Predictable

Minnesota wind turbines won’t work in cold weather
(Besides when the wind is not blowing.)

You can just predict this kind of trouble from when you're behind a truck on the highway in cold weather, and you try your windshield washers. Nothing. Your windshield is so bad you can't even see your own hood ornament, but not the feeblest little squirt can be coaxed from those nozzles. When it's sunny and warm and you don't need them, they work fine.

There's something parallel in the demand that Obama show he can fix Medicare before he gets the go-ahead to launch a total overhaul of the entire health care system. How about our technological wizards first show they can develop windshield washers that work in cold weather, then we can talk about depending on wind and solar for our energy needs.

Revolutionary types like to disparage the American Revolution for being insufficiently revolutionary. More like a palace coup, they say, with rich American landowners taking over the reins from rich British merchants. Rights got extended eventually, but the process has been way too incremental and slow. The French Revolution is seen as the Real Thing, the Russian Revolution, also. Absolutely right, and the case in favor of incremental change can rest right there.

Byron

Left view of Obama

Conservative critiques of the Obama presidency are predictable enough. But what does the left think about him? The question might not even interest you, but if it does take a look at How to Squander the Presidency in One Year. It's by a left-liberal progressive college professor, and it ain't pretty: "Barack Obama has now, in just a year's time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime. Never has so much political advantage been pissed away so rapidly, and what's more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis. It's astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in a single year... It's almost as if he were a Republican sleeper politician in some party politics version of the Manchurian Candidate, planted to arise on cue and destroy the Democratic Party from within."

So, the question is: Who is still on board the ObamaBus? Anybody?

Byron

Green Jobs...

...for China!

Huge Texas Wind Farm's Turbines Will Be Made in China

Clean tech has seen a boost as the U.S. pours government funding into renewable energy, and China looks set to reap much of the benefits. Latest example: a Chinese wind-turbine company has just become the exclusive supplier for one of the largest wind-farm developments in the U.S...just 15 percent of the 2,800 new jobs from the new wind-turbine development will take the form of U.S. jobs. The U.S. government has tried to help the nation's renewable energy industry with $500 million in grants...

Let's see, 15% of 2,800 jobs is 420 U.S. jobs. Assuming all 2,800 jobs don't end up in China, that is. But why wouldn't they all end up in China?

The only way they won't all end up in China is if U.S. taxpayers hugely subsidize domestic manufacturers. (Probably be cheaper if that $500 million just went to unemployment benefits.)

Hmmm. Well, er, anyway -- Green jobs are the future of America!

Obamanomics at its finest.

Byron

Swedish Meatball

UN climate change expert: there could be more errors in report

The IPCC climate report was, it turns out, an error-filled mess. Yet this is the report that was given the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize! It was lauded for "two decades of scientific reports that have created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming." Create the data, create the consensus! And Al Gore was the 2007 co-winner for his movie about polar bears playing with hockey sticks or something.

Isn't it about time for the Swedish Academy to junk the Nobel Peace Prize, which long ago became an embarrassing, politicized joke? If they don't want to do that, how about having it go to the winner of "American Idol," for bringing the world together to watch contestants sing and dance? That has a sort of peaceful ring to it.

Byron

Why AA failed

http://airamerica.com/

It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.

Who will notice? I thought they were gone a long time ago. In fact, this is their second bankruptcy. The first time, in 2006, they were bailed out by George Soros, Rob Reiner, and others in a coalition of liberal fat cats. No such this time; I guess the welfare mentality has its limits, and those folks got tired of pouring their own money down this particular rat hole.

But that doesn't mean they wouldn't like to pour your good money after bad. Last year, the solution the left was peddling for its inability to attract an audience in the talk radio free market was, naturally, to destroy the free market. The demand was that Government (the FCC) step in and impose an ideological quota system.

This from Daily Kos, last August:

"We need to contact our news outlets, write letters to our papers, and challenge this false idea that there is no market for liberal talk. If we don't, the continuing domination of the airwaves by conservatives will continue to perpetuate the lie that no one wants to hear progressive talk. They are not serving their communities, as they are required to do under FCC law, by keeping out the left's point of view."

The plain truth, of course, is that the only barrier to "the left's point of view" attracting an audience is...the left's point of view. MSNBC's miserable TV ratings are another case in point, with their few viewers mostly tuning in to watch the low comedy of Keith Olbermann's freak-outs. The fact that NPR survives by virtue of an involuntary taxpayer subsidy is yet another example; give people a choice by making NPR support a tax return checkoff item and watch what happens. (In Britain, the thoroughly left-wing BBC survives because it's subsidized by taxes everybody with a TV set is forced to pay, which amount to about $200 per year for a color set. To find tax dodgers, authorities roam the neighborhoods in vans with detection devices, and being caught means heavy fines and possible jail time. The Left's ideal system of mass media is one where the masses pay to be propagandized. They've established exactly that system in every nation where they've managed to achieve political control.

Air America failed because it attracted no audience. It attracted no audience because the liberal mainstream media was already doing the job AA set out to do, and doing it much better. Conservative radio flourishes (as does Fox) because its audience is not served, but rather is scorned, by the mainstream media.

(For a typical example, yesterday on ABC's "Good Morning America," anchor and Liberal Democrat operative George Stephanopoulos came on to preview his interview with Obama to be shown later in the show. His promo was to say that, following the GOP win in Massachusetts, he had sat down with the President to ask him "how we go forward from here." We. With a mainstream media operates like that, what need is there for Air America? None at all.)

Byron

Convenient Out

How many Democrats in Congress, especially but not only in the House, privately hope Brown wins in MA so the ObamaCare bill goes back to the drawing boards for a do-over? (And, better yet, Martha Coakley takes the blame, for running such miserably bad campaign.)

If I had to bet, I'd say 30-40% of them. Who wants to try to get reelected with this stinking sardine can tied to his tail, banging along behind him at every campaign stop?

Byron

Head Start fails

Head Start Basically Has No Effect

Big definitive study, negative results, media silence.

We're talking here about a failed educational investment of over $100 billion, and it's not newsworthy.

As far as I know, Project Head Start has never been shown to produce lasting results, in any study, and there have been lots of those. The study reported above is the huge new one, and it finds the same failure.

Early childhood intervention was thought to be the key to boosting academic performance of poor and minority kids. Developmental psychologists had a number of theories, including some highly dubious ones, about why that should be so. None of those theories of has panned out.

What early enrichment programs appear to do, and all they appear to do, is to promote intellectual growth at an earlier age than it would otherwise occur. That's why kids in the program often show an initial boost in test scores. Measured against age-norms, earlier intellectual growth raises their percentile rankings, compared with kids not in the program.

But earlier growth does not increase eventual intellectual level, it merely alters the timing. As the other kids catch up, the initial advantage disappears. This has been called the "hothouse effect" -- you get the tomatoes earlier, but not any more tomatoes than you would have gotten eventually anyway.

Intellectual ability, at least as measured by IQ tests, is virtually certainly a product primarily of inherited, genetic differences. The potential of environmental enrichment to improve IQ scores in wealthy societies like ours is extremely limited, as we have discovered during decades of trying and failing.

But since basic academic skills can be taught in ways that do not require a high IQ, there is no excuse whatever for mass failure in our public schools, and that includes inner city systems where failure has become the accepted norm, and generations of kids are being dumped like garbage. That ongoing tragedy is a product of the power of bloated administrative bureaucracies and self-interested teachers unions to resist innovation, not a result of low IQ scores.

Byron

Buyer remorse

If the election were held today, Obama could count on only 23% of the vote. Last April 42% thought the country was moving in the wrong direction, today 55% think that. Incredibly, Democrats are having a very tough time and having to spend a lot of money to retain Teddy Kennedy's old Senate seat in Massachusetts.

As usual, the killer is the economy. It's become obvious that Obama badly fumbled the ball with his "stimulus" fiasco, and his only response is to compound the mistake. He's too ideologically hidebound to do anything else. It's the policies, not the man, and Obama's a Government Man right to his bone marrow. If Reagan had responded the same way to the mess Carter left behind, then Reagan would have ended up in the same place. But Reagan cut taxes, stimulated growth, and the result was a dramatic recovery to a strong economy with high levels of job growth that lasted for many years. The healthcare issue is also a net negative for Obama, and that's only partly about health; it's mostly due to well-grounded fears that ObamaCare will explode the deficit and further cripple any prospects for a durable economic recovery.

Byron

The Plan

Ed Morrissey at Hotair.com :

As part of his “hard pivot” towards jobs, Barack Obama announced last week a new program to stimulate “green jobs” with a $2.3 billion federal program. Mark Tapscott took a look at the particulars of the grants and checked with the Institute of Energy Research, which had already grabbed its calculator. The bill aims to create 17,000 jobs, mainly temporary, which means that we’ll spend over $135,000 per job in stimulus...

Please. The only "hard pivot" towards jobs in the Obama Plan is away from private-sector jobs and toward Government-funded jobs. It's all about expanding the public sector at the expense of the private sector. "Stimulus" has nothing to do with it, except to provide the opportunity and the excuse for socializing the work force.
Nirvana will be reached when the work force is made up entirely of unionized Government employees, who owe their jobs, pay, and benefits to the Democratic Party. Or to the Republican Party. It'll be all Government, all the time, no matter what label it hangs on itself.

Working for the Government is, by definition, working for the Common Good, while working in the private sector is working for selfish profit at the expense of your fellow citizens. In the Fair Society, everyone will be working for the Common Good, enabling each of us to receive according to our needs, from a Government that will decide what those needs are, and are not.

George Orwell, please call your office.

Byron

Wordsworth nailed it

William Wordsworth, the English poet, died in 1853, making it truly remarkable that he could have commented with such precision on the Obama Revolution. Actually, he was commenting on the French Revolution, which he witnessed first hand. He began as a strong supporter, describing himself as "inflamed with hope." Hope and Change!

O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, us who were strong in love!
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!

Later, Wordsworth saw it rather differently:

This was the time, when, all things tending fast
To depravation, speculative schemes --
That promised to abstract the hopes of Man
Out of his feelings, to be fixed thenceforth
For ever in a purer element --
Found ready welcome. Tempting region that
For Zeal to enter and refresh herself,
Where passions had the privilege to work,
And never hear the sound of their own names.

Dostoevsky quoted the second passage at the beginning of Crime and Punishment, his novel depicting the destructive effects of leftist ideological intoxication among the Russian intelligentsia of the 1860s. Of course, he couldn't foresee the eventual scale of that tragedy, any more than we can.

There is nothing new under the Sun. When "soft" liberalism doesn't deliver in hard economic times, you might expect a turn toward market solutions. Forget it. Always and everywhere, the Left thrives on crises. Obama is a man of the Left. His program is for a huge expansion and consolidation of Federal control over every area of our national and personal lives.

As always, dependency is the lever, so the trend in job losses and unemployment is key. Obama's "stimulus" program was never a serious effort to tackle the problem of unemployment? Of course it wasn't. A genuine job-creation program could not possibly spend so much money and create so few jobs; in its targets and methods, a genuine job-creation program would not even resemble what Obama put into operation. Now he's resisting a second "stimulus" effort. Well, yes, of course he is, because Congress would force that one to be the real thing.

Byron

No slam dunk?

Ed Morrissey at Hotair.com :

Nancy Pelosi’s caucus held a conference call yesterday to discuss the health-care overhaul bill that came out of the Senate, and it appears that House Democrats are in no mood to accept it. Ben Pershing reports in the Washington Post that the “Cadillac tax” has generated the most opposition, with only one House Democrat (Colorado’s Jared Polis) defending it. Driven mainly by union opposition, Pelosi’s caucus appears ready to revamp the bill again — which will create more openings for division...

Since fixing this means less revenue, any fix will have to raise taxes, co-pays, etc. for others (or further explode the deficit). Many of those others will be folks who know they are less well compensated than these union workers. The issue of union pay, perks, and job security is starting to gather steam, especially with respect to public employee unions and government workers generally compared with those in the private sector. The disparity during this recession has become somewhere between glaring and outrageous. The Dems may find another deep division developing within the working class that they claim to represent. (Marx dreamed of a homogeneous, unified proletariat, but it was only a dream, even then.)

If ObamaCare begins to be recognized for the zero-sum game it is -- and not just for Medicare recipients and doctors -- the whole project may collapse in a snarl of competing interests. Polls show that most people don't really want this massive program, but they will mostly remain supportive or neutral as long as they don't think it will cost them anything personally. Good luck with that. Good luck also with getting House members who have to run for re-election every two years to stiff arm their constituents. Presidents come and go, but if you play your cards right you can stay in Congress until you die of old age.

The Dems are in a big hurry to get this monstrosity passed and signed before one constituent group after another discovers that it can't work the way they've been led to believe. The political problem is that the primary beneficiary group is low income people, and they tend not to show up at election time; Medicare recipients, on the other hand, will push their walkers through sleet and hail to take revenge for lost benefits. Choices, choices. Stuff like this is why it's so much harder to govern than it is to take cheap shots from the sidelines, and why when either party gets into power it tends to be of short duration.

Byron

Air travel security a joke

Our airline security system is a preposterous joke, the entire effort fundamentally unserious. In contrast, consider data security over the Internet, for example with credit card numbers, bank transactions, stock trading, and all the rest, and including the data systems used by our armed forces and security agencies. Those systems are surprisingly secure, and why is that?

It's because there are armies of hackers, free-lance or employed by other governments, all over the world who spend their time testing and probing those data storage and transmission systems for holes and weaknesses to exploit. When they find one, a bunch of credit cards, for example, get compromised, everybody suffers the hassle, but the security defect gets fixed. A good argument can be made that we have hackers and their constant testing and probing to thank for the soundness of computer data systems, including for example that a US missile barrage does not get criminally launched with the White House as its target.

So where is the testing of the airline security system? Do we really want terrorists doing that job, so a security breach may cost hundreds of lives, because we only react in a flailing panic after the fact? If we don't want that, then obviously we need some independent outfit that is tasked with constantly trying to crack the system as it exists, to find and expose holes and weaknesses before the terrorists do. Emphasis on independent outfit, independent in the same way that financial auditors are independent of the firm they audit, or hackers are independent of the targets they seek to compromise.

Any model that involves hints, heads-ups, and pre-warnings of impending tests is not even worth bothering with. The effort has to be constant, unrelenting, and fundamentally adversarial. Get hired onto an airline cleaning crew or food service and see how hard it is to smuggle binary explosives onto an airliner; put mock devices in baggage and see how hard it is to get by the screeners; forge or computer-hack documents and see how hard it is to get a seat on a US-bound flight; and so on and on and on. Constant, unrelenting, adversarial testing and probing of the system to find its weaknesses so those can be fixed before the terrorists find them.

The mutual-CYA ethic that prevails in Washington probably makes that impossible, so we will continue to have the lax and disorganized joke that passes for our air travel security system, with the real-time testing done by terrorists. Our bureaucrats would rather have hundreds of American citizens die than that they might fail the testing and be made to look bad. There is no other plausible explanation for why what I describe here has not been implemented long before now. What we have instead amounts to a prescription for planes being blown out of the sky, the only question being when, not whether.

In The Joke's On Us, Mark Steyn examines other aspects of this long-running farce.

Byron