We in the US tend to forget about what’s going on in the rest of the world. While we hear about the neverending failures at GM and Ford, the steady dominance of Japanese cars, the rise of Korean cars and even the baby steps of Chinese automakers, but do we ever think about the auto market in the rest of the world? China has not been as single-minded about breaking into our auto market as we would imagine. I think our assumption has been ‘Where else would they go?’ As it turns out other parts of the world buy cars too. The Wall Street Journal gave us a peek at the African market.

Africa had been Europe’s dumping ground for used cars. It was a happy symbiosis. Africa was an outlet for these cars so it helped to keep resale prices up in Europe. At the same time it gave Africans access to safe, quality cars. Sure they were a few years old but they also cost less than new cars. That trade is now being disrupted by Chinese automakers who want to expand beyond their domestic market. America and Europe are too safety conscious for the Chinese. Some safety features would be too expensive for them to include. There are others where they lack the engineering knowledge to include them. Safety is not an issue in Africa though. That’s a market where buyers care about price and reliability.

The WSJ interviewed the owner of a construction company in Senegal. This guy had the choice of a 2003 Land Cruiser for $40,000, or a Hover from Great Wall Motor Co. for $32,000. He chose the Hover II because, “Why would you want used when you can buy new for cheaper?” Does he understand Chinese vehicles have lower safety standards than European ones? I have no idea. Unfortunately the WSJ didn’t ask that question.

I get the feeling this is an issue where some may cry over corporate responsibility. How can Chinese manufacturers sell these vehicles when they know they are not as safe? Why would African governments permit this? For moralists like that anything less than the most stringent safety requirements is unacceptable. I don’t share that view. Safety is just one of many issues that go into a product. You have to weigh it against price, reliability, availability, etc. Let’s not beat around the bush. Africa is a poor continent. An African consumer needs to be very price conscious. I’m sure they want a safe vehicle, but price still matters.

The tone of the WSJ article is something I have to take issue with. When I was reading it, I felt it was beating the paranoid drum of the Chinese march to dominance. Today Africa, tomorrow the world! Paranoia over China is polluting people’s minds. These companies are just trying to fill a market void left by Americans and Europeans who couldn’t be bothered with building super cheap cars. Neither does this mean Chinese companies are locking in the African market forever. If the Chinese produce pure crap cars they will alienate African consumers. It will be a repeat of what American automakers did in the 70s and 80s. Because of the dismal quality of American cars in those years, they became synonymous with junk. Now there are millions of Americans who won’t even consider an American car because of that. The Chinese can’t sell death traps to Africans otherwise ten or twenty years from now, they will hand the African car market back to the Europeans.

All things considered through, I hope Africans enjoy their new cars but it will be a long time before I consider buying a Chery.

I still have my doubts about this, but I really hope it’s true because it’s awesome. This comes from College Humor.

“A man sent his friend a Christmas card, but didn’t remember the address. So he sent it as shown: no street name, no town, and no postcode. And it still arrived at his friend’s house 9 days later.”

Ever since the French and Dutch rejected the EU Constitution I have wondered what the typical European wants from Europe. I can’t imagine these people are lying in bed at night thinking about “ever closer union”. Do they even think about it at all?

I guess this is the €100,000 question. There are lots of dreamers who planned for the constitution to be the first step to federal Europe. They would certainly like to know. Common people derailed the European experiment. It would be nice to know why they did it.

Maybe I should tell you why I’m rambling about this. Just about everyone has accepted the constitution is dead, but not everyone has given up on the ideas on that document. The very same Europhiles who were perplexed by the public’s rejection have found a way around it. They are going to take the ideas they worked out in the constitution and put them into a new treaty. A treaty is nothing as grand as a constitution, so the national parliaments can vote on it. No need for referendums they probably won’t win.

Surprisingly not all Euro-boosters like this idea. Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the George Washington of the EU Constitutional Convention, has decried this new treaty as an attempt to sneak the constitution into existence. I guess people like him must be real diehards. Even though regular people don’t seem interested in more integration, they still want to press their case and make them change their minds. It’s both admirable and foolhardy.

I kind of wish I could wander Europe and simply survey the public. I get the feeling I would get an enthusiastic yes if I asked if they want a closer Europe. Yet I can’t imagine these same people would all agree on what “closer” means. The European Union is such a fuzzy idea. For some it’s a utopian dream of nations cooperating and renouncing war. Other people think it’s the start of a single European nation. Practical people see it as a way to make life easier by toppling trade and travel barriers. I’m sure if I actually performed that survey, I would get dozens of answers I never imagined.

I doubt any constitution could pass in that sort of environment. When I heard it needed every member state to ratify I knew it would fail. You can never satisfy everyone. Realistically passage should have been based on a super-majority. Say if 75% of the states ratified it, then it would come into force.

Well that’s old news. Referendums are over with. The new treaty will get passed by national parliaments and come into force. For a time we will have to listen to bitching about unfairness. After all the talk of “inclusiveness” and “transparency” it seems hypocritical to fall back on parliamentary ratification. Does that make it wrong though? I have to say no. The EU is not supposed to rely on the direct vote of its “citizens”. They have representatives that are supposed to be trusted to make these choices for them. If these representatives have failed to follow the will of the citizenry, they can be replaced with those who will. Britain is probably the most Euro-skeptic country there. Let’s say Parliament went ahead and passed the original constitution. Much of the public would be outraged. When the next election came, New Labour would probably be replaced by the Tories and they could go ahead and reverse course. As far as I know there is nothing that says a nation can’t leave the EU.

The EU Constitution should have been debated and voted on in national parliaments from the start. The people would still have their say through their representatives as they do with all other legislation that gets voted on there. They were always free to write, email or call their representatives and tell them what they think. What I don’t like is how this new treaty is trying to cloud those changes from public scrutiny. The ideas from the constitution are still there but it’s been renamed a treaty to diminish its stature. Plus the text has purposely been made unreadable through the overuse of references to previous treaties. Here’s the text. I particularly enjoyed the Horizontal Amendments starting on page 41. Read it and you’ll see it’s impossible to understand on its own. You need to sit down with the Rome Treaty and Nice Treaty, and a pen so you can cross out and write in the changes. This is so much more outrageous than parliamentary voting on the constitution.

Watch this 30 second clip from The Flintstones. Is this as risqué as I think it is? What else could Barney possibly mean though?

On Monday night I was at work. It was around 8 pm and the lights were off in the office, except for my desk lamp. Huddled over my keyboard a thought struck me. I think I understood why we need the Electoral College. I cannot explain why this thought was making its way through my subconscious. I’m guessing it was triggered by an article I read a few weeks ago. I can’t remember who, but the author argued for the states to pass laws that would pledge their electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote in their state. I couldn’t help but reflect on the arguments I’ve heard over the years, especially back in 2000, to do away with the Electoral College. It’s an anachronism. It’s elitist. It’s undemocratic.

Now I understand why it’s also a good thing. It protects America from the tyranny of the masses. If we switched to a straight popular vote like so many have suggested, the power of picking the president would fall to the cities. According to the Census Bureau 68.3% of Americans live in an urbanized area. These people would control presidential elections. Everyone else would have no say, or at least one that didn’t matter. Is that fairer than what we have today?

This argument is only happening because our culture has fetishized democracy. We have come to believe anything democratic is good, and more democracy will make everything better. That is simply not true. Democracy has done nothing good for school boards. Once upon a time school curricula were decided at the state level by very boring commissions of very boring teachers. Then in the 1970s people got it into their heads that creating electable school boards to decide curricula would be better. I think it had something to do with fostering parental involvement. Anyway 30 years of democracy in education has brought culture wars about evolution into classes. Yet America’s students still lag behind their foreign counterparts. And don’t get me started on ballot initiatives!

Democracy is a bad thing. It leads to a government of thugs who trample on the rights of minorities. The United States has never been a democracy. Our nation was founded as a republic. The important distinction between the two is that democracies follow the whim of crowds. Anything and everything gets voted on, and majority rules. Our republic is constrained by the rules of the Constitution. The leadership is not permitted to break those rules no matter how popular doing so may be. In a democracy rules are toothless because the majority can toss them whenever they please.

The Electoral College is needed to protect the nation from the whims of democracy. It spreads out the power from the majority, to everyone. Without it the two-thirds of the country living in cities today would disenfranchise the remainder. Politicians would campaign only to the cities and everyone else would be ignored. That hardly makes all citizens equal.

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”
– Benjamin Franklin

Crap, I can’t decide this… Since last Mother’s Day I’ve been thinking about getting my mom an LCD TV. Her 25″ set from 1985 finally died a couple of months ago. My plan was to buy the LCD for her birthday and fly out there to set it up for her.

I was reading up on HDTV antennas because there no reason to let a fine TV go to waste on a standard definition picture. During this research I discovered that an indoor antenna cannot get a signal worth a damn when you have aluminum siding on your house. I’m left to wonder if getting her an LCD is really worth it when I know she can’t get an HD signal.

Don’t suggest placing an antenna on the roof. That is not an option for me. I have no idea how to mount it to the roof and I don’t want to put holes up there for the bolts and to run the cables. I almost certainly will cause leaks. Neither is buying a normal CRT TV an option. That 25″ set was so damn heavy and she lives on the third floor of a walkup. No one wants to deliver that.

So what should I do? SDTV on an HDTV is so crappy, but at least she would be able to watch DVDs in HD. Is that really worth $500 for a TV and a $300 flight? Plus she hasn’t mentioned a TV at all, and it’s been almost a year without a big living room TV. Maybe this gift isn’t even necessary. Perhaps I’m just making up a reason to spend money, for the fun of buying big ticket electronics.

This is a priceless piece of history. I just found it last night, after I wrote about the correction of NASA’s annual mean temperature data.

This is a Newsweek article from 1975 describing how food production will drop off because of a worldwide fall in temperature. I read that this was actually one part of a whole series of global cooling articles but I have not found any other from this alleged series. One day I’ll need to browse the microfiche at the library.

Some excellent supplemental reading is a rebuttal from the Boston Globe of Jon Meacham’s, the current Newsweek editor, dismissal of this historical treasure. My favorite part was how Meacham claims there was no consensus on global cooling when in 1975 Newsweek wrote meteorologists were “nearly unanimous” in their agreement.

Correcting bad data sounds like the dullest topic I could possibly come up with. Yet this topic is central to so much that goes on in society these days. That’s because the data is climate data gathered by NASA. A blogger named Steve McIntyre noticed a discontinuity in NASA’s temperature graphs around the year 2000. The NASA scientists who created the graphs refused to show him the algorithm they designed, so McIntyre reverse engineered it. His work uncovered a y2k-type bug in how the raw data was handled.

McIntyre reported his discovery to those NASA scientists who acknowledged the problem and said the data would be fixed during the next scheduled refresh. That time has come and silently NASA released the corrected figures. When I read the results it literally took my breath away.

First you should have the proper background to understand why I was so floored. This story is delightfully alarmist and explains perfectly. It trumpets the claim from NOAA that the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1995. Yet the fixed data that NASA released last week shows the hottest year on record is 1934. Turns out the claim that the temperatures are getting hotter year after year is based on faulty data processing.

So I copied the latest data and created a graph from it. The data is not the actual average temperature. It’s the deviation from the average temperature from 1951 to 1980. The graph goes back to 1880. Remember that the planet was emerging from the Little Ice Age at that time so it shouldn’t be too surprising that the 19th century segment looks cooler.

To my eye the graph looks fairly muddled. Seems like we’ve had warm times during the 1930s through 1960. Then another warm time from the mid-1980s to today.

What can we deduce from this? Well it does make the 20th century temperature record less clear. The hysteria promoted by An Inconvenient Truth is based on faulty science. An ever rising temperature is hardly assured. Worse than that is seeing that scientific discussion about climate change has been shut down. When McIntyre contacted Reto Ruedy and James Hansen, the two scientists who first processed the temperature data, with questions about their work, his request to see their source code was denied. Why deny that? Science can’t be top secret. Their work should be public knowledge so it can be checked and reproduced by others.

This news did come out at an auspicious time though. It’s great to hear about a bogus temperature record during the same week as Newsweek’s global warming cover. The story is 6 web pages long but I can sum it up in a sentence: If you question man-made global warming you’re in the pay of evil polluters or you are a complete retard. Isn’t it remarkable how they cast skeptical scientists as being part of a well monied machine and forget pro-global warming scientists have billions of dollars from various governments and the UN to fund their research. I’m sorry but if you’re in it for the money, you go where the money is. 

It’s a shame though that no news organization has picked up this data story. It’s been out there for about a week now and I have not read anything about it in the science sections of the BBC, CNN or MSNBC. Yet these organizations seemed to jump on climate news when people were saying the ten hottest years were the last ten years. Gee, it’s enough to make you think there’s a conspiracy.

I’m not alone in missing out on Dennis Kucinich’s wedding right? I had no idea he was married until today. I can still remember that strained date he had during his first presidential campaign to try and boost his image. Our little ratboy has grown up. That’s not the real reason I’m writing about it though. I am astonished at who he has married. Check this out.

She’s about 30 years younger than him! I don’t really go for redheads but even I can see she’s pretty fine. We can all agree she’s way beyond anything in his league, right? How on Earth did he land her?

Or maybe I should be asking why in the world did she choose to marry him? We can assume she’s super liberal because no conservative or moderate could stand to be around preachy ratboy. Maybe she married him because she admires his uber-liberal credentials. Who would have guessed the Department of Peace would get anyone ass?

By the way, Mrs. Kucinich has a tongue stud. I think that would be a first for a potential first lady.

Sticking with this vein of first lady firsts, Fred Thompson’s wife is being described as the first potential first lady who is too hot for the job. Here’s a picture. You be the judge. I don’t really see what the fuss is about. Would she be the first first lady with jugs? Aside from that she doesn’t look so stunning as everyone seems to be saying. I guess Washington DC has lower standards.

While looking Jeri’s picture up I found a choice quote from Joe Scarborough. It’s from his radio show. Up until now I had no idea he was the one who took over Imus’s morning spot. Enjoy the video.

I never would have guessed that would come from Joe Scarborough. When I hear “works the pole” the first thing that comes to mind is a handjob. I guess blowjob could also apply but “smokes the pole” is the more traditional phrase. The numerous outcry has assumed a much tamer reference; that Joe was calling her a stripper. As it turns out the banter just before this had the traffic and weather reporter saying she “works the pole” to stay in shape. She was referring to exotic dance as an exercise form. Think of it as a slutty aerobics. Since Jeri is such fine looking woman, and one can assume she does something to stay in good shape, Joe was just making a wiseass joke about what her exercise routine may entail. That’s hardly even worth repeating. All those people bitching and moaning about its inappropriateness  must have zero personality. Before you remove the mote from Joe Scarborough’s eye, you should remove the beam from your own ass.

Let’s end on a positive note. Here’s a picture of Fred Thompson’s ex-girlfriend, country star Lorrie Morgan. Now that’s a first lady I would salute.

Okay this old news but I only heard about it yesterday. A few months back Anthony Bourdain, the gadfly chef, posted his opinions of Food Network’s personalities. If anyone else wrote this it would be quite a jolt, but since it comes from Bourdain it’s hardly a shocker. Still pretty damn funny though.

I can’t agree with everything he wrote. I can’t stand Mario Batali. He gets under my skin and irritates the hell out of me. So I’m pretty glad to have him shunted off to Iron Chef America where it’s easy to pretend he doesn’t exist. Oh and I have to say Ace of Cakes is crap. I tried to watch it once but I could only stand half an episode. That show doesn’t belong on Food Network. It’s a reality show, not a cooking show.

I’m going to quote his comment about Rachel Ray because it’s too hilarious not to share and you dear reader might actually be too lazy to click through the link above and read the whole post.

Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful. Her ear-shattering tones louder and louder. We KNOW she can’t cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So…what is she selling us? Really? She’s selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She’s a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that “Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!” Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, “Hell…I could do that. I ain’t gonna…but I could–if I wanted! Now where’s my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?” Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better–teach us–and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. “You’re doing just fine. You don’t even have to chop an onion–you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing…Just sit there. Have another Triscuit…Sleep….sleep….”

But his most caustic comment was for a lesser known che…AHEM…personality – Sandra Lee. Whereas Rachel Ray merely makes people lazy with their food, Sandra Lee is a food terrorist. I knew nothing about this woman before I read this. So I went to Google and searched. Good lord Sandra Lee is hot! She’s tall, very blonde and has a highly distracting rack. I’m pretty sure this sort of woman was what Hitler had in mind when he talked about a master race.

I know nothing about her cooking but I gather it’s heavy on the prepackaged, processed supermarket food. I wouldn’t automatically dismiss her for that. Some people are just too busy to spend their time wandering through farmers’ markets or slaving over a stove for an hour or two. Why shouldn’t those people have someone to give them creative ideas for their cooking? I still think that’s a good idea but Sandra Lee isn’t the one to help them. Take a look at her recipes. There’s nothing special here. Anyone could come up with this. I am stunned at the “recipe” for Noodles Alfredo. It’s just boiling pasta and tossing butter over it! Food Network is that really all you’re looking for? If so, hire me. I will work for so much cheaper than Sandra Lee and I can pick cans off a supermarket shelf as good as anyone.

Before I wrote this I tried to watch an episode of her show Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee. About 10 minutes before it started I forgot it was coming and missed almost the whole episode taking a shower. I did catch the last few minutes and was introduced to tablescapes! Part of her shtick is to give people ideas for decorating their dining area. The episode I saw had her making some rustic table spread. She used some kind of secondhand fabric for the tablecloth. The cups looked like miniature tin buckets from a farm, and she even got mini gardening tools to decorate with. I don’t want to criticize this because presentation is so important in dining. Sandra probably does have some good ideas for a dinner party where you want to wow your guests. Watching the show though all I could think was, “Who has the time for all that?” Plus I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling all that decorating effort was being spent to distract people from mediocre food. If I were having a bunch of friends over all I would work on is having a nice set of dishes, picking out a good bottle of wine and maybe a small centerpiece on the table if I wanted to impress them. Most of my worry would be on what I’m making. In the end people will love coming over even if they’re eating on paper plates and drinking from dixie cups as long as the food is outstanding.