The View From the Sinister Side of Life
August 25th, 2008
I was anxious to hear Michelle speak tonight. I was concerned that not being a professional, she might not be too effective in communicating her message. Needless to say, those concerns have been soundly put to rest. She certainly put Nancy Pelosi to shame.
I wonder if we could have a debate between Cindy McCain and Michelle. That would be a very interesting experience.
Categories: General, Politics | 6 Comments
August 25th, 2008
Sebastian of Pro-Gun Progressive gets his panties all in a twist because Lewis Black — a vocal critic of gun rights — had some fun at the expense of gun rights on a comedy show. (Sample line: “I don’t have the energy to google up the location of a gym, let alone come to your house and wrestle your guns away.”) And it’s not like they went soft on PeTA while daring to go after the Sacred Church of the NRA. In any case, the “expert witness testimony” at 0:43 of the video below is funny, I don’t care who you are.
I mean, I knew that the real serious gun rights activists had a rifle stick up their collective ass, but when you can’t take being the brunt of a few jokes on a show that treats everything that way (and I do mean everything — they’ve lampooned everything from Tila Tequila to the Catholic Church), then I humbly (or, maybe not-so-humbly), that may suggest that it’s time for a nice warm glass of Get The Hell Over Yourself.
H/T: Say Uncle
(Full disclosure: I thought PeTA should have been declared the root of all evil, but that’s because I thought Tompkins was funnier.)
Categories: Bloggin, Media, Weekend Flame Bait | No Comments
August 25th, 2008
So its Biden. better pick than most. He is wrong about a lot of stuff, staring with the bankruptcy bill, but he is correct about a lot too, starting with things like FISA. I think I like this pick. Biden is too old to run for the office himself, so he doesn’t prevent a progressive voice from winning the nomination in 2012 that a younger centrist might have. He is better on most issues and is more competent than most of the other names floated, especially Bayh and Kaine. The press, bless their myopic little hearts, seem to love him so that might offset some of the media McCain worship that is already intolerable. And, most importantly, he is a funny, sarcastic guy perfectly willing, even eager, to play the bull dog role. Obama could have done better, but he certainly could have done worse.
Categories: General, Politics | 2 Comments
August 25th, 2008
It has officially jumped the shark. See if you can spot why!
Categories: I do too have a life | 18 Comments
August 25th, 2008
Nothing is lamer than when one of the “reasonable” conservatives tries to make a fact-based argument about politics. George Will tried it today and is now still wandering around the Science and Nature section of Barnes & Noble, gibbering like a loon.
Obama recently said that he would “require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term — more than double what we have now.” Note the verb “require” and the adjective “renewable.”
By 2012 he would “require” the economy’s huge energy sector to — here things become comic — supply half as much energy from renewable sources as already is being supplied by just one potentially renewable source. About 20 percent of America’s energy comes from nuclear energy produced using fuel rods, which, when spent, can be reprocessed into fresh fuel.
Uh, no, George. You know jack shit about nuclear energy, and your claim doesn’t even make sense on its face. “Renewable” energy doesn’t mean re-using unspent fuel - that’s just recycling. And you can’t reprocess “spent” fuel - it’s . . . “spent”.
It sounds to me like he’s confusing reprocessing partially spent fuel rods from ordinary reactors, and transmuting non-fissionables in “breeder” reactors. Breeder reactors are often described as “making more fuel than they use”, which is true in the sense that they output more fissionable material than is input to them. But doing that requires a steady input of non-fissionable material, usually low-enrichment uranium (but there are other designs). So you’ve still got to keep digging radioactive crap out of the ground and shoveling it in there to get any energy out. It would be more accurate to say they are non-renewable generators capable of using a wide range of fuels (by transmuting non-fissionable ones into fissionable ones). And they’re going to play exactly no role in energy production in the next four years: there are very few breeder reactors in the world today, and most of those are shut down or obsolete; breeders were banned in the US because they generate huge amounts of nuclear material requiring reprocessing, raising the danger of the diversion of plutonium from the output stream. There are ways to make it almost impossible to use that plutonium for nuclear weapons, but all of the fissionables are potential contamination sources for “dirty bombs”, which are much more likely to be a terrorist weapon that an actual fission bomb anyway.
Will might also want to take a look at the Department of Energy’s own Web site, which explicitly lists nuclear (and other non-renewable) energy sources in completely separate categories from “Renewables”, and does not list nuclear energy among its examples of renewable sources on the page for that category.
The rest of the column is equally dumb. He just wanders around yawping at whatever shiny bit of energy policy catches his attention. Spent fuel containment? George knows the way. Electric car industry growth by way of market incentives? That can’t work, because liberals believe in it. (Yes, he thinks that way.) And see here: Obama’s projected 1 million electric cars won’t have enough power because his proposed 80% carbon-emissions reduction would require a cap set at the level of “colonial days” due to the projected 11% population increase over the next 40+ years. (Wow. Science. It’s got numbers in it and everything. Never mind that he bounces from electric cars to population growth to carbon caps to colonial wood-burning stoves like a Labrador chasing a butterfly. It’s all so . . . real-seeming.) Is any of this true? It comes from the American Enterprise Institute by way of George Will, so the answer is almost undoubtedly “no”, but who cares? The whole point to carbon reduction is that we need to shift to other energy sources, not live like colonials. Is Will suggesting that, if we could find large amounts of renewable energy, we should still keep emitting greenhouse gasses anyway?
It doesn’t matter what he’s saying, because, in the very next paragraph, he’s off on (wait for it . . .) marginal tax rates for upper income levels. (Huh. What a shock.) He notes that Obama has remarked in passing that he didn’t want a 60% marginal tax rate, and then states that “Obama’s policies would bring it to the mid-50s for many Americans, close to the 60 percent Obama considers excessive.” And this means - what? That Obama has set his own tax policy to conform to his own beliefs about appropriate maximum levels? What else did Will expect? (Never mind. The paragraph did give him a chance to mention Ronald Reagan twice, which presumably was reward enough.)
Remember, this is the smart conservative.
Categories: Climate Change, Economics, Environment, General, Math, News & Current Events, Politics, Taxes, Technology | 31 Comments
