Monthly Archives: October 2012

Well, Isn’t This Special?

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The British newspaper The Sun ran this interesting article the other day.  It seems the Brits have found a way to make petrol—gasoline to us colonials—from thin air.

[Air Fuel Synthesis] from the north of England has developed “air capture” technology which creates synthetic petrol with only air and electricity.

The technology was presented to a London engineering conference this week.

It mixes sodium hydroxide with carbon dioxide before zapping the resulting sodium carbonate with electricity, to form pure carbon dioxide.

At the same time, hydrogen is produced by electrolysing water vapour captured with a dehumidifier.

The carbon dioxide and hydrogen are then used to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol.

Wait, what?

This process works on air, but it adds sodium hydroxide to the mix?  But that’s minor; it’s not at all unusual to identify a process with a primary source, while adding additional chemicals along the way.

The really confusing part, to me, is this.  This process takes CO2 as an input and then messes with it to get, as a goal, CO2 as an output?  And then, to get the hydrogen, the process captures water vapor from the air and electrolyzes that?  I confess, I don’t understand.

Aside from processing carbon dioxide to get carbon dioxide, unless things have changed a bit since I took high school chemistry, reacting sodium hydroxide (NaOH) with carbon dioxide (CO2) generally produces “the resulting sodium carbonate” (Na2CO3) and…wait for it…water.  No need to collect water vapor with a dehumidifier.  Unless they wanted more water than that reaction would produce.  But that reaction produces a lot of water.

I’m no engineer, but a “breakthrough” isn’t what I see here.

Do the Brits do April Fool’s in mid-October?

Obama on Israel

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Ann Bayefsky, writing for Fox News, has some thoughts on this.

President Obama told Jewish leaders in July 2009 that he was deliberately adopting a policy of putting daylight between America and Israel.

President Obama made Israeli settlements the key stumbling block in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Starting in 2009 he chose to castigate Israel publicly, often, and in extreme terms at the General Assembly and the Security Council.

President Obama treated Israel’s Prime Minister to a series of insulting snubs during his visit to the White House in March 2010.

President Obama cut a deal with Islamic states at a May 2010 meeting of parties to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty…agreed to help convene a 2012 international conference intended to pivot attention towards disarming Israel….

President Obama suggested in May 2011 that Israel use the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations—knowing full well that Israel considers those borders to be indefensible, and that agreements require the border issue to be determined by the parties themselves.

President Obama created a “global counter-terrorism forum” in September 2011 and invited eleven Muslim states to join—on the grounds that they were “on the front lines in the struggle against terrorism.”  At the insistence of Turkey, he then denied entry to Israel.

President Obama told French President Nicolas Sarkozy in November 2011—when he thought he was off-mike—that he regretted having to deal with Israel’s Prime Minister.

In August, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dempsey said: “our clocks are ticking at different paces” and he wouldn’t be “complicit” in an Israeli effort to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s] words, the Iranian threat is “existential” only for Israel;  only Israel is “right in the bull’s eye.”   President Obama’s “pro-Israel” policy, therefore, is to wait past the point that the intended victim of the planned genocide believes is safe.

President Obama denied Prime Minister Netanyahu’s request to meet with him in September, despite the Iranian peril.

[O]n Monday night, at the final debate, Governor Romney answered the question he was asked about what poses the greatest threat to our national security with “a nuclear Iran,” while President Obama responded “terrorist networks.”

RTWT.

Weasel Words

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Or breathtaking incompetence.

Fox News is reporting that the Obama administration is changing, again, its story about what happened to our Libyan consulate in Benghazi.   Now they’re reverting to insisting that the terrorist attack was a response to, and spread of, the Cairo riots at our Egyptian embassy and the burning of our American flag flying above it.  These are riots which Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s minions also are laying off to a YouTube video.

Now the White House is saying that the video sparked the planned, organized, coordinated, three-pronged assault on our consulate.

All the while acknowledging, given the evidence that’s been released since that attack, that

there was no actual protest in Benghazi at the time of the attack and that “extremist” elements were likely involved.

So now Obama’s folks are trying to manufacture an amalgamation of, on the one hand, the…flawed…account our UN Ambassador Susan Rice gave on five Sunday talk shows and which Obama frequently repeated through his Press  Secretary Jay Carney at his noon press conferences that the attack was a “spontaneous” response to a video and, on the other hand,  real-time and within-24-hours reports, Senate testimony by National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew G Olsen in mid-Sep, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s later claim that it was a coordinated terror attack.

Now it’s…what…an organized and fairly complex terrorist attack ginned up in response to a video and “rioting” elsewhere?

The intelligence official who spoke to Fox News about this on condition of anonymity (because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly (which raises its own questions about his integrity and the reliability of his claims)) said that that everything is subject to change.

You bet.

It Doesn’t Get Any Clearer Than This

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Ustad Ahmad Farooq, al Qaeda’s spokesman for Pakistan, has issued a statement, addressed to his “beloved Pakistani brothers and sisters.”  That statement says, in part,

Nobody spoke up for thousands of such Malalas who became victims of military operations, and nobody protested for them on the roads.  But these circles made so much noise when we targeted this girl who made of fun of jihad, the veil and other Islamic values on behest of the British Broadcasting Corporation. … I may ask why? Why is Malala’s blood more important than those killed by the army?  The attack on Malala has been termed a national tragedy, but no one pays any attention when…the army targets gems of the Ummah who come to Khorasan to wage jihad from Arab lands and other places of world.  Why these double standards?

I’ll ignore the…inaccuracy…of the BBC’s role in Malala Yousufzai’s push for educating herself and educating other girls, and women, generally.

Threat Matrix (the above link) also cites SITE Intelligence Group‘s translation of Farooq’s statement as including Farooq’s “puzzlement” over why “these circles” ignore women who die due to poverty and those women (and children) killed during military operations.

In civilized nations, though (and here I include Pakistan), the people and their governments work hard to alleviate that poverty so that all—women, children, men—can lead safer, more confortable lives.  In civilized nations, the people, their military, and their governments work very hard to minimize deaths from collateral damage, as well as work very hard to minimize collateral damage to real estate and other facilities when battles are fought.  They mourn the deaths, they hold accountable those responsible for the collateral damage and deaths that could have been avoided with more careful targeting.

These are accidental, and they are generally within our power to minimize, if not to avoid altogether.  They are not the result of deliberate acts.

But al Qaeda (in Pakistan, and everywhere else) insists, through Farooq, that the deliberate murder of a particular child, on the one hand, is of a piece with these accidents and conditions that civilized peoples work tirelessly to alleviate, and on the other hand is entirely justifiable as a deliberate act.  Al Qaeda insists, through Farooq, that those who “come to Khorasan to wage jihad”—that is who go to Khorasan for training in the techniques of murdering the Mulalas and any other innocents they can reach, for training in the mass murder of Americans, Spanish, British, Pakistanis, Afghanis, of anyone—are not legitimate targets: we are not to defend ourselves.

Can any civilized person have any doubt left that al Qaeda—that terrorist gangs everywhere—must be destroyed?

Romney’s Tax Plan and Obama’s Tax Plan

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It’s interesting, at this juncture just after the third debate—on foreign policy—to look at the proposals the two Presidential candidates have for personal taxes and personal tax reform (yes, yesterday’s debate and tax policy have little to do with each other, but never mind about that).

The Wall Street Journal provided a description of Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney’s proposal.  Against a backdrop of an across the board rate cut of 20% (along with a reduction in the top business tax rate from the current 35% to 25%), Romney is proposing a cap on the total value of the deductions and credits an individual or family might take.

During the first Presidential debate, Romney proposed

What are the various ways we could bring down deductions, for instance?  One way, for instance, would be to have a single number.  Make up a number—$25,000, $50,000.  Anybody can have deductions up to that amount.  And then that number disappears for high-income people.

He repeated the concept in early October, suggesting a $17,000 cap with higher income people perhaps having a lower cap.

In the second debate, Romney again put forward his concept.

I’ll pick a number—$25,000 of deductions and credits, and you can decide which ones to use.  Your home mortgage interest deduction, charity, child tax credit, and so forth, you can use those as part of filling that bucket, if you will, of deductions.

Of course Progressives and the NLMSM want yet more specificity, and Romney declines to provide it.  In the first place, it doesn’t get much more specific than a cap—no particular deductions or credits are on the table for elimination, so there’s nothing about which to be specific there.  In the second place, Romney acknowledges that there are, also, other

ways to reduce deductions that in any case would have to be negotiated with Congress.

This is quite a different approach to Obama’s concept of negotiation.

Why a cap, rather than eliminating outright several of these market distorting deductions and/or credits?  Each taxpayer would pick and choose the deductions and credits that are of value to him in his particular circumstance, in a particular year.  Thus, these deductions and credits would compete with each other for inclusion.  What a concept: competition and individual choice.  And we’d be accumulating empirical data about which deductions and credits really do have value for us taxpayers.  But those are anathema to Progressives, whose raison d’être would disappear the moment their dependents don’t need them anymore.

Moreover, this competition, coupled with the generally lower tax rates, would reduce the degree of market distortion that each deduction causes.

The cap also preserves, for now, the degree of progressivity in our tax code that in itself is market distorting, yet is politically necessary to get any reform be passed in today’s DC environment.  See the table below.

Notice how, under the current system, the average total of deductions and credits rises with income.  The Progressives’ evil rich would bear the brunt of the effect a deduction cap.  And middle income Americans wouldn’t feel the cap at all.

Set in apposition to Romney’s proposal is Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s tax plan.  We’ve seen his idea at the link above: raise taxes on those Americans whom he despises.  And for what purpose?  Not to pay down our national debt or even to reduce the Federal budget deficit.  No, Obama intends to use his tax increase to transfer funds to his favored Americans—union, and so-called green energy, cronies who will then fund his political power.  And he’ll use the monies to fund the rapidly increasing spending for which he called in the last two budget proposals he sent to Congress.

Hmm….