An odd and jittery performance on Charlie Rose

By the Speaker of the House of Representatives, that is. Did you see the interview with the good Speaker Pelosi? The normally placid environment (that solid wooden table!) is not so placid with said guest visiting. Petty to note, perhaps, but I felt as if I were watching a performance, and the performer was a nervous and jittery one.

Anyway, judge the quality of the interview for yourselves. Here are a few choice excerpts from the transcript at Real Clear Politics:

Pelosi: “People are more optimistic outside of Washington D.C. than they are inside of Washington. They want to — they want to be sure that we stick to our path which is to take us out of this economic challenge and not be afraid to do so” – What?

Pelosi: “When the president began and he said that he called for swift, bold action now. And the public responded to it in a very positive way. And he said in a very shall we say professorial way, but also inspirational way, we will harness the sun and the wind and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories, and we’ll invest in science, have better healthcare innovation and schools for the 21st century.” – What?

Pelosi: “Universal healthcare. It’s a place where we are recognizing the damage to our planet by decision that said we have made that we need to reverse. It’s a place where we have to go — we had the industrial revolution, we have the technological revolution. Now we have to have a green revolution.” – What?

Pelosi: “I think there is a realization among all people that all the things we want to do, we need to think in public private — public, public, all different kinds of different combinations on how we get them done, so we can leverage our dollars in a safe way, but leverage our dollars so we get more than just the appropriate dollars.” – What does that even mean?

I could go on and on. What do you suppose she’s saying?

SUPER-DUPER MASSIVE AND IMPORTANT UPDATE: I screwed up – the link is to the 2010 Rose interview that I recently watched, while the excerpts are from the 2009 interview. I honestly did not pick up on that while reading the transcript, obviously. In my defense, here’s an excerpt from the correct transcript:

“It’s so historic. It’s so exhilarating to be part of
history that each one of us in the Congress is on the brink of making
history. This is Social Security, Medicare, health care for all Americans.
So it is its own — it has its own encouragement to it. ”

“It has its own encouragment to it.” Well, there you go. Make fun of me and my faulty memory, and her statement, in the comments. Or just me. Whatever.

Why Alternative Power Is and Will Remain Useless

Here’s a fact you won’t see mentioned in the public policy debate over “alternative” energy:

There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.

Nada.
Zero.
Zilch.

Yet many want to make this group of functionally useless technologies the primary energy sources for our entire civilization.

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The Makers vs the Talkers

[Note :I wrote this as a comment to this Victor Davids Hanson post but it ran long enough that I think I will make it an actual post.]

Way back in the ’80s the columnist William Raspberry wrote about a conversation he had at a Washington party.

Looking around at the collection of lawyers, bureaucrats, journalists, academics, etc., he turned to a friend and asked:

“Do you know anybody who makes anything?”

It had suddenly occurred to Raspberry that his entire professional and social circle was comprised of people who more or less did nothing but talk for a living. He had no personal contact with anyone who participated in the creation of any material good. After asking around, he found that he didn’t know anyone who even made things as a hobby. He said, “I couldn’t even find anyone who had made so much as a bookcase.”

That little newspaper column opened my eyes up to the most profound division in modern society. It is not rich vs. poor or ethnic-group/race A vs. ethnic-group/race B or male vs. female etc. It is the division between those who create the real physical wealth of our civilization and those who merely manipulate others by persuasive communication.

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Put Up or Shut Up

I haven’t been paying much attention to the whole Copenhagen climate summit debacle because my doctor told me that I should watch my blood pressure. Good advice, as even the few details that have leaked through my self-erected Wall of Silence threatens to blow the top of my head off.

A few weeks ago, back on Dec. 11, it was announced that the European Union was going to pony up $10.5 billion for aid to developing countries so they would be able to fix power-wasting infrastructure, and invest in cleaner technology.

But that cash wasn’t going to be passed out all at once. It was going to be doled out over three years. If my grade school math skills haven’t degraded away to nothing, then it seems to me that the EU will spend $3.5 billion per year.

It may be simple enough in concept, but it certainly isn’t enough in reality. The figure needed to actually make a dent in the increasing amount of pollution produced by the developing world will start at around $100 billion a year. And that money will have to be raised and passed around every year for pretty much forever!

Where is that kind of scratch going to come from?

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Scientists Are Not Software Engineers

The real shocking revelation in the Climategate incident isn’t the emails that show influential scientists possibly engaging in the disruption of the scientific process and possibly even committing legal fraud. Those emails might be explained away.

No, the real shocking revelation lies in the computer code and data that were dumped along with the emails. Arguably, these are the most important computer programs in the world. These programs generate the data that is used to create the climate models which purport to show an inevitable catastrophic warming caused by human activity. It is on the basis of these programs that we are supposed to massively reengineer the entire planetary economy and technology base.

The dumped files revealed that those critical programs are complete and utter train wrecks.

It’s hard to explain to non-programmers just how bad the code is but I will try. Suppose the code was a motorcycle. Based on the repeated statements that Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming was “settled science” you would expect that the computer code that helped settle the science would look like this…

SuzukiBiplaneMotorcycleConcept-3

…when in reality it looks like this:

leannag-frankenbike

Yes, it’s that bad.

Programmers all over the world have begun wading through the code and they have been stunned by how bad it is. It’s quite clearly amateurish and nothing but an accumulation of seat-of-the-pants hacks and patches.

How did this happen?

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