Author Archive

Okay, this is driving me nuts.

A joint venture between Russia’s Gazpom and Nigeria’s NNPC resulted in a company named “Nigaz.” [h/t Instapundit] They got into this trouble due to the Russian style of making acronyms using the  syllables of words instead of the first letter. This style was very popular in socialist movements prior to WWII, which is were we got Nazi, Gestopo and Checka. This style remain popular in formally communist countries and in Asia whose ideographic languages do not lend themselves to initialisms e.g. the Pokemon children’s game comes from the romanized Japanese POket MONster. 

This style of acronym has a specific name but I can’t remember it and I find it in any online or offline reference. This will bug me  all day!

If you know the word I’m am looking for pitch in and save my sanity!

[Update: Wikipedia suggest either a "portmanteau word"  or "syllabic abbreviation" but I can't shake the feeling that their is a specific word with latin or greek roots. *Sigh*]

While reading this story about changes in the water rights laws of western states, [h/t Instapundit] this bit at the end caught my eye.

Ms. Fitzgerald, an associate professor of sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, still lives the unwired life with her own family now, growing most of her own food and drinking and bathing in filtered rainwater.
 
Rain dependency has its ups and downs, Ms. Fitzgerald said. Her home is also completely solar-powered, which means that the pumps to push water from the rain tanks are solar-powered, too. A cloudy, rainy spring this year was good for tanks, bad for pumps.

*Sigh* Somebody actually designed a solar powered system to pump water out of a rain filled system. Somebody voted for Obama. 

The entire point of energy systems is to shift work in time and space to when and where we need it. Weather-dependent energy sources can’t shift work in time and space. Instead, the work happens when and where the weather wants it to happen. Weather-dependent energy systems cannot perform this most basic task of shifting work and that is why they are worthless for any large-scale use. 

I mean, if weather-dependent power can’t meet the needs of a hippy college professor, why do people think we can run factories, transportation and hospitals with it? 

[By the way, the water rights laws of the American West might seem bizarre but they do make sense in the context of the region's historical development.]

Or perhaps I should say we got dragged into the Village Voice. They linked to Jonathan’s post:  Michael Jackson’s Death: A Media-Driven National Disaster. Apparently, the Village Voice is amused that non-leftists are upset that Jackson’s death is distracting the media away from more real concerns.

I know I shouldn’t wallow in tabloid speculation but this profile of Michael Jackson [h/t/ Instapundit] suggests that he might have been. 

If the story is true, Jackson would have been worth more alive than dead to many people including his entourage. If Jackson failed to perform due to ill health, the promoters of his upcoming series of 50 London concerts would lose all the money they put in. If he died, they could recover some or all of their investment from insurance. Someone in his entourage might have feared that Jackson would be sued and wiped out if the concert promoters had learned he had been too ill to perform when he made the contract. If he died, they at least would have the estate and children to pick over (or thought they would). His Nation of Islam bodyguards might be the obvious suspects because (1) no one can murder an individual easier than their own bodyguards and (2) they may have detested Jackson for his homosexuality. 

As I wrote before, we see in superstars like Jackson all the psychopathologies that used to afflict the absolute rulers of old. Assassination would be just one more parallel. 

Maybe we should issue an Intrade contract for when the first murder conspiracy book will be published. I’d put my money on 30 days.

… and the world just got a little less creepy.

[update (2009-6-25-09:50): My spouse says I was overly snarky so here's a more nuanced view of Jackson from an old post from June 2005.]

One of the greatest dangers of socialism is the creation of a privileged class of wealthy political insiders who live under different rules than the rest of the citizenry. 

Ed Morrisey suggests that Obama had a “Dukakis Moment” when he refused to say that he would leave his own family dependent on politically-managed health care. [h/t Instapundit]

I don’t think we should leave him any choice. 

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I haven’t watched the ABC Primetime special yet but I did read ABC’s Web summary and I find it less biased than I feared. 

Because of the way human memory and cognition work, the most important parts of any text news story are the headline, the first paragraph and the last paragraph. Indeed one of the cannons of print journalism is that you can summarize a story with just these three parts. 

So let’s try that with this story:

President Obama Defends Right to Choose Best Care 
 
President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people — like the president himself — wouldn’t face.
 
“If the American people get behind this, this is going to happen,” the president said.

The headline is positive towards Obama. It says that Obama “defends the right to choose” which is obviously a positive statement. A more neutral headline would be something like, “Obama explained his ideas for health care reform.”

The first paragraph is negative in saying that Obama “struggled” and pointing out that he is a rich and powerful person who will never have to rely on the politically-managed health-care that he advocates for other people. 

The last paragraph is positive towards Obama because it gives him the final word and does so in a quote. 

So the summarized story that people will take away reads, “Obama defended people’s right to choose the best care, but he struggled to explain how that would work. The plan is going to happen.”

I was surprised by the opening paragraph. Given my dim view of ABC’s built-in bias, I can only assume that Obama really did struggle. Even so, ABC spun the story to Obama’s favor.

Megan McArdle asks, if politically-managed health care is so great, why isn’t military health care a shining example to be emulated? [h/t Instapundit]

It’s an important question to ask and answer because the military health-care system is a completely socialized system. If we can politically manage health care in the real world then the military system should be a shining example of medical care in America. Yet care for both for service personnel and their dependents sucks. 

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Here’s three posts from Instapundit this morning:

ENVIRONMENTAL SOLUTION becomes environmental problem. D’oh!  – Chemicals used to replace CFCs due to CFCs’ theoretical degradation of the ozone layer now seen as a significant greenhouse gas. 

IF THIS HAPPENED IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR, WE’D BE HEARING ABOUT “GREED:” DC subway crash: Regulators had warned to replace aging fleet. — The DC Metro system fails to take unsafe cars out of service. 

SACRAMENTO BEE: Dan Walters: Pension hike of a decade ago backfires. – Government-managed pension investment implodes.

What do these stories all have in common? They all demonstrate that government organizations do not systematically make better decisions in the same circumstance than do private organizations. 

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From South Park Season 2 Episode 12 “Clubhouse”

Sharon (Stan’s Mom): [sighs] Stanley, you know you’re the most imprtant thing to me, right?

Stan: If that’s true, then get back together with Dad for me!

Sharon: Now Stanley, you have to understand how divorce works. When I say, “you’re the most important thing to me,” what I mean is, you’re the most important thing after me and my happiness and my new romances.

Stan: Oh.

I think South Park is the most moral show on TV. Even with all the cursing and gross-out humor, I think it should be shown in Sunday School.

So, the bright bulbs at Obama’s Federal Trade Commission have decided to regulate blogs based on the premise that undisclosed financial relationships between bloggers and businesses could lead bloggers to deceive their readers as to the value of products they blog about. [h/t Instapundit]

If we’re going to regulate speech based on inducements to bias why stop with mere financial relationships? I think we should require all media sources to reveal all possible sources of bias starting with the political affiliations of the publishers and reporters. After all, the media sells stories they advertise as accurate and objective. Shouldn’t consumers have ready access to the information they need to decide if those claims are true?

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Megan McArdle makes a very good general point in her post on the illusion that socialism will reduce health-care costs:

We have been trying to control health care costs since the 1970s made it clear that Medicare was going to get really, really expensive.  And any idea that you care to name, from comparative effectiveness research to healthcare IT to preventive medicine . . . these have all been on the table for more than thirty years, under one name or another.  They haven’t happened.
 
The answer that those promising magical cost reductions need to ask is “Why haven’t they happened?” and “What has changed to make them feasible now?”  But when I ask this question, I get angry demands that I put forward my plan for cost control, rather than merely critiquing everyone else’s.  This seems rather like demanding that I put forward my design for a perpetual motion machine before I am allowed to point out problems in the US energy market.

I was reminded of this style of argumentation by Harry Angstrom’s comments in my previous post, where he makes this exact argument. In thinking about it, I realized that a lot of debates with leftists often come down to this type of, “I have an idea and you don’t, therefore I must have the best plan,” argument. 

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Allow me to make some predictions about how ABC will make sure its Obama infomercial examination of health care issues will be “ informative and fair, thoughtful and thought-provoking.” [h/t Instapundit]

ABC will frame the entire infomercial in leftist terms. They will use leftist definitions of what is and is not a health-care problem and they will present only leftist solutions to those problems. The “balance” will come when they deign to let non-leftists argue within the bounds that leftists set. 

It will go something like this:

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Here’s another example of Obama and Ayers running in the same political circles.

I’ll say it again:

…, the real troubling aspect of the Obama-Ayers relationship is that Obama comes from a political subculture in which Ayers is an accepted and unremarkable individual. Looking at Ayers, one is forced to ask exactly what kind of leftist extremism would be considered unacceptable by Obama and his cohorts.

Ayers clearly wasn’t an outsider in leftist circles in Chicago. In this case, no one found it odd that an Illinois state senator was sharing a forum with an unrepentant, stalinist terrorist. One has to wonder how an political culture so accepting of Ayers shaped Obama’s world view.

Clearly, Obama has to have had some sympathy with Ayers or he would not have shared a forum with him or endorsed his work.  In any other context, everyone would find this a highly questionable decision. I don’t think that Obama would let off the hook a Republican that shared a forum with someone who tried to kill abortion doctors and never expressed any regret for doing so. I doubt it would matter to Obama whether or not the anti-abortion terrorist went on to do humane work in another field. Obama would view a political culture that embraced an unrepentant anti-abortion terrorist as immoral and any politician that came out of that culture as strongly suspect.  

We should hold Obama to the same standard.

Robert Fisk (yes, that Robert Fisk) is apparently in Iran. As is routine for Fisk with his delusional world view, he finds himself shocked at the violence directed against demonstrators. 

Robert Fisk, a writer and journalist who was observing the rally, told Al Jazeera he had heard shoots fired and seen demonstrators break out into a run, but that things had continued to be largely peaceful.
 
“It’s extraordinary to me that anyone would start shooting at such a huge crowd of people,” he said.

Gee, Fisky, do you think it might have something to do with the people doing the shooting being are… what’s the technical term for it… oh, right, Evil?

It says a lot about Fisk’s world view that he finds it extraordinary that a brutal, authoritarian regime would open fire on protestors. It explains a lot as well.

There are reports coming from Twitter that the Iranian regime is using Arabic-speaking paramilitary troops to put down the demonstrations over the latest election. 

If true, this report is a significant sign that the regime’s power has grown shaky. Using foreign troops with no native loyalties save to the leader that employs them is an age old practice of threatened leaders. The use of foreign troops would indicate that the Iranian regime no longer trusts it’s own native forces to suppress the people. 

The current election squabble is clearly a power struggle within the ruling oligarchy. The people of Iran have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the oligarchy’s regime. One faction in the oligarchy has decided to deploy that dissatisfaction against its opposing faction. Regardless of who wins, the oligarchy will have lost membership. Once-powerful insiders will find themselves as outsiders.

Such a contracting oligarchy has fewer and fewer people it can trust within the military and security forces, so they resort to importing troops they can trust. 

Things might be looking up.

Via Instapundit comes this story on plans to bulldoze large sections of 50 failing cities in Great Lakes states. That alone is enough to make one weep.  A mere 40 years ago, these cities were still the economic titans of all the earth and now they are imploded wastelands. 

Even more shocking and frightening is the strange, delusional state that seems to have settled over the political thinking of the majority of the people in the region. They seem to have no conception that their own political choices destroyed their communities. Worse, they’re rationalizing their own self-inflicted failure as a good thing. 

Here’s Dan Kildare, Obama’s point man for the plan:

“The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there’s an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they’re shrinking, they’re failing.”

What the HELL is wrong with these people?

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Gosh, scientists are mystified as to why the military would suddenly classify data they have made public for years. [h/t Instapundit] Well, I have an idea and if the scientists and the journalists had bothered to think about it from the perspective of military intelligence, they could have figured it out as well.

The public data lets a potential enemy figure out the sensitivity of the satellites and how to create countermeasures. 

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[Here's a little light (1,900 words) reading for the weekend. I banged it out rather quickly so I apologize for any typos, misspellings or poor grammar. I'll monitor this thread over the weekend so I don't end up posting a hot-button topic and then ignoring it like I did last time.]

Robert Wright has a new book out “The Evolution of God“. [h/t Instapundit]  The Amazon description says:

In this sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright’s findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism, but future harmony.

I haven’t read the book yet, but based on his previous works I can guess where he is going with this. I’ve been thinking about this subject as well for some time, and I ‘ve been writing up my thoughts on the matter in detail, but since Wright may have beaten me to the punch I thought I would try to get my tiny bit of priority in. (Besides, I owe him for that bar fight in Tucson.)

I believe that religions and all other facets of human culture are subject to and created by natural selection. Even though I am a philosophical agnostic and a functional atheist, I have come to a science-based understanding that religions serve an evolutionary purpose, and that they provide a vital mechanism for enhancing and maintaining cooperation that no secular mechanism can duplicate. 

Traditionally atheists have argued that religions cannot have any functional foundations because there are many different religions with so many different stories about how the universe works. They commonly point out that since most religions contradict each other, the vast majority of religions have to be wrong even if we were to assume that one is right. Science produces just one best explanation for each phenomenon. We don’t have hundreds of different, equally valid models of the solar system. How could religion be any different? Therefore, the existence of many different religions proves that religions are arbitrary, fictional, fabrications like novels. It follows that religion has little to teach us about life and cannot serve as any kind of rational guide for humanity. 

This seems like a plausible argument. I used to believe it myself but in the last 15 years my ongoing study of evolutionary theory convinced me that atheists have missed one crucial piece of evidence:  We don’t have a vast variety of contradictory religions, we have a vast variety religions that all teach the same thing. 

In one critical functional area, all religions are identical.

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[update 2009-06-12 10:00am: Please keep in mind that this post is about how people's economic intuition goes awry when thinking about oil. The features internal to the oil industry are not as important as the differences between the oil industry and all other industries. It is these difference that cause people to misunderstand oil pricing. ]

Oil prices are headed up even though the world economy is headed down. [h/t Instapundit] What gives? Shouldn’t a declining economy lead to decreased demand which keeps down prices? 

Well, yes and no. Oil is a strange commodity. It doesn’t change price and availability in the same pattern as other commodities that are based on natural resources. This strangeness arises out of the technology of oil production, distribution and refining. 

Several factors give oil an unusual economic profile:

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