GOOD FOR THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: Administration to Push for Small ‘Modular’ Reactors. “The longer-term goal is to foster assembly-line production of the small reactors at a far lower cost than construction of conventional reactors. The reactors could even replace old coal-fired power plants that are threatened by new federal emissions rules and sit on sites that already have grid connections and cooling water.” And beyond that, there are many other applications. Faster, please. Some early efforts may be in my neck of the woods: “The Tennessee Valley Authority has publicly discussed the idea of placing several small modular reactors on a site adjacent to the Clinch River just outside Oak Ridge, Tenn., where 30 years ago the government tried to build a breeder reactor, which would have produced more fuel than it consumes. That site could supply power to the government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, some experts say.” Good. But we should have built that breeder reactor.
Food inflation driven by freezing weather in Florida during December and in Mexico during February, is hitting the US supermarkets in the coming day’s. Sysco sent out an alert that announced an “Act of God”, to address their contracted supply issues.
The cold of the Superbowl weekend in Texas, has had a more lasting impact than on just the game plans for lots of travelers. The deep cold sank into the produce fields of northern Mexico, destroying fresh produce crops. This is the biggest page 16 story, about to hit a headline, that you have seen in a while. Your restaurants will be low on fresh produces for weeks. They will have to raise prices significantly or cut the produce out of the menu.
It turns out that the composting program not only cost the House an estimated $475,000 a year (according to the House inspector general) but actually increased energy consumption in the form of “additional energy for the pulping process and the increased hauling distance to the composting facility,” according to a news release from Lungren.
As far as carbon emissions were concerned, Lungren concluded that the reduction was the “nominal … equivalent to removing one car from the road each year.” He plans to switch the House to an alternate waste-management system recommended by the Architect of the Capitol, in which dining-service trash would be incinerated and the heat energy captured.
“Composting releases methane,” said Lungren’s spokesman, Brian Kaveney, and methane gas, as even the most warming-conscious among us have to admit, traps atmospheric heat far more efficiently than carbon dioxide, the usual bugaboo of the climate-change crowd.
Lungren’s stick-a-biodegradable-fork-in-it (if you can) stance toward a linchpin of Pelosi’s grand green plan marks the latest skirmish in a lifestyle war that may on its surface seem purely partisan: GOP global-warming skeptics versus a Gaia-worshipping Democratic Party. But I’d say the battle lines are really between an elite determined to impose upon a captive populace its notions of what is good for it — cost be damned — and the populace itself, which would rather not be coerced.
As I said before, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. Pelosi could have saved a lot more energy/greenhouse gas by flying commercial, but that was never on the table.
MARKDOWNS ON Weber Genesis Gas Grills. Every year I think I’ll replace the Kenmore Premium (I didn’t spring for the “Elite”) gas grill I bought with my Bush tax cut check back in 2004, but it just keeps going and going. I haven’t even had to replace a burner.
ENTITLED AUTHORS: Colby Cosh writes: “Anyone who has read an interview with children’s author/grumpy village atheist Philip Pullman will surely have sensed that he was a bit of an a-hole. He proved the hypothesis, with the cataclysmic decisiveness of a Shaq slam-dunk, in a January 20 address concerning austerity-driven public-library closures in the UK. It is the speech of someone who believes every jot and tittle ever put to paper about his infallible genius.”
I might be tempted to believe every jot and tittle about my infallible genius, too — if anybody ever, you know, wrote about that. Couldn’t I get a jot or two? Hell, I’d settle for a tittle. . . .
SALENA ZITO: Our New Jeffersonian Era. “Today we are in the midst of a cultural U-turn away from a Hamiltonian meritocratic-elitist, centralized-power society to a more Jeffersonian Main Street focus, with state and local governments as the primary powerbrokers”
RACIAL INSENSITIVITY ALIVE IN THE MEDIA: 25-Year-Old White Boy From Harvard Disses Herman Cain. Obviously, he’s just threatened by the thought of a black President. These Ivy Leaguers, bitterly clinging to their credentials and their privileged opinion perches. . . .
MAX BOOT: Don’t drop the ball on Iraq. Given the way that the Administration’s foreign initiatives have been working, I fear that “inattention” may be the best we can hope for . . . .
KEEPING THE RIGHT TO ARMS ALIVE IN THE HEART OF EUROPE: Swiss Vote To Keep Their Guns. The story says “soldiers,” but in Switzerland that includes pretty much everybody. For fascinating background, I recommend John McPhee’s excellent La Place De La Concorde Suisse.
UPDATE: Jim Bennett emails: “Your post reminded me that the McPhee book also includes a good discussion of the Swiss civil defense and nuclear shelter system. He points out that the extensive Swiss nuclear shelter system, which everybody considers to be typically characteristic of Germanic precision and thoroughness, was designed by taking American civil defense plans and implementing them. Of course, I suppose you could say it is Germanic thoroughness to take what Americans design and, unlike us, actually implement it.”
NRA WEIGHS IN on the ATF gunrunning scandal. “BATFE’s desire to mandate reporting of multiple long gun sales by border area firearms dealers is questionable since BATFE seems incapable of managing the criminal leads it already has and unwilling to submit to constitutionally mandated Congressional oversight.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE: In response to yesterday’s post on Rick Perry’s $10,000 B.A. proposal, reader Steve Schroeder writes:
While visiting with old college friends on New Years’ Eve we did a back of the envelope calculation on the cost and value of our BA degrees in Accounting from 1981. We attended a small well regarded Midwestern liberal arts college from 1977 to 1981. Tuition, room and board was between $3,000 and $4000 per year so around $16000 for our BA. As entry level accountants in public CPA firms we earned a salary of around $17,000 per year. So we earned in salary an amount equal to the cost of a BA degree in our first year of employment. Now that same college, which my youngest daughter is looking at attending costs $42,000 per year. If she earned her BA in Accounting it would cost her $168,000. Her possible first year salary as a CPA? Not even close to $168,000. Maybe around $45,000. What a change in 30 years in the value of that BA in Accounting.
Indeed. Many degrees have seen a similar decline in their return on investment. It’s because the return has (more or less) kept pace with inflation, while the required investment has run wildly ahead.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Reflections On The Revolution In Egypt. “And does the West invariably keep silent about Iran (cf. spring/summer 2009) because in some strange way, in Western eyes, its virulent anti-Americanism lends a veneer of authenticity, of genuineness, even as we confess that the theocracy has lost popular support — while we assume that Mubarak’s alliance de facto made him more suspect in our eyes? (Would CNN be euphoric at news that the streets of Havana are in uproar?)” Yes on the first, no on the second. For certain values of “we,” anyway. Any other questions?
And Hanson’s point about the gradual — and dishonest — turn of the Iranian revolution from something that looked middle-class and liberal to something that was, as always intended by Khomeini and his followers, theocratic and dictatorial is very apt.
Most important, it should be humbling to those elites that ordinary American citizens choose spontaneously to enter the political arena in droves, concert opposition, speak up in a forthright manner, and oust a host of entrenched office holders when they learn that a system of punitive taxation is in the offing, when they are repeatedly told what they know to be false—that, under the new health-care system that the administration is intent on establishing, benefits will be extended and costs reduced and no one will lose the coverage he already has—and when they discover that Medicare is to be gutted, that medical care is to be rationed, and that citizens who have no desire to purchase health insurance are going to be forced to do so. . . . What we are witnessing with the Tea Party movement is one of the periodic recurrences to fundamental principles that typify and revivify the American experiment in self-government.
UPDATE: Reader Ron Drees writes: “Hey Glenn, my son bought two of these (since he just came off the rolls of the unemployed!) and we have our own mid air battles in the kitchen. At $30 each, you should do the same and challenge the Instadaughter, since her superior hand – eye coordination will soon overcome your experience and treachery!”
And reader Stewart Greathouse emails: “I bought one for myself at Christmas. I showed it to my coworkers, they were astounded at the quality and stability. We ended up buying 12 more. I gave one to my son at college, plus I sent 2 to my nephews in Singapore. Way better than Airhogs!”
And yeah, I cracked and ordered one. (Bumped, because people seem to like this).
In a world where it depends on what the meaning of is is, all the government needs to do is interpret. Regulating interstate commerce includes forcing people to buy things they don’t want to buy, and smoking includes not smoking. You can make anything you want be true, if you only believe. And “you” means “the government,” and “believe” means “dictate.”
Thus spake the Constitutional Law professor. And who would know better?
OWN A SECOND HOME IN NEW YORK? Prepare For A Higher Tax Bill! “I expect a massive sell-off of second homes. New York has some of the highest tax rates in the country. No one is going to voluntarily subject themselves to such rates just for the dubious privilege of having their own apartment in New York. There are hotels for that.”
RHODES SCHOLAR REX MURPHY on Al Gore and Keith Olbermann’s smarts. “As Gore’s star pales and recedes, and as the furious sanctimonies of global warming meet resistance, perhaps fading Al sees something of a mirror image in the fall of Keith. And perhaps both of them sense that each of them has had his moment, that this moment is past, so maybe the only fun left is to join hands and mutually console for what little of the gig remains to either of them.”
Perry was inspired by comments that Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, made at a conference in California, said Catherine Frazier , a spokeswoman. A video posted on YouTube captured some of Gates’ remarks.
“College, except for the parties, needs to be less place-based,” he said. Web-based instruction and other technology could drive the price down to $2,000 a year, he said.
Perry wrote to university regents last week , urging them to develop $10,000 degree programs and to scale up those programs so at least 10 percent of the sheepskins awarded by their schools are based on this approach. He said programs could include online classes, classes at no-frills campuses, credit for prior learning, credit for Advanced Placement classes in high school and other elements.
There’s room for increased efficiency. In particular, certification based on skills rather than time served, offers real potential.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
From your link: “After Perry’s speech, State Rep. Dawnna Dukes, D-Austin, asked reporters, ‘Now how many people do you know that stated they got a Ph.D or a law degree online which you hired to represent you in court?” No one who utters a sentence like that should be lecturing anyone on education policy.
These cuts barely scratch the surface of our fiscal problems. With deficits like those we’ve been running, a $100 billion-dollar cut is little more than a rounding error.
That said, I’m pleased the Tea Party has scored a major victory in pushing House Republicans to cut at least that amount ”in spending this fiscal year“, but that still leaves us with a deficit larger than any in the Bush years (when that good man’s detractors, including your humble bloggers, were faulting congressional Republicans for their big-spending ways). . . . Indeed, the deficit this year will be at least twice that of any comparable period when we had a Republican president and Congress. To be sure, these cuts represent a step in the right direction, but given the size of the deficit, they amount to little more than a few drops in a very, big bucket.
Indeed, but they also represent momentum. More perspective on just how small they are, though, is here.
UPDATE: Bruce Bartlett thinks the GOP is cutting with an axe. I really don’t think that’s true, but he says that like it’s a bad thing.
What I’d say is that for the time being at least, across-the-board cuts are better than cutting with a “scalpel.” First , scalpels aren’t good for cutting very much at a time. Second, wielded by incompetents, scalpels don’t cut any more precisely. Now, how competent do you think our political class is?
If they cut with a “scalpel,” it’ll mostly be used to carve out exceptions for favored constituencies. I’d rather see an honest axe than a dishonest scalpel.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Hyer writes:
To me, this is where we find out if the Republicans are good politicians AND conservative. If they were to propose a 10% across the board cut, and let each department/agency deal with the new reality, they can’t lose. When some guy from the EPA comes out and says that cutting their budget by 10% will lead to massive poisoned water supplies, everyone will roll their eyes. I don’t know a single family that hasn’t cut their budget by 10% and most by 40%, and none of us had to sell our children!!!! Someone in Congress has to learn to address these issues frankly like Christie in NJ. Tell the brutal truth, and let the other guy explain that it’s not fair that his pay only went UP 2%.
Even 5% across the board would be a good start, and even more politically defensible. Then repeat.
CONCEPT: The Nautilus Long-Duration Spacecraft. “The Nautilus X would consist of a variety of ridged and inflatable modules, solar dynamic arrays, any of a number of mission specific propulsion modules, a manipulator arms, docking ports for Orion or commercial space craft such as the SpaceX Dragon, landing craft for destination worlds and (this is the key) a centrifuge that would simulate partial gravity to maintain the health of the crew for long duration space missions. There would be logistical modules, a radiation mitigation system, facilities for a hydroponic farm, and hangers for landing craft and EVA pods.”
GALLUP: Unemployment Up To 10.3 Percent. I’ve noticed a divergence between the Gallup numbers and the “official” numbers lately. I wonder why that is? Is it seasonal adjustment, or something else? Underemployment is up to 19.7 percent.
UPDATE: Reader Andrew Hansen writes: “The BLS non-adjusted rate is 9.8%. The Gallup rate of 10.3% has a reported margin of error of 0.7%, so the 95% confidence interval for their data is 9.6% to 11.0%. No reason to think one contradicts the other, but it is a good time to remember that both sources are estimates from survey data and have a margin of error.”
POPULAR MECHANICS:The Modernization of the Muzzleloaded Rifle. “The muzzleloading rifle is the oldest firearm on earth. It has been around since the start of the 17th century, yet the past 25 years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in muzzleloaders.”
PUBLIC PENSION UPDATE: Number of $100,000 retirees skyrocket in teacher pension system. “More proof that pension costs are spiraling out of control: The number of retirees earning $100,000 or more from the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) has increased dramatically since 2009, according to new data obtained by the nonprofit California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.”
RICK PERRY: We Blew It On Amazon. “Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas, told The Examiner in an exclusive interview that Amazon’s decision to leave the state was a result of a wrong decision by the state comptroller, and that he will work with legislators to make sure Amazon can stay.”
ALAN BOYLE: Let’s Talk About The Final Frontier. “New business ventures could find a profitable place in space — in Earth orbit, on the moon and beyond. Suddenly, private-sector spaceflight is becoming one of the biggest things in the solar system.”
MICHAEL TOTTEN: The Flight Of The Intellectuals. An interview with Paul Berman. “Partly it’s sloppiness, but mostly it’s fear of discovering what they’re going to hear in the sixteenth minute. They don’t really want to take him seriously. He demands to be taken seriously, yet his admirers are precisely the types who, out of fear of the sixteenth minute, don’t wish to do so. What you discover in the sixteenth minute is that Tariq Ramadan is his grandfather’s grandson.”
Plus this: “What’s fascinating to me is how some Western intellectuals will praise this guy as a moderate when he is, at best, only half moderate, and yet at the same time they sneer at authentic Arab liberals.”
BECOMING HISTORY: The factory-installed in-dash tape deck. “It’s a little difficult nowadays to recall how revolutionary this idea of playing whatever you wanted in your car really was.”
READER MIKE PUCKETT SENDS THIS QUOTE FROM GEORGE ORWELL:
It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon–so long as there is no answer to it–gives claws to the weak.
BABY MONITORS LACK SECURITY: “We connected our monitor, which acts as a receiver, in our car, and then drove around the city. Within moments, we started seeing nurseries, bedrooms, and hearing people’s conversations. One baby’s image we picked up from almost half a mile away.”
HMM: Autopsy: Lobbyist was drunk at time of fatal accident in garage. “Ashley Turton, a former senior aide to Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), was intoxicated when she died in an accident last month, according to an autopsy report. Turton, who was working as an energy lobbyist at the time of the accident, died from the ‘inhalation of products of combustion and thermal burns,’ according to Beverly Fields of the D.C. Chief Medical Examiner’s office. ‘Acute alcohol intoxication’ was a contributing factor in her death, Fields said.” This seems quite odd.
Plus this: “Along with mailing in tea bags to members of Congress, we should send them our compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) for proper disposal in hazardous-waste landfills, since they contain mercury.” Probably some sort of environmental crime.
“Has the conservative movement become a champion of gay rights? Is gun-owning, lesbian singer Sophie B. Hawkins of ‘Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover’ fame a liberal in bed and conservative in the head?”
LAWYERING: Larry Tribe Caught Up in Post-Employment Restrictions in AEP Case. “The most interesting fact to me is that the government apparently acted to have his name striken from the brief. Clearly, by that point, DOJ knew of the the brief and his role in it, so it would seem that any violation would have occurred. Taking his name off the brief at that point wouldn’t seem to make it any more or less of a violation.”
MULLAHS NOT AMUSED: Iranian Tries To Walk Like An Egyptian. “Mr Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, another opposition leader, had called for a rally on Monday to support the popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.”
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, we’d have a White House claiming the FBI could eavesdrop without any oversight. And they were right! “The Obama administration’s Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy.”
PETER WOOD WRITES ABOUT THE BECK-PIVEN CONTROVERSY in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and I was glad to see this right up front:
The strikes and riots in Greece ended up destroying a great deal of property and costing lives. In one instance, protesters threw a Molotov cocktail through the front window of Marfin Bank in central Athens. Three people inside died from asphyxiation and four others were badly injured. There were other atrocities.
A lot of Piven’s defenders in the academy have been trying to distract from this. He continues:
The consistent theme of Piven’s work has been the desire to set Americans against one another in the hope that out of the resulting conflict will come a more organized and energized movement of the poor and disenfranchised. Thus Piven’s recent invocation of riots in Greece and protests in England is nothing especially novel. . . .
For the record, I have been unable to locate any instance in which Beck called for Piven’s death or incited violence against her. As many others have pointed out, however, Piven herself has long extolled the value of civil unrest up to and including riots, which would seem to put her own academic discourse in a place other than “responsible criticism and debate.” Her belief in the salutary character of some kinds of violence is, of course, not an isolated case in academe. Frantz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth, long a staple in American college reading lists, luxuriates in the idea of the liberating quality of killing the oppressor. The academy has its share of men and women who theorize on the utility of revolutionary violence—and a few who have actually practiced it. On that scale, Piven is something of a moderate. She is attracted to the idea of violent social disruption but doesn’t apotheosize killing for its own sake.
Read the whole thing. Wood’s quite hard on the American Sociological Association, and rightly so. And Ann Althouse has related thoughts.
UPDATE: Reader Jeff Johnson emails: “The comments and defense by sociologists of Piven really knocks down their position of saying that there are hardly any conservatives in the social sciences since they aren’t as intelligent as liberals. If this type of thinking is their idea of intelligent, then that word doesn’t mean what they think it means.”
DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION IN EDUCATION: KHAN ACADEMY PARTNERS WITH BITTORRENT TO DISTRIBUTE COURSES. The missing element here is back-end certification that students have learned. Provide that, and the higher education bubble will burst even faster, I suspect.
UPDATE: I had some related thoughts here. And reader Matthew Thornton writes: “With clenched, upraised fist and the best Shatner imitation they can muster, are the higher education types screaming, ‘KHAAAAAAAAANNN!!!!!!‘?” That would be cool.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ on what’s next: “Recent events may have convinced the Army officer corps that Mubarak had to go, but it probably still believes the Army has to remain in charge. The role of opposition groups in this context will be to take sides with factions in the Army.” If I had to guess the Islamists’ plan, it would be to emulate Turkey, and gradually weaken the Army without provoking a direct confrontation until the Army is too weak to win.
CLIVE CROOK: Why Intellectuals Are Not Conservatives: “Paul Krugman wearily observes that stories about liberal bias in the academy surface on a regular basis. They do, but that does not make them untrue. He’s right, too, that ideological discrimination is not the same thing as racial discrimination. But that does not make it a good thing, does it?”
Crook quotes Nozick: “Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.”
