…has been hauled up from off the coast of Hawaii.
But it wasn’t tsunami debris, nor was it plastic bags from grocery stores. It was the cast-off detritus of the fishing industry.
But it’s been put to some use:
The massive amount of garbage pulled from the ocean will now be put to use as fuel for electricity generation. Hawaii’s Nets-to Energy program removes metal from broken-down nets and cuts them up for combustion. The steam from the fires runs a turbine to create energy.
It’s come to my attention that some people who’ve installed Ad Blocker or similar programs on their computers may have had the Amazon widgets on my right sidebar disappear as a result, which would make it difficult for them to order from Amazon through my blog. So I’ve created an alternative method here.
Just click on this link and order, and I think that should work.
I’m creating a new category on the right sidebar called “Amazon orders,” and putting this post in it. That way you can always find it if you need to.
Of course, if your screen is showing the Amazon portal on the right sidebar, please feel free to use that. Thanks very much!
When I first read about the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, my thoughts went to the victims of the horror, and my initial impression (before the shooter had been identified) was that the perp would turn out to be an isolated crazy person rather than a terrorist connected with Islam or al Qaeda. Don’t know why I thought so, but perhaps it had something to do with the venue and method of the killings.
If previous experience was a guide, the case would also feature accusations of a right-wing affiliation for the shooter that would in all likelihood turn out to be false, and calls for more gun control as well as calls for more opportunities for concealed carry. The former occurred right on schedule, when the 24-year-old shooter with the all-too-common name of James Holmes was misidentified (ignorantly, sloppily, unforgivably, callously, incompetently, recklessly, purposely—take your pick) by ABC news as 53-year-old Tea Party member James Holmes of Aurora.
The Tea Party has been falsely demonized from the start by reporters, pundits, and political operatives eager to pin various offenses—racist or violent—on a movement that in actuality has been remarkably free of them.
As for the real perp, we learn that he had withdrawn from a graduate program in neuroscience at the University of Colorado in Denver, that he told police his apartment was booby-trapped and they found that to be so, and that he was apparently dressed as the Joker when he committed the crime.
Would someone else in the crowd with a weapon have mattered? I have my doubts in this case. The scene must have been very chaotic: a darkened movie theater is not a good place to get the visibility and clarity necessary to do something about felling a perp in the act.
[Hat tip: Ace.]
Or is it the rest of the news that bothers you even more?
No matter; listen!
I love this sort of thing. I use one of these every night, too. Used it for decades.
Coming a bit ahead of schedule.
I thought it would be saved for September, but it’s about to happen. Perhaps Obama’s run out of other lines of attack, or perhaps there’s a different strategy for the fall. Anyway, now we have the predictable one:
…[T]oday when Obama begins a two-day swing through the crucial state of Florida — with all of its seniors — he’ll introduce another attack: hitting Romney on Medicare and the Ryan budget. Per the campaign, the president “will discuss his commitment to strengthening Medicare, and a new report tomorrow that highlights the devastating impact Mitt Romney’s Medicare plan could have on the 3.4 million Floridians that rely on Medicare.” Bottom line, per the campaign’s guidance: Obama will argue that Romney — through his support for the Ryan budget plan — advocates ending Medicare “as we know it.”
Commenter “Gringo” makes an interesting point about Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark:
A big part of the problem is that ∅bama said something that could be interpreted several ways.
Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
If you include the first sentence, the third sentence means that the business owner didn’t make the infrastructure building happen. If you emphasize just the last two sentences, the implication is that the business owner is not responsible for his success.
That ∅bama made a statement with ambiguous meaning contradicts the image of ∅bama as the great wordsmith, the great speechmaker. While Dubya mangled the Queen’s English from time to time, it was pretty clear what he meant. Dubya’s meaning, whatever his problems with syntax, could not be MISUNDERESTIMATED. You knew what Dubya meant.
The lefties have been crying that all three sentences have to be read together. In that case, ∅bama is making a misleading statement, because by paying taxes which funded building roads and bridges, business owners DID help make it happen.”SOMEBODY ELSE” implies that business owners had nothing to do with building infrastructure which is FALSE- as they helped fund them.
Even if you include the first sentence, there are PLENTY of other statements in ∅bama’s Roanoake speech where ∅bama implied that people weren’t responsible for their own success, or where he denigrates individual success. Look up smart people and working hard.
Obama’s message had seemed very clear to me when I first read it and then listened to it. But in retrospect I can see that Gringo is correct, and that there’s a more ambiguous interpretation, although you have to work very very hard to see the alternative one through the maze of Obama’s perhaps-tortured syntax.
Gringo is also correct that even the less offensive interpretation of Obama’s words is only marginally less so, because of course businesses pay taxes (especially those on gas) and user fees such as tolls. And Gringo is further correct that there are plenty of other indications in Obama’s speech that he is saying exactly what we originally thought he was saying—which is that business owners don’t really create things.
Let’s look at Obama’s words once again:
…[L]ook, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something ”“ there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
Note that Obama repeats “you didn’t get there on your own” twice, for emphasis. He likes rebutting that strawman, but who has ever said that his/her success occurred in a total vacuum? Then Obama jumps to the suggestion that hard work and brains aren’t really related to success, and that successful people cannot be differentiated from the unsuccessful on either of those characteristics, and are successful not because of anything special they do but because they got “help.” He ignores the fact that most of the “help” he lists—the American system (of what: government? business?), and roads and bridges—is available to everyone equally, and everyone is not successful.
So, if the successful are not differentiated from the unsuccessful by their brains or their hard work, nor the “American system” or its roads and bridges, then why are they successful? Is it chance? Is it patronage?
Or is it race or gender? Is this the “American system” Obama really means—racial or gender discrimination? And if so, then why isn’t the “help” of affirmative action that’s been going on for decades causing minorities and women now to be the most successful of all?
Or is it another factor he lists, “great teachers,” that makes all the difference? But if so, what makes some teachers great and others not so great? Is it that great teachers had great teachers? Is it great teachers all the way down?
And what about this sentence, which has gotten a bit lost in the “you didn’t build that” shuffle? It’s pretty amazing all on its own:
Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
In the world according to Obama, companies are parasites on the research done by the government to create the internet, and the government did this (out of the goodness of its heart, I suppose) for the purpose of allowing these companies to make money. If one looks at the actual history of the internet, it’s pretty easy to see that government provided a lot of the early impetus and funding to the many individual academics/scientists/researchers/think-tankers who in fact “invented” the internet, but the original government purpose was military, and the “internet” that was created bore little resemblance to the internet as we now know it. Let’s see:
People often say that the government created the Internet. This is not true.
The Internet is a trillion dollars of fiber optic cables laid in the ground and under our oceans. Fiber optic technology was developed by corporations, such as Corning Glasworks, not the government. The trillion dollars in capital that was used to pay for laying cable came from Wall Street, not the government…
The early days of computing were a hodge-podge of networking standards. Only computers from the same vendor could talk to each other — indeed, often only the same model of computers…In much the same way, around 1980, governments around the world, working with international standards organizations, created the “OSI” or “Open Systems Interconnect” group. The purpose of OSI was to create a single standard for all networks, to create a world wide “internetwork” that all computers could be connected to. By 1990, developed countries (US, Europe, Japan) had laws called “GOSIP” or “Government OSI Profile” that required all computers purchased by the government must support the OSI network standard. All large corporations, such as IBM and HP, supported this standard with their computers.
What’s important about the Internet is that the OSI standard failed. It’s not the standard of today’s Internet. The government backed the wrong horse, so to speak. Instead, today’s Internet is based on TCP/IP — a networking standard the government tried to kill off…
Government threw money at many networks, including the TCP/IP Internet. TCP/IP was influenced by many things, among them the government. But what government most gave TCP/IP was its benign neglect as it spent its guidance, vision, leadership, and energy on developing the OSI network.
See also this, which makes the connection between government funding and private business innovation more clear and gives a lot of detail:
The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network.
Of course the designers could not have foreseen what the (commercial) internet has become. Still, this reality has important implications for how the internet works ”” and explains why there are so many roadblocks in the continued development of online technologies. It is only thanks to market participants that the internet became something other than a typical government program: inefficient, overcapitalized, and not directed toward socially useful purposes…
In other words, the internet would have been a pretty good example of the “it takes a village” approach that Obama was supposedly describing—the interface of government and private enterprise to create a whole, with each bringing its strengths and weaknesses into the mix. But instead he made it a case of the fruits of beneficent government effort being expropriated by private businesses to make their money.
In looking at Obama’s speech again, I got more curious not just about the internet, but about how roads and bridges are funded. Who might that “somebody else” might be who Obama says finances the highways and bridges for those businesses? I got this information:
About 70 percent of the construction and maintenance costs of Interstate Highways in the United States have been paid through user fees, primarily the fuel taxes collected by the federal, state, and local governments. To a much lesser extent they have been paid for by tolls collected on toll highways and bridges. The Highway Trust Fund, established by the Highway Revenue Act in 1956, prescribed a three-cent-per-gallon fuel tax, soon increased to 4.5 cents per gallon. In 1993, the tax was increased to 18.4 cents per gallon, where it remains as of 2012.
The rest of the costs of these highways are borne by general fund receipts, bond issues, designated property taxes, and other taxes. The federal contribution comes overwhelmingly from motor vehicle and fuel taxes (93.5 percent in 2007), and it makes up about 60 percent of the contributions by the states.
There’s also something called a Heavy Highway Vehicle Use Tax that applies “only on highway motor vehicles which have a taxable gross weight or combination weight of 55,000 pounds or more.”
I could go on and on for hours, I suppose, doing research in order to try to uncover what percentage of these fuel taxes and tolls and other taxes are paid by businesses. But if you just think about the proliferation of trucks on the roads it’s clear that successful businesses pay quite a bit of this cost. And if you consider who buys bond issues, it’s certainly not the poor, it would have to be the “successful,” or at least somewhat successful.
I know, I know; logic isn’t really the best approach to all of this, because Obama’s statements weren’t meant to appeal to logic, whatever he really was meaning to say. They were meant to appeal to those who feel resentment of others who are successful, or those who feel guilt about their own success. Come to think of it, many of his supporters probably fall into one or the other of those two categories.
But I’m not at all sure they were ever really on.
[ADDENDUM: You might be interested in watching Romney’s entire speech in Irwin, Pennsylvania yesterday, which was a response to Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remarks.]
[ADDENDUM II: For those who haven’t watched the Romney video, here’s the heart of the speech:
More here on a different but related topic.
And John Podhoretz thinks Romney should send Obama a fruit basket.]
I don’t ordinarily read the Chicago Tribune, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of John Kass before, but this is one heckuva good column.
I’m tempted to quote the whole thing, but I’ll just suggest you read it. In it, Kass takes on Obama for his speech the other day in which the president said to business owners:
“You didn’t get there on your own…I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something ”” there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
Kass contrasts this with his own father’s experience as an immigrant owning a small grocery store and working his fingers to the bone. The column is a tribute to a hard-working man who tried to rise above the rest and build a business through the sweat of his own brow and that of other family members working with him in the store. It ends with this thought:
When I was grown and gone from home, my parents finally managed to save a little money. After all those years of hard work and denying themselves things, they had enough to buy a place in Florida and a fishing boat in retirement. Dad died only a few years later. You wouldn’t call them rich. But Obama might…
And he offers an American dream much different from my father’s. Open your eyes and you can see it too. He stands there at the front of the mob, in his shirt sleeves, swinging that government hammer, exhorting the crowd to use its votes and take what it wants.
As I mulled over Obama’s speech (a fuller excerpt can be found here), I found it to be an excellent example of the different approaches of left and right. Obama is not just pointing out an obvious fact—one that even Republicans and small business owners do not deny—which is that people do not exist in isolation, and there are countless factors, little and big, that go to influence a person’s life. He is saying that economic success is not a meritocracy, and capitalism itself is not a meritocracy. Furthermore, it seems to me that he implies, without exactly saying it, that businesses succeed on the backs of other people who deserve success as much as those who do succeed.
In his address, Obama later added the obligatory disclaimer sentence, “The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together,” but the earlier (and longer) part of his speech belied that statement.
He then went on to give a version of his old “uniter” speech (“We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for president ”“ because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.”) Is there anyone—anyone—who still believes this claptrap that Obama wants to unite rather than divide us? If so, I doubt that there are many of them left. But there are a lot of people who believe the rest of his speech: the politics of envy, and the logical consequence of a self-esteem movement in which high self-regard has become uncoupled from a realistic appraisal of a person’s actions in the real world.
Obama is using this argument to justify “ask[ing] for the wealthy to pay a little bit more,” to “want to give something back.” Now, when last I looked, most of the wealthy paid a lot of taxes, although they (much like everyone else) try to legally reduce their tax load as much as possible. They also are pretty prominant on the rolls of voluntary giving, otherwise known as philanthropy. The latter is a way that people, rich and poor, express their gratitude for what they have and their compassion for those who have less—that is, to voluntarily “give something back.” But Obama thinks that government should be asking them to “give something back”—more and more back, because what they give is not enough. They are a cash cow ripe for being milked, all in the name of togetherness.
No one is ignoring the interrelationship of human beings with one another, nor the need to work together. But more and more government compulsion is hardly a great way to do that, and it doesn’t even foster that warm fuzzy “we” feeling. Ask those who lived under Communism.
And no one is saying that capitalism is a perfect meritocracy, or that those who succeed in business are inherently superior people to those who don’t. But to say, as Obama did, that “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” is a slap in the face to people like Kass’s father. One wonders what Obama knows of businesses, or those who run them, whether small or large. One wonders how much Obama’s own history, in which he was the (self-admitted; see the next-to-last paragraph of this letter) beneficiary of affirmative action, has affected his view of how and why people succeed.
The American Dream says that hard work pays off—and that yes, people who have a business actually built that business. That last fact co-exists with another obvious one—that no man is an island. Republicans and conservatives don’t need Obama to tell them that, either. We’ll let John Donne do it:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
[NOTE: The life of Donne, oddly enough, contains the following somewhat-relevant facts:
Donne was elected as Member of Parliament for the constituency of Brackley in 1602, but this was not a paid position. The fashion for coterie poetry of the period gave him a means to seek patronage and many of his poems were written for wealthy friends or patrons, especially Sir Robert Drury, who came to be Donne’s chief patron in 1610.
So, voluntary philanthropy and love of literature on the part of the rich seem to have helped Donne produce his poetry.]
[ADDENDUM: Zombie offers a discussion of Obama’s “summary of core progressive fiscal dogma” that includes a lot more detail, plus charts and figures.
And Richard Fernandez has something to say worth reading, as well.
Stuart Schneiderman at Had Enough Therapy adds some observations.
Funny stuff here.
Gerard Vanderleun at American Digest calls our attention to these stirring words (mentioned by Scott Johnson at Powerline) by Republican Abraham Lincoln. I think Romney would do well to quote them:
They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge [i.e., Stephen Douglas] is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will””whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent ”¦
They sure don’t make eloquence like they used to, do they?]
From political science professor Jacqueline Stevens (via Volokh):
It’s an open secret in my discipline: in terms of accurate political predictions (the field’s benchmark for what counts as science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of time and money. The most obvious example may be political scientists’ insistence, during the cold war, that the Soviet Union would persist as a nuclear threat to the United States. In 1993, in the journal International Security, for example, the cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote that the demise of the Soviet Union was “of such importance that no approach to the study of international relations claiming both foresight and competence should have failed to see it coming.” And yet, he noted, “None actually did so.”…
in the 1980s, the political psychologist Philip E. Tetlock began systematically quizzing 284 political experts ”” most of whom were political science Ph.D.’s ”” on dozens of basic questions, like whether a country would go to war, leave NATO or change its boundaries or a political leader would remain in office. His book “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” won the A.P.S.A.’s prize for the best book published on government, politics or international affairs.
Professor Tetlock’s main finding? Chimps randomly throwing darts at the possible outcomes would have done almost as well as the experts.
Aha! In Part 5 of my change story, I wrote the following about the failure of experts to see the coming fall of the Soviet Union:
If the experts”“academic, governmental, and media”“had been unable to foresee this, then how could I trust them to guide me in the future? In retrospect, it was probably the first time I began to distrust my usual sources of information, although I certainly didn’t see them as lying”“I saw them as incompetent, really no better than bad fortunetellers.
What they seemed to lack was an overview, a sense of history and pattern. Newspapers could report on events, but those events seemed disconnected from each other: first this happened, then that happened, then the other thing happened, and then the next, and so on and so forth. In the titanic decades-long battle between the US and the USSR, there had been a certain underlying narrative (yes, sometimes that word is appropriate) that involved the threat of Armageddon, and the necessity to avoid it at almost all costs, while stopping the spread of Communism. Although T.S. Eliot had said the world would end “not with a bang but a whimper,” who ever thought the Soviet Union would end in such a whimpery way, and especially without much forewarning? It seemed preposterous, something like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy throws the bucket of water on the Wicked Witch, who dissolves into a steaming heap of clothing, crying “I’m melting, melting.”
Although these events predated my change by over a decade, they sounded an early warning bell about experts that said “beware.”
And yet I don’t especially fault them, except when they demonstrate the hubris of thinking they can predict the future at all: accurate predictions are just too hard to make, as this review of Tetlock’s book makes clear. There are just too many variables and too much complexity.
Does this begin to sound familiar? AGW, anyone? But that’s science, and the hallmark of science is the ability to predict outcomes. If you mix this and that in certain proportions and subject them to heat, for example, you will reliably get a chemical reaction that produces another substance in a certain quantity. If Einstein’s relativity theory was correct, its prediction that “massive, spinning objects like Earth should warp space and time around them, as well as drag space and time along as they rotate” would be able to be confirmed, and that’s the case. And so on and so forth.
But the problem with climate science is that it would be fiendishly difficult to design an experiment that would test its accuracy. Climate science bears little resemblance to the sciences such as chemistry and physics described in the previous paragraph, and seems more akin to the system of prognostication described by Tetlock. So it’s strange that people feel they can rely on its predictive abilities.
Is anyone really good at consistently making predictions about complex events? I don’t think so. I think that what tends to be happening is that the list of people making predictions is long, and so somebody is bound to be right each time. It’s just not usually the same person twice—or three or four or five times, which would be even more impressive.
Anyway, he’s too something.
Notice how the MSM is concentrating on Romney rather than Obama, the economy, or anything else that matters? Blogs on the right are, too, at least to a certain extent. There’s been quite a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking about Romney’s response to Obama’s Bain attacks. Why won’t he take the gloves off? Or why did he? Or whatever?
I’m with Jen Rubin at this point:
The divergence between what the Obama campaign and the media (I repeat myself) are talking about (Bain, Bain and Bain) and the most important economic (and hence political) news of the year is breathtaking. To put it bluntly, we are looking at economic contraction. In laymen’s terms, that is a recession…
For the left flogging the Bain story and the right bemoaning Mitt Romney’s response, stop. Just stop.
The left, of course, won’t obey that command. The right would do well to. Romney must continue to respond, and going on the offensive again in a bit would be good. I happen to think he will do so.
I expected Obama to be relentless, negative, nasty, and run a dirty campaign in 2012. He hasn’t disappointed me. If Romney’s smart (and I think he is), he knew it too. But knowing it intellectually and actually experiencing it are two different things. He’s straddling a delicate line in trying to be calm and collected and yet respond forcefully and counterpunch as well. Defense and offense simultaneously, and keep his cool while being lied about. Not the easiest thing on earth.
Will it work? Darned if I know. This election has made me very, very nervous from the start.
I’ll give the last word on the matter to commenter “lael” at Ace’s:
It’s so funny that people complain about Romney being “too nice” or not “tough enough” toward Obama precisely when Romney is basically calling Obama a Chicago thug. A lying, corrupt Chicago thug. Has this escaped your notice, people? Has any establishment Republican ever come close to calling Obama a lying, corrupt Chicago thug– someone whose campaign is “beneath the dignity of a POTUS”?
Just because Romney’s keeping cool calm and collected, just because Romney doesn’t look or sound angry, doesn’t mean he isn’t…sticking the stiletto in deep. The astuteness of Romney, the jujitsu of Romney, is that he sticks the stiletto in (hidden in his hand, so onlookers hardly notice) precisely when the other guy is angrily and conspicuously waving around a big knife and making exaggerated stabbing moves in the air. So the other guy looks to onlookers like the violent thug, but at the end of the fight it’s the other guy who’s bleeding more, from deeper wounds.
As Miss Marple noted this morning,
1. In response to the president’s refusal to apologize, he pointed out that the entire thing is an attempt to distract from Obama’s terrible record on jobs.
2. On Rahm saying he should quit whining, he said when someone falsely accuses you of a crime, you get a bit upset. He is proud of his ethical business record
3. On business in general, he pointed out the forgiveness of government loans to political donors (Solyndra, etc.) stinks to high heaven.
4. On transparency, he pointed out the executive orders regarding Fast and Furious, which he said was unprecedented and something else (maybe suspicious).So, he used the openings Obama gave him to talk about Obama’s terrible jobs record, the fake accusations and his own excellent ethical record, the graft and corruption with companies like Solyndra, and the White House involvement in Fast and Furious.
Romney’s seized the opportunity– the wonderful opportunity presented when the Obama campaign called Romney a felon, a charge so ridiculously over-the-top and obviously false that it thereby discredits itself, weakening its own attempt to charge Romney with corruption and lack of transparency– to point out Obama’s own arrant crony capitalist corruption (Solyndra) and the suspicious, potentially criminal opacity surrounding Fast and Furious. Fast and Furious, people. Romney is talking about these things with the MSM spotlight helpfully on him– because of this seemingly silly (non)apology story.
Not that I think many people other than newshounds in the blogosphere are paying all that much attention right now.