You know that the Green New Deal has already been tried?

Southern Australia has been trying it good and hard for ten years or more.  The latest madness is a judge refusing to authorize the construction of a coal fired electricity plant because of "Climate Change".  So the GND madness is not unique to these shores.

So what are the fruits of that tree?  You know, no fossil fuels, 100% reliance of "renewable" energy?  That sort of thing?  A billion dollars for a single day's power bill:

The cost of electricity on Thursday in two states of Australia reached a tally of $932 million dollars for a single day of electricity. Thanks to David Bidstrup on Catallaxy for calculating it. 

... 

In Victoria, per capita, that means it cost $110 for one day’s electricity. For South Australians, Thursday’s electricity bill was $140 per person. (So each household of four just effectively lost $565.) In both these states those charges will presumably be paid in future price rises, shared unevenly between subsidized solar users and suffering non-solar hostages. The costs will be buried such that duped householders will not be aware of what happened. Coles and Woolworths will have to add a few cents to everything to cover their bills, and the government will have to cut services or increase taxes. No one will know how many jobs are not offered or opportunities lost. This is the road to Venezuela. 

If Hazelwood had still been open, the whole bidstack would have changed, quite probably saving electricity consumers in those two states hundreds of dollars. Eight million Australians could have had a weekend away, gone to a ball, or bought brand new fishing gear. And this is just one single day of electricity. If Liddell closes, things will get worse, no matter how much unreliable not-there-when-you-need-it capacity we add to the system. Indeed, the more fairy capacity we add, the worse it gets. NSW will soon join the SA-Vic club. 

This is what happens when an electricity grid is run by kindergarten arts graduates who struggle with numbers bigger than two.

$500 per family for a single day's electricity.  There's your Green New Deal.  The only question is why Australians are not rioting in the streets and burning their politicians in effigy.  Maybe the reason is that we see voters going for this madness here, too: Georgetown Texas household electricity bills rise by $1200/year due to "100% renewable" power.

Frankly, I can't think of a more regressive tax - it falls heaviest on the poor and the only benefit is to let smug upper middle class liberals feel even smugger.  Tagged with the post tag "evil" because, well, you know.  What a nasty class war tax it all is.

Republicans and Democrats actually understand each other

A parable:

A woman in a hot air balloon realizes she is lost. She lowers her altitude and spots a man fishing from a boat below. She shouts to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." 

The man consults his portable GPS and replies, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude. 

She rolls her eyes and says, "You must be a Republican!" 

"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?" 

"Well," answers the balloonist, "everything you tell me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you're not much help to me." 

The man smiles and responds, "You must be a Democrat." 

"I am, replies the balloonist. "How did you know?" 

"Well," says the man, "You don't know where you are or where you're going. You've risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and now you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but, somehow, now it's my fault."

Via the Queen Of The World.

Cops ask man to breathe into a breathalizer

Hilarity ensues.



I love how the cop cracks up.

Johann Melchior Molter. Trumpet Concerto No. 2 in D major

Johann Molter was a baroque composer well known in his day.  A prolific writer, we have 140 symphonies among his many other works. Here's a baroque trumpet concerto, because who doesn't like a baroque trumpet concerto?



Happy birthday, Johann, born this day in 1696.

Metallica - You're Looking At Country

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in ages:

Welcome to the colliding of your two little musical worlds, where that classic country connoisseur and twang hound in you meets the hard-driving metalhead who punched a hole in your bedroom wall in 7th grade while listening to Master of Puppets. This is what occurred when Metallica showed up in Nashville Thursday night (1-26) for their first show in Music City in 10 years, and were graced by the presence of other than country music legend Loretta Lynn who was there to soak it all in. 

... 

About halfway through the show, frontman James Hetfield took a break, and guitarist Kirk Hammett and bass player Rob Trujillo took the opportunity to play a stripped down version of Loretta’s 1971 hit, “You’re Lookin’ at Country.”

That's so awesome that it's in danger of collapsing into a black hole of awesome - not least that Loretta went to their concert.  The video quality is pretty bad here but it's a cool moment.



And who knew there was a web site called Saving Country Music?

Ode to a pocketknife

This is a tale from a Country long ago:

Growing up in rural Northeast Alabama in the foothills of the Appalachians, I was privileged to catch the tale end of what was an era marked by ruggedness and self-sufficiency. I grew up around men that were willing to fix what was broken and take the time to do it right. My father was a Vietnam veteran and the product of growing up farming the hills of these same mountains where I was raised. He always carried a small pocket knife much like the one pictured. He had an affinity for Case knives, but would carry the occasional “Old timer” or “Buck” or even “Schrade”. One thing was for sure, that he had one with him, wherever he was. You could also be pretty sure that his pocket knife would be so sharp that if you were to stare at it too long your eyeballs would bleed. Now that's pretty sharp.... The pocket knife was an important part of his life. Whether it was to slice a freshly picked apple, or to cut some twine, (coincidentally twine can patch most any broken farm implement until you can get home) he was always prepared. At Christmas time, my father always had his knife waiting to help open those pesky gifts that needed cutting open as only a father can do best.

I too got my first pocketknife from Dad, back around 1970.  I have a new Benchmade one that the Queen Of The World got for me that I keep clipped in my pocket.  It feels weird if it's not there.

And the love affair that men have with their pocket knives goes back a long, long way.

The cold, hard truth

pic.twitter.com/2kUgBKYQSR

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) February 3, 2019

Thoughts on the State of the Union address

Trump is really not very good at delivering prepared speeches - although not many of our recent Presidents were, either.  Reagan was unusually good, but you'd expect that from a Hollywood background.  Trump didn't have the verbal elegance of a truly great speaker,  It doesn't seem to keep him from communicating effectively, though, but it's prose not poetry.  It's been said that poetry is the art of letting the word be heard behind the words, and that's just not his forte,

But the last minute or two of the speech was different - he did bring out the words behind the words.  It was a message that I don't recall hearing, at least not in a long, long time.  The word behind the word was unity.  He struck me as completely sincere about this.

Alas, I am starting to think that there are too many factions that think their path to power is by disuniting these United States - chief among these may be the media.  If Trump means to fight this battle then this is big, big stuff.  That's inspirational, but there's quite a good chance that he will lose, going down in history as a tragic hero fighting a lost cause.

I wish him luck.  I'd never seen him as a Martin Luther figure before.  He sure gave us his 99 Theses of American Greatness last night.

Linky, not Thinky

Several items are worth your time.

I hadn't known that not only could you actually go into King Tut's tomb, but that it had been restored.

The Red Sox and the New York Yankees are perhaps the greatest rivalry in Baseball.  It's cats and dogs, oil and water.  So it's a pretty strong statement of character when a died in the wool Sox fan meets Mariano Rivera.  As a Sox fan, I have to agree - Rivera has always been 100% class.

The EPA's newest science advisor is John Christy.  He runs the UAH satellite climate database - in my opinion the gold standard of temperature accuracy.  This seems like a very good sign.

The Silence of the (Climate) Data

I've posted before (a long, long time ago) about how many weather stations have been tracking temperature.  The whole Global Warming panic is based on world wide measurements, but the measurements are surprisingly (shockingly?) sparse.  The problem is worse, though - the weather stations are very strongly clustered in the Northern Hemisphere, specifically Europe and the United States.  But we're told this is a global temperature.  Just how global is "global"?

Short answer: not very.

This is the foundation of the whole Global Warming narrative. Then a huge layer of statistical manipulation is layered over it to attempt to hide the data quality and quantity issues. Kriging, interpolation, homogenizing, “the reference station method” of making up a number based on a temperature up to 1200 km away. None of this can fix the real problems with the underlying data. They can only burry it under a layer of bafflegab.

How bad is it? 

These are the months of data, that is not a missing data flag, for each wmo number in the Antarctic region (country starting with a 7). Note that the very first one has 10 years of data, that’s all. 120 months. THE longest is 1356 or about 113 years, then the next is 1212 months, or 101 years. Long for a human lifetime, nearly nothing in geological time scales and climate cycles. Most of the rest are around one human lifetime or less.

Even worse, these are surface stations (South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and Antarctica).  Almost all of the southern hemisphere south of 45° is ocean.  How many readings are in the climate database from ship reports?

Fourteen.

This is a great example of why I put MUCH more trust in the satellite climate data - it's a true global measure.  And it doesn't show essentially any warming in two decades.

The Lord forgives

I'm not so sure about Sign Guy.

Well that certainly didn't age well

One week ago:

On the quest to become one of Los Angeles’ most revered sports institutions, a victory Sunday in the Super Bowl is only the start. What comes after will be almost as important for the Rams.

If President Donald Trump invites them to the White House, they have to decline.

Today:

Problem solved, I guess.

Why Virginia Governor Northam has to go

And why it's for the greater good that he's going to hang around twisting in the wind for a while before he goes.

So, basically #GovNortham is retreating to the classic "These aren't my pants" defense so familiar to street cops.https://t.co/PuaU9T3MMB

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 2, 2019

Not for nothing is Tam known as the Queen of Snark.  Northam is trying to hang on but that's really just embarrassing and damaging his party now.  Five years ago this all would have been dealt with quietly, with Approved tut tutting and "mistakes were made" noises from the GOP side.  No more:

Democrat Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia just stated, “I believe that I am not either of the people in that photo.” This was 24 hours after apologizing for appearing in the picture and after making the most horrible statement on “super” late term abortion. Unforgivable!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2019

Northam has done what few pols accomplish - stepping into it up to his chin twice in two consecutive days.  The last time a Governor has been this amusing was when South Carolina Governor Mark Stanford hiked the Appalachian Trail all the way to his mistress' apartment in Buenos Aires.  

The Press is, of course, outraged.  Not at Northam, although privately they're mad that he's peed in their punchbowl - no, they're mad that people like Tam are mocking a Democrat.  And that she's being joined in the free for all by the Mocker In Chief.

What they're really mad at is that the tools that they used to monopolize - mockery of your political opponent - are now available for everyone, and are being used against their political allies.  And quite frankly, this is why Northam has to go after a long, agonizing, and damaging time (weeks?) of twisting in the wind.  You see, the power that the Press used to monopolize was used corruptly, and there are mathematical proofs that using this back at them will tend to reduce their corrupt use of it in the future.

Really.  I've written before about this:

Game Theory is a field of mathematics originally developed to try to mathematically derive optimum solutions for card games in the 18th century.  It has developed into a major field of analysis used in computer science and even the design of crypto systems.  Any of you who saw the film "A Beautiful Mind" have at least a passing familiarity with the subject. 

You probably even know the most famous example of Game Theory: The Prisoner's Dilemma.  Two prisoners are (separately) offered a deal - rat out the other guy or keep silent.  If they rat and the other guy doesn't, they go free and he gets a long sentence.  If neither of them rat, they both get short sentences.  If they both rat, they both get long sentences.  And most importantly to the prisoner, if he doesn't rat but the other guy does, he gets a long sentence while the other guy walks. 

It's a one-time deal, which makes the math simpler.  Real world situations are not so simple, and a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma has incorporated this.  Tit For Tat is a sequential set of prisoner's dilemma events where the strategy is to play what your opponent played in the previous round.  If your opponent was cooperative, you will be cooperative; if he screwed you, you will screw him back.
What's interesting about Tit For Tat is that mathematical proofs have shown that it leads to the outcome with maximum combined utility.  If your opponent always screws you, you're no worse off playing Tit For Tat, but if your opponent is always cooperative or also plays Tit For Tat then both of you derive the maximum benefit.

Politics has been played as a disconnected series of Prisoner's Dilemma rounds.  The Republicans have pushed their own to resign in the face of scandal, but it's only been the last year that the Democrats have shown a sign of doing the same.  This has been good politics for Democrats over the last 15 years or so.

This is why Northam has to go.  House GOP leader Steve King was stripped of his posts within a day or two of an interview that (depending on who you listen to) may or may not have been taken out of context or misrepresented for political purposes.  If these are the new rules, then Northam has to go because he admitted to (and later changed his story) the events.

I don't think that the Republic is well served by scalp taking, but it is even less well served by scalp taking applied to only one side.  The math tells us that we maximize the Republic's welfare by taking scalps from both sides.

Thoughts on the Superbowl

The NFL clearly laid down the law on taking a knee.  None of the players I saw did.  The NFL knows that this is ratings poison and didn't let it happen.

Despite what the haters will want to say, this should pretty much end the debate on who is the greatest NFL quarterback of all time.

It probably should (but won't) end the debate on what the greatest NFL franchise of all time is.

The Halftime show was idiotic music, but there wasn't anything politically controversial.  The Queen of the World recognized him but I didn't have a clue until they played that song that was covered by the Axis Of Awesome.

A lot of the commercials were hilarious.  Michael Bubble and T-Mobile had us laughing out loud.  The Verizon commercial with the guy meeting the EMTs who saved his life was touching.

All in all, we did not expect a Superbowl with basically no political bull***t.

Johann Georg Albrechtsberger: Konzert für Maultrommel, Mandora und Orchester F-Dur

Image von der Wik

Some different concepts often don't seem to go together.  "Beethoven's music teacher" and "composer of the Jew Harp" seems a great example.  But actually, there's a whole tale here that involves some pretty interesting music.

Johann Georg Albrechtsberger was an Austrian composer who became so famous that Ludvig van Beethoven sought him out for composition lessons.  Beethoven had originally studied with Josef Hayden but Beethoven's temper kept disrupting the study and so Hayden recommended his friend Albrechtsberger as a replacement.  Since Albrechtsberger had published the (to that time) definitive book on music theory and composition, Beethoven eagerly agreed.

What was a surprise to me was that music for the Jews Harp was a thing in late 18th Century Vienna, and that Albrechtsberger was considered one of the greatest composers for it.  It's not at all what you're expecting, although today's musicians don't seem to play multiple Jews Harps at the same time as did musicians of the day.



Johann Albrechtsberger was born on this day in 1736.

A Groundhog Day prediction

pic.twitter.com/wOeHIGICtZ

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) February 2, 2019

Harold Bradley - too many songs to name

Harold Bradley died in his sleep this week, after 93 years on this good Earth.  He was one of Nashville's greatest studio musicians and the co-founder of Music Row.  His obituary in Variety makes an attempt at listing the hits that he played on:

Bradley was a part of Nashville’s recording scene for more than seven decades. A member of Nashville’s famed “A-team” group of studio musicians, Bradley played on many of Nashville’s greatest hits. His staggering list of credits includes Patsy Cline’s “I Fall To Pieces,” “Crazy,” She’s Got You” and “Sweet Dreams,” along with Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Elvis Presley’s “Devil in Disguise,” Roy Orbison’s “Crying” and “Only the Lonely,” Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away,” Alan Jackson’s “Here in The Real World,” Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans,” Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John,” John Anderson’s “Swingin’,”  Hank Williams’ “Ramblin’ Man,” Conway Twitty’s “Hello Darlin’,” the Everly Brothers’ “Ebony Eyes” — and so many more that a complete discography would turn this piece from an obituary into a book.

Add in Hank Williams, Burrell Ives, Perry Como, Boan Baez, Buddy Holly, and Connie Francis.  I don't know that this makes him the most important studio musician in history but I don't know that it doesn't.

Interestingly, he was a fan of Django Reinhardt, who we've seen here before.

In any case, here are some of the hits that he played on.











Rest in Peace, Mr. Bradley.  Thanks for all the great music.

Wolfgang didn't do this

But he likes to bite up a mouthful of snow.

Should you use a GPS watch to track your kid's location?

Oh hell no.  Only if you want every perv on the planet to be able to track them too:

the Norwegian Consumers Council published the excellent ‘WatchOut’ research that demonstrated trivial access to kids GPS locations through vulnerable tracker watches, including the Gator.

It received plenty of press coverage and resulted in several kids tracker watches taking swift action to secure their systems.

A year on, we decided to have a look at the Gator watch again to see how their security had improved as a result of their actions.

TL; DR

Guess what: a train wreck. Anyone could access the entire database, including real time child location, name, parents details etc. Not just Gator watches either – the same back end covered multiple brands and tens of thousands of watches

The bottom line is that these watches (including but not limited to brands Gator, Tinitell, and Xplora) have NO security in their database and allow ANYONE to access ANY USER'S DATA without having to log in.  This is a year after a Norwegian government report on this, and NOTHING HAS BEEN IMPROVED.  This is perhaps the worst example of a saying I frequently roll out: security wasn't an afterthought, it wasn't thought of at all.

In short, if you think it's really cool to be able to know where your kid is at any given moment, realize that Joe Blow can do it, too.  And the watch company simply doesn't give a damn.

My recommendation is to throw the damned things into the garbage to keep someone from accidentally using it in the future.

It's funny because it's true

But if you torture the data it will confess to anything.

I must say that I'm digging this meme.  For those unfamiliar with it, back during the days when government policy encouraged off-shoring of manufacturing jobs there were a lot of articles in the press that laid off factory workers should learn to code.