WORD AROUND THE NET

"We need to redouble our efforts to deal with the challenge."

The third quarter US Economic news is over and the federal government is reporting 3.5% growth, a respectable amount after a year of contraction. Economists primarily credit the "stimulus" package for this growth as it has injected hundreds of billions of dollars into states for projects such as jogging tracks, repaving roads, and constructing a Beatles museum in New York City. This means jobs and money. I hope that this helps jumpstart the economy and things turn around, but if it does not, it will merely be a slight arresting of the recession which will start again once the initial impact of the stimulus money runs out. And, as Ace points out, the news coverage of this is a bit different than when President Bush was in office. Back then the growth was over 7% (!) and the news, after noting that the tax cuts brought this about, was hand wringing about jobs:

While Treasury Secretary John Snow predicted this month the economy would soon be adding 200,000 jobs a month, other White House officials Thursday were quick to note the recent burst of growth has yet to create many jobs.
...
In fact, during a quarter with the strongest growth rate since 1984, total employment fell by 165,000 jobs, according to Labor Department statistics, in part because of strong productivity growth, which enables companies to get more work out of fewer workers.

The jobs did come, of course, they always lag the other economic indicators (and losing 'only' 165,000 jobs would be a massive upturn in this economy). So lets hope the jobs come soon, rather than the inflation and return to recession I fear.

*UPDATE: Consumer spending for September was down .5% according to Reuters, reversing the one bright spot in the economy so far. Despite the recession spending was staying high, but as I've noted in the past, that lags behind recession some as people have resources for a while.

Unfortunately, new home sales dropped even as the recession slowed, a drop of almost 4% over the last month. This is one sector of the market which the Obama White House hoped would recover, stimulated by tax incentives and different laws, but it has been struggling all 2009. Simply put, people are hesitant to make large purchases such as a home when the jobs are so scarce. At the same time, sales of durable goods (items meant to last 3 years or more, such as a refrigerator) rose by 2%, giving some economists hope.

From CNN Money, we hear that Edmunds.com estimates the Cash for Clunkers program cost $24,000 per car, since most of the autos sold would have sold anyway. That means the program didn't stimulate car sales for most of those vehicles,

Energy Tribute ran an interesting article recently: an old essay by Albert Einstein explaining why, based on his famous E=MC² formula, renewable energy cannot answer our energy needs. Here's a few samples:

Let’s start with hydroelectricity. Water falling off a high dam reaches a speed of about 60 miles per hour or 80 feet per second. Raising the height of the dam by 80 or more feet cannot increase the velocity by more than 20 miles per hour. The only way to increase the energy output is to increase the mass, meaning we must use more water.
...
Wind is less dense than water so the land requirements are even greater. Contemporary 50-story windmills generate 1-½ MW apiece, so it takes 660 windmills to get 1000 MW. They must be spaced about half a mile apart so a 1000-MW wind farm occupies 125 square miles. Unfortunately the best windmills generate electricity only 30 percent of the time, so 1000 MW really means covering 375 square miles at widely dispersed locations.

Tidal power, often suggested as another renewable resource, suffers the same problems. Water is denser than wind but the tides only move at about 5 mph. At the best locations in the world you would need 20 miles of coastline to generate 1000 MW.
...
If we covered every rooftop in the county with solar collectors, we could probably power our indoor lighting plus some basic household appliances – during the daytime.
...
There is only so much energy we can draw from renewable sources. They are limited, either by the velocities attained, or by the distance that solar energy must travel to reach the earth.

According to Dr Einstein, physics proves that these alternate energies do not provide enough juice to actually run our economy, no matter how completely they are exploited. And that's why, my conspiracy minded friends, these resources are not being taken advantage of as much as they might (aside from the usual suspects opposing every single possible attempt to build alternative power plants). There's no vast cabal of energy companies blocking these efforts, alternative energy sources just don't work like you think they do. The present sources of energy we use were chosen not at random or whim, but because they're the best available to us at the moment.

Home here in Oregon, a man illegally entered a house to commit a crime. Interestingly enough, that's defined as "burglary" even if he has no intention to steal anything. His crime was the intent to sell pot to a teenage girl who lived there. He was convicted of burglary, and appealed his case all the way to the supreme court, who ruled that the man was guilty not of burglary but trespassing. Why? Because, the court said, the prosecution had no evidence of him committing a crime (other than trespassing). The fact that he was carrying a bag of weed to distribute to a minor was, in their mind, not actually a crime despite it being illegal in Oregon.

Hurricanes are what Alan Caruba has on his mind at Warning Signs. He wants to ask a question of Al Gore: where are they?

The hurricane season that runs from June through November is about to end with nothing more than one weak to borderline moderate tropical storm that hit Florida’s panhandle, but there have been NO hurricanes; at least none that made landfall.

So, where are the hurricanes of 2009, Mr. Gore?

For the last four years, the official hurricane predictions of major organizations have been consistently wrong and too high, despite assurances that we'd see more hurricanes of greater destructive force each year due to global warming. Even the larger number of hurricanes seen in the 1990s were fewer than seen early in the 20th century (the last time the Sun's activities increased global temperatures).

Glenn Garvin at Reason.com has a terrific piece up about Communist apologists in academia and the press. Unlike movie stars these guys aren't fawning worshipers, they don't go visit Castro and Chavez or make movies that praise these tyrants. They just write papers and articles.

In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don't see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system."

Barely six years later, the Soviet empire began falling apart. By 1991 it had vanished from the face of the earth. Did Professor Byrnes call a press conference to offer an apology for the collective stupidity of his colleagues, or for his part in recording it? Did he edit a new work titled Gosh, We Didn't Know Our Ass From Our Elbow? Hardly. Being part of the American chattering class means never having to say you're sorry.
...
Miami University's Robert W. Thurston, in his 1996 book Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, rejects the overwhelming evidence that Stalin's purges took the lives of millions. He concedes only 681,692 executions in the years 1937 and 1938, and a mere 2.5 million arrests. Even using those low-ball figures, that means that nearly one of every 20 adult Soviet males went to prison and that more than 900 of them were executed per day. Nonetheless, Thurston says Stalin has gotten a bad rap: There was no "mass terror...extensive fear did not exist...[and] Stalin was not guilty of mass first-degree murder."

Theodore Von Laue, a professor emeritus of history at Clark University, goes further in a 1999 essay in The Historian. He says it's the damnable Russian peasantry that ought to be begging poor Stalin for forgiveness: "He supervised the near-chaotic transformation of peasant Eurasia into an urban, industrialized superpower under unprecedented adversities. Though his achievements were at the cost of exorbitant sacrifice of human beings and natural resources, they were on a scale commensurate with the cruelty of two world wars. With the heroic help of his uncomprehending people, Stalin provided his country, still highly vulnerable, with a territorial security absent in all history."
...
The new picture of American Communists that emerged looked nothing like the one painted by the revisionists. The CPUSA was founded in Moscow, funded from Moscow (as late as 1988 Gus Hall was signing receipts for $3 million a year), and directed by Moscow; the Comintern reviewed everything from the party's printing bills to its public explanations of the nuances of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the slightest misstep could bring scorching rebukes.

Worse yet, it really was a nest of spies: Hundreds of CPUSA members had infiltrated the American government and were passing information to the KGB. They honeycombed the State Department and the Office of Strategic Services. Virtually all of the revisionists' martyrs really were spilling secrets to the Kremlin, including Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and a pair of Roosevelt aides, Harry Dexter White and Laurence Duggan, who died (White of a heart attack, Duggan of a jump or fall from a window) after being questioned by HUAC.
...
A prodigious apologist, [Ellen] Schrecker in one article conceded that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg delivered atomic secrets to the Soviets, then plaintively demanded: "Were these activities so awful?" She also coined the immortal phrase "non-traditional patriots" for the Rosenbergs, a felicitous way of saying that they lived in the United States but were loyal unto death to the Soviet Union.

Go take a look. These apologists for Communist brutality and tyranny are unable to apologize for their being utterly wrong. The article comes from a book called In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.

Robin Pagnamenta reports in the Times that England is using up so much land for wasteful, inefficient, costly, and polluting biofuels that they'll soon need to start importing grain. Biofuels have been largely rejected, even by former supporters, as a remotely useful replacement to petroleum (again, that's used not because of whim or random choice, but because it's the best we have right now) but governments are slow to act and slow to back away from stupid ideas they embraced to seem up to date and caring.

Democrats in the US Congress voted to give notoriously corrupt and illegal leftist organization ACORN a seat on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) board along with other radical organizations of its type. ACORN's illegal activity has gotten so excessive and so noxious that even their defenders are backing away, but the Democratic representatives in congress think they should have a bigger say in US government.

Speaking of ACORN, the Democratic Party senses a couple of close election, such as the upcoming New Jersey Governor vote. We all should all know by now what that means: maneuvering to steal the election as Ace of Spades points out. The first step according to National Review Online is to pressure the Secretary of State (a Democrat in a corrupt administration) to ignore absentee ballots whose signatures are different than those on registration cards. Meanwhile, the New York congressional district 23 is looking close too, so Democrats are on the job: they want to immediately impound any new machines used for the election, according to Rick Karlin at the Albany Times Union.

Also in England, we find that, according to government stats released recently, gun crime has almost doubled since the Labor Party took power. That happened despite a series of ever more restrictive laws regarding gun ownership and use in the country which have made it virtually illegal to own any handgun whatsoever. Its almost as if criminals don't care what the law says.

Finally at Right Wing News, McQ writes about the difference between choice and choice. When it comes to abortion and health care, the Democrats in the federal government wants you to have choice (at least between government insurance and private; they don't care for you to choose between many insurance companies). When it comes to schools, not so much. He notes how President Obama's words while campaigning are being used in an ad trying to get Washington DC's voucher program reinstated, and the White House is displeased. "We're losing several generations of kids," Obama says, "and something has to be done." Now his song is a bit different:

President Obama isn’t taking kindly to a television ad that criticizes his opposition to a popular scholarship program for poor children, and his administration wants the ad pulled.

Former D.C. Council member Kevin Chavous of D.C. Children First said October 16 that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had recently approached him and told him to kill the ad.

Choice, it seems, is more about a persuasive slogan than actual liberty.