Welfare for the rich

The WaPo finally gets a clue: Electric cars and the liberal war with science - The Washington Post

Advocates insist that the government should help them crank up mass production of electric vehicles. Once economies of scale kick in, they argue, electric vehicles can compete.

Four decades after the 1973 oil crisis, this logic is wearing thin. Any company that figured out how to build a practical mass-market electric car would be swimming in cash. That no one has done so suggests we are bumping up against the limits of nature, not just politics or economics.

Certainly the many hundreds of millions of dollars that the U.S. government, GM and GM’s competitors have poured into the effort might have been better spent on more plausible energy-efficiency efforts, such as advanced internal combustion engines.

Instead, Big Government and Big Business have focused on the Volt, the Fisker Karma or the Tesla Roadster, none of which is remotely affordable for the “99 percent” of Americans. And yet in his 2013 budget, Obama proposes to boost the tax credit for electric vehicle buyers to $10,000.

What’s “progressive” about that, I’ll never understand.

Yet even after this tax credit, the just-discontinued Chevy Volt cost $33,000, and since the $10K credit is, well, a tax credit, not a buyer rebate, it means that the few Volt buyers this year had to shell out $43,000 to drive it away, not being able to claim the $10K credit until tax filing time next year. No wonder that the average annual income for Volt buyers was $170,000. That's why I called this tax-credit scheme "Obama's Sheriff of Nottingham Plan" - it takes from the poorer to give to the richer. (And the WaPo also observes that the Volt was a car without a market, anyway, which events have proven.)

Here in Tennessee, Nissan North America makes it headquarters and in Smyrna there is a huge Nissan auto plant. So of course in 2010 then-Governor Phil Bredesen, Democrat, proposed his own Nottingham Plan for the Nissan Leaf.

Taxpayers will subsidize this car to about one-third of its sale price. Every time you see a Leaf drive by, you'll know someone else is driving it thanks to you. Once again, a technology and product that has no natural market is being favored by the political class at the expense of the rest of us. ...

The political class is devious, not stupid. They try to make sure that everyone is a moocher at one time or another. So the Leaf's rebate program lets a large swath of the producing class take a turn at mooching, too. In fact, this is one of the rare looting programs that actually comprises welfare for the rich, or at least the well off, since even with rebates the Leaf will be out of reach of the low-income earners. But the sales taxes they pay and the fuel they buy for their cars are both going to fund the rebates.

Now I point out that I voted for Bredesen for both his terms and have no regrets. He was a very good governor with a huge helping of business sense. But I have no explanation about his adherence to the Nottingham Plan except that above.

Honest Chevy Volt ad

At last, an auto ad that tells the truth~



However, Chevy is doing even more to help the economy rebound. Having announced it is suspending production of the Volt, we can all expect an economic bounce because of all those laid-off Volt workers! At least, that's the Obama administration's official position.

Tornados and disaster drivel

The atheists are at it again - remonstrating that the storms and tornados that ravaged the Midwest and parts of the South late last week are evidence of the stupid, bitter clinging to God and religion of the so-called Bible Belt. Gerard Vanderleun quotes "liberal firebrand" Mike Malloy, who said on his radio show:

"Their God … keeps smashing them into little grease spots on the pavement in Alabama, and Mississippi, and Arkansas, and Georgia, and Oklahoma," Malloy says in his broadcast from Friday. “You know, the Bible belt, where [in a mocking voice] they ain’t gonna let no [profanity] science get in the way, it says in the Bible, blah blah blah blah blah. So, according to their way of thinking, God with his omnipotent thumb reaches down here and so far tonight has smashed about 20 people into a grease spot on highway 12, or whatever the [profanity] highway they live next to."

Malloy's mocking tone does not bother me. It is his scorn for that which he absolutely does not understand that betrays his intellectual vapidity. He has no more conception of religious conviction, traditions or insight than a chimpanzee has of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Worse, in his smug, anti-intellectual liberalism (all liberalism today is anti-intellectual) he neither wishes to learn about that which he mocks, nor is he able even to agree that there might be something there to learn.

But the people afflicted in Indiana know.

The town of Holton fire fighters (from left) Shaun Kreider and Eric Grossman and Town Marshal Bob Curl (right) bow their heads in prayer during a non-denominational church service for people that lost loved ones or are dealing with their destroyed homes after a tornado passed through the town on March 4, 2012 in Holton, Indiana. The Holton Methodist Church held the service due to the other churches in town being too damaged to be used.

In Fairview, Tenn., where I live, the storm cells moved north of town at first, then south. There was barely enough rain at my house to wet the ground. But vast expanses of Tennessee got hammered by high winds, including two tornados that touched down, by very large hail and monsoon-like rains.

But in serious reply to nitwittery like Malloy's, I can recommend nothing better than British columnist Gerard Baker's January 2005 essay, "Spare us this disaster drivel." In December 2004, a massive sea floor earthquake sent enormous waves of tsunamis across the India Ocean, violently flooding coasts of Indonesia, Thailand, India and other lands. Probably about 250,000 people died, most in Indonesia, just minutes away from the epicenter for the tsunami to travel.

No sooner had rescue operations been mounted than religious scoffers began. Mr. Baker responded thus:



"I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God. I myself will see him with my own eyes" Job 19:25-27a.

The Church rebuilds few buildings, but restores many souls. We stand with the great line of Hebrew, Jewish and Christian people who have declared that nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God (Rom 8:39).

The tornados struck us in the days leading to Easter. But we are Easter people, bound to God in the love of Christ our Lord. Our calling is to share God’s love by word, deed and offering with the injured and the despairing. We understand that God was not in the wind, but is very present in the silence that follows. It is in that silence that we are to be the body of Christ for those who suffer.

That is what is completely opaque to Mike Malloy.

"Yahoo to lay off thousands" - Great news for the economy!

News report:

Yahoo (YHOO: 14.78, +0.06, +0.41%) is reportedly planning a massive restructuring that may include thousands of layoffs as the struggling media company that was once at the pinnacle of Silicon Valley's boom looks to regain its footing.

This is really wonderful news for the economy! Now all those thousands are workers will start to receive unemployment checks, and as we all know, the official Obama administration position (and of the Democrat party generally) is that unemployment checks are a stimulus to the economy.

Grab the cash while you can

In my heart, I hope he's wrong. In my mind, I fear he's right.

Hitler learns Georgetown University's health insurance doesn't cover contraception

It was inevitable, perhaps.



Oh, the humanity!

Sandra Fluke & Contraception - Oh! The Humanity!

"Sex-Crazed Co-Eds Going Broke Buying Birth Control, Student Tells Pelosi Hearing Touting Freebie Mandate"

A Georgetown co-ed told Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s hearing that the women in her law school program are having so much sex that they’re going broke, so you and I should pay for their birth control.

Speaking at a hearing held by Pelosi to tout Pres. Obama’s mandate that virtually every health insurance plan cover the full cost of contraception and abortion-inducing products, Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke said that it’s too expensive to have sex in law school without mandated insurance coverage.

Apparently, four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it's hard to make ends meet if they have to pay for their own contraception, Fluke's research shows.

"Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy (Georgetown student insurance not covering contraception), Fluke reported.

It costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over the course of her three-year stint in law school, according to her calculations.

"Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school," Fluke told the hearing.

Let's go to the video!

"Killing people while they're asleep should be no crime"

Professor Norman Geras, the most respectable and likable member of the Left that I know of (we have exchanged a number of very cordial emails) responds to the proposal of academic philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva that there should be no distinction between aborting an  unborn child and killing a fully-born baby - a killing that G-M simply call "after-birth abortion" (link). The good professor takes it to its logical conclusion.

Killing people while they're asleep should be no crime

Provided, that is, that the killing is painless. I take this to be a logical development from the proposal of two philosophers, as reported here and here, that after-birth abortion - what you and I know as infanticide - is sometimes justified, if the interests of the parents require it. Like the foetus, so the argument goes, a newborn baby is not yet a person (though it is a potential person); so it is not in a condition to be ascribed a right to life.

I avoid the knotty question of what the criteria of personhood are (self-consciousness, capacity to reason, having a life-plan etc), and merely go on what the two philosophers whose view is under discussion here say when they say:

We take 'person' to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her. This means... that all the individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons.

I put it to you, friends, that someone who is fast asleep is incapable of attributing basic value to her own existence, and therefore a prime target for being killed, without that representing any loss to her. You might say that she will again be capable of valuing her own existence when she wakes up, and I do not deny this. But it only means that, once a person - before she went to sleep - she has ceased to be that since dropping off, and is now only a potential person until she wakes up again, if, of course, she ever does - since we can justifiably kill her (as being an actual non-person) if it serves our interests to do so.

Again, you might say that the definition of personhood builds in a notion of continuity and duration, such that a sleeping individual may be credited with the capacities which the same individual has while awake. But what a convenient allowance that is. For somewhere between a quarter and a third of most people's lives their capacities are not manifest while they sleep but, like them, dormant; and yet they are acknowledged still to have them. That could cover anything between 20 and 30 years, without personhood being snatched from their sleepy selves by others. No, let them be bumped off when there's something to be gained by doing so - that's what I say.

Slippery slope? No, the idea that there should be no distinction between aborting an unborn child a fetus and killing a fully-born baby is no slope. It's a vertical plunge to the rocks of moral dissolution.

The "privilege" of being born American

Former Federal Reserve Governor Lawrence Lindsay rightly takes Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to task for saying that,

the "most fortunate Americans" should pay more in taxes for the "privilege of being an American." One can debate different ways of balancing the budget. But Mr. Geithner's argument highlights an unfortunate and very destructive instinct that seems to permeate the Obama administration about the respective roles of citizens and their government. ...

Philosophically, the concept that being an American is a "privilege" upends the whole basis on which America was founded. Privileges are things granted to one individual by another, higher-ranking, individual. ...

This is an age-old view that our Founding Fathers rejected. First, they argued that the basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., economic liberty) were natural rights, endowed by our Creator, not by government.

But Geithner's statement absolutely accurately reflects the Left's basic view of government and the people, namely that the government rules supreme and the people are order takers from their government overlords. And "Turbo Tax Time," as the SecTreas is sometimes known, is far from the first Leftist to betray this world view.

In 2009, Ramesh Ponnuru wrote of an "insane" analogy used by Robert Frank in the NY Times. It's this:

"Anti-tax zealots denounce all taxation as theft, as depriving citizens of their right to spend their hard-earned incomes as they see fit. Yet nowhere does the Constitution grant us the right not to be taxed. Nor does it grant us the right to harm others with impunity. No one is permitted to steal our cars or vandalize our homes. Why should opponents of taxation be allowed to harm us in less direct ways?" Um, maybe because the analogy is insane?

Yes, but that's not the fundamental error Frank makes here. The real boneheaded, but typical liberal thinking Frank displays is that the Constitution grants rights.

It does not.

In America, the state apparatus grants no rights at all to the people because the government has no rights to grant. All rights reside in the people to begin with. The American founders understood that human rights are simply a fact of human existence; human beings are "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights," as the Declaration of Independence puts it.

Therefore, in the American system, the people grant powers to the government, but no rights. Yet we still have to endure and rebut idiocy from people such as Geithner and Franks, who believe that the government is the fount of all things good in America, including our very rights. In fact, the First Amendment, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution as a whole give or grant no rights at all: all rights automatically are always held by the people in the first place. The Bill of Rights was intended to restrict the power of the government -- to make sure that government apparatchiks didn't step on the rights of the people. The Constitution secures our rights against encroachment. It does not found them to begin with.

So in Geithner land, being born an American is a privilege. (Of course, to most of the Left, being born at all is a prvilege.)

Exhibit C: The government also claims that owning a passport is a "privilege," too.

NASCAR is boring now

Saw most of the rain-delayed Daytona 500 Monday night, and I have to say that it was an incredibly boring race - except, of course, when driver Pablo Montoya blasted into a jet-engine-blower truck and everything blew up. No one was injured, incredibly, and so I can guiltlessly say that the episode was the only truly entertaining period of the race.

The problem is not new. NASCAR races became boring when NASCAR mandated that every Sprint Cup driver had to drive the "Car of Tomorrow" racer beginning in 2008. That means that all the Sprint Cup races - the big leagues of NASCAR - are basically just one big IROC series, a now-defunct racing series in which, "Drivers raced identically-prepared stock cars set up by a single team of mechanics in an effort to make the race purely a test of driver ability."

The problem with using the COT in NASCAR is that brand distinction (Ford, Chevy, etc.) now means nothing at all. It did back in, say, Richard Petty's day. The cars now are all the same except for very minor and immaterial differences. In Daytona there was a field of 30-plus cars that all had almost exactly the same performance envelopes and so most all the race looked like this:



A giant clump of cars in which almost none of the drivers are actually racing except for the handful at the front. Inside the gaggle there is no real racing, just each driver awaiting a screwup by someone else to leave an opening. The problem is that the screwups turn out this way:



This was merely the first of several (IIRC, four) such wrecks. Again, no one hurt, thankfully. In the old days it was rare for NASCAR wrecks to wipe out eight or so cars at a time. It happened, but not much. Now, it's rare when wrecks don't do so. All this does is stop the race (well, what little racing there actually is) for many laps under the yellow. What it does not do is make the race a race when the green flag gets waved again. There are fewer cars to clump together at 195 mph, but it's still just a clump. And so: another such wreck. In fact, the last of these wrecks of the evening took place mere minutes before the end, and when it started I thought for a moment that Fox was replaying the wreck in the video above.

NASCAR blames its multiyear attendance drop on the recession. Problem is that attendance peaked in 2005 and has shrunk every year since. Both 2009's and 2010's attendance were less than 2003's.

Why? Because the drivers aren't racing anymore; the winner usually just turns out to be the luckiest of the last men standing, having missed being wiped out in a pile up. That means the "race" is boring because viewers are not actually watching a competition, just a high-speed game of Russian Roulette. Even the wrecks are not entertaining, not because drivers don't get hurt (that's a good thing) but because they are so predictable and frequent that there is no longer a surprise factor in them and all they do is interrupt what little racing there might be. "Look, honey, twelve cars are spinning out of control again. I'll go get that popcorn for you now."

As I said at the beginning, the only entertaining part of the evening was this:



Related: The day I raced against Darrell Waltrip. He won.

NASCAR remains the palest of professional sports: "It makes the NHL look like a melting pot."

What is the fastest you have ever driven?