A lesson on the nature of souls.
How Obama Won Re-Election
By breaking the law?
The Obama campaign doesn’t seem to have been deterred by the possibility that it was violating federal law. I can think of at least four reasons why that might be. Three of them are scandals.
Hey, it’s not like President Asterisk (or his sycophants) has ever given a damn about the law.
Nostalgia
Obama’s Leadership
I don’t know why that’s even a question. Of course he can’t lead. If he could, he would have by now.
The Social Cost Of Carbon
…and the much higher cost of carbon denial:
…the relationship between GDP and carbon is not merely linear, but quadratic, with total economic output rising as roughly the square of carbon use. For example, since 1975, carbon use has doubled, causing a quadrupling of global GDP. Furthermore, if we take the ratio of current global GDP ($60 trillion) to carbon use (9 billion tons) and divide it out, we find that, at present, each ton of carbon used produces about $6,700 of global GDP.
So each ton of carbon denied to the world economy destroys about $6,700 worth of wealth. That is the difference between life and death for a Third World family. Seven tons denied corresponds to a loss of $47,000, or a good American job. Since 2007, the combination of high oil prices and a depressed economy has reduced the United States’ use of carbon in the form of oil by about 130 million tons per year. At a rate of $6,700 per ton, this corresponds to a GDP loss of $870 billion, equivalent to losing 8.7 million jobs, at $100,000 per year each. Were we to implement the program of the Kyoto treaty, and constrict global carbon use to 1990 levels, we would cut global GDP by $30 trillion per year, destroying an amount of wealth equal to the livelihood of half of the world’s population.
These people understand neither science, or economics.
Solving The Last-Mile Problem
Fiber speeds on copper phone lines?
Obama’s Five Disconnects
…as pointed out by Mickey Kaus:
Does Obama recognize that his initiatives have a weak connection, and even perverse connection, with actually achieving his goal? I hope his biographer, Jonathan Alter, will tell me. But either way, there’s a vacuum between his speechmaking and governing. Is that unusual? After all, Democrats have campaigned for years by arguing that Republican policies benefit the rich–think of all the distributional tables Democrats distributed to fight Reagan’s budgets-without ever saying how much inequality, exactly, they’d be willing to tolerate.
But Obama isn’t vague or incoherent. He’s quite precise about where he wants to go–namely back to something like what we had three decades ago. If his means don’t come close to matching his ends, if they even subvert them, that seems a more troubling, almost pathological mismatch, in which liberalism becomes a sort of cargo cult whose mechanisms have zero hope of achieving the desired results.
Yes, it is a cargo cult, driven by magical thinking.
The “Phony” IRS Scandal
In which Rachel Maddow calls Barack Obama a liar. And as it continues to “fizzle out,” we learn that the IRS also targeted existing conservative organizations.
The XCOR/ULA Engine Development
An interesting story at Space News about the progress on a piston-pumped cryogenic RL-10 replacement.
The Indianapolis Anniversary
Some thoughts. As a commenter points out, many of the men died of many awful things — drowning, dehydration, loss of blood — the sharks were just one way for a relative few of them, but somehow I guess it’s human nature to attach some special horror to being eaten by wild animals. Anyway, as they said, they delivered the bomb, and we should be in awe at the sacrifice that generation made for us. It’s a shame that many today seem to want to squander the freedom that was won then.