Overnight Open Thread (7-26-2015)

Quote of the Day

Americans seem to be less shocked than a wee little foreigner such as I that this republic has a corrupt tax collection agency that torments its ideological opponents. I must say the original revelations about the IRS - what is it now? two, three years ago? - did shock me, and the fact that all those people are still in place carrying on as usual shocks me even more. I'm old-fashioned enough to regard a nonpartisan civil service as a basic building block of a civilized society.

But the relevance of this to my own situation isn't hard to follow: Michael E Fraudpants' lawyers have already asked for my "donor list". Mann's fellow scientist Dr Peter Gleick burrowed his way into the Heartland Institute and leaked their donor list, and, when that didn't quite do the trick for his purposes, he faked up his own Heartland top-secret document. (Like Mann, Dr Gleick remains a respected figure in the world of climate science.)

So I could set up a 501(c)79(f) and have Mann demanding I cough up the names so that Lois Lerner's chums can audit them, and, if I stonewalled, I'd have to stay up all night to check whether that weird noise at three in the morning is Dr Gleick crawling down the ventilation shaft.

So I'd rather do things the old-fashioned way and sell our exclusive range of DC Superior Court trialwear.

-- Mark Steyn

In Defense of America's Love of Air Conditioning and Why It Is Eco-Friendly

I've worked with Germans. And Brits. And Swedes. And Dutch people. And French people. All of whom professed themselves absolutely baffled by our insistence on wasting so much energy cooling our offices and homes, when we could just build buildings that cool themselves naturally if we open the windows occasionally.

For Europeans reading this, I may actually be able to clear up this baffling issue: Americans use air conditioning more because America is a lot hotter than Europe is. For example, in Washington, where the weather is apparently "pretty similar" to Berlin, it is expected to be 87 degrees Fahrenheit (31 Celsius) tomorrow. In Berlin, Weather.com informs me that temperatures are expected to be a torrid, sultry . 75 Fahrenheit (23 Celsius).

Of course, on any two random days, the weather might be unseasonably cold or unseasonably hot. You really need to look at monthly averages. And lo and behold, when we look, we discover that Washington has an average temperature of 88 degrees in July, while Berlin has an average temperature of . 73 (yes, that is indeed 31 and 23 Celsius).

And we're not talking about a place that's really hot, like Dallas (average July temperature is 96, or 36 Celsius) or Phoenix (106, or 41 Celsius). We're just talking about a rather ordinary American city in roughly the middle of the country's north-to-south span.

We do have some cities with more European temperatures, including San Francisco and Seattle, but they are not our largest population centers. The rest of the country, even places that are frozen wastelands in the winter, experiences summertime average highs above 80 degrees. That's not a rogue heat wave, the kind that Northern Europeans complain about endlessly while futilely fiddling with their fans. That's just what we Americans call "summer." A heat wave is when it's 100 degrees (38 Celsius) and your dog won't go outside because the pavement burns his feet. . . .

You could argue that if Americans had not migrated en masse from the temperate north to the blistering sunbelt, we would need less energy for climate control. You could argue that, but you'd be wrong. Americans still expend much more energy heating their homes than cooling them. That's actually not that surprising. The difference between the average temperature outside and the temperature that is comfortable inside is generally only 10 to 20 degrees in most of America, for most of the summer. On the other hand, in January, the residents of Rochester, New York - the cold, snowy, rapidly depopulating area that my mother hails from - you need to get the temperature up from an average low of 18 degrees (-8 Celsius) to at least 60 or 65. That takes a lot of energy.

On average, the move from cold areas to warm ones has actually saved energy, not caused us to use more. So why are we so down on air conditioning, while accepting flagrant heat use as normal? In part, it's because air conditioning still seems optional. Unlike a cold winter with no heat, a hot summer with no cooling won't definitely kill you.

And here Daniel Engber shows that AC is actually cheaper and more efficient than heating:

[T]he case against AC has always been more a moral judgment than a scientific one. Summer cooling is no more damaging to the climate than the heating that we do in winter. In fact, it's substantially less so, since the United States burns more fuel on radiators than it does on air conditioners. According to the most recent stats available from the federal government (which cover 2010), the average American household puts 40.4 million British thermal units into home heating, and just 9.3 million BTUs into home cooling. As I've pointed out before, this explains why the long-term shift in population from our coldest, Northern states into the hot and humid South has in sum reduced the amount of fossil fuel we burn to keep our houses at a comfortable temperature. Simply put: It's more efficient to air-condition homes in Florida than it is to warm the ones in Minnesota.

As Insty points out, "snobs, busybodies and puritans seem to occupy colder climates for some reason."

The Human Monsters of Sci-Fi: "If enough children are sexualized young enough, gayness will suddenly be "normal" and accepted by everyone, and the old fashioned notions about fidelity will vanish"

This is the story of Moira Greyland whose parents, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen, were fixtures in the science fiction scene of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. They were also monsters in human skin who both molested their own daughter and likely many, many other children. Walter Breen was eventually sent to prison for child molestation in 1991 where he later died. What's disturbing is that Breen's proclivities were known as far back as the early 60s yet other members of the sci-fi community were unwilling to judge him.

What they did to me is a matter of unfortunate public record: suffice to say that both parents wanted me to be gay and were horrified at my being female. My mother molested me from ages 3-12. The first time I remember my father doing anything especially violent to me I was five. Yes he raped me. I don't like to think about it. If you want to know about his shenanigans with little girls, and you have a very strong stomach, you can google the Breendoggle, which was the scandal which ALMOST drummed him out of science fiction fandom.

...My observation of my father and mother's actual belief is this: since everyone is naturally gay, it is the straight establishment that makes everyone hung up and therefore limited. Sex early will make people willing to have sex with everyone, which will bring about the utopia while eliminating homophobia and helping people become "who they really are." It will also destroy the hated nuclear family with its paternalism, sexism, ageism (yes, for pedophiles, that is a thing) and all other "isms." If enough children are sexualized young enough, gayness will suddenly be "normal" and accepted by everyone, and the old fashioned notions about fidelity will vanish. As sex is integrated as a natural part of every single relationship, the barriers between people will vanish, and the utopia will appear, as "straight culture" goes the way of the dinosaur. As my mother used to say: "Children are brainwashed into believing they don't want sex."

And this story makes the case for her claims that her parents' beliefs are shared by many in the gay community: At Anti-Bullying Conference Led By LGBT Group, Iowa Middle Schoolers Taught About Lesbian Strap-On Anal Sex, Fake Testicles.

Huh - UN Inspectors Will Be Forced To Rely on Nuclear Samples Provided by...Iran

This agreement just gets better and better. It's a farce masquerading as a sham of a mockery of sham of a real agreement.

"In other words, if nuclear inspectors get a hot tip that Iran is conducting (or conducted in the past) atomic-bomb work at a secret site, they don't get to go to the site themselves and take samples from the soil, the walls, etc, to see if there's uranium present," Allahpundit writes at Hot Air. "They get their samples . from Iran. That's like drug-testing a junkie by asking him to bring a sample from home."

SJWs Finally Go After Mel Brooks

You knew that eventually this was coming.

British SJW Picks Exactly the Wrong Video Game to Push Her White Privilege Theories

Did she ever even play Skyrim? Almost certainly not.

Bookworm Travels to the American South For the First Time

I have never felt closer to America's past. I came away with an even greater than usual appreciation for our Founding Fathers, some of whom may have had feet of clay, but all of whom lived in a brilliant and rarefied world that revealed itself in our founding documents.

I also felt in my bones, rather than just intellectually, the scourge of the Civil War, the repercussions of which still resonate in our world. And if those who chant "Black lives matter - but no one else's lives do" think they are any different from those who believed in slavery and segregation, they are completely delusional. The takeaway is that the Democrat party never changes: It is now and always will be devoted to racial hatred enforced by government power.

Speaking of the South and race, I've never seen a part of the U.S. that's as racially integrated as the South. Wherever we went, people of all races dined together, traveled together, worked together, or were clearly dating or married without regard to racial boundaries. In my part of the world - the uber-Liberal San Francisco Bay Area - people of various races tend to stick with their own kind. If you walk into a restaurant, the blacks will be at one table, the whites at a second, and the Asians at a third. They won't be fighting, but they sure won't be mixing.

In the South, the races seem to be comfortable to mix-and-match. This integration was so obvious that even the Leftist in our party, who had already delivered a lecture - predicated on the Confederate flag kerfuffle - about the South's racism, was forced to comment upon the harmony we saw.

Venezuela Nationalizes Food Distribution

So the farmers must sell all of their production to state-owned stores and distributors at prices set by them. You can guess what the outcome of this will be.

My predicted outcome from this is that Venezuela is now one harvest away from serious starvation.

The point of this history stuff is to see what didn't work and then not repeat it. Yet Maduro appears to be selecting the very worst public policies of the past as those that he will impose today. Confiscating the food off the farmers is just going to lead to no farmers and no food.

Someone really should tell the President about 1930s Ukraine.

Texas Supreme Court Flushes Houston's Transgender 'Bathroom Law'

A Forgotten 80s Song: Translator - Everywhere That I'm Not

Is The 9mm vs .45 ACP Debate Over?

Essentially yes. With modern HP 9mm ammunition there's effectively no difference between the two calibers. So use whichever you prefer.

When using any sort of "like" ammunition for comparison, the .451? bullet of the .45 ACP is going to make a bigger hole than a .355? 9mm bullet. That allowed, the FBI Training Division noted that with modern ammunition, the difference in actual wounds in human bodies is so slight that doctors can discern no difference between the wound channels caused by 9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP handguns.

Twitter Now Erasing Tweets With Stolen Jokes

Mental Health Company CEO Embezzles $510,000 To Give To Psychic

Scientists Identify Sixth Taste: Fat

What Happened to Film Crushes of the Eighties?

Weekly Commenter Standings

Top 10 commenters:
1 [417 comments] 'rickb223' [58.54 posts/day]
2 [405 comments] 'Vic  - Republicans help Obama commit treason'
3 [404 comments] 'Christopher Taylor'
4 [361 comments] 'mynewhandle'
5 [351 comments] 'Ricardo Kill'
6 [349 comments] 'Anna Puma'
7 [326 comments] 'some random meathead'
8 [293 comments] 'ThunderB'
9 [273 comments] 'cthulhu'
10 [264 comments] 'logprof'

Top 10 sockpuppeteers:
1 [98 names] 'The Political Hat' [13.76 unique names/day]
2 [80 names] 'militarized thug cop'
3 [65 names] 'Turd Ferguson'
4 [56 names] 'Shallow HAL 9000'
5 [54 names] 'some random meathead'
6 [52 names] 'Ready For Hillary!!11!!'
7 [51 names] 'Cicero (@cicero)'
8 [46 names] 'Prince Ludwig the Indestructible'
9 [44 names] 'wth'
10 [38 names] 'Mike Hammer, etc., etc.'

The group. Banned on 12 universities.

Where it's at - the Twitter

Tonight's post brought to you by the naked gunner over Rabaul, 1944:

Notice: Posted by permission of AceCorp LLC. That is all.

posted by Maetenloch at 11:11 PM

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