GREEN CARS UNDERWHELM: Nissan Leaf nets middling 78-point Consumer Reports score, still beats Volt. Plus, range anxiety: “CR discovered that, under gentle driving conditions, the Leaf averaged 90 miles on a full charge. But in cold weather, CR’s testers report the range dropped to approximately 60 miles. It’s for this reason that CR refers to the Leaf as an urban runabout.”
Archive for September, 2011
September 30, 2011
IN THE MAIL: Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse.
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Coffee Cuts Depression In Women.
Who knows what it’ll do for Anderson Cooper?
EUROZONE UPDATE: NEIN, NEIN, NEIN, and the death of EU Fiscal Union. “Judging by the commentary, there has been a colossal misunderstanding around the world of what has just has happened in Germany. The significance of yesterday’s vote by the Bundestag to make the EU’s €440bn rescue fund (EFSF) more flexible is not that the outcome was a ‘Yes’. . . . The significance is entirely the opposite. The furious debate over the erosion of German fiscal sovereignty and democracy – as well as the escalating costs of the EU rescue machinery – has made it absolutely clear that the Bundestag will not prop up the ruins of monetary union for much longer. . . . Yet Europe and the world are so used to German self-abnegation for the EU Project – so used to the teleological destiny of ever-closer Union – that they cannot seem to grasp the fact. It reminds me of 1989 and the establishment failure to understand the Soviet game was up.”
FRANK J. FLEMING: How To Make Obama Like Us. “Obama was elected on the promise of hope and change; he was going to make everything better by fixing the economy, ending all wars, and making every rainbow a double rainbow. As smart and capable as we all knew he was, he should have succeeded beyond our wildest imaginations. But instead, we’re even worse off than before — I don’t remember the last time I even saw a single rainbow. The only explanation is that somehow we’ve angered Obama and caused him to turn against us. It’s just that I’m not sure how. . . . We just need to accept the fact that we’re a bad country, and that’s why Obama is not following through on the hope and change he promised. So now what we need to do is try to figure out how to become a better country so Obama will like us and decide that he doesn’t need to destroy us. So I’ve done my best to study Obama and figure out some ideas to make us a country he considers worth saving.”
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Graphene nanoribbons grown inside carbon nanotubes develop electronic properties.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Weak income curbs consumer spending. “Incomes fell for the first time in nearly two years in August and consumers dug into their savings to keep spending, according to a government report that showed the impact of the weak jobs market.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Washington’s Quietest Disaster: Student loan defaults are growing, and the worst is still to come.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION (CONT’D): More Pay for Play… Obama DOE Awarded $400 Million Loan Guarantee to Top Bundler’s Solar Investment Project.
LIVE FREE OR DIE: A new Afterburner from Bill Whittle.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): 90 percent of Americans say economy stinks.
NPR: New Boom Reshapes Oil World, Rocks North Dakota. “Two years ago, America was importing about two thirds of its oil. Today, according to the Energy Information Administration, it imports less than half. And by 2017, investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts the US could be poised to pass Saudi Arabia and overtake Russia as the world’s largest oil producer. Places like Williston are the reason why.”
Wow, I knew it was big, but I had no idea it was that big. But read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Okay, here’s more:
Amy Myers Jaffe of Rice University says in the next decade, new oil in the US, Canada and South America could change the center of gravity of the entire global energy supply.
“Some are now saying, in five or 10 years’ time, we’re a major oil-producing region, where our production is going up,” she says.
The US, Jaffe says, could have 2 trillion barrels of oil waiting to be drilled. South America could hold another 2 trillion. And Canada? 2.4 trillion. That’s compared to just 1.2 trillion in the Middle East and north Africa.
Jaffe says those new oil reserves, combined with growing turmoil in the Middle East, will “absolutely propel more and more investment into the energy resources in the Americas.”
Russia is already feeling the growth of American energy, Jaffe says. As the U.S. produces more of its own natural gas, Europe is free to purchase liquefied natural gas the US is no longer buying.
“They’re buying less natural gas from Russia,” Jaffe says. “So Russia would only supply 10 percent of European natural gas demand by 2030. That means the Russians are no longer powerful.”
The implications here are huge. If I were Russia and Saudi Arabia, I’d be subsidizing U.S. environmental groups in an effort to stop, or at least slow, the process.
ROGER KIMBALL: Is Obama Right? Has America “Gone Soft?”
No, there is nothing flaccid about American business. There’s plenty of keenness on its “competitive edge.” It’s far and away the most productive and innovative economic machine in the world.
What’s “gone soft” and lost its “competitive edge” is American government, which can’t see a pile of money it doesn’t wish to expropriate in order to feed its “spread-the-wealth-around” socialist appetite and which sees government as the adversary rather than the enabler of business. That’s the rotten softness we have to worry about.
Indeed.
I GET THE BEST INTEREST RATES AT THE PONZI NATIONAL BANK: This Is The Type Of Story That Makes People Freak Out About China’s Underground Banking System.
METRICS: Turns Out, The South Is A Pretty Nice Place To Live. “The advantages of the South — especially the advantages of the 21st century South — are less well known (and, somehow, Southern coastal cities are frequently overlooked as major cities). Oh, there are books and TV shows, songs and movies about Dixie — but, as Habeeb points out, they’re often misleading caricatures or dwell too heavily on the South’s past. Little has been done to update the popular image of the region, which is now economically inviting and culturally reassuring — perhaps because those who spin popular images, from the president to junior reporters, haven’t taken the time to really understand the South for themselves. That happens to be Habeeb’s thesis.”
To be honest, we’d rather word didn’t get out. Stay away! In fact, I need to point this out: The South is a cultural desert, across which ride Klansmen on horseback and NASCAR fans in F350 Dually pickups. The cultural center is Wal-Mart, and the occasional tailgater before a lynching. Gunshows are disdained as the domain of pointy-headed intellectuals, because they also sell books. No, really, that’s all true — stay away! For the love of God, stay away!
UPDATE: Reader Phil Manhard emails: “I wish to add that we have fire ants, sinkholes, red tide, shark attacks, huge and regular brush fires, sandspurs, sunburn, hurricanes (though, unexpectedly!, none in the last couple of years). Yes, for the love of God, stay far away!”
And the chiggers. Beastly critters you want no part of. Stay in Massachusetts!
HOW GOOGLE DROVE SAMSUNG AWAY: “The patent licensing agreement between Microsoft and Samsung this week set off a firestorm of childish tit-for-tat between Microsoft and Google. But more telling is what Samsung had to say about its relationship with Google: ‘Samsung knows it can’t rely on Google. We’ve decided to address Android IP issues on our own,’ a Samsung official told The Korea Times.”
CLAIRE BERLINSKI: Is Turkey Really a ‘Vibrant Democracy’? A closer examination reveals a nation sliding into dictatorship.
UPDATE: Oops. It’s not Claire Berlinski, it’s Okan Altiparmak.
REPORT: Anwar al-Awlaki killed in Yemen. Hope it’s true.
CHANGE: More bad news for bank customers: Debit card fees. “Bank of America will start charging debit-card users $5 a month to pay for purchases. The move comes as the cards increasingly replace cash and as banks look for ways to offset the loss of revenue from a new rule that will limit how much they can collect from merchants.” Taking money out of my pocket, and putting it into merchants’ pockets instead. Thanks, feds!
THE RISE OF THE FLAT TAX produces Morning In Albania. “Today, the flat tax idea is perhaps even more politically remote, in the United States, than it was in 1985. However, the rest of the world caught on to the idea. Today there are at least forty governments with flat tax type systems, most of which made the switch in just the last decade.”
Our political class doesn’t like a flat tax because it provides insufficient opportunities for graft.