Month: October 2009

In Secular Decline I discussed how we can get out of our current financial troubles. I talked about Kondratieff Waves and what drives economic cycles. Innovation. Electronic Component News makes a similar point. Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can’t, because there isn’t one.…

Yikes… That’s the biggest fall in employment ever. The good news is, once the trend bottoms out history suggests employment should bounce back strongly. The bad news is no one really knows when it will bottom out. And with the huge expansion of FHA, continued loss of employment could mean another massive financial crisis looming…

While I’ve read reports like these before, it’s a bit of a shock to see them finding their way into the BBC. But find its way this one did, with a headline sexy enough to make any sceptic drool: What happened to global warming? This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so…

Speaking of considerations related to crime and punishment, I sometimes wonder whether (in some minds, at least) abortion is becoming a sort of moral reductionist trump card that can be used to trivialize concerns about nearly anything else. It’s a version of the slippery slope argument, and I first heard it a few years ago…

After playing around with the idea a bit, I thought this was funny enough for the blog: Coco is hoping I don’t print it out and paste it on the gate.

Crime and punishment seems to be under a great deal of discussion lately, and it’s one of those issues that always seems to be lurking in the background, even when the issue is not directly about crime and punishment. Roman Polanski, for example is not an ordinary sex scandal, but is a debate about crime…

I was going to comment on Barack Obama winning the now-thoroughly discredited Nobel Peace Prize, but I see M. Simon has beaten me to it, and said this: Expect a war. A big war. Soon. Yes, as I said just last week, “If you want war, prepare for peace.” The Brits are already having fun…

Yep. The results of the experiments are in and it is now official. Cosmic Rays affect clouds. ScienceDaily (Oct. 6, 2009) — Billions of tonnes of water droplets vanish from the atmosphere in events that reveal in detail how the Sun and the stars control our everyday clouds. Researchers of the National Space Institute in…

Novel headline eh? About what you would expect if you believed in law enforcement. Well as usual I mean what I say but in a different sense. Pot cartels are going broke. ARCATA, Calif. — Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug…

President ∅ has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. I’m not going to name all the losers who have won that award. But I will name a few. Al Gore – for Global Warming. The Globe is cooling. Jimmy Carter for bringing Peace to the Israelis and Palistinians. The war never stopped. Yasser Arafat for…

Yes we have gas. Lots of gas. Lots of natural gas. Last October, just as the economy was tilting into crisis, a small oil and gas company in Houston quietly announced the discovery of a mammoth natural gas field in South Texas that at any other time might have garnered bigger headlines. Petrohawk Energy’s find,…

A dishwasher fill valve consists of a simple plastic body, to which are attached a solenoid and an inlet coupling, and a few plastic interior parts. Mine conked out recently, and here is what it looks like, in its disassembled state: Yes, I did clean it up and reassemble it, but the solenoid remained dead.…

Donate to help with breast cancer research. The Boobiethon page is work safe. The rest of them? You are on your own. My mother is a 40+ year breast cancer survivor and she approves of this solicitation. H/T Instapundit Cross Posted at Power and Control

I love Facebook. It’s the perfect medium for tracking down long-lost friends, getting in touch, and then reminiscing. Which is great. (Even though I wouldn’t say anything there that I wouldn’t say here in my blog) But as they luxuriate in the warmth and camaraderie of a technology that seems calculated to invite dredging up…

In what I think is a very ominous development, this administration is moving away from a longstanding tradition of defending the principle of free speech, and is instead supporting a UN resolution with “a number of disturbing elements.” It emphasizes that “the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties…

If we want to save the planet we will need to put it in a bank. If we want to invest the planet we will have to get an army of space aliens to surround it. Another possibility is setting up a series of artificial banks often referred to as dikes. If we can get…

My apologies for titling this post with a 1960s slogan, but the stuff I have been reading about makes me so angry that I thought a little vintage rhetoric was justified. Anyway, Glenn Reynolds is not kidding when he speaks of “THE CRIMINALIZATION OF EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING”: With the proliferation of criminal law, everyone is…

Speaking of a lack of virginity, the last thing I am interested in is David Letterman’s sex life. (No really. Do I have to explain why?) Just thought I’d point that out in case I’m accused of deliberately avoiding it. This is not to say that I’m in any way supportive of sexual harassment; even…

What do vinyl records, slow food, mechanical watches, cloth diapers (and the more primitivistic diaperless movement), as well as what I think is the latest example (linked by Glenn Reynolds yesterday) — running barefoot — have in common? The old way was better? Bring back lost innocence? Things that evoke a return to simpler, more…

One reason is that signs like this amuse me. Via Robert Bidinotto, who blogs here. UPDATE: Here are more signs that also amused me: But I might as well be honest and point out that while the above might look like conventional Tea Partiers, they are actually angry gay rights protestors in Beverly Hills, California.…