No Oil for Pacifists

I'm crazy busy at work, so blogging will be light for a few days.

In Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992), the Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment's prohibition on "establishment of religion" to forbid clergy from reading non-sectarian invocations and benedictions at public school events such as graduations. I'm not a huge fan of that decision -- among other things, it's inconsistent with Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783 (1983), allowing the Nebraska Legislature to open sessions with a prayer from a Presbyterian minister paid out of public funds -- but I'll accept stare decisis for this post. And, apart from egregious circumstances, I've also emphatically opposed turning Federal Courts into a forum for second-guessing public school administration. Cf. Regents of University of Michigan v. Ewing, 474 U.S. 214, 226 (1985) (Federal Courts are "far less . . . suited to evaluate the substance of the multitude of academic decisions that are made daily by faculty members of public educational institutions -- decisions that require 'an expert evaluation of cumulative information and [are] not readily adapted to the procedural tools of judicial or administrative decisionmaking.'").

So I agree with the result of the recent ruling in Nurre v. Whitehead, No. 07-35867 (9th Cir. Sept. 8, 2009). There, the Ninth Circuit held that a Washington state public school system superintendent's decision to bar playing Franz Biebl's version of "Ave Maria" at the upcoming graduation ceremony because of its "religious connotations" did not violate the free speech rights of a high school alto sax player. In general, the Constitution doesn't enshrine the principle to sue your principal. Cf. Safford Unified School Dist. # 1 v. Redding, No. 08-479, Part IV (June 25, 2009).

But. . .

Senior student-musicians historically picked the graduation theme. The text of Ave Maria is unquestionably liturgical. Yet, the school group was a wind-ensemble, so no "religion" would have been sung. The sole intrusion of faith into the function would have been, as the dissent noted (slip op. at 12756), in the printed program.

Again, I agree that the Constitution normally doesn't entitle students to second-guess public school policies. But religious freedom isn't freedom from religion. So, I also agree with National Review senior editor Jay Nordlinger, in the November 2nd issue (subscription-only for now):

We have reached a pass where, if we hear the word "God," or even "angels" and "heaven," we say, "Eek, a mouse!" American life has always been soaked in religion, from the Pilgrims to Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King and beyond. If American life, including graduation ceremonies, is purged of religion, American life is something new and twisted. Given the importance of religion to man in general, it is barely life itself.

The problem with Biebl’s Ave Maria, in its wind-ensemble version, was the title alone. If the kids had told the principal that it was called "Against the Despoliation of the Environment," or "Ode to President Obama," that would have been fine, you can bet. No one in the audience would have been guilty of thought-crime. Many composers draw inspiration from God and religion when they put pen to paper, no matter what their titles. Should they tell [the superintendent] when they have received such inspiration, just in case?

Conclusion: Our system properly is secular. Yet religion underlies history and government. So faith influenced many laws--six of the Ten Commandments are codified in most criminal codes--because it can be an element of voter and legislator judgment.

Biebl’s Ave Maria is a beautiful tune, not a budding theocracy. But litigation isn't the answer; democracy is. For the band to beat the ban, elect a new school board wanting to hire a more open-minded superintendent.

They call that tolerance--which is intolerable only where the object is conservative.

From Sunday Morning Breakfast Cereal:


source: Oct. 23rd SMBC

(via reader Michael Y.)

UPDATE: below

As reported in the Washington Post:

Leftist President Hugo Chavez called on Venezuelans on Wednesday to stop singing in the shower and to wash in three minutes because the oil-exporting nation is having problems supplying water and electricity.

Venezuela has suffered several serious blackouts in the past year because of rapidly growing demand and under-investment, which has been aggravated by a drop in water levels in hydroelectric dams that provide most of its energy.

Chavez announced energy-saving measures and said he would create a ministry to deal with the electricity shortages, which have affected the image of his socialist revolution before legislative elections due in 2010.

MORE:

Apparently not understanding that insufficient investment by inefficient state-run enterprises plus price controls lead to shortages, the New York Times is perplexed by Venezuela's problems.

(via Normblog, Planet Gore)

From Daily Pundit:

The national health care bandaid will provide improved coverage for a group estimated at between 5 and 20 million people, some of whom are US citizens, at a cost of roughly an MRI machine per newly-covered patient.

With a healthcare "public option" back on the table, Cassandra of Villainous Company concludes we've "Learned Nothing From the Financial Crisis":

Now let me get this straight. We just suffered a devastating financial crisis. Industry and government analysts saw it coming years ago, but were powerless to avert it.

Having had our fingers badly burned by a massive national flirtation with disaster, some might conclude that caution and fiscal restraint were the order of the day.

They would be wrong. Instead, we've decided to stop paying the mortgage, untether major expenses from the tiresome obligation of earning money with which to pay them, and peel out for Vegas (en route to which, we plan to blithely "spend our way out of the doldrums", assuming levels of debt never before attempted -- either in real terms or as a percentage of GDP).

What could possibly go wrong?

Yup--with Medicare and Social Security failing and spending expanding, Democrats propose doubling down to add expense and create more institutions too big to fail.

(via reader OBH, Betsy's Page)

Think Obama is right to slam bonuses for Wall Street execs? Well, what about bonuses for government controlled mortgage lender CFOs?:

The pay package given to Freddie Mac's new chief financial officer should have sent a message from Washington to corporate America about how executive compensation standards must change. Instead, it did just the opposite.

The government-controlled mortgage finance company is giving CFO Ross Kari compensation worth as much as $5.5 million. That includes an almost $2 million cash signing bonus and a generous salary that could top $2.3 million.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Freddie Mac, approved the pay package. A spokeswoman pointed to a statement that justified the agency's approval of the pay, which was done in part because the amount was comparable to what others in the financial services industry make.

BTW, the other federal-guaranteed mortgage lender, the Federal Housing Authority, likely soon will require a bailout, just like Fannie and Freddie.

(via Instapundit)

Russian writer/blogger Stanislav Mishin in the October 19th Pravda:

I am a fan of economics and of history, as well as politics, a combination that forms some very interesting cycles to research, discuss and argue on. None is so interesting than the death of great nations, for here there is always the self destruction that comes before the final breakups and invasions. As they say: Rome did not fall to the barbarians, all they did was kick in the rotting gates.

It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course, is that they are just repeating the failed mistakes of the past. One would expect their fellow travelers in suicide, the British, to have spoken up by now, but unfortunately for the British, their education system is now even more of a joke than that of the Americans.

While taking a small breather from mouthing the never ending propaganda of recovery, never mind that every real indicator is pointing to death and destruction, the American Marxists have noticed that the French and Germans are out of recession and that Russia and Italy are heading out at a good clip themselves. Of course these facts have been wrapped up into their mind boggling non stop chant of "recovery" and hope-change-zombification. What is ignored, of course, is that we and the other three great nations all cut our taxes, cut our spending, made life easy for small business. . . in other words: the exact opposite of the Anglo-Sphere.

That brings us to Cap and Trade. Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies. Energy is the key stone to any and every economy, be it man power, animal power, wood or coal or nuclear. How else does one power industry that makes human life better (unless of course its making the bombs that end that human life, but that's a different topic). Never in history, with the exception of the Japanese self imposed isolation in the 1600s, did a government actively force its people away from economic activity and industry.

Even the Soviets never created such idiocy. The great famine of the late 1920s was caused by quite the opposite, as the Soviets collectivized farms to force peasants off of their land and into the big new factories. Of course this had disastrous results. So one must ask, are the powers that be in Washington and London degenerates or satanically evil? Where is the opposition? Where are the Republicans in America and Tories in England?

Answer: outvoted. And as to Mishin's view on cap-and-trade, agreed, many times over. Shouldn't we be alarmed when Democrats are too leftist for admitted Russian nationalists?

Read the whole thing.

(via reader David H.)

Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics:

In his inaugural address Obama told us that "the time has come to set aside childish things." He promised to bring "an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics."

Not only has President Obama failed to live up to those promises so far, it appears that on more than a number of occasions he’s made a conscious decision to break them.

In the first nine months in office President Obama and/or members of his administration have accused doctors of performing unnecessary medical procedures for profit; demonized bond holders as "speculators;" produced a report suggesting military veterans are prone to becoming right wing extremists; attacked insurance companies and threatened them with legislative retribution; ridiculed talk show hosts and political commentators by name from the White House podium; dismissed and demeaned protesters and town hall attendees as either unauthentic or fringe characters; maligned a white police officer for arresting a black man without knowing the facts of the case; launched an orchestrated campaign to marginalize the country's biggest pro-business group; and publicly declared war on a news organization. . .

Obama took the public’s cynicism and turned it to his advantage by vowing he would be a different kind of leader. So far, however, he is falling well short of his promises, using tactics and rhetoric that not only drive Americans apart but hurt him politically. It's time for Obama to start acting like the President he told us he’d be.

See also Jonah Goldberg at National Review.

Someone at the New York Times gets it right. This time, it's Tyler Cowen in the October 25th edition:

Americans seem to like the idea of broadening health insurance coverage, but they may not want to be forced to buy it. With health care costs high and rising, such government mandates would make many people worse off.

The proposals now before Congress would require just about everyone to buy health insurance or to get it through their employers -- which would generally result in lower wages. In other words, millions of people would be compelled to spend lots of money on something they previously did not want, at least not at prevailing prices.

Estimates of this burden vary, but for a family of four it could range up to $14,000 a year over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Right now, many Americans take the gamble of going without insurance, just as many of us take our chances with how much we drive or how little we exercise. . .

There are now about 1,500 insurance mandates among the various states, and hundreds of others are under consideration. The dynamic at work here is that the affected groups have a big incentive to push for mandates, while most other people are unaware of the specific issues and don’t become involved.

Because mandates don’t stay modest for long, health insurance would become all the more expensive. The Obama administration’s cost estimates haven’t considered these longer-run "political economy" issues.

Agreed.

(via Right Wing News)

NASA's Dr. James Hansen has a history of climate alarmism that hasn't happened. But this prediction, from an interview with author Bob Reiss in 1988 or '89, is worse than wrong--it's comic:

I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, "If what you're saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?" [Hansen] looked for a while and was quiet and didn't say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, "Well, there will be more traffic." I, of course, didn't think he heard the question right. Then he explained, "The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water.

As Anthony Watts documents, the highway's still there:


source: Watts Up With That?

And there's "virtually no trend" in the sea level over the last 20 years:


source: Watts Up With That?

Of course, the science supposedly is settled around a consensus of man-made warming. But only because the so-called experts aren't called to account for errors. Yet this time, Hansen's false fear doesn't demand a physics or statistics doctorate to refute.

As Galileo Galilei might have muttered, "and yet, it [doesn't] move."

(via TigerHawk)

The United States Courts of Appeals for the Second and Fifth Circuits recently have reversed lower court dismissals and allowed government (2nd Cir.) and private individuals (5th Cir.) to sue companies for excessive greenhouse gas emissions:

And that means contingency fees. And thus the promise of copycat lawsuits. . . We're off to the races in private party climate change class action litigation!

More legislating by lawyers--an end-run around policy and subverting democracy.

(via Moonbattery)

UPDATE: Berman Post picks up the point.

Congressman Alan Grayson (D.-Fla.) claims that "[e]very year, more than 44,000 Americans die simply because they have no health insurance." Single-payer insurance pressure groups and other lefties say the same. As does the mainstream media.

All such claims are based on a study called Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults, published in the September 2008 American Journal of Public Health. In predicting that 120 Americans die daily because they lack health insurance, is the study valid? Like many claims about the uninsured, no.

Initially, though not definitive, I note that many of the study's authors are lefty single-payor advocates themselves, a fact the media mostly fails to mention. This doesn't settle the issue, but it does raise the question, as Michelle Malkin suggests, that the science might be "infused with left-wing politics." So, in assessing bias, consider the source.

More importantly, the study's methodology obviously is flawed. The paper uses survey data gathered between 1988 and 1994 by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). About 34,000 people were interviewed about various health-related characteristics, including whether they were insured. The authors then excluded those over 64 (virtually of of whom are covered by medicare) and children under 17. They also excluded non-elderly already covered by Medicare, Medicaid or VA health insurance, because "a substantial proportion of those individuals had poor health status as a prerequisite for coverage." The researchers also culled those with missing or incomplete interview data. The resulting relevant population was 9,004 surveyed individuals, of which about 84 percent were listed as insured while the remaining 16 percent were not. In a 2000 follow-up of the 9,004 individuals, 351 (or 3.1 %) had died. Then, for the most part, they assumed that mortality among the uninsured was caused by the lack of health insurance. This is nonsense, for three reasons:

First, demographics matter:

People with insurance tend to be healthier, wealthier, wiser and more gainfully employed than people without insurance.

So you can't blame their longer lives only on their insurance.

To be sure, the study acknowledges several other factors contributing to mortality, such as "gender, age, race/ethnicity, poverty income ratio, education, unemployment, smoking, regular alcohol use, [sub-standard] self-rated health, [and sub-standard] physician-rated health." But, because they found "no significant interactions" between the lack of insurance and those other variables, the authors downplay those factors.

Second, there's scant causal connection. The lack of health insurance isn't static--over 80 percent of the uninsured regain coverage within two years. And one can't assume deaths were due to any lack of health care--after all, bad health care also can be fatal. Yet the study presumes lack of health insurance is among the causes. As John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis notes:

The subjects were interviewed only once and the study tries to link their insurance status at that time to mortality a decade later. Yet over the period, the authors have no idea whether subjects were insured or uninsured, what kind of medical care they received, or even cause of death.

And the study itself concedes that "between 7% and 11% of those initially recorded as being uninsured were misclassified," raising questions about the sample's accuracy.

Third, other research is to the contrary. For example, a study by UCSD prof Richard Kronick, Ph.D., found:

Adjusted for demographic, health status, and health behavior characteristics, the risk of subsequent mortality is no different for uninsured respondents than for those covered by employer-sponsored group insurance at baseline.

Further, a June 2009 report by Drs. June and David O’Neill of Baruch College found the differential mortality between insured and uninsured to be of questionable statistical significance, and in any event only about 3 percent when comparing the insured with the voluntarily uninsured. Overall, they conclude:

a lack of health insurance is not likely to be the major factor causing higher mortality rates among the uninsured. The uninsured--particularly the involuntarily uninsured--have multiple disadvantages that are associated with poor health.

Conclusion: I've always supported a tax-funded safety net for the poor, including for those who can't afford health insurance. But rejecting phony scare stories is crucial for assessing the scope of the actual problem and crafting the appropriate policy remedy.

Fables still generate more coverage than facts. Healthcare costs don't drive personal bankruptcies--consumer spending does. And while insurance coverage may have some relation to mortality, it's nowhere near the numbers claimed. So, consider carefully before abandoning a system that is comparatively good and cost-effective. Junk science is no reason to junk what works.

A peek inside the deficit, from Veronique de Rugy in American magazine:


source: American via CBO

As de Rugy explains, the problem is spending under both Bush and Barack:

In Washington, a common explanation is that the recession produced the deficit. To be sure, as the graph displays, the recession caused lower than expected tax revenue--$419 billion lower, in fact. The recession caused corporations to make less profit, and individuals to earn less income, which also meant less money for the government.

But the reality is that this deficit is largely the product of government spending, as spending makes up the bulk of the deficit. Indeed, $459 billion of the deficit came from spending decisions made in the years preceding 2009. In 2009, the government added an additional $592 billion to this previously projected deficit; $245 billion for the financial bailout and $347 billion on stimulus spending. The only piece of good news comes from the projected cost of the interest we have to pay on the debt. Lower-than-projected interest rates reduced this amount by $61 billion. However, overall, spending accounts for more than $1 trillion of the entire deficit.

Agreed.

I've previously detailed the anti-Israel bias of "Human Rights Watch," the supposedly impartial lefty NGO. HRW's defense was to label the claims as "fundamentally . . . racist." But the latest critique comes from Robert Bernstein, the organization's founder, in a New York Times op-ed:

As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state. . .

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world -- many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.

So how do lefties respond to an insider's confirmation of the bias? By insisting, says Think Progress's Matthew Yglesias, that Bernstein can't think for himself (emphasis added):

It’s certainly news that Human Rights Watch’s critics were able to get a former HRW chairman to slam the organization for having the temerity to hold Israel to the same standards of international humanitarian law to which it holds every other country.

Of course, Yglesias offers no evidence anyone "got" to Bernstein. And he bypasses the central points of Bernstein's piece--that human rights are far more safeguarded in Israel as compared with most of the Middle East; HRW is biased; and holds Israel to a different standard than it applies to others.

I used to say "Arabs citizens of the middle-East can freely vote in only two places: The U.N. General Assembly in New York and Israel." Add Iraq to the list. Not that HRW, Yglesias or most progressives ever will acknowledge.

(via Volokh Conspiracy)

I have no objection to "renewable energy," only to nonsense about green jobs, absurdly espensive (and lethal) subsidies, and false and impractical efficiency claims. So read this new study on the Economic impacts from the promotion of renewable energies: The German experience by the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung think tank (at 5-7):

An aggressive policy of generously subsidizing and effectively mandating "renewable" electricity generation in Germany has led to a doubling of the renewable contribution to electricity generation in recent years. . .

The total net cost of subsidizing electricity production by PV modules [photovoltaic solar cells] is estimated to reach 53.3 Bn € (US $73.2 Bn) for those modules installed between 2000 and 2010. While the promotion rules for wind power are more subtle than those for PV, we estimate that the wind power subsidies may total 20.5 Bn € (US $28.1 Bn) for wind converters installed between 2000 and 2010. . .

There are much cheaper ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than subsidizing renewable energies. CO₂ abatement costs of PV are estimated to be as high as 716 € (US $1,050) per tonne, while those of wind power are estimated at 54 € (US $80) per tonne. By contrast, the current price of emissions certificates on the European emissions trading scheme is only 13.4 Euro per tonne. Hence, the cost from emission reductions as determined by the market is about 53 times cheaper than employing PV and 4 times cheaper than using wind power.

Moreover, the prevailing coexistence of the EEG and emissions trading under the European Trading Scheme (ETS) means that the increased use of renewable energy technologies generally attains no additional emission reductions beyond those achieved by ETS alone. In fact, since the establishment of the ETS in 2005, the EEG’s net climate effect has been equal to zero. . .

Renewable energies are thus among the most expensive GHG reduction measures. . .

Consumers ultimately bear the cost of renewable energy promotion. In 2008, the price mark-up due to the subsidization of green electricity was about 1.5 Cent per kWh (2.2 Cents US $), meaning the subsidy accounts for about 7.5% of average household electricity prices.

While employment projections in the renewable sector convey seemingly impressive prospects for gross job growth, they typically obscure the broader implications for economic welfare by omitting any accounting of off-setting impacts. These impacts include, but are not limited to, job losses from crowding out of cheaper forms of conventional energy generation, indirect impacts on upstream industries, additional job losses from the drain on economic activity precipitated by higher electricity prices, private consumers’ overall loss of purchasing power due to higher electricity prices, and diverting funds from other, possibly more beneficial investment.

Proponents of renewable energies often regard the requirement for more workers to produce a given amount of energy as a benefit, failing to recognize that this lowers the output potential of the economy and is hence counterproductive to net job creation. Significant research shows that initial employment benefits from renewable policies soon turn negative as additional costs are incurred. Trade and other assumptions in those studies claiming positive employment turn out to be unsupportable.

In the end, Germany’s PV promotion has become a subsidization regime that, on a per-worker basis, has reached a level that far exceeds average wages, with perworker subsidies as high as 175,000 € (US $ 240,000).

It is most likely that whatever jobs are created by renewable energy promotion would vanish as soon as government support is terminated, leaving only Germany’s export sector to benefit from the possible continuation of renewables support in other countries such as the US.

The truth is, the costs of green energy often outweigh its benefits. Despite what Congressman Waxman and Markey might say.

(via Power Line)

. . . the New York Times gets it right, such as Nick Kristof's October 15th column:

Good schools constitute a far more potent weapon against poverty than welfare, food stamps or housing subsidies. Yet, cowed by teachers’ unions, Democrats have too often resisted reform and stood by as generations of disadvantaged children have been cemented into an underclass by third-rate schools.

President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are trying to change that -- and one test for the Democrats will be whether they embrace administration reforms that teachers’ unions are already sniping at.

It’s difficult to improve failing schools when you can’t create alternatives such as charter schools and can’t remove inept or abusive teachers. In New York City, for example, unions ordinarily prevent teachers from being dismissed for incompetence -- so the schools must pay failed teachers their full salaries to sit year after year doing nothing in centers called "rubber rooms."

A devastating article in The New Yorker by Steven Brill examined how New York City tried to dismiss a fifth-grade teacher for failing to correct student work, follow the curriculum, manage the class or even fill out report cards. The teacher claimed that she was being punished for union activity, but an independent observer approved by the union confirmed the allegations and declared the teacher incompetent. The school system’s lawyer put it best: "These children were abused in stealth."

The effort to remove the teacher is expected to cost about $400,000, and the outcome is uncertain. In New York City, with its 80,000 teachers, arbiters have removed only two for incompetence alone in the last couple of years.

Agreed at least thrice.

Sometime about 960 BC, King Solomon built the so-called "first" temple in Jerusalem. Detailing the construction of a brass-cast vessel, 1st Kings 7:23 (King James) reads:

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

An essentially identical description is in 2nd Chronicles 4:2. Each suggests the Old Testament set the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter -- π or pi -- equal to 3.

Now, at least in Euclidean space, everyone knows that pi = 355/113 = 3.1415929. (Irrational joke; kidding). So, a ten cubit diameter sphere would be more than 30 cubits round. Do these Old Testament passages prove god not infallible and the Bible not literally true?

Some say yes. Yet three verses down (Kings; Chronicles), the vessel is described as having "the thickness of . . . an handbreadth, and the brim of it like the work of the brim of a cup." As a result, believers argue that the "handsbreadth" (the thickness of a human palm) or the flare of the cup-shape top account for the missing circumference. Others use gematria numerology interpretation of scripture to decode the text as adding 111/106 cubits to the circumference, which would be considerably closer to Solomon's actual 31.4159265... cubit sphere. And closer than what would have required under Indiana's famous, failed, late 19th century effort to declare pi equal to (among other things) the ratio 4:5/4 = 3.2.

Who is right and what does it mean? I dunno (outside of rejecting any inevitable conflict between religion and science). Just thought it research- and essay-worthy.

(via reader John B., The Straight Dope, Hatless in Hattiesburg)

At the annual National Press Club charity auction, I bought the signed original of this cartoon. Chatted with the cartoonist too--who is quite a baseball and hockey fan.

As revealed in the October 14th New York Times:

Plug-in hybrid and electric cars, it turns out, not only reduce air pollution, they cut noise pollution as well with their whisper-quiet motors. But that has created a different problem. They aren’t noisy enough.

So safety experts, worried that hybrids pose a threat if pedestrians, children and others can’t hear them approaching, want automakers to supply some digitally enhanced vroom. Indeed, just as cellphones have ring tones, "car tones" may not be far behind -- an option for owners of electric vehicles to choose the sound their cars emit.

Didn't I read this in Kornbluth's The Marching Morons?

(via Instapundit)

Every space mission ever:


source: Dump.com [surf there for hi-res version]

(via reader Michael Y.)

Barack Obama on August 28, 2008, accepting the Democrat Party Presidential nomination:

If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament and judgment to serve as the next commander-in-chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have.

For -- for while -- while Senator McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats that we face.

When John McCain said we could just muddle through in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11.

President Obama's March 27, 2009, briefing on Afghanistan and Pakistan:

I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That's the goal that must be achieved. That is a cause that could not be more just. . .

There is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated.

Reuters report October 19, 2009:

[Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates did not say when he expected U.S. President Barack Obama to decide on whether to increase troops, a decision complicated by rising casualties and fading public support for the stalled, eight-year-old war.

(via Paul Mirengoff in the Washington Examiner, Patterico, Best of the Web)

Last November, voters in the small North Carolina town of Kinston "approved a charter amendment . . . to allow non-partisan municipal elections in the city, a move that could eliminate the use of party labels among candidates in future city elections." Non-partisan voting isn't a new idea--it's common in local and judicial elections, such as in King County in Washington state. Indeed, Kinston is one of only six out of more than 550 towns or cities in North Carolina to have partisan municipal elections.

Section 5(a) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. § 1973c(a)) requires "certain (mostly Southern) states to get "pre-clearance" of their voting-rules changes from the Justice Department." Such pre-clearance "is granted only if the change neither 'has the purpose nor will have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.'" Northwest Austin Municp. Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, 08-322 (June 22, 2009). Although a majority of both residents and registered voters in Kinston are black, North Carolina is a "Section 5" state, meaning that "before nonpartisan elections could be implemented, the city had to get approval from the Justice Department."

On August 17th, the Obama Justice Department denied the request:

Black voters have had limited success in electing candidates of choice during recent municipal elections. The success that they have achieved has resulted from cohesive support for candidates during the Democratic primary (where black voters represent a larger percentage of the electorate), combined with crossover voting by whites in the general election. It is the partisan makeup of the general electorate that results in enough white cross-over to allow the black community to elect a candidate of choice.

This small, but critical, amount of white crossover votes results from the party affiliation of black-preferred candidates, most if not all of whom have been black. Numerous elected municipal and county officials confirm the results of our statistical analyses that a majority of white Democrats support white Republicans over black Democrats in Kinston city elections. At the same time, they also acknowledged that a small group of white Democrats maintain strong party allegiance and will continue to vote along party lines, regardless of the race of the candidate. Many of these white crossover voters are simply using straight-ticket voting. As a result, while the racial identity of the candidate greatly diminishes the supportive effect of the partisan cue, it does not totally eliminate it.

It follows, therefore, that the elimination of party affiliation on the ballot will likely reduce the ability of blacks to elect candidates of choice. Black candidates will likely lose a significant amount of crossover votes due to the high degree of racial polarization present in city elections. Without party loyalty available to counter-balance the consistent trend of racial bloc voting, blacks will face greater difficulty winning general elections. . .

Removing the partisan cue in municipal elections will, in all likelihood, eliminate the single factor that allows black candidates to be elected to office. In Kinston elections, voters base their choice more on the race of a candidate rather than his or her political affiliation, and without either the appeal to party loyalty or the ability to vote a straight ticket, the limited remaining support from white voters for a black Democratic candidate will diminish even more. And given that the city's electorate is overwhelmingly Democratic, while the motivating factor for this change may be partisan, the effect will be strictly racial.

This is multiply outrageous:

1. Assumption electorate votes by race: Are they saying whites must be fooled into voting for black candidates by calling them Democrats? Or that blacks can't be trusted to uphold their self interest absent a party affiliation? Either assumption is insulting. Dubious too: although whites comprise nearly 74 percent of North Carolina's population, Barack Obama won the state last year.



2. Inconsistent assumption electorate votes by party: Right after presuming voting by color, the DoJ elevates "the partisan cue" to "the single factor." Which is it? It can't be both.



3. Factually challenged: As National Review's Hans von Spakovsky observed:

   [O]n the town’s five-member city council (elected at large), two of the councilmen are black and all five are Democrats. Although the current mayor is white, the longtime prior mayor was black.
   
   Thus, there no evidence whatsoever that blacks face any barriers to registration and voting. And in an election in which blacks comprised the majority of registered voters and turned out in droves to support Barack Obama’s candidacy, the referendum passed with a [nearly] two-to-one margin (although you would never know that from reading the Justice Department’s objection).

4. Race equals result: Even were it true that blacks weren't electable in Kinston, the letter complains of limits on black voters' "candidates of choice." In other words, as Ben Conery says in the Washington Times, the DoJ presupposes that the sole legitimate choice for blacks are other blacks. This is burning the village in order to save it: in order to prevent discrimination, the Administration must intervene to guarantee discrimination.



5. Irrelevance to discrimination: The Voting Rights Act was designed to combat electoral systems that had either a discriminatory purpose or discriminatory effect on the right to vote. Non-partisan elections only flunk that test, as James Taranto says, by "equating civil rights with partisanship," which is outside the scope of the law. Or was DoJ swayed by the fact that Kinston's county, Lenoir, went for McCain by a whopping 23 votes. Has voting Republican become prima facie evidence of discrimination?

Conclusion: Never mind those promises to de-politicize the Justice Department -- this Administration dropped the "New Black Panther" investigation and challenged Georgia's verification of voter citizenship. And about Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act -- Clarence Thomas is right that it's unconstitutional. So much for equal protection -- race is destiny. That's racist -- though I'll probably be called racist for saying so.

We're witnessing the death of popular sovereignty. Progressives prefer rule by an un-elected bureaucratic elite in Washington. Or, for the current Administration, simply ensuring Democrats always win.

Today is the 204th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar, possibly the most decisive naval engagement in history. The French and Spanish lost 22 ships; the British none, and Britain gained a century of maritime supremacy, though at the cost of the life of Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, the widely-esteemed British commander. English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was walking the streets of Naples when the news arrived there:

and I can never forget the sorrow and consternation that lay on every countenance . . . Numbers stopped me and shook hands with me, because they had seen the tears on my cheek, and conjectured that I was an Englishman; and several, as they held my hand, burst, themselves, into tears.

Roger Knight, The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson at 528 (2005).

There's nothing new about limited-government protesters, conservatives and Republicans in general being compared to Nazis. Lately, mere disagreement with Obama prompts libelous labels. (Such perceptions are encouraged by the MSM.) Noam Chomsky -- Bin Laden's favorite lion of the ultra-left -- is the latest example, though too tiresome to quote.

Still, read Ed Morrissey's thoughtful response:

But . . . "anger" and "opposition" do not equal "Naziism" or "fascism". Context is rather important in that analysis. The Nazis did not come to power by tapping into a deeply-seated notion of limited government, after all. They satisfied that urge for a charismatic leader who would reorder society through a fuehrerprinzip that would get the trains to run on time, succeeding because of that disregard for a Weimar constitution more or less imposed on them by their enemies and the political and economic chaos it created. Regardless of what one thinks of the very, very different styles of Limbaugh and Savage, neither one pump for greater government control of our lives; in fact, the very reason both get exercised is to fight that creeping intrusion.

The only way anyone can make this argument is either by breathtaking intellectual dishonesty or sheer ignorance of 20th-century history and current events.

Godwin's law is time-tested and undermines free debate. And it's especially unfortunate when the accusers don't know their facts.

In the October 13th USA Today:

Democratic members of the House of Representatives now represent most of the nation's wealthiest people, a sharp turnaround from the long-standing dominance that Republicans have held over affluent districts.

A USA TODAY analysis of new Census data found that Democrats represent a far different constituency today than they did in 2005, when they were the minority in the House, or in 1990, when they were the majority.

The Democratic-controlled House is now an unusual combination of the richest and poorest districts, the best and least educated, and the best and the worst insured. The analysis found that Democrats have attracted educated, affluent whites who had tended previously to vote Republican.

Democrats now represent 57% of the 4.8 million households that had incomes of $200,000 or more in 2008. In 2005, Republicans represented 55% of those affluent households.

Agreed--though I noted five years ago that "the majority of political contributions from Americans with annual incomes over $100k go to Democrats, while most Americans making less than six figures contribute to Republicans" (original source link, alas, expired). But somehow Republicans still are assumed to represent the rich.

Because he tamed the weather in only nine months, as Reuters reports:

Thanks to El Nino, the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season has been the quietest in more than a decade, offering a reprieve for residents in the danger zone and a chance for insurance firms to refill depleted coffers.

With the peak of the season -- late August to mid-October -- now behind, the Atlantic-Caribbean basin has seen just two hurricanes and a total of eight tropical storms.

El Nino, the Pacific warm-water phenomenon that can produce destructive weather in other parts of the world, played a big role in suppressing Atlantic cyclones this year, experts said.

If the full season, which runs from June through November, ended today, it would be the lowest number of storms since 1997. The last time an Atlantic season produced only two hurricanes was 1982.

I'll gladly credit the President with conquering wind, if the Administration only would concede the paucity of evidence for man-made global warming.

(via Planet Gore)

. . . is the headline I'd love to top this October 15th Reuters story:

Most members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee initially argued against awarding the 2009 Peace Prize to President Barack Obama before agreeing to the choice, Norway's top-selling daily Verdens Gang (VG) said on Thursday.

The paper said three of five members had objections during the early phases of the process, but were persuaded in favor of Obama mainly by the chairman of the committee, former [far-lefty] Prime Minister Thorbjoern Jagland.

(via Berman Post)

The same week Finland made broadband Internet access a legal right, neighboring Sweden goes renewable at the expense of animal rights:

Stockholm's bunnies burned to keep Swedes warm

The bodies of thousands of rabbits culled every year from the parks in Stockholm’s Kungsholmen neighbourhood are being used to fuel a heating plant in central Sweden.

The decision to use Stockholm’s rabbit cadavers as bioenergy to warm Swedes living in Värmland doesn't sit well with Stockholm-based animal rights activists.

"Those who support the culling of rabbits surely think it’s good to use the bodies for a good cause. But it feels like they’re trying to turn the animals into an industry rather than look at the main problem," Anna Johannesson of Vilda kaniners värn (‘Society for the Protection of Wild Rabbits’) told the local Vårt Kungsholmen newspaper.

Every year, the city of Stockholm kills off thousands of rabbits in an effort to protect trees and shrubbery in the city’s extensive network of parks and green space.

According to Tommy Tuvunger with the Stockholm Traffic Office, the agency responsible for controlling the city’s rodent and wild animal population, part of the problem rests with delinquent pet owners who decide to release their rabbits into the city’s parks.

"Many of the released rabbits are tame," he told the newspaper.

Animal control authorities employ a special rifle to shoot the excess rabbits, with most of the culling taking place at dawn when the animals peek out from their holes.

The city usually steps up its rabbit hunting efforts in the autumn as leaves begin to fall from bushes and trees, making it easier to see the rabbits.

Tuvunger explained that it doesn’t take many newly released rabbits to do what rabbits are known for doing, much to the detriment of Stockholm’s efforts to control the size of its rabbit population.

"People who think that the bunnies are cute and cuddly suddenly don’t think they’re as fun anymore and put the animals outside. They think: ‘there they can play with the other rabbits’," he said.

Last year marked a new record for Stockholm’s rabbit cull, with nearly 6,000 rabbits, mostly from Kungsholmen, being removed from Stockholm’s parks.

But rather than simply disposing of the dead rabbits, the city instead froze them for eventual transport to a special heating plant in Karlskoga in central Sweden, where the bunny bodies are then burned as a form of bioenergy.

I hope this fight goes the full 15 rounds.

(via Planet Gore)

The tide must be turning when Harpers magazine's publisher pens this in that normally far-left publication:

Could This "Smart" President Be Really, Really Stupid?

Are you tired of hearing how "smart" Barack Obama is? I reached my limit over the summer, when The New York Times Magazine quoted Valerie Jarrett, the president’s liaison to Chicago City Hall, declaring, "I mean, he’s really by far smarter than anybody I know."

Well, as any Chicago schoolboy knows, there are many different kinds of smart. And right now our commander-in-chief is not looking particularly brilliant--at least on the level of substantive politics.

See also Power Line's Scott Johnson and Charles Krauthammer in Friday's Washington Post: "It [Obama's foreign policy] is amateurishness, wrapped in naivete, inside credulity."

(via The Corner)

The Obama Administration's stimulus package -- officially, Public Law 111-5, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed February 17, 2009 -- cost $787 billion. Under Section 1512 of the law, companies that directly receive stimulus money, via any "grant, loan, or contract," must report the funding and the number of jobs created. As recently as September, the White House predicted the package as a whole would create or save one million jobs.

The first data set was released last week. What do the numbers show? I'm not sure.

According to the official Recovery.gov website, $16 billion worth of contracts have been awarded, of which $ 2.2 billion already was received. And, as of early October, the same website says 30,383 jobs were created or saved as a result of directly awarded money (additional jobs could have been added as a result of other stimulus spending). The White House believes that each new job reported creates one further indirect job.

That means that each job cost $ 267,000 per awarded funding or about $ 36,000 for funding already received. Or, without the assumed job multiplier, twice those figures (about $ 533,000/$ 72,000).

I have no idea which number is right. Nor, I think, does anyone else. Bueller?

As I've discussed, protected legal rights make sense only as "negative rights," i.e., limitations on government action. This is the approach adopted in America's Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to the Constitution. The weakness of the opposite scheme, positive rights, is that it demands a concomitant duty on the part of someone to fulfill that aspiration.

Like the former Soviet Union, Europe favors the latter system. The latest example comes from Finland:

Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Finland is the world's first country to create laws guaranteeing broadband access.

The government had already decided to make a 100 Mb broadband connection a legal right by the end of 2015. On Wednesday, the Ministry announced the new goal as an intermediary step.

By obliging a broadband connection, Finland upped the ante on countries already insisting on a legal right to (lower speed) Internet access, in particular France, Estonia, and Greece (automatic translation here). To the applause of progressives, the United Nations lately has been trying to add Internet access to the list of "human rights".

Just like Dems want to classify healthcare, sometimes proffering a bogus Aristotle quote. But, neither guaranteeed healthcare nor enormous amounts of electrons at your door are established under the Constitution. Period. So, before declaring a new "right," amend the Constitution--if you have the votes.

Apart from that, and instead of a long rant, here's two relevant quotes:

Radio Vice Online:

It is not clear who will pay for the infrastructure, or if users will just get access everywhere for "free." There is no indication the Fins will mandate computer manufactures and cell phone makers distribute free computers and iPhones, but without a device to actually access the Internet, there is no Internet.

Politablog's David Brooks:

The internet is important, but it is not logical to rationalize the addition of internet access to the list of human rights. . . If internet access eventually ends up on this list of human rights it will have the potential to make this list as meaningless as the Noble Prize is currently.

FYI, the second bumper sticker on my car reads: "I, for one, welcome our new Marxist overlords" (Simpsons reference).

(via CNET News, Best of the Web)

Methane (CH₄) is a greenhouse gas which, because of its greater potential to trap heat, worries enviros even more than CO₂. So are methane concentrations rapidly rising (prompting calls for emission reductions and offsets) or substantially stable?

World Climate Report recently answered:

source: The Ups and Downs of Methane

Figure 1. Atmospheric methane concentrations, 1985-2008, with the IPCC methane projections overlaid (adapted from: Dlugokencky et al., [Observational constraints on recent increases in the atmospheric CH₄ burden. Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L18803, doi:10.1029/2009GL039780] 2009)


source: The Ups and Downs of Methane

Figure 2 shows the year-over-year change in the methane concentration of the atmosphere, and indicates not only that the growth rate of methane has been declining, but also that on several occasions during the past decade or so, it has dropped to very near zero (or even below) indicating that no increase in the atmospheric methane concentration (or a even a slight decline) occurred from one year to the next.

BTW, U.S. government data from Alaska is similar.

World Climate Report concludes:

This behavior is quite perplexing. And while we are not sure what processes are behind it, we do know one thing for certain--the slow growth of methane concentrations is an extremely cold bucket of water dumped on the overheated claims that global warming is leading to a thawing of the Arctic permafrost and the release of untold mega-quantities of methane (which, of course, will lead to more warming, more thawing, more methane, etc., and, of course, to runaway catastrophe).

(via Watts Up With That?)

We now know White House staff aren't pacifists--they've declared war on FOX News:

Dan Pfeiffer, the White House's deputy communications director, called FOX News an "ideological news outlet[]."

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the same, calling the network "an ideological outlet."

White House blogger Jesse Lee said the network "lies."

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called it "opinion journalism masquerading as news," and promised the Administration would "be more aggressive."

Last Sunday, Dunn also claimed "FOX News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. . . [C]ertainly the way we view it is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party."

Uh, doesn't anyone remember lefties condemning Nixon's (crazed) belief that "The press is the enemy"? Or the wide-spread media suck-up of Obama and Democrats as a whole?

In truth, the White House is mad that FOX News is hugely popular and doesn't want to play ball with the Administration. Liberals mostly tout press freedoms when the media favors progressives. I'd call it a three-way tie for the biggest cry-babies between the mainstream media, the Administration and internet progressives.

(via NewsBusters, Think Progress)

Events moved too swiftly to reward Neville Chamberlain with a Nobel Peace Prize. But he's alive and well and working for the State Department:

For the past five years, researchers in a modest office overlooking the New Haven green have carefully documented cases of assassination and torture of democracy activists in Iran. With more than $3 million in grants from the US State Department, they have pored over thousands of documents and Persian-language press reports and interviewed scores of witnesses and survivors to build dossiers on those they say are Iran’s most infamous human-rights abusers.

But just as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was ramping up to investigate abuses of protesters after this summer’s disputed presidential election, the group received word that -- for the first time since it was formed -- its federal funding request had been denied.

As Ed Morrissey says:

This is truly a breathtaking step. Obama has signaled that he doesn’t care at all about human-rights abuses, and that he in fact cares more about making the ruling mullahs happy than in how they treat the subjects of their oppression. After all, the mere documentation of abuses doesn’t constrain Obama’s policymaking choices; it merely informs them. He can choose any direction he wants, but one would expect an American President to make those choices on the basis of intelligence and research.

(via Doug Ross, BizzyBlog)