Stones Cry Out

Your neighbor across the aisle does not. Here is some unsolicited advice for the left wing on this topic. If you really think this is a problem, and you want everyone, not just your side of the aisle to push for it futilely … Here’s a newsflash for y’all. You’re selling it wrong.

Look at us over here on the right. We think the space program was cool. We love going to flight museums and wistfully wishing we (as a nation) were still flying SR-71s (RS-71 dammit, stupid Presidents). We gawk at daisy cutters and talk about yields and payloads. While we might take up on those government goodies that are “free” it sticks in our craw and we wish that ‘ol time Yankee rugged individualism wasn’t dying out, killed by bureaucratic mind-numbing cookie cutter schools among other things. Read these two books, here and here. That’s good reading. So, do you like Bob? We do.

In a past era, a Democratic President challenged his nation to go to the moon, not because it was easy but because it was hard. You want a nation to get behind you with a climate crises. Challenge them that way. Tell ’em to go out and fix it, not by sucking back our economy and going all green-ified on us, scrimping out toilet paper curbing consumption of interesting toys and things to do.

No. Fix it the old fashioned way, with a hammer, tongs, and big bad-ass technology. Challenge us that way, and you might get a rise out of us.

Of course it might alienate you’re side of the aisle, but you can’t break an omelette without making eggs, or something like that.

(with tongue firmly in cheek … and attempting to ignore the silly season somewhat)

Remember those flotilla that went to Gaza that were ostensibly to deliver humanitarian aid because the mean Israelis wouldn’t let any in? Never mind that Israel ships in humanitarian aid there all the time, tons of it. No, the real reason for the flotillas was to break the blockade; one that even the UN has admitted is understandable.

If the reasons were really humanitarian, there’s another place, very close by, that could use it. But all those alleged "humanitarians" seem to be blind to it. Ron Prosor, writing in the Wall Street Journal, takes them to task.

The conflict in Syria has also claimed roughly four times as many victims in the past 20 months as were killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past 20 years. The residents of Gaza continue to enjoy more international assistance than virtually any other population on the planet, but almost no aid is reaching the two million people displaced within Syria—roughly 10% of the country’s population.

The flotilla crowd has different priorities. They prefer to work around the clock to protest Israel’s legitimate defense against the terrorists who target its citizens and fire thousands of rockets into its cities. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: It’s much easier to face news cameras in Tel Aviv than bullets in Damascus.

Indeed, Israel is the luxury destination of choice for this type of "human-rights activist." In Israel, these weekend revolutionaries are free from the dangers of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution that abound in the totalitarian states that make up the rest of the region. Instead of trying to dig into the dark abyss of abuses in neighboring states, they prefer to lounge in the comfort of Israel’s democratic institutions, civil society and independent media, which offer a wealth of easily accessible information that they use to attack Israel.

Remember this the next time they try this stunt on Israel. And remember which US political party has been Israel’s most stalwart defender. (Hint: Not the one that excised it from their platform.)

These three day weekends … really shorten the week, I mean it’s Wednesday already.

1. I don’t feel the belonging thing they talk about.
2. Fisking Ms Obama.
3. Feeling the pain.
4. Just zipping along.
5. He “duped” me? Huh? Seriously?
6. Persuasion.
7. Learning to learn is the main point … the content is less important.
8. A question for the Keynesians.
9. Photo ID and the Democrats.
10. Who’s important.
11. Climate change and hurricane strength and frequency. Wow, that trend is so very clear.
12. The problem with complaining about a fictional Obama is that Obama did it first.

So, d’ya have a good laborious day yesterday? Munch munch munch.

1. Yikes.
2. Sneeze. (yes I’m very very allergic to those)
3. Liberal global energy policies and unintended consequences.
4. A park to confuse the urban liberal.
5. Some reading enjoyment in the pipeline.
6. Well, by one name it sounds like megalomania.
7. Some advice for the college bound.
8. On being responsive to your constituents.
9. I have a sneaking suspicion that the 2nd problem is not specific enough to answer … but I’ve not thought it through well enough. The problem as stated doesn’t state that the machines are identical. If for example the machines pipeline their production (machine 1’s output goes into machine 2 and so on … first off, if you start it up, machines 2-5 have idle time at the onset (unless they are pre-filled with production … which also isn’t stated). Additinonally there is no indication that the added 95 machines have the optimal “type” distribution for efficiency, as a worst case all additional machines are of type #1 and adding 95 more of them improves your rate not at all).
10. This complaint works just as well for the open immigration crowd.
11. Not a Democrat talking point in the wake of the GOP convention.
12. Isaac and priority.
13. Our national disease.
14. Swivel plane.
15. I’d weight the likely men to the earlier eras, TR is late … but was out and about a lot. How about not during their tenure but at their respective prime-of-life? Who then and if/how would that change your answer?

(And by "Obama’s budget", I mean the one unanimously rejected even by his own party.)

What are those "draconian cuts" that Paul Ryan has proposed in his budget? Is he really going to throw Granny off the cliff with his changes to Medicare?

The Independent Voter Network has an interactive graph where you can see the spending over the next 9 years with the two different budgets. You can also choose a specific area (Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt, security, etc.) to see how that particular area is affected.

What you’ll see is that, under the Ryan budget, spending increases every year. The "cuts" that Democrats and the media keep referring to use the typical DC definition. "If you don’t raise spending on X as much as I want to, you are therefore "cutting" spending to X."

The one exception is Medicaid, where spending dips slightly early on, but over the 9 year span does indeed increase slightly.

Point your friends at this page when they start believing the Democratic talking points. We simply cannot have a rational discussion on the debt problem facing us if we demagogue what amounts to a tepid response to the problem.

Good morning.

1. All those freshman starting school away from home … parents? The same everywhere.
2. A book recommended.
3. Harvard in the news, noted here and here.
4. Charity, culture, economics and more.
5. Not charity?
6. Obama and measuring success.
7. Sometimes the “A” for effort is all that matters. The winsome Ms Olson long ago accepted my proposal at a horrible failure of home cooked dinner. Only the soup was edible (actually the soup was amazing … everything else completely failed).
8. Journalism and disaster.
9. More on the GM plant closing that you haven’t seen elsewhere.
10. Comments?
11. How not to accuse Mr Ryan of being “Randian”.

Cancelled, due to lack of interest.

Good morning.

1. Windly things.
2. That cycle of life thing.
3. Syria.
4. Legal eagles (beagles?) talk hermeneutics.
5. A Mormon crosses the Tiber and talks about it.
6. Speaking of Mormons, apparently they’re Western WASPS.
7. While I’m not enamored of requiring by fiat what is discussed here … this, alas, is high on my I’d-really-like one (but won’t be able to afford) list and not my will buy when available list.
8. Preparation.
9. How not to deal with local OWS behavior.
10. So … now the “reality based party” will all jump behind vouchers?

Go and do the right thing, eh?

That’s the title of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the results of a new study on how school vouchers affect their recipients.

President Barack Obama last month signed an executive order promising to "improve outcomes and advance educational opportunities for African Americans." The order instructs federal agencies to "promote, encourage, and undertake efforts" to increase "college access, college persistence and college attainment for African American students." Unfortunately, his administration remains opposed to the Opportunity Scholarship program in Washington, D.C., which lets students—mostly low-income and African-American—use a voucher to attend a private school.

Perhaps Mr. Obama will reconsider his position on vouchers now that we have for the first time tracked the impact of a voucher program all the way from kindergarten (in 1997) to college enrollment (in 2011). Our study compared students who won a voucher lottery with students who didn’t—the only difference between the groups was the luck of the draw, the gold standard in research design.

The study shows that an African-American student who was able to use a voucher to attend a private school was 24% more likely to enroll in college than an African-American student who didn’t win a voucher lottery.

Some take issue with voucher programs because the parents might actually spend the money on >gasp< religious schools (as noted in the article).

And given the money involved, they got better results for a lower cost.

These impacts are especially striking given the modest costs of the intervention: only $4,200 per pupil over a three-year period. This implies that the government would actually save money if it introduced a similar voucher program, as private-school costs are lower than public-school costs. To get a similar (19%) increase in college enrollment among African-Americans from a class-size reduction effort in Tennessee in the late 1980s, the public-school system had to spend $9,400 per pupil (in 1998 dollars).

But one of the barriers to this successful program is…politics, of course.

President Obama is certainly correct to identify the particularly steep educational barriers that African-American students must surmount if they are to become college-ready. And he seems to have nothing against private school per se, as he has long sent his own daughters to private schools. Yet—apparently thanks to opposition to vouchers from powerful teachers unions—the president still hasn’t taken the next step and helped open private-school doors for low-income children as well.

One more reason to consider when stepping into the voting booth this November.

Slept in. Oops. Still at job site here in Sterling. Anyhow, another quick push for the morning.

1. Another sort of race.
2. Of taxes and offerings.
3. Remember how Germany got rid of nuclear power and went to solar and wind. How’s that working out?
4. Entrepreneurship in Iraq.
5. I too cannot listen to prepared speeches, especially when interrupted every 10 seconds by applause. Bonus, a bit for the Palin fans.
6. Not quite the Le Brea Tar Pits (translation: the the tar tar pits). But close.
7. The auto-green interests and the two candidates.
8. A tight squeeze, helps to be boneless.
9. A prize-winner and some of his work explained.
10. More similarities than differences.
11. A question asked.
12. Playing the game as insight into a person.
13. Sometimes Japan is just weird.
14. I bought the first book last night.
15. TARP and a success story that wasn’t TARP-like.
16. Just say no.
17. Social welfare.

Gotta run. Have a good one!

Good morning. I’m short on time … so I’ll try to be quick. I apologize in advance for errors, of meaning and syntax.

1. Water and ballistics.
2. Rhetoric and … I think a reference to the remarks made by Mr Akin.
3. Is this where Illinois corruption skews the pictures?
4. So, does that make the recent German law anti-Semitic? Or just disputed medical results.
5. Relativism and the term “safe”.
6. I wonder if that includes non-government R&D funding? And if so, how the heck would they measure it?
7. No silly, the Democratic base is soon-to-be unemployed journalists and union workers.
8. Noetic mapping.
9. Getting rid of those gomers … and liberal bigotry.
10. Dishonesty in political commercials … I’d have thought the unusual thing would be to look deeper and find honesty.
11. I really really need to dig into Christos Yannaros and how ethics changes when your idea of person changes.
12. ’cause here is where you find freedom (freedom not from rights and choice, but communion in love).
13. So, why do you think why?

Gotta run. That took 10 minutes. Whew.

The ability to make what are called "induced-pluripotent stem cells" (iPS) has been done before. What’s new now is that making them is becoming easier.

Johns Hopkins scientists have developed a reliable method to turn the clock back on blood cells, restoring them to a primitive stem cell state from which they can then develop into any other type of cell in the body.

The work, described in the Aug. 8 issue of the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS), is "Chapter Two" in an ongoing effort to efficiently and consistently convert adult blood cells into stem cells that are highly qualified for clinical and research use in place of human embryonic stem cells, says Elias Zambidis, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and the Kimmel Cancer Center.

"Taking a cell from an adult and converting it all the way back to the way it was when that person was a 6-day-old embryo creates a completely new biology toward our understanding of how cells age and what happens when things go wrong, as in cancer development," Zambidis says.

"Chapter One," Zambidis says, was work described last spring in PLoS One in which Zambidis and colleagues recounted the use of this successful method of safely transforming adult blood cells into heart cells. In the latest experiments, he and his colleagues now describe methods for coaxing adult blood cells to become so-called induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPS) — adult cells reprogrammed to an embryonic like state, and with unprecedented efficiencies.

Zambidis says his team has managed to develop a "super efficient, virus-free" way to make iPS cells, overcoming a persistent difficulty for scientists working with these cells in the laboratory. Generally, out of hundreds of blood cells, only one or two might turn into iPS cells. Using Zambidis’ method, 50 to 60 percent of blood cells were engineered into iPS cells.

Click here for other stem cell stories that we’ve covered. The idea that embryonic stem cells are a must-have for research is a myth.

Yikes. Busy busy.

1. Climate changers and the law.
2. Exactly a point I’ve been (unsuccessfully I think) been trying to make repeatedly.
3. Well, I wish I had time to listen to this.
4. Those three young girls rioting in Russia cathedrals. Imagine for a moment that the Polish President, Mr Komorowski, was a practicing catholic and some rock group interrupted a catholic service of remembrance for the slain at Auschwitz. Would they be defended strongly … or would even the left suggest that there is a place and a time for political activism.  Read the link for some context.
5. Speaking of which.
6. Eat and run … yer not doing it right.
7. Remember the press is very very blue. Not so much the readers.
8. Using your hammer to hammer.
9. RepRap? Never heard of it, but it sounds interesting.
10. Trade wars.
11. Educational?
12. That cheap overseas labor … fixed. See more here? And more.
13. Mr Obama against Obamacare on principles.
14. On the left side of the aisle, saying thank you = sucking up. Weird.

Have you seen this little ditty floating around the internet (e.g., on Facebook)?

Cute.

Here are my thoughts:

• Schools:  Along with Public School Employee Unions, low performing teachers, overpriced and bloated administrations, emphasis on testing rather than students? Average expenditure / student in US = $11,665. And you want MORE?
• Roads:  Along with Public Employee Unions, excessive benefits, civil service mentality, bureaucratic red tape? Try contracting roads to private firms to see efficiency in execution.
• Firefighters:  Along with early retirement pensions for some at upwards of 90% of final salary?
• Police Officers:  Along with early retirement pensions for some at upwards of 90% of final salary?
• Hospitals:  You mean like the ones run by the Catholic church?
• Paramedics:  A wonderful perk of living in the 21st century West.
• HAZMAT Teams:  Oh yeah, that must be a big line item in the budget.
• Soldiers:  Definitely.
• Sailors:  Definitely.
• Airmen:  Definitely.
• Marines:  Definitely.
• Coast Guard:  Definitely.
• Clean Air:  Not at the expense of bloated over-regulation.
• Clean Water:  Not at the expense of bloated over-regulation.
• Safe Food:  Not at the expense of bloated over-regulation.
• Pure Drugs: Not at the expense of bloated over-regulation.
• Child Protection:  As long as child protection agencies do not abuse their authority and power.
• Safe Products:  Not at the expense of bloated over-regulation.
• Air Traffic Control:  Yes, definitely. And fire them all (a la Reagan) if they try to go on strike.
• Space Exploration:  Robotic exploration is the future.
• Bridges:  Managed by government, contracted to private firms. Kind of like the transcontinental railroad.
• Tunnels:  Managed by government, contracted to private firms.
• Flood Defenses: Hopefully not as was managed in New Orleans (by the gov’t)…
• Universities:  Like Stanford, Claremont, or Yale? Oops, those are private firms. Same comment regarding overpriced and bloated administrations.
• Museums:  Culturally enriching… yet a low priority for taxing the citizenry – ask the 1%’ers to help out.
• Science:  Science? Science couldn’t exist without more taxes?
• Diplomatic relations with other countries:  Definitely.
• Public Parks:  The ones that are used frequently or the ones that sit empty for most of the week?
• Criminal Justice: Definitely.
• Medical Research: This can’t happen without taxes? Oh yeah, when you socialize medicine, you take away incentives for private research – got it.
• National Forests:  Definitely.
• Care for the Elderly & Disabled: This is the government’s responsibility?