Category Archives: Business

Business, Space

Saw The Rollout

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Man, is it cold up here. I can barely type, and even the laptop is running slow.

I was going to live blog the press conference, but my computer wouldn’t even boot until I found some power for it. We watched the plane(s) roll out, emerging from the darkness into floodlights, with searchlights dancing on dissipating (perhaps only temporarily) clouds above the cold desert sky. The wind was blowing at gale force, and cutting right through, with the temps probably in the lower thirties.

More later, after I warm my fingers up. But it may be much later…

[Update a few minutes later, at 7:40 PM]

The party was supposed to go until 9, but they’re evacuating the tent before the wind blows it down.

[Late evening update]

For those of you on the edge of your seats wondering if the tent collapsed on me, I got out before the wind blew it down, and we retired to the Mariah Hotel bar (but tonight, they could have called the wind Mariah, as the old song goes). I just got in from the drive back down to LA. More on the morrow.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

More Evidence That These Are Religious Fanatics

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After doing yeoman’s duty in going through the CRU emails, Steve Hayward notes:

How is it possible for a group of smart people to write over 1,000 e-mails over the course of a decade without a single shred of wit or humor in any of them?

As the title says…

And as Mark Steyn notes at the link, the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin has been excommunicated.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

A View From Inside The Sausage Factory

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…from someone who escaped:

In Washington, he used his BlackBerry to determine the bailout sum presented to Congress. His arithmetic: “We have $11 trillion residential mortgages, $3 trillion commercial mortgages. Total $14 trillion. Five percent of that is $700 billion. A nice round number.”

Looking back, he says, he is more confident about the two-by-sixes.

“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’ We didn’t know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.”

I’m glad he got out, and wish him well in his new life in California. But it doesn’t instill confidence in the government, nor should it.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

More Climaquiddick

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California style:

Crafty use of statistics, lack-of-transparency, wild projections about future calamity requiring government intervention now…Hmmmm.

If all of this is sounding familiar there’s a reason. Stefan Rahmstorf is one of the CRU e-mail clatch and a contributor to Real Climate. For instance, here is an e-mail in which he is desperately seeking help writing a reply to a critic.

Based on this alarmist study, Schwarzenegger and the State of California have put together…a…video which includes the Rahmstorf’s prediction of a 4 foot sea level rise by 2100 and images of San Francisco inundated by rising seas.

By the way, the California Energy Commission which is pushing this is the same group that outlawed future sales of my TV a few weeks ago. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it since TVs don’t work well underwater anyway.

I’ll be OK. We’re a couple dozen feet above at least, with dunes between us and the beach a mile and a half away.