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.