Tag: policy

The Democrat mayor of Philadelphia has demanded an investigation against a local magazine because he doesn’t like what they wrote.

11:07 am

Free speech according to Democrats: The Democrat mayor of Philadelphia has demanded an investigation against a local magazine because he doesn’t like what they published.

I ask the Commission consider specifically where Philadelphia Magazine and the writer, Bob Huber, are appropriate for rebuke by the Commission in light of the potentially inflammatory effect and reckless endangerment to Philadelphia’s race relations probably caused by the essay’s unsubstantiated charges. While I fully recognize that constitutional protections afforded the press are intended to protect the media from censorship by the government, the First Amendment, like other constitutional rights, is not an unfettered right, and notwithstanding the First Amendment, a publisher has a duty to the public to exercise its role in a responsible way. I ask the Commission to evaluate whether the “speech” employed in this essay is not the reckless equivalent of “shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater,” its prejudiced, fact-challenged generalizations an incitement to extreme reaction. [emphasis mine]

Under this Democratic mayor’s standards, anything that offended anyone could be banned. In fact, it would destroy all free speech. All any bully would need to do to silence his critics would be to complain about the inflammatory nature of their statements.

You can read his entire letter here. [pdf]

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Visiting a nuclear missile silo

10:04 am

a fuel line for the Titan missile
A fuel line for the Titan missile.

Last week my oldest friend Lloyd and his wife Denise came to visit Diane and I here in Tucson. One of Lloyd’s requests was to visit the Tucson Missile Museum. This museum is built at the site of one of the now disabled missile silos built in the 1960s as a means for launching nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. Fifty-four silos total had been built and operated, with eighteen of those silos scattered around the Tucson, Arizona area. When the U.S. signed a nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union in the 1980s these silos were then shut down and sold. Some became private residences. Others remain buried and abandoned.

One silo, however, was kept as intact as allowed by treaty and made into a museum in order to preserve this artifact of history. Because Diane and I happen to know Chuck Penson, the archivist at the museum, we were able to arrange an augmented tour of the facility. Below are some of my pictures as Chuck took us down into the deepest bowels of the silo.
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Europe today inked a partnership deal with Russia for its two spacecraft ExoMars mission, planned to launch in 2016 and 2018.

9:01 am

Europe today inked a partnership deal with Russia for its two spacecraft ExoMars mission, planned to launch in 2016 and 2018.

Russia essentially replaces the United States, which backed out of the deal last year when the Obama administration eliminated the funding for most of NASA’s planetary program.

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Physicians fight back against Obamacare.

9:11 pm

Physicians fight back against Obamacare.

Dr. Ryan Neuhofel, 31, offers a rare glimpse at what it would be like to go to the doctor without massive government interference in health care. Dr. Neuhofel, based in the college town of Lawrence, Kansas, charges for his services according to an online price list that’s as straightforward as a restaurant menu. A drained abscess runs $30, a pap smear, $40, a 30-minute house call, $100. Strep cultures, glucose tolerance tests, and pregnancy tests are on the house. Neuhofel doesn’t accept insurance. He even barters on occasion with cash-strapped locals. One patient pays with fresh eggs and another with homemade cheese and goat’s milk. “Direct primary care,” which is the industry term for Neuhofel’s business model, does away with the bureaucratic hassle of insurance, which translates into much lower prices. “What people don’t realize is that most doctors employ an army of people for coding, billing, and gathering payment,” says Neuhofel. “That means you have to charge $200 to remove an ingrown toenail.” Neuhofel charges $50.

Neuhofel is not alone in this. The article describes other doctors who have done the same. As the bureaucratic mess from Obamacare expands and becomes increasingly impossible for anyone to handle, we are going to see this happen more and more.

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The budget battle at NASA

10:49 am

Two stories today highlight not only the budget problems at NASA, but also illustrate the apparent unwillingness of both Congress and Americans to face the terrible budget difficulties of the federal government. In both cases, the focus is instead on trying to fund NASA at levels comparable to 2012, before the Obama administration or sequestration had imposed any budget cuts on the agency.

It is as if we live in a fantasy world, where a $16 trillion dollar debt does not exist, and where money grows on trees and we can spend as much as we want on anything we want.
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The dirty little secret of electric cars.

6:17 pm

The dirty little secret of electric cars.

A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds. …

So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a bit faster than your average jogger.

In other words, government subsidies for electric cars are nothing more than another feel-good program, accomplishing nothing.

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New computer models find that the tropical rain forests will not be harmed by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

4:06 pm

The uncertainty of science: New computer models find that the tropical rain forests will not be harmed by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Tropical forests are unlikely to die off as a result of the predicted rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century, a new study finds. The analysis refutes previous work that predicted the catastrophic loss of the Amazon rainforest as one of the more startling potential outcomes of climate change.

In the most extensive study of its kind, an international team of scientists simulated the effect of business-as-usual emissions on the amounts of carbon locked up in tropical forests across Amazonia, Central America, Asia and Africa through to 2100. They compared the results from 22 different global climate models teamed with various models of land-surface processes. In all but one simulation, rainforests across the three regions retained their carbon stocks even as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration increased throughout the century.

The study provides “robust evidence for the resilience of tropical rainforests”, says lead author Chris Huntingford, a climate modeller at the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford. But uncertainties remain, he adds.

First, this prediction is based on a computer model, which is as likely to be as right as the previous pessimistic predictions. With that in mind, no one should start dancing for joy. The long term consequences of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remain unknown.

Second, I am baffled by the previous predictions that favored catastrophe for the tropical jungles because of increased levels of carbon dioxide. Plants breath CO2. They prosper from it. If you put more in the atmosphere they will thrive. Moreover, the tropical jungles are already hot, and the plant life there is adapted to that heat. Raising the global temperature should not hurt them significantly.

Finally, faced with a result that defuses all the crisis-mongering of the global warming crowd, the author of the article feels obliged at the end to emphasis their new bugaboo: extreme weather! It’s coming! Duck your heads!

But don’t worry. When weather extremes also fail to appear, they will find something else to scream about.

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