John Hindraker over at the he Powerline blog has a fascinating, if troubling, post about the long term economic implications of the policies of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi government. It’s titled “What’s In Store, Inflation or Default?”
It makes for sobering reading. The silver lining? The end of the welfare state is coming . . . one way or the other.
Arriving yesterday: The End of Secularism by Hunter Baker.
This goes in the “Waiting” pile that includes recent acquisitions:
The National Geographic Channel . . . or “NatGeo” is the new hip new name, I believe . . . is running a great little special over the next few weeks. It’s called “9/11: Science and Conspiracy.” In it, a team of scientists in various specialties examine the key elements of the major conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon.
They set up experiments to test things like the effects of burning jet fuel on structural steel (Guess what, Rosie . . . Fire actually can melt steel!) In fact, they laid a length of of structural steel over a shallow pit with jet fuel in it and placed a small amount of weight on the beam. Then they lit the jet fuel and started a stopwatch. The steel bent, buckled and twisted after only 3:51 seconds–even though the fire only reached a temperature of 2000, several hundred degrees lower than the steel’s “official” failure temp.
The best parts of the special are when they show a group of high profile “truthers” each experiment and the scientific findings. In each case, the truthers simply refused to accept what they were seeing. They were so invested in their preferred narrative that no amount of refutation could move them.
I was reminded of a great Thomas Sowell quote I heard recently. “A person cannot be reasoned out of a position they did not reason themselves into.”
Check out this video excerpt from the special. And catch one of the airings of this special if you can.
We had a good, long Skype webchat with our girl in Nairobi this weekend–with both audio and video. Seeing her face and hearing her voice was like water to a parched desert traveler for her mother.
Actual water continues to be a precious commodity there in Kenya. Our former homecoming queen mentioned that she had learned several valuable life skills in her first month there. She said:
“I’ve learned how to wash all of my clothes with only a liter of water. I’ve learned how to bath in a bucket the size of my face. And at night, I can wash my face and brush my teeth with only a dixie cup of water.”
She’s about to settle into a new routine–teaching math three days a week at an orphanage/family shelter, and on the other two days teaching young pastors how to use the Bible software that comes with the computers they are given by the ministry in which she is a volunteer.
It seems she’s busy, weary, and living in conditions that are uncomfortable to say the least. But it’s also clear to us she has no interest in coming back early. She’s having the time of her life.
. . .the online gallery of “Crappy Taxidermy.”
There’s 65 pages of this stuff. I don’t advise viewing it right before bedtime, though. It’s high-octane nightmare fuel.
Conservative writer Roger Simon has been traveling in Europe and reports that he’s finding the Al-Jazeera news network less biased and more professional than CNN.
Except for those stories when the “I”-word was prominent (you know, that little country south of Lebanon), Al Jazeera was clearly better, more honest, more informative and more entertaining than CNN International or the BBC. And kinder to the US. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Also, since much of the news they reported was coming from the Middle East, they seemed better informed about such things as the death of the Iraqi Shiite leader Hakim (they referred to Saddam Hussein flatly as a fascist, something you rarely hear on CNN) and the Al Qaeda suicide bombing in Saudi Arabia (they had nothing but withering contempt for Al Qaeda – no pussy-footing “insurgent” rhetoric for them).
It’s not that Al-Jazeera is actually good. It’s just than CNN is that awful.
It’s the day for remembering the achievements of Ted Kennedy, it seems. Here’s a shining moment:
If a young person ever asks you when it was that America’s public discourse began to rapidly devolve into the fetid, polarized mess we have today, point them to this day–when Kennedy, backed by NOW, People for the American Way, and a brilliantly viscious ad campaign featuring Gregory Peck smeared a good and brilliant man.
Sorry for the sparse posting lately. I volunteered to work on a special project for my daughter’s school and it’s ended up sort of owning me and my business over the last few days. In the spirit of making restitution, the following are some things I should’ve/would’ve noted:
Last Friday night the Dallas Cowboys officially launched their new $1.2 billion stadium as they hosted the Tennessee Titans for a pre-season game. A client of ours was gracious enough to invite us to join him for the game in his shiny new luxury suite. I have to tell you, this is not a bad way to watch a football game:
The whole facility is pretty impressive. But one of the most stunning things about the thing is what amounts to world’s largest high-definition television set hanging from the ceiling:
This four-sided screen is essentially a 5-story building hanging from the ceiling. And the pictures this thing produced had even Jon Simpson, a A/V critic of the highest order, gobsmacked. But as anyone who watched the game will attest, there’s just one small problem with this wonder of technology . . .
It’s difficult to imagine that the likely height of a punt wasn’t factored into the construction of a stadium purpose-built for football. In postgame interviews, Jerry Jones was in full “Nathan Thurm” mode about it. “Of course, I knew punts were going to hit the scoreboard. I can’t believe you think I didn’t know this. It’s part of our plan.”
We launched a new website for our business a couple of weeks ago and with it, Jon Simpson and I began a weekly series of audio podcasts. Each runs about 5 minutes and tries to combine a nugget of information about technology or media with a little levity. You can find it and subscribe here. Or you can subscribe through iTunes by searching “Cobalt Bridge.”
I hope to start creating some audio and video for this site as well. Stand by for . . . something.
The Obama administration continues to be on exactly the wrong side of the governmental controversy in Honduras. Sweet flaming Uzziah, is there anything this president isn’t wrong-headed about? . . . spectacularly, petulantly, condescendingly wrong? God help our poor country . . .
A few weeks ago, on the anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing, I posted some thoughts about conspiracies. (One Giant Leap for Conspiracy Theories). Since then, I received some good-natured chiding from a friend or two suggesting I’m being naive. So, I’ll take this opportunity to expand and clarify my remarks.
I did not mean to suggest that there are no conspiracies. History is filled with them–some criminal, some political, some financial. A few succeed (e.g., the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln.) Most fail (as with Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot of 1605).
My argument is not that conspiricies aren’t hatched and attempted. Only that people are reliably bad at carrying them out and/or keeping them a secret if by dumb luck or providence, they succeed. Thus, here are three guidelines I follow when presented with a juicy conspiracy theory.
1. Never attribute to malice what can adaquately be explained by incompetence. (So, no, Roosevelt didn’t intentionally ignore warnings about a Japanese attack in order to justify America’s entry into the war. He and a lot of other people down the chain of command were hiney-covering nincompoops.)
2. Always apply lex parsimoniae (the law of economy), also known as Occam’s Razor. When evaulating competing hypotheses, the simplest explanation that adaquately explains the phenomena is likely to be the correct one. In other words, embrace the explanation with the fewest moving parts. (No conspiracy theory in the history of paranoia has more moving parts than the “9/11 was in Inside Job” narrative.)
3. “They,” whoever they may be, are no smarter, organized, dependable, disciplined or mistake-proof than your local chapter of the Kiwanis Club. People are fallen, frail, and finite.
Yes, as the second Psalm reminds us, the heathen rage and the peoples devise vain things. But it also points out that God finds it all very amusing.
Mark Steyn makes pretty much the same point I was attempting to make below . . . except he does a much better job because . . . well, he’s Mark Steyn, for crying out loud:
Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan and much of Continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away.
Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.
Read the whole thing here.
Financial headlines this morning said U.S. stocks were soaring. Why? (emphasis mine)
Stocks jumped Friday, setting the stage for a four-session winning streak, after a sharp jump in existing-home sales and some encouraging economic data out of Europe.
First let me say that I’m always skeptical of these financial press explanations of why stock indices are doing whatever it is they do. It’s usually just wild speculation. If the stock markets go down, reporters search the headlines for bad news and then point to it and declare: “That’s the reason.” When they go up, they search for good news and do the same thing.
Nevertheless, any investor basing his bets on what European markets are doing should have his head examined. Here’s why:
So yes, the business outlook in Europe is probably getting brighter. But why anyone would assume that would translate to improvement here is beyond me.