Author: Dave

I was and remain a big fan of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom. Oh, Fareed, why hast thou forsaken facts? He seemed to be implying that the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan were not the crucial path to America’s long-term security. He explained that challenges at home — economic growth, technological innovation, education reform…

Not that anyone knows, I just thought I should ask. UPDATE: I mean, wow.

…The theory is flawed. After one month – admittedly not an “infinite” amount of time – the monkeys had partially destroyed the machine, used it as a lavatory, and mostly typed the letter “s”. NOTE: On a related subject, my own blogging may be light due to similar issues.

Lots of links over at Glenn’s. My two cents as a professional programmer: it’s pretty clear from the code comments that the CRU dataset is both junky and deliberately manipulated to produce a warming trend. This is devastating to the credibility of the entire field, because CRU is the most widely cited dataset in climate…

From Frank J: Work extra hard knowing your money is going towards getting poor people prison sentences for not buying health insurance. Heh. More here.

Iowahawk Geographic ventures into the strange and wonderful ecosystem of the climate researcher: Our very planet depends on them. Yet they remain nature’s most elusive scientific species, inhabiting some of the world’s most delicate and daunting academic environments. But thanks to new breakthroughs in high speed cameras and email files, metascientists are finally beginning to…

Great news for civil liberties: The same day they rejected a gay marriage ballot measure, residents of Maine voted overwhelmingly to allow the sale of medical marijuana over the counter at state-licensed dispensaries. … The shift is widely described as generational. A Gallup poll in October found 44 percent of Americans favor full legalization of…

60-39. This appears to be a good sign. They may not be able to pass anything. The problems with this bill are legion. Let’s cover a few: 1) This will explode the deficit by trillions of dollars. The Medicare cuts are a three-card monte political ploy; they will never be upheld by future Congresses. The…

No, really. If you haven’t heard, someone has posted a whole bunch of correspondence between AGW “scientists.” The mask has slipped, fallen, and shattered: This is part of a letter send from Michael E. Mann to Phil Jones: I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should…

Is this what it sounds like when magical gov’t healthcare ponies die? Quinnipiac 36-51. PPP 42-50. The claims that America spends more for worse health care are crumbling under closer examination; people aren’t being fooled anymore by misleading comparisons of things that don’t measure health care outcomes. The poll numbers are dropping like a rock…

Apropos, I think: We have to foster reform in the Arab/Muslim world because it’s the only real way in the long run to make them stop trying to kill us. — Steven Den Beste, July 2003 And this seems almost prophetic: But does America have the stamina to finish the job? Yes. Just barely, and…

It’s now taken longer for Barack Obama to evaluate General McChrystal’s plan than it took George W. Bush to overthrow the Taliban after the September 11 attacks. From The Decider to The Ditherer: President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead…

Willis Eschenbach nails it: Here’s the point: prior to this study, the IPCC was 99% certain that the radiative forcing from methane was between about 0.4 and 0.6. But this new study is now 99% certain that it is between 0.7 and 1.3 … which means that the uncertainty ranges of the earlier studies, or…

A crawler team wins $900,000. As I recall, braided carbon nanutube cables may be strong enough to make the idea work. A space elevator is a game-changer because it makes putting things in orbit an order of magnitude cheaper. That would mean we could think seriously about manned exploration of the Solar System or a…

Yes, this attack was a case of Muslim extremism: A former classmate has said Hasan was a “vociferous opponent of the war” and “viewed the war against terror” as a “war against Islam.” Dr. Val Finnell, who attended a master’s in public health program in 2007-2008 at Uniformed Services University with Hasan, said he told…

So, the true 10-year cost of Obamacare is… $1.8 trillion. A trillion in new taxes, $800B in new deficit spending (oh, excuse me, I mean “imaginary Medicare cuts that will never happen”). And the next ten years are going to be even worse. It’s like 1938 all over again…

The combination of Gaia worship, agitprop and rent-seeking pays very well indeed. So, given that Gore is reaping huge rewards, doesn’t this call into question just a teensy bit the objectivity of his business partner James Hansen, the man NASA has administering the numbers telling us how much the climate is allegedly warming (when he’s…

Today we learn JFK was advised by morons. Well, at least one. America’s unwise, unwarranted, and sadly unwinnable war in Afghanistan–hastily initiated and then abandoned for Iraq by President Barack Obama’s ideologically blinded predecessor and dumped into Obama’s lap in the worst possible way–is beginning increasingly to smell like the 1964-68 war in South Vietnam…

Bastiat on taxes: Have you ever chanced to hear it said “There is no better investment than taxes. Only see what a number of families it maintains, and consider how it reacts on industry; it is an inexhaustible stream, it is life itself.” In order-to combat this doctrine, I must refer to my preceding refutation.…

Advocates of socializing health care have asked: how can America’s relatively free market spend the most money on health care, yet have among the worst outcomes? The answer is, we don’t. The oft-cited WHO rankings don’t really measure quality of health care, preferring to judge things like “fairness of financial contribution” and measures like life…