Radioactive Communist Zombies

A 2011 Recap

Since I tend not to blog on weekends and holidays, this will probably be the last post of 2011.

So, what did we do in 2011? We covered a lot of ground for both my readers.  I've just been looking at January and I talked about the Gabby Gifford shooting aftermath (and the stupid calls for speech restrictions), the fact that Canada banned the song "Money for Nothing" and that nuclear power is a better use of concrete than wind power.

And that was just January.

I blog because I have something to say.  Sometimes it's a little forced as I try to blog every weekday.  Sometimes it's inspired as I run across something I really feel the need to say something about.  I've occasionally turned Toastmaster speeches into posts (see here and here).  I bashed ethanol (not as much as in the past), doubted anthropogenic global warming, and tweaked political correctness and liberals whenever I could.  And occasionally, I simply rambled.

Also celebrated this blog's five year anniversary.

Well, look for more in the future.  You never know what might pique my interest.

Ethanol Subsidies are Dead?

The Red State blog is reporting that ethanol subsidies are going to be allowed to expire and with the current make up of the House, won't be coming back (links original):

Details here and here: the short version is that the Senate back in June kicked off opposition to continued ethanol subsidies via a bipartisan amendment: it didn’t pass, but Congress has just let both the ethanol subsidy and a restrictive foreign tariff (on Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol) lapse. Given that the Iowa caucuses will be finished by the time Congress reconvenes – and given that the House of Representatives is currently chock-heavy with people who spit at the very phrase ‘ethanol subsidy’ – getting back either is going to be a problem for the domestic ethanol industry.

As Red State points out, there's still a mandate for ethanol use but with the price of local ethanol going up 45 cents per gallon and Brazilian ethanol going down 54 cents per gallon, if we're going to meet the mandate it will probably be with juice from Brazil.

For a while this blog was the anti-ethanol blog. I railed against this waste of taxpayer and consumer money for years.  On of this blog's first posts was about ethanol.  As I said then about ethanol subsidies:

Morally and ethically, it's a legal mugging.  But it's good news for farmers.

The end of ethanol subsidies and the tariff on import ethanol is good news for taxpayers and consumers.  Now if we could just get rid of the stupid mandates so we can stop putting food in our cars.

Whither Iowa?

The Iowa Caucuses are January 3rd!  That's 5 days away.  Polls are all over the place, with Ron Paul up one day and down the next and Mitt seemingly above it all.  As I've said before, I detest our system of choosing nominees.  I hate that Iowa and New Hampshire have so much say in it and most of us have none.  I hate that Iowa and New Hampshire allow "independents" and "non-committals" to vote in our primaries (how do we always end up with mush like John McCain and Bob Dole?).

I don't know who's going to win Iowa.  It probably doesn't matter in the long run.  If it's Ron Paul maybe that would force the GOP to look at this crazy system.  If it's Mitt, who will probably win New Hampshire, we'll probably end up with Mitt as the nominee, probably.  And the problem with Mitt is it seems he thinks the problem with our out-of-control government is that he's not running it.  That's why I support Perry (who is fading fast) because he wants to make the U.S. Government as inconsequential in your lives as possible.

So, sorta like today's big football game, I'll sit on the sidelines, helpless to do anything but watch.

Five Years Ago

Instapudit has been doing "Ten years ago on Instapundit" which is marginally interesting.  This blog hasn't been around for 10 years but it has been around for five.  Five years ago today I was speculating on the 2008 Democrat presidential primary in which I said Hillary and some guy named Barack Obama were the front runners:

This is based solely on Hillary being Hillary and Barack being a Black man who doesn't walk/talk/act like a rap singer or NBA star.  And Barack being an unknown with zero baggage.  Hell, at this moment in time I know of no reason not to vote for him other than he's a Democrat.

Oh, if we only knew then what we know now.  Now I wouldn't vote for Barack Obama for dog catcher.

It's amazing how things can change in just half a decade.  The MSM wanted Obama to be president and they got him.  They are still trying to keep him in the Oval Office but even with the lickspittle love affair between Obama and the MSM, his approval is somewhere in the low forties.  Now if the GOP will only nominate someone who can beat him (good luck with that).

New York Times Shoots Itself in the Foot (Again)

I was in Starbucks earlier today where they, of course, carry the New York Times.  And I saw a headline on the front page: "Guns in Public, and Out of Sight"  with the subhead (from memory): "More Concealed Guns and Some are in the Wrong Hands." Wherein I assumed (correctly apparently) the NYT was saying "Hey, look, some concealed weapons permit holders have committed crimes! Aren't these permits a bad thing?"

What other position would the NYT take, after all?  And here's the crux of their argument:

More than 2,400 permit holders [in North Carolina] were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period, The Times found when it compared databases of recent criminal court cases and licensees. While the figure represents a small percentage of those with permits, more than 200 were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter. All but two of the killers used a gun.

(What do you want to bet "traffic related crime" is DUI, which has nothing to do with owning or carrying a firearm, although I would hope you wouldn't get drunk and pack heat.)

The first problem is, in any large population, you're going to have some bad people.  I wonder, for instance, who many killers could one find among NYT subscribers.  Doesn't mean subscribing to the TImes makes you a crazed killer (well, it might me).  But as Robert VerBruggen points out in The Corner, the NYT story proves that gun holders are more responsible and peaceful than the average North Carolinian (links original):

North Carolina has a statewide murder rate of about 5 per 100,000. Even without counting manslaughter, that’s 25 murders committed per 100,000 North Carolinians every five years. There are about 230,000 valid concealed-carry permits in North Carolina, so by pure chance, you’d expect these folks to be responsible for nearly 60 murders over five years. And yet only ten of them committed murder or manslaughter. Instead of “rais[ing] questions,” the Times has demonstrated yet again that permit holders are more peaceful than the general population.

Of course the New Yuck Times has an anti-gun agenda.  And it's easy to cherry-pick your data to prove almost anything (just ask so-called climate scientists).  Or as someone said "figures don't lie but liars figure."   Study after study shows that the more access the public has to guns, the less crime there is.  Being blind to the facts is part of the Time's stock in trade.  That they are lying about guns is no surprise.

Political Not Economic Considerations Drove "Green" Agenda

Those of us on the right say the market, not government, should pick winners and losers.  Why?  Because government is very bad at picking winners (viz. Solyndra) while the market is very good at it.  But why is the government bad at picking winners? Because while the market uses economic considerations (i.e., the "invisible hand") to pick winners and losers, government invariably uses politics to pick winners.  That is, usually the firm or person with the best political connections and the biggest lobbying budget.

The Washington Post (!) has an article yesterday showing the failures of the Obama Administration in picking winners was exactly due to politics.  As the WaPo puts it, politics "infused" every part of the Obama Administration's "Green" programs:

The Washington Post found in an analysis of thousands of memos, company records and internal ­e-mails. Political considerations were raised repeatedly by company investors, Energy Department bureaucrats and White House officials.

Of course the poster child for this is the more than half-billion dollars that went down the Solyndra rat hole:

[Documents] show that as Solyndra tottered, officials discussed the political fallout from its troubles, the “optics” in Washington and the impact that the company’s failure could have on the president’s prospects for a second term. Rarely, if ever, was there discussion of the impact that Solyndra’s collapse would have on laid-off workers or on the development of clean-
energy technology.

“What’s so troubling is that politics seems to be the dominant factor,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “They’re not talking about what the taxpayers are losing; they’re not talking about the failure of the technology, whether we bet on the wrong horse. What they are talking about is ‘How are we going to manage this politically?’”

They "bet on the wrong horse." In other words, they gambled with $500 million taxpayer dollars and made their decision politically.

Yes, private investors sometimes bet on the wrong horse and end up poorer but wiser.  That's how the market works.  But when governments bet on the wrong horses, they drag every taxpayer to the betting window with them to subsidize their bet.  And using politics is the worst way to decide what company should be invested in.  But it's the only thing Washington knows.

Which is why keeping governmnet out of the business of business is so important.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all my readers (both of them)!

Obama's Failures Detailed

Bill Whittle speaks his mind on our failure of a president.  Watch this:

Don't mince words, Bill, tell us what you really think!

It's Christmas Eve Eve

It's the Friday before a three-day weekend (Monday the 26th is a day off if not a holiday) and Christmas is coming soon. So it's a slow news day. I haven't found this anywhere but from my Twitter timeline it seems Ron Paul is trying to "disavow" is old racist newsletters, saying he didn't write them. Yeah, but they came out under your name, Bucky.

According to a Reason-Rupp poll there are still 29% of voters who will "definitely" vote for Barack Obama.  This is pretty much down to the hard-core leftists in America.  And 44% say they definitely will not vote for the Leader-from-behind.  That figure must include a fair amount of so-called "independents" that elections hinge on.

Now I can kind of understand voting for Obama in 2008.  He said he was going to cut the budget (lied) and he said he would do all sorts of wonderful things.  And he was the first black man to be nominated by one of the two major parties and you wouldn't want to be racist and not vote for him.  But now that he has down little that he said he would, and pretty much flushed the economy down the toilet, why would you vote for him unless you are a hard-core leftist who actually believes Keynesian economics works?

As I saw somewhere (Twitter?  Facebook?) "If you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you weren't a racist, vote against him in 2012 to prove you aren't an idiot."

Probably won't post again until Monday so Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah, everyone.

No Wonder They Wailed

After the death of Kim Jong Il, North Korea's "Dear Leader" (as the government called him) some videos went viral of North Koreans wailing in apparent anguish at the loss of their dictator.  Some people wondered about that.  I didn't.  Even if they hated Kim, they would wail for the cameras (and for anyone else) to avoid being sent to join the estimated 200,000 political prisoners in Kim's gulag.

Ira Stoll details just a few of the stories that have come out of the nightmare camps.  If you have a strong stomach go read them.  Women publicly executed for having handing out bibles.  Or for "Ideological Impurity."

North Korea is the most brutal regiem on the planet.  Oh, and we get word today that Jimmy Carter sent condolences.  To a mass murderer.

Until the day North Korea no longer exists (it's possible), this kind of repression will continue.