Interesting Items - Oct 10 Come visit us at our new web site: www.interestingitems.org Leave your thoughts, comments and opinions. We look forward to hearing from you. Interesting Items Alex Gimarc [email protected] Monday Oct 10, 2011 Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue: 1. Perry 2. Riots 3. Elections 4. Nuclear Option 5. Quasicrystals 6. China 1, Perry. You can always tell who the left is terrified of during an election season by who they are going after hammer and tong. This election cycle, that target is Rick Perry. He is doing well enough that the Washington Post trotted out a seven-page hit piece on a painted rock at a ranch his family had purchased hunting rights to with the word Niggerhead on it. Somebody did the opposition research on that little factoid and leaked it to the Post. It was not anyone in Texas, as the issue did not come up in previous elections against Bush-supported candidates or against the democrats he has been defeating for the last decade. Speculation is that it came out of the Romney campaign, which is the only one with the resources to do the opposition research and the motivation to pull the trigger on this now rather than late October 2012. It turns out that that name is a relatively common place name throughout the English speaking world. Anthony Watts pointed it out here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/03/surprising-things-and-places-in-science-engineering-and-geography-named-niggerhead/ Herman Cain weighed in on the story by calling Perry insensitive rather than going after the Post for publishing a hit piece on Perry. Later in the week, he also said that he would consider running as a VP with any of the Republican field other than Perry. This includes uber-RINO, John Huntsman. These two reactions and the lack of media hit pieces on Cain led to some speculation that he was running the same split the conservative vote tag team with Romney that Huckabee did with McCain against Romney in 2008. For his part, Romney’s anti-coal support of cap and trade while MA governor was the topic of a WSJ article and a PowerLine piece. The Perry campaign posted a YouTube ad on Friday. You can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUHaMSxLYc8 The left always tells us who the most conservative candidate is and who they are most scared of. This time around, that candidate is Rick Perry. 2. Riots. The Occupy Wall Street mob received more media as the Move On / Soros / union orchestrated and funded protests spread out to cities nationwide. These protests are the leading edge of the Obama reelection campaign and are likely setting the foundation for riots next year. We had some protesters here in Anchorage. Nightime temperatures are falling below freezing, so they won’t be around long. One of the local talk shows interviewed a young protester who redefined the term “clueless” for his listeners. She didn’t know why she was there. She didn’t know who paid for government benefits. All in all, she was a perfect example of the product we are getting out of the unionized government schools. Obama weighed in with support of the protesters. These people are Obama voters – young, dumb and clueless. Their protests are artificial. This is what community organizers are paid to stir up. It is what they need to do to win reelection next year. This will get a lot worse before it gets better. 3. Elections. We had local elections here in Alaska last Tuesday. The anti-Pebble mine initiative in the Lake and Peninsula Borough will not have votes counted until Oct. 17. A ballot initiative in Juneau that would impose a 15 cent tax on plastic bags used at large stores like Wal-Mart and Fred Meyer went down to defeat with 69% voting against it. Juneau is the most liberal town in the state with a loud and healthy community of committed greens. For this tax to fail like it did is moderately surprising. In Fairbanks, a ballot initiative that would ban wood stoves for home heating also failed with 60% voting against it. The EPA has long threatened Fairbanks with clean air violations during the winter. When it is very cold, there is little wind and over the course of a few days, you end up with an inversion that collects everything dumped into the air underneath it. Eventually, you fire off a violation from the EPA’s clean air monitors. The EPA has threatened to withhold federal money to Fairbanks unless they cleaned up their air. Local greens came up with this taking of home heating stoves as a solution. Congratulations to the people of Fairbanks. The fight with the EPA will continue. 4. Nuclear Option. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) changed senate rules by a simple majority vote. This was the so-called nuclear option suggested by Republicans in the mid-2000s as a way to limit democrat obstruction of Bush judicial nominees. The change in senate rules has to do with how amendments can be offered after a filibuster is defeated. It also limits the ability of any senator to call for a suspension of senate rules afterwards and force a voice vote. Reid was involved in a relatively mundane knife fight over Obama’s mythical jobs bill. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had almost forced a public vote on the legislation. Reid had to protect his members, 22 of which are up for reelection next year, from having to take a vote against Obama’s legislation. Many observers view this as an act of weakness and desperation. By setting this precedent, Reid has made it much easier for any future administration to confirm conservative judicial nominees; made it much easier to repeal all the legislation passed during the Reid – Pelosi congresses. It was a cute maneuver that will be used against democrats the next time they are in the minority. 5. Quasicrystals. The Nobel Prize for chemistry this year went to a 70-year old Israeli scientist who discovered a new way for crystalline structures to organize themselves – quasicrystals. The discovery was ridiculed by everyone in his field. He was fired from his research group. He was publicly ridiculed by Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling on a regular basis. The discovery has to do with how crystals are organized. In normal crystals, the atoms are organized in regular, repeating arrays. Quasicrystals look regular, but the patterns of organization never repeat. This is yet another example of a scientist that found something at odds with what was consensus science worldwide at the time. He announced his findings, was dismissed as a lunatic and a crank. Yet over time, his results and methods were reproducible and he ended up being correct and everyone else was wrong. This is how science is supposed to work. Contrast this with publicly funded climate research into manmade global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions, where somehow consensus is supposed to trump every observation, bit of data, or model that is out of line with that consensus. Story about this can be found on Yahoo: http://news.yahoo.com/vindicated-ridiculed-israeli-scientist-wins-nobel-183256852.html 6. China. China has long been a bad actor in free trade. They manipulate their currency; steal patents by simply copying American products; and engage in a variety of unfair trade practices. To date, no administration has done much of anything about them. Senate democrats, desperate for something – anything to use against conservatives next year drafted legislation imposing tariffs on Chinese goods coming into the US unless China stopped manipulating their currency. Essentially this legislation is Smoot – Hawley II, and will have precisely the same impact that Smoot – Hawley did during the Great Depression. To date, the House leadership is in strong opposition to the legislation, which encourages senate democrats to push it even harder for passage. Laura Ingraham, who has her own conservative talk show and sits in on FNC for O’Reilly from time to time, is over the top in support of the legislation and spent most of last week berating guests over their lack of support for it. In this, she is wrong on both the tactical and strategic levels. Triggering a trade war with China will not solve this problem. It will not clean up their bad behavior. And trying to do so this way will only repeat a terrible mistake made 80 years ago, one that will do to this awful economy what that legislation did to the awful economy 80 years ago.
On the other hand, there is a better way to get China’s attention. They hold a significant amount of our debt. What better way to get their attention than to start talking about defaulting on those Chinese-held bonds. Default will hurt them a lot more than it will hurt us. And it is something that can be done in quiet, away from the light of day, as a friendly discussion to a trading partner, allowing them to save face in public. Worth considering. More later - - AG "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776. Interesting Items can be found at the following locations: Our Home Page http://interestingitems.org/ Archives can be found at http://home.gci.net/~agimarc The Alaska Standard http://thealaskastandard.com/ MatSu Valley News http://www.matsuvalleynews.com Subscriber and supporter Elbert Collins at http://thatselbert.wordpress.com/ Rod Martin's The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column: http://www.thevanguard.org/ -- To join RichsRants, send email to: [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/richsrants?hl=en
