Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Where the wealthy Americans live...

Where the wealthy Americans live...  On the map at right (a snapshot of this interactive map), the more yellow an area is, the more wealthy its inhabitants.  Most of these areas are associated with a general population concentration, and thriving businesses: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.

Another stands out for its association with a large number of people who make their living by taking from their fellow Americans: Washington, D.C.  It's the largest concentration of wealthy areas in the entire country.

That pretty much sums up my problems with our government right there...

Progressive bubble in action...

Progressive bubble in action...  Yesterday I drove “down the hill” to have lunch with a couple of friends (at Siam Nara, most excellent!).  On the way there, I listened to NPR for a while, until I heard this: an interview with a business reporter for NPR in Texas, opining on why businesses were starting to relocate from China to Texas – in particular, why Texas more than any other state.

That report twisted himself into pretzels to avoid giving the real reasons: Texas' business-friendly regulatory environment, low taxes, and large number of well-educated and willing workers.  Instead he cited things like climate (and he lives there!), the Houston seaport, and proximity of natural gas production.  It's clear that the reporter had either never talked with an actual business decision maker, or had ignored everything he heard.  Doesn't fit the narrative, you know...

I turned off the radio.

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  The Wall Street Journal gets it today, for this, the first sentence in an opinion piece called “California’s Green Reality Check”:
Governor Jerry Brown ought to be canonized as the patron saint of hopeless environmental causes.
Hah!

Iran's nuclear marathon...

Iran's nuclear marathon...  Bret Stephens, writing at the Wall Street Journal, on why the French had to be the adults at the bargaining table with Iran (an excerpt):
... But it's mainly an example of failing up—the Washingtonian phenomenon of promotion to ever-higher positions of authority and prestige irrespective of past performance.

This administration in particular is stuffed with fail-uppers—the president, the vice president, the secretary of state and the national security adviser, to name a few—and every now and then it shows. Like, for instance, when people for whom the test of real-world results has never meant very much meet people for whom that test means everything.

That's my read on last weekend's scuttled effort in Geneva to strike a nuclear bargain with Iran. The talks unexpectedly fell apart at the last minute when French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius publicly objected to what he called a "sucker's deal," meaning the U.S. was prepared to begin lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange for tentative Iranian promises that they would slow their multiple nuclear programs.

Not stop or suspend them, mind you, much less dismantle them, but merely reduce their pace from run to jog when they're on Mile 23 of their nuclear marathon. It says something about the administration that they so wanted a deal that they would have been prepared to take this one. This is how people for whom consequences are abstractions operate. It's what happens when the line between politics as a game of perception and policy as the pursuit of national objectives dissolves.

The French are not such people, believe it or not, at least when it comes to foreign policy. ...
2016 sure seems like a long way away, doesn't it?

Not only inane, but willfully fraudulent...

Not only inane, but willfully fraudulent...  Steve McIntyre notes a scientist's scathing indictment of nutrition research.  Much of what that scientist (Edward Archer) has to say about nutrition science applies directly to climate science, which I'm sure is Steve's unstated point.  From Archer's editorial in The Scientist:
Perhaps more importantly, to waste finite health research resources on pseudo-quantitative methods and then attempt to base public health policy on these anecdotal “data” is not only inane, it is willfully fraudulent… The fact that nutrition researchers have known for decades that these techniques are invalid implies that the field has been perpetrating fraud against the US taxpayers for more than 40 years—far greater than any fraud perpetrated in the private sector (e.g., the Enron and Madoff scandals).
Ouch.  Certainly that applies just as well to climate science.

Don't miss Steve's last line – it's a hoot!

Faster than Legolas!

Faster than Legolas!  Danish archer Lars Andersen has rediscovered the ancient martial skill of shooting arrows rapid-fire, one after the other – while still being accurate.  Watch this video of him, and then imagine an army full of archers with his skills, as history tells us there were.  Scary!

ObamaCare debacle update...

ObamaCare debacle update...  Because what would your morning be without it?

26 year old Katrina figures out ObamaCare is screwing her.

Surprise!  Obama administration stonewalls investigation into ObamaCare web site disaster.

Time to start considering ObamaCare's worst-case scenarios.  Because, you know, those are starting to look like the likely scenarios...

3% - that's how close not-so-close the state ObamaCare exchanges came to their enrollment target numbers.  Sheesh.

Hope is all that ObamaCare has left.  So says Megan McArdle, as she lays out some of the possible scenarios over the next few months.  It ain't purty...

I just enrolled for COBRA extension through next July, when my eligibility for it runs out.  That means I have great health insurance (my former employer's plan) through that time.  At this point I have no idea what comes after that ... but I'm hoping that something will have settled out of this mess before then...

Facing the reality of stage 4 colon cancer...

Facing the reality of stage 4 colon cancer... is my colleague from a former job, Mark Rizzo (at right).  He's blogging about his experiences with treatment, and he's also raising money to help find a cure for colon cancer.  He's fighting hard to expunge his cancer, and the next step for him (hopefully!) is HIPEC treatment here in San Diego.

He and his family could use the support and prayers of all of us.  A donation to his fund-raising effort would be appreciated, I'm sure...

Dog Goldberg...


Dog Goldberg...  Your morning smile, fellow dog-lover.  If you're not a dog lover, then what the hell are you doing on my blog?