Coyote Blog

President Obama wants a 56.2 mile per gallon standard for cars by 2025.  Both advocates and opponents of this say the only way to make this is if everyone drives an electric car or plug in hybrid.  But the fact of the matter is, even those don't get 56.2 mpg, except through an accounting fiction.

A while back I ran the numbers on the Nissan Leaf. According to the EPA, this car gets an equivalent of 99 MPG.  But that is only by adopting the fiction of looking only at the efficiency in converting electricity to power in the wheels.  But the electricity comes from somewhere (the marginal kilowatt almost certainly comes from a fossil fuel) and the new EPA methodology completely ignores conversion efficiency of fuel to electricity.  Here is how I explained it at Forbes:

The problem is that, using this methodology, the EPA is comparing apples to oranges.   The single biggest energy loss in fossil fuel combustion is the step when we try to capture useful mechanical work (ie spinning a driveshaft in a car or a generator in a power plant) from the heat of the fuel’s combustion.  Even the most efficient processes tend to capture only half of the potential energy of the fuel.   There can be other losses in the conversion and distribution chain, but this is by far the largest.

The EPA is therefore giving the electric vehicle a huge break.  When we measure mpg on a traditional car, the efficiency takes a big hit due to the conversion efficiencies and heat losses in combustion.  The same thing happens when we generate electricity, but the electric car in this measurement is not being saddled with these losses, even though we know they still occur in the system.

Lets consider an analogy.  We want to measure how efficiently two different workers can install a refrigerator in a customer’s apartment.  In both cases the customer lives in a fourth floor walkup.  The first installer finds the refrigerator has been left on the street.  He has to spend much of his time struggling to haul the appliance up four flights of stairs.  After that, relatively speaking, the installation is a breeze.  The second installer finds his refrigerator has thoughtfully been delivered right to the customer’s door on the fourth floor.  He quickly brings the unit inside and completes the installation.

So who is a better installer?  If one only looks at the installer’s time, the second person looks orders of magnitude better.  But we know that he is only faster because he offloaded much of the work on the delivery guys.  If we were to look at the total time of the delivery person plus the installer, we’d probably find they were much closer in their productivity.  The same is true of the mileage standards — by the EPA’s metric, the electric vehicle looks much better than the traditional vehicle, but that is only because someone else at the power plant had to do the really hard bit of work that the traditional auto must do itself.  Having electricity rather than gasoline in the tank is the equivalent of starting with the refrigerator at the top rather than the bottom of the stairs.

The DOE has actually published a better methodology, going from "well to wheels," creating a true comparable efficiency for electric cars to gasoline engine cars.  By this methodology, the Nissan Leaf all electric car only gets 36 MPG!  In fact, no current electric car would meet the 56.2 MPG standard if the accounting were done correctly.  Which is why the EPA had to create a biased, inaccurate MPG equivalent measure for electric vehicles to artificially support this Presidential initiative.

Courtesy of the Doublethink blog, comes something really, really wrong.  A cross between My Little Pony and Serenity.  Eek.

When the framers of the Constitution designed its separation of powers features, they presumed that members of each of the three branches would try to protect their own turf.  In other words, grabs of power by one branch would be met by hard pushback from other branches.

What they did not anticipate was that Congress would simply give away power to the Executive.  It seems like Congressman only want their job titles, and maybe the ability to pass a few earmarks for the home district now and then, and would really like not to be bothered by that whole legislation thing.  After all, your election opponents can't critique you for votes that were never taken.

This has been occuring for years, with the accretion of regulatory authorities (like the EPA) whose rules-making effectively usurps traditional Congressional regulatory authority.

More recently, the Democrats in Congress gave away immense power in Obamacare by creating an independent cost cutting board.  Cost cutting suggestions of this board become law automatically unless Congress votes to override the changes, and even then they cannot override without passing cost cuts of similar magnitude on their own.  The whole point was to take legislation of things like the doc fix, which just gets everyone riled up, out of the sphere of Congressional accountability.

Now the Senate Republicans are proposing what appears to me to be exactly the same bullsh*t vis a vis the debt limit.  The debt limit is in fact a poor name.  In fact, it should be called the debt authorization.  Issuance of government debt can only by Constitutionally authorized by Congress, but instead of giving the Administration a blank check, it authorizes the Treasury to issue debt up to some limit, kind of like the limit on a credit card and serving much the same purpose.  While Democrats talk about the debt limit as if it is some useless device, sort of like an appendix, it is in fact central to the excercise of power by both branches as set up in the Constitution.

Senate Republicans, though, want to change all that by giving the Executive Branch what amounts to a credit card with no limit.  Why? Again, Congress is just dead tired of being so accountable for so many difficult decisions, and it would rather turn the President in to an Emperor than have to face difficult questions at reelection time.  This is so gutless I could scream:

The debt limit now works as an only if proposition: the debt limit is increased only if Congress votes affirmatively to authorize an increase. Increasing the debt limit therefore requires a majority of the House and Senate to cast a difficult aye vote, plus a Presidential signature. The McConnell proposal would invert this into an unless proposition: the debt limit would automatically be increased unlessCongress voted to stop it. And by changing the key vote to a veto override, you would need only 1/3 of either the House or Senate to take a tough vote to allow the debt limit to increase.

In exchange for this significant increase in Presidential authority, the President would take most of the political heat for the debt limit increase, and he would be required to propose difficult spending cuts of an equal or greater amount.

Congresspersons of both parties don't give a cr*p about the Constitution or fiscal responsibility.  They just want to avoid accountability.

Fortunately, I can see the House buying this at all.  The House has a special role in spending and taxation, and I see them far more loath to accept this kind of deal.

So, should our deficit today be considered a spending problem or a taxation problem?  Kevin Drum argued yesterday it is a tax problem, and used a historic chart of spending as a percent of GDP to make his point.

I have to thank him.  I would have normally been skeptical of such an analysis yielding much that was useful, but I was forced to do the analysis to correct some obvious data errors in Drum's chart.  Having done so, I found the exercise useful and it became the basis for my column this week at Forbes.  The short answer, its a spending problem.  For more, hit the link.

Update:  Make sure to see bottom of post, I have run the numbers from the source and the chart below is proven to be totally BS.

In an effort to paint the current budget deficit as a tax shortfall (ie we don't take enough of others people's money) rather than a spending problem, Kevin Drum offers this chart:

OK, I was going to talk about how they cherry-picked the start date (which is the peak of spending at that time since WWII) and the end date (the left off the ugly 2011).  But I just can't bring myself to talk about anything else except those trendlines.  Not sure what algorithm Drum uses to create the trendlines -- they seem suspicious but surely someone in the science-based, reality-based community would not just draw them on by eye!

It is just incredibly disingenuous (and ballsy) to try to portray 2009 and 2010, which represented the highest numbers since WWII, as a declining trend line falling faster than revenues.

Postscript: Here is the longer view, from here, with projections which I presume come from the Obama budget.  I think if I took 1950 as a start point I would get pretty different trend lines.

Update: Here is the data right from the Federal web site with Excel adding a linear trend.  Sure looks like Drum is wildly exaggerating.  Just as in Drum's chart, red is outlays as a percentage of GDP, blue is collections.

So lets look at the longer trend.  WWII was obviously an anomaly, so we will jump to 1950 to make sure we are well past it.  And we will go through 2012, because those projections are probably pretty good (though optimistic on the spending side).

Here is Drum's chart, with the longer trend and actual mathematically rather than politically calculated trend lines.

Hmmmm.  Revenue or spending problem.  You make the call.

Often we libertarians think of making common cause with liberals on social and civil rights issues while making common cause with conservatives on fiscal and regulatory issues.

But these are rules of thumb, as often those we think of as allies on a certain issue abandon us in favor of statism.  Certain conservatives do when they give up capitalism for corporatism.  And Ken at Popehat has a fabulous example of a situation -- protection of defendant's rights in a trial -- where expected liberal support does not materialize.   He discusses the case of an accused child pornography creator

In real life, the accused has the right to review the evidence against him. But how you feel about that scenario can help to determine whether you lean liberal orlibertarian — whether you are suspicious of state power in all instances, or whether you trust the state and look to its firm hand when it comes to hot-button issues, like OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

We’ve been conditioned by the culture to expect that “liberal” and “supportive of due process and fundamental fairness to all people accused of crimes” go hand-in-hand. It’s a lie.

I think the same holds true in other circumstances, like rape trials.  Rights liberals would normally fight for, say, in the case of an accused black murderer in Mississippi were totally tossed aside for white college students accused of rape at Duke.

One might think a line like about Greek finances was printed just this week

What followed could only be described as a comic progression of populist pandering [and] the spread to the national economy of a series of parasitic labor unions and cabals

But in fact it is describing Greek conditions circa 1944.

A while back I observed that the difference between Greek and US finances is that the US needs to return to a spending level circa 2007, while Greece has no similar default state of relative fiscal sanity it can return to.  This article in Finem Respice reinforces this premise by discussing the absolute insanity of Greek fiscal management before and after and even during WWII, which was characterized by all the exact same problems that have driven the current crisis.  Good background reading.

Greece, then as now, was dominated by an expensive public sector funded insufficiently by a tax system that did not work.  As may happen soon, Greece was not able to borrow, so all they could do was print money and inflation soared.  Only one man was able to stop the inflation, and I won't spoil the ending by the humorous way he did so.

Here is the current global warming hype process as it exists today:

1. Identify a 2 or 3 sigma weather event.  Since there are 365 days in the year and hundreds of different regions in the world, the laws of probability say that some event in the tail of the normal distribution (local high, local low, local flood, local drought, local snow, local tornado, local hurricane, etc) should be regularly occurring somewhere.
2. Play weather event all over press, closely linked as often as possible with supposition that this is due to manmade CO2.  If the connection to global warming is too outlandish to make with a straight face (e.g. cold weather) use term "climate change" or "climate disruption" instead of global warming.
3. Skeptics will point to actual data that this event is not part of a long term trend, e.g. there is no rise in tornado activity correlated with 20th century rise in temperatures so blaming one year of high tornadoes on global warming makes no sense.    Ignore this.
4. Peer reviewed literature will emerge 6-12 months later demonstrating that the event was not likely due to man-made global warming.  Ignore this as well.  Never, ever go back and revisit failed catastrophic predictions.
5. Repeat

Last year's Russian heat wave is a classic example.  Here is an example of the hype and the tie to man-made global warming in Time.  And here, 12 months later, is the study saying that weather was just weather:

Reference
Dole, R., Hoerling, M., Perlwitz, J., Eischeid, J., Pegion, P., Zhang, T., Quan, X.-W., Xu, T. and Murray, D. 2011. Was there a basis for anticipating the 2010 Russian heat wave? Geophysical Research Letters38: 10.1029/2010GL046582.

Background
The authors write that "the 2010 summer heat wave in western Russia was extraordinary, with the region experiencing the warmest July since at least 1880 and numerous locations setting all-time maximum temperature records." And as a result, they say that "questions of vital societal interest are whether the 2010 Russian heat wave might have been anticipated, and to what extent human-caused greenhouse gas emissions played a role."

What was learned
The nine U.S. researchers determined that "analysis of forced model simulations indicates that neither human influences nor other slowly evolving ocean boundary conditions contributed substantially to the magnitude of the heat wave." In fact, they say that the model simulations provided "evidence that such an intense event could be produced through natural variability alone." Similarly, on the observation front, they state that "July surface temperatures for the region impacted by the 2010 Russian heat wave show no significant warming trend over the prior 130-year period from 1880-2009," noting, in fact, that "a linear trend calculation yields a total temperature change over the 130 years of -0.1°C." In addition, they indicate that "no significant difference exists between July temperatures over western Russia averaged for the last 65 years (1945-2009) versus the prior 65 years (1880-1944)," and they state that "there is also no clear indication of a trend toward increasing warm extremes." Last of all, they say that although there was a slightly higher variability in temperature in the latter period, the increase was "not statistically significant."

Not sure I find the computer model work comforting one way or the other but the complete lack of any observational trend seems compelling.

The progressive argument for a larger state has, for over a hundred years, rested in part on the premise that smart people at the top in government can better optimize the allocation of resources and make better investment choices.

This premise always has been ludicrous.  Government officials have neither the information nor incentives to perform this function, and lacking such, decisions always get made based on political rather than economic or other objective functions.

Ethanol is such a great example, it will almost be a shame when its mandates and subsidies are repealed.  As a reminder, corn-based ethanol production get the trifecta of state sponsorship -- mandates for its use, subsidies for its protections, and stiff tariffs to prevent lower-cost imports.

The result is a classic government fail.  The economic subsidies benefit only a small number of the politically connected, while hurting the great mass of humanity, even outside the US, through higher food and fuel prices.  Because ethanol takes as much fuel to produce as it provides, it does nothing to change the amount of fossil fuels we use.  And as a result, it does nothing to affect CO2 production and in fact has a number of environmentally negative effects, particularly in land and water use.

I am reminded of all this by these staggering figures, via Carpe Diem

"U.S. ethanol refiners are consuming more domestic corn than livestock and poultry farmers for the first time, underscoring how a government-supported biofuels industry has contributed to surging grain demand.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that in the year to August 31 ethanol producers will have consumed 5.05 billion bushels of corn, or more than 40% of last year’s harvest. Animal feed and residual demand accounted for 5 billion bushels."

As Mark Perry shows in his blog, US ethanol policy has also pushed corn prices up from $2 a bushel in 2007 to over $8 today.

I want bother to except this, you really need to see the post in its entirety.  Popehat looks at 98 pages of Colorado state regulations on day care centers.  The breadth and depth of the regulations, down to exactly how many of what type blocks kids should have to play with, is just amazing.

This is job security for life for a bunch of bureaucrats.  If we require all this stuff, we need regular reporting don't we, on compliance.  And inspections. And a detailed licensing and application process.  And ten years from now, when all the day care centers are closed or cost too much, we will need extensive government programs to provide subsidized day care.

Gary Johnson gave the finger to the Republican my-family-values-must-be-your-family-values set

Presidential candidate and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson charged today in a formal statement through his campaign that the Family Leader “pledge” Republican candidates for President are being asked to sign is “offensive to the principles of liberty and freedom on which this country was founded”.  Governor Johnson also plans to further state his position against the Family Leader pledge this afternoon in Las Vegas, NV at a speech he will deliver at the Conservative Leadership Conference.

Johnson went on to state that “the so-called ‘Marriage Vow” pledge that FAMILY LEADER is asking Republican candidates for President to sign attacks minority segments of our population and attempts to prevent and eliminate personal freedom.   This type of rhetoric is what gives Republicans a bad name.

“Government should not be involved in the bedrooms of consenting adults. I have always been a strong advocate of liberty and freedom from unnecessary government intervention into our lives. The freedoms that our forefathers fought for in this country are sacred and must be preserved. The Republican Party cannot be sidetracked into discussing these morally judgmental issues — such a discussion is simply wrongheaded. We need to maintain our position as the party of efficient government management and the watchdogs of the “public’s pocket book”.

“This ‘pledge’ is nothing short of a promise to discriminate against everyone who makes a personal choice that doesn’t fit into a particular definition of ‘virtue’.

Johnson is easily my favorite Presidential candidate in recent memory.

What does a statist government do when attaching "unexpected" to all negative economic numbers does not provide the necessary political cover?

Argentina’s government has filed criminal charges against the managers of an economic consulting firm, escalating its persecution of independent economists.

…The government is charging MyS Consultores with “publishing false information about inflation data” to benefit themselves and their clients. The criminal complaint alleges that MyS’s data also lead to speculative behavior in Argentina’s bond market.

…Consumer prices rose 9.7% in May from a year ago, according to the national statistics agency, Indec. But virtually all economists say annual inflation surpasses 20%—one of the world’s highest rates—angering government officials who dismiss inflation as a problem.

…So far this year, the Secretariat has fined at least nine economic research firms 500,000 pesos ($122,000) each. This week, the Secretariat also slapped a second fine on Orlando J Ferreres & Asociados.

“They fine us for saying how much prices have risen,” Mr. Ferreres, director of his eponymous firm, said. “They could seek criminal charges against all of us. We don’t know how far they’re willing to go.”

Mr. Ferreres said the legal actions are part of a strategy to prevent independent economists from publishing potentially negative information during an election year…

Government officials say they hoped the fines would deter economists from “deceiving” the public into making poor financial decisions by publishing inflation estimates that differ considerably from Indec’s consumer price index.

It is sad to see how far Argentina has fallen.  In the past it has been one of my favorite countries in the world to visit.

I am amazed lately as the left has tried to pitch libertarians as corporate whores, taking certain small-government positions because they have been paid off by Koch or Exxon.

I can understand how this charge might bite for Democrats and Republicans whose positions tend to be a hodge-podge of individual liberty and state control (and which seem to morph back and forth depending on which team is in the White House).  When there is no consistent, temporally stable philosophy that drives political positions, then it might be appropriate to look at other factors that might drive a public stance on an issue.  If, for example, I had always supported tight regulation of corporate market share, one might wonder why I defend Google against anti-trust scrutiny and reasonably look for other motives.

But as a libertarian, I consistently support market solutions over government regulation.  On this site I have supported the right of hair threaders and interior designers and real estate agents and casket sellers to ply their trade without government permissions.  I have supported legalization of gambling, marijuana and narcotic sales, and prostitution.

So why is it that I can plow along trying my best to be a consistent advocate of individual liberty, without a hint that I am in the pay of hair threaders or hookers, but as soon as I write on, say, natural gas fracking I am in the pay of the Koch brothers?  This strikes me as the lamest possible argument.

On this blog, think of me as sitting at a roulette table and always betting on black  (yes, the house will eventually win but welcome to the world of being a libertarian in modern statist politics).  Spin after spin I bet black.  Imagine a couple of folks walking up and seeing me place my next bet on black.  Why do you think he did that?  Was it because the last number was a 6?  Or because three of the last five were red?  No guys, it's because I always bet black.

Of nearly all the political groups, libertarians should be the most transparent.  We always side with individual liberty, and searching for other motives for these positions is generally futile.

Apparently the newest pro-tax meme out of the Left is that millions of dumb Americans don't already know that they are benefactors of social spending programs and that if they understood this, they would surely support government expansion.  Such programs they highlight include:

• 529 or Coverdell savings deduction
• mortgage interest deduction
• hope or lifetime learning tax credit
• student loans
• child and dependent tax care credit

etc. etc.  Whole list here.  I don't want to spend too much time on this silliness, but two immediate responses come to mind

1. If tax credits, ie the ability to keep more of your money and be taxed less, is a government social program, then the implication is that all your money belongs to the government, and the very fact you keep any of it is a gift or benefaction of the government for which you should be grateful.  The fact the Left cannot understand the simple difference between, on the one hand, keeping more of your own money, and on the other, getting money that has been taken by force from others, explains a lot about the current budget fight.
2. In many cases, Americans "benefit" from government programs because the government does not allow any alternative.  Or, if it allows an alternative, the government provides heavily subsidized services or pre-paid services (e.g. public education which you pay for whether you use it or not) that crowd out private alternatives.  Just because roads and schools and home loans have heavy government involvement does not mean that they require that government involvement to exist.

More analysis here.

I blogged on our dust storm last week.  It was really bizarre to watch it rolling in on us.  It was one of those things that you know intellectually is not really threatening but a steady diet of Stephen King and other authors had some part of my brain wondering if I shouldn't be driving north at 90MPH to stay ahead of it.

By the way, such storms are called a "haboob".

Radley Balko linked this time lapse video.

Kevin Drum had a post lamenting that Congress is doing nothing when it could be spending money that would, in his view, stimulate the economy out of a recession.  All well and good, and predictable based on his assumptions.  But he ended with this

We are ruled by charlatans and cowards. Our economy is in the tank, we know what to do about it, and we're just not going to do it. The charlatans prefer instead to stand by and let people suffer because that's politically useful, while the cowards let them get away with it because it's politically risky to fight back. Ugh indeed.

I was horrified by this sort of discourse, and wrote back:

It is so tiring to see both parties ascribing horrible and hostile motivations to their political opponents.  Your last paragraph is just absurd, implying that everyone agrees with your economic prescriptions and that the only reason everyone is not following them is either a) political self-interest or b) loathing for the poor and helpless.

Is it really so hard to understand that well-intentioned, intelligent people who honestly want the economy to get better might disagree with you about the benefits of deficit spending? The literature is at best mixed on this topic and certainly there is nothing about the last stimulus that causes me to become a believer.

Those of us who believe strongly that diverting trillions of dollars of capital from private to public hands (ie from hands focused on productively employing it to hands focused on politically employing it) makes the economy worse by necessity are just as motivated by trying to improve the economy as you.

I really don't understand this absolute insistence on ascribing bad motivations to those with whom one disagrees.  Is it ego, or just insecurity?  If one admits his or her opponents can be smart and well-motivated, it certainly creates an edge of doubt and uncertainty.  Deal with it.  That's healthy.  It keeps us intellectually honest.

Corporate profitability is back up, and output has returned to nearly pre-recession levels.  But employment still has not recovered.  Why?

Well, I am sure there are a lot of reasons, but one potential reason I have pointed out for a while are Federal efforts to increase the cost of employment.  If the true cost of an employee is higher, or even more uncertain, then investments are going to be funneled preferentially into capital rather than labor.  Certainly that is what our company has been doing for a while.  Thus productivity is way up, and employment is low.

I believe that Obamacare is a very important element in raising the cost and uncertainty of hiring new employees, particularly for small and middle-sized businesses that so often drive much of American employment growth.  Certainly in the NFIB, the small business group to which my company belongs, the entire character of our internal discussions has changed.  Three years ago we might have been discussing a mix of 10 or 12 issues we had.  Now all you hear is Obamacare discussion.  [Note - some on the Left like Kevin Drum argue that this concern is irrational.  I seldom take seriously the opinion of people who have never tried to make a payroll about what business people should and should not be concerned about, but it almost does not matter.  Whether it is irrational or not, the concern is a fact.]

Let me share a chart I just saw on Kevin Drum's blog (which he used to make an entirely different point).  Let's look at the recession up to March 2010:

Look at the orange line which is private sector employment growth (the blue bars include government and get squirrelly in 2010 due to temporary census workers).  This looks like a normal (though deep) recession with a nice recovery beginning.

Then, on March 18, 2010, Obamacare passed.  Now lets play the numbers forward.  Again, pay attention to the private job growth in orange - the blue spike in April in May is all temporary census workers

Correlation is not equal to causation, but Obamacare looks to me to be exactly like the National Industrial Recovery Act under FDR, a huge source of regime uncertainty and stab at free markets that killed an incipient recovery.

This is awesome, and the only real argument is which one is the bigger piece of crap.  The drag race was particularly funny. Part 2 here

Update: Fixed the second link.  Forgot to give credit to reader Leith Kronenberg for the link, who, by the way, needs his own blog.

It happens all to seldom, for reasons I understand well.  Oil companies and Wal-Mart and other vilified private entities that are the object of populist and cynical political attacks very seldom fight back.  The reason is not because they are in the wrong, but because  the government has the power to gut them like a fish in a myriad of ways, and are populated by petty little thugs who love to dish it out but can seldom take any criticism.

That is why its great to see Koch Industries telling demagogues in the Democratic Party to take a hike.  For some bizarre reason, perhaps because the Left saw how much fun the Right had vilifying George Soros for everything, the Koch brothers are not the source of all imaginable plots and schemes.

Check out this letter, where Koch Industries responds to Democratic fundraising pitch.

Until two days ago, I had never ever heard of Nancy Grace but apparently she has a TV show or something and uses it to actively root for prosecutorial abuse.  The presumption of innocence is frustrating until they come for you.

Our rulers are pretty good at finding tricky ways to expand their power

...several environmental groups that have received millions in EPA grants regularly file suit against that same agency. A dozen green groups were responsible for more than 3,000 suits against the EPA and other government agencies over the past decade, according to a study by the Wyoming-based Budd-Falen Law Offices.

The EPA even tacitly encourages such suits, going so far as to pay for and promote a "Citizen's Guide" that, among other things, explains how to sue the agency under "citizen suit" provisions in environmental laws. The guide's author — the Environmental Law Institute — has received $9.9 million in EPA grants over the past decade.

And, to top it off, critics say the EPA often ends up paying the groups' legal fees under the Equal Access to Justice Act.

"The EPA isn't harmed by these suits," said Jeffrey Holmstead, who was an EPA official during the Bush administration. "Often the suits involve things the EPA wants to do anyway. By inviting a lawsuit and then signing a consent decree, the agency gets legal cover from political heat."

 

What do corn farmers and Hollywood studios have in common?  They both have an uncanny ability to force self-serving legislation through Congress.  This week's bit of sucking up to Hollywood is the PROTECT IP act, currently under consideration in Congress:

An ideologically diverse group of 90 law professors has signed a letter opposing the PROTECT IP Act, the Hollywood-backed copyright enforcement/Internet blacklist legislation now working its way through Congress. The letter argues that its domain-blocking provisions amount to Internet censorship that is barred by the First Amendment.

Jointly authored by Mark Lemley, David Levine, and David Post, the letter is signed not only by prominent liberals like Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler, but also by libertarians like Post and Glenn "Instapundit"Reynolds.

"The Act would allow courts to order any Internet service to stop recognizing [a] site even on a temporary restraining order... issued the same day the complaint is filed," they write. Such a restraining order, which they describe as "the equivalent of an Internet death penalty," raises serious constitutional questions.

The Supreme Court has held that it's unconstitutional to suppress speech without an "adversary proceeding." That is, a speaker must, at a minimum, be given the opportunity to tell his side of the story to a judge before his speech can be suppressed.

Yet under PIPA, a judge decides whether to block a domain after hearing only from the government. Overseas domain owners (and the speakers who might make use of their websites) aren't offered the opportunity to either participate in the legal process or appeal the decision after the fact. (Affected domain owners may file a separate lawsuit after the fact.) This, the professors say, "falls far short of what the Constitution requires before speech can be eliminated from public circulation."

 

This is pretty hilarious. Environmentalist and global warming advocate Chris Mooney writes

My latest DeSmogBlog post is about how climate skeptics basically seem to believe that their opponents are driven by socialism and communism. We aren’t, of course–duh–but it is fascinating to listen to how they explain this, in their own words.

After some participation years ago in this kind of finger-pointing over motivations in the climate debate, I have of late found such activity to be worthless at best and have tried to stay away from it.

But this became funny when Mooney's readers started commenting on the post.  In effect, they wrote "we are anti-growth socialists."  Mooney was forced to write, in comment #32:

yes. i guess my side loses this round, thanks to this thread. depressing

Thanks to Climate Depot for the tip.

Wiretaps and government surveillance is on the rise, and it has little to do with terrorism.  The failed war on drugs continues to be the main excuse for assaults on privacy:

State and federal investigators obtained 3,194 wiretap orders in 2010, an increase of 34 percent over the previous year, and a whopping 168 percent increase over 2000. Only one wiretap application was denied—which you can choose to take as evidence that law enforcement is extremely scrupulous in seeking applications, or that judges tend to rubber stamp them, according to your preferred level of paranoia. Just half the states reported any wiretaps, and nearly 68 percent of the total 1,987 state wiretaps were attributable to just three states: California, New York and New Jersey....

Still, this invasive technique is still reserved for investigating the most serious violent crimes, right? Alas, no: For 84 percent of wiretap applications (2,675 wiretaps), the most serious offense under investigation involved illegal drugs. Further proof, if proof were needed, that privacy suffers enormous collateral damage in our failed drug war. Drugs have long been the reason for the vast majority of wiretaps, but that trend, too, is on the upswing: Drug cases accounted for “just” 75 percent of intercept orders in 2000.

Coke has a billboard covered in some kind of plants that it claims absorbs 46,800 pounds of CO2 a year.  Forgetting for a moment whether we should care about CO2 abatement, I have a question for Coke:  What are you going to do with the plants after you take down the billboard and/or after they die?  Are you going to shrink-wrap them and bury them deep?  Because otherwise, when they die, they are just going to give up the carbon back to the atmosphere as they decompose.  If you really want to abate carbon with plant growth, go build some wood-frame houses.

Update: Incredibly, as the 13th commenter on the linked post, I was the very first who did not think this was an awesome step for the environment.