Squaring the Culture

The Hot Air boys introduced me to The Optimistic Conservative by cross-posting this piece of hers yesterday (thanks, boys.) TOC speaks the truth that corrupt and frightened politicians on both sides of the aisle are clearly unwilling to say: no matter what we think of British Petroleum and their role in the unfolding eco-disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration shook down BP to obtain a $20 billion slush fund, and it’s both immoral and illegal.

Joe Barton (R-TX) is right: the $20 billion escrow fund is a shakedown. Not because BP isn’t liable for the oil spill, and not because BP shouldn’t help the people losing their livelihoods on the Gulf Coast. But because Obama extorting the escrow fund from BP is an exercise of executive power outside the rule of law.

Following the rule of law would produce relief for the oil spill’s victims. It just wouldn’t put Obama’s appointee in sole charge of a $20 billion fund. That has a meaning beyond the “Chicago” implication of pure extortion, fund-skimming, and payola. It means Obama couldn’t use the money to cushion the near-term consequences of his own policies. He’d be constrained by that pesky rule of law, if he weren’t holding the discretionary purse strings for the damages payouts…

This is worth noting: within the span of my lifetime, America has become so accustomed to the largely unsupervised overreach of federal agencies that our ability to detect a shakedown in progress has been severely compromised. We have the confused idea that somebody should somehow be doing something to help all these people, and don’t we have an agency for that? – so why shouldn’t the president, the man in charge of the agencies, step in and take matters into his own hands?

This is, however, confused sentiment. It’s pure sentiment, with no temper from wisdom or judgment. It’s not a sound basis for government, no matter how we feel and no matter what the problem is. Governments good and bad operate on precedent, whether you like it or not, and one shakedown tolerated will lead as night the day to more shakedowns. Eventually one of them will get to your doorstep. No one is so perfectly positioned in his universal immune-victim status as to never face being sliced through the mid-torso region by the Super-Whammadine Shakedown-o-matic.

This is SEIU/UAW tactics writ large – and those tactics thrive on the government-by-agency paradigm.

It’s worth your time to read the whole thing. The fact that Rep. Barton was forced by shame to back down from his candor demonstrates why ordinary political activism is not going to work this time. We have a Thug President. He is not constrained by the rule of law. The very point of his bending the system this way is to place his thumb firmly on the electoral scales so that electoral politics will not remove him and cannot undo what he’s doing. The solution must lie outside of ordinary electoral politics, and must be approached now; if we wait until we see the result of his scale-cheating maneuvers, our objections will be dismissed as sour grapes for having lost an election, the way we dismissed Al Gore’s sour grapes in 2000 (never mind that our complaint would be orders of magnitude more legitimate.)

It’s already starting, in fact. Let your outrage settle just a few weeks and it goes away. The outrageous becomes backdrop. We forget what got us so agitated in the first place. We’ve watched how it went with AIG and Citibank, with GM and Chrysler, with Fannie and Freddie. We’ve become accustomed to abuses of law and process, and think this is just part of politics as usual. It is not. The republic is dying. We used to see it clearly; now it is less so. If we do not rise up and stop the Thug President from engaging in his thuggery, it will become the norm, the US will become like any penny-ante Central American dictatorship, and it will be our fault.

UPDATE 6/20 @5:33 PM: One of the RedState regulars has posted what Rep. Joe Barton (R, TX) actually said in his “apology” to BP. After reviewing it, I’m ashamed that anybody in the Republican party raised a single word of objection. He was absolutely clear in objecting to the lawless behavior of the White House, and completely correct. Unsurprisingly, the reaction by that ugly Nazi Henry Waxman and the rest of the Democratic party has been nothing but vicious demagoguery. I agree with every word of Barton’s statement… the first one, not the later one when he had been shamed into backing down. I want to identify all the Republicans who objected to his words and mark them for defeat, because nobody who countenances the plainly illegal thuggery of the Obama administration has any business holding office in this nation.

For about three decades now, talk of America’s energy policy has been dominated by calls for renewable sources of energy — sources of energy that are just as available after you use them as before. Fearful of the theoretical possibility that we might someday run out of oil, coal and natural gas to drive our industrial economy, whipped into frenzy by environmentalists’ scientifically- and economically-deficient howling over what comes out of smoke stacks, leftists have flogged their infatuation with 70s-chic technological solutions that seem, on the surface, to solve both the depletion and pollution problems of fossil fuels.

Never one to miss an opportunity to sound smarter than the citizens he governs, last week our President used the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to reinforce his already-too-well-established endorsement of renewables:

For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

I don’t agree with any of the premises, either stated or implied, in that paragraph, but I’m having a particular problem these days with the assertion that we need to replace “finite” fossil fuels with “infinite” sources of electricity like wind, solar, and biomass. Renewable though they may be, these are just, plain lousy solutions, and the effort to force markets to choose them over sensible, plentiful, readily-available fossil fuels is likely to lock the US economy into a permanent deep freeze. “Renewable” and “clean” are nice-sounding features, but they ignore the more crucial imperative: energy sources need actually to supply enough energy.

Energy sources for a robust, industrial economy need to be available in plenty, easily transportable to the place they’ll be used, available on demand, relatively safe and easy to use, and they need to be able to do these things at a price that compares well with other energy sources that meet those criteria. When we say an energy source is “renewable,” we’re addressing only one small portion of the first of those criteria. When we say it’s “clean,” we’re addressing only one portion of the “safe” criterion. “Renewable” and “clean” are helpful features, but they’re not sufficient to commend a technology to us. There are other criteria that must also be met, and if our “renewable” source can’t meet them, we need to keep looking until we find something that can.

Nor is “renewable” a necessary criterion. We can continue to use non-renewable energy sources for centuries while we look for alternatives. That there exists no hurry is proved by the fact that there exists no shortage: Enviros have to force fossil fuel prices up artificially in order to make them seem unattractive. If there were real shortages, the prices would rise without anybody’s help.

“Clean” is in some sense necessary, but it’s also relative. Technology has done an amazing job of addressing the soot problems of the 50s and the smog problems of the 70s; air pollution from stationary sources has plateaued and is dropping, even while the number of automobiles and smokestacks is rising. We can all breathe, far into the foreseeable future. How clean do we have to get to be clean enough?

Solar, wind power, and biomass are all limited by the laws of physics. They’re available to some degree everywhere, but they’re diffuse. The Sun may be an enormous source of power, heat, and light, but it’s about 92 million miles away, and only a tiny fraction of its energy actually hits the Earth; you only get so much sunlight on a particular square mile of ground. By the same token, only so much wind passes over a given square mile of earth, and only so much vegetable matter can be grown on that same square mile. They’re all limited by the amount of land that’s available for producing energy; and land is a finite and extremely precious commodity.

Robert Bryce provided a useful metric with which to assess this notion of energy density in an analysis he produced for Forbes Magazine in May 2010.

The two [nuclear power] reactors at the South Texas Project produce 2,700 megawatts of power. The plant covers about 19 square miles, an area slightly smaller than the island of Manhattan. To match that output using wind energy, you’d need a land area nearly the size of Rhode Island. Matching that power output with corn ethanol would require intensive farming on more than 21,000 square miles, an area nearly the size of West Virginia.

Bryce also noted that a marginal oil well producing only about 10 barrels of oil per day has an energy density that’s roughly half that of the South Texas Project nuclear power plant, but about 22 times more dense than that of a wind farm.

These numbers can be improved marginally for wind and solar power, but ultimately they’re limited by the laws of physics. Ultimately, the choice to use these “renewables” is the bad end of a Hobson’s Choice: in order to spare the earth some insult, we’re choosing to permanently use up vast stretches of the earth itself to supply our energy — and there’s no indication that doing so will ever actually provide enough energy to keep our economy rolling.

Furthermore, solar and wind are intermittent. The sun does not shine at night, and gets clouded over frequently during the day. The wind does not blow 100% of the time in the range of speeds required to drive a wind turbine. The electrical grid does not have batteries built into it to store previously-generated electricity against future needs (and the resources required to build such batteries would be unimaginable). So, for every new watt of power from a wind turbine or solar plant an electrical power company builds, the company has to build a conventionally-fueled plant to provide that same watt of power — because sometimes the power will be available from the “renewable,” but sometimes it won’t. And it has to be available at a second’s notice, so — watch carefully — the conventional plant that gets built alongside the “renewable” plant has to be fully powered and ready to be brought on-line at all times, and it has to be large enough to produce just as much power as the “renewable” plant. For this reason, wind turbines and solar plants cannot stop a single ounce of CO² from being generated — and they more than double the price of electricity. Proponents of wind and solar argue that electrical utilities build spare capacity all the time, and they’re correct — but they don’t have to build a watt of spare capacity for every watt of new capacity, it’s more like 20%, or 30%. With renewables, they need to build spare capacity to cover 100% of the capacity of the new source. And that’s new capacity; they can’t just use the existing conventional power plants because they’re already in use generating electricity live.

As for biomass, who could possibly imagine that in a world with 8 billion living souls and land a finite and increasingly valuable resource, it would make sense to burn our food to run our factories? American biofuels subsidies, produced by the Bush administration, are probably responsible for nearly doubling the cost of grain worldwide during a period when hungry nations could least afford it. There’s nothing difficult to predict about this outcome; of course farmers are going to cash in if the government pays them extra to plant corn instead of wheat and provides them with a guaranteed market. Biofuels are a disaster — and that’s before assessing whether they can even produce more energy that it takes to grow them!

Charles Krauthammer took the President to task yesterday for his pompous insistence on using federal power to rescind the laws of nature.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy. And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around. With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy… His argument: Well, if we can put a man on the moon, why not this?

Aside from the irony that this most tiresome of cliches comes from a president who is canceling our program to return to the moon, it is utterly meaningless. The wars on cancer and on poverty have been similarly sold. They remain unwon. Why? Because we knew how to land on the moon. We had the physics to do it. Cancer cells, on the other hand, are far more complex than the Newtonian equations that govern a moon landing. Equally daunting are the laws of social interaction — even assuming there are any — that sustain a culture of poverty.

Similarly, we don’t know how to make renewables that match the efficiency of fossil fuels. In the interim, it is Obama and his Democratic allies who, as they dream of such scientific leaps, are unwilling to use existing technologies to reduce our dependence on foreign (i.e., imported) and risky (i.e., deep-water) sources of oil — twin dependencies that Obama decried in Tuesday’s speech.

Private electric companies refuse to build solar power plants and wind farms except where enormous government subsidies distort real economic incentives enough to make them do it. As soon as the subsidies dry up, they abandon the wind farm or the power plant and go right back to generating power using energy-dense, highly available fossil fuels and/or nuclear power. There is no sensible way for a power company to make money using wind or solar to generate electricity on the scale we need. It does not work, and can’t. These are bad ideas.

Today I addressed the question of whether the fact that a power source was renewable was sufficient to commend it as a power source. In a few days, I will add to this by examining the premises on which the President and his leftist friends insist that the national government must force technological change to rescue us from “addiction to fossil fuels.”

Since the topic of leadership has come to the fore lately, two of today’s stories from the Gulf region earn our attention:

Take 1, from The DESTIN Log, Destin, Fl:

Okaloosa defies Unified Command over East Pass plans

DESTIN — Okaloosa County isn’t taking oil spill orders any more.

County commissioners voted unanimously to give their emergency management team the power to take whatever action it deems necessary to prevent oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill from entering Choctawhatchee Bay through the East Pass.

That means the team, led by Public Safety Director Dino Villani, can take whatever action it sees fit to protect the pass without having its plans approved by state or federal authorities.

Take 2, from ABC News:

Gov. Bobby Jindal Orders National Guard to Build Barrier Wall Off Louisiana Shore

Louisiana Gov. Takes Matters Into Own Hands, But Will BP Foot the Bill?

Eight weeks into the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of the Mexico, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has told the National Guard that there’s no time left to wait for BP, so they’re taking matters into their own hands.

Before his speech, the president takes another look at the oil-tainted region.

In Fort Jackson, La., Jindal has ordered the Guard to start building barrier walls right in the middle of the ocean. The barriers, built nine miles off shore, are intended to keep the oil from reaching the coast by filling the gaps between barrier islands.

When there’s an absence of leadership at the top, individuals lower on the totem who have leadership skills take the initiative where they can. The situation there on the Gulf, with the oil coming ashore, is critical, and local leaders who know what needs to be done are saying “Protocol be damned, we’re tired of waiting for real leadership, let’s do something.”

Meanwhile, President Obama is attempting to turn the public relations tide in a manner that we’re getting used to seeing from him, by taking shots at his political adversaries and attempting to shift attention. Only, this time he merely proves what’s being said about him, that he hasn’t the slightest idea what’s involved in leadership. From Politico last Friday:

Obama to POLITICO: Some in Congress hypocritical on spill

In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: “I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending…”

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said.

He’s completely without a clue.

Leadership is not about who has what power; it’s about who has ideas and initiative that others are eager to follow. He could have zero authority, but if he’s got leadership skills, he’d be taking action that others are willing to follow or emulate. He could be the tyrant of the world with all power, but if he doesn’t know how to lead, leaders further down the chain will start taking actions on their own. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the size or power of government, and everything to do with the character of the man in the Oval Office.

When you’re President, the entire nation pauses and waits to see what you’re doing, simply because you’re the one tasked with leading. It doesn’t matter what power the President has, if he has ideas that are worth following, people will follow willingly. Most people are eager to be led, and are just waiting for someone to show them what needs to be done.

Only, leading is not something a President is supposed to learn once he gets elected; we’re supposed to elect people who have already exhibited that quality. This is what a number of us were getting at when we pointed out during the election in 2008 that Obama had never really accomplished anything (nor had Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, for that matter.) I never liked John McCain, and I still don’t, but there’s no question he’d be taking charge of the Gulf cleanup in an appropriate manner if he’d been elected. Sarah Palin would be taking charge appropriately, too; she’s shown that quality. And we know perfectly well what sort of a leader George W. Bush was. For about 3 weeks following the World Trade Center attacks, even Democrats were heaving a sigh of relief that it was Bush and not Gore sitting in the Oval Office. His response to that situation was magnificent. (And then the shriekers from the Left started carping about what he did for 7 minutes after getting the first report about the WTC attack. Democrats are clueless, and worse, they’re vicious.)

So now the leaders in localities and states around the Gulf are taking matters into their own hands. This is the clearest evidence one could possibly garner to prove that there’s a hole at the top of the organization chart. Some partisans, during the election season in 2008, took to calling Obama “Zero.” I did not join in at that time. Nor did I complain much when I read reports about the President enjoying wagyu beef and scheduling a lot of parties; I don’t object if we as a nation allow those who serve the public some perks of high office, But he has to do something to earn the perks. This time he’s earned the name. We have an empty suit in the Oval Office. We have President Zero.

Since President Obama insists that his chief role in the oil spill clean up is to Chuck Norris the Big Bad Oil Barons, he’s made it fair game for anybody who cares to comment on just how well he projects that image. I consider this two minutes very well spent. The best part is the second minute, so bear with it.

One commenter at YouTube observes that Chuck Norris could simply stand on the Louisiana shoreline and glare at the oil, daring it to come ashore.

It’s a great joke. For Louisiana’s sake, I wish it were true.

However that might work, I think we can all agree that the President is making a clown of himself by pretending that this “ass-kicker” talk somehow fills the gap left by his sheer absence of leadership skills. Barack Obama may be many things — academic, arugula-eater, hard-ball Chicago campaigner — but Chuck Norris, he is not. The irony is that President Obama probably deserves some of the less flattering labels that leftists attempted to paste on his predecessor; “frat boy” seems a lot more appropriate to describe quail-egg-scarfing, party-every-three-days Barack than it did to describe GWB, who really did know how to lead, the opportunistic whining of New Orleans Democratic party operatives notwithstanding.

As the oil industry’s Chernobyl unfolds in slow motion in the Gulf of Mexico, the White House finds itself embroiled in a battle to defend itself against charges of aloofness and incompetence. Between golf outings, multiple vacations, meetings with sports teams, and parties featuring quail eggs and wagyu beef, a few hours’ visits to the Gulf have not reassured the public that the White House is in control, nor have the public reassurances reminding us how many meetings the President has held, nor have photos of the President on the phone. What do they want from him, wonders President “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”?

A week ago Press Secretary Robert Gibbs issued what may be the Obama administration’s version of “Let them eat cake”:

…in an interview, Gibbs said Obama doesn’t see the need for a theatrical display of concern.

“If the president thought getting mad and yelling would plug the hole, he’d do it on top of the White House,” he said. “He understands we’ll all be judged by our response and our recovery efforts, not on whether he’s been a good method actor.”

Corresponding to their condescending and frankly unintelligent impression that what the public wants is theater, President Obama this week appeared on the Today Show and told Matt Lauer that his most helpful role in the matter was “Ass Kicker,” and that he consulted experts regularly so that he would know best “whose ass to kick.”

So, the White House hears criticism of the President’s “leadership,” and infers that it needs to engage in “method acting” and to go around yelling at the right people. Could they have said anything that indicates more clearly that they no idea what a leader does?

Bobby Jindal, Republican Governor of Louisiana, knows what a leader does. He’s not acting, he’s just doing his job, but unlike President Obama, he understands what his job is and goes about it in a manner that shows that he’s handling the situation. Jindal apparently realized the scope of the BP oil spill disaster within about a week of the event. By the end of April, he was coordinating local containment efforts and approaching federal authorities to obtain disaster aid and permits to build barrier islands to block oil from coming ashore. After three weeks passed with very little response from federal agencies, Jindal went public with his requests and announced “We’re not waiting, we’re moving ahead without them” — after which, suddenly, all his requests were met. Five minutes are shown below from the speech from May 24 in which he made clear what had not been acted upon:

Jindal provides us with a useful counterpoint to the Obama administration’s handling of the oil spill affair. Let’s take a look at a time line of actions taken by them both. I’ve embedded a calendar so you can picture the passage of time. Some of the times assigned to events are approximate, as specific dates were not included in some news reports.

• April 20: The deep water horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana.
• April 23: The Obama administration was briefed on the situation and told that it could potentially become the largest oil spill in US history.
• April 23: The government of the Netherlands offered their expertise and oil-skimming booms, and proposed dredging sand barriers to protect marshlands. The Obama administration refused the assistance.
• April 29: Gov. Jindal declared a state of emergency, and requested the first of several permits to build barrier islands to protect his state’s coastline.
• April 30: Gov. Jindal requested a finding of “commercial fisheries failure” from US Dept of Commerce, and loan assistance from Small Business Administration for businesses affected by the oil spill.
• May 1: Gov. Jindal, noting the slow response of BP and the federal government, announced that the state would begin its own measures to protect its coastline. He requested 3 million feet of absorbent boom, 5 million feet of hard boom, and 30 “jack up” barges from responsible federal authorities to help stop the oil from coming ashore.
• May 6: The Small Business Administration announced that it was offering loan assistance to small businesses in Louisiana affected by the oil spill.
• week of May 10: Gov. Jindal applied for permits to dredge a chain of barrier islands, since it appeared to the Governor that neither BP nor the federal government had a plan to stop the oil.
• May 22: Gov. Jindal renewed his request for permits to dredge barrier islands.
• May 24: Gov. Jindal delivered a nationally-televised speech detailing what had been requested and what had not arrived. He made it clear about the barrier: “We’re not waiting for their approval, we’re going to build it.”
• May 24: Interior Secretary Salazar declared his resolve to “keep our boot on their neck,” referring to BP executives.
• May 24: Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced his finding that a “fisheries failure” has occurred, freeing funds for the assistance of Louisiana fisheries affected by the oil spill.
• Sometime around May 25: The Army Corps of Engineers approved Gov. Jindal’s barrier island plan, but said it would pay for only 1 island as a “prototype” to see if it will work.
• May 25: Leaks revealed that the President, taut-jawed, growled “Why don’t they plug the damned hole?”
• May 27: Ken Salazar, Interior Secretary, shut down all oil production in the Gulf of Mexico for at least 6 months, claiming for cover that an expert panel agreed that they should shut down all oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for 6 months. The expert panel later published a letter explaining that they agreed to no such thing.
• May 27: President Obama acknowledged that the effort to stop the spill and clean it up is under federal direction. Responding to complaints that he appears not to care, he explained that he has more meetings about this topic than any other.
• June 1: Eric Holder’s Department of Justice ordered BP to pay for all of Gov. Jindal’s barrier islands.
• June 2: President Obama gave a speech in Pittsburgh implying that businesses involved in the oil spill may have violated federal laws, and emphasizing that he will “bring them to justice.”
• June 8: President Obama told Matt Lauer that he talks to the experts “So I know whose ass to kick,” and said that his most important role is ass-kicking.
• June 10: Seven weeks after it was offered, the Obama administration began accepting oil-skimming booms from the Netherlands.

What’s clear from this disturbing history is that the Obama administration, while responding in some sense to the fact that the oil spill had occurred, did not accept a role at the forefront, apparently waiting for other parties to solve the problem. When a proactive governor requested reasonable assistance, only one agency — the Small Business Administration — responded in a time frame indicating that they realized the gravity of the situation. Other agencies simply followed bureaucratic procedure for three weeks, until that governor made enough of a public splash to shine an unfavorable light on the administration — at which time his specific requests were met as quickly as possible, to be followed soon after with tough-sounding rhetoric. Now the administration, properly chastised, is being careful to issue more tough-sounding rhetoric, while also attempting to shift the blame away from themselves and toward the oil companies. Their agenda appears to consist entirely of talking tough and bashing British Petroleum.

Good leadership in this case would have created proactive measures to coordinate the responses of federal and state agencies to appropriate requests for aid, so that awkward legal barriers (like those preventing Dutch ships from bringing equipment) could be waived, appropriate permit requests could be expedited, and equipment could be procured and allocated smoothly. Gov. Jindal ought not have been made to wait three weeks for a permit to build barrier islands. The Dutch should not have been put off for seven weeks. Not a single foot of boom should have sat in a warehouse even a day waiting for instructions regarding where to send it. Nobody should have heard a single accusation against any party before appropriate investigation revealed the relevants facts.

Nobody wants theater, nobody wants the impossible, and especially, nobody wants angry foot-stomping; what we want is responsible action to ensure that whatever can be done, will be done. That’s what we’re missing, President Obama. Governor Jindal knows how to do that. You do not.

Ironically, Governor Jindal was dismissed with sneers in February 2009 after he delivered the GOP’s rebuttal to President Obama’s stimulus plan speech in Congress. As is usual when dealing with Democrats, Jindal’s awkward delivery apparently mattered far more than did the substance of his talk (one is astonished that Democrats apparently believe that delivering a speech poorly is supposed to disqualify one from holding high office, but delivering one containing plagiarized and fallacious details about one’s career does not). That’s why we’re now stuck with a President who apparently knows a great deal about organizing campaign financing schemes but has no idea how to lead a nation in an environmental crisis, and one whose $787 billion stimulus package, announced with such excellent style, has failed to stimulate anything other than the Census Bureau. President Obama ought to spend a few months studying Governor Jindal, who outshines him in every way when addressing matters requiring substance.

Hold your breath. No, don’t — you’re not going to make it as long as this fellow, world champion free-diver Guillaume Nery. This is a (literally) breath-taking video of Nery jumping down Dean’s Blue Hole, a submarine sinkhole in the Bahamas.

The video is fiction: while Nery does do this sort of thing, and the site is one of the places where he might do it, Dean’s Blue Hole, at 202 meters deep, is about twice as deep as most blue holes, and the world record free dive into it went down only 86 meters. The sequence where he touches bottom is staged elsewhere, obviously. Edited by Bluenery©. Music: “You Make Me Feel” by Archive.

Blue holes are vertical caves underwater, so-called because the water inside the hole appears to be a deeper blue than the surrounding water when it’s viewed from the surface. They were formed by rainfall leaching limestone formations in areas that were above sea level during an earlier era but submerged at the end of the Ice Age.

Athletes like Nery compete in free-diving, a modern “extreme sport” in which divers attempt to reach ever-greater depths or distances without mechanical breathing apparatus. This particular dive would be called “constant weight apnea without fins,” because the athlete is not dropping weights at the bottom to increase his buoyancy, and because he’s not enhancing his swimming distance with fins.

Comedy, but also as clear a description of the fiscal crisis among the EU nations as you’ll hear anywhere. Sometimes economics is just common sense. Listen:

By the way, “they’re owned by China” is not very secure, either. China has been deliberately limiting their birth rate to 1 or less for several decades, so they’re sitting on a depopulation bomb that just hasn’t gone off yet, and that cannot be defused. When the next, smaller generation starts into its earning years, what they’re going to discover is that an industrial economy cannot survive a massive depopulation. Who will buy our trillions of dollars worth of debt then?

Pretty simple question, really: if you’re so eager to get supplies to the Palestinians in Gaza, and the Israelis are the true villains in blocking those supplies, why didn’t you try to bring the supplies through the border guarded by Egypt?

This is the part of the story everybody wants to forget: Israel does not control all of Gaza’s borders. Egypt guards the southwest border. No blockade of Gaza would be possible if Egypt did not cooperate. Israel does not even occupy Gaza anymore (the statement in the graphic image is a little misleading); it simply claims maritime control of the Mediterranean shoreline. Goods could be delivered to coastal towns south of Gaza and driven overland through the Egypt-Gaza border. The truth of this is illustrated by today’s story reporting that Egypt has temporarily lifted its blockade of Gaza — Egypt’s blockade — to allow aid to Gaza in the wake of last week’s incident.

The attempted delivery of supplies, financed by an organization recognized as a terrorist financier, was never intended to arrive in Gaza. It was sent to create a public relations attack against Israel. The various nations of the world commenced with their periodic Dance of Outrage. It’s Kabuki Theater.

The truth is that Israel allows supplies into Gaza regularly, from suppliers that it trusts. It refuses to allow certain suppliers because if they were approved, the next set of ships would be delivering munitions. Egypt apparently complies with the blockade because they don’t want war on their border, either.

From the Washington Times editorial:

Adequate supplies of food, medicine and other necessary goods are delivered regularly to Palestinians in Gaza — and by the Israelis. The government in Jerusalem quickly invited reporters to the Kerem Shalom crossing to see, and photograph, the convoys of trucks delivering these goods to Gaza. The Israelis even offered to transfer the goods from the “activist” boats as soon as they could be unloaded and inspected. The sponsor of the “activist” armada, the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, is regarded by Israel as a radical Islamist organization, part of a global fundraising operation for Hamas. If the Israelis allow such flotillas to deliver supplies to Gaza, other ships will follow, not with rice and beans but with explosives, rifles and long-range Iranian Fajr-5 missiles.

If we could get the reporters to ask a simple question like the one at the top of this article, they might wake up to the complicity of the Muslim nations surrounding Israel in a campaign to destroy that nation. The same reporters, discovering this complicity for the first time (assuming they’ve just been stupid, and not complicit themselves), might then be encouraged to ask a deeper follow-up question: why have none of the nations surrounding Israel permitted Palestinians to emigrate and become citizens of their nations?

Here Rests In Honored Glory
An American Soldier
Known But To God

The Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, VA, contains the remains of three unidentified American military servicemen. The first was buried on November 21, 1921, to represent all the missing and unidentified casualties from World War I. On Memorial Day, 1958, two additional unidentified soldiers were interred in the tomb, one from World War II, one from the Korean war. A fourth unknown was interred there in 1968 to represent the Vietnam war, but later investigation determined the identity of that soldier, so he was removed and buried in a marked grave. Modern DNA identification may prevent any further casualties from ever being added to the tomb.

A military guard has protected the site for every minute of every day since 1937, regardless of weather, time of day, or circumstance. This takes discipline and fortitude on the part of the individual guard, and a wholehearted commitment on the part of the American military that maintains the guard. In this manner, a grateful nation acknowledges the sacrifice offered by ordinary men and women in extraordinary circumstances, defending our ability to live safely in our own homes.

They died an ugly death, in pain and misery, a long way from home. They probably died afraid. Most likely, though, they had some opportunity to be somewhere else, and refused it do what they and the nation decided was necessary. There’s nothing unique about dead soldiers; they’ve existed so long as humans have gathered into clans. These solders, however, died defending a self-governing nation, and died defending our right to continue to govern ourselves. That makes their sacrifice as great as the sacrifice of the most highly honored Homeric hero, or that of the greatest king ever to die in battle. The fact of self-government makes the sacrifice of each American soldier personal; he died defending his own. We do well to remember them, even those we did not know.

Happy Memorial Day, 2010.

The Congressional Budget Office issued its quarterly report regarding the effect of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), claiming that the ARRA spending has increased real (inflation-adjusted) GDP somewhere between 1.7% and 4.2%. Leftie blogs are reporting this as proof that the stimulus worked, including gloating from Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen:

There’s a word to describe a recovery effort like this: success.

Facing the greatest economic crisis in generations, the nation had two choices early last year: the Democratic stimulus or the Republicans’ proposed five-year spending freeze. We’re all very fortunate the latter was in the minority.

Even worse was Prairie Weather:

I don’t think even the toxic right can wiggle around those results.

These guys are beclowning themselves. The CBO report is an exercise in question-begging. All it does is run the actual spending numbers through a model that presupposes that Keynsian government-spending multipliers are correct, producing a range of results by changing the multipliers. In other words, they’re using a model to project what the spending did, not actually measuring economic output. Since the projections of what the stimulus would accomplish used exactly the same models, all they’re doing is reciting their theories and patting themselves on the back. Bruce Reidl of the Heritage Foundation explains, and Stephen Spruiell boldly predicts that each quarter’s CBO report will simply repeat the fiction.

In case you’re not familiar with Keynsian multipliers, allow me to explain briefly:

Keynsians argue that when individuals have money to spend, they save some of it, but when the government has money to spend, they spend all of it. They argue that by taking the money as taxes and spending it as government spending, more money reaches the economy — the difference being what the taxpayers would have saved. That’s how they claim that taking money out of the economy through taxation then re-inserting it through government spending actually stimulates the economy.

This is nonsense, in my humble opinion, because dollars saved do not disappear from the economy, they get cycled into capital formation. Capital formation results in expansion, and expansion occurs by way of spending. For instance, Widget Manufacturing builds a new plant by buying materials from suppliers, paying construction workers, etc. So saved dollars circulate just as readily as spent dollars, only they cycle through the banking system first.

I accepted the Keynesian multiplier when I first studied economics, because that’s what college freshmen do when their professors feed them an equation, but I’m not buying it now, especially with all the real-world examples of failed Keynesianism to work from. Those reading this who feel compelled to complain that I’m a nobody criticizing the uncontested brilliance of Nobel prize-winners should reread my post addressing that very point back in February 2009, when the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the New York Times listing the names of all the professional economists who simply don’t believe that the Kenysian multiplier has any relevance to the real world.

It is not clear that stimulus spending has done anything other than benefit Democratic party donors and bloat an already unmanageable deficit. It is abundantly clear that Democrats want very badly to claim that it has helped things. Those who use the CBO report to prove it, though, prove either that they have no idea what they’re talking about or that they have no scruples.