Monday morning ramble [update 2]

Here’s a brief ramble through a bunch o’ links I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for a while.

• “Why we should fear American health care reform”: “Because medical innovation is hugely driven by what happens in the US market. . .  Thus 300 million of the richest people on the planet underwrite, through the prices they pay for new treatments, the developments that we get years later as prices drop.
      If the US does indeed bring in some form  . . . of price rationing, then medical innovation will fall....no, not cease completely, simply there will be less of it than there would otherwise have been. Thus people who could or might have been cured will not be and they will die.” 
  Read all Tim Worstall’s commentary here.
• MacDoctor reports that minor child assaults have increased from 32 to 45 a month since the inception of Sue Bradford’s/John Key’s anti-smacking law.  That’s either 156 cases of parents being persecuted for smacking, or it’s an alarming increase in children being assaulted. Read the MacDoctor for at least three reasons to be concerned: “Smacking Intimidation.”
• Plenty of people reckon that free speech isn’t supposed to protect “being an asshole whenever I feel like, saying whatever I like, being disrespectful to people and not be courteous.” Singer John Mellencamp is one of them.  Jeff Perren reckons he’s wrong.  Wrong In Every Way. And he’s an asshole.
• Are you keeping up with BERL’s wriggling in the face of severe criticisms of its work on the “social costs of alcohol”?  Anti Dismal wraps up the latest round: “The reply to the response to the criticism of the original (updated).” It’s the “updated” that really gets me.  :-)
      Baaically, BERL's nearly total lack of response on economic grounds, lack of references to any theory or evidence in the literature in response to our criticisms, combined with their continued willingness to assume all of the key elements supporting their headline costs, indicates fairly persuasively that BERL has conceded the economic argument.
• It’s not quite true to say that banks and central banks “create money out of thin air,” says Economics for Real People author Gene Callahan: In fact, today’s paper money “is created from a government’s ability to collect taxes, combined with the fact that it promises to accept the pieces of paper in payment for those taxes.”  Read “Fiat Money.” [Hat tip Anti Dismal] 
  And if you haven’t already, then check out George Reisman’s “companion  piece”: “Counterfeit Capital.”
• Here’s a new Atlanta-based arts website started by a friend of a friend -- “the well-known classical music reviewer Pierre Ruhe; he is very knowledgeable and has quite a strong reputation,” says my friend.  Check out: artscriticATL.com.
• Have you ever noticed how warmists on the internet always reach for one of two rejoinders to combat non-warmists’ evidence.  The first is to point out that everyone involved with said evidence is paid for by ExxonMobil/BP/Shell/Beelzebub.  And the second is to point to a “thorough debunking” of the evidence over at RealClimate.org – a blog featuring “real climatologists.” (Experiment: let’s see how long it takes before someone tries both ruses on this morning’s thread.)  Good to see then that someone is pointing out the mote in Real Climate’s eyes – and the man who’s bankrolling them. The Truth about RealClimate.org, says The Truth about RealClimate.org, is that “the site exists to promote global warming alarm-ism and attack anyone who does not agree with their declaration of doomsday. The Truth about RealClimate.org is to “give their fanboys ‘ammunition’ to further promote alarmist propaganda across the Internet (and of course declare victory).” The Truth about RealClimate.org is to give a job to a propagandist “to edit dissent and smear skeptical scientists on Wikipedia.” The Truth is that RealClimate.org “is an environmentalist shill site directly connected to an eco-activist group, Environmental Media Services and Al Gore but they don't want you to know that.”
• Meanwhile, Gail Heroit wants to know if “Is Al Gore the Re-incarnation of the Xhosa Prophetess Nongqawuse?”
• And now for something completely different.  Quote of the day, on Abortion:

      “The question of abortion involves much more than the termination of a pregnancy: it is a question of the entire life of the parents. . . . [P]arenthood is an enormous responsibility; it is an impossible responsibility for young people who are ambitious and struggling, but poor; particularly if they are intelligent and conscientious enough not to abandon their child on a doorstep nor to surrender it to adoption. For such young people, pregnancy is a death sentence: parenthood would force them to give up their future, and condemn them to a life of hopeless drudgery, of slavery to a child’s physical and financial needs. The situation of an unwed mother, abandoned by her lover, is even worse.
      “I cannot quite imagine the state of mind of a person who would wish to condemn a fellow human being to such a horror. I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object. Judging by the degree of those women’s intensity, I would say that it is an issue of self-esteem and that their fear is metaphysical. Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life. In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today’s intellectual field, they call themselves ‘pro-life’.”

• Now this is important: a website showing the different pitch dimensions for different football codes. There is a certain kind of person fascinated by stuff like this.  I am one of those kinds of people.
• Dale Steinreich celebrates “75 Years of American Housing Fascism.”  But don’t look too smug.  It’s not much different here.
• We’ve now come to the obligatory ObaMessiah section of the Ramble.  Author Edward Cline presents “Parsing Obama” posted at The Rule of Reason, saying,
  • “To grasp the magnitude of the national debt Obama (and his Republican predecessor) has been ringing up, a comparison should help illustrate the task. Bernard Madoff’s robbery and defrauding investors of some $50 billion can be represented by the diameter of the solar system. The federal government, using the same scamming tactics, is amassing a debt about the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy. Madoff’s scheme can be measured in millions of miles. The federal government's, in almost limitless parsecs. That measurement ought to suffice to dramatize the scale of the hole he is deliberately digging for the country in his role as Community-Organizer-in-Chief.”
• But the ObaMessiah worship continues.  “I don't get to the lower level of Washington's Union Station much,” says Mark Krikorian, “but today I passed through and saw "My Obama Shop" — that's the actual name of an entire store devoted to all things Obama. My phone takes lousy pictures, but a blogger at Cato’s Cultwatch has a photo. Obviously there's a market for this sort of thing (I'm assuming it's not a government-owned business, at least for now) is a way there never would be for "My Bob Dole Shop" or "My John McCain Shop," but it's still kind of creepy. In fact, the very fact that there is a market for an Obama store is creepy." [Hat tip Jeff Perren]
• And Keeping Stock has an “Obama Caption Contest” you might like to look at. So to speak.
• Time for an Israeli Strike on Iran?  John Bolton thinks so.
• You’ve heard this morning from the mainstream morons that “economists expect inflation to slow further,” and “the aggregate inflation picture is very subdued.” These are the morons who never even say the collapse coming, but they’re still around pointificating as if they know what’s going on.  Two more “companion pieces” on the money-supply sleight-of-hand used by central banks might help you better understand the moronry:
  • “Inflation: What You See and What You Don't See” by Thorstein Polleit
  • “How Much Money Inflation?” by Howard Katz
• Basically, if you don’t understand the difference between price inflation and money inflation, then you’re less than worthless at knowing what’s now going on.
• Randal O’Toole offers more evidence at the Master Resources blog against the energy hog that is public transport. Read “Do Passenger Trains Save Energy? Another Look.”
• And you think there’s an energy shortage?  Doesn’t need to be, says Alex Epstein.

      Most people have become acclimated to an extremely slow rate of energy progress. While, say, our computers and electronics will rapidly decrease in price while increasing in quality, our energy bills look to be going nowhere but up. This despite the fact that today, as in the past several decades, government “energy planners” promise us an energy paradise of solar, wind, or whatever other technology they happen to favor.
      My new essay, “Energy at the Speed of Thought,” tells the story of an entirely different sort of energy market. . .
      In the essay, I argue that the amazing speed and impact of “the original alternative energy industry” is achievable today. What will it take? Go read “Energy at the Speed of Thought” to find out.

• Oh, and while we’re talking about energy, did you hear how clean, green geothermal energy has been, could be and probably is a source of earthquakes.  Read “A green energy disaster.”
• I don’t know about you, but the braindead morons at TV3’s imbecilic infotainment show Target really get my goat. If there was a real consumer show that looked at consumer shows, they’d be giving Target the kick in the pants it deserves.  The mush that is regularly served up as nutrient is bad enough – let alone the grinning fools who present it, who clearly possess about as much expertise as next door’s cocker spaniel.  What’s disgraceful is that they can take it upon themselves to ruin small businesses with as little care as an incompetent pest-killer might give to a bit of overspray.  Latest example: the slack bastards did a perusal of the hygiene standards of eight Auckland’s cafes, and ended up falsely fingering Cafe Cezanne, whose owners Rod Williams and Jackie Wilkinson say the "unbelievable" mistake has ruined their once-thriving business.  Time to ruin the imbeciles at Target, I say, not the cafe which just got an A grade rating during a food and safety inspection by the Auckland City Council last month.
• If you haven’t seen it already, and even if you have, then this “personals chart” produced for a dating website is a pretty cool use of graphics.  Except I still can’t find the picture of her boat . . .
• Here’s a piece of news guaranteed to get some of you excited: “Vegetarians less likely to develop cancer than meat eaters, says study.”
• And speaking of food, George Light runs down the big issue of “A Semi-Definitive Guide to Food at Blues Festivals Everywhere” and leaves me asking two questions: just what the hell are grits? and how the hell can he fit so many great blues and jazz clips into one pithy post.  Check it out.
• Together with “modern art,” vapid celebrity worship must surely be the epitome of our air-head culture.  Here’s a service that sums up the culture: For 5000 bucks, you can hire yourself a stalker so YOU TOO can feel like a celeb.  Please insert obvious quips, links and references below.
• Dr Shaun Holt says the widespread use of placebos is a waste of taxpayers’ money on ineffective medication.  See here and here.  Lindsay Mitchell isn’t quite so sure: “The placebo effect exists, therefore if a drug improves someone's condition, it has 'worked'.”
  [UPDATE: Shaun tells me “The Dom got it wrong, I don’t think that they're a waste of $ at all and I posted that on Lindsays blog - but hey, the media don’t always get it right! Here's a piece on this morning’s Breakfast...
  Also, here's some comments on the folic acid issue...John Key got hammered about this by Paul Henry this morning, well worth watching on the Breakfast site. ]
• What is Objective Law?  It’s a good question, isn’t it, since that’s what governments are supposed to uphold, right?  Here’s a potted summary.  It’s called, surprise, surprise: “What is Objective Law?”
• Yesterday I finally watched a presentation I’ve been meaning to watch since July 4: John Ridpath’s outstanding lecture on Virginia’s “Son of Thunder” – the man who Jefferson called “the first man” on the American continent – more well known as Patrick Henry.  Ridpath talks with eloquence and unhidden passion “on the inspirational life of the man who did so much to guide America towards becoming a free country administered by presidents, rather than another wasteland ruled by tyrants.” 
  As Myrhaf says, “The speech is entertaining and, more important, it reminds us that the American Revolutionaries stood on the principle of individual liberty. There were timid souls back then, moderates, as there always are. It took a a man of integrity and oratorical genius to steel their resolve. Henry persuaded people that there could be no compromise. . .”  Watch it here the first chance you get: “In the Dawn’s Early Light: Patrick Henry—Beacon for America.”
• And finally, Richard Feynman. If you don’t already know the great physicist, then this video is a great introduction to his wit, his charm and his downright intelligence.  And as Bob Muphy notes, “a flurry of Richard Feynman YouTubes has been hitting the blogosphere,” so if you like this then check out YouTube for more.
  
  
  
  
• And finally, (yes, really finally this time) here’s what Lindsay Perigo reckons is YouTube’s ultra-kick-arse musical gem of the century!  Check it out here.

UPDATE 1: Added Blunt’s RealClimate.Org cartoon above.  Thanks mate.

UPDATE 2: And a late entry in the Health stakes, from Diana Hsieh, who says, “I fucking love this. Study shows that swearing mitigates pain.” I could have told you that for fucking nothing.