CARB: We’re Not Tyrants

“We wouldn’t do something so silly as to ban black paint,” says the friendly California Air Resources Board. Of course not. That would be tyrannical. All those dittoheads can just relax.

The California Air Resources Board said Friday that it has no plans “at this time” to regulate car paint as part of a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — and never intended to outlaw black cars in the first place.

“We are by no means interested in banning or restricting car colors,” CARB spokesman Stanley Young said.

There, don’t we all feel better?

Wait… What’s this?

CARB ultimately decided to ditch the paint scheme and move ahead with just the reflective glass mandate (which is not window tinting, by the way; it’s a reflective clear coat).

So CARB still thinks they can mandate a technology just because they like it. This is a proper function of government? The whole “cool cars” project is tyranny. If there are coatings or paints or goat-sacrifices which will make vehicles more efficient let the market find them. CARB is being just as tyrannical with this as banning black paint would have been, only tyrannical in a stealthier way.

I cannot undertake to lay my finger…

Anybody from the press corps reading this blog? Didn’t think so. But if someone were, I’d like to submit a question to be asked at The One’s next press conference:

Exactly where in the constitution are you authorized to fire anybody in the private sector? Or, for that matter, to tell any private citizen what to do?

New York Times Spiked Obama Donor Story

Well. You could knock me over with a feather.

A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”

and

“If this is true, it would not surprise me at all. The New York Times is a liberal newspaper. It is dedicated to furthering the Democratic Party,” said Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of Political Science at Grove City College. “People think The New York Times is an objective news source and it is not. It would not surprise me that if they had a news story that would have swayed the election into McCain’s favor they would not have used it.”

Ain’t It Grand to Have Experts?

‘Cause without them there experts we rubes wouldn’t know fancy stuff like this.

But presidential experts from the right and left who spoke with The Hill said that if gaffes keep adding up, Obama may be damaged by incidents ranging from a foot in the mouth to a protocol faux pas.

“Gaffes do shape the public perception of the president because the mistakes that one makes reveal how you think and what you’re doing,” said Darrell M. West, vice president and director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. “Ultimately, that can add up to an unfavorable public profile.”

Gee, Cletus. Ya think?

What on Earth is YouTube Up To Now?

They’ve suspended the account of the James Randi Educational Foundation. So apparently YouTube is quite comfortable hosting Jihadi filth, but one of the leading lights of rationalism is not permitted.

Morons.

To give them a piece of your mind go here.

• Scroll to the very bottom and click on “new issue”
• Select “suspended account” from the options and express your opinion.

If you’d like to mirror the video a copy is here. That’s what I did: Downloaded it, then uploaded it to my YouTube account and then embedded it above.

Perhaps because he did not understand the cow’s ways

TS Eliot rejected Animal Farm for publication. He certainly missed the point.

Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

Crime and Punishment

As Mark Hemmingway puts it, “being stupid on camera is a crime that Christopher Hitchens will prosecute to the fullest extent.”

Don’t watch unless you can handle a battle of wits against an unarmed man.

President Doofus

So, apparently, The One is firing off letters to Italy without knowing who’s in charge over there.

He also sent a letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano (a member of the now defunct Communist Party), expressing confidence that the United States and Italy would work together “to overcome the current global political and economic hardships and build a safer world.”  The only problem with the letter was that the Italian president does not make policy; that power resides with the prime minister and his cabinet.  Perhaps the White House czars have issued an ukaz stipulating that the American president writes only to his peers, and thus instead of addressing himself to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, President Obama wrote to a man who holds an almost entirely ceremonial position.

Luckily for The Messiah His name isn’t Bush or the press would never let him live this down.

Don’t read the rest of the article or you’ll just see how Barry is fumbling Iran.

De-Baptism?

Remember those guys who put the wrong message on the busses in England? They, and others like them, are trying to get de-baptised from their churches.

I’m having a very hard time following the logic here. If the state of being baptised or not has meaning then that implies that the religion is valid. If the religion is a fantasy whether or not one is baptised carries no weight.

I suppose it means that just because someone has moved beyond faith doesn’t mean they’ve learned to think, or have reflected at all upon life.

I suggest these “rationalists” just move on and get a life.

We’re in the best of hands

Good thing nobody in the Messiah Administration would do something as provocatively stupid as tell a crazy enemy that they are free to flout international law and launch a missile. Because that, you know, would be insane.

Almost as insane as the president of the United States telling the CEO of a major corporation to resign. That would take weapons-grade hubris.

Homeless with a Cell Phone

Apparently some conservatives are using this to bash Michelle Obama.

I say “apparently” because the only references that showed up in a quick web search were left-wing sites complaining about “conservatives criticizing Michelle”. But there may be some.

Fooey. This is a perfectly appropriate sort of thing for a First Lady to be doing, and you won’t catch me complaining about anybody making mushroom risotto. That’s food of the gods as far as I’m concerned.

As was cleverly pointed out in the L.A. Times a “homeless” person probably isn’t going to have a mobile phone (why do people still call them cell phones when cell phones are all but extinct?) because you sort of need a billing address.

What this picture tells me is that a) there are probably Michelle Obama sycophants willing to pretend to be “poor and homeless” just for some risotto (and I can’t say I entirely blame them) and that b) there really is no such thing as poverty in this country.

I don’t think the soup lines of the previous depression served mushroom risotto.

The Messiah’s Shill Theatre

That on-line “town hall” (talk about a tortured metaphor) was, I’m shocked – shocked – to say, stacked with shills.

But while the online question portion of the White House town hall was open to any member of the public with an Internet connection, the five fully identified questioners called on randomly by the president in the East Room were anything but a diverse lot. They included: a member of the pro-Obama Service Employees International Union, a member of the Democratic National Committee who campaigned for Obama among Hispanics during the primary; a former Democratic candidate for Virginia state delegate who endorsed Obama last fall in an op-ed in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star; and a Virginia businessman who was a donor to Obama’s campaign in 2008.

The WP claims this was taking a page from the “Bush playbook”. That’s news to me. Anybody remember when Bush did something like this?

RealAge = RealShill

I keep seeing ads on the web for some on-line “test” to find my “real age”. I never bothered clicking because I knew it would be bogus.

Just how bogus, though, I didn’t suspect.

Well, well, well, well, well. Isn’t that interesting? “America’s Doctor,” friend to Oprah, and that die-hard supporter of CAM and “integrative medicine” who recently testified in front of Senator Tom Harkin’s committee about how the U.S. needs to “integrate” more woo into its medicine is shilling for a company that gathers health care information about its members from its surveys and serves as a middle man for the targeted distribution of big pharma advertisements designed to sell them the latest and greatest pill! His picture is even right there on the front page of the RealAge website! Moreover, RealAge appears to be playing it–shall we say?–coy when it comes to informing its members about its relationship with big pharma

Just think what I’ve been missing by not watching Oprah.

Dim Bulbs

Remember those CFL bulbs the dimwits in congress want to force you to buy in order to “save the planet” from the imaginary threat of anthropogenic “global warming”?

I have refused to buy a single one. And now I’m feeling smug about it.

Consumers who are trying them say they sometimes fail to work, or wear out early. At best, people discover that using the bulbs requires learning a long list of dos and don’ts.

John J. Miller tried buying some, not to save the planet but to save some money, and got stung.

But the dumb things keep blinking out. They don’t last 10,000 hours, as advertised. I’m lucky to get a few of them to last 10 hours.

Monkey’s Uncle in Texas

Well, the steadfast ignorant in Texas have succeeded in muddling the science education standards.

Someone check a calendar. I thought this was the 21st Century. And here’s another thing that chaps my hide:

The standards adopted were generally good, but there are several that are flawed, fortunately most in minor ways that textbook authors and publishers can deal with. I think we can work around the few flawed standards. But the point is that there shouldn’t be ANY flawed standards. The science standards as submitted by the science writing teams were excellent and flaw-free. All the flaws were added by politically unscrupulous SBOE members with an extreme right-wing religious agenda to support Creationism.

Right-wing? It’s true that most young-earth creationists are right wingers, but that does not mean that being right wing, or conservative, implies a severe disconnect with reality. Most criminals are blacks, but you’d have to be as duplicitous as Michael Behe to construe that to mean that most blacks are criminals. Meanwhile, this minority of unscrupulous morons from the Organized Ignorance wing are being used to tar all conservatives.

So the damage done is double: Kids will be taught that the earth is flat in spite of the shape they can clearly see, and conservatism will be damaged in perception. And, in politics, perception is reality.

Too bad there isn’t a hell. If there were, everyone in the Discovery Institute would  go there for their dishonesty.

What a shameful day for Texas.

FAA’s New Bird-Strike Plan

It’s called hide the statistics.

The federal government plans to block public access to its records of aircraft and bird collisions such as the one that forced a US Airways jet to splashdown in New York’s Hudson River in January.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says that the information could mislead the public and its release could prompt some airports and others not to report incidents, but the proposal is drawing sharp criticism from bird safety experts and public records advocates.

I guess the theory is that no aircraft has ever collided with an ostrich that had its head in the sand.

Just Because it’s Friday

Friday is the day we dance!

And Sing, Sing, Sing!

The Lost Tribes of New York

Nice. But where’s the hat tip to Nick Park?

Simon Says

that Pat Oliphant did us a favor.

BTW, have you noticed how Jews all over the world are burning cars and threatening Oliphant with beheading as a result of this cartoon?

Welcome to Fascism

California style.

The California legislature is considering regulating the color of cars and reflectivity of paint to reduce the energy requirements to cool them. A presentation on the proposed legislation by the California Air Resources Board is below.

The problem isn’t the color per se, but the reflectivity of the paint overall. And dark colors just don’t reflect well, so they are likely out. “Jet black remains an issue,” says the report.

Just try to read this without laughing

I dare you.

A would-be suicide bomber accidentally blew himself up on Thursday, killing six other militants as he was bidding them farewell to leave for his intended target, the Interior Ministry said.

“The terrorist was on his way to his destination and saying good-bye to his associates and then his suicide vest exploded,” a statement from the ministry said.

World Irony Shortage Averted

The irony supply has hit new highs thanks to two braying jackasses.

Michael Ledeen, call your office.

A Work of Art

I just got to see The Secret of Kells for the second time. Unfortunately it does not yet have distribution in the U.S. but, if you’re in Ireland or France, you can see it now.

Loosely based on the history of the Book of Kells, and very much based on the look of said book, this is an emotionally-satisfying movie that is also art that moves. They broke most of the usual rules of animation (avoiding flat poses and tangents, for example) and made one of the most beautiful and successful blends of hand-drawn and computer animation ever. Note that there is practically no 3D CG in this film: the computer was used to animate flat art in some really innovative ways.

If you get a chance to see it, do yourself a favor and get a nice dose of eye candy.

Let’s Hear It for the Twins

This is one place where NASA has given us more than our money’s worth.

Hopeful planners are already setting future operations for the twins, assuming the pair will continue to plow ahead but acknowledging that one or both of the rovers could fail at any time. After all, these robots aren’t exactly spring chickens. Spirit has been driving backwards since one of its wheels jammed in 2006, and a broken electrical wire has reduced movement of Opportunity’s robotic arm.

Good thing there are no VHS tapes of Hello, Dolly up there.

A Fine Tongue-Lashing

Enjoy Daniel Hannan MEP dressing down the “devalued Prime Minister”.

We’re In The Best Of Hands

Fortunately for us, Timmy “Turbo-Tax” Geithner has experience with fixing broken economies.

In a speech to a closed gathering at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Thursday, Paul Keating gave a starkly different account of Geithner’s record in handling the Asian crisis: “Tim Geithner was the Treasury line officer who wrote the IMF [International Monetary Fund] program for Indonesia in 1997-98, which was to apply current account solutions to a capital account crisis.”

In other words, Geithner fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. And his misdiagnosis led to a dreadfully wrong prescription.

John Galt Heard From

The consequences of the criminal foolishness of The Messiah and the “thugs” in congress are starting.

We have a president who shows no instinct for economic issues; a Treasury Department that, in a supposed crisis, is just one designated fall guy rattling around an all but empty building for whose senior positions no one has even been nominated; and thug legislators-for-life who bear far more direct responsibility for this mess posing as champions of da liddle guy in order to extend their already disastrous “oversight” ever deeper into the private sector. Things are going to get a lot worse.

Time to stockpile food and ammo.

The New Humanism

I think that Dawkins and his peeps were foolish to take out those bus ads. It makes them look unserious, because they draw exactly the wrong conclusion from the fact that there “probably is no god.” Roger Scruton writes in the American Spectator about the contrast between this new humanism and the old.

The British Humanist Association is currently running a campaign against religious faith. It has bought advertising space on our city buses, which now patrol the streets declaring that “There probably is no God; so stop worrying and enjoy life.” My parents would have been appalled at such a declaration. From a true premise, they would have said, it derives a false and pernicious conclusion. Had they wished to announce their beliefs—and it was part of their humanism to think that you don’t announce your beliefs but live them—they would have expressed them thus: “There probably is no God; so start worrying, and remember that self-discipline is up to you.”

and

Like so many modern ideologies, the new humanism seeks to define itself through what it is against rather than what it is for. It is for nothing, or at any rate for nothing in particular. Ever since the Enlightenment there has been a tendency to adopt this negative approach to the human condition, rather than to live out the exacting demands of the Enlightenment morality, which tells us to take responsibility for ourselves and to cease our snivelling.

If Dawkins wants to win converts he needs to offer something positive, not just be against something.

Do You Want to Raise Corporate Taxes?

If so, you need to listen to professor Williams.

If there’s an imposition of a property tax on your land, who pays the tax? I guarantee you that land does not pay taxes; only people pay taxes. That means a tax on your land is a tax on you. You say, “Williams, that’s pretty elementary, isn’t it?” But what do you say to a politician or news media people who propose increasing corporate taxes as means to get rich corporations to pay their rightful share of government? They should be told that they speak nonsense because corporations, like land, do not pay taxes; only people pay taxes.

If a tax is levied on a corporation, and if it is to survive, it must raise the price of its product, or lower dividends or lay off workers. In each case, it is people, not some legal fiction called a corporation, who bear the burden of any tax levied on the corporation. An important subject area in economics called tax incidence says that the entity upon whom a tax is levied does not necessarily bear the burden of the tax. Some of the tax burden can be shifted to another party. That’s precisely what corporations do and as such they are merely government tax collectors.

Read the whole thing.

There Was No World War II

It was just a multinational contingency operation.

It’s not that “Global War on Terror” was ever anything but a stupid name for the global war against radical Islam, but at least it had the word war in it. Not calling a war a war is part of losing it.