A Belly Full of Bailout

It's forced feeding time for the Auto Industry. And Otto Von Carmaker is not just going to get it in the tank, but up the tail pipe and in the trunk.

Detroit revs up its bailout begging | Salon News

On bended knee, and with promises to retool their operations, the Big Three ask Congress for billions to save the auto industry. They might get it this time.

Oh, there going to get it. It's what they are going to do with it and what the rest of us are going to do about it that is the mystery. Can we buy Cars in Canada? You know, like prescription drugs?

Do Terrorists ever experience unintended consequences?

BBC NEWS | South Asia | US 'warned India' about Mumbai

Mumbai police chief Hassan Gafoor told a news conference on Tuesday that security authorities had "had an alert that hotels like Taj could be exposed to such danger".

ABC News quoted Indian officials as saying that after receiving the US warning, they also intercepted a satellite phone message on 18 November warning of a seaborne attack on Mumbai.

The city had been on high alert but security measures at the attacked hotels had recently been relaxed, the network reported.

ABC also reported that the Indian authorities had seized a mobile phone SIM card belonging to the attackers, which they said had led to a "treasure trove" of contacts and information.

We were told this was a well organized and planned operation. Why would the well trained terrorist bring along a "treasure trove" of contacts and information?

I'm reminded that the 9/11 attackers did not bother to conceal their identity. In fact, AQ hoped to get the US bogged down in that sand trap known as Afghanistan. Instead, we fought AQ in Iraq -- which at least has an outlet to the sea and the prize of vast amounts of oil. The idea that we should isolate a large US army in Afghanistan (in the midst of hostile neighbors) never appealed to me. If Barack Obama puts a large army in there, he better hope there are no Barack Obamas around to undermine him when the going gets tough -- as it likely will.

Clearly the idea behind this attack is to provoke conflict between India and the new Civilian government in Pakistan. If the terrorists deposited evidence of the involvement in this atrocity of Pakistan's security forces, then the Civilian government will find itself in a hard place indeed. But it might be possible to rally the rest of the nation against the "Pashtun-Arab alliance" that is trying to drag Pakistan into a disastrous war with India -- and perhaps the US as well.

The High Cost Alternative

Pajamas Media » Green Policies Mean Less Green in Our Wallets

At first glance, one wouldn’t see a connection between a rash of stolen copper pipes from vacant buildings and sky-high prices for food items — say the $70 that a local St. Louis grocer was charging for a single holiday goose — but those connections are there, and they ultimately stem from environmentalist-driven land use policy imposed by the government. It’s difficult to imagine that restrictions in ANWR may be responsible for copper theft, but responsible it is! Ditto food; why would we pay more for our holiday feast because the price of natural gas has risen?

The extreme Global Warmist are about concentrating power in Washington and turning the USA into the Soviet Union that works -- only it won't.

They blow bubbles, don't they.

Here is Spengler's take on President Elect Obama's financial wizards, from an article with some good background:

For a quarter of a century, the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills have known nothing but a rising trend in asset prices. About the origin of this trend, they were incurious. The Reagan administration had encountered a stock market in 1981 trading 50% below its the long-term trend. Reagan restored the equity market to trend by cutting taxes, suppressing inflation and easing some regulations. The private equity sharps were fleas traveling on Reagan's dog. They simply rode the trend with the maximum of leverage...

Without leverage, the clever folk around Barack Obama are fleas without a dog. None of them invented anything, introduced an important new product, opened a new market, or did anything that reached into the lives of ordinary people. They wore expensive cufflinks, read balance sheets, exercised regularly, sat on philanthropic boards, and assumed that their flea's ride on the Reagan dog would last forever.

Apparently their new idea is "shock and awe" stimulation for the economy.  Like the old joke says, when you have a hammer all your problems look like nails. The Real Estate bubble worked out well for Rahm  Emanuel, Barney Frank and the Congressional Democrats. Their Wall Street Pals will "bail out" alright, too.  Obviously, if you know how to create bubbles then when you see a problem break out the bubbly.  So soon we'll have a bubbly auto industry, a bubbly "alternative fuel"  sector and a bubbly bath for the taxpayer. I hope it is "for the children" since they are the ones who will pay for it.

Will his sensible appointees come up with sensible policies?  Or will they break out the bubbly?

Want a well used crisis? How's about Global Warming for 45 trillion?

History News Network

What is to be done? We must use this crisis to make major strides towards energy independence. A major part of the stimulus package should be spent on investment in our energy resources. This is the time to take a holistic approach. We should do everything, so that never, but never, will energy warlords be in a position to hold us hostage again. As in 1973 and 1979, they have demonstrated yet again that they cannot be trusted. Enough is enough.

I wonder. If President Obama wants to serve two successful terms he will go slow on alternative energy development. Alternative energy is expensive energy and will drain America's wallet while putting the nation's industry at a competitive disadvantage. He would be wise to keep the price of oil low (and our enemies -- now his enemies, too -- poor) by allowing more domestic production and generating cheap, coal powered electricity for the grid. The fact that we may be entering a mini ice age should help. Instead of a ten year time frame for alternatives, he should think thirty years and have a successful Presidency.

He has been making sensible appointments. He should follow up with sensible policies.

Settled Men

Pajamas Media » The Peter Pan Myth: The Real Reason Men Won’t Settle Down

But what was original was just how much of a backlash Hymowitz herself incited –all of it from the boys. Her inbox overfloweth with righteous invective styling itself as the “Menaissance,” which sure sounds as ridiculous as “Iron John” did in the ’70s, but recommends an altogether healthier program than banging bongo drums naked in the woods. The Menaissance mantra seems to be, “We’re mad as hell, and we’d rather be masturbating”...

I watched "House" Tuesday and on that show an "emancipated" 16 year old girl said the reason she was estranged from her parents was that her father had raped her. I thought the statistical genius Doctors on the show should point out that for the biological father to rape the daughter is a rather rare event. For the "live in" boyfriend or the latest hook-up of a single mom, much more common. This is one of my favorite gripes against Hollywood: They constantly show the "traditional fathers" as wretches; the single mom as heroic. Then they will associate the social problems of the broken family with the intact ones. In the real world a daughter living in an intact family is at much less risk.

Now in this case the daughter was lying about her father raping her. On the program it seemed regarded as a perfectly acceptable "polite" lie, however. In the end they did show the parents reuniting with the daughter. That is progress, for Hollywood.

I think the gripes of the "boys" have to do with what they are called when they become men.

An august bureaucrat gives us August in October

From the folks who brought us bogus "climate models" heavily biased toward global warming (or rather prejudiced against Free Markets and Free Enterprise) comes Flaming October!

The world has never seen such freezing heat - Telegraph:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

Jimmy Hansen and his jimmied up climate records is a prime example of a bureaucrat taking over a taxpayer funded institution to promote their own ideology. There is apparently nothing we can do about this if the individual shows up to work on time and don't take too many sick days or murder their co-workers. I remember this guy saying -- when global warming critics claimed that much foreign temperature data was inaccurate -- that third world readings track with US data so it's all good. Then when his "reformulation" of US data turned out wrong (the 90s were not the warmest decade in the US) he said it tracked with foreign data so he was still right globally even if his claims were wrong locally. 

The author Christopher Booker describes the cause of the latest screw up:

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The mistakes seem to go one direction -- the direction of giving these folks all sorts of power and spending $45 trillion in a crash program to crash the economy.