TigerHawk

Ralph Peters' column on victory in Iraq is a balm for those of us who did and do support the American effort there, and it has some great red meat besides:

We all recall the delighted leftist claims that Iraq had entered a hopeless civil war. Wrong. That Iraqis preferred al Qaeda to us. Wrong. That Shia militias represented the people. Wrong. And that Iran would seize control. Wrong again.

Looking back over six years of good intentions, tragic errors, generosity, arrogance, partisan vituperation, painful deaths and ultimate vindication, two things strike me: the ever-resisted lesson that human affairs are more complex than academic theories claim, and the simple truth that most human beings prefer a measure of freedom to immeasurable repression.

Perhaps it is because I was raised in Iowa, or maybe it is the old school WASP in me. Either way, I open doors for people, regardless of their gender, age, physical capacity, or sexual orientation, if I get to the door first. Sometimes people smile and say thank you, sometimes not. I do not resent it when people do not thank me, however, because I do it as much out of habit as to relieve them of the door-opening burden.

That said, my opening of the door for you does not explicitly or implicitly authorize you to enter the line in front of me and order six differently mixed lattes and an assortment of pastries for the gang at your morning meeting. Protocol in most parts of the country -- not the greater New York area, perhaps, but just about everywhere else -- calls for you to invite me to order my grande non-fat no-whip mocha ahead of you. Capiche?

Notwithstanding my own poor talents, I do not want to ignore those many TigerHawk readers who are handy around the house and garage. Behold, Amazon's massive sale on air-powered tools. A bit arcane, to be sure, but deals to be had nonetheless.

A photographic history of the bikini, with explanatory notes.

Fell out of the habit of linking to the O'Quiz. Good thing. This week's O'Quiz is absolutely brutal. I guessed my way to 5 out of 10, but that is still significantly above the prevailing average of 4.07. I defy you to name a more difficult multiple choice test. Take the O'Quiz and post your own score, no matter how glorious or ignominious, in the comments.

Doug Ross really does not like Rep. Steve Driehaus, so much so that he is calling in favors to spread the word. Done. And, well, he certainly does appear to be another Democrat who ran as a fiscal conservative and votes as a fiscal derelict. A "lite" version of our president, I would say.

It is a shame that the Republicans made it so easy for Democrats to do that.

Client Number 9 thinks that Mark Sanford is worse than he is. His rationale is that he did not fall in love with the prostitutes with whom he transacted. Spitzer's moral parsing is interesting, and might equally go the other way. What say you? Take the poll!

This is just about the most damning indictment of the Obama administration's mostly costly legislative initiatives (regarding health care and greenhouse gas regulation) you are going to read anywhere, and it comes from somebody who supports both initiatives.

The cap-and-trade bill is a travesty. Its net effect on short- to medium-term carbon emissions will be small to none. This is by design: a law that really made a difference would make energy dearer, hurt consumers and force an economic restructuring that would be painful for many industries and their workers. Congress cannot contemplate those effects. So the Waxman-Markey bill, while going through the complex motions of creating a carbon abatement regime, takes care to neutralise itself.

It proposes safety valves that will ease the cap if it threatens to have a noticeable effect on energy prices. It relies heavily on offsets – theoretical carbon reductions bought from other countries or other industries – so that big US emitters will not need to try so hard. It gives emission permits away, and tells utilities to rebate the windfall to consumers, so their electricity bills do not go up. It creates a vastly complicated apparatus, a playground for special interests and rent-seekers, a minefield of unintended consequences – and the bottom line for all that is business as usual.

If you regard universal access to health insurance as an urgent priority, as I do, the draft healthcare bills are easier to defend as at least a step in the right direction. Nonetheless, the same evasive mindset – the appetite for change without change – has guided their design. If you are happy with your present insurance, the bills’ designers keep telling voters, you will see no difference.

The crux of the US healthcare problem is the incentives that encourage over-production and over-consumption of services. Addressing that would alter the way healthcare is paid for and delivered to all Americans. At that scary prospect, Congress looks away. Debate thus revolves around how much of an increase in coverage you can buy for $1,000bn over 10 years in subsidies and other outlays. That is a good question. But legislators aim to duck the bigger challenge: controlling long-term growth in costs per patient.

Lest you think the Chinese will not sell our bonds and crush our currency when the spirit moves them, consider this troubling graph from The Economist:

It depicts China's looming "dependency bubble" (the huge ratio of old people and children to total population) which because of that country's strange demographics will make our various entitlement issues look trivial. The only way the Chinese will be able to finance care for so many people will be to liquidate their assets, including particularly our bonds. We need a plan for managing our own dependents that does not require the Chinese to do the saving on our behalf; they will need that money for themselves.

CWCID: Paul Kedrosky.

Hey, all you middle income Obama voters out there, I've got a little parsing exercise for you. Reconcile this...

...with this:

White House senior adviser David Axelrod said the president won't rule out a health care reform bill that includes a middle-class tax hike.

Many more of these stories, and people are going to wonder whether climate science has been entirely captured by people with political objectives:

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists' agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".

Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

While you were paying attention to Mark Sanford's affair and Michael Jackson's entourage, you may not have noticed that the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter affair seems to have ventured into sex tape territory. Whatever. The Breck Girl and, frankly, everybody else involved are so unrelievedly tacky that we are almost forced to rehabilitate Sanford and Eliot Spitzer just because they are not, well, John Edwards. When the bar's that low, just about anybody ought to be allowed over it.

The Wharton School has published a paper (pdf) that examines patterns of consumer behavior by race (or, rather, by American "racial" categories, which are not consistently racial). The carefully-hedged abstract:

Using nationally representative data on consumption, we show that Blacks and Hispanics devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles to visible goods (clothing, jewelry, and cars) than do comparable Whites. These differences exist among virtually all sub-populations, are relatively constant over time, and are economically large. While racial differences in utility preference parameters might account for a portion of these consumption differences, we emphasize instead a model of status seeking in which conspicuous consumption is used as a costly indicator of a household’s economic position. Using merged data on race and state-level income, we demonstrate that a key prediction of the status-signaling model -- that visible consumption should be declining in reference group income -- is strongly borne out in the data for each racial group. Moreover, we show that accounting for differences in reference group income characteristics explains most of the racial difference in visible consumption.

It is a little bit surprising that the clowns distinguished officials who run Princeton (Borough or Township, take your pick) have not yet adopted this arrestingly silly program (in which towns in New England are guilting businesses into doing work for free). Maybe they have not thought of it yet. Anyway, a similar mandate would put the McCaffrey's chain in a tough spot, because it is both aggressively "green" in its propaganda and (by all accounts) immensely profitable. "Green" for no profit does not seem like it is part of the program.

Anyway, more businesses need to stand up and refuse to be roped into the latest doing of good for no reason other than altruism or the demands will never end and businesses will no longer actually serve their customers and owners. Hank Rearden was, and remains, the last word on that subject.

Glenn Reynolds links to and excerpts an editorial from Der Spiegel that absolutely savages Barack Obama:

The occupant of the White House may have changed recently. But the amount of ill-advised ideology coming from Washington has remained constant. Obama's list of economic errors is long -- and continues to grow.... Barack Obama and George W. Bush, it has become clear, are more similar than they might seem at first glance.

Chris Christie has another anti-Corzine ad up. If you share, as I do, the dream of defeating Jon Corzine in November for both New Jersey and the national headlines it would garner, consider helping the Christie campaign.

Yesterday we learned that American consumer confidence was at its highest level since February 2008 and that our savings rate was shooting through the roof, reaching 6.5% in May, the highest rate since the early 1990s (check out this graph to see the speed of the ascent). The unemployment rate rose but so did personal income, largely on the back of one-time government stimulus payments to senior citizen (I missed out on those -- any of our readers get one?). Apparently, notwithstanding their growing confidence, most people banked the payments or used them to pay down debt, either of which is "savings."

In general, I applaud the higher savings rate and hope it persists for a generation. With the federal government spending trillions it does not have and cannot raise by taxation, Americans are going to need a lot of savings to avoid debasing their own currency and destroying their own standard of living to finance all of this largess. There is no time like the present to relearn the thrifty habits of our grandparents. That said, yesterday's news does tend to support at least one of the arguments that Barack Obama made for his massive direct spending stimulus package over the Republican call for tax cuts: That tax cuts and direct transfer payments will not contribute to economic growth in the short term because people will use them for debt reduction rather than investment or consumption. That is indeed what seems to be happening here. (Of course, neither is this news a refutation of the right's counterarguments, which were (i) changes in the tax law would foster a change psychology that would make for more durable economic growth, and (ii) the stimulus money flows too slowly to achieve its purported objective, which is to stimulate the economy now).

Of course, by now everybody who reads blogs knows that Barack Obama is preparing an executive order that would "reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely." At this point there is little to add to the big round-up at Memeorandum, except perhaps this: Wars only have "definite" endings in retrospect -- who knew in 1931 that the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was the opening shot in a 14-year second "world war"? As surely as Allah God made little green apples, this one will also definitely come to an end. When that day comes there will be very little legal basis to detain jihadis at Gitmo or wherever they may be held, and we should release any who pledge not to take up arms again.

We hold prisoners, even unlawful enemy combatants, until the war is over. This one has been going on since at least 1996 when al Qaeda's antecedents first proclaimed jihad against the United States. It will end when al Qaeda and its principal allies and descendents lay down their arms and surrender or walk away, for then violent jihad against the West will have run its course. The odds of that happening within the next decade or two, well within the natural lives of most of the detainees, are fairly high.

My old prep school's 2009 "summer reading list" is a lot less demanding but a lot more directive than it was in 1979. Back then, they told you to read a huge pile of books in the summer before you arrived at school; I believe I got through something like 10 of them, only to learn that many of my less ambitious peers had largely blown it off. Now the school is clear that you must read at least two books, annotate them, and prepare to be tested on them.

Candidly, I'm not sure which approach is better on average, even though the old school method worked well for me. I do know, however, that each seems to fit with the dominant child rearing paradigm of its decade. Back when hair was long and pot was harmless, the educated parents of the Silent Generation basically figured that if they exposed you to many different things your muse would find you and their job was done. Now, the unstructured children of that era, perhaps in reaction, manage their own kids down to the method of note-taking and the color of highlighter. That they and the school they hire should dictate the summer reading should come as no surprise. That does not make it any less depressing.

Anyway, I for one will be fascinated to see what outrages today's children visit upon our hapless grandchildren.

I could not handle the rain and gloom in the northeast for a moment longer, so the TH Daughter and I lit out for the territory. Chicago, that is, where the sun is shining long and warm as it ought in late June. We took in the Taste of Chicago, the Shedd Aquarium (which I had not been to in a very long time and which is way cooler than I remembered), and the Cubs and White Sox interleague game at "the Cell." Herewith, a few shots from my Blackberry, with the chance of more to come if I have the energy and you have the enthusiasm...

The actual opening pitch in a 5-4 victory for the Northsiders...

I'm going to climb out on a creaking and structurally suspect limb and say I agree with Dorothy Rabinowitz:

We can now add the sad-eyed Gov. Mark Sanford, making his tearful public confessional, to the galaxy of similar fallen stars we have seen in this state before. The question no one has ever answered is how they all fell into the grip of the same delusion: namely, that the way to retrieving dignity is to go before the microphones to issue craven apologies to a list of purported victims.

Can these recitals, interrupted by barely suppressed sobs, acknowledgment of all the betrayed -- the family dog will be in there some day -- actually be what an adult male, whatever his status, imagines will do the trick? Perhaps someday one of these VIPs in trouble will figure out that on these occasions it's not such a great thing to go public looking like a pathetic dolt -- the kind of man who would induce instant headache and skin crawling in any woman imagining him as a lover.

Can we dream that some day a Mark Sanford -- or any other self-acknowledged miscreant -- will say what there is to say and refuse to slobber before the cameras?

From my scroll, Andrew Breitbart:

Gov Sanford is thinking to himself: Perhaps I should have done my big televised admission on Thursday instead of Wednesday.

Here are three energy graphs that might brush you back; the question is, what ought the policy response be? There is room for policies that both promote conservation and production, but most supporters of each policy are not very interested in the other.

I almost never think much more than "huh" when some celebrity dies, but I confess to some wistfulness on hearing of Farrah Fawcett's death this morning. If you are a man of a certain age, she was your first pin-up love, and no woman's look more iconically expressed the style, such as it was, of the 1970s. Her casual and affecting willingness to go without a bra did not hurt, either.

Farrah, rest in peace.

MORE: I'm having my more usual reaction to this news.

Regarding the deafening silence of the United Nations on the oppression in Iran, this is spot on:

Imagine the U.N. as a sort of Thugs’ Protective Association and you will seldom go far wrong.

I've been busy, which accounts for the transporting superficiality of my posts recently, so I have not bothered with Mark Sanford's cry for Argentina (massive blog round-up). I am, however, newly sensitive to this point: In matters of the heart, acts that others might judge as immoral or foolish do not necessarily reflect fundamental or pervasive defects in character or intelligence. Perhaps they usually do not. So, yes, I agree with Andy McCarthy, both on the morality of the matter and in the utilitarian consequences, to wit:

If the Colson standard is going to be the standard, two things — both bad — happen. First, good people are going to refrain from public life because they are not going to put their loved ones through the ringer the Colson standard invites (the standard that encourages the media and our ideological adversaries to scorch the earth since a single flaw is sure to derail the career of a talented conservative). Second, the people who will be most wounded by this state of things are conservatives: The Left does not impose the same standards and its most talented people needn't fear being marginalized by their human flaws. We will be ensuring that they get their best team on the field and we don't.

They told me that if I voted for John McCain the Environmental Protection Agency would politicize science and suppress information crucial to understanding the threat of global warming, and they were right!

The Obama administration is finally dropping the hammer on the Islamic Republic, disinviting its diplomats from the 4th of July White House cookout. And if that fearsome sanction does not move the mullahs back to the straight and narrow, we can always withdraw the badminton team. Did that bit of "ping-pong" diplomacy work the way I predicted, or President Obama hoped?

Pew’s got a new poll out today showing Romney’s net favorable rating at +12, compared to just +1 for Sarahcuda. With Sanford and Huntsman now out of the game, Jindal almost certainly biding his time until 2016, and Palin possibly too polarizing to win against The One, we’d all better hope Mitt runs. Because if he doesn’t, an ominous scenario presents itself...

Over the email, from Mrs. Charlottesvillain...

I was amused.

If this is not the most, well, imperial -- and I use the term admiringly and specifically -- blog post you have ever read, what would be? One gets the sense that the Jungle Trader is working in the wrong century.

It is a measure of my other obligations that I am the last blogger of means in America to link this video from Saturday Night Live, but there actually are a few people who read only TigerHawk!

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.

In case you were wondering how much fiber optic cable has been installed under the world's oceans, I provide this handy map (pdf). Via FP Passport, which takes note of the big surge in broadband coming to the east coast of Africa, the last place on earth without it. Will the islands in the net disappear?

Those of us delighted to drive south on the Garden State Parkway earlier this evening were treated to a beautiful and very well defined rainbow. I snapped a phone camera picture; you'll have to imagine how great it was to the naked eye.

From the same deck as yesterday's chart, a new slide that suggests that we are going to face new structural limits to rapid economic growth just when we need it most:

An aging workforce and declining investment (because capital costs more, presumably) drive a lot of the decline, but so does the slower rate of productivity growth, which presumably is a function of the declining investment.

And, yes, blogging has been light. Lot's of exciting stuff at this end, which at the moment just happens to be Boston.

Last week I stumbled across the following chart in a deck of slides from J.P. Morgan. It basically shows how much economic growth would be required to return the unemployment rate to "only" 6% -- recognizing that we had grown used to it being under 5% -- over the next one to three years, given a "starting" unemployment rate at the end of this year. It goes some distance to explaining in graphical terms why the Obama administration has thrown anything and everything into stimulating the current economy.

Very painful.

A friend, on vacation somewhere in Southeast Asia (I believe Borneo), grabbed this picture of a posted admonition. I am almost forced to wonder what, exactly, the prohibition might be.

President Nerobama. Cruel, and possibly unfair. But funny.

CWCID (for the BBC link): Tom Maguire.

Dr. Helen's Father's Day interview of Dr. Richard Driscoll is well worth watching, especially for those of you who have a father, know a father, or, in particular, are married to a father. I do not agree with all of it -- the geopolitical consequences of the decline in the status of fathers strike me as a stretch -- but it is worth a few minutes of your time. You know, while you're (perhaps resentfully) folding his laundry.

If you've watched the interview, I would respectfully suggest that Drs. Smith and Driscoll do not mention one of the big sources of female rage, the continuing preponderance in the workplace of men, male values (such as they are) and male behavioral impulses. That anger needs to come out, and the male partner is the most probable recipient. Inside more than a few marriages, therefore, husbands and therefore fathers take some of the blame for the suppressed frustrations of the day job, perhaps just because they are also men. That transference is as sexist, or more so, than the underlying outrage, but there is no corporate compliance program to deal with it.

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.

Most regular readers know that Anthony Watts has made a project of doing due diligence on the government's surface temperature measurement stations, using the distributed readership of his blog to note physical and administrative factors that might influence the temperature readings. Among his other contributions, he has located stations that have mysteriously dropped out of the main temperature database over the years. Now he's found one just by watching television! Hilarious, fascinating, and scary, all at once.

I have not been writing much about Iran because I am note sure that I have much to add of either substance or wit. And, of course, other bloggers have been flooding the zone (see Pamela Geller's long post of photos, videos, and links as an example).

The memory of 1979 looms large, and not just in the battle for the revolution's legacy. The whole world remembers the promise and tragedy of Iranians in mass assembly, but we all remember it in different ways. As you follow the coverage of the new Iranian demonstrations, bear in mind the following items from 1978-1979:

The 1978 demonstrations were the largest in human history, with crowd estimates in at least one case exceeding seven million people. That's even bigger than the Taste of Chicago! (and around triple the estimates we have seen so far). Of course, it gives today's opposition a goal to shoot for; they know that Iranians hold the world record, so they also know the potential is there for more.

Even so, most observers expected the Shah to shut down the demonstrations with brutal force. The national security team of the sainted Jimmy Carter, desperate that Iran not be seen to "fall" on its watch, even told the Shah to "do whatever is necessary," or words to that effect (my copy of Kenneth Pollack's book is out of reach, but that was the gist of it). Fortunately for the demonstrators of 1979, the Shah was sick with cancer and did not want to die having slaughtered his own people, so he ignored the advice of his own loyalists and the panicking Carter team.

In any case, it was not at all clear that the Iranian military would be unqualified in its loyalty to the Shah. As the demonstrations progressed, it became increasingly possible that a crackdown would beget fighting between and perhaps within units. The Islamic Republic is safe until it has the same concern, which is less likely with the Revolutionary Guards in charge.

A popular movement is not in control of its own destiny, and it is very difficult to predict where it will lead. The anti-royalists who led the first resistance to the Shah ultimately lost to the Khomeinists, but that result was far from obvious when the first task was to overturn the Peacock Throne. The lesson, of course, is that in Iran there is always a devil you don't know.

Old school leadership, revised to conform to modern sensibilities. Example:

"Mr. Gorbachev, that wall is none of our business." — Ronald Reagan

The TH Daughter, a friend of hers, and I had a fun if somewhat damp day in Manhattan. We got to Penn Station mid morning, hung a strap on the "1" to 79th St., and walked to the American Museum of Natural History, which I had not visited in years. After lots of geology, the whale room, no end of climate change propaganda, a grossly overpriced lunch in the cafeteria, and a long tour of the dinosaur exhibit (which is way cool, and a big improvement over my memory from the 1970s), we travelled across Central Park in the spring rain. On Madison Avenue, I stopped and took a picture of the Steuben Glass display, which featured crystal bats and balls with Yankees and Mets monikers. Kind of a self-portrait. Blackberry quality, to be sure.

More exciting phone camera pictures to come.

Storied money managed Paul Tudor Jones is invited to speak at the graduation of some 9th graders. He avoids the usual cant and instead teaches them about the importance and power of failure, which is a far more effective teacher than success, didactic instruction, or even the example of failure in others. Short commentary below.

Paul Tudor Jones - Failure Speech June 2009

In my professional life especially, I have always tried to fail well so that I could learn from the experience (I'll leave it to others to decide whether I fail well in my personal life). The main requirement for good failing is honesty about the cause of the failure; if you do not understand the mistakes that you made, you will repeat them. In fact, the capacity to be honest about one's own failures, at least to one's self, is often if not usually the most important difference between a competent employee and an incompetent one.

Actual social science on that subject here.

CWCID: Paul Kedrosky.

James,
I know that I have seen posts about deep water wells, but when I search I really don't see that many applicable posts. I am looking at a property where water [static level] is about 400 feet down. In a "grid-up" scenario, this isn't really a problem, but I am looking for "grid-down" options for using a well at this depth. Not knowing much about the specifics of wells, I am not having much luck searching with Google, either. Would you be able to cover some deep well basics and some options for grid down/solar/backup pumping, specifically for deep wells? - John C.

JWR Replies: As per your request, here are a few deep well basics:

Solar and wind power are the best solutions for deep wells in a grid-down collapse. If you live in an area with reliable winds, a windmill used in conjunction with a large gravity-fed tank or cistern, is relatively inexpensive and trouble-free. Photovoltaics are getting less expensive with each passing year, but system complexity is an issue, especially with systems that use a battery bank. (To maintain water pressure during hours of darkness, you will either need to store water in a gravity-fed cistern, or you will need a battery bank, so that you can operate your well pump. )

Deep wells can be pumped with submersible AC pumps, but not submersible DC pumps. This is because the "line loss" (voltage drop) in DC cabling is tremendous. Even with fat, heavy gauge DC cables, if you start out with 24 Volts DC (VDC) at your battery bank, you will likely be down to just two or three volts at 400 feet! Given that sad fact, there are two good solutions:

1.) Use a DC-to-AC inverter top-side, and run AC cabling down the well shaft to an AC well pump. (Note: Many of these pumps require 220 VAC, so you will either have to use a much more expensive 220-capable inverter, or replace the pump with a 120 VAC model. (You may be an electrical neophyte, and asking "What type of pump do I have?" Take a quick look at your AC circuit breaker box. If the breaker labeled "Well Pump" is a pair of breakers that are ganged-together with a wire loop so that they'll be actuated simultaneously, then the chances are 99% that you have a 220 VAC pump.)

or,

2.) Install a jack ("cricket") type pump or a windmill to actuate the sucker rod pump cylinder. Traditionally, sucker rods were made from hardwoods such as white ash. More recently they've been made with metal or fiberglass. Even with ash wood, their service life is measured in decades. The pump cylinders are made of brass and will last many decades. However, the pump leathers will eventually wear out, so you should consider buying a couple of spare sets and storing them someplace safe from mice and moisture/mold. Unfortunately changing all of the leathers on a down-hole sucker-rod actuated pump means yanking the entire sucker rod and then the weight of all 400 feet of your service line. That is a lot of weight, requiring a heavy duty hoist and of course all the usual "mind your head, fingers and toes" safety precautions and protective gear. Lifting a 1-1/2" or 2" diameter 400 foot long pipe is no problem for a pump company, but it would be a challenge for a typical rural family working with an improvised hoist. I recommend that you watch your pump company man carefully as he installs the pump in your well for the first time. You will notice that the crucial piece required is the flange that catches the pipe unions on each 20+ foot long section of service line pipe as they are raised or lowered in the well casing.

I've previously owned a jack type pump, and in my experience I found them problematic. I would much rather use an AC submersible pump.

Shallow wells (say, 50 feet or less) can be pumped with a DC submersible pump. I generally advise my consulting clients to "hang" both an AC pump and and a DC pump, one above the other in the same well casing, for the sake of versatility an redundancy.

With only a hint of partisan wingnut-baiting, Chris Chambers takes a long, hard look at the great upstagers in television history.

An Iranian student has an excellent and enlightening op-ed in the New York Times this morning. He pointedly makes the case that much of what passes for "analysis" in the Western media is hogwash, founded on 30 year-old experiences and attenuated knowledge that simply does not capture what is happening there. And there is this surprise, too:

One final note: the election does reveal a paradox. There is strong evidence that Iranians across the board want a better relationship with the United States. But if Mr. Moussavi were to become president and carry out his campaign promise of seeking improved relations with America, we would probably see a good 30 percent of the Iranian population protesting that he is “selling out” to the enemy.

By contrast, support for Mr. Ahmadinejad’s campaign was rooted in part in his supposed defense of the homeland and national honor in the face of United States aggression. Americans too-long familiar with the boorish antics of the Iranian president will no doubt be surprised to learn that the best chance for improved relations with the United States perhaps lies with Mr. Ahmadinejad. But Mr. Ahmadinejad is perceived here as being uniquely able to play the part of an Iranian Nixon by “traveling to the United States” and bringing along with him his supporters — and they are not few.

In other words, Iranians believe they face a daunting choice: a disastrous domestic political situation with Mr. Ahmadinejad but an improved foreign policy, or improved domestic leadership under Mr. Moussavi but near impossible challenges in making relations with the United States better.

It really is astonishing that Barack Obama is able to get virtually anything he wants out of Congress -- billions for this, trillions for that -- but somehow cannot extract a lousy few million clams to close Gitmo, a policy that the Democratic Party stands united behind. It's almost as though the president is telling the public one thing, and quietly signalling Congress -- perhaps using a dog whistle -- to do the opposite.

Perhaps Congress would give him the money if he left the room.

Lawyers are taught to "leave the room" if something untoward is going on. Back in the day, I learned antitrust law from a former head of the Justice Department's antitrust enforcement group. One day he told us that if we were ever present when two competitors discussed fixing prices, we should grab the nearest glass of water and dramatically pour it out on the table. Why? So "everyone will remember when you left."

Well, apparently Barack Obama learned pretty much the same thing at Harvard:

When President Obama arrived at the Mandarin Oriental hotel for a fund-raising reception on Thursday night, the new White House rules of political purity were in order: no lobbyists allowed.

But at the same downtown hotel on Friday morning, registered lobbyists have not only been invited to attend an issues conference with Democratic leaders, but they have also been asked to come with a $5,000 check in hand if they want to stay in good favor with the party’s House and Senate re-election committees.

The practicality of Mr. Obama’s pledge to change the ways of Washington is colliding once more with the reality of how money, influence and governance interact here. He repeatedly declared while campaigning last year that he would “not take a dime” from lobbyists or political action committees.

So to follow through with that promise, Mr. Obama is simply leaving the room.

If it is going to rain non-stop, you're going to need some indoor activities. You might want to consider blowing some of your increased savings on one of Amazon's ten best deals in electronics.

A recent study shows that you are more likely to get shot by a fat cop if you run.

In case you were wondering why some people question the surface temperature data used to "prove" that average global temperatures are rising, this would be one of many reasons. Another would be the divergences between the land readings (in May, an anamoly over the baseline of +0.87C, the 9th warmest May in 130 years) and lower troposphere readings from satellites and balloons (in May, an anamoly of only +0.05C to +0.09C, the 15th-16th warmest May in 31 years of such readings). One would think there would be more coverage in the popular press about this sort of thing, but the big media organizations seem to be in the tank for the "consensus."

I am not too swift when it comes to manipulating the template for this blog, so I resisted the urge to go "green" for the people of Iran. But then I realized, if they can do what they are doing, I can spend 15 minutes digging around until I find the right code to change. And besides, if it is good enough for Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan (and Eric Scheie!), it must be the right thing to do.

Four years ago, Bill Clinton roiled the righty blogosphere by offering a, er, generous view of Iranian democracy:

Iran is the only country in the world that has now had six elections since the first election of President Khatami (in 1997). (It is) the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: Two for president; two for the Parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.

Greenstapundit is making a good point here.

Meanwhile, in other (somewhat related) news, the Club of Rome continues to be wrong:

Thanks to new drilling technologies that are unlocking substantial amounts of natural gas from shale rocks, the nation’s estimated gas reserves have surged by 35 percent, according to a study due for release on Thursday.

The report by the Potential Gas Committee, the authority on gas supplies, shows the United States holds far larger reserves than previously thought. The jump is the largest increase in the 44-year history of reports from the committee.

It has been raining a lot here in New Jersey. In the last 30 days, during the usually delightful stretch from mid-May to mid-June, cumulative rainfall here in Mercer County exceeds the normal by more than 50%. And we've been in an excess rain position for almost three months, so this is not some recent thing.

There is no end in sight. It is supposed to rain all day today and tonight, be cloudy tomorrow, and then back to rain over the weekend and for most of the 10-day forecast on Weather.com. All the goddamned rain is affecting my mood. It is June, fer heaven's sake, and I want some farookin' sun.

Meanwhile, the local activists are on the case.

They told me that if I voted for John McCain the climate would destroy my quality of life, and they were right!

Once again, eagles have nested on our property in the Adirondacks. The fellow from the "endangered species unit" of the "wildlife diversity group" of the New York State environmental agency who banded the young birds took these photographs.

This one is suffering mightily from an obnoxious sister and the plague of black flies that hammers the Adirondacks in May and June until the dragonflies come out.

Here's one of the parents, credit me last summer...

Enough with the phony outrage, already. We all think it is unbelievably tedious when it comes from the left. However successful it may be as a tactic, it is no less tedious coming from the right. Develop other successful tactics -- you do not have to copy everything the left does -- and leave the culture of victimhood to the Democrats.

Title reference here.

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.

A 27-year-old Mesa man apparently tried to kill himself Tuesday by rigging a sword to his steering wheel and ramming his car through a block wall, police said.

Nathan Ryan’s car ended up at the bottom of a swimming pool in the 1300 block of North Dakota Street in Chandler, and he went to the hospital with wounds that were not a threat to his life, said Sgt. Joe Favazzo, Chandler police spokesman.

The handle of the 24-inch sword was positioned against the instrument panel with the blade sticking through the steering wheel. It was tied into place with a T-shirt.

Ryan then drove his car through the block wall, but the airbag deployed and bent the sword.

Alan Steinberg has an interesting essay that compares the national implications of the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia. The question, Steinberg argues, is whether Barack Obama will be willing to invest his prestige in a losing race and thereby suffer political damage in the event of an adverse result, especially in a traditionally Democratic stronghold. Steinberg's point is that Obama would gain much and risk little by campaigning for Creigh Deeds in Virginia because nobody would blame him if the Old Dominion elected a Republican governor, but that defending Corzine in New Jersey sets Obama up for the blame if Garden State voters turn him out. If Republican Christie is still ahead by double digits in September, the national Dems might well turn their back on Corzine and start quietly putting out the word that they expect him to lose. Presumably, that would go a long way toward blunting the impact of a Christie victory on the national political narrative.

Your comments are most welcome.