Happy Thursday all.

Crab Comes Out of Its Shell

So here's a time lapse video of a spider crab shedding its shell. The good part happens around the 0:50 mark. It's new shell will harden over the next 24 hours. And as one commenter noted doesn't this mean it's kosher for a day? Anyway this video makes me hungry for seafood and want to go watch some more Deadliest Catch on Tivo.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:08 PM | Comments (734)
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Unbefuckin'lievable.

Somebody gave this young lady a passing grade, or two, or fifteen, that she did not earn.

It's not bad enough that she doesn't know her geography; unfortunately, lots of Americans fail miserably in that regard.

What makes it worse is that she was so confident about her ignorance (probably placing Arizona, I don't know, somewhere North of Texas) that she didn't even bother checking a goddamn atlas before she opened her cakehole in front of the public and her obvious betters.

Democrat County Supervisor.

Wow.

Posted by: LauraW at 05:17 PM | Comments (287)
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So, so sorry.

Dave Wiegel's not a bad guy at all. I like him, personally, based on brief meetings.

But... come on. The "right wing correspondent" gets his spin from the exact same place the left wing correspondent does?

The specific sins he confesses to here are small beans stuff, but what the hell is the "right wing correspondent" doing on JournoList?

Thanks to Ricky.

Posted by: Ace at 02:06 PM | Comments (257)
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A little going away present for Gen. McChrystal.

Afghan and Coalition forces killed the top Taliban commander in a vital district in Kandahar province after destroying an IED factory in an airstrike.

The clashes took place after Coalition aircraft bombed the Taliban IED factory in Panjwai. A Coalition and Afghan force raided the attack site and battled with a Taliban force in the area. The combined force "quickly overwhelmed insurgent forces defending the area near the destroyed IED factory," the International Security Assistance Force stated in a press release on its website.

BTW- Who would have guessed McChyrstal's drink of choice was Lime Bud Lite?

Via CDR Salamander

Posted by: DrewM at 01:05 PM | Comments (101)
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What?

A company did this?

Spain’s Dr. Gabriel Calzada — the author of a damning study concluding that Spain’s “green jobs” energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure — was mailed a dismantled bomb on Tuesday by solar energy company Thermotechnic.

Says Calzada:

Before opening it, I called [Thermotechnic] to know what was inside Â… they answered, it was their answer to my energy pieces.

Dr. Calzada contacted a terrorism expert to handle the package. The expert first performed a scan of the package, then opened it in front of a journalist, Dr. Calzada, and a private security expert.

The terrorism consultant said he had seen this before:

This time you receive unconnected pieces. Next time it can explode in your hands.

Dr. Calzada added:

[The terrorism expert] told me that this was a warning.

His study found what you'd expect it to find, but with rigorous methodology: that "green jobs" cost far more money than comes back out of them through economic effects, and that, therefore, are a money sink, and a not-insignificant one, as each taxpayer in Spain is measurably poorer due to massive subsidies of such mockupations in pretendustries.

The whole stupid idea that "Green Jobs" will produce other, real jobs is insane from the outset. Whenever someone pitches this, they'll claim, sure, we're throwing money into this nonprofitable pretendustry requiring lots of subsidies (funsidies?), but hey, employment will go up.

In a trivial sense this is correct: If we replace a coal-burning electricity plant, employing 200, with a giant hamster-wheel affair in which 2000 people jog all day to produce energy, sure, I guess we've increased employment at that particular situs 1000%.

But that is anti-wealth -- it ignores the secondary effects of people having to pay 1000% more salaries for their energy than they used to. And the entire history of wealth in the entire history of man is the story of fewer men and fewer man hours to produce the same number of goods.

If our economy becomes twice as efficient, producing exactly twice as many goods as it once did, for the same investment of manpower, then we have become exactly twice as wealthy. We now have twice as many goods at the prices we used to pay for half as many.

It is ridiculous to keep asserting, contrary to basic common sense, that if we reverse the wealth-producing effect of increasing efficiency, and make ourselves less efficient -- with basic goods now requiring two, three, or five times as much as they once did -- that we will become wealthier.

We won't. We'll become poorer. Of course we will.

How could it be otherwise? In what society, ever, did basic goods (food, shelter, energy) become more labor-intensive and more expensive and yet that society became wealthier?

By this logic we should abandon technologically-advanced farming methods and go back to hunter-gather societies. After all, if you increase the number of people required to feed the nation to hunter-gatherer levels-- like, say, to 98% of the total population-- you've really increased the hell out of employment in that sector, haven't you?

That's basic common sense, and basic economics. Caldaza's deadly study, however, wasn't about common sense or abstract economics -- it was about cold hard numbers, how Spaniards fared before the Pretendustrial Revolution as compared to how they fare now as the Pretendustrial Revolution reaches crisis point.

And so they sent him a bomb.

As Mel Brooks said, "How are we going to protect our phoney-baloney jobs?" Well, with bombs, I guess.

Cf. The Broken Windows Fallacy. Some nitwit once proposed that a person who throws a rock through a shopkeeper's window is actually increasing societal wealth. Because, see, that shopkeeper will now have to employ the glazier a second time to get a new window, and that glazier will have more money, and that money will then be spent on other goods, etc.

In other words, the vandal, far from being penalized, should be rewarded by the government for doing his part to keep the government running.

Later some other economics studied this curious claim and found it to be, in economic terms, strictly retarded. Obviously so. As it failed to take into account that the shopkeeper now had to charge his customers higher prices to cover the cost of the broken window, and thus they each had their own wealth diminished (and if he had to keep on replacing the window, that shopkeeper would find his wealth greatly diminished, as he'd go bankrupt).

The Green Jobs Fallacy is almost exactly like the Broken Windows Fallacy, in that both posit that somehow, if everything costs a lot more due to waste (and destruction), somehow we all wind up richer.

Call it the Broken Solar Panel Fallacy, then.

In World War II, the Germans had to synthesize a lot of fuels (at a much higher expense than petroleum) because the Allies substantially cut off their petroleum supplies.

Did the Germans become richer during the war due to having so many manhours diverted to synthesizing fuel out of canola oil (or whatever)?

Did Adolf Hitler ever say, "Wow, thank God the Allies are cutting off our oil shipments. This canola-to-fuel industry is really keeping our economy humming nicely!"

No, he did not.

And no, they were poorer.

Because thousands of people who otherwise might have been fashioning goods for sale were instead diverted to chemical plants to make an expensive synth fuel.

More Media-Friendly Headline: Crazed Tea Party Radicals Send Bomb to Environmental Scientist.

Posted by: Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (203)
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No, seriously.

Chief executives of several major corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney and News Corp., are joining Mayor Michael Bloomberg to form a coalition advocating for immigration reform — including a path to legal status for all undocumented immigrants now in the United States.

The group includes several other big-city mayors and calls itself the Partnership for a New American Economy. It seeks to reframe immigration reform as the solution to repairing and stimulating the economy.

Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp., appeared together Thursday on Fox News to discuss the effort.

Why single FoxNews out? Because it's one of the few actors here where a boycott would actually have a big influence.

My problem here is that Murdoch's behind the scenes influence -- money, mostly -- probably carries a lot more weight than his viewers' opposition to this, even if his news channel is friendly to that opposition. And I don't really want him carrying the flag for this.

Posted by: Ace at 10:13 AM | Comments (330)
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This guy either has cajones of Titanium, and/or he's crazy like a fox and willing to sacrifice his life to prove the point.

The son of one of the founders of Hamas is turning his back not only on the organization that now controls Gaza, but the religion that so animates the followers of the group his father helped create.

Speaking on Wednesday night to the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a pro-Israel organization that focuses on radical Islam in education and media, Mosab Hassan Yousef said, "The god of Islam is the god of hate."...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 09:07 AM | Comments (109)
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Vid.

We’re giving relief to people that I deal with in my office every day now unfortunately. But because of the longevity of this recession, these are people — and they’re not minorities and they’re not defective and they’re not all the things you’d like to insinuate that these programs are about — these are average, good American people.

Will the media make an issue? No. The media far too closely identifies with the Democratic Party and therefore are not only willing to give Kanjorski a "you know what he meant pass," but they also believe that this is how you have to sell welfare/relief programs to bitter clingers -- you have to maybe lie to them a little bit, because they're so racist, and tell them the money is going to white folks.

And they believe this even about white Democrats. Any Democrats not living in a major urban center, they think are racist.

So to them this isn't about racism per se, but a good man having to speak in a way that will appeal to racists.

Posted by: Ace at 08:26 AM | Comments (133)
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Her? She wants attention?

Posted by: Ace at 07:57 AM | Comments (74)
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I suppose this is the logical conclusion to the theory of social promotions, worrying about "self-esteem" more than achievement, grading on effort rather than results and the soft bigotry of low expectations.

One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average. But itÂ’s not because they are all working harder.

The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.

In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient...

I intentionally took a number of known brutal courses with known brutal profs as an undergrad and in grad school under the (apparently) erroneous impression that simply surviving those classes would better prepare me. Clearly I was a fool.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 07:42 AM | Comments (204)
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