Author Archive

The President has just given away the contents of half the nation’s wallets by arranging things so that the survival of the other half depend on getting it.

-Richard Fernandez

This is the kind of thing that happens when governments distort market incentives.

The above-market prices, called feed-in tariffs because panel owners feed power into the grid at premium prices guaranteed for decades, are high enough in Italy to generate average revenue of 35 euros ($48) a day for a 100-square-meter (1,076-square-foot) roof, according to Bloomberg calculations.
 
“The feed-in tariff drives our business plan and profitability,” said de Vergnies, whose plans include two photovoltaic plants in southern Italy that will generate enough electricity for 25,000 homes.

The gist:

The solar industry is “built on subsidies,” said James Britland, an alternative energy analyst at Allianz RCM in London. “This is a non-competitive industry that has to be subsidized.”

The investment capital that’s diverted by taxes into subsidies for politically-correct tech fads, and by investors themselves in response to the distorted incentives created by such subsidies, is capital that doesn’t get invested in productive ventures in biotech, medical devices, etc., etc. Keep this fact in mind the next time you or someone you know needs advanced medical treatment. Those chemotherapy agents and other wonder drugs don’t invent themselves. Fewer of them get invented to the extent we allow our reckless political class to divert precious capital to unproductive solar-energy schemes and other financial sinkholes.

If you use Gmail you may have noticed a new feature called “Buzz”, which is Google’s attempt to create something like Facebook.

Email and Facebook-type social networking services are different in function and in their users’ privacy expectations. Google erred by 1) assuming that users of email, the less intrusive service, would want to be signed up by default for the more intrusive social networking service, and 2) configuring the privacy settings of the social networking service in a way that can casually expose a user’s private information before the user has a chance, or even knows, to change the relevant settings.

Here is an example of the kinds of problems Google’s new scheme caused.

Here are instructions for restoring the (relative) privacy of your Google account.

Google will probably correct its blunder soon if it hasn’t already. But it’s interesting that they blundered in this way in the first place. They showed a Microsoftian level of cluelessness about privacy and security. It’s as if the Google offices were a monoculture of young computer geeks for whom clever new features are first and foremost cool toys with business upside and no downside, rather than complex systems that sometimes interact in unexpected ways and may have the potential to harm people who have something to lose. Oh, wait…

Google’s “don’t be evil” motto, always a cynical joke, deserves at least as much ridicule as does the DHS terror-threat color code. People in China learned this some time ago.

Don’t be stupid. Don’t trust Google or other free Web-service providers with information that you can’t afford to make public.

UPDATE: An attorney offers scathing and insightful critique of Google here and here. The second linked post gives additional advice on deactivating your Buzz account, including a link to Google’s own instructions for doing this.

Quoted here:

“This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception,” Mr. Blair said. “It’s a decision. And the decision I had to take was, given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over one million people whose deaths he had caused, given 10 years of breaking U.N. resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons program or is that a risk it is responsible to take?”

(See also.)

Important news from the Middle East:

Using a satellite dish on loan from a nearby broadcast station, cooks in an Arab town near Jerusalem whipped up more than four metric tons of hummus, the chickpea paste that is a staple – and a near-religious obsession – for many in the Middle East.
 
The cooks doubled the previous record for the world’s biggest serving of hummus, set in October by cooks in Lebanon. That record broke an earlier Israeli record and briefly put Lebanon ahead.
 
Hundreds of jubilant Israelis, a mix of Arabs and Jews, gathered around the giant dish in the town of Abu Ghosh near Jerusalem on Friday, many of them dancing as a singer performed an Arabic love song to the beige chickpea paste.

But note that these developments are not without geopolitical implications:

Lebanese tourism minister Fadi Abboud told The Associated Press that his country plans to beat the new record in the spring with an even bigger plate of hummus prepared on the border with Israel. “This way they can learn how to do hummus,” he said.
 
“We have no objection that other people do hummus but they should know that it is Lebanese. They (Israelis) should find a name other than hummus because this is a Lebanese name,” Abboud said.

Check out the photo at the linked article, too.

Early and often
Is no longer adequate.
Will Dems move rightward?

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Barack Obama!
Double down, you clever guy.
We need more Scott Browns.

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Scourge of Amiraults,
Martha was unappealing.
(The best they could do?)

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(Feel free to add your own contribution in the comments.)

I post below the contents of a message that the Illinois State Rifle Association is sending to people on its email distribution list.

ALERT – Supreme Court Case on Chicago Handgun Ban
 
 
Yesterday the City of Chicago filed their brief in response in the US Supreme Court case brought by the Illinois State Rifle Association. The case, McDonald v Chicago, seeks to overturn Chicago’s handgun ban and punitive registration process.
 
This is the most important case in U.S. history concerning the Second Amendment and it is the ISRA’s case. Can state and local governments take away your Second Amendment Rights? Or is the Right to Keep and Bear Arms so fundamental that it is protected by being incorporated against the states through the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution? Without going into a bunch of legal language, Chicago’s brief is their attempt make sure that the handgun ban lives on.
 
These are the next steps in this case:
 
1. Our reply to what Chicago just submitted is due January 29.
 
2. Oral Arguments in the case have been scheduled for March 2.
 
3. The court is expected to deliver a decision near the end of June.
 
The outcome of this case is expected to affect the status of the Second Amendment across the nation. If we win, it does not mean that the fight is over, it means that next phase of the fight has begun.
 
The City of Chicago is using tax dollars pay for the defense in this case, in order to keep preventing its residents being able to have effective self-defense at home. Of course, no tax payer monies are being used to defend your Second Amendment rights! The legal effort behind the McDonald case is paid for privately.
 
The ISRA needs your support and your contributions to keep this case, and the inevitable follow-up cases, moving forward.
 
Now is the time. If you are an ISRA member, we need your continued support. Please make a donation on-line here, or over the phone at 815-635-3198. If you would like to mail or fax a donation, we have a printable form here [pdf].
 
Now is the time. If you’re not an ISRA member, join NOW and ride with us into history. You’ll be able to say “I was an ISRA member when WE overthrew the Chicago handgun ban and forever changed the gun control debate!” You can join on-line, or over the phone at 815-635-3198. You can download a printable application form here [pdf].
 
Post this alert to all internet blogs and bulletin boards to which you belong. Also, pass this alert on to your gun owning friends and fellow sporting club members. Ask them to forward this alert to their friend far and wide. Although the suit targets the local ordinance in Chicago, the implications of incorporation of the 2nd Amendment are national in scope.

(Note that I edited some of the links in the message to make them easier to use, but the content is unchanged.)

One hour of computer programming after ten hours of sleep is more productive than ten hours of computer programming after one hour of sleep.

Chicagoboyz visits Jimbo’s:

From James Rummel:

(Previous entries: Here and here.)

From a brilliant column by Caroline Glick:

Then there is the message he sent the Afghans. Just as Barak and Olmert discouraged the Lebanese from cooperating with IDF operations against Hizbullah when they declared that the IDF would not remain in Lebanon, so by announcing a timeline for withdrawal at the same time he announced his force build-up, Obama told the Afghan people that they have no reason to collaborate with US and NATO forces on the ground.
 
For Obama personally, this is a win-win situation. If McChrystal is able to make headway, Obama will take the credit. If not, Obama will blame McChrystal, and the Afghans, and NATO, and the Republicans, and George W. Bush for his failure. Then he will withdraw all US forces from the country, and watch as a disinterested observer as the Taliban retake control of Afghanistan – all to the rousing applause of his anti-war political base.
 
On the other hand, for the American people and for the free world as a whole, this is a lose-lose situation. The sound and light show strategy Obama announced will enable al-Qaida and the Taliban to grow stronger as they wait out the American withdrawal. Likewise, just as Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon emboldened the Palestinians to initiate their terror war in September 2000, so the US retreat from Afghanistan will embolden terror forces and their state sponsors the world over to attack US and Western targets.
 
IN ISRAEL, the refusal of successive governments to fight our jihadist enemies to victory served to demoralize the public by making it believe that the IDF is incapable of truly protecting the country. The path that Obama has now embarked upon in Afghanistan will likely have the same impact on many Americans. This posture of weakness and helplessness will be sharply contrasted with the emboldened stance of America’s enemies.
 
From the time the Netanyahu government took office in late March until its recent moves to cut a shockingly dangerous deal with Hamas and prohibit Jewish building in Judea and Samaria, there was a sense that Israel had turned a corner. The public rejected the Barak-Olmert legacy of defeat and elected Netanyahu to change the course of the country. Depressingly, today it is less apparent that Netanyahu has in fact abandoned their legacy of defeat.
 
What is absolutely certain, however, is that until both Israel and the US change course and defeat our enemies, we will not be safe. Moreover, we must recognize the infuriating fact that even if both countries decide to defeat their enemies, their embrace of victory will come too late for the soldiers killed in futile and pointless battles and for civilians murdered in terror attacks that could have been prevented.

This is worth reading in full.

I fear that both the USA and Israel will pay a terrible price for the despair-inducing plague of bad leadership that afflicts both countries.