Nixon without the decency

Bill Clinton is again trying to rewrite history - this time about Somalia.

That force asked for heavy armor--in the form of Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles--as well as the AC-130 gunship, but the Clinton Administration denied those requests. On October 3 on a mission to pick up Aidid, two Black Hawks were unexpectedly shot down; in the ensuing urban gun battle, 18 American soldiers were killed and another 73 injured.

Many military experts believe that if the U.S. forces had had armor, fewer would have died. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin resigned two months after Somalia, having acknowledged that his decision on the armor had been an error. A 1994 Senate Armed Services Committee investigation reached the same conclusion. But perhaps the most poignant statement came from retired Lieutenant Colonel Larry Joyce, father of Sergeant Casey Joyce, a Ranger killed in Mogadishu: "Had there been armor . . . I contend that my son would probably be alive today."

But Bill Clinton was Commander in Chief and had to make weighty decisions. Among a CinC's responsibilities is to decide what to hold in reserve - who could know where armor might be needed next? For instance, how about here?

An honest mistake...

One of several strange items from here

Woman Mistakenly Adjusts Wrong Man's 'Package'

From the NORTHWEST FLORIDA Daily News comes this story of a Crestview couple who drove their car to Walmart only to have their car break down in the parking lot. The man told his wife to carry on with the shopping while he fixed the car there in the lot.

The wife returned later to see a small group of people near the car. On closer inspection she saw a pair of male legs protruding from under the chassis. Although the man was in shorts, his lack of underpants turned private parts into glaringly public ones.

Unable to stand the embarrassment she dutifully stepped forward, quickly put her hand UP his shorts and tucked everything back into place. On regaining her feet she looked across the hood and found herself staring at her husband who was standing idly by.

The mechanic, however, had to have three stitches in his head.

Strange crime

Right here.

Read at your own risk

Look here and check out the list of disclaimers on the lower right side of the page. Do you think he left anything out?

Photoshop contest

Ya gotta see this. It's too late to vote, but the right one won.

Interesting environmental sites

Once in a while I find a decent environmental technology resource that has a high practicality to politics ratio. This one, Journeytoforever.org, is about the best I've ever seen.

And through them I found developmentbookshop.com. Here you'll find references for simple practical technologies that you could put to work on your farm or in the most godforsaken Third World countries. They're based in the UK, so prices are in pounds and delivery will take some time.

If those packs of elitist jerks like the Sierra Club or joyriding adolescents like Greenpox were worth the powder it would take to blow them up, this is what they'd be promoting.

God - the evidence

Donald Sensing doesn't have a comments section on his blog, but I do. So I'll point to three interesting posts of his:
God - the evidence
Scientism is not science, it is faith in science
Some feedback on God and creation

Charles Ponzi's big mistake

Silly guy, didn't he know that only Congressmen can create financial schemes like that?

Now we get to see Congressmen preaching fiscal responsibility to businesses. It's enough to cause projectile vomiting. Link via Todd LaClair.

Fuel cells - future?

You can't have fuel cells without fuel. Producing, storing and transporting those will be severe bottlenecks, particularly with hydrogen, even if the price is right.

I don't think this is the answer. If it is, don't we look silly - the answer was behind us all along.

On a more serious note, I'm keeping an eye on biotechnology for this problem. Yo, Gene Expression crew - it's time you guys whipped us up a germ that'll excrete hydrogen...

Even if they did so, there's still the question of where all the hydrogen is going to come from. Yeah, we have plenty of water, but it's not easy to get the hydrogen from that. Making it from fossil fuels is possible, but there are probably better alternative uses for those.

I'm not sure what's the next most prevalent, but off the top of my head I suspect it's animal and vegetable fats. This sounds like something a Greg Hlatky would know about. We hydrogenate fats all the time - can we dehydrogenate them and make it worth our while?

Fuel cells...

I went looking for new info on fuel cells and spotted this. Then I read it. Ugh.

Maybe the errors don't matter to most people, but it was still pretty bad. The most innocent one was a sentence that said "Fuel cells produce electricity through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen", Some fuel cells do, but the technology can be applied with other fuels too. H₂ is attractive because the emissions are nothing but water. It's not a real big deal, but it's misleading.

Then came this:

The automaker wants to tap the lucrative "premium power" market, such as data communications companies and hospitals that are willing to pay as much as $1,000 per kilowatt hour for reliable power.

Such power is interrupted an average of just more than three seconds a year, compared with an average of 8.76 hours a year for electricity provided to most residential and commercial customers who pay $1 a kilowatt hour.

That's premium power alright. A dime per kWH is about right, which is a tenth of the lower number they cited. Sheesh, at $1000/kWh I'd quit my day job, buy a treadmill and start generating power myself.

But there was something to be salvaged from the article - most people probably wouldn't remember the numbers anyway. It's good to see some progress, even if this isn't likely to pay off for a while.

Shut up, Al

Remember the 2000 election with Al Gore on the cover of the Rolling Stone? We heard all this fuss about his "package". They were on the right track.

Now Gore says as a result of President Bush's economic policies, "What has been put at risk is nothing less than the future of democratic capitalism."

To which I can only say, "What an ass!"

Too cynical?

One of Lily Tomlin's better quotes is "No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.".

Back in the 80's we saw televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker go down in flames. Bakker in particular, with his overpainted wife Tammy Faye and his PTL Club, got in trouble for financial shenanigans. (Nominally "PTL" stood for "Praise the Lord", but a popular alternative was "Pass the Loot").

Steven Den Beste notes that Bill Clinton's misadventures with Afghanistan turned out to have strengthened al-Qaeda. Hmm.

We've heard all sorts of explanations for the attacks by al-Qaeda, in terms of religion, culture, etc. But maybe we're not cynical enough. What if it's all about some mullahs and their fundraising?

Prison rape

I'm not a journalist, and I'm about to present proof in case there was any doubt. But it so happens that I'm from a small town that happens to house a maximum security prison and a hospital, and I know any number of people who have or do work there, as nurses, guards and others.

After Spoons' post noted below, I got morbidly curious because I didn't recall ever hearing anything about prison rape from the local prison. This could be because it was unheard of, or because it was so commonplace that it wasn't remarkable. I thought I'd find out.

Have you ever cold-called someone and asked them about prison rape? That poor woman is probably still creeped out. You see, I called the local hospital and asked if they ever got inmates delivered there for uh, reconstructive surgery after such an event (I had heard that they had). The woman at the emergency room stood up well under the coyly phrased questions and noted that they didn't see much if any of that or other prison-related injury. She also noted that the prison had its own health facilities. She was amazingly game, but she clearly wanted off the phone, and it was an emergency room after all. Remind me to work on my interviewing.

Next stop - call some people I knew from town about the topic, whether for scuttlebutt or direct news. Nobody recalled ever hearing anything about such events, in a town with plenty of prison guards who hang out in local bars. Hmm, interesting.

Next - call a person who I know very well, who had worked in nursing at the prison, who no longer works there, and who has no reason to shade the truth. How often was prison rape seen? She didn't recall any that required the attention of her staff, over a three year period. She noted that prison sex was against the rules, so there was an incentive to cry rape. And over her tenure, they had only seen two instances of medical conditions that implied inmate-inmate sex of any kind.

OTOH inmates were ingenious at getting it on with visitors. Wearing big coats provided cover for someone else within. They could gather around picnic tables as a screen while taking turns screwing beneath. I've heard that woman prisoners have managed to get pregnant while serving time, and not by the guards either, but I can't find a link as this is written.

Caveats about the above: obviously it's anecdotal. The prison in question is maximum security, so inmates are more constrained in their movements than they are at other facilities. And different states do things differently. But we have to start somewhere, and you're getting every bit of what you pay for.

Here is what Human Rights Watch has to say. The short answer is that they don't know, and attempts to answer are all over the map. Extrapolations are treacherous because practices vary from state to state.

And HRW is biased, as evidence by this: "Unsurprisingly, when corrections officials are asked about the prevalence of rape in their prisons, they claim it is a exceptional occurrence rather than a systemic problem." Why is this unsurprising? Obviously they presume that corrections officials would lie about this. Certainly they might, but then so might the prisoners and advocates who provide the more spectacular numbers.

My personal conclusion is that activists are magnifying a problem, as usual. Prisoners and lawyers are always looking for grounds for lawsuits. And I don't hear the activists proposing sanctions against the prisoners who are doing this - it's always the prison that needs to change.

Not bad for a Steeler fan

Let's get rid of some federal bureaucrats - John Cole can discern unemployment levels all by himself.

Electric car-b-q

Greg Hlatky has the story

Dittos

To help Hillary answer the question of where the corporate corruption came from truthfully, I submit the following minimum competency test:
1. Who was in the White House when Enron and Citigroup, with the help of former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were concealing billions in bad debt from investors, the public and the government?

2. Who was in the White House when Adelphia and Global Crossing were making insiders like DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe rich, and concealed the bad debt from investors, the public and the government?

3. Who was in the White House when the stock market began to tank, reducing all those 401-K accounts?

It goes on for 14 more.

He just won't go away

If Bill Clinton won't go away, then he still deserves a good cussing. And this should continue until his last defender curls up and dies of shame. The only question is where to start.

Now suppose you're in the White House surrounded at every turn. Your finances are subjected to downright proctological examination. You're living high at govt expense, so you really don't need to spend any of your own money anyway. You're known as an enthusiastic drug user who would screw a snake in a sandstorm, and you're married to a woman who couldn't get laid on Death Row with a pardon in each hand. You can and will reduce White House security and background checking as needed to let in anyone you want. Under these circumstances, what would be the best things for influence peddlers to offer you?

Sex and drugs of course. There's no audit trail except possibly in your medical records, and you don't have to release those. It doesn't take long to use the drugs, so you're not likely to be caught in the act, and who's going to give you a drug test? You can always claim that the sex was other than commercial, and you're not pro-choice for nothing. And with a quick BJ you don't even have to hang up the phone. "Sorry Yassir, the Jews lined me up with this chubby chick, but you can have this cigar".

It's not as if using sex and drugs for bribery is unprecedented. And don't forget extortion too, whether in cash or espionage. Good grief, the guy had the entire federal investigation apparatus at his command, and he wasn't squeamish about using it - if he just couldn't contain himself, couldn't he have shown a bit of discretion and at least screen them a little?

He must have had a bad day.

First read this. Then read this. Are we talking about the same article?

I'm not in favor of rape, in prison or elsewhere. But PJ's article didn't even mention sex, much less rape.

And my bet is that anybody raped in a prison is guilty of worse than writing a column somebody doesn't like.

Raise consciousness about prison rape if you want. But this is far over the top. What now, is he going to wish anal rape on me too?

For all your evil needs

If Andrea Harris is intent on world domination, this must be where she shops. From TOVBlog

The Ames test, toxicity and you

Derek Lowe is always terrific, but now he has a couple of posts on the Ames test too.

As DL puts it, the Ames test is used "as a measure of carcinogenicity and other Bad Things". He goes on to discuss details and the interpretation of the results, and the unnatural distinction some would have us make between "natural" and "unnatural" compounds.

Something else you need

How about a Shoulder Saddle? It's just the thing for carrying little kids on your shoulders. This page shows the Shoulder Saddle and a bunch of other goofy inventions.

I could have used one once. Back in high school some relatives were small and I would give them and their friends rides on my shoulders. Unfortunately one of the kids had ringworm on the inside of her thigh, and it rubbed on my neck. Someone asked me how I got ringworm on my neck and I innocently told them. I have some warped friends.

Get rich quick

They're offering distributorships for Bumper Dumpers

Horsepower, or is there work after death?

There's no point in beating a dead horse, but that doesn't mean you can't get any more work out of him.

In animated cartoons, the way to make a horse run faster was always to give him a whiff of some glue. I learned that as a little kid, but I didn't know what it meant. And if I didn't know right now, that would be alright too, because it's not the most pleasant topic. Yes, I'm talking about rendering plants, where dead animals and other waste get recycled into glue, gelatin, food supplements, pet food, bone meal, cosmetics and others.

This tells more about them and their processes than you might care to know, including the possible connection with mad-cow disease.

So why do I bring this up? Actually I was looking for waste-to-energy information, and I figured that rendering plants might be good candidates for this. They use a fair amount of energy to cook their ingredients, and their byproducts would include fats that could be turned into biofuels. These can be used to drive a diesel generator, which can provide power to run pumps, conveyors and lighting loads.

But we're not through yet. The engine heat can be used to preheat the water used for processing, and the exhaust heat might be usable too if only for a turbocharger. Using the energy in this way is called cogeneration, and by using it your energy input will give you more output horsepower.

If you want to do it you'll have to pony up some money though - this increases capital costs significantly. The heating and electrical power output of the diesels might not match the requirements of the rest of your process, and you might need special auxiliaries either for startup or for backup. Personnel will need more training, maintenance people will have to learn new tricks and the viability of the whole works depends strongly on the cost of alternatives like electric power and diesel fuel.

But you don't know until you analyze it. Given that a successful implementation could lower costs substantially, it might be that anyone using a cogen system in this application considers it a trade secret and won't talk about it.

The Anna Nicole Smith Show!

How'd you like to be first on your block to get a personal message from Anna Nicole Smith?

Go see E! Television next Sunday for the premiere of her show.

They promise no educational value, but you probably already suspected that. Unless, as the teasers showed us, you've never seen a small dog humping a teddy bear.

What, you haven't heard of Anna Nicole Smith?

The "natural inferiority" of women

Hey, it's a book title. Written by a woman, too - Tama Starr. She subtitled it "Outrageous Pronouncements by Misguided Males", but I won't hold that against her. What could be wrong with a book whose title was taken from a quote by the Marquis de Sade?

It has some great quotes:

People ask me how many children I have and I say one boy and seven mistakes - Muhammad Ali

What do women need money for? - Mick Jagger

The only way to resolve a situation with a girl is to jump on her, and things will work out. - Lee Marvin

There's marital guidance too:

A bride received into the home is like a horse that you have just bought: you break her in by constantly mounting her and by continually beating her - Chinese proverb

That's one of the tamer ones.

She was doing so well, but then she went and fouled it all up by writing Eve's Revenge - Saints, Sinners and Stand-up Sisters on the Ultimate Extinction of Men, in which she offers slurs like the following:

What do you call that useless flap of skin at the end of a penis?

Where do you find a man who's committed?

Women who want to be equal to men lack imagination - Timothy Leary

So it looks like she just can't make up her mind. Isn't that just like a woman....

The latter book was published in 1993, too early to include one of my favorites, from here(some graphics might not be appropriate for work):

Men are like linoleum. If you lay them right the first time, you can walk on them for 20 years. - Brett Butler

Note: the preceding post is for entertainment purposes only, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial position of No Watermelons Allowed. Yes dear, I'm coming...

Marketing of professionals

So doctors don't like to see pharma firms spending money on marketing. Too bad.

In my experience, besides a line or two in the phone directories, doctors usually don't market themselves.

Unless of course they do vanity work. And I suspect that of all the medical fields, those practitioners are the ones least respected by the other fields. They oughtta be working gratis on deformed children instead of mounting Revision 3 of Pamela Anderson's boobs.

So, frankly, just what do physicians as a group know about marketing?

I do know that I've received free meds before. This makes the doctor look like a good guy. But where did he get them from? Uh-huh, by those pharma companies' marketing organizations.

Some years back lawyers weren't allowed to advertise either. When this was being discussed I was in grade school, and to my unsophisticated brain it seemed unfair if they couldn't advertise - what could be wrong with that?

Plenty. Strangely enough, if you promote something, you'll get more of it. And now we have ambulance chasers on the back of phone books, on TV ads, running full page ads in newspapers, you name it.

And look at what has happened to our legal system.

So tell me again who it is who shouldn't be spending money on marketing.

Who, me?

Here I am working in the dead of the night grinding out a few terabytes of data. Nobody's around, so I'm sitting here brushing my teeth.

You have to be in a bathroom to brush your teeth? Obviously you've never lived with a bunch of people and a common bathroom. I've heard people say that you aren't supposed to swallow toothpaste so I usually head for the bathroom (more details available upon request). Anyway, I'm brushing away as I decide to check the hit counter.

What do you know? Google sent me somebody who wanted to know "how to give a good blowjob". This isn't funny, Jody.

I retrieved my toothbrush and went to the bathroom to wash my mouth out a bit more thoroughly than usual. I wish the toothpaste had been another color. At least it wasn't a gel.

Let me state clearly for the record that any expertise I possess in this area is limited to providing feedback, seeing a smutty movie or two, and reading stuff like this.

Alright, so I dance a little and I watched something about Liza Minnelli the other day. But that's it.

Marry Theresa!

She's still trying. I haven't been through Nashville since the billboard went up, so I don't know if it's still there or not. Anyway, she's writing of her travails and some of the losers she's met on her site, which is bloglike in part.

She has a few things to tell us men. So does Moxie. And Uncle Dever.

Dissent?

Diana E. likes "dissent", speaking as if it's a virtue rather than mere sanctified bitching.

Well, it would scare me if everyone had the same opinions. But this, comrade, is no accident. Diana E. doesn't like the Bush administration.

OK, I have my differences too. But what does she cite? President Bush's association with Harken Energy and Dick Cheney's business past.

As she notes, there's nothing wrong with questioning these things per se. But there is something wrong with pursuing it long after a reasonable person would have dropped it.

Take Harken for example. This was well before the 2000 election and Bush had dealt with it before. So why is it coming up again, and why doesn't it go away? And if there was anything to it, why didn't the supposedly smart Al Gore use it in 2000?

Perhaps it was an oversight, but she didn't mention anything about the worthiness of an investigation of a former Clinton official like Robert Rubin.

It might have helped us decide whether her positions were "dissent", or mere partisan politics.

The singing blogger

First I saw Meryl Yourish with this, setting a plea for links to "Frere Jacques". Then somewhere on A1A we find this, set to "Matchmaker Matchmaker". Now MY is linking to this from The Bar Code King, set to Loudon Wainwright III's immortal "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road".

Keep trying folks, but you'll never top this one - "Green Haze" by Elvis Hitler. It's the lyrics from the theme from "Green Acres" set to the music of "Purple Haze".

Whatever happened to Katie Beers?

By now we've all heard about Erica, the 7 year old girl from Philadelphia who escaped some creeps.

That reminded me of the Katie Beers story from 1993. She was locked in a basement in Long Island for 17 days before being released.

She'd be around 20 by now. I didn't find anything recent in Google. Whatever happened to her?

Gray Davis vs. Reality

Steven Den Beste on Gray Davis' energy pipe dreams.

Off the Blogspot

Charles Kuffner has moved to http://offthekuff.com/mt/ and onto Movable Type, and he gives info on how you can make it happen yourself.

I'll be following him one of these days - the host and domain have been in place for some time now, but I'm still jacking around with it. I might even change the name of the blog.

Hamas Leader Killed in Gaza Strike.

Let's see if this martyrdom thing catches on with management. It's better this way - they don't need any of those expensive explosive belts and they can do it without even leaving home.

She did ask...

Thanks to Instapundit I found Laura Crane's blog. It's an interesting mix of environmental issues, risk, and other topics I have had every intention of writing more about on this blog. Definitely worth a visit if not a bookmark.

Here's one of the "other topics". It's not representative of most of the content, but she did bring it up - what with that prickly exterior, how do hedgehogs mate?

I can't speak for the hedgehogs (and probably shouldn't for the humans either), but this is what the porcupines do.

While we're on the subject, this might be a conversation starter.

Am I missing something?

In general I think the answer is 'yes', but I have something specific in mind.

I always figured I was as horny as anybody, but then that's hard to believe sometimes. After all, I'm not willing to go as far as some of the crazies I've seen. Examples include PeeWee Herman, George Michael, Hugh Grant, and of course Bill Clinton. (I couldn't think of any women for this, besides maybe Monica Lewinski. Any suggestions? How about phone numbers?)

If I were looking for a description of an orgasm, I'd probably check with Dawn Olsen or Shell. Barroom sages have assured me that "if God made anything better than [orgasms] He kept it for Himself." If I were writing about it, I'd probably write something like "a brief intense localized sensation that's difficult to improve upon".

But can it be? Is it really better for others? Or are they just too obsessed to keep things under control?

I suppose it's plausible that some people get more out of sex physiologically than others. After all, some people see better, hear better, etc - why not this too?

Any better ideas?

Glenn Reynolds is not happy with Tom Ridge. Fair enough, I respect Glenn's judgment.

But what I don't seem to be seeing anywhere are constructive alternatives to Ridge's proposals. Whatever his talents, I don't envy the guy his job. No matter what he does, somebody is going to shout "Fascist!" or invoke Orwell. Even the "Homeland Security" name rubs some people the wrong way.

So what should Ridge (or his successor) be doing?

St. Lous Blog Bash II this Friday

Don't forget the latest St. Louis Blog Bash! That I will be there is by itself an experience most can only dream about in their lamest fantasies. You'll also get to see cats like emcee Juan Gato, and we couldn't do without our Sine Qua Non Pundit Charles Austin (no excuses). Others are supposed to be there too - I just can't think of any bad lines to introduce them with. There's no word on whether we'll be seeing Richard Cohen.

Anyway, check out Gato's site for the particulars, then check us out next Friday night. See you there!

The Safety Valve has moved

To here. It's a must-see.

David Horowitz has a blog

Right here.

What would you get if you crossed him with Ann Coulter?

Bloggers beware

Apparently some creep is abusing a list of blogger email addresses. I was about to send a warning to someone that they had sent me the Klez "sucker" email when I looked and saw someone had sent me email saying I had sent them something. What they have in common is that I hadn't previously exchanged email with either.

You won't get any legitimate email from the email address I currently have posted on this blog, so if you receive any from it, you can delete it immediately. Meanwhile I'll be setting up a new email address and posting it shortly.

Practical biology

Biology is useful, but that pathetic subset of it taught in American secondary schools is beneath inadequate. Mitochondria, ATP, meiosis...when was the last time any of you non-biologists ever had anything to say about any of these?

Fortunately I'm here to address the shortcomings. For instance, the Possum recounts the roadkill from a recent outing, referring to "furry meat pies". This must have been frustrating as he identified other species more explicitly. Obviously he could have used this book. Or, if he happened upon them soon enough, this one.

Let us not neglect the insects: for this we have "That Gunk on Your Car". The Amazon page for this says "Fascinated by the critters he found stuck to his car at the end of a road trip, zoologist Mark Hostetler started looking into just what ends up on your windshield and why. From the common mole cricket to the dog-day cicada, this scientifically sound and charmingly written book makes an amusing and educational addition to any offbeat nature list."

Of course there are non-corporeal leavings, for which we have this.

Some of us are homebound for whatever reason, but that's no excuse for ignorance of practical biology. For those itching to learn more, we have "Furtive Fauna". An Amazon blurb offers this: 'The author of the popular, offbeat book Flattened Fauna returns with a look at such fascinating fellows as the eyebrow mite and to tooth amoeba, not to mention the dreaded tropical chigoe, which can lay thousands of eggs in places you'd really rather not think about.'

We're not through yet. There's also "Fearsome Fauna", about the critters that live in you. An Amazon blurb: 'Fearsome Fauna is a wickedly amusing and startlingly informative look into the secret world of these parasites. From their lowly beginnings ("Life for a young hookworm begins in a pile of dung and for most of them it goes downhill from there") to their physical appearance ("In a contest for first prize ugly, tapeworms at any stage of their development would win hands down, if they had hands") and sexual practices ("many internal parasites are hermaphroditic; probably a good choice considering the difficulty of finding a mate in the bewildering darkness of our interior") author Roger Knutson tells you everything you always wanted to know about parasites but were too digusted or terrified to ask'.

Incidentally, don't forget that with Amazon and just one click, you can add any of the above to a wedding registry.

Politically correct trash talk

I was wandering through a bookstore and found a book called "In These Girls, Hope Is A Muscle". It's about a girl's high school basketball team from Amherst, MA that suffered repeated frustrations in the postseason. And they had to have been good - they had Jamila Wideman, who starred at Stanford on some excellent teams and played in the WNBA too.

Anyway, I read a few pages in. Amherst is a college town, which of course means political correctness of all stripes runs amok. Which caused some problems for the basketball team - what could they say for trash talk?

The coach came up with several examples: "I'm going to meet you outside the game and refuse to mediate". "You ignore your inner child". And the coup de gras - "So's your co-parent".

This just begs for a contest. Who can come up with the best PC trash talk?

Yes, I'm still alive

Life just got a little too busy there for a while, but I'm back for the time being. Everybody must have been worried. Right?...

Glenn Reynolds tells us that Daniel Taylor of Dreaded Purple Master had a heart attack. He's hospitalized and a full recovery is expected. Hang in there, bud.

For a good cause

I'm trying to assemble a list of songs involving dancing, preferably involving incompetence. Examples I thought of were "Your Mama Don't Dance" by Loggins and Messina, or "Long Tall Glasses" by Leo Sayer ("you know I can't dance, you know I can't dance..."). Any suggestions?

Carbon tax?

I started to address Doug Turnbull's comment on a previous item here, but it got too large (imagine that). So I'll expand on it here. What inspired me was his mention of a carbon tax.

What usually happens when electricity, gasoline, natural gas or other prices rise? The lefties start bitching about cartels, capitalism, exploitation...the same tired BS we've been hearing for years.

Yet they would have us use less of these commodities to minimize our impact on the environment. How to do this? Allocation via rationing or by prices.

Nobody likes rationing, and lefties don't like it in particular because then the govt gets the blame it so richly deserves. So it'll have to be price increases.

Forget the ideology - what needs to be done to reduce pollution? That's too big a topic - what needs to be done to reduce pollution resulting from electric power consumption, or at least to assure that the consumers bear the costs of the environmental impacts of their consumption? And how do we make sure that each watt consumed has the minimum practical impact on the environment?

Reducing the pollution per watt requires capital investment. Reducing the consumption requires increasing prices. Voila - we let electric power prices rise to reflect these costs, using existing regulatory bodies and local pollution standards. An added bonus is that every dime spent on the increased power costs goes back into the industry for further investment and development.

The left can't stand this - it's too simple, too decentralized, and they have too many groups to pander to. Wearing their pro-labor mask, they support coal miners. In the pro-environment mask, they support higher prices on power. In their coal-black hearts, they support more govt power, higher taxes and lower revenues to "capitalists", while trying to deflect the blame to "capitalists". So how do they reconcile these?

A carbon tax! You can still mine the coal. The prices will rise to reduce consumption, furthering green goals. The govt gets more regulatory power and revenue. And because the charges show up on your utility bills, the "capitalists" look like the bad guys.

Who's left out here? The guys who generate the power and have to make the capital improvements to reduce pollution per unit of power. Well, to quote an old Communist sympathizer, to make an omelet you have to break some eggs.

Oh, the generators will be thrown a bone - maybe they'll be able to apply for some grants to install newer technology. That will give the govt still more power, and the left will bitch about it as "corporate welfare". Congress will turn it into a pork program, channelling available funds to their pet utilities. And just as gasoline taxes do more than just maintain our highways, some of this revenue will be redirected far from the power industry.

So there are your choices for simultaneously reducing power consumption and pollution per unit of consumption. You can set standards for the environment and leave utilities free to meet them, and leave existing regulators to keep resulting price increases in line. Or you can set up still another complex bloated govt bureaucracy to redistribute money from your utility bill to pork projects and unrelated govt expenditures while furthering socialization of the power industry. It sounds like a simple choice to me.

What can the left do to help? They can quit yapping about every energy cost increase that doesn't go straight into the govt's pocket.

It sounds easy. But they won't do it. Because given a choice between environmentalism and bigger govt, they'll sell out the environment every time.

Great moments in Ebay

Whoops

Wind power - still not profitable

Wind power is a favorite of green groups because it's renewable and nonpolluting. And in the right applications it's very useful. But when alternatives are readily available, usually the cost of wind power is not competitive.

Some countries are associated with wind power initiatives, such as the Netherlands. Denmark has also been particularly active with wind power - several major wind turbine manufacturers are based there and Danes have subsidized wind power for years.

But they still can't make it pay, according to this item from Tech Central Station. Here's my favorite quote from it:

Just as a footnote to all this, I looked up data on Danish electricity at America's Energy Information Administration website. Almost all Danish electricity, other than the small part deriving from wind, comes from that notoriously environmentally green source -- coal. So the Danes produce more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than the supposedly environmentally-hostile Americans, where only about 55% of electricity comes from coal.

Actually Americans have been using windpower for a long time too. Old Aermotor wind-driven pumps were a common site on isolated farms going back to the 1880's and are still around now. They are good for tasks like pumping water for livestock in isolated areas where steady energy delivery is not essential.

Green activists love to point out that the "true costs" of coal burning and other "non-renewable" power sources are not recognized on our utility bills, and they say that if those costs were recognized that windpower would be cost-competitive.

OK, suppose they're right. Then let them talk the public into paying more for electricity so these costs can be paid. Why don't the greens do this?

Because they're watermelons - they're green on the outside and red on the inside. They're more interested in big govt programs, more regulation, more taxes, and demonization of opponents than they are in real practical solutions to their alleged concerns. And they can't raise money without raising issues, so the bitching will never stop.

Incidentally, I'm a mechanical engineer. Energy is my business, and I can make money off it no matter how we generate it or distribute it. Wind power in particular offers the prospect of all sorts of design, operations, maintenance and other consulting business. Paying more for power is a small price for me to pay - I'll make it back many times over from the rest of you. So all of my personal financial incentives are in favor of wind power.

No, Virginia

I'm a Virginia Postrel fan. She was one of the few Day 1 links on this blog, I have subscribed to Reason over her term, and I've had a copy of "The Future And Its Enemies" from the day it landed on the shelves at the local bookstore.

But on stem cell research she's lost it. We can argue about whether embryonic stem cell research ought to be banned or not. What is unmistakably wrong is that Virginia Postrel's opponents are "criminalizing science" or are supporting "prison terms for biologists".

Unless we are to assume that she believes that anything a biologist might want to do for research is legal and ethical. Which puts her in some select company - do I have to mention who?

I expect better than that from her.

UPDATE: Gary Farber attempts to teach me how to parse English. The post I was referring to was "Ban Stalls", currently at the bottom of her site (her permalinks don't work). I responded on GF's site.

Two story outhouses

I found this looking for something else. Honest.

Worldcom

This article is worth reading before continuing.

What inspires this is Glenn Reynolds' post of an email suggesting that WorldCom was a "stupid company", in part by growing by acquiring "lousy companies".

IMO the only "lousy company" they acquired was MCI. Among other things, MCI's billing problems were incredible, and my sources have told me that there have been times when MCI had buildings full of people calculating bills using Excel. Even without such nonsense, billing costs money, and penny-ante customers are losers for the long-distance companies. (Notice the pricing plans - the phone companies are pushing for largely fixed bills guaranteeing them a minimum amount, and most of us can avoid usage-sensitive charges.) What MCI had that WorldCom wanted was lots of Internet backbone.

Former CEO Bernie Ebbers was able to acquire all those companies primarily with stock. So it was imperative that he keep the stock price high by any means necessary. I heard stories of salary cuts without warning so Bernie could make his numbers. And as long as he did make them, the stock stayed high enough to keep the acquisitions coming.

Of course you don't keep stock prices high by losing money, as WorldCom's books would have shown had their costs been accounted for properly. There must have been tremendous pressure on the CFO to do something to keep the price up. We see what he came up with, and there's no possibility of "mistake". Whether Bernie knew what was going on or not remains to be determined.

The CFO for sure violated the law and investors' trust. But isn't it amazing that something that happened in the back room (not operations) would cause such a change in the stock price so far removed from the time of the offense?

WorldCom has substantial hard assets that would be valuable to healthier competitors, and it might be a ripe target for a foreign telecom firm to take over. I haven't looked at annual reports, but it's hard to believe that WorldCom doesn't have more than enough assets to cover recent quarter per share prices.

It will be interesting to watch the current CEO, John Sidgmore, as he deals with his situation. Laying off 17,000 will surely lower costs, and it's a backdoor way of running off unprofitable customers via poor customer service.

They won't be funding any acquisitions with stock for a while, and the bad PR may sink them. But if they can keep their business customers, the ones they wanted all along, we might yet see them recover.

If they don't recover, well, keep an eye on AT&T for the next couple of years...

If you're considering changing your telecom provider, take a look at One Star Communications of Evansville, IN. They are a small privately held firm that offers a number of telecom services, including local service in limited areas (primarily New England). They also offer a referral program - if you refer people to them as noted on their website, they offer a bonus on your next bill based on the billings of the new account.

A beautiful naked blonde jumps up and down

If you don't remember where that phrase comes from, then you need to read the rest of this item.

Some years ago Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas released "The Memory Book". I should know, I have two copies.

Anyway, they offered any number of ways to help remember otherwise incomprehensible things. For instance, consider the number 91852719521639092112. How long would it take you to memorize it, if you needed to? It didn't take me long at all using the Lorayne/Lucas scheme. Using their system, numbers are translated into consonants, and vowels are inserted as needed to convert the string of consonants to a phrase you can remember. So one way to express that number from earlier is also the title of this post.

I was into this for a while in college. I wound up visiting a house in Atlanta and I remember the street number to this day. The person who brought me there was kind of touchy, and I really didn't have to point out that the street number translated into "mule shit". I don't figure on going back, and it's just as well - I don't remember the name of the street.

Someone blogged on some mnemonic devices a while back. I remember a few from engineering school, such as the color code on resistors. Each color stripe represents a digit or an exponent based on its position, and the colors (black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white) can be remembered by "bad boys rape our young girls, but Violet gives willingly."

Biology wasn't my long suit, but I was able to remember the taxonomical schemes of the day (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) from the lamer but effective "King Philip came over from groovy Spain".

Of course there's the flip side of this, where meaningless numbers stick in your head for some reason. For instance, 1.71E98. That's 69 factorial, the biggest factorial that the old "slide-rule" calculators like my long-retired TI SR-50 could calculate without overflowing. The square root of 69 is easy to remember too - eight something...

This one is arcane: May I have a large container of coffee? There are several others like this, but the trick is that the number of letters in each word is the corresponding digit in pi - 3.1415926.....

This one is timely - to remember the "circle of fifths" in music there is "Father Charles goes down and eats bananas".

Enough. I'll bet you remember at least one of the above.

Bomber miscellany

I wonder how they arm those bombs the homicide (Hamaside?) bombers use, and how the bombers are trained. "Like this?" BOOM!

Here's an idea to spread - that the bombs are made using pork products.

Want to adopt a potential bomber? This guy does.

Who funded this?

Back to that Pledge of Allegiance thing again. Alright you attorneys out there, tell me this - how much does it cost to proceed with something like this to that level? Is any real human being going to spend that much of their own money to make such an asinine point?

Maybe so, but I smell some professional religion-bashers like the ACLU. They'll leave no slimy rock unturned in their quests to find someone with standing to sue for whatever their cause of the moment is, and they like to bully small towns like Hillsboro, IL, or Republic, MO.

For all we hear about threats to liberty by the "War on Drugs", maybe they wouldn't be such a big threat if the ACLU were fighting them, instead of bitching about fish symbols on a town seal. If they see possible violations of the Establishment Clause as a greater threat to our liberties than civil forfeiture and other excesses, it reflects poorly on the judgment of their leadership.

In a related issue, what would concerned citizens have to do to get federal judges off the bench? And if they do, how can they make sure the SOB doesn't end up in Congress?

UPDATE: It looks like our atheist crusader is representing himself. OK, it still takes time, fees and other expenses. How much is he paying?

And let's not hear any crap from Democrat Senators trying to disown this, especially the ones on the Senate Judiciary Committee. If they honestly don't like decisions like this, they can be pretty sure that Bush's nominees will have different ideas, and they can start confirming some of them instead of playing asinine political games.

Strange English usage

Certain English usages strike me as odd.

For instance, do we "discharge" or "release" pollution? No, we "spew" it.

A few years ago National Lampoon published collections of oddball news stories called "True Facts", where they assembled a whole bunch of clippings about buses running off the road. For some reason these all used "plunge". Go ahead and Google "bus plunge" and see how many hits you get. Somebody has even written a song about it.

You might remember Hillary Clinton's "turtle on a fence post" line. The idea is that it didn't get there by itself. This must be the reason for the current vogue for "shredding" the Constitution - somebody must have tested it with focus groups, found it impressive and faxed it to all the Democrats. Or maybe it's just a sign of the times - 20 years ago when a lot of phone bills came out on punched cards, they might have said "fold, spindle or mutilate" (there's even a movie called "Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate")..

The Democrats contrived the mantra that tax cuts would "blow a hole in the deficit". Where on earth did this one come from? Usage apparently started in the 1996 Presidential campaign, and suddenly this improbable expression was heard everywhere.

Got any more examples?

Establishment of stupidity

They have some real live wires on the 9th Circuit. They proved it with the shocking decision that the "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is un-Constitutional.

From the decision:

Newdow does not allege that his daughter’s teacher or school district requires his daughter to participate in reciting the Pledge.3 Rather, he claims that his daughter is injured when she is compelled to “watch and listen as her state employed teacher in her state-run school leads her classmates in a ritual proclaiming that there is a God, and that our’s [sic] is ‘one nation under God.’ ”.....Newdow asks the district court to order the President of the United States (“the President”) to “alter, modify or repeal” the Pledge by removing the words “under God”; and to order the United States Congress (“Congress”) “immediately to act to remove the words ‘under God’ from the Pledge.”

As I understand it, the court did not recognize any injury to the plaintiff.

Children are soooo sensitive, you know:

the mere fact that a pupil is required to listen every day to the statement “one nation under God” has a coercive effect.

But this might backfire - the teaching of evolution must surely be coercive to religious kids, whether done in a science class or not. That's because the Establishment Clause cuts both ways - from the same decision:

The Establishment Clause prohibits government from making adherence to a religion relevant in any way to a person’s standing in the political community. Government can run afoul of that prohibition in two principal ways. One is excessive entanglement with religious institutions . . . . The second and more direct infringement is government endorsement or disapproval of religion.[italics mine]

I am not an attorney by any stretch of the imagination, but I noticed this:

Newdow has standing as a parent to challenge a practice that interferes with his right to direct the religious education of his daughter.

Does this mean that the 9th Circuit is recognizing atheism as a religion? If so, maybe they've finally done something right.

What the world, needs now...

...is this gesture to ask for forgiveness

A modest proposal

I didn't get hit on the head with a big rock, but reading this post was the next best thing. I think it was the line where he said "So the whole debate about the marriage penalty is complete nonsense. It’s a debate over a non-issue; the pretense that there is a financial penalty to getting married is simply wrong".

Then I got this great idea for raising money for the govt. After all, you know they need and deserve the money, and they'll do something really intelligent with it.

So I thought, who is it who has the extra money to be taxed? After all, that's the idea behind progressive taxation, isn't it? - that we can decide that some people ought to have to pay more in taxes than others even though they don't get any more out of the govt for their money?

Ah, a brainstorm -people with roommates! They're saving money on rent, utilities and other things, right? Why shouldn't the feds get a cut of their savings? Sheesh, you'd think those silly taxpayers thought it was their money when they can see it says "United States of America" right on it.

Here's how it works - all we have to do is make everybody report to the feds and their employers every time they move in with someone else, platonic or not. Compliance would be handled with the fairness and efficiency of the IRS. Failure to comply would incur the same penalties that falsification of income taxes would. There would be regular audits where everyone would be forced to produce utility bills and deeds or leases in their own name. Throw in random bedchecks too - tax them extra if they're sharing a bed and thereby saving even more money. And if they're having sex, count the avoided expense of prostitution as taxable income.

What's this? You think it's none of the feds' business whether you room with someone else or not? Actually, neither is your income, but you have to file income tax forms all the same, so what does privacy have to do with anything? Let the feds count the avoided costs as ordinary taxable income - in the words of the post cited, "if you support a graduated tax schedule, you should support this outcome as well."

I guess that was sarcastic enough to last me a few days. Really, what justification is there for considering the incomes of both married partners in their taxation that doesn't also apply to other cohabitants?

History Channel WTC special tonight

It discusses the construction of the World Trade Center, including a discussion with a man who said that the WTC could withstand a direct hit from a Boeing 707 airliner. This gentleman was in the WTC on 9/11 and has not been identified.

Another way to show baseball standings

As many statistics geeks as there are around baseball, I suppose someone has already done this. But I have to ask - what would the standings look like if the teams were ranked by the number of wins per dollar of payroll? Or per ticket sold?

Life expectancy of women athletes?

No, I don't have a study. I just had the TV on as ESPN beat the drum about Title IX and how it supposedly revolutionized women's sports.

Title IX itself is a subject for another post. For now I'll settle for linking this, and I'll note that once upon a time women's sports were discouraged because they supposedly caused all kinds of "female troubles". Undoubtedly that was overblown, but...

Today ESPN did a series of shows on various female athletes. One of them was on Wilma Rudolph, a track star from the 1960 Olympics. She died in 1994 at age 54.

Various other athletes and coaches offered testimonials on the show. One of them was Florence Griffith-Joyner. It struck me that FloJo is dead too. She was only 38 when she died in 1998.

So I thought of some other famous female athletes and looked them up. Mildred 'Babe' Didrikson Zaharias died at 42. Sonja Henie died at 57.

I couldn't think of any more in the right age group (60+), so the above isn't exactly scientific, and the women above are extreme examples even among athletes. But it struck me how young these women were when they died. How politically incorrect it would be if it turned out that woman athletes had lower life expectancies than the rest of us.

SpiderGoat?

From Drudge, scientists have implanted spider genes into goats, and now the goats give milk that can be used to produce fibers with the strength of spiderwebs.

Let the jokes begin: did you hear about the mad scientist who crossed an owl with a rooster?

What's the most illegible website?

I nominate Paul Musgrave. I can stand six feet or more from most people's monitors and spellcheck over their shoulders, but this black on dark red scheme as of 6/22 is more than I can deal with. I shouldn't have to change my browser font size or monitor brightness to read a blog.
UPDATE 7/3: Mr. Musgrave has changed the text background for the main body, so that much is visible without technological intervention. The blogroll is still hard to see. (he must be ashamed of it because it doesn't include No Watermelons Allowed. This, even after I mention Evansville and plug a company from there...)

Right on Next Right

Sean McCray is back and is going deep.

Wandering uranium...

Kathy Kinsley notes the discovery of 2 kg of uranium in Russia in a company car, as reported in the Hindustani Times. Is this a big deal?

IMO somebody wanted something scary to write. For one, why 2000 microRoentgen, instead of 2 milliRoentgen or .002 Roentgen? Physically speaking, if a piece of pure uranium of this mass were in the form of a cube, it would be less than 2" to a side.

Warning - I am not a health physicist. But I worked with them for a few years at commercial nuclear power plants. I was always interested in my exposure for obvious reasons, so I learned some interesting things. And I'll give you links to what I'm talking about, so take it for what you're paying for it.

The first thing to note is that there is energy exposure, and energy absorption. Your microwave oven provides an example. It puts out microwave energy, but this energy isn't absorbed by everything - it's designed to be absorbed by water. Then the water molecules heat up and transfer that heat to the rest of the food. It won't do to try to use a microwave oven to try to heat something without water in it (or some other substance that will soak up microwaves). Similar logic applies to sunscreens - they don't affect the sunlight, just how it interacts with your skin.

Likewise what matters about the radiation is how much of it is absorbed by the body, not how much is there. That's why we have units like roentgens (R) for energy, radiation absorbed dose (Rads), and radiation equivalent in man (rem, also sieverts). The first is about how much energy is there, the second is about how much of it is absorbed, and the third is a measure of the impact.

Measure of the impact? Yes. This is necessary because not all parts of your body are equally sensitive - the quicker the cells grow, the more susceptible they are to radiation. That's why radiation picks on cancer cells, and why federal law requires us to chase pregnant women out of situations where they might get significant radiation dose. Your outer skin surface is already dead, so radiation there means nothing. Your lower extremities have no vital organs, so radiation matters less there. Your bone marrow is very susceptible, so the radiation equivalent is higher than for your lower extremities.

From here, "Rem: (Roentgen Equivalent Man) A unit used to express all types of ionizing radiations on a common scale to indicate relative biological effects. For beta and gamma radiations: Exposure to 1 Roentgen delivers a dose of 1 Rad, which is equivalent to 1 Rem." This is not strictly true in that the same dose to your hands isn't the same as that to your bone marrow (which is why we speak of equivalents), but it's the most comprehensible thing I found on the Web in a few minutes of looking.

But...2000 microRoentgen per hour as cited in KK's post then equates to 2000 microrem per hour or 2 millirem per hour. OK, that's 48 mrem per day. The historical dose rate cited in KK's post is .2R/day, which would convert to 200 mrem per day per the earlier conversion (with caveats as noted). This would imply a permissible yearly dose of 73000 mrem, as compared to a federal maximum of 5000 per year when I last looked. In practice 100 mrem per day is a common daily limit, and we would aim for no more than 1000mrem/year.

Again, but...not all radiation has the same properties. For everyday purposes there is alpha, beta and gamma radiation. With gamma there's nowhere to run and nowhere to hide - it'll penetrate anything. OTOH alpha won't even penetrate your skin, and it doesn't take much to block beta (gloves and glasses mostly). But when it hits something vital alpha will do the most damage, beta less so, and gamma the least. The outside layer of your skin is already dead, and because it repulses the alphas, the real impact of external alpha radiation is almost nil. And uranium is an alpha emitter.

There will be some gamma present for reasons beyond the scope of this post. But the idea is that this occurrence isn't exactly a radiological disaster in itself. I'm awfully interested in what it's doing where it was found though...

Hair of the dog

I see that New Jersey will be passing out potassium iodide pills as a precaution against various types of radiological terror.

The devil in me makes me point out that these pills will be radioactive.

Why? The potassium. About a percent or so of all potassium is a radioactive isotope. Sic a Geiger counter on some salt substitute (potassium chloride) and you'll see what I mean (you have a Geiger counter laying around, don't you?)

Of course potassium is essential to your body, particularly for your heart. So if your body can't handle some radiation, it's a pretty bad design, eh?

UPDATE: The percentage of radioactive potassium found in naturally occurring potassium is significantly smaller than "a percent or so" as mentioned above. According to this PDF it's about .012%. The idea is the same though.

There's other interesting stuff in that PDF, such as this:

Hence, the potassium-40 content in the body is constant, with an adult male having about 0.1 microcurie (µCi). Each year, this isotope delivers doses of about 18 millirem (mrem) to the soft tissues of the body and 14 mrem to bone.

That's just from living, folks - if you're a human being you have no practical way to avoid it. Keep those numbers in mind the next time someone wants to spread radiological terror.

Super pork

Dave Kopel earned his permalink on this blog with stuff like this about "Superfund".

Read it all. But here is the best passage.

If the people of a given state are unwilling to raise their own taxes (or to cut other government services) in order to pay for the ultra-expensive, over-protective remedies favored by Ms. Kriz, the public's unwillingness suggests that spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make abandoned factories as sanitary as day-care centers isn't a good idea.

Doggone right. The fact is that legislators love having money spent in their district, because some of the money is going to wind up in local pockets. This means that well intentioned legislation like this can be turned into pork by inflating claims about toxic sites. If the locals won't raise the money to fix local messes, why should the rest of us?

If you really have an environmental problem which endangers your life and health, or that of your family, you either get out or otherwise start dealing with it immediately. If you have time to wait for lawyers to settle on how it's paid for first, then your problem must not be critical. If the do-gooders want this, let them pay for it themselves instead of funding it through what amounts to random taxation. Otherwise they don't get the negative feedback needed to impose restraint.

PC marches on

Recently we've seen posts about tests using bowdlerized versions of various writings without the authors' knowledge or consent. Kimberly Swygert offers a plausible enough defense of the practice for tests at least, but this Orwellian nonsense has to stop somewhere.

Amy Welborn and Lee Bockhorn point out some PC sanitization of old movies, Tom and Jerry cartoons and others.

Next time you get a chance to watch an old MGM movie, look at the image directly below the lion. What's that? It looks to me like an illustration of a white man in blackface. Uh oh...

Scouting boys

This post is rated R.

From a collection of smutty limericks:

From the depths of the crypt at St Giles

Came a scream that resounded for miles.

Said the vicar, "Good gracious!

Has Father Ignatius

Forgotten the Bishop has piles?"

Yes, people have joked about homosexuality in the priesthood for some time. But we haven't seen anything like the recent scandals, pitting gays against the Roman Catholic Church.

Gays have a formidable lobby and some gay groups have shown themselves to be particularly nasty protesters. They also are strong in the media and have managed to spin many stories in their favor or suppress them entirely. Now we are seeing attempts to present the molestations of boys by priests as something other than homosexuality.

It always seemed plausible to me that closeted gays would head for a seminary - they'd have to hide their sex life anyway, and they wouldn't have to explain not being married. Likewise it always seemed plausible to me that gays would be more likely to prey on the young than straights, if only because by being gay in the first place they had already demonstrated a willingness to buck strong social taboos.

But I had no statistics. I don't know where the following writers got theirs, but it seems I was on the right track. According to Eric Raymond, gays are 3 to 10 times more likely to have sex with children than straights are. Then after a long passage he offers this:

Here is where the question becomes practical: were the Boy Scouts of America so wrong to ban homosexual scoutmasters? And here we are with a crashing thud back in the realm of present politics. After the numbing, horrifying, seemingly never-ending stream of foul crimes revealed in the scandal, even staunch sexual libertarians like your humble author can no longer honestly dismiss this question simply because it's being raised by unpleasant conservatives.

The priestly-abuse scandal forces us to face reality. To the extent that pederasty, pedophilic impulses, and twink fantasies are normal among homosexual men, putting one in charge of adolescent boys may after all be just as bad an idea as waltzing a man with a known predisposition for alcoholism into a room full of booze. One wouldn't have to think homosexuality is evil or a disease to make institutional rules against this, merely notice that it creates temptations best avoided for everyone's sake.

That must have been awful hard on him - his email ought to be a real trip after this. But he takes pains to say that the issue is not pederasty per se, but whether it was consensual.

I don't have a scientific answer. But it's clear that various gays (who might represent the tiniest of fringes) have been moving to make pedophilia acceptable. Some have even succeeded in introducing gay sex education in schools to the point where we're teaching kids "fisting". And they have a history of harassing the Boy Scouts of America for their policies of banning gay Scoutmasters, in terms that suggest that there is a civil right to be a Scoutmaster. And as Raymond notes, less radical gay groups don't attempt to distance themselves from groups such as the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

What makes me laugh are the efforts to represent priestly celibacy as the real problem. Yeah, that's it. And the next time there's a mad dog bomber in Israel, let's blame it on the Bahais. What, you've found evidence of cannibalism? Round up the vegans. You heard a joke? It must have been the feminists. Stop it, we're not all that stupid.

Thomas Sowell sounds off too.

Is this post anti-gay? That's your call. But don't tell me to deny the obvious - there's some things I just can't swallow.

The scientist in the kitchen

I started out engineering school intending to be a chemical engineer. Mercifully I got out of that - it was overcrowded when I was there. The professors were meaner than snakes and made no bones about trying to drive you out of the department. Then when I graduated I saw guys with sterling averages and excellent coop experiences go without jobs because the market had turned south severely. (Aerospace engineers can tell you something about that too).

A big part of ChE is something called unit operations. Here you learn about things like filtration, distillation, and other batch or continuous processes to create such things as bourbon, fudge, gasoline, ketchup, or about anything you can pump or dump. They never did tell us how they put the stripes in the toothpaste, doggone it, but this does.

I got my engineer designation the hard way. But calling traditional housekeepers "domestic engineers" might not be so far off the mark, especially if they can cook. You can read all about it in Robert Wolke's book "What Einstein Told His Cook". Nine stirring chapters cover the stuff you might have learned about cooking in engineering school - topics such as food irradiation, microwave ovens, chemicals like vinegar and cream of tartar, why cooking is different at high altitudes, and everything else you're just dying to know.

And for extra credit, you can measure the speed of light with your microwave oven.

What would you do for a link?

Gary Farber proposes an extension to Nick Denton's Blogallery.

Because it's my blog, that's why

This blog has been too serious lately. So I'll offer this invaluable contribution from "Hee Haw", and a list of Worst Country Song Titles!. The latter I found while researching the lyrics to "If My Nose Were Running Money, Honey, I'd Blow It All On You".

Costs of nuclear power - some details

Now for some harder info about what nuclear plant operating companies pay toward their liability and other costs.

Nuclear power plants are required to carry $200M in liability insurance, and this is provided by a joint underwriting association called the American Nuclear Insurers. It may just be a coincidence that ANI is the plural of "anus", but it gives you an idea about what it's like dealing with these guys - if they have an issue, it gets fixed (and nothing regulates a capitalist like another capitalist).

Above and beyond this, in the event of a severe nuclear accident, existing nuclear power plants' operating companies would be assessed to pay for the losses:

The Act also requires nuclear operators to participate in a secondary retrospective assessment program to meet public damages above the $200 million primary insurance limit. Any damages above a reactor’s $200 million primary insurance coverage are to be assessed equally against all operating reactors, up to a current limit of $83.9 million per reactor, per accident (a 5% surcharge may also be imposed to pay legal costs). These assessments, called “retrospective premiums,” would be paid out at a rate of $10 million per reactor, per year, until the cap is met. Retrospective premiums are adjusted for inflation every five years. The Act currently covers 106 reactors (103 of which are currently operating). As a result, the Price-Anderson Act would provide $9.09 billion in compensation in the event of a nuclear accident. Payment of any damages above this combined primary and secondary cap would require congressional action. Under the Act, only reactor owners and operators are liable for damages in the event of an accident; companies that designed reactors or provided reactor parts or construction services are exempt from liability under the Act.

So nuclear operating companies have a strong incentive toward helping one another as needed to make sure that plants are operated safely, and they have formed organizations such as the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) to spread best practices, maintenance information, parts failure info, and other common information on their own terms without recourse to govt regulators like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

For radwaste, operators have been contributing to the Nuclear Waste Disposal Fund for years now. These contributions come from the ratepayers as noted here:http://www.rw.doe.gov/techrep/feead_98/feead_98.htm

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), referred to as the Department, finds that the current 1.0 mill ($0.001) per kilowatt-hour fee charged on generators of spent nuclear fuel is adequate, and recommends that the fee not be changed.

Note that this assessment dates to 1998, during the Clinton administration. The amounts are not chicken feed -we're talking around $600M per year.

Here is some more information specifically about the funding of Yucca Mountain.

As for security, the costs are borne by the utilities themselves, and violators are subject to heavy fines. It's inappropriate to go into any more detail here.

Questions? Bear in mind that I'm no longer in the industry and I have a day job and a life, so it may take some time to run things down.

Cost of nuclear power - some history

I often hear questions about federal subsidies to nuclear power in one form or another. This might be the wrong question.

I haven't yet found the document that says exactly what I want to demonstrate, if it exists at all. But you must realize that whether there were any commercial nuclear power plants or not, the US govt would still have to pay for mining uranium, transporting it, refining it, reprocessing it, and ultimately disposing of it, because the Manhattan Project and other govt initiatives long predated commercial nuclear power. And the stuff the US govt uses is nastier and more highly refined than what is used in commercial nuclear power plants, so the marginal cost of adding additional consumers is not particularly high.

So under such circumstances, what is the logical thing to do? Apparently President Eisenhower had the right idea when he initiated the "Atoms for Peace" program. With this, the govt loosened its grip upon radioactive material and technology so that private industry could develop new applications or expand the usage of existing ones. And the new consumers could then contribute to the costs of maintaining the nuclear infrastructure without obvious taxes on voters.

One particular concern was labor problems. Some nasty coal miner strikes had occurred in 1946 on Harry Truman's watch, and that liberal Democrat was forced to break them. Nuclear power offered a way to break that stranglehold on our power supplies, and Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act that very year.

But electric utility executives weren't born yesterday, and they were particularly worried about liability in case of accidents. Insurers were not willing to underwrite anything near the costs of postulated accidents. It became clear that no private firms would build nuclear power plants until the govt dealt with this. Thus was born the Price-Anderson Act capping liability in case of accidents at nuclear power plants.

Bear in mind that at this point there were no commercial nuclear power plants. So there is no way that Price Anderson can be considered pork. Rather, it is clearly an inducement for private industry to enter the market in the first place.

Likewise the govt was concerned with control of nuclear material, and electric utilities wanted no part of the new field of radioactive waste disposal. So it was agreeable to everyone that the govt would make fuel available and would handle the waste.

Why would the US govt agree to these things? Was the govt stupid? Was it fear of labor problems? Was this just Cold War politics? Something else?

Or was the real reason the exact opposite of what detractors claim? That is, perhaps the real motive was to get nuclear power plant operators to help in bearing some of the costs of the nuclear infrastructure, through their purchases of fuel and reprocessing services. In this way we can help pay our defense costs without raising taxes.

The short answer is that the commercial and the govt nuclear establishment are tightly linked, and it would be difficult to say what might fairly be called a subsidy or not. But it is clear that the nuclear fuel cycle, with all of the technological and safety problems it entails, long predates commercial nuclear power and might well long outlive it. And that the existence of other consumers of nuclear material extends the usefulness of these facilities as a minimum, and might even help support them.

There's an interesting corollary to this theory. Note that anti-nuclear groups typically are left-wing politically. Why is that? Surely fears of the shortcomings of a technology would cross over traditional political lines. So there would appear to be no rational reason for the left wing orientation of antinukers.

Except for one. Left-wingers historically have been more sympathetic to our Cold War rivals than other groups have. And those rivals were aided by anything that 1) increased costs of our defenses, and 2) reduced the reliability of our energy supplies. Both of these goals could be advanced by attacking nuclear power. So although they might claim that the govt subsidizes nuclear power in their propaganda, their behavior says otherwise.

Liver cancer

A couple of months ago I asked for information about good liver cancer resources on behalf of a friend and coworker of mine. Some of you were very helpful, particularly Derek Lowe.

It's over now - he died Tuesday, on his 42nd birthday, leaving a wife and two preteen kids. It was fast too - I didn't suspect a thing until he started missing work for chemo in February.

The visitation was last night (Friday, 6/14). It had been going on for two and a half hours when I got there and I still had to park two blocks away and wait in line for an hour. The makeup couldn't hide the fact that this man looked like he had aged 40 years in 4 months.

The following clips come from this:

People with a history of cirrhosis, malnutrition, and/or chronic hepatitis B infection are at greater risk than the general population for developing liver cancer.

What are the symptoms?:

Sometimes people have no symptoms at all and are discovered to have a liver tumor during evaluation for some other physical complaint. More often, people complain of feeling tired and many describe a dull aching pain in the upper right side of their abdomen. Other symptoms include a sense of fullness in the abdomen, loss of appetite, loss of weight, fever, nausea, and jaundice.

I don't know if my friend or his doctor missed warning signs. But you had better not.

Expedience?

A murderer here in St. Louis decided to taunt the cops by sending them a map showing them where to find a body. The cops realized that the map was produced by Expedia, and managed to trace the request back to the murderer. Here's the story.

Investigators broke the case after a Post-Dispatch reporter received a letter and computer-generated map May 24. The map showed the intersection of Highway 67 and St. Charles Street in West Alton, and the letter writer said another body could be found at that spot. The skeleton of an African-American woman was discovered at the location by police the next day.

Investigators were able to trace the map to a computer mapping site and then were able to determine that it was Travis who had pulled up the map May 20.

Too bad the creep managed to kill himself.

According to Clayton police, Travis carefully threaded a torn strip of a bed sheet through small holes of a jail wall vent six feet off the floor and looped the other end around his neck.

He placed a pillowcase over his head, stuffed more pieces of cloth into his mouth and somehow managed to tie his hands behind his back.

With a final, fleeting thought known only to him, the 36-year-old waiter, nicknamed "Toby" by his friends and family, apparently stepped from the rim of a toilet and died.

Sounds fishy, but I'm all pitied out.

Capital costs of nuclear power

My interest in nuclear power as a citizen, engineer, and past employee was a factor in establishing this blog, and it's terrific to see people asking about it seriously again. And because I'm an engineer whose resume includes 10+ years onsite at various nuclear power plants, I know a bit more about it than John Q. Public.

What follows is largely from memory. The numbers provided might be a bit off, but not so substantially as to mislead materially. I want to get this out while the iron is hot on this topic, so there will be few if any links. So kindly bear with me as I continue.

To measure cost-efficiency of nuclear power plants, it helps to have a yardstick that can be used to compare the costs of plants of varying sizes and ages. For our purposes, the best measurement is probably cost per kilowatt (kW) of generating capacity. You would expect well-designed plants to have very similar costs per kW, with a slight edge toward the larger plants. Coal, hydro, solar photovoltaic (PV) and windfarms can also be measured this way, so it's a handy concept for energy economics.

In the late 1970's and early 1980's, the costs per kW for nuclear power plants were skewed all over the map. Plants like LaSalle County Station came in for around $1000/kW, while Clinton Power Station (CPS) about 80 miles away in the same state (Illinois) was about $5500/kW. CPS was to have had two 950MW units for $485M, but various problems led to a final installation of one 950MW plant for about $5B. That's a factor of 20 difference. How did this happen?

There were several problems. Some affected the industry at large. Some were peculiar to the Illinois regulatory environment. And some were purely local, the result of bad management.

First the at-large problems. The generation of nuclear power plants built at that time were based on load projections dating back to the 1960s. These were boom times for electric power, and it looked like demand would keep increasing at the same rate indefinitely. So utilities overestimated both how much power they would need in the future, and the cash flow they would have to finance the construction.

Then came the 1970's. The economy headed south, and demand for power fell. Utilities had less income and had to borrow more, while interest rates rose to very high rates. The accident at Browns Ferry gave nuclear power some bad publicity. The federal Atomic Energy Commission split into what became the Department of Energy and what is now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the new NRC was less chummy with the plant operators. Environmentalists got stronger, raised more issues and developed new legal and regulatory intervention strategies. The worst came in 1979, when "The China Syndrome", a movie portraying a hypothetical nuclear power plant accident, was released just weeks before the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident.

TMI lit a fire under the NRC, leading to a huge number of new regulations. Some of this was necessary, but much more was ordered without regard to cost-effectiveness or regard for alternatives. Plants that otherwise were ready for operation had to have entirely new systems installed, or required vast changes in existing systems. Necessary or not, the impact on construction schedules was horrendous, and that in turn sent costs through the roof.

But despite all that, some companies brought in their plants for costs of less than $1000/kW in that time frame. The best performer was probably Duke Power, based in the Carolinas.

Commonwealth Edison (CECo, now Unicom) was probably the next best performer, and like Duke Power had already built and operated other units before LaSalle and the later Byron and Braidwood units. So the availability of experienced hands certainly helped. However, CECo had to deal with the Illinois regulatory environment, which grew harsher over time.

Regulation of the utilities permitted rates based on the capital they had invested in their generating capacity. Regulators were obliged to disallow costs they considered imprudent, because otherwise a utility would earn the same rate of return on capital for poor performance as for good performance. And regulators did not permit any return on the capital until the assets had actually begun generating electricity.

Because of problems like those above however, the capital investment required to build a plant were higher than before, including interest on the funds used for construction. The result was that when the new units were included in the rate base, rates would have to be permitted to rise. But the politics of rate increases in Illinois elsewhere dictated that regulators were especially restrictive compared to the past, disallowing expenses and generally delaying permission for historically lawful rate increases.

Then another wrinkle was added. Illinois legislators subjected CECo and IP to "prudency" audits. This is where the over-optimistic past projections of power demand came in - intervenors like the Citizens Utility Board claimed that the utilities had built excess capacity and were not entitled to a return on the corresponding investments. It amounted to changing the rules in the middle of the game, which is a good way to ruin financial projections.

Anyway, the resulting delays and disallowances hit CECo hard, leading to layoffs in 1993 (including me). But it was especially bad for smaller operators like Illinois Power (IP, now Illinova) downstate. Having less cash flow, they had to finance more of the cost of CPS. Since they had less institutional knowledge about building a plant, they took much longer to build CPS than was warranted. Since they had not worked under such a regulatory environment before, they experienced quality assurance problems so bad that the NRC ordered them to stop some kinds of work entirely until they could prove that they were doing things right. Because of those delays, the interest mounted to the point that it was well over half the cost of building the plant.

But IP hung on and managed to get the plant online and running around 1987. They had no choice - at this time the plant accounted for about 17% of their generating capacity, but about 80% of their assets. Giving up meant writing it off, which would have been corporate suicide - the writeoff would have exceeded their capital. (I'm not an accountant, so take it easy on me with the nomenclature).

So now I hope you have some idea about how costs of nuclear power plants grew out of control for the most recent generation. Regulations changed precipitously and caused costly delays. Interest rates were high. The public grew hostile. And some plants simply were mismanaged.

Is the above relevant to any possible nuclear renaissance? Regulations should be more stable nowadays. Interest rates have calmed down. The public may have mellowed out by now. We have many more people with knowledge of how to manage a nuclear power plant under construction, and one manager in particular did a tremendous job with the St. Lucie plant in Florida. The industry has circled the wagons and shares information very effectively through organizations like the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations (INPO). The technology has matured significantly. And environmentalists have shown by now that they are opposed to virtually any form of power, so there's no point in trying to please them (although some are starting to recognize the benefits of nuclear power vs. alternatives).

What we do know is that power correlates well with human wealth and welfare, and we'll have to get it from somewhere.

Costs of decommissioning nuclear power plants

I won't offer much more than an acknowledgement on this topic tonight for lack of time. The main point to be made is that these costs are a very strong function of our regulations, and our regulations are both incredibly strict and inconsistent.

Opponents of nuclear power often attempt to confuse the issue, acting as if nuclear waste does not already exist. They'll complain that Yucca Mountain is insufficiently analyized or otherwise inadequate without ever acknowledging that it's the best we have. It certainly is easier to secure waste at one site than the dozens and dozens we have now, yet instead of seeking the incremental improvements they would have us remain in a state that is worse. Incidentally, have you read this?

As for decommissioning plants themselves, how clean is clean? That decision alone would raise or lower the costs by entire orders of magnitude. Opponents of nuclear power want the area restored as if no one had ever set foot there, but there simply isn't any logical reason for that. If it was a good site for a nuclear power plant, it's probably a good site for another one - rip out the parts that are past their useful lives and start over. The cooling is there, the power lines are there, the staff is there, the seismic analysis is there, the emergency plan is there - why throw this all away?

Busy....

Posting will be near-nonexistent for a few days as I deal with a nasty deadline. In the meantime, there are plenty of links to bloggers on the left and others on the right. By the time you've checked them all out I might even be back.