Fausta's Blog

Korean rapper Psy, he of Gangnam Style(*), is scheduled to perform at the White House tomorrow.

It turns out that Psy had some unkind things to say to the USA back in 2004

According to reports, in October of that year, Psy took part in a concert in which he joined several other prominent artists onstage for a version of Korean rock group NEXT’s song “Dear American,” and after seizing the microphone, rapped a verse that stated “F—ing Yankees” and their families, should be killed “slowly and painfully.”

The concert reportedly took place months after the kidnapping — and subsequent beheading — of South Korean missionary Kim Sun-il by an Islamist group, who demanded the nation cancel plans to send 3,000 troops to support the U.S. war in Iraq. After the South Korean government refused to back down, Kim’s execution was videotaped, with the masked executioner stating “Korean citizens, you were warned, your hands were the ones who killed him … your soldiers are here not for the sake of the Iraqis, but for cursed Americans.”

Say again? Islamists murder a Korean missionary, and it’s the Americans who are the “F—ing” evildoers?

In case you think he just blurted it out on impulse, here are the lyrics,

Kill those f****** Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives
Kill those f****** Yankees who ordered them to torture
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers
Kill them all slowly and painfully

Not what you would expect from a performer that claims,

“In my music I try to give people a release, a reason to smile.”

Psy now wants to go to the WH, though, so he’s issued a non-apology, starting with the classic,

“I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused anyone by those words,”

by which he’s not apologizing for what he actually said, but for the pain he caused you.

Apology accepted, but please stay home.

And, by the way, I find it offensive and inappropriate that the White House would have him perform after finding out about this, for two reasons: the incitement to violence against Americans, and the fact that tomorrow’s is a Christmas concert.

UPDATE,
Obama Still Meeting with “Gangnam Style” Korean Rapper, Who Rapped So Eloquently About Murdering US Troops & Their Families

Cross-posted at Liberty Unyielding.

(*) In case you don’t know what Gangnam Style is, here‘s the video.

The Happy Planet Index is at it again! When your criteria on happiness is “measure what matters: the extent to which countries deliver long, happy, sustainable lives for the people that live in them”, you really must come up with some crazy crap, like this equation,

Which, translated into practical terms means that if you have very very low expectations and live for a long time without electricity or running water, you’ll score really high.

How Cuba Became a ‘Happy’ Country
Citizens flee on rafts. But environmentalists know better.

The Happy Planet Index hasn’t been composed by some lonely obsessive living with his mother and boring a very small number of readers in a rarely visited corner of the Internet. No, the Happy Planet Index has been produced by the New Economics Foundation, a think tank with an annual budget of more than $3.9 million and a staff of more than 50. They may be as mad as a box of frogs, but these people are well-funded and influential.

They are also playing with taxpayers’ money. One of the New Economics Foundation’s biggest donors in 2010-11—giving them more than $155,000—was the British government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs paid more than $90,000 for another project in 2009 in which the New Economics Foundation produced a report—”Moments of change as opportunities for influencing behaviour”—which looked to Communist Cuba for an example of “mass efficiency improvement.”

Cuba, by the way, ranks 12th on the Happy Planet scale.

Reports like the Happy Planet Index claim to show us a different way of measuring success that “puts current and future well-being at the heart of measurement.” But there’s a reason Cubans regularly risk (and lose) their lives trying to escape their home country and make it to America, and there’s no waves of humanity flowing in the opposite direction. That the Happy Planet Index can’t capture those realities, or chooses to ignore them, suggests, well, that its authors are living on another planet.

No, just a planet with a well-funded agenda…in rooms with central heat; the NEF’s contact phone number is country code 44, for the United Kingdom & the Isle of Man.

They must be miserable!

(more…)

Last night I was having a quiet evening at home when the doorbell rang. An earnest young woman was gathering signatures for a petition against fracking. To the best of my knowledge there is no fracking in Princeton (and if there was, I would probably support it), so I told her I wasn’t interested.

She insisted that I sign, since the petition was “against the fracking companies in Pennsylvania sending their radioactive waste to New Jersey.” Again I declined, again she persisted. I wished her a good evening and shut the door. She yelled something to the effect of “the evil must be stopped,” and moved on.

She ought to get a job with Al Armendariz’s Region 6 EPA office:
EPA Official Not Only Touted ‘Crucifying’ Oil Companies, He Tried It

The Armendriz video (which appears to have been taken off YouTube late late night) was shot around the same time he was preparing the action against Range. Here’s the highlights of what he said.

The Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.

And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there. And, companies that are smart see that, they don’t want to play that game, and they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up.

And, that won’t happen unless you have somebody out there making examples of people. So you go out, you look at an industry, you find people violating the law, you go aggressively after them. And we do have some pretty effective enforcement tools. Compliance can get very high, very, very quickly.

That’s what these companies respond to is both their public image but also financial pressure. So you put some financial pressure on a company, you get other people in that industry to clean up very quickly.

The former professor at Southern Methodist University is a diehard environmentalist, having grown up in El Paso near a copper smelter that reportedly belched arsenic-laced clouds into the air. (Here’s a profile of him in the Dallas Observer.) Texas Monthly called him one of the 25 most powerful Texans, while the Houston Chronicle said he’s “the most feared environmentalist in the state.”

Nevermind that he couldn’t prove jack against Range. For a year and a half EPA bickered over the issue, both with Range and with the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas drilling and did its own scientific study of Range’s wells and found no evidence that they polluted anything. In recent months a federal judge slapped the EPA, decreeing that the agency was required to actually do some scientific investigation of wells before penalizing the companies that drilled them. Finally in March the EPA withdrew its emergency order and a federal court dismissed the EPA’s case

The video has been pulled but you can watch a snippet at a Fox News report,

UPDATE,
found the YouTube with Almendariz’s statements here,

As Steven Hayward explains,

It is important to grasp why this kind of excessive zeal is the rule rather than the exception from federal regulators, and always will be. Armendariz is wholly typical of the regulator mentality, and we won’t prevent future “crucifixions” until we make fundamental changes to revive the rule of law and restore some kind of democratic accountability to the administrative state.

Let the snark flow!

UPDATE, 30 April,
Top EPA official resigns after ‘crucify’ comment

says Ben Zycher in his new book, Renewable Electricity Generation: Economic Analysis and Outlook, which I found this morning while reading Steven Hayward’s OMNIBUS EPIC GREENFAIL BLOG

Back on the crony energy/Solyndra front (you do remember Solyndra, don’t you?), as the time Solyndra went upside down the defenders of green energy downplayed it by saying it was just one loan out of $35 billion, and investments sometimes go bad, right? What’s the big deal. The Obama Administration has now released a dry report saying that total taxpayer losses from bad loans in the program may reach $2.7 billion, which starts to look like real money, even if the figure is a low-ball estimate, which is likely is. The Wall Street Journal comments on the issue today.

The WSJ’s article, The Green Eyeshade Report
Got questions about Solyndra? Don’t look here.

Only in Washington is $2.7 billion in losses considered performing “well.” But the bigger problem is that the Allison report addresses none of the main issues. Because Mr. Allison’s brief was to examine only current loans, the report failed to investigate the bankruptcies of Solyndra or Beacon Power, an energy-storage company. So apart from its biggest failures, the program is a success.

Next thing you know, Washington will want to sell you a car that only people making $175,000 a year can afford.

Brian Preston asks that question, and also, NYT Falls Off the Green Jobs Bandwagon? after reading this NY Times article,
Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises

A study released in July by the non-partisan Brookings Institution found clean-technology jobs accounted for just 2 percent of employment nationwide and only slightly more — 2.2 percent — in Silicon Valley. Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.

UPDATE,
Looks like the Times buried the story.

First the US is lending Brazil’s Petrobras $2billion for offshore drilling; now the EPA is paying to upgrade mufflers with catalytic converters in old Mexican trucks that won’t meet US safety standards anyway,
U.S. Pays To Upgrade Mexican Trucks

In the latest effort to accommodate its cherished trade partner in the south, the U.S. government is paying to upgrade outdated Mexican trucks that hemorrhage illegal amounts of exhaust on their trips north to deliver merchandise.

The Mexican trucks enter the U.S. under a 17-year-old international trade pact known as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and they’ve created an air pollution crisis. The air quality in border towns has been especially impacted by the exorbitant levels of exhaust released by the Mexican trucks, which also fail to meet American safety standards.

Since the Mexican truckers have no intention of fixing the problem, Uncle Sam has stepped in to save the environment. U.S. taxpayers have picked up the cost to replace old mufflers on dozens of trucks and many more are scheduled to be upgraded by the middle of this year. The unbelievable story was reported this week by an Arizona newspaper that says replacing the old mufflers with new catalytic converters will reduce harmful diesel emissions by up to 30%.

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality is running the operation but the money is actually coming from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),

And how much is that costing?

Each truck costs U.S. taxpayers about $1,600.

Probably more than the market value of some of the trucks.

a few years ago the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General determined that Mexican trucks that regularly travel throughout American highways are rarely checked for safety by U.S. authorities despite a provision requiring it. Rules requiring that every Mexican truck undergo a thorough safety compliance check and that every driver has a valid license and is proficient in English have been virtually ignored, according to the IG’s findings.

Doug Ross

I swear to all that’s holy: someone in the Obama administration has a dastardly sense of humor. Just when you think they can’t do anything more completely, utterly insane, they bust out a brand new comedy sketch.

Gateway Pundit:

The fact that Obama’s EPA is punishing US industry with a slew of new business-killing regulations is one thing… The fact that Obama’s EPA is paying the Lung Association to defeat Republicans is somethnig else… But, this takes the cake.

Photo via IOwnTheWorld.

Via Memeorandum

My latest article, Cancun Is Cold on Climate Change, is up at RightNetwork. Please read it and leave a comment.

Either cut your carbon emissions by 10%, or you’ll get decimated: that’s the message of a new video by the 10:10 global campaign – all for the sake of “keeping the planet safe for everyone”.

The Romans rarely would use decimation as a punishment, but the environmentally-aware cooks that came up with this campaign don’t see what’s wrong with the approach:

Ed Morrissey:

What makes this fascinating is that the people who produce this dreck have no clue as to just how far removed they have become from normal human sensibilities, or at least they didn’t until the video began provoking the fully-predictable reaction. They have become so wrapped up in Gaia that they seem to have little connection to humanity.

Instapundit:

It always ends up as mass murder, real or fantasized, with these people. That’s what they do. Treat them with all the respect they deserve.

James Delingpole points out that this Richard Curtis (he of The Vicar of Dibley, Mr Bean, Bridget Jones, Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral) film was paid by British taxpayer money,

The 10:10 Campaign is supported by:
ActionAid (Govt of UK 2nd largest funder in 2009);
The Carbon Trust (surely #1 on the list of quangos-to-go);
The Energy Saving Trust.

Be not surprised that The Guardian is their ‘media partner’.

On the other hand, if you’re outraged by the video, you might be interested to know that they also have a small number of genuine commercial sponsors: O2, Sony and Kyocera all have helped fund the 10:10 Campaign.

Ed Driscoll has lots more on Springtime for Al Gore.

Maybe Curtis – the pasty little hypocrite – ought to title this despicable little gem No Weddings and Your Funeral.

Ladies and gentlemen, we may have stumbled into the only way to profit and make money in the Obama economy.

How idiocy innovation killed the lights

IN WINCHESTER, VA. The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison’s innovations in the 1870s.

The remaining 200 workers at the plant here will lose their jobs.

Guess where those jobs are going?

China?

Hell yeah!

Now think about this:

• the fluorescents are more expensive,

• last very little time (I’ve had to change the fluorescents here at casa de Fausta twice, even when they are supposed to last “as long as seven years”)

• they make you look like death warmed over

• they are legislated in the cause of global warming, which is a scam to begin with

• and it’s costing thousands of American jobs here in the USA.

What is there not to love? It’s the perfect setup for a black market! Go forth and find yourself some incandescents to peddle.

And then,
Watch For It – The Mexican Incandescent Light Bulb Cartel. Nah, I say it’s a home-grown black market opportunity.

Chan Park & Mónica Paz dancing to Francisco Canaro’s Todo te nombra,