Radioactive Communist Zombies

U.S. Taxpayer Dollars go to Russian-Owned Steel Mill

The U.S. government's Energy Department is giving a $730 million (yes, almost three quarters of a billion dollars) subsidy to Rouge Steel in Dearborn Michigan under "Green manufacturing."  This is the same fund that gave money to the politically connected Solyndra.

The steel mill is owned by the Russian compay Severstal which is owned by one of the world's richest men:

[Congressman Darrell] Issa asked in a letter to [Secretary of Energy] Chu, released Wednesday, why the loan was approved because Severstal "was already moving forward with production before the [Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing] loan was approved with apparently no need for federal financing."

He noted the Russian company is run by Alexei Mordashov, one of the wealthiest people in the world with a net worth of $18.5 billion, according to Forbes.

Issa also noted that "It does not appear that Severstal would have any difficulty self-financing the Dearborn project."

And how is making steel, a very old and very carbon-intensive process, considered "advanced" or "green"?  Perhaps it comes from Obama's desire to be re-elected, as Henry Payne points out at at Planet Gore (links original):

[L]ike the bailed-out GM and Chrysler, the White House seems to be motivated more by sustaining an industry with Big Labor ties (United Steelworkers Union represents Severstal workers).

So three quarters of a billion dollars goes to keep labor union voting Democrat.

And that's what crony capitalism does.  Doesn't it feel good to have your taxpayer dollars going to make sure Democrats get elected, including the miserable failure in the White House?

Wine Snobs Can't Distinguish Cheap Wine from Expensive Stuff

Looking for a bottle of wine for the weekend?  Might as well get the cheap one. In two studies wine experts were not able to distinguish cheap wine from expensive vintages, and in one study, red wine from white!

Why?  Because the experimenters managed their expectations:

The wine tasters in the experiments above were being influenced by the nasty beast of expectation. A wine expert's objectivity and powers of taste under normal circumstance might be amazing, but Brochet's manipulations of the environment mislead his subjects enough to dampen their acumen. An expert's own expectation can act like Kryptonite on their superpowers. Expectation, as it turns out, is just as important as raw sensation. The build up to an experience can completely change how you interpret the information reaching your brain from your otherwise objective senses.

In fact, totally objective observation is considered pretty much impossible.

In psychology, true objectivity is pretty much considered to be impossible. Memories, emotions, conditioning, and all sorts of other mental flotsam taint every new experience you gain. In addition to all this, your expectations powerfully influence the final vote in your head over what you believe to be reality. So, when tasting a wine, or watching a movie, or going on a date, or listening to a new stereo through $300 audio cables -- some of what you experience comes from within and some comes from without. Expensive wine is like anything else that is expensive, the expectation it will taste better actually makes it taste better.

So, what to do?  Buy the $6 wine but put it in a $60 wine bottle.

A New, Good, Perry Ad

Watch this; it's great:

When I first saw that I thought "Oh, a minute and 14 seconds, this will feel like forever." But it's such a great ad, it flies by. I had to watch it again. Let's hope this ad helps Perry's lagging campaign.

Conservatism Can Win

Quick quiz: 

Question one: who was the most unabashedly conservative president of the last 50 years? 

Question two: who was the only Republican president since Eisenhower to leave office still popular with most voters?

The answer is, in both cases, Ronald Reagan.

So why do party insiders think we need to nominate a moderate (read: Romney) to win the presidency and become a popular party again?  We need to nominate a conservative to beat Obama and to turn this country and our party around.  We need a president who will rein in spending be it by Republicans or Democrats.  We need a president who will reform taxes, entitlements, and regulations.  Perry, Bachmann, Cain and Newt would all probably do that.  Maybe even Santorum.  But Romney, no.  Romney is George W. Bush without the accent.  Romney is George H.W. Bush without the "vision thing."

I don't know why Romney is doing so well in the polls.  I'm hoping when it comes to voting the people who get to chose our nominee (not me, but Iowans and New Hampshireites) wise up and don't support Romney.

We can and will win, in 2012 and the future, if we nominate an unabashed conservative.  The "establishment" thought Reagan was then end of the world.  He made being Republican respectable again after Nixon/Ford.  A true conservative can and will do that.

Want a Good Paying Job: Take a Hard Major in College

A lot of the Occupy Wall Street crowd are young people right out of college with large student loan debts who can't find good paying jobs like they see on "30 Rock" or whatever shows are putting silly notions in their heads.

One wonders what these kids studied in college that they can't find jobs?  I'm pretty sure there's not a lot of work out there for Womyn's Studies majors.  At least work that pays more than the minimum wage.

A new study (pdf file) finds that if you want a good paying job you need to study science, technology, engineering, or math, the so-called "STEM" majors.

As Walter Russell Mead wrote in his blog:

Both undergraduate and graduate STEMS earn roughly 50% more than their non-STEM counterparts. Longtime guild-industries like academia, medicine and law will stick around, and at the top these fields will still offer good pay, but those top slots are going to get harder to find.

Stem students face better odds.  Rather than be replaced by robots, STEM graduates may design or work with them.

(Yes, there is a good chance that teachers, doctors, and lawyers will be replaced by technology within those kids' lifetimes.)(And the good news is, robots don't have unions and tend not to give to Democrats.)

But a word of warning: you have to study and do homework if you want to take a STEM major in college.  No time for protesting or even socializing.  And the weekly kegger at the Phi Tau house?  Forget it.

In college you could always spot the non-STEM majors: they were the ones protesting whatever the latest thing leftists were protesting.  Me, I had to study differential equations and fluid dynamics.

Record Low Number Americans Want Handguns Banned

In 1960 (the earliest I could find) the violent crime rate in America was 160.9 per 100,000 residents.  Thanks to liberal policies on incarceration, gun control, police procedures, and the welfare state, by 1970 it had more than doubled to 363.5. The violent crime rate peaked in 1991 at 758.1 and by 2010 had dropped to 403.6, still well above 1960 levels.

Interestingly, since 1959, the number of people supporting gun control has dropped.   According to Gallup,  support for stiffer gun control is at the lowest they've ever measured.

For example, Americans wanting a ban on handguns stands at 26%, down from 60% in 1959.  And 60% of Americans say we should enforce current gun laws, not pass new ones.  Even a slight majority are against an "assault weapons" ban.

Now you can wonder why when crime was almost 1/4th what it is now people were more in favor of gun control than they are today.  I think it's because the American people are smarter then we give them credit for.  In the 1990s they became fed up and demanded stiffer sentencing for repeat offenders (three strikes laws).  But they saw that handgun bans did not make the places they were enforced safer.  Rather the opposite.  Even Clinton's "assault weapons" ban (basically a ban on ugly guns) did not reduce crime.  But incarceration did.

Frankly, if want to reduce crime, you need to eliminate most gun control and then put someone in jail who uses a gun in a crime for a very long time.  I think the American people are becoming aware of this.

Market Forces Reduce Carbon More than Subsidized Green Energy

Which has been better at reducing carbon dioxide output?  The market or billion-dollar subsidized "green" energy? According to David Kreutzer, it's the market:

Natural gas-fired electricity generation has grown from 15.8 percent of America’s power generation in 2000 to 24.1 percent in the most recent 12-month tally from the Energy Information Administration. That 8.3 percent increase is enough to cut 120 million metric tons of CO2 [sic] per year compared to coal.

Over the same span, wind- and solar-generated power grew to 2.75 percent of total power generation. That would cut CO2 by 108 million metric tons per year compared to coal power. So over the past decade, hugely subsidized wind and solar have done less to cut CO2 emissions than market-driven natural gas production.

And unlike wind and solar, natural gas works all the time. In fact, because wind and solar are so unreliable, you have to have backup fossil fuel generation on standby (burning fuel) all the time ready to take up the slack.  Either that or have brown outs and black outs whenever the wind doesn't blow or the sun shine (like at night).   So "Green" energy requires more CO₂ emissions.  (Except in the Pacific Northwest where that backup can be hydro, at least until the greens succeed in getting our dams removed to save some fish.)

Thus it seems if you want to reduce CO₂ (why?) the market is better than Obama's green energy.  Why does that not surprise me?

They are the 10%

The Occupy Wall Street movement likes to say they are the 99% (that is, they are poorer than the richest 1%). But according to the Global Rich List website, they are probably at least the 10%.

Why?

The U.S. poverty line is (for a family of four) is $22,350 per year income (higher in Alaska and Hawaii).  And that put you in the top 10.65% of rich people in the world.  Even if you only made $10,190 a year (the poverty rate for one person) that puts you in the top 13.12%  If you worked full time (2040 hours per year) at the current U.S. minimum wage you'd make $14,790 and you'd be in the top 12.28%.

To be in the top 1% globally you'd only have to make $47,500 per year.  In 2009 the U.S. median household income (pdf file) was not much over that at $49,777.

Why is the U.S. so prosperous that our poor people are richer than 90% of the rest of the world?  It is because of the capitalist system the Occupy Wall Street crowd so disdains.  If we don't allow people to get rich, then no one will get rich (viz, North Korea).  When someone creates wealth for themselves, they also create wealth for a lot of other people.  (Trial lawyers are the exception to this rule.)  I'm glad the "1%" have their money because that means the 99% have more money, too.

If you're upset about the economy, you should be occupying Washington D.C.  The over-regulation, over-spending, and over-taxation of our economy is what's stopping growth.  Not that some people managed to get rich by supplying people with goods and/or services they want.

Democracy in Action

I'm having one of those nothing-screams-blog-about-me days. Apparently the TSA let a loaded gun slip by in checked luggage.  While this isn't a threat, guns are supposed to unloaded, and declared to the airline if in checked luggage (and in a locked container with a big "GUN" label on it that the airline puts on, so it's easier for thieves to identify).

But what got me thinking today was, it looks as if Tunisians' first elections are going to put into power Islamists.  And I'm thinking they'll regret it.

In the West so many people worship at the alter of "democracy" as if that is the best of all possible government systems.  It's not.  Someone once describe democracy as two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

Our founding fathers knew this so they set up a constitutionally-limited, representative democracy.  This was designed to do at least three things: 1) limit what government could do even if the people voted for it (e.g., free bread and circus are not constitutional), 2) protect minority rights (just cause the lamb loses the vote doesn't mean it has to be lunch), 3) make the government as sclerotic as possible (government that acts quickly often acts badly).

Too much democracy is bad for freedom.  That seems self-contradictory but it's true.  Yes, the majority will rule.  But what if the majority rules that blue-eyed people must serve as housekeepers for all green-eyed people?  That pretty much limits the blue-eyed folks' freedom.

Under democracy, the majority can (and will) vote itself the goodies of the minority.  Those Occupy Wall Street protests saying they are "the 99%" shows what they want: the wealth of the 1%.  And when they say "This is what democracy looks  like" they are absolutely right.  Not a pretty sight.

That's why the U.S. was never, ever supposed to be a democracy.  And that's why we need to get back to our constitutional limits that have been eroded since 1932.

Who?

Today, Google looks like this (click for a larger image):

Which is to honor the 100th anniversary of Mary Blair's birthday.

On Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday anniversary, Google looked like this:

Which begs the question, who the @*%& is Mary Blair?