Turning Sunlight Into Oil

There was an interesting article in POPSCI last month about a new technology to make fuel/oil from carbon dioxide and sunlight — effectively making fuel out of thin air.

• Making fuel/oil
• Using sunlight
• Consuming CO₂
      This news is GREENER than GREEN.

This is HUGE, even as it stands. If it pans out at a larger scale, then it's HISTORIC.

UPDATE: A Technology Review article confirms the demonstration of a prototype device, the first step out of the laboratory and toward full-scale operation.

Warning Flags, Ignored

Let's see — Here are a few things we know (from the news reports) about the piece of sub-human garbage who tried to kill a large number of humans on Christmas:
    • He bought a one-way ticket
    • He paid cash
    • He apparently bought it pretty close to the last minute
    • He checked in with no checked baggage

All these are things we have been told ad infinitum would always produced detailed secondary screening. But it's pretty clear no secondary screening — detailed or otherwise — ever took place. If it had, that screening would probably have turned up the fact that
    • He had been reported as a dangerous extremist to US and foreign authorities by his father,
    • He had been denied a re-entry visa (to return to school) by the British,
    • He was associated with al Qaeda in Yemen, which has claimed the blame for this attack, and
    • He was on a warning list of dangerous, terror-connected individuals, even though
    • He hadn't (yet) been promoted to the no-fly list

These are just a few warning flags. I've no doubt there were more.

It looks to me like the bureaucrats of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) really don't know what they're doing. As a result, they are mainly just hassling ordinary passengers without doing what's needed to make us safer.

One more thing: After Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber", tried to blow up a plane over the Atlantic 8 years ago, we all had to start taking off our shoes for screening. Since this guy had his PETN explosive in his underwear, will we have to start taking ours off for TSA?

UPDATE: Another missed warning flag — on his way to a frigid city, he had no coat.

Cash for Corruptocrats

This phase of the battle over the Democrat “health care” bill is over, and its finish was spectacular — and I mean that in the worst possible way. Harry Reid and his cronies demonstrated conclusively that they have no scruples whatever. Not only did Harry and his friends completely shut out the Republicans from having any input on the bill at all, but they also shut out most Democrats and even most of the Democrats’ leadership.

Even so, they only way Harry Reid could “win” was to buy off — bribe — a number of his colleagues. Actually it’s worse than ordinary, garden variety bribery. Harry Reid didn't bribe the other senators with his own money — he bribed them and purchased their votes with our money. Michelle Malkin calls Harry Reid’s vote buying program Cash for Corruptocrats.

I guess I wouldn’t mind so much if, like in the other Cash for Clunkers program, this meant they would first be disabled and then taken out to be dismantled.

Merry Christmas

Wishing you all a blessed Christmas

Image thanks to ZIP

Democrats' "Health Care" Bill

The Democrats in Congress say they want to reduce medical care costs, "bend the cost curve down", and cover those who don't have health insurance. They claim they will can do this in a way that will not increase the deficit, and will allow (!) those happy with their medical insurance to keep it.

To accomplish these noble goals, the Democrats have produced a "health care" bill. Their bill accomplishes none of these goals — and, in fact, makes every one of these problems worse.

Further, the Democrats pretend that those without health insurance cannot get health care. This is a lie, and they know it. They pretend that taking half a trillion dollars out of Medicare will improve it — another flagrant obvious lie. They pretend that dumping extra costs on the states is the same as reducing costs.

And that's before all the horse trading, diddling, extortion, and outright bribery conducted by Harry Reid (in back rooms excluding all Republicans and nearly all Democrats) to get the votes to pass this sack of (probably) unconstitutional crap. As a result, a small number of states will have their increased costs covered by the federal government. That means Harry Reid has arranged for the rest of us to pay all the increased costs for the states whose senators he needed to buy off as well as for our own. Among other things, that's a clear admission that the cost curve is about to be bent up, not down. And that they know it.

It also appears much of the bill is still in "conceptual language" rather than "legislative language". That means senators cannot actually determine what they are being asked to vote on. They're being asked to trust Dirty Harry Reid to fill that in later.

All of which says Daryl Cagle is right in his representation of the difference between the health plan and the health bill.
The whole thing is a fraud. And those pushing it know it is entirely fraudulent.

Democrats' Profligate Spending

The country is tightening its belt. There is 10% unemployment, and no inflation. Yet the Senate today joined the House — or perhaps I should say (more accurately) the Democrats in both bodies — in passing an omnibus spending bill that will cost us $1.1 trillion, and giving the agencies covered an average 10% budget increase.

The disconnect between the people of America and the leftist elites asserting their right to rule us is HUGE.

Harry Reid's Hate Speech

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) made his statement on the floor of the Senate, so I suppose he has some degree of limited immunity. But if he says, or has said, similar things elsewhere, he should be arrested for hate speech.

What did he say? Reid Compares Opponents of Health Care Reform to Supporters of Slavery "Reid argued that Republicans are using the same stalling tactics employed in the pre-Civil War era." Reid is also quoted as saying "When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."

In other words, he condemned opponents of his bill as being like the kind of Democrats we should have left behind long ago — the kind of Democrats who maintained slavery, the Democrats who pushed secession in the face of the anti-slavery views of the first Republican president (the president who ended slavery), the Democrats who later thwarted desegregation efforts for decades, the Democrats who opposed anti-lynching laws, and the majority of Democrats who voted against the civil rights acts. The kind of Democrat like Harry Reid.

That really is offensive projection. Apparently Harry Reid thinks we should be as bigoted and ignorant as he is. And he is deploying his offensive rhetoric in support of a massive disaster of a bill (much of which he continues to hide, even from his second-in-command) that is opposed by more than 60% of the people Senators and Congressmen are supposed to represent.

I think the Democrats, and especially their current (mis-)leaders, would do better to accept the racist history of the party and learn from it — and clean up their own act — rather than continuing to lie about it and impugn others for the past actions of their own party.

The Official Response to Climategate

No comment is needed.

... if you show me yours

Barack and Michelle Obama held their first state dinner — and had their first state dinner gatecrashers. The next day's coverage said "It was not clear Wednesday night how close the Salahis [Michaele and Tareq Salahi] got to Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, or to the guests of honor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, and his wife, Gursharan Kaur." But later the same day, pictures appeared (e.g., here & here) showing Michaele with Vice President Joe Biden. By Friday, the White House released a photo showing the couple with President Obama and Prime Minister Singh.

The White House released this photo of President Obama as he greets Michaele and Tareq Salahi in the Blue Room of the White House before the State Dinner with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, left, of India, on Tuesday.
By Samantha Appleton, AFP/Getty Images

All of which is really just to show my favorite version of that picture (below) isn't a photoshop invented out of nothing.
Only the conversation is invented. Maybe.

These People Are Not Scientists

I have never known a scientist to either throw away or destroy raw data. But these people did — they threw away the data on which their claims of man-made global warming are based.

To me, that means they may be politicians, but they are not scientists. And, as such, they do not belong in a scientific discussion.

UPDATE: More confirmation of what I said here -- Jonah Goldberg quotes a reader:

If I were caught bending the data to fit the model as the CRU was doing, I'm quite confident that I'd be unemployed and quite possibly facing time as a guest of the Feds.

Obama's Czars

President Obama has appointed a number of "czars" — a lot of "czars". In fact, Barack Obama has way more "czars" than Russia has had in its entire history!

But there's a problem: A czar, by definition, is a supreme ruler. There is nobody above a czar. But there is clearly someone — Barack Obama — over these people.

That leads to a clear conclusion: These people are not "czars". A more appropriate word for what they are is "commissars". And given the way they have been appointed and they way they operate, they are clearly political commissars.

Veterans Day

hat tip to Michelle Malkin for the image

Berlin 20 years later

The Cheeseburger Mandate

The federal government is about to mandate that I must buy cheeseburgers. Indeed, it now plans to mandate not only how many cheeseburgers I must buy, but also what I may and must have on and with them. I will not be allowed to buy either more or fewer, or to change the accompaniments. I will be heavily fined if I don't buy enough cheeseburgers, and I will be heavily taxed if I buy too many.

All determinations about how many cheeseburgers I must buy, what they must look and taste like, and how much I must pay for them, will be made by unelected bureaucrats following regulations written by appointed politicians to implement mandates made by "progressives" acting "for my own good". Those "progressives" obviously know what's good for us so much better than we do ourselves. That's why they feel so free to ignore the American people's desires and wishes, and call the people thugs and terrorists for daring to express their views in opposition to the benevolent arrogance of their overlords.

I just wonder how the "progressives" think they have the right to order my commodity purchases, and where they think they get the authority to do so. If memory serves, the last time the aristocracy got this controlling, they produced a revolution.

Boss Pelosi Wins — America Loses

Crime boss Nancy Pelosi and her enforcers managed to get their way tonight. They managed to threaten, extort, and bribe enough Congressional "representatives" to get her massive Pelosicare bill passed. That bill started the week at 1990 pages, creating at least 111 new bureaucracies and spending massive amounts of money without accomplishing any of its claimed objectives. With the "manager's amendment", it grew to somewhere between 2042 and 2790 pages in length depending on whose page count you choose to use — we don't really know how big the "manager's amendment" is because it wasn't available to the House members, even during tonight's debate, in violation of House rules that require it. (Like her fellow Queen Bee on the Senate side of the Capitol, Pelosi will break any rule and any law, and will trash any promise to get what she wants. She is truly shameless.) Even so, the bottom line for tonight is that Pelosi's extortion and bribery worked enough to get her party to pass her bill by a 220-215 margin.

To his credit, Congressman Harry Teague, who was elected from my district in New Mexico, voted NO in spite of the pressure put on him. New Mexico's other two Congressmen, Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan, followed Pelosi's orders like the party hacks they have always been.

This is all particularly frustrating because the Pelosi "healthcare" bill is such a complete and utter fraud. It purports to provide universal coverage but, according to the Congressional Budget Office, leaves at least 12-15 million Americans uncovered out of the 30 million Barack Obama says are uncovered today. Its proponents claim it won't increase the deficit, but "reaches" that by such subterfuges as claiming "savings" that have already been spent seventeen times over — and by massively increasing taxes. They pretend it will reduce healthcare costs when it only reduces federal payments. They pretend it will reduce healthcare costs when it insures premiums will go up and directly increases medical device costs.

Actually, it's worse than that. The "savings" they claim are a theft of more than half a trillion dollars from Medicare. They claim they can save that much by getting rid of Medicare waste and fraud. They've used that multiple times. But there are no real savings — there are only reductions in what Medicare pays to doctors. And Medicare already doesn't pay the actual costs of the "coverage" it "provides" (at the cost of a huge amount of paperwork), which is why so many doctors limit the number of Medicare patients they will see or won't take Medicare patients at all. Taking that amount of additional money out of Medicare will insure that more doctors go bankrupt and/or leave the practice of medicine, and will make it much harder for seniors to find a doctor by making sure that fewer doctors will be willing to see Medicare patients.

Yes, Nancy Pelosi rushed her fraudulent bill through the House tonight. She had to — she had to get it through before all the Congressmen she lied to found out what was really in her bill. That's why she had to use bribery and extortion to get her way. And that's just one more reason we really need a class action lawsuit, to produce a ruling that no legislative vote can be legitimate if the legislators have had no chance to read the bill they're voting on.

Tonight Boss Pelosi has won, but the country has lost. Big time.

Time to Support General McChrystal

There's something here I don't understand:

The Obama Administration says it can't really respond to General Stanley McChrystal's request for more troops until it decides what its policy should be for the war in Afghanistan. I don't understand that, because that's what the Administration did early this year. It started right after the Inauguration, reviewing and reworking our national policy in this area, deciding what the strategy and tactics should be. President Obama then appointed Gen McChrystal to carry out the new policy and strategy, and promised him the resources he needed to do that. McChrystal identified the additional resources needed to do his assigned job. His request letter was held up by the Pentagon, reportedly at the request of the White House which didn't want to deal with the request at that time. (There have also been reports that he was directed to reduce his request from what he originally wanted.) And now the Administration "needs" to do a new Afghanistan policy review, its second in less than a year, before deciding whether to give Gen McChrystal the support he was promised.

Actually, it's worse than that. In an interview released in September, Gen McChrystal acknowledged that, since he had taken command in Afghanistan, he had only had one short telephone conversation with President Obama. Shortly after that, at a Pentagon-approved event in London, McChrystal was asked if he supported a shift to a strategy supported by Vice President Biden that relies more on drones and less on foot soldiers. "The short answer is: No." was his response. He said "Chaos-istan" would be the result of that strategy. That apparently shocked and angered presidential advisors. And so, as a result,

The next day he was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago's unsuccessful Olympic bid.

It would be better if there were more promises kept, and less dithering by the White House.

Zero Tolerance Is Zero Intelligence

... suitable only for those with no capacity for judgment.

Time for a Lawsuit

It appears our lawmakers are now routinely derelict in their duties, and violating their oaths of office. Some of it is not their fault. They are not being given the chance to consider the provisions and consequences of bills they are being asked to vote on. Essentially, the Congressional leadership is putting them in an untenable position.

We need a class action lawsuit. It should assert, at a minimum, that any vote to report a bill out of a committee or to pass a bill from either the House or the Senate is invalid if the legislators have not had the opportunity to read and evaluate the actual legislative language of the bill at issue before voting on it.

“Conceptual languate” doesn't cut it. The actual legislative language often violates the conceptual language it supposedly implements. And the budgetary effect of actual legislative language is often radically different from that of its “conceptual language”.

Here's the bottom line: If the legislators have not had the opportunity to read and analyze the actual legislative language of the bill, no vote by the legislators can be legitimate.

Yes, I'd like to be able to push the idea that legislative bodies should be required to post the actual language of bills for public comment before a vote can be taken, but I don't think that can be done this way. That would require some actual legitimacy of the legislative leadership. Without that legitimacy, the most we can ask the courts to enforce is that our legislators have the opportunity to evaluate bills they are asked to vote on.

We may not be able to enforce their reading and evaluating bills' language, but we should be able to enforce their not being prevented from performing their Constitutional duties. No matter what, simply trusting the legislative leadership is not enough.

Polka Dotted Sky

The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta opened yesterday, bringing hot air balloons to New Mexico from all over the world. The famed Albuquerque Box, which may be unique in the world, was in effect.

This picture from a past Balloon Fiesta shows what yesterday looked like.

The Balloon Fiesta began in 1972. But my favorite question about it is timeless:

Do you have to be Catholic to attend the Mass Ascension?

The Axelrod Assertion

Presidential advisor David Axelrod was interviewed a few minutes after the conclusion of President Obama's health care speech last Wednesday. That interview has produced some coverage, mostly of his shot "I don't know what medical school Dick Morris went to." (My thought was, it was evidently a better one than Axelrod's.)

UPDATE: Dick Morris' response was better. He said something close to "That's not the issue. The issue is elementary school. It's really that simple." END UPDATE

I heard that interview when it occurred. And I heard David Axelrod make an incredibly important statement in that interview. But, even now, I have seen no coverage of that statement.

Axelrod was asked about Dick Morris' warning that Obama's plan would lead to rationing of health care by dumping millions more people into the system without doing anything to add to the numbers of doctors and nurses. Axelrod answered, saying that was a phony issue. He said those people are already getting care — they're just getting it now in emergency rooms instead of medical offices.

Stop and think about what Axelrod said there — two huge things in one single statement. (1) He said plainly that the lack of health insurance does not translate into a lack of health care. (2) He also said everyone is getting medical care now, so there is no "crisis" to be dealt with.

People will differ on whether Axelrod's assertion in this interview is accurate. But here's the thing: If it's not, the warning is right and rationing is a serious danger. If it is, it substantially undercuts the rationale for the current health care initiative.