Something I Never Thought I’d Say….

Susan Estrich actually has some common sense:

Roman the Rapist

He had sex with a 13-year-old girl. He got her to go to Jack Nicholson’s house by promising that she would be in a photo shoot. When she got there, he fed her a Quaalude and alcohol — champagne for a 13-year-old, how enticing — and then he raped her.

Roman Polanski was on his way to a film festival in which he was to be honored for his life’s work when he was arrested last weekend. Some 100 European big shots have released a statement in protest: “Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.”

I’ve got news for the big shots: International cultural events are not safe havens for criminals, nor is there any reason they should be. A criminal is a criminal, even if he is “one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers.” There’s nothing “inadmissible” about it, guys.

Do read it all. I definitely do not agree with most of what Estrich believes in, but on this one, I’m on the same side.

For a sanitized, but still extremely unpleasant description of what Roman Polanski, darling of the Hollywood “elite”, did to a 13-year old girl, ABC News has the details.

Defending the indefensible in the name of “art” shows just how badly out of touch with this country the majority of the Hollywoodenheads are. There have been, thankfully, some voices on the left who are repulsed by Polanski and his defenders.

Thank you. Thank you Susan Estrich for calling a criminal a criminal and standing up for justice.

Absolutely Twisted – Part Two

Yech.

Woody Allen, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese today added their names to a petition demanding the immediate release of Roman Polanski from detention in Zurich. The director was arrested on Saturday over a three-decade-old underage sex case when he arrived to receive a lifetime achievement award at the city’s film festival.

“Film-makers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision,” says the petition, which is co-ordinated by the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD), a film industry organisation which also represents performance and visual artists.

“It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary film-makers, is used by police to apprehend him,” it adds.

Mark those names of people in the film industry who think that being one of the “greatest contemporary film-makers” gives one a pass on drugging and raping a 13-year old girl.

Yech.

Cannibal Mikey

Mikey threatens to eat Democrats:

Controversial liberal filmmaker Michael Moore on Tuesday issued a warning to Democrats who have been cool to President Barack Obama’s call for meaningful health care reform: Get on board or prepare to lose your seat.

“To the Democrats in Congress who don’t quite get it: I want to offer a personal pledge. I – and a lot of other people – have every intention of removing you from Congress in the next election if you stand in the way of health care legislation that the people want,” Moore told supporters of women’s groups and unions gathered at the headquarters of the government watchdog group Public Citizen. “That is not a hollow or idle threat. We will come to your district and we will work against you, first in the primary and, if we have to, in the general election.”

This is what passes for deep thinking on the authoritarian (decidedly NOT liberal) left. Toe the line of our agenda or we will destroy you. No thought at all to the political reality that a vote for the left’s agenda might already be a vote for political suicide.

Let’s face it, Mikey, who has lived very large off the capitalism he now abhors, is a poseur. He fancies himself a man of the people while living in very nice digs paid for by those same people. In other words, he’s a happy, rather rich capitalist playing at being a populist agitator. 

Mikey’s threats against Max Baucus are – completely – meaningless, incidentally. Baucus was reelected in 2008 and is not up for reelection within the memory-span of Mikey.

Bring it, Mikey. We can use all the help to unseat Democrats in 2010. Thanks for offering!

Got Snuggies?

If you happen to live in the Northeastern United States, you might want to order several sets of long underwear. It’s looking to be cold up in those parts:

“Weak El Ninos are notorious for cold and snowy weather on the Eastern seaboard,” Rogers said in a Bloomberg Television interview from Washington. “About 70 percent to 75 percent of the time a weak El Nino will deliver the goods in terms of above-normal heating demand and cold weather. It’s pretty good odds.”

Warming in the Pacific often means fewer Atlantic hurricanes and higher temperatures in the U.S. Northeast during January, February and March, according to the National Weather Service. El Nino occurs every two to five years, on average, and lasts about 12 months, according to the service.

How good are the odds? Well, hedge fund managers and traders are betting that heating oil prices are going up. That should tell you something (the Northeast uses an inordinate amount of heating oil).

In the Midwest, it has been a very cold summer – according to folks who have lived in this area all their lives. Coupled with Rich Horton’s post about the so-called science a lot of AGW hysteria is based on, you should have some food for thought. (If you have not read Rich’s post, now is a good time to do so.)

Shaken, Not Stirred

Not a Bond martini, consumer confidence. Contrary to the cheery pronouncements of Federal officials, the Obama administration and the ever more ridiculously sycophantic major media, consumers are feeling less secure in the notion that the economy is recovering.

The New York-based Conference Board, a private research group, said that its Consumer Confidence Index dipped to 53.1 in September, down from the revised 54.5 reading in August. Economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected a reading of 57.

The index — fueled by signs that the economy might be stabilizing — had enjoyed a three-month climb since hitting a historic low in February of 25.3 but has been bumpy since June as rising unemployment has caught up with shoppers.

A reading above 90 means the economy is on solid footing. Above 100 signals strong growth.

Economists watch consumer sentiment because spending on goods and services for consumers, including housing and health care, accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity by federal measures.

The Conference Board’s Present Situation Index, which measures consumers’ current assessment of the economy, declined to 22.7 from 25.4. The Expectations Index, which measures consumers’ outlook over the next six months, dipped to 73.3 from 73.8 last month.

“While not as pessimistic as earlier this year, consumers remain quite apprehensive about the short-term outlook and their incomes,” said Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center. “With the holiday season quickly approaching, this is not very encouraging news.”

Actually, I’m guessing that it is disastrous news just as we are beginning to enter the Christmas shopping season. The “everything’s coming up roses” routine is not stirring consumer confidence. Nor are the increasingly strained attempts to spin horrific job losses and unemployment numbers week after week by the media.

As a matter of fact, I suspect that the increasingly silly attempts at claiming things are looking up in the face of the evidence people can see right in front of their own eyes is making people more nervous. Because if the media is spinning this hard over indefensible numbers, what are they hiding? Or who are they kidding?

There are things coming that are going to make things worse. A commercial credit crisis and huge numbers of ARMs due to reset just to name two.

Brace for impact, folks.

Yet More AGW Fraud

Big news: Cherry Picking of Historic Proportions

The sheer effrontery and gall appears to be breathtaking.

The Briffa temperature graphs have been widely cited as evidence by the IPCC, yet it appears they were based on a very carefully selected set of data, so select, that the shape of the graph would have been totally transformed if the rest of the data had been included.

Kieth Briffa used 12 samples to arrive at his version of the hockey stick and refused to provide his data for years. When McIntyre finally got hold of it, and looked at the 34 samples that Briffa left out of his graphs, a stark message was displayed. McIntyre describes it today as one of the most disquieting images he’s ever presented.

Go read the whole thing. It’s important.

Absolutely Twisted

Kate Harding, writing at Salon:

Roman Polanski raped a child. Let’s just start right there, because that’s the detail that tends to get neglected when we start discussing whether it was fair for the bail-jumping director to be arrested at age 76, after 32 years in “exile” (which in this case means owning multiple homes in Europe, continuing to work as a director, marrying and fathering two children, even winning an Oscar, but never — poor baby — being able to return to the U.S.). Let’s keep in mind that Roman Polanski gave a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude and champagne, then raped her, before we start discussing whether the victim looked older than her 13 years, or that she now says she’d rather not see him prosecuted because she can’t stand the media attention. Before we discuss how awesome his movies are or what the now-deceased judge did wrong at his trial, let’s take a moment to recall that according to the victim’s grand jury testimony, Roman Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she said no and asked him to stop; performed cunnilingus on her as she said no and asked him to stop; put his penis in her vagina as she said no and asked him to stop; asked if he could penetrate her anally, to which she replied, “No,” then went ahead and did it anyway, until he had an orgasm…

…But none of that changes the basic, undisputed fact: Roman Polanski raped a child. And rushing past that point to focus on the reasons why we should forgive him, pity him, respect him, admire him, support him, whatever, is absolutely twisted.

It’s sickening to see the people defending Polanski at this point. The man – whether or not he is a great artist – raped a child. Regardless of the personal tragedies in his life, he drugged and raped a 13-year old girl.

This should not even be a topic of discussion, much less one of defending him. Too many in Hollywood, Europe and on the American left are doing the latter. It shows the disconnect between those elements and the majority of America.

Do go read the whole article. Harding is spot on as to why the defense of this is so grotesque.

Quid Pro Quo?

I suspect AllahPundit has this precisely right. After assuring America that health care “reform” was his number one priority, much, much more important than appealing in person to the International Olympic Committee, Barack Obama is flitting off to Denmark to appeal in person to the IOC for Chicago to get the Olympics. Why?

AP (and NRO’s Jim Geraghty) thinks the IOC secretly offered the games to Chicago only if Obama showed up.

Geraghty’s spot on. There’s no way The One would risk his political capital on a personal appeal in Denmark unless he’d been assured that Chicago will get the games if he makes a cameo. It’s a done deal; the only question is who approached whom. I think the IOC probably forced his hand: Given the terrible optics of the trip plus the fact that, as Geraghty reminds us, Obama said as recently as two weeks ago that he wouldn’t go himself, he had every incentive to avoid this — unless the IOC sweetened the pot by promising him the games if he showed up. Once they did that, he had no choice.

My son, only 14, heard the report with me in the car driving home yesterday. He commented, “The president should stop with the PR stuff and do his job”. Smart kid.

So, if the fix is in, as it almost certainly is, how screwed are the other cities feeling right now? Eventually, the facts about this will leak out. There are plenty of people who will want to make sure of that.

I’d like to join AP in thanking the IOC and Obama for handing the right a club with which to beat both. You know that corruption will be rampant given the venue (and the apparent means by which the venue was chosen), so the opportunities to administer beatings will be boundless!

Thanks!

Doing Letterman Is Not Progress

Howard Fineman has seen enough:

There is only so much political mileage that can still be had by his reminding the world that he is not George W. Bush. It was the winning theme of the 2008 campaign, but that race ended nearly a year ago. The ex-president is now more ex than ever, yet the current president, who vowed to look forward, is still reaching back to Bush as bogeyman.

He did it again in that U.N. speech. The delegates wanted to know what the president was going to do about Israel and the Palestinian territories. He answered by telling them what his predecessor had failed to do. This was effective for his first month or two. Now it is starting to sound more like an excuse than an explanation.

Nicolas Sarkozy sees through the very thin veneer that is Barack Obama. Fineman sees through the impeccably dressed, TelePrompTer-smooth-talking, media-obsessed, overly-slick Obama as well:

The president’s problem isn’t that he is too visible; it’s the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube.

I’d point out that the media overexposure also lets a lot of people see exactly what Obama stands for – which is not a good thing for Obama. The American people are not as easily swayed as Obama appears to believe they are.

You Are My Density

A (very) long piece by James P. Hogan at Lew Rockwell is worth reading. Some of it is purely speculative, but it covers a lot of interesting ground. (Generally speaking, it is longer than I suspect most web readers will bother with, but I’d still recommend it, even if you bookmark it and read it in sections). Had Hogan stayed on his very first point and expanded it a bit, he could have had a shorter, punchier article that would have been excellent.

You see, it’s the density that matters.

From unaided muscle power, through the use of animals, wood, wind and water, to coal, and oil, finding better ways of doing the work involved in living has reflected the harnessing of more concentrated energy sources. A lot is written about how much energy can be obtained from this source or that source. But if you really want to do things more easily and efficiently – and open up ways to doing new things that were inconceivable before – what counts is energy density. How much can be packed into a given volume. It’s easy to calculate how much energy it takes to lift three hundred people across the Atlantic, and how much wood you’d need to burn to release that much energy. Okay, now try building a wood-burning 757. It won’t work. The mountain of logs will never get itself off the ground. You need the concentration of jet fuel.

Some people argue that we don’t need nuclear power because we already have other ways to generate electricity. This misses the whole point. It would be like somebody in an earlier century telling Michael Faraday that we didn’t need electricity because we already had other ways to heat water. What made electricity so different was its ability to do things that were unachievable to any degree with existing technologies, and the whole field of electrical engineering and electronics that we take for granted today was the result. A similar distinction sets nuclear processes apart from conventional sources. All forms of hydrocarbon and other chemical combustion involve energy changes in the outer electron shells of atoms. The energies associated with transitions of the atomic nucleus are thousands of times more intense, and hence represent a breakthrough to the next regime of energy control that the growth of human populations and wealth creation require. The so-called alternatives do not.

Longtime readers know what I do for a living. For better or worse, I have spent most of my professional career keeping the lights on working in the utility sector. One of the things that has , frankly, annoyed the heck out of me in recent years is this push to less energy-dense technologies. Wind and solar are – by their very natures – extremely low density. That means that they are extremely demanding for space. Wind farms have a ginormous footprint. Solar, even worse.

The Nuclear Electric Institute used to (they may still) distribute a card with a dummy uranium fuel pellet glued to it. The pellet was about the size of the tip of your little finger. The card described how that pellet alone – if real – contained the energy equivalent of several train cars full of coal.

Instead of recycling spent nuclear fuel, we are being pushed into low-density technologies that will take huge – really huge – areas to generate equivalent energy. Vast fields of really, really ugly wind generators (bat and bird mince-o-matics) or an area equivalent to the entire state of Georgia paved over with photovoltaic cells.

All the “green” solutions are inherently unreliable enough to require a spinning reserve – or everything stops when the winds drops or the sun goes down.

This is the future our “green-friendly” politicians are planning for us. 

God help us.

Dead Ends

Imagine a whole generation of young people who have virtually no chance of doing better – or even as well – as their parents. Well, it is not a thought experiment. It is a very real possibility, right here in the United States:

The unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept. — meaning millions of Americans are staring at the likelihood that their lifetime earning potential will be diminished and, combined with the predicted slow economic recovery, their transition into productive members of society could be put on hold for an extended period of time.

And worse, without a clear economic recovery plan aimed at creating entry-level jobs, the odds of many of these young adults — aged 16 to 24, excluding students — getting a job and moving out of their parents’ houses are long. Young workers have been among the hardest hit during the current recession — in which a total of 9.5 million jobs have been lost.

The dream of every generation of parents is that their children will be able to reach higher than the parents themselves did. But that hope is based on the children starting from a relatively higher economic position than the parents started from. And it is based on a steady progression of lower-paying to higher paying jobs as skills are learned.

What if the kids cannot get their foot on the first rung of the ladder. What is there is a launch failure, so to speak? They don’t get those vital skills, they don’t learn how to function in a job.

They are in a hole right from the get-go. And that starting damage compounds through the rest of their lives.

The expert the article quotes, Al Angrisani, a former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, believes it may take four or five years for jobs to recover in this country. (He also places blame squarely on the Obama administration for failing to understand the economic growth engine that is small business in this country).

I’ve posted about this terrible statistic before, of course.

That’s My Soul Up There

Dead salmon (not, apparently, frozen in a waterfall) responds to pictures of people. Not.

A dead salmon has become a scientific celebrity after its brain supposedly lit up when shown pictures of humans during a brain scan.

Some bloggers last week reported that the fish was still thinking or that the research is evidence of an ethereal soul. However, the study was done to show that data from an fMRI brain scan can lead to false positives — misleading results — if not carefully analyzed.

Yes, the salmon was dead — bought in a lifeless state at a fish market and scanned an hour later. No, the results are not shocking or miraculous. Like many scientific studies, the study and its results, presented earlier this year in a poster at a conference, are technical and rather bland:

….

In a nutshell, the data reported by Bennett and colleagues in no way suggests the salmon’s brain was functioning, but rather reveal anomalies that can be misleading if you’re not careful.

In other words, sloppy statistics can lead to some really, really silly conclusions. Where have we heard that before?

Oh, yeah. Here.

Website Upgrade

I have just finished updating to the latest version of WordPress. As far as I can tell, everything appears to be working at this time. Please do let me know if you encounter a glitch, however.

“Don’t Worry About Him, He’s Just Crazy.”

David Warren:

But why should we worry? Why should Israel, in particular, which has been repeatedly threatened with nuclear annihilation by Ahmadinejad, worry? For after all, he’s just crazy.

It is not just Ahmadinejad. As demonstrators in all of Iran’s major towns and cities have been at pains to allege, for several months now, the whole government of Iran is crazy. It may be worth reminding my reader that by exacting Shia Islamic standards, it is crazy: for the whole Khomeinist revolution was built upon an interpretation of Shia Islam that is far from orthodox.

Now, at the United Nations this week, where Ahmadinejad was making his annual appearance, the man who is not wearing a woman’s frilly dress was actually upstaged by the president-for-life of Libya.

By contrast, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, poster boy for Latin American socialism – and Iran’s most voluble ally in the New World – delivered an uncharacteristically understated performance, devoting half his speech to a (favourable) review of Oliver Stone’s latest movie, and saving only to the other half such stranger things as his pious hope that President Obama would not be assassinated the way President Kennedy was.

I was speaking at an academic conference in Toronto recently with an old friend who, for his sins, was made UN ambassador for his Central European country. He was telling me, I suppose mostly off the record, about the surrealist or “dada” environment of that day job. He’d noticed that conventional diplomats were perfectly aware that others of their colleagues are, quite literally, insane. “You can’t help but notice the symptoms, when you get close to them.”

 Please read the whole piece. Warren titles it Madmen at the Gates. I’d only quibble with one aspect of that title. The madmen are actually inside the gates. As I have said before, far to many of the member states of the UN are tyrannies, thugocracies or badly dysfunctional. Yet the left in the West looks to the UN as some sort of enlightened body that deserves full support. Madness.

More proof of just how mad this all is comes from David Harsanyi:

And the last time Israel withdrew from disputed lands without pre-conditions to allow the potential of the Palestinian people to shine through was in Gaza. The Arabs, hungering for the light of freedom, used the gift to elect Hamas – now an Iranian proxy and always a terror organization – to rain rockets down on the civilians that voted to allow the first democratic Arab entity in history.

If Obama expects Israel to end the “occupation” that began in 1967 he is also demanding Israel abandon parts of Jerusalem. If he really anticipates a Palestinian state will be “contiguous territory,” what he expects is that Israel can’t be contiguous.

And when he uses the word “occupation” he is negotiating for the Palestinians. None of the lands up for discussion are “occupied” territory. The president, a highly educated man, knows well that there has never been an ultimate agreement on borders, nor has there ever, in history, been a Palestinian state to occupy.

There is an ethical question that the president might want to answer, as well. Why would the United States support an arrangement that scrubs the West Bank of all its Jews? Why is it so unconscionable to imagine that Jews could live among Muslims in the same way millions of Arabs live within Israel proper? Not many international agreements feature ethnic cleansing clauses.

Nicolas Sarkozy flat-out derided Barack Obama’s naivety at the UN this week. The madness of singing Kumbaya at the UN has been obvious for years. If the world had command of its rationality, UN corruption and waste would have been corrected. In a sane world, the corrupt professional UN bureaucrats who participated in and profited from the Oil for Food program would have been handed lengthy prison sentences – at best. In a world where the madmen were still outside the gates, the person who stood by while Rwandans were slaughtered would not have been elevated to leadership of the UN.

But the madmen are already inside the gates.

Walking Away

The LA Times reports on a troubling trend. People with good credit who simply walk away from their mortgages:

* The number of strategic defaults is far beyond most industry estimates — 588,000 nationwide during 2008, more than double the total in 2007. They represented 18% of all serious delinquencies that extended for more than 60 days in last year’s fourth quarter.

* Strategic defaulters often go straight from perfect payment histories to no mortgage payments at all. This is in stark contrast with most financially distressed borrowers, who try to keep paying on their mortgage even after they’ve fallen behind on other accounts.

* Strategic defaults are heavily concentrated in negative-equity markets where home values zoomed during the boom and have cratered since 2006. In California last year, the number of strategic defaults was 68 times higher than it was in 2005. In Florida it was 46 times higher. In most other parts of the country, defaults were about nine times higher in 2008 than in 2005.

Do go read the entire article.

Didn’t General Motors and Chrysler just do this very same thing with the full assistance of the Obama administration? They walked away from securitized obligations with the full cooperation of the government.

Be careful of the lessons you teach.