIOS: Out Of School And Into The Red. “Instead of looking at tuition and salaries, I have examined the debt-to-salary ratio. Student debt captures more about the true costs of college than does tuition alone; due to generous scholarships and grants, many universities’ sticker price is vastly different from what students actually end up paying. . . . Schools with a ratio of .57 or higher (marked in red) are at the other end of the spectrum. According to Mapping Your Future, student debt that represents more than 57 percent of one year’s salary will yield loan payments that are unaffordable. Nineteen North Carolina Schools exceed that ratio. Two schools, Johnson C. Smith and Meredith College, have ratios greater than one-to-one.” Can you say higher education bubble? These are mostly fairly obscure private schools with high tuitions but no offsetting national reputation. Such schools will be the first casualties when students are no longer willing to bear punishing levels of post-graduation debt.
RANKING LAW SCHOOLS by graduates’ standard of living. Yale is #16. Harvard is #17.
HEH: “Also, Make Sure to Write Obsessively About Trig Palin’s Matrilineal Line. I don’t know why Andrew Sullivan forgot to mention that bit of advice.”
REMEMBERING OBAMA AND HONDURAS: “Please compare Obama 2009 to this year’s Obama, reacting to events in Arab countries.”
TIMOTHY DALRYMPLE: An Open Letter To A College Freshman. “Appreciate your professors and learn what you can from them, but do not venerate them and do not view them as the tribunes of the truth. Sadly, the better I came to know my professors, the less their opinions swayed me.”
Having spent my childhood among professors, I came to that stage rather early . . . .
THE ANGUISH OF COFFEE. Well, give those sixties housewives a break. They didn’t have access to modern technology.
WHAT HYPERINFLATION looks like today. “All meat has gone to Russia.”
Plus this: “If only these people had known in advance what happens when a deranged Keynesian madman is in charge of it all… Oh well, they will learn now.” Good thing that can’t happen here. Stupid foreigners. When will they learn?
THE AMAZING, colossal syllabus.
LIBERTARIANS AND DEMOCRATS: Respectfully disagreeing with Will Wilkinson.
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DISASTER PREPAREDNESS: Hurricane Irene: Some Lessons Learned.
WHAT YOU THINK YOU LOOK LIKE, vs. what you really look like.
FIVE IMPORTANT CHILDHOOD ARCHETYPES the movies somehow overlooked.
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COLLECTIVE ACTION: New Media and the People-Powered Uprisings.
CHANGE: Obama shelves EPA smog rule in huge defeat for environmental groups.
Related: White House moves to limit fallout from retreat on clean-air rule.
UPDATE: Reader Joel Mackey writes that this is Rick Perry, Winning the Future:
Have not seen this analysis yet in the articles I have read, but it is pretty obvious that not only is it a cry of UNCLE by the 0bama admin on job killing regulations, but it is a case of removing a stick with which your opponent is going to beat you.
Can you imagine next August, 107 farenheit across Texas with rolling brownouts and blackouts and Rick Perry pointing directly at Obama administration policy and its real world effects. Oops, hard to spin that.
On a side note, if they ever do carry thru with the new regulations, look to see a lot more natural gas fired generators installed as a home appliance.
Yeah. I wouldn’t mind having one of those anyway, except that my power basically never goes out.
THIS IS THE SORT OF THING WE NEED TO BE HEARING AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL: Tennessee’s state agencies told to prepare for 5 percent cuts.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Will This ‘Major’ Jobs Speech Be Any Different Than Others?
For more than two years the president has been giving “important” jobs speeches — and no wonder. After an $830 billion stimulus and multiple “jobs” bills since, the employment picture has only deteriorated. The economy added zero jobs in August, and 2.4 million fewer people work today than when Obama took office.
Yet despite the advance billing on all those previous speeches, none was anything remotely “bold” or “imaginative,” something Democratic lawmakers and Obama’s liberal media cheerleaders are now hoping for with his next one.
Instead, in every speech, Obama simply dusted off the same crabbed list — more money for roads and “clean energy,” various temporary tax credits, more unemployment insurance, temporary payroll tax cuts — despite the fact that each has already been tried on his watch, and all proved to be expensive failures.
More at the link.
THE SHOCKING TRUTH about electric cars.
APRIL ATKINS: The World’s Strongest Teenager?
BLUE ORIGIN SPACESHIP CRASHES, but the photos are pretty cool.
FIVE WAYS TO trick out your dorm room.
FOLLOW THE MONEY: Investigators Probe White House Role in Massive Energy Loan.
THE NEWLY NEOCONSERVATIVE New York Times? Hey, if you’re not a neocon when a black Democrat is President and waging war, it’s because you’re racist.
THE PROBLEM WITH keeping astronauts fed on a 5-year Mars mission.
HOW BAD will the jobs picture get? Worse than they’ll admit, I predict.
