Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Flipping Alinsky?

http://www.redstate.com/russellc/2013/10/29/flip-alinskys-rules-for-radicals-against-far-left-activists-a-global-warming-case-study-for-not-being-polite-anymore/

Roger L. Simon » Relax, GOP — Obamacare Will Defund Itself


With only a small penalty for abstaining, the numbers for signing up not only don’t add up — they’re absurd. Here’s one of the supposedly attractive deals: “One option available only to people under 30 is a so-called catastrophic policy that kicks in after a $6,350 annual deductible. In Monroe County, you can buy that policy on the New York State of Health exchange for as low as $131 a month for single coverage.”
Over fifteen hundred a year for a sixty-three hundred plus deductible? What healthy thirty year old would waste his or her money?
Who invented this plan? Certainly not Obama or Pelosi, neither of whom was paying close attention, I would bet. (Pelosi admitted she wasn’t. All Obama wanted was something to put his name next to, something that sounded vaguely “progressive.”)
I am writing this before Obama speaks on Monday, so have little idea of what he is going to say. But his only choice is to put his best face on the dreadful enrollment figures. Otherwise, he has to announce a delay in the program — the very thing Republicans shut the government over! (He’ll never do that. It’s too easy to point out.)


http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/10/20/obamacare-will-defund-itself/2/

A Billion Dollars A Day Are Wasted On Limiting Global Warming - Investors.com

The world reportedly "invested" $1 billion a day last year to fight global warming. What a waste. Properly invested, a billion a day would yield productive results.
According to the Climate Policy Initiative, $359 billion was invested in 2012 to limit global warming. That's a nice pile of cash. But of course it wasn't enough to do the job. Media portal EurActiv.com reports that total was "barely half the $700 billion per year that the World Economic Forum has said is needed to tackle climate change."
Sounds a lot like the war on poverty that America has been losing since it was declared in 1964 by President Johnson. When asked why the billions spent on easing poverty hadn't moved the poor out of their financial misery, Sargent Shriver, who ran the war as head of Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity, said the government didn't spend enough.
The story's the same today. U.S. taxpayers have shelled out $3.7 trillion to cover welfare payments over the past five years, according to data from Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions' staff. Despite the largess, the poor are still poor. (See editorial above.)
Then there's the $1 trillion economic stimulus legislation that the Democrats passed in 2009 at the command of President Obama. Where are we in 2013? The economy's still struggling, and the workforce continues to shrink. New jobs aren't staying up with demand — and in fact are being destroyed by government policy.
Yet many supporters of the stimulus, economist Paul Krugman chief among them, say it hasn't been effective because we haven't spent enough.
Rather than waste other people's money, governments should let people keep what's theirs so they're able to invest or spend as they please. Which brings up the question: How much can a billion dollars a day buy?
It would buy nearly a million shares of wealth-generating Google stock. Or start 100,000 businesses — at the average $10,000-per-startup cost that's been established by Wells Fargo. Those businesses would hire hundreds of thousands of workers.
More interested in the "humanitarian" possibilities? Consider how much clean water a billion dollars a day could provide for the Third World masses who die in the millions each year for lack of it.
Think of how those dollars could prevent malaria, which kills more than 650,000 a year — and one child every minute. The malaria control funding gap in Africa — $3.6 billion — would be closed in less than four days.
A billion a day could also develop a drug a day to save lives, ease suffering and generate wealth.
If man-made global warming were a real threat, it might be worth a billion a day to curb its effects. But it's simply conjecture, not hard science. It's a chimera that doesn't deserve our attention, much less our money.



What is unseen?  All of the outcomes which the billion a day could have created were it not being destroyed "fighting" global warming.

To Win or To Fight for the Ideal

Conservatives in this country — at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is serious question whether there are others — are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars. Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.
http://www.redstate.com/2013/10/29/the-hungry-and-the-well-fed/

Friday, October 25, 2013

Health emergency: On eve of Obamacare, Britain's NHS needs political therapy | WashingtonExaminer.com

http://washingtonexaminer.com/health-emergency-on-eve-of-obamacare-britains-nhs-needs-political-therapy/article/2536520
"The individual is essentially a suplicant."

Read on and have a look at one person's example of the dark underbelly of getting health care you don't pay for at the point of sale.

Harvard: US debt bill is $123,000 per worker | WashingtonExaminer.com

http://washingtonexaminer.com/harvard-us-debt-bill-is-123000-per-worker/article/2537299
Not as bad as I thought, but does that include unfunded liabilities?

Minimum Wage, Maximum Nonsense: Newsroom: The Independent Institute

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=4751

Why do you pay your kids $5 to mow the lawn but not pay the professional $40 to mow the lawn? If your choices were to spend an hour once/week to mow, or to pay a professional $40/week to mow, which would you do? What do you think the "average" homeowner would do?

In other words, you already know that minimum wage hurts unskilled workers who cannot provide value greater than the compensation they receive.  

The Weekend Interview with Stanley Druckenmiller: How Washington Really Redistributes Income - WSJ.com


But he adds that "I did not think it would be nutty to tie entitlements to the debt ceiling because there's a massive long-term problem. And this president, despite what he says, has shown time and time again that he needs a gun at his head to negotiate in good faith. All this talk about, 'I won't negotiate with a gun at my head.' OK, you've been president for five years."
His voice rising now, Mr. Druckenmiller pounds his fist on the conference table. "Show me, President Obama, when the period was when you initiated budget discussions without a gun at your head."
Which brings him back to his thieving generation. For three decades until 2010, Mr. Druckenmiller ran the hedge fund he founded, Duquesne Capital. Now retired from managing other people's money, he looks after his own assets, which Forbes magazine recently estimated at $2.9 billion. And he wonders why in five years the massively indebted U.S. government will begin sending him a Social Security check for $3,500 each month. Because he earned it?
"I didn't earn it," he responds, while pointing to a bar chart that is part of his college presentation. Drawing on research by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, it shows the generational wealth transfer that benefits oldsters at the expense of the young.
While many seniors believe they are simply drawing out the "savings" they were forced to deposit into Social Security and Medicare, they are actually drawing out much more, especially relative to later generations. That's because politicians have voted to award the seniors ever more generous benefits. As a result, while today's 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303680404579141790296396688
Did you see that headline about how social security robs the young and poor to give to the old and rich?  No?  Wonder why that is ...


“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”


― Friedrich von Hayek

Why Obamacare Is Like Three Mile Island - Bloomberg

Does this mean that we are definitely going to have a death spiral? Of course I can't say that; I'm not psychic. There are various steps that the administration might take, legal or quasi-legal, to try to get the insurers to keep selling cheap policies even as their costs rise. And as I pointed out a while back, the young may buy simply because this is now the law of the land, even if it's difficult, and even if we delay the individual mandate.
But, of course, there was no way to be 100 percent certain that invading Iraq would turn out badly; smart critics of that policy argued (correctly) that invading Iraq ran unacceptably high risks. The goal was a great one: Free Iraq from a dictator who was a destabilizing geopolitical force and help the Iraqi people to establish a prosperous and functional democracy. But the downside risk of embroiling the U.S. in an unwinnable war that would kill a lot of Iraqis and destabilize the region even further was horrifying, and all too likely. Looking at the aftermath, I sure wish I'd listened -- and even more that our leaders had.
Which reminds me of something that I've been wanting to say. I admire the way that fearless liberals have come out to criticize the rollout of the exchanges -- much more quickly and completely than supporters of the Iraq War managed, I'm afraid. (Though of course, in fairness, the malfunctioning exchanges are right here where everyone can see them, not thousands of miles away.) But as with Iraq, I fear that the bitterness of the debate in the run-up is making the administration and many of its supporters discount too deeply the valid criticism coming from the opposition. It is true that I, and many others who are talking about the problems with these exchanges, opposed the health-care law; my preference is not for a delay but for completely getting rid of this law, and starting over with something that works better. (More on that later.)
But I'm also an American who wants our insurance market to work. My first preference is for Obamacare to go away, making room for a more market-oriented solution. Failing that, of course I want Obamacare to work as its designers envisioned, rather than destroying the market for individual insurance and costing the federal government boatloads of money that it doesn't have. It's just that I don't think this is the most likely outcome, and frankly, it's looking less likely with every ham-fisted management decision that endangers the long-term health of the system and gains only some evanescent political advantage.
In this, I expect I feel much the same way as patriotic critics of the war who wanted the troops brought home ASAP because they thought that our efforts in Iraq were doomed -- but, failing that, would rather have seen their opponents proven right, their country prevail, and peace and prosperity come to Iraq.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-23/why-obamacare-is-like-three-mile-island.html

Thanks to Natural Gas and Climate Change, U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Continue Downward Trend | Cato @ Liberty


The big player in 2012 was the continued switch from coal to natural gas for electrical generation. It is generally accepted that gas-fired generation results in about half as much carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt-hour as coal-fired.
While some would glibly say this is a result of increased regulation of greenhouse gases, it's much more just good-old economics and the profit motive that are responsible. Hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, and inherently less expensive physical plants mean it is cheaper to produce electrical power from gas than from coal.  In fact, as the figure below shows, there's been pretty much a one-for-one switch between the two sources, with coal-fired down by 215 billion kilowatt-hours (kwh) and gas up by 212.
Despite the fact that "renewable" electricity generation declined in 2012, carbon dioxide emissions per kwh still went down, by 3.5 percent, thanks to the overwhelming effect of natural gas substitution.  http://www.cato.org/blog/thanks-natural-gas-climate-change-us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-continue-downward-trend

McArdle - "Stop the Madness"


I’m a longtime critic of federal contracting rules, which prevent some corruption at ruinous expense in money, quality and speed. But federal contracting rules are not what made the administration delay writing the rules and specifications necessary to build the system until 2013. Nor to delay the deadline for states to declare whether they’d be building an exchange, in the desperate hope that a few more governors might decide -- in February 2013! -- to build a state system after all. Any state that decided to start such a project at that late date would have had little hope of building anything that worked, but presumably angry voters would be calling the governor instead of HHS.
Federal contracting codes, so far as I am aware, do not emit intoxicating gases that might have caused senior HHS officials to decide that it was a good idea to take on the role of lead contractor -- a decision equivalent to someone who has never even hung a picture deciding that they should become their own general contractor and build a house. Nor can those rules explain their lunatic response when they were told that the system was not working -- “failure was not an option."
Nor can you really blame the Republicans -- an argument that makes sense only if you don’t examine it very closely. It starts by assuming (but never stating) that the administration passed a law that didn't work as written, and then posits a civic duty for the opposition not to oppose laws that they oppose, but instead to help the majority party turn an unworkable law into something more to said party’s liking. This is absurd. Moreover, it’s not even a very good explanation for most of these problems. Maybe CMS turned lead contractor because they couldn’t get more funds to hire private help, but lack of funds does not explain why HHS took so long to write regulations and specifications, keeping insurers at loose ends until as late as this summer, and preventing their biggest contractor from writing code until spring. It does not explain why officials decided to launch a system that was so badly behind schedule, or to keep insisting, against all evidence, that it wasn’t broken. What explains this long train of poor decision-making is some combination of bureaucratic inertia, a desire to hide what they were doing from voters who might not like it and a terrifying insouciance about how easy it might be to build a system of this size and complexity.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Pension Death Spiral, "What Could Go Wrong?"


Frank McCoy’s coming retirement after eight years as Oceanside police chief comes with a steep price: taxpayers will owe him an annual pension of more than $170,000, based on the 51-year-old’s 29 years as a cop. Factoring in automatic 2 percent annual increases, McCoy is on track to one day make more as a former cop than he ever did on the force.
Such is the fallout from the generous pensions cities and counties throughout California granted employees during the late 1990s and early 2000s, particularly to public safety workers, many of whom are able to retire at 50 with a pension of 3 percent of their highest base pay for every year they worked. “It’s an unsustainable system,” says Oceanside City Councilman Jerry Kern.
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/oct/14/pension-tsunami-strikes-again/

Coercion at its finest!  What are you paying to prevent this man from ever facing the economic risk you face each day?

Energy Flows Where Focus Goes


Even the newly crowned Miss America, Nina Davuluri, who sure seems like a winner by conventional standards, was portrayed as a victim in many news stories. Since she's the first Miss America of Indian descent, some trolls on Twitter made racist remarks.
But skeptical writer Gavin McInnes did a little digging. He found those racist Twitter users were almost certainly just irresponsible little kids. One of the media's most quoted tweets, "You look like a terrorist," was sent by a Twitter user with zero followers.
If millions of people are familiar with that remark now -- and some Americans grow up a little bit more frightened that they will be victimized -- it will be largely because media hyped racism rather than because of the handful of racists themselves.


Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/10/16/longing_to_be_a_victim_120342.html#ixzz2ht17wpLM 
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter


Incentives matter.  If you get paid to be a victim, there will be more victims.

Causation

As Professor of Meteorology Dr. Richard Lindzen at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences observed, “The latest IPCC report truly sank to the level of hilarious incoherence – it is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.”  The banner claim of this 2013 Summary for Policymakers (AR5) release is that “Human influence is extremely likely to be dominant cause of observed warming since the middle of the last century.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/10/15/the-true-global-warming-crisis-is-the-fibs-underlying-the-theory/

Opinion dressed in science's clothing - that's the IPCC.

Spend the Same as We Spend? You Are Crazy!


With these lessons learned, here's my budget proposal: An across-the-board cut of 5% in every government department's budget line. (You can't convince me -- and you'll certainly have a hard time convincing voters -- that there's not 5% waste to be found in any government program.) Then a five-year freeze at that level. Likewise, a one-year moratorium on new regulations, followed by strict limits on new regulatory action: Perhaps a rule that all new business regulations won't have the force of law until approved by Congress.
This approach would drastically cut the deficit, and as the economy grew, our debt-to-GDP ratio would improve over time instead of steadily worsening. (And, with a guarantee of reduced spending and regulation, economic growth would probably also take off.)http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/10/15/government-shutdown-washington-column/2976849/

Organize Via Guns or Cooperation?


To do so would have been naive, because history — and common sense, along with a large catalog of economic theory — tells us that central planning has not and cannot work.
What works and always has is voluntary cooperation among free people. Consumers and producers don't need functionaries in Washington managing their transactions. Groceries, wrist watches, cheeseburgers, bowling balls, aspirin and any number of other goods and services are bought and sold just fine without government involvement. These markets organize themselves.
Buyers and sellers speak clearly to each other through price signals. Government planners would only wreck what has developed efficiently on its own.
It's foolish to believe a group of planners in Washington, D.C., or anywhere else, could organize a market as large and complex as health care.


Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-obama-care/101413-675070-ezra-klein-admits-obamacare-a-big-failure.htm#ixzz2hsx4ZNYV
Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook

Adams on Nietzsche


Nietzsche famously said, "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." It sounds clever, but it's a loser philosophy. I don't want my failures to simply make me stronger, which I interpret as making me better able to survive future challenges. (To be fair to Nietzsche, he probably meant the word "stronger" to include anything that makes you more capable. I'd ask him to clarify, but ironically he ran out of things that didn't kill him.)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304626104579121813075903866.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsTop

Graveyard Sustainability?

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303342104579097100412815862
I've always wondered about the sustainability of graveyards.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Ferguson on Krugtron


Second, Krugman’s claim that a vastly larger fiscal stimulus would have generated a more rapid economic recovery in the US depends entirely on conjecture. But the macroeconomic model on which he bases his claim can hardly be called reliable, given its manifest failures to predict either the crisis or the euro’s survival. Moreover, at least one of his pre-crisis columns flatly contradicts his view today that current – or even higher – levels of federal debt carry no risk whatsoever. So he has no right to claim, as he has, “a stunning victory” in “an epic intellectual debate.”
Finally – and most important – even if Krugman had been “right about everything,” there would still be no justification for the numerous crude and often personal attacks he has made on those who disagree with him. Words like “cockroach,” “delusional,” “derp,” “dope,” “fool,” “knave,” “mendacious idiot,” and “zombie” have no place in civilized debate. I consider myself lucky that he has called me only a “poseur,” a “whiner,” “inane” – and, last week, a “troll.”
Far from engaging in Holmes’s free trade in ideas, Krugman has been the intellectual equivalent of a robber baron, exploiting his power to the point of driving decent people away from the public sphere – particularly younger scholars, who understandably dread a “takedown” by the “Invincible Krugtron.”
My preferred solution would be accountability. But I have given up hope that the New York Times will perform its proper editorial function.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/on-the-perils-of-paul-krugman-by-niall-ferguson#M5KvorzTwkUExQpY.99

Krugman does serve a very important function - he makes it easy for real economists to explain the difference in economics and Krugetronics and all of the distorted mis-representation of economics contained therein.

But we should also want to consider the ways a relentlessly rising level of debt could damage our economic prospects. The debt ceiling for the United States is currently set at $16.7 trillion. In 2000, the U.S. national debt stood at$5.7 trillion. The amount of the U.S. national debt is now roughly the same size as the annual output of the economy. Is this a problem?
Yes, suggests recent research by numerous macroeconomists. Specifically, they find that a big public debt “overhang” likely slows down future economic growth for more than two decades. In other words, excessive national debt racked up now will make future Americans considerably poorer than they would have been otherwise.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/10/11/the-morning-after-americas-debt-binge
This is why the Keynesian idea, which was to borrow if necessary to create economic growth, and which by the way has never been proved to be true, is the ultimate drug for politicians.  In debt with slow growth?  Borrow more!  And spend more!  "What could go wrong" as they say.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

TANSLFL?


To begin, health care in Canada is anything but free. The average Canadian family of two parents with two children (similar to Walt’s family in the drama) pays approximately $11,320 in taxes for hospital and physician care through the country’s tax system, in addition to — for those who buy it — the cost of private insurance for things such as dental care and outpatient prescription drugs. While overall health care spending is lower in Canada than the United States in comparison to their overall economies, it is certainly higher than in almost any other developed country that offers universal health care.
Canadian Care?
Next comes the question of the scope and timeliness of medical services provided in exchange for this substantial expenditure. Surely such expenditure is justified if Canadians receive a stellar health care system in return for their tax dollars. Unfortunately, that simply isn’t the case. Canada actually has fewer medical resources (physicians, beds, and diagnostic imaging scanners, for example), and performs fewer medical interventions than its American and European counterparts.
In fact, Canada has one of the lowest physician-to-population ratios in the developed world. Add fixed hospital budgets and the monopolization of health insurance by the government, and you get a universal access health care system that also fails to provide access to services in a timely manner. The most recent annual survey of wait times in Canada revealed that patients have to wait approximately four and a half months on average to receive treatment for medically necessary elective procedures after referral from a general practitioner (whom many Canadians also have a hard time finding). While the wait is shorter for cancer patients (about a month), we also have to remember the long wait patients face for access to diagnostic imaging technologies like MRIs (over two months on average) and CT scanners (almost a month on average) which are vital for assisting in making the diagnosis in the first place. Such delays can have large impacts on cancer patients given the possibility that the size of a cancerous tumor doubles every four months.
http://www.american.com/archive/2013/october/hate-to-br-eak-it-to-you-walt-but-its-pretty-ba-d-in-canada-too
Well, I suppose you could say having health care paid for through taxes which insulates consumers from price and quality is the ideal, because it is universal, and "fair" and stuff like that.  But only the naive would think such a system wouldn't have consequences, some predictable and some unexpected.
The expected consequences are rationing, shortages, and wait times including filters between patients and doctors.  Other expected consequences would be quality decreases associated with a disconnect between patients and the service provider.  Unexpected consequences are that you could get better access to diagnostic equipment in Canada if you were a dog or cat, because animal care is not socialized and vets make money by buying good equipment (capital expenditure) to leverage for better patient care.

Will: Wonderland

Yes, in Tuesday’s Through-the-Looking- Glass moment, the court will be urged to declare that Michigan’s ban on unequal treatment violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal-protection clause. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit — divided 8 to 7, with five dissents — has said just that, citing what is called the political-restructuring doctrine.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-a-wonderland-moment-for-the-court/2013/10/11/2f8dd95c-31f1-11e3-8627-c5d7de0a046b_story.html

Saturday, October 12, 2013

George F. Will: When liberals became scolds - The Washington Post


"He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It's — it had to be some silly little Communist."
Jacqueline Kennedy,
Nov. 22, 1963
"She thought it robbed his death of any meaning. But a meaning would be quickly manufactured to serve a new politics. First, however, an inconvenient fact — Oswald — had to be expunged from the story. So, just 24 months after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedys' kept historian, published a thousand-page history of the thousand-day presidency without mentioning the assassin.
The transformation of a murder by a marginal man into a killing by a sick culture began instantly — before Kennedy was buried. The afternoon of the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy's "martyrdom" to "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots." The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a "streak of violence in the American character," noting especially "the violence of the extremists on the right."
"Never mind that adjacent to Reston's article was a Times report on Oswald's Communist convictions and associations. A Soviet spokesman, too, assigned "moral responsibility" for Kennedy's death to "Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right."
"Three days after the assassination, a Times editorial, "Spiral of Hate," identified Kennedy's killer as a "spirit": The Times deplored "the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down" Kennedy. The editorialists were, presumably, immune to this spirit. The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people's defects."

I did not realize the "hatred of the right" meme began this far back.  Fascinating and horrifying.  

Force Dressed Up in Sheep's Skin


  • Says an FB poster:
    In a democracy, voting isn't a matter of force. We agree as citizens to accept the vote of the majority, unless it contravenes constitutional rights. When we are on the losing side, we accept the law (albeit grudgingly), because that was the implicit contract before we voted. When we are on the winning side, we expect our opponents to accept, too. The "force' is the voice of the people.
    16 hours ago · Like · 1
  • Paul Eich rick, I couldn't disagree more. When the guy comes up to you with the gun and says pay up, that's force. Pretending it isn't is delusional. You can say force is ok with you, but denial that it is force is ... unclear thinking. FWIW, we do not have a democracy. We have a representative republic, because the track record for democracy is poor. The republican form was chosen to limit the amount of force the government could legitimately utilize against individuals. Those limits have only been reduced since the signing of the constitution - almost no examples of limiting the govt's force, numerous examples of how the govt can use more force against you or me. I'm for laws that reduce the way the govt can legitimately use force to make you do what I want, or that me do what you want. Putting a cloak of "might makes right" on force doesn't make it anything other than one group (in our case the political class) making us do what they think is good.

AGW - Are You a Govt Licensed Scientist?


  • My comment:
    This is funny. Imagine the shame of someone who "casts doubt on the science" of AGW. The POINT of science is to doubt! The scientific method is based on the idea that you cannot trust scientists, especially yourself. This article is like a man holding a religious book saying "It says right here this is all true." The relationship between the scientific method and opinion/consensus is like the relationship between ... any two things that are totally unrelated. And that is all the IPCC has - opinion. But at least IPCC is more sure of itself now, it used to be only 90% sure of it's opinion of the cause of climate change, now it is 95% sure. Oh so scientific ...
    My friend Ike replied:
    My personal favorite is when someone with a degree in 17th century Croatian poetry scoffs at my lack of understanding the "science", as though they are at home with beakers and lab coats, testing and retesting their theories until they attain a level of certitude that I simply can't argue with... When a non-scientist mocks my lack of understanding of "the science" I'm always like, you do realize that you are just taking someone's word for it, right? You are not an actual scientist... you know that you didn't do the science, right?
    18 hours ago · Unlike · 1
  • Paul Eich Ike, I get that, but being a "scientist" isn't like being a pilot - you don't get tested and licensed, and you can fork it up all day and still have folks call you a scientist. The point of the scientific method is that scientists (with academic degrees or not) cannot be trusted. You can be a scientist and know 1000% more facts about bristle cones and models and what forces what - but there's still no model that predicts the climate, so there's no "science" that is revealing what "causes" climate change. Until causality is determined by the scientific method, the "science says" we don't know. You could be a dumb ass naval aviator and still understand that just as well as a guy with a degree who does nothing all day but take donations to study climate.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Charles Krauthammer: The way out - The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-the-way-out/2013/10/10/9dc2e70a-31e2-11e3-9c68-1cf643210300_story.html

Works for me, but usually the deal has to allow both parties to claim victory, and that means nothing substantially good results.  I don't think any of those clowns have an end game yet.  Obama just seems to want a pyrrhic victory.

Limited Government


We know better now, even the most deluded of us. We’ve read the text messages, heard the tapes, followed the paper trail, met the hundreds who were deceived or diminished or destroyed by their association with him. The evidence is overwhelming: He simply robbed our city blind.
And we know that, however unwittingly, we were coconspirators as well as victims, because we empowered him. That’s the downside of living in a democracy, where elected officials can betray only what voters have entrusted to them.
Kilpatrick is still a mirror, but instead of reflecting our lofty hopes and dreams, he reflects our gullibility, our vulnerability, our desperation. It’s not a pretty picture, and we are impatient for something more attractive to look at.
http://www.freep.com/article/20131010/COL04/310100165/Brian-Dickerson-Happiness-Kwame-Kilpatrick-our-rearview-mirror-video-
Limited government.  Less power, less abuse of power.

Left the Victims to Clean Up the Mess


Government leaders stripped the economic motor — business — out of Motor City, and there was nothing left but a burned-out chassis. And the real victims were those who didn’t have the means to flee — who didn’t have the ability to escape Detroit’s slow-motion suicide.
In 1999, 34.8 percent of Detroit’s children lived in poverty. A staggering 60 percent of its children live in poverty today. They are stuck in a dysfunctional city, with little hope of escaping the maze of federal programs that run their lives.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/360788/dont-detroit-america-lee-habeeb-mike-leven

The government elites make the messes, and those with resources leave to find a better option.  The ones left to clean the mess are the ones with no options.  Thank you government.