Clipping blog

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• Naval…Lasers? Yes, Please and On A Battleship!
• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Welcome Back to the Shire Friday Edition
• The Problem With the Left Is Not that They’re Lemmings but that They’re Hijackers
• The Essay that Finally Killed the Church of Global Warming

Naval…Lasers? Yes, Please and On A Battleship! Posted: 15 Apr 2011 08:30 AM PDT Oh, United States Navy, you had me at “lasers” and “pirates”. The US Navy's MLD system, designed and built by defense contractor Northrop Grumman, is a bit different in nature. The MLD is a 15 kilowatt laser specifically designed to handle the pitch and roll of a ship deck without losing track of its target. When fired, it can reach targets up to a mile away, and in its first test the laser disabled a small boat by setting fire to the outboard engines on the back. With a few short pulses, the engines were in flames, the rear of the small boat was engulfed shortly afterward. The MLD could very well, if it proves functional enough to be mounted on ships, be a weapon against small enemy vessels and pirates… That, folks, is not the best part of this story. I know it may seem like it is, what the the images you now have in your mind of fleets of fast attack boats firing lasers at craven Somali pirate ships, exploding them higher than yon like the most awesome episode of G.I. Joe ever. But hold your imagination in check just a little longer for the real payoff — the rest of that last sentence. …but while the Navy considered the test a success, they noted it's only a small indicator of the eventual power of the laser system. [Emphasis mine] Oh. OH! The eventual power? Forget shooting down missiles. I’m pretty sure “the eventual power” is Navy Weapon Geek Secret Code for “Wave Motion Gun”. Let’s get that working and then develop an interstellar propulsion system we can mount on a battleship and we’re in business! (via PrimorisEra’s Twitter feed)

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Welcome Back to the Shire Friday Edition Posted: 15 Apr 2011 03:10 AM PDT Peter Jackson is one of my favorite directors. He makes movies I truly enjoy and I consider him a careful and diligent craftsman. The Frighteners is one of the most underrated suspense movies of the past twenty years and, well, I can’t pile enough superlatives on how he handled The Lord of the Rings. As part of his production of The Hobbit, he’s started a video blog on Facebook to give fans a few heaping helpings of sneak peeks at the sets and some of the early work. Take a look. Hopefully more good directors will do the same when they film their movies. And now, links! This video on how the Japan Tsunami happened is long, but worth it. Victor Davis Hanson really wants to know what’s going on in Barack Obama’s head. Here is a blistering review of Barack Obama’s budget attack speech from Pat Austin. Jim Pethokoukis has found the gaping hole in the President’s budget “plan”. Wisconsin school teachers are about to get a very expensive surprise from their union. Keven Eder has a tax-related challenge for any Democrat willing to take it up. At last, the real reason Transformers 2 was such a noxious pile of movie dung. I’ve gotten used to seeing some odd things pop up in my RSS reader, but I was genuinely surprised to see a profile of Shirley Jackson show up today. I recommend it highly to you, especially if you enjoyed The Lottery or The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson was an interesting author.

The Problem With the Left Is Not that They’re Lemmings but that They’re Hijackers Posted: 14 Apr 2011 12:52 PM PDT From "The Far Side" by Gary Larson I used to think the progressive left was little more than a bunch of lemmings, determines to leap en masse off the cliffs of fiscal insanity. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that comparison just doesn’t work. Here is a recent example (via memeorandum) If President Obama’s deficit-reduction speech today includes a call to end the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, there will surely be pushback; Republicans have already begun a preemptive attack on raising taxes. One group of millionaires, however, is saying that they are more than willing to pay more for the good of their country. The "Patriotic Millionaires" penned a letter to Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and House Speaker John Boehner, urging them to "increase taxes on incomes over $1,000,000." The Millionaires—a group that includes producer and director Doug Liman, actress Edie Falco, the founder of Ask.com, and top Google engineers—wrote that the United States has helped them succeed financially, and they are willing to help the country do the same. That sounds pretty lemming-like, doesn’t it? A bunch of rich left-wingers believe that big, intrusive government actually helped them become rich and they want to give back by granting that government permission to take even more from them so it can grow even bigger and more intrusive. It does make sense, assuming you believe that you can’t be prosperous without large amounts of government intervention, but it is lemming behavior? It is not, and here’s why. Lemmings, so the legend goes, are content to fling themselves over the cliff. These rich left-wingers don’t want that at all. As Moe Lane notes, these folks can send the government as much of their money as they please, but they don’t. If these rich progressives were really lemmings, they wouldn’t be part of an organization that is itself exempt from most federal taxes. Instead, they would make themselves more open to taxes (perhaps by incorporating and fully disclosing their donors and assets) and would provide plenty of links to the relevant sections of the tax law so that  like-minded cliff-divers could send as much money as they wanted to Washington. That’s not what they’ve done, though. If you visit their web site, all you’ll see is their letter, a slick video, and a petition sign-up form where you can ask your members of Congress to help them force the unwilling to do what they want. And what is it that these alleged Patriotic Millionaires really want? Why, they want the government to toss them off the cliff along with every other rich person in the country, whether that person wants to be tossed or not. They’re not lemmings; they’re hijackers. We should treat them with the same amount of caution and scorn as we would anyone else who kidnaps a bunch of unwilling hostages and takes them where they don’t want to go just to fulfill their own selfish political desires.

The Essay that Finally Killed the Church of Global Warming Posted: 14 Apr 2011 11:37 AM PDT It’s no secret, I consider the entire issue of global warming dead beyond any possible resurrection. However, I do recognize that someone, somewhere may be capable of performing a miracle and rescuing the Church of Global Warming from its Dark Age of corruption and pseudo-scientific folderol. If that person ever comes forward, their very first task should be to refute, in detail, this essay by David Evans in the Financial Times? Here are a few excerpts: The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant. Let's be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much. He then goes on to explain, clearly and in layman’s terms, how a complex system like the global climate adjusts to balance itself and how the Church of Global Warming has ignored that simple fact and direct evidence that its theory is simple wrong. He also names the chief culprits who keep the fiction alive. Do read the whole thing and keep it bookmarked. At some point I think you’ll want to refer to it again. It’s that good.

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