Byron York:

Lawmakers across Capitol Hill, both Democrats and Republicans, were surprised to learn recently that the Obama administration has made reaching out to Muslim nations a top priority for the space agency NASA. They will probably be more surprised to learn that administration officials told the Middle East news organization Al Jazeera about it before they told Congress…

Bolden told Al Jazeera that the “foremost” mission he had been given by Obama was “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”…So far, the story has gone unreported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Whether you think the NASA story is important or not, it is certainly odd enough to be reported in the news outlets above. (Many interesting things have been written on the NASA story, including this and this.) Our own take is that Obama’s outreach program is a misplaced, but revealing, attempt to paper over perhaps the fundamental theological issue of our time with feel-good-ism.

David Deming leads us on a tour of technology, much of which was introduced by the barbarians of northern Europe — it is interesting that this humdrum world of technology was largely not the product of the great southern European societies, the classical Greeks and the Roman Empire. AT:

From the sixth through the ninth centuries AD, Europeans adopted new agricultural technologies that dramatically increased productivity. One of these innovations was a heavy wheeled plow that broke up the soil more efficiently than the Roman “scratch” plow. Formerly unproductive lands were transformed into arable cropland.

The Greeks and Romans had harnessed horses with a throat-and-girth harness that consisted of a strap placed across the animal’s neck. As soon as the horse began to pull, he would choke himself. In the ninth century, Europeans began to use a padded horse collar that transferred the load of a draught animal to its shoulders. Horses harnessed with collars were able to pull four to five times more weight than those with throat-and-girth harnesses.

Horse power was also facilitated by the introduction of the iron shoe. With fast-moving horses harnessed efficiently, it became possible to transport goods up to 35 kilometers in one day if a sufficiently good road was available. There was now a way to dispose of agricultural surpluses and create wealth that could be used for investment in technology and infrastructure. Thus the introduction of the lowly horse shoe and collar fostered commerce, civilization, and the growth of towns.

Under the Roman system of two-field crop rotation, half the land was left fallow and unproductive at any given time. In the eighth century, Europeans began to practice three-field crop rotation. Fields lay fallow for only a third of the year, and grains were alternated with legumes that enriched the soil with nitrogen. The cultivation of legumes such as peas and beans added valuable protein to European diets.

In the tenth century, the climate began to warm and Europe entered the High Middle Ages. By the thirteenth century, the new agricultural technologies had doubled per acre yields. Population surged; architecture and commerce flourished. Europeans began a program of aggressive territorial expansion. They reclaimed Sicily in 1090 and systematically drove Muslims out of Spain. The First Crusade was launched in 1095, and Jerusalem was captured from the Seljukian Turks in 1099.

The prosperity created by the new agricultural technologies subsidized education and the growth of knowledge. In the late eighth century, Charlemagne had revived education in Europe by setting up a general system of schools. For the first time, not just monks but the general public was educated. As the European economy prospered, students multiplied and traveled, seeking the best education they could find. Christian Cathedral Schools evolved into the first universities. The Universities of Paris and Oxford were founded c. 1170, Cambridge in 1209 AD.

The harnessing of water power began around 200 BC with the invention of the quern, a primitive grain mill consisting of two rotating stones. The Romans had been aware of water power, but made little use of water wheels and mills. In contrast, by the tenth century, Europeans had begun a wholesale conversion of their civilization from human and animal-power to water power. The water-mill came to be viewed not just as a grain mill, but as a generalized source of power that could be adopted for many uses. This new approach was to fundamentally alter the fabric of human civilization.

By the thirteenth century, water power was being utilized in sawmills, tanning mills, and iron forges. Mechanical power derived from moving water was used to process beer mash, to turn wood lathes and grinding stones, to power bellows, to drive forge hammers, and to manufacture paper.

Because water power was only available where streams were located, Europeans developed other sources of mechanical power. Tidal power was used in Dover and Venice in the eleventh century. The first windmill in Europe appeared in 1085 AD. Over the next hundred years, windmill technology spread rapidly over the plains of northern Europe.

We read some E. J. Dijksterhuis a long time ago (at least we were assigned the reading), but Deming’s concise overview is certainly easier to follow. And for those who say that going back is impossible, we offer the following: (a) once again the windmill is seen by some as a leap forward; and (b) the art of two-point perspective, developed in 5th century BC Greece, was apparently forgotten and absent from medieval art until it was rediscovered centuries later around the time of Giotto in Trecento Florence.

It has been about a year since the President’s speech in Cairo, with its odd and inaccurate revisions of history. And a year since he was photographed dissing Benjamin Netanyahu from the Oval Office. And a year since he said this: “if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Actually, the US is the largest Christian country in the world, the largest Jewish country in the world after Israel, and number 52 among countries with Muslim populations — well behind Germany and France.

Why would an American President say such a thing? For a fellow whose life has been so much about concealment and the indirect gesture, there is a certain consistency to the man that becomes clear over time. You don’t have to believe in conspiracies to get an understanding of where his sentiments lie. You can just ask the guys who work for him on terrorism or at NASA for that matter.

Powerline:

Charles Bolden, head of NASA, tells Al Jazeera that the “foremost” task President Obama has given him is “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.” Thus, NASA’s primary mission is no longer to enhance American science and engineering or to explore space, but to boost the self-esteem of “predominantly Muslim nations.” Exploring space didn’t even make the top three things Obama wants Bolden to accomplish. The other two are “re-inspire children to want to get into science and math” and “expand our international relationships”

Help!

Andy Grove, the Hungarian refugee from 1956 who went on to become the third employee and CEO of Intel, has a fascinating and important piece in Business Week on the heavy lifting that lies before us if America is to re-learn what it has forgotten about being an industrial power:

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975. Meanwhile, a very effective computer manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers — factory employees, engineers, and managers. The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenues last year were $62 billion, larger than Apple, Microsoft, Dell, or Intel. Foxconn employs over 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Sony…

most know the products it makes: computers for Dell and HP, Nokia cell phones, Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles, Intel motherboards, and countless other familiar gadgets. Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in southern China produce Apple’s products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. That means for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods, and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology, and other U.S. tech companies…

The job machine breakdown isn’t just in computers. Consider alternative energy, an emerging industry where there’s plenty of innovation. Photovoltaics, for example, are a U.S. invention. Their use in home energy applications was also pioneered by the U.S. Last year, I decided to do my bit for energy conservation and set out to equip my house with solar power. My wife and I talked with four local solar firms. As part of our due diligence, I checked where they get their photovoltaic panels — the key part of the system. All the panels they use come from China…U.S. employment in the making of photovoltaic films and panels is perhaps 10,000 — just a few percent of estimated worldwide employment…

Scaling isn’t easy. The investments required are much higher than in the invention phase…How could the U.S. have forgotten? I believe the answer has to do with a general undervaluing of manufacturing — the idea that as long as “knowledge work” stays in the U.S., it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs. It’s not just newspaper commentators who spread this idea. Consider this passage by Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder: “The TV manufacturing industry really started here, and at one point employed many workers. But as TV sets became ‘just a commodity,’ their production moved offshore to locations with much lower wages. And nowadays the number of television sets manufactured in the U.S. is zero. A failure? No, a success.” I disagree. Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution…

the free market is the best of all economic systems — the freer the better. Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies. So we stick with this belief, largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better.

Such evidence stares at us from the performance of several Asian countries in the past few decades. These countries seem to understand that job creation must be the No. 1 objective of state economic policy. The government plays a strategic role in setting the priorities and arraying the forces and organization necessary to achieve this goal. The rapid development of the Asian economies provides numerous illustrations. In a thorough study of the industrial development of East Asia, Robert Wade of the London School of Economics found that these economies turned in precedent-shattering economic performances over the ’70s and ’80s in large part because of the effective involvement of the government in targeting the growth of manufacturing industries…

The first task is to rebuild our industrial commons. We should develop a system of financial incentives: Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars — fight to win.) Keep that money separate. Deposit it in the coffers of what we might call the Scaling Bank of the U.S. and make these sums available to companies that will scale their American operations.

The “China Builds / America Buys” model is broken for structural reasons. We can’t simply export debt and import products anymore. Perhaps the trickiest part of re-learning how to re-create large scale domestic job generators is to avoid the potential trade war that Grove seems to take in stride. No, on second thought, the toughest challenge is getting back the can-do attitude that seem to be missing from many in America and its leadership today.

The China Daily had this story the other day on the A-Whale:

With no assurances it will be allowed to join the Gulf oil cleanup, a Taiwanese-owned ship billed as the world’s largest skimming vessel began a three day voyage to the scene of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The ship — the length of 3 1/2 American football fields and 10 stories high — is designed to collect up to 500,000 barrels of oily water a day…

The company is still negotiating with the Coast Guard to join the cleanup and does not have a contract with BP to perform cleanup work. The company also needs environmental approval and waiver of a nearly century-old law aimed at protecting U.S. shipping interests.

Environmental Protection Agency approval is required because some of the seawater returned to the Gulf would have traces of oil. The Coast Guard, which has received more than 2,000 cleanup proposals, said the supertanker skimmer had survived a preliminary review and was being studied further. Capt. Ron LaBrec said that initial review involves a number of government agencies, including the EPA…

If the ship passes the additional review, its owners could then negotiate terms with BP. He could not provide an estimated timetable for the review would be completed. The company said it also needs a waiver of the 1920 Jones Act, which limits the activities of foreign-flagged ships in coastal U.S. waters.

You’d think the phase “let’s cut through the red tape” would have occurred to someone in the administration by week eleven of this farce. But the administration has so few experienced private sector executives, maybe it hasn’t occurred to them yet.

Dick Morris on the travesty that is this oil spill:

Alabama conceived a plan — early on — to erect huge booms offshore to shield the approximately 200 miles of the state’s coastline from oil. Rather than install the relatively light and shallow booms in use elsewhere, the state (with assistance from the Coast Guard) canvassed the world and located enough huge, heavy booms — some weighing tons and seven meters high — to guard their coast. But … no sooner were the booms in place than the Coast Guard, perhaps under pressure from the public comments of James Carville, uprooted them and moved them to guard the Louisiana coastline instead.

So Alabama decided on a backup plan. It would buy snare booms to catch the oil as it began to wash up on the beaches. But … the Fish and Wildlife Administration vetoed the plan, saying it would endanger sea turtles that nest on the beaches.

So Alabama — ever resourceful — decided to hire 400 workers to patrol the beaches in person, scooping up oil that had washed ashore. But … OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) refused to allow them to work more than 20 minutes out of every hour and required an hourlong break after 40 minutes of work, so the cleanup proceeded at a very slow pace.

The short answer is that every agency — each with its own particular bureaucratic agenda — was able to veto each aspect of any plan to fight the spill, with the unintended consequence that nothing stopped the oil from destroying hundreds of miles of wetlands, habitats, beaches, fisheries and recreational facilities. Where was the president?

It’s hard to fathom incompetence of this magnitude, when so much could have been addressed in the first week or two.

We’re about ten weeks into the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It didn’t have to be this bad. Financial Post:

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn’t capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana’s marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company’s expense. “If there’s a country that’s experienced with building dikes and managing water, it’s the Netherlands,” says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston…

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

The punchline: “The Americans…finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer — but only partly. Because the U.S. didn’t want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.” Good grief! HT: Jim Hoft

The lawyers go to war, China’s Roaring 20′s, Tom and Jerry and the case of the dirty mice, and something’s probably got to give in the matter of AGW. Also, the temptation to corruption in declining industries. TIME’s Rathergate moment.

The NYT, apparently oblivious to the outside world, asks

an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?

Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.

A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009.

Question: in what proportion are these explanations responsible for the change? (a) climategate and (b) everyone is broke so who wants to spend vast sums of money money to fix a hypothetical problem half a century away? HT: JOM

The Washington Post editorializes in favor of cap and trade on yet another morning-after that was bad for Beltway insiders:

Legislators should seize this moment. The burning of oil, natural gas and coal for industry, transportation and modern life generally gives off gases that get trapped in the atmosphere, keeping heat in and warming the Earth. The consequences of this human-induced influence on global climate are difficult to predict with precision but are likely to be disruptive, possibly catastrophically.

Scientists are clear enough on this to make it obvious that people should begin to reduce their dependence on these carbon-based fuels. Every big country will have to play a role — but many won’t get started unless the United States gets serious.

The most rational action, as we’ve said before, would be to put a gradually rising tax on carbon emissions and let the market find the cheapest alternatives. The Kerry-Lieberman bill doesn’t go that route. But it does, through a system of tradable emission permits, create a gradually rising price on carbon emissions…

The longer Congress waits to pass a comprehensive climate bill, the less time America will have to cut its emissions — and the more expensive the process will be. According to the International Energy Agency, every year the world fails to seriously deal with climate change raises the price tag by $500 billion — a lot of which, no doubt, Americans will be on the hook for

As we’ve said before, maybe there’s AGW, maybe not. But that’s not really the point right now. Even if there is AGW, there is zero probability that India and particularly China are going to trade even 0.1% of GDP growth to prevent a sometime-maybe-problem 50 years out, when maximum growth is required to support domestic peace. So no matter how many UN boondoggles in Bali the taxpayers write checks for, nothing meaningful is likely to be accomplished if China and India have to play ball (except that California will outlaw hot TV sets and incandescent light bulbs and similar nonsense.)

And as for the WaPo’s quaint observation about a price that “Americans will be on the hook for” — they clearly haven’t heard that one of the two overarching messages being shouted at Washington by the people in these elections is this: We don’t have the money, so stop spending it! But they still don’t listen.

This excerpt is from an appalling and oh-so politically correct policy statement in the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. It comes from the Committee on Bioethics by the way.

The American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement on newborn male circumcision expresses respect for parental decision-making and acknowledges the legitimacy of including cultural, religious, and ethnic traditions…

Most forms of FGC are decidedly harmful, and pediatricians should decline to perform them, even in the absence of any legal constraints. However, the ritual nick suggested by some pediatricians is not physically harmful and is much less extensive than routine newborn male genital cutting. There is reason to believe that offering such a compromise may build trust between hospitals and immigrant communities, save some girls from undergoing disfiguring and lifethreatening procedures in their native countries, and play a role in the eventual eradication of FGC.

It might be more effective if federal and state laws enabled pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ritual nick as a possible compromise to avoid greater harm.

The policy statement is careful to note that the practice of FGM has been documented in Christian and Jewish communities, as well as some others in the “Middle East and Africa.” We were going to entitle this piece “WTF?” but the editors said we couldn’t. HT: Powerline

Washington Examiner:

The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to lower the boom on sodium content in American food…the salty and the sweet will be carted off in Michelle Obama’s great food roundup. The rules are being worked out with the producers so that consumers won’t notice any big shift, but one day it will be illegal to sell food that exceeds federal standards for saltiness…

after decades of failing to scare people off salt, the government will simply turn it into a controlled substance. They claim that thousands of lives will be saved from decreased incidence of high blood pressure and hail the move as a blow against Big Food…Big Food will be able to use the regulations they help design to dominate the market even more. They are already spending millions to find new chemical compounds that keep the foods yummy but skirt the new sodium prohibition.

The local potato chip maker whose greasy treats taste divine will find that they can’t afford Frito Lay’s Space Age salt substitute. Mom and Pop will have to sell chips that taste like a fried dishrag and eventually close…the president’s health program will be imposed in pieces over the next four years. By the end, the government will have a fiduciary interest in the waistlines and cholesterol counts of every American.

If someone told you twenty years ago that salt and carbon dioxide were slated to become controlled substances subject to strict federal regulation, would you have believed it?

NBC science correspondent Jay Barbree on President Obama’s NASA appearance:

I’m a little disturbed right now, Alex. I just found out some very disturbing news. The President came down here in his campaign and told these 15,000 workers here at the Space Center that if they would vote for him, that he would protect their jobs. 9,000 of them are about to lose their job. He is speaking before 200, extra hundred people here today only. It’s invitation only. He has not invited a single space worker from this space port to attend. It’s only academics and other high officials from outside of the country. Not one of them is invited to hear the President of the United States, on their own space port, speak today.

The media begin to see what is happening, but they can’t bring themselves to face the consequences. Tick tock.

MIT Professor Richard Lindzen shares a few more thoughts on AGW:

In a world where we experience temperature changes of tens of degrees in a single day, we treat changes of a few tenths of a degree in some statistical residue, known as the global mean temperature anomaly (GATA), as portents of disaster.

Earth has had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a 100,000-year cycle for the last 700,000 years, and there have been previous interglacials that appear to have been warmer than the present despite lower carbon-dioxide levels.

More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th century, these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat, and, indeed, some alpine glaciers are advancing again.

For small changes in GATA, there is no need for any external cause. Earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Examples include El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, etc. Recent work suggests that this variability is enough to account for all change in the globally averaged temperature anomaly since the 19th century.

Of course Lindzen is one of those litmus test figures — sensible fellow or nut? HT: AJ Strata

The backtracking on AGW is ever so gentle. The FT quotes a damaging report on East Anglia, but notes that it “should not be seen as invalidating climate science”:

A key piece of evidence in climate change science was slammed as “exaggerated” on Wednesday by the UK’s leading statistician, in a vindication of claims that global warming sceptics have been making for years.

Professor David Hand, president of the Royal Statistical Society, said that a graph shaped like an ice hockey stick that has been used to represent the recent rise in global temperatures had been compiled using “inappropriate” methods. “It used a particular statistical technique that exaggerated the effect [of recent warming],” he said…It is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians,” the report concluded.

The hockey stick graph was a key part of the scandal. In the e-mails, UEA’s Professor Phil Jones referred to a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures suggested by certain sources of data. A similar trick was used in the hockey stick graph.

Maybe there’s global warming, maybe not. In any event, it is interesting to contrast theories that may or may not have impact in some gauzy future with the starker realities of life on this earth.

The discovery that quasars don’t show time dilation mystifies astronomers:

The phenomenon of time dilation is a strange yet experimentally confirmed effect of relativity theory. One of its implications is that events occurring in distant parts of the universe should appear to occur more slowly than events located closer to us. For example, when observing supernovae, scientists have found that distant explosions seem to fade more slowly than the quickly-fading nearby supernovae…

time dilation should be a property of the universe that holds true everywhere, regardless of the specific object or event being observed. However, a new study has found that this doesn’t seem to be the case – quasars, it seems, give off light pulses at the same rate no matter their distance from the Earth, without a hint of time dilation.

Astronomer Mike Hawkins from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh came to this conclusion after looking at nearly 900 quasars over periods of up to 28 years. When comparing the light patterns of quasars located about 6 billion light years from us and those located 10 billion light years away, he was surprised to find that the light signatures of the two samples were exactly the same. If these quasars were like the previously observed supernovae, an observer would expect to see longer, “stretched” timescales for the distant, “stretched” high-redshift quasars. But even though the distant quasars were more strongly redshifted than the closer quasars, there was no difference in the time it took the light to reach Earth…

Officially called “quasi-stellar radio sources,” quasars are dense regions surrounding the central supermassive black holes in the centers of massive galaxies. They feed off an accretion disc that surrounds each black hole, which powers the quasars’ extreme luminosity and makes them visible to Earth.

One of Hawkins’ possible explanations for quasars’ lack of time dilation is that light from the quasars is being bent by black holes scattered throughout the universe. These black holes, which may have formed shortly after the big bang, would have a gravitational distortion that affects the time dilation of distant quasars. However, this idea of “gravitational microlensing” is a controversial suggestion, as it requires that there be enough black holes to account for all of the universe’s dark matter.

This is unlikely, however, since most of the universe is “dark“. Indeed, dark matter accounts for 23% of the mass-energy density of the observable universe, while the ordinary matter accounts for only 4.6% (the remainder is attributed to dark energy). By way of background, most of the universe’s dark matter was created during Grateful Dead concerts in the early 1970′s.

Reuters reports the first big success at the Large Hadron Collider:

Soon after 1100 GMT on Tuesday, and after two efforts earlier in the day were aborted due to technical glitches, the LHC slammed beams of particles together at a collision energy of 7 TeV, or 7 million million electron volts. This was three and a half times more than ever achieved in a particle accelerator. The particle beams were travelling at a fraction under the speed of light when they hit each other in a tunnel 100 metres (330 feet) under the Swiss-French border.

Oliver Buchmueller, a German physicist on the project, said hard information on what the many billions of collisions over the coming years reveal would emerge only slowly. “But by the end of 2010 we think we will find evidence of dark material,” he added. The Higgs boson was likely to prove more elusive, and perhaps appear only after 2013, when the collider is boosted to collision energy of 14 TeV.

The boson is named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed it three decades ago to explain how the disparate matter produced by the Big Bang was converted to mass.

The LHC had some problems and was offline for a while. We’re glad to see that the coolest machine ever is working again — and even happier that, when it was re-started, it did not cause the end of the world.

IBD lists 20 problems with the law of the land. Here’s our favorite:

13. If you are a physician owner and you want to expand your hospital? Well, you can’t (Section 6001 (i) (1) (B). Unless, it is located in a county where, over the last five years, population growth has been 150% of what it has been in the state (Section 6601 (i) (3) ( E)). And then you cannot increase your capacity by more than 200% (Section 6001 (i) (3) (C)).

That’s funny, but not funny enough to cheer up VDH. HT: Ace

The WSJ sees something like the end of the republic if Obamacare passes:

Democrats are on the cusp of a profound and historic mistake, comparable in our view to the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act. Everyone is preoccupied now with the politics, but ultimately at stake on Sunday is the kind of country America will be.

The consequences of this bill will not only be destructive for the health-care system and the country’s fiscal condition, though those will be bad enough. Inextricably bound up in a plan as far-reaching and ambitious as ObamaCare are also larger questions about the role of government, the dynamism of American enterprise and the nature of a free society…

Once the health-care markets are put through Mr. Obama’s de facto nationalization, costs will further explode. The Congressional Budget Office estimates ObamaCare will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even under low-ball assumptions. Soon the public will reach its taxing limit, and then something will have to give on the care side…

Democrats deny this reality, but government rationing will become inevitable given that overall federal spending is already at 25% of GDP and heading north, and Medicare’s unfunded liabilities are roughly two and a half times larger than the entire U.S. economy in 2008. The ObamaCare bill already contains one of the largest tax increases outside the Great Depression or the world wars, including a major new tax on investment income — and no one seriously believes it will be enough.

We share a number of the Journal’s concerns, but if the last year has taught us anything, it has taught us the danger of drawing straight lines. The President was once very popular; now more American voters strongly disapprove of Obama than in total approve of him, however tepidly. If healthcare passes, it does not go away — it becomes a topic that will continue to dominate the national dialogue until November and beyond, in our view to the detriment of Democrats.

There’s a deep anger about this legislative process and about congress itself among many Americans, the kind that doesn’t fade easily. Unlike the clear majority of Americans favoring past healthcare reforms, there is no natural or national majority for this bill — the proof of that is that Democrats have been able to pass a bill for a year, and even the day before a vote is scheduled, they are still bickering among themselves and don’t have a clear path to a majority vote.

As for Republicans and Independents. the vast majority of whom oppose this measure, their opposition to the Obama agenda gives them a great deal in common as they stand together athwart history yelling “Stop!”

Moreover, there is a great deal of fury over the arrogance and rank corruption of America’s legislators. Matthew Continetti: “When you bake a cake, everything depends on the selection of ingredients and the manner of preparation. So, too, with the law. Health care reform’s inputs — the partisanship, the special deals, the procedural tricks, the budgetary gimmicks — will directly affect its outputs, i.e., its consequences. They are part and parcel of a $1 trillion-plus health bill that will raise taxes, cut Medicare, become ridiculously expensive sooner rather than later, and poison politics for a long time to come…The process is the substance.” Many of the opponents of this legislation don’t think simply that it’s a bad bill — they think it is an illegitimate bill.

There’s a need for real healthcare reform that is simple, incremental, and relies on decentralized solutions, and market solutions whenever possible. There is a need to control runaway entitlement spending. There’s an urgent need to get the skyrocketing deficit under control. Top-down, centrally imposed grand schemes for new entitlements are the wrong fantasy at the wrong time, and we think a clear majority of Americans know this. We may be wrong, but we expect the anti-Washington mood to grow, and we expect November to reveal that, while we may be a deeply divided country, we are no longer such a closely divided country.