Interesting Blog Posts By Michael Williams

I've been too busy to read Michael Williams' blog--which is a sign that I am too busy--and there's some interesting stuff there. Here he does the math to point out that American produced biofuels aren't every going to be a big chunk of our energy consumption:

So assuming our coal and oil consumption haven't grown since 2000 (unlikely) and assuming a generous ratio of biomass to biofuel conversion, the United States could generate about 18% of the power it consumes by converting 100% of its arable land to biofuel production.

He also points to a New York Times article about Japan's criminal justice system, and how it relies heavily on coerced confessions--and then has to release these people years later, when they turn out to be innocent:

Norimitsu Onishi makes it sound as if Japanese police don't even do proper investigations or gather evidence, they just pick a suspect, coerce a confession, and then rely on that confession alone for a conviction.

This wasn't a surprise to me. Dave Kopel's book The Samurai, The Mountie, and The Cowboy makes the point that part of how the Japanese police achieve 99% conviction rates--with something 95% of suspects confessing--is that they rely on torture. Even though it is illegal, and suspects often still have marks of torture visible when they come to court--Japanese judges routinely refuse to do anything about it.

Finally, Michael Williams points to this Michael Barone column about how the big cities on the coasts are fast turning into the Third World--a small number of extremely rich people and fast quantities of desperately poor people:

The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.

Michael and his wife left Los Angeles for this reason:

Sounds about right to me; my wife and I left Los Angeles because we're neither rich nor immigrant laborers.

This is part of why liberals are so dangerous for America. While they talk about "two Americas" one rich, one poor, they are the major forces causing this increasingly Third World divide. They want illegal immigrants to come here in large numbers because this provides them with cheap maids; cheap gardeners; cheap busboys and kitchen help in their fashionable restaurants; and cheap prostitutes. If liberals really believed their own garbage about helping the working poor, they would be willing to shut off illegal immigration, so that wages of citizens and lawful immigrants would rise.