Check out this fantastically well done web video from the guys at Depth of Speed.
I love seeing the old cars racing at Bonneville. It is so cool.
Depth of Speed Video: Racing at the Bonneville Salt Flats
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Category Archives: History
Sunday Night Links: The Vintage WPA Art Project Edition
In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (the name was changed to Work Projects Administration in September of 1939), as part of his New Deal program to put millions of unemployed Americans back to work. In July of 1935, Federal Project Number One (Federal One) was established within the WPA as a central administration for the arts-related projects. Federal One provided funds specifically for artists, musicians, actors, and writers through the Federal Art Project (FAP), the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Writer’s Project. FAP employed more than five thousand artists in various art projects including the many poster divisions that were created throughout the United States.
Many New Deal administrators believed that art could be a part of the daily lives of all Americans, not just the elite, and could enrich the lives of all who came in contact with it. The main objective of FAP was the employment of out-of-work artists, but this was not its only goal. The activities of FAP also included art production, education, and research. The project employed artists in the fields of easel painting, sculpture, photography, mural painting, and graphic arts, and it also held exhibitions and organized community arts centers through which many Americans were first introduced to the arts. Another well-known, well-received FAP project, the Index of American Design, created a survey of illustrations of American decorative and folk arts from colonial times through the late nineteenth century.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
On to the links…
Bunkerville: Obama tells 7 lies in under 2 minutes.
CoF: Past Reports that the Great Recession Ended in June 2009 were Wrong! It Still Hasn’t Ended!
TheCL: Do You Know That You Are a Creditor?
The Sentry Journal has the best post title of the week: Serfs Up
Media Matters Lies About America’s Watchtower: I’m Jealous
The Eye: X-Files III in the Planning Stage (The X-Files were appointment viewing for me back in the day)
The Bitter Americans: Are You Doing Enough?
Gator: Shocker! Thomas Friedman hates the Tea Party
MTTM: Editorial Bias and Purposeful Omission
RR: “What if We Controlled All Elected Branches of the Federal Government?”
ChrisWy is back from vacation : OK kids, it’s time once again to play “Name That Party!”
Wade: Obama Shrugged
I Don’t Care About the Debt Ceiling: The Sky is Falling!
FCBZ: Marco Rubio, you totally ROCK, sir.
WWTFT: The Founding Fathers Solve Our Debt Crisis
Bot: Get Ready
Pundette: Covering the moon with yogurt
TWN: Today’s World News Now On Google+
TMGGB: Bend Over America…
The Similarities Between Obama And President Herbert Hoover’s Economic Policies
“The only problem with capitalism is the capitalists.”
History tells us why cutting the size of government and reduce the amount of money it spends is so vitality important.
Obama’s failed stimulus plan has drawn significant comparisons to FDR’s New Deal. While there are numerous similarities between Obama’s Stimulus and FDR’s New Deal, Obama’s economic policies have much in common with another disastrous Presidency. Herbert Hoover.
First of all, Hoover was no advocate of laissez-faire. His immediate response to the 1929 crash was to pressure industrial leaders not to cut wages. That drive to maintain wages continued throughout his presidency, even as prices fell. Hoover’s administration cartelized American agriculture in an attempt to rig agricultural prices at artificially high levels, and he signed into law the hugely protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff. He expanded public works, intervened in the financial and housing sectors, and restricted immigration. Oh, and he increased spending by 31 percent from 1930 to 1931, running what was then the United States’ biggest ever peacetime deficit, before introducing huge tax increases. Suggesting that Hoover was pursuing a laissez-faire, free market approach is just a flat-out lie.
We know what came next, The Great Depression.
Inside The Mind Of An Ivy League Liberal: Why A Shrinking Economy Is Good
According to this Lib, we should give up, go green and embrace a shrinking economy. Via Yale Environment 360:
Herman Daly has reminded us that if neo-classical economists were true to their trade, they would recognize that there are
diminishing returns to growth. Most obviously, the value of income growth declines as one gets richer and richer. Similarly, growth at some point has increasing marginal costs. For example, workers have to put in too many hours, or the climate goes haywire. It follows that for the economy as a whole, we can reach a point where the extra costs of more growth exceed the extra benefits. One should stop growing at that point. Otherwise the country enters the realm of “uneconomic growth,” to use Daly’s delightful phrase, where the costs of growth exceed the benefits it produces.
Of course, it is the elites in academia that will measure the costs and benefits, not consumers or the markets. They will decide what is best for us.
The lunacy continues:
Though not widely accepted, the case is strong that growth in the affluent U.S. is now doing more harm than good. Today, the reigning policy orientation holds that the path to greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. GDP, productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption must all go up. This growth imperative trumps all else. It can undermine families, jobs, communities, the climate and environment, and a sense of place and continuity because it is confidently asserted and widely believed that growth is worth the price that must be paid for it.
But an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy is ruining the environment; it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; it hollows out communities; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues — for doing things that would truly make us and the country better off.
It is time for America to move to post-growth society where the natural environment, working life, our communities and families, and the public sector are no longer sacrificed for the sake of mere GDP growth; where the illusory promises of ever-more growth no longer provide an excuse for neglecting to deal generously with our country’s compelling social needs; and where true citizen democracy is no longer held hostage to the growth imperative.
Read the rest if you dare. It is truly nauseating.
For a guy who is who is supposed to be super smart and is going to tell us how to live our lives better than we are now, his two main points are dead wrong.
First, he is tring to tell us that our chase for economic growth is turning people into working zombies through increased working hours. This is not true at all. Via Economic History
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And it gets better:
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The idea that people are working longer hours in an expanding economy is flat out false.
Our intrepid lib professor’s second assertion that we are destroying ‘the environment’ in a ruthless pursuit of an expanding GDP is false as well.
If you are a frequent MCT reader, you know that one theme here is that only wealthy countries can afford to worry about the environment.
Go to any poor or developing nation and look at the condition of the environment. Go to rural China, Africa & Cuba and look at the conditions people live in. They don’t care about the environment. In many cases, they only care about where their next meal is coming from.
A growing economy makes life better for everyone.
Australian Government Tips For Living Green During Winter Months
Something to look forward to from our government in a few months.
AUSTRALIANS are being urged to play board games and snuggle up under a rug with a pet or their families to help cut power bills.
On its LivingGreener website, the federal government urges switching off the TV and heater and finding old-fashioned ways of keeping snug and occupied.
Of course this is being sold by the Australian Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet as “tips on how to save energy & money.” It seems to me that Mr. Cobet thinks the people of Australia aren’t ‘sophisticated’ enough to figure this out for themselves.
It is amazing how romanticized living condition’s in the 1800′s and earlier are portrayed. Look at this picture of a South Dakota log cabin from around 1890:
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Sure is a simpler time. No pesky furnace or air conditioning. No energy wasting TV or inefficient incandescent light bulbs. Heck, you can snuggle by the fire and read a book or play a board game to pass the hours.
Back in the simpler times, people didn’t live that long... But they lived green.
Monday Night Links: The Cartographic Land Octopus Edition
Humorous War Map
Via Big Think- Strange Maps Blog:
Real octopi are sea creatures, of course. But the Cartographic Land Octopus – CLO for short – need not worry about being in the right ecosphere. Being fictional, it is not restricted to the sea. It can (and need) do only one thing: instill map-readers with fear and revulsion. But the CLO’s pedigree does stretch back to the ocean. It is clearly descended from an older monstrosity, equally fictional but wholly sea-bound: the Kraken, a giant squid whose enormous tentacles dragged whole ships down to their watery graves.
I suspect it’s those tentacles that explain why the octopus became cartography’s favourite land monster. They turn the CLO into a perfect emblem of evil spreading across a map: its ugly head is the centre of a malevolent intelligence, which is manipulating its obscene appendages to bring death and destruction to its surroundings. This is perfect for demonstrating the geographic reach of an enemy state’s destructive potential. It can even be used on a more abstract level, showing dangerous ideologies insipidly infiltrating and/or strangling the world.
Gator: Why does the truth upset Liberals so much?
Hold the peas: Michelle O’s meal at the Shake Shack
Fleece: Iran’s nuclear threat is escalating
theCL: Why Be Libertarian?
The Bitter Americans: Weekend Update
How Communism Works
CH2.0: “I’m a Democrat” Parody…or is it?
Robot: Valour IT… Have You Made Your Donation Yet?
The Eye: Welcome to the first in an irregular feature of favorite commercials from the past.
WCW: Washington and Madison on Power
United Nations: Going Green to Cost $76 Trillion – No Thanks
ChrisWy: Abandon all hope ye who enter Newark, NJ
1942 Propaganda poster by the pro-German Vichy government in France
CoF: The Focus Should Be On The Debt and Not The Deficits
Bunkerville: Indiana law will track users of some cold medicines in real time.
Jen Kuznicki: Rangel Uses God For Political Gain
TWN: Google Plus vs. Facebook Video Chat
WWTFT: America Is Exceptional, Not Objectionable
Government Spending Drains Life From The Economy
Obama, in March of 2009 called on governments of the G-20 to increase their stimulus spending. He even had one of his speech writers pen an Op-Ed, that ran in newspapers around the globe. Here is an excerpt:
Our leadership is grounded in a simple premise: We will act boldly to lift the American economy out of crisis and reform our regulatory structure, and these actions will be strengthened by complementary action abroad. Through our example, the United States can promote a global recovery and build confidence around the world; and if the London Summit helps galvanize collective action, we can forge a secure recovery, and future crises can be averted.
Our efforts must begin with swift action to stimulate growth. Already, the United States has passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the most dramatic effort to jump-start job creation and lay a foundation for growth in a generation.
Other members of the G-20 have pursued fiscal stimulus as well, and these efforts should be robust and sustained until demand is restored.
And the response? Germany’s Chancellor Merkel did not buy it:
During the hourlong interview, Mrs. Merkel made clear that she was not wavering in her response to the economic crisis, by loosening the German checkbook or encouraging the European Central Bank to follow the Federal Reserve in pumping money into the system.
“On an international level, we must all recognize that after the crisis we need to return again to solid financial policies,” Mrs. Merkel said. “Otherwise, we run the risk of already preparing the next crisis.”
Where long lines of unemployed people are the indelible image from the Great Depression in the United States, it is the wheelbarrows of worthless currency during the hyperinflation of the 1920s that preoccupies Germans. Mrs. Merkel has exerted discreet but stubborn leadership in Europe to prevent the kind of overspending that could lead to inflationary pressure on the euro.
It is not, she pointed out, simply a philosophical difference. Borrow and spend today, repay down the road, is a particularly difficult proposition for a country with a shrinking population, she said.
Czech premier Mirek Topolanek was a bit less diplomatic and called Obama’s plan a “road to hell” and didn’t back down:
Outgoing Czech premier Mirek Topolanek on Monday defended his description of US plans to use vast capital injections to boost growth as a “road to hell”, saying such measures would not work for Europe.
Writing in The Times, Topolanek said his comments to the European Parliament were a “legitimate warning” against the dangers that huge increases in public borrowing or the subsidising of banks and industries could become permanent.
Obama made his call for increased spending by G-20 governments in March of 2009. The G-20 did not follow Obama’s ‘leadership.’ And the results?
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Germany, 6% unemployment. Former Soviet Union satellite, the Czech Republic, has an unemployment rate of around 7%. The poster children for government spending, Greece and Ireland have unemployment rates above 14%.
The United States has an ‘official’ unemployment rate of 9.1% and has been hovering there since 2009.
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Remember, the Democrats seized control over both houses of Congress in 2007 and government spending accelerated.
Saturday Morning Links: The Visions of our Future Edtion
I found these great Modern Mechanix and Popular Science magazine covers @ How to be a Retronaut:
Popular Science was first published in 1872, while the Mechanix titles first appeared in 1928.
A Mexican’s Thoughts on Immigration
The Eye: Michele Bachmann’s History v. Barack Obama’s Geography
The man [George Stephanopolous] has gone from advising a president to asking Elmo if he wants a play date with Katy Perry. There is one Rhodes Scholarship that was not wasted, huh?
I couldn’t agree more.
T. Christopher @ RR takes a look at Thaddeus McCotter’s run for President.
Bunkerville: 2000 Years of History
CH 2.0: The Story of our Declaration of Independence
CoF: It’s High Time President Obama Began Earning His Paycheck and All Those Perks He Enjoys So Much
Fleece: When all else fails, imagine a conspiracy
MTTM: Michigan Freedom To Work Video
Some Thoughts on Human History, and Progressives
Deciphering Obama: He really can be both at the same time. Clueless and laser focused.
Robot and Gov’t Mule on a Friday night.
Gator: A tale of two states
WCW: On a national bank…
WWTFT: Thoughts on the Balanced Budget Amendment
WyBlog: Has Fred Upton seen the light?
The venerable 100 watt light bulb just might get a reprieve. Congressman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is finally going to make good on his promise to hold hearings on repealing the idiotic incandescent bulb ban he championed in 2007.
Are Some Conservatives Jumping On The Governance By Intellects Bandwagon?
I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
One of my daily political blog reads is Ace of Spades. I find myself agreeing with Ace much of the time. However, a couple of days ago, I ran across a post that Ace did about Sarah Palin and her supposed lack of ‘gravitas’ on things more intellectual.
This passage in particular bothered me:
A lot of Palin’s supporters blow this off and essentially offer an anti-intellect defense: Well that stuff doesn’t matter anyway.
Well, for some of us it does. And if Palin could put these questions to rest, but doesn’t, she’s alienating a lot of potential supporters. Some of us can’t just tell ourselves, “I don’t care about what’s in her head, I care about what’s in her heart” or some pablum like that.
So you tell me if it matters. I think it does. 90% of the Palin critics, skeptics, and now outright opponents find little fault with her policy portfolio, or her bio, or her cultural background, or her charisma. (Obviously on the latter.)
For 90% of us it’s this one thing.
So you tell me it doesn’t matter.
I don’t have to tell you it doesn’t matter, history will tell you that what matters. Looking at history, what matters most is core beliefs, principles and adherence to the ideals of limited government.
Take a look at Woodrow Wilson. In the late 1800′s they didn’t grant Ph.D’s like they do today. So, the fact that Woodrow Wilson earned a Ph.D. in history and political science in 1886, is quite an academic accomplishment. No one would doubt his intellect.
What did Wilson accomplish with his superior intellect during time in office? He created the League of Nations (the forerunner to the UN), the Federal Reserve and got us involved in WWI. He also backed a slew of legislation that put new controls on big business and supported unions. The repercussions of Woodrow Wilson’s superior intellect are still being felt today (and not in a good way).
Would any conservative vote for Woodrow Wilson today? He certainly had a lot going on in his head.
Looking at the other side of the coin, would conservatives support someone like Calvin Coolidge who had a solid conservative ideology:
Coolidge’s nickname was “Silent Cal.” He was known for his silence. He believed that the government should have as small a role as possible in the country. He believed that the country’s well-being was best preserved by allowing business to create wealth. His most famous remark was in a speech that he made in 1925 in which he stated: “The business of America is business.”
Wilson had Ph.D. from Princeton University and Coolidge graduated from Amherst College. I think its safe to say, Wilson was ‘smarter’ (in a strictly academic sense) than Calvin Coolidge. However, like most conservatives I would vote for Coolidge every time.
Looking at recent history, Ronald Reagan, who graduated from Eureka College, endured continuous mocking as not being too bright. However, he possessed a strong , conservative world view and ended up a fantastic President.
History demonstrates that it is more important that a President have a conservative world view rather than being perceived as an intellectual (i.e the what is in their heart pabulum Ace spoke of).
Since Reagan left office, we have been subjected to an unbroken string of Ivy League elites setting the tone for our nation. Look at this list: George H.W. Bush (Yale), the skirt chasing Bill Clinton (Georgetown, Oxford – Rhodes Scholar and Yale), George W. Bush (Yale and Harvard Business – MBA) and Obama (Occidental College, Columbia and Harvard Law School), all Ivy League intellects. With all this supposed intelligence and education at the top, is our nation better off? Do we have less government encroaching in our daily lives and work? Is our economy stronger?
The skirt chasing Rhodes Scholar gave us the housing bubble that helped crash our economy.
George Washington had a surveyor’s certificate from William & Mary College.*
*I know this is not the perfect example, since we know from Washington’s writings he was very intelligent. However, he is remembered and revered because of what was in his heart.
Going Green Without Thinking: Using 250 Acres Of Photovoltaic Cells To Power 50,000 Homes
The development of solar cell technology begins with the 1839 research of French physicist Antoine-César Becquerel. Becquerel observed the photovoltaic effect while experimenting with a solid electrode in an electrolyte solution when he saw a voltage develope when light fell upon the electrode.
Environmentalists are trying to save the planet with Victorian era technology. If photovoltaic technology isn’t sufficiently practical after 172 years of development (who would’t want free electricity) what will change in another 10 or 20 years making solar power practical?
Another example of the latest green energy pipe dream coming out of New York City is a 250 acre photovoltaic ‘farm’ that supporters claim will provide power to 50,000 homes. Only during the day. When the sun is shining.
Via the EPA’s very own Greenservation web site:
Under the city’s proposal, 250 of these acres would be leased to a private operator, who would install and run the plants. Although pricey at first, such an arrangement would be attractive to potential developers, since it would likely take just 10 years to recoup construction costs. If all goes as planned, the project could be enough to power as many as 50,000 homes.
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Finally, solar energy would provide electricity to New Yorkers when we need it most — during the hot, sunny days of summer. Having lived through the 2003 blackout and the July 2006 Queens power outage, a plan to help keep the air conditioners running through the summer is a plan that gets my support.
Always take the claims of power to 50,000 homes with a grain of salt. Supporters of green energy are notorious for over promising and under delivering.
The idea of dedicating 250 acres of land to cover with photovoltaic cells is a waste of real estate (even if it is a covered land fill). For example, Zeeland Michigan has a natural gas ‘peaker’ power plant sitting on only 30 acres and powering a community of over 800,000 people. Day or night. Rain or shine.
What power source would you want to rely on a hot and humid August night to power your AC?