Logosphilia

Rough days ahead

2008-12-04T09:37:00.003-06:00

I almost feel bad for Obama, actually. Well, about as much as I feel bad for Bush. Contrary to what most presidential candidates (and most people) think the president has very say in what will define his term. The only recent president without significant surprises was Clinton, who instead manufactured his own. Carter was defined by OPEC and Iran; Reagan by the USSR and a recession (and subsequent recovery); Bush by the Gulf War; Clinton by... a Republican congress, sex scandals, and a non-war in Bosnia which is directly related to NATO / Russian tensions today; and GWB by 9/11. What will define Obama's presidency? He ran on getting out of Iraq. By the time he takes office, his position on that will be largely irrelevant.

Things Obama will have to deal with:

The possible demise of NATO. NATO represents an era of foreign policy in the world defined by long term alliances between many nations against a mutual threat. That era may well be over. Germany's chancellor essentially told NATO to shove it during the Russo-Georgian incident a few months ago. NATO is struggling to maintain a coherent face to the rest of the world, largely due to stresses induced on it by the global financial crises, a resurgent Russia and the ongoing fight in Afghanistan. It's being pulled apart. Without NATO we are back to an environment of short, shifting alliances similar to the 19th and early 20th century.

A Resurgent Russia. Russia was largely a non-factor on the world stage for the past decade. Other than a few fits of pique involving Ukranian natural gas contracts, threats of energy supply cutoffs to Europe and an internal rebellion in Chechnya which was ignored by the rest of the world, Russia has been relegated to obscurity. That all changed when Russian troops invaded South Ossetia and nearly toppled a US-backed state in the process of applying for NATO membership. It was a direct statement to the rest of the world. Russia is reasserting itself in its sphere of influence lost in the breakup of the Soviet Union. The opportunity exists because the United States is stretched thin due to deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and because NATO is no longer coherent enough to object. The world is discovering that the EU has no real power, and the UN has been a joke for decades. Russia was seemingly deliberately baited by NATO membership hints to Georgia, the Western-inspired Orange revolution in Ukraine (a nation which was direct geopolitical consequences to Russia, including Mediterranean port access, pipeline control to Europe, and geographic defense value), and western involvement in the Balkans during Clintons term. Now they have the opportunity to object to these perceived threats, and they are taking full advantage of it while it lasts.

A deteriorating state of affairs in the Indian subcontinent. One of Obama's first, and possibly most important, challenges will be to pick up where the Bush administration leaves off in India and Pakistan. Condoleeza Rice is heading to Islamabad after she finishes in New Dehli to try to prevent a crisis between the two nations. However, there are fewer and fewer options available to all players. India, driven by public opinion within, must react to these attacks. They must assure their populace that a similar attack will not occur again, much as the United States was forced to react to 9/11. The only way they can accomplish this is to address the growing factions of militant Islam functioning with increasing boldness in Pakistan. So far this has been limited to a demand for Pakistan to control these elements of their populace and military. If this does not happen, they may follow the US model in Afghanistan: namely, that a nation providing asylum or aid to terrorist interests is acting in a state of war and react accordingly. This will result in a crisis of some sort, anywhere from a buildup of troops on the border to artillery or airstrikes into Pakistan's interior.

Pakistan is in a state of near-crisis. The civilian government is almost insolvent and seems to be at direct odds with the military government, which is a separate entity. The civilian government is writing checks it cannot cash in an attempt to prevent crisis with India. They are caught between a rock and a hard place with the US and India. The United States is demanding (via Obama's incoming administration's statements) that they increase their participation and cooperation on Taliban and al Qaeda factions in Waziristan along the Afghan border. They currently have 100,000+ troops stationed along that border. However, action against the militant Islamic factions is not very popular with the Pakistani population, and even less so among factions of the military and intelligence services. How mainstream those factions are will be seen in the coming days. Any threatening action by India will result in a movement or reaction by Pakistan away from Afghanistan and toward India, which will upset the US. Any significant action against the Taliban or other militant Islamic factions may result in a failed state or elimination of the civilian government. A failure to act in any meaningful way will result in increased US cross-border attacks, which will also stir public opinion against the civilian government.

Afghanistan / Iraq. Directly related to the former, Obama will have to deal with realities in Afghanistan -- namely, that without a significant increase in troop levels or a drastic change in policy, the US will not win in Afghanistan. The Taliban is too entrenched in "off limits" areas to directly engage. Without NATO involvement (see above) or Pakistani compliance, the US will have to go it alone -- a proposition most of the population is not ready to face. If the Indo-Pakistani crisis develops into a real mess, the options for the US in Afghanistan will rapidly decrease. The Bush administration is preparing for this already. Gen. Petraeus has already began to float indications of negotiations of some sort to reconcile Taliban factions into the existing government. This is very similar to the recent about-face the Bush administration did on their stance with Iran in the face of the Russian crisis. As Russia asserts itself, other geopolitical issues must be reprioritized. US "agreements" with Iran and Iranian factions in Iraq led to a not-good-but-OK solution in Iraq. If not a US-friendly government, Iraq will at least be, for now, a US-neutral state. Obama will be left with this tenuous arrangement and will be the deciding factor in the future of Iraq. Again, this future is largely out of his control, as most of his options will be reactionary.

And that doesn't even begin to factor in all of the mess on the economic front -- all the better, too, because he seems hell-bent on following the path of FDR and the New Deal. It wouldn't make his future look any brighter.

The biggest problem for Obama is going to be that the decisions he must make have no happy answers, particularly for his base. He will be, as all successful politicians, a pragmatist. This is why his cabinet has been largely Clinton retreads and middle-ground people. This will make a lot of people happy, but it will (and has) infuriate large portions of his base. He will have to consolidate his base of power while navigating through decisions that have no win-win solutions. We'll see how he does -- and how long it is before people evaluate Bush fairly.

The kine that tread the grain

2008-11-12T16:04:00.002-06:00

This is something that I've been thinking heavily upon in the past few years. I find our current system of no-cost universal suffrage to be unsustainable. Therefore, in the spirit of preserving our great nation, I propose that we continue to make suffrage universal but no longer make it free.

Let me explain. I do not want to deny anyone the right to vote. Attaching a cost would have that affect, but in the end it is not the desired outcome. Instead, I want all people to place a higher value on the votes that they can cast. Rather than voting being a meaningless thing with no value attached to it that we must do once every few years, I would like voting to be something that is cherished.

People do not value that which they are given, or that which they do not earn. This is the greatest single failure in mass socialism. If we accept this, why do we continue to allow an unjust system of entitlement to continue in this nation? The bottom 50% of workers pay less than 3.5% of taxes while the top 5% pays over half. And yet the votes of the bottom 50% of earners count every bit as much as the votes of the top 5%. This is not fair. Furthermore, this is unsustainable in a climate where politicians willingly pitch class warfare as a campaign platform and where people view the rich as evil, greedy and selfish.

As long as the American citizen can freely vote to steal money through reapportionment of wealth we will be caught in a downward spiral where fewer and fewer people are pulling the cart, and more and more are riding it. Eventually, Atlas will Shrug.

To counterbalance this I have a few proposals. The first and most logical is this -- a nonprogressive income tax based on a single flat percentage of income. For those who do not currently pay taxes, this would be a burden -- but what sort of justice is it where a man who works hard may come out with less than a man who does not work? Why should a greater and greater amount be taken out of a paycheck for increased success? This is perhaps the simplest and easiest way to eliminate some of the pain of the current system. Under a nonprogressive, universal income tax everyone would have a fair stake in the game.

An alternative to this would be to keep the current progressive tax system but require that one must present that year's income tax return showing a net positive amount paid to the government in order to vote in that year. This is similar to voting on "shares" in a corporation except that it does not afford the rich more votes based on the increased amount of dollars. However, the principle is the same -- if you want to vote, you have to buy in. There is absolutely no valid reason for a person who has not even paid the "cover charge" to get to decide how the nation is run.

A third idea is to have anyone able to vote based on some sort of earned suffrage, which must be universally available. By that I mean that anyone should be eligible to earn their citizenship, but that it must nevertheless be earned. Citizenship would, under this system, be voluntary. I feel this is a strong idea, but the devil is in the details. What would qualify a person for citizenship? Public service, of course...but what constitutes sufficient service to the public? Military service, would be one, including the national guard and the reserves. Would being a fireman or a police officer count? How about a doctor or nurse?

My tentative answer to this is to allow any person of any vocation, skilled or otherwise, to opt to work for society for a specified amount of time to earn their suffrage. Thus, a bricklayer could lay bricks for, say, five years. An engineer could engineer; a soldier could soldier; a doctor could doctor. No vocation is worth more than any other...and if you're unskilled, there's no harm in that: you join the military.

The crux of the matter, though, is that at the end of the day they would have to buy in to the system. Suffrage would come with a price -- greater for some, perhaps, but a price nonetheless.

Under this system there exists the risk of tyranny: the citizenry riding roughshod over the non-suffraged members. But aren't we at that point now anyway? The tyranny of an unchecked majority? We see the effects of a rabid, unlimited "democratic" majority in the French Revolution -- is that what anybody wants? Furthermore, suffrage would be guaranteed to be universal: if you don't like it, sign up and then vote. It would end the never ending deluge of complaints about the system.

In summary, I believe that the kine that tread the grain should be rewarded. In that train of thought, though, those that do not tread should not eat.

Thoughts

2008-11-05T18:55:00.003-06:00

This is a random mishmash of thoughts about the election.

I hope the right doesn't act like the left has for the past eight years. I hope I will never hear the hatred or vitriol towards President Elect Obama that I heard against Pres. Bush -- things like "chimpy mc hitler" or "shrub". For starters, it's childish, and it's unbecoming of a nation to eat its own like that. The Right has consistently decried the Left for "Bush Derangement Syndrome," most disgustingly personified in the attempts of the Left to sabotage anything they deemed to be associated with Bush, including our efforts in the GWOT. Let's not be hypocrites now, hmm? As some guy recently said, "Country First".

Another thing I hope is that people like Buckley were right and he'll tack toward the center, thought I doubt it. We know very little about this man, and, frankly, he has very little reason to do so. Now, his popular vote is hardly a mandate (though keep and eye out for the media to spin the electoral college mismatch as such... a thought process strangely absent from the Bush wins) but he is very nearly immune to approval ratings for a year at least, given the fact that his party controls the senate and the house convincingly. I don't think most people realize this but as things stand he will have more power on his inauguration day than most presidents ever realize across their entire terms. With that in mind, why on earth would he tack center? Particularly if his personal ideology is far left (as I believe it is)?

The timing of the credit crunch is particularly...humorous, given its origins in leftist legislation. Just as it seemed we were finally free from the malaise left to us by Jimmy Carter, in comes Obama to capitalize on the meltdown cause largely by the community reinvestment act. I don't believe most people have an understanding of the financial crisis or its underlying causes, making the story that the economy won him the election all the more bitterly ironic.

As an employee of an industry that is tied at the hip to both the power generation and energy sectors I have particular concerns with Pres. Elect Obama's energy plans. My employer's customer base varies from paper mills to electrochemical companies but is by far represented the strongest by power generation and oil & gas production. This gives me double cause to pause, as the plan to defame the coal industry alongside "evil Big Oil" will not only pain me on an ideological level, but possibly on a practical (read: employment) one as well. Coal fired electrical plants make up a very large portion of our electrical infrastructure. Coal plants are wonderful for baseline electrical loads. They represent cost efficient, reliable, and proven technology. Many coal plants under current regulations actually exhaust air cleaner than they take in (specifically plants in states with strict regulations such as California). The campaign against them is foolhardy and, if taken to fruition, will ultimately bankrupt an industry which employs tens of thousands while simultaneously increasing costs on every item every consumer buys. Ever tried to do much of anything without electricity? Why fix what ain't broke?

The next few thoughts I'd like to share came to me as I was trying to go to sleep last night. When the networks began calling the victory for Obama, cheers, whoops, and yells began to ring out in the apartment complex I live in. I heard shouts of "Praise Jesus, he won!" "Obama! Yes we can!" and other similar cries. Shortly thereafter I began to hear arguing over his victory, whether he was a good choice, and shouting of a different sort.

A few things occurred to me as a I began to think about it. One, that anyone who is excited enough about this election (or any other) is likely due for an extreme letdown.

As the media is already noting, this does not erase the history of race in this country, for better or for worse. It does not prove that people are (or are not) racist, and it does not fix the tensions between people. Judging from the shouting match I witnessed last night, it may have exacerbated the problem. This election was not unifying on any level -- race, party, or geography. Furthermore, I don't really believe that it was intended to be. Divisiveness has fueled the political machine in this nation in ever increasing amounts for the past twenty years. Why should it stop? It should be noted that most of mention of race in this campaign came in the form of unfounded accusations and threats of threats from Obama's own party!

These people who are so deliriously ecstatic are going to wake up in their same beds, with their same jobs, their same lives tomorrow as they had the day before. People can not, must not, look to external secular leaders to give their lives meaning or happiness, hope or joy. To do so is inviting disaster. Obama's victory brought elation to those who voted for him, and perhaps rightly so. But to assume that it will somehow transform this country for the better is sheer foolishness.

Those particularly ripe for letdown are blacks in this country. I am a strong critic of the current state of black culture in this country. I feel that the lack of a father figure, the prevalence of single-mother households, and the chip-on-the-shoulder victim of white oppression angle has severely handicapped black America. Unfortunately, Obama's victory does nothing to assuage these serious concerns, and in reality his brand of politics will most likely lead to legislation that will be to their detriment. His choice of preacher is telling, as are his constant "reminders" to his race, the so-called "plight" of blacks in this nation and the hearty serving of guilt to the "rich white people" that "caused" it.

I wish him the best of luck in upholding the duties which he will assume once sworn in. I will support him as an American in defending America and fulfilling the obligations of his office. However, I will vehemently oppose him in any endeavors to swing our free market further towards socialism, to increase the dependence of the poor on the government, or to limit our strength militarily. I hope others on my side of the political spectrum -- and on the opposite side as well -- will be similarly thoughtful.

Finally, this election has proved to me one thing beyond all possible doubt: the ignorance of our nation will be our downfall. Take that for what you will.

Where has all the warming gone?

2008-10-14T19:33:00.002-05:00

Seriously, wasn't the polar ice cap supposed to totally disappear this year? Or something like that?

Instead, enter reality:

Two hundred years of glacial shrinkage in Alaska, and then came the winter and summer of 2007-2008.

And this:

Cold temperatures set several new record lows this weekend, including a low of 22 Saturday in downtown Pendleton that broke a 118 year-old record of 24.

Record lows started falling Thursday with a new low of 20 for Meacham, four degrees cooler than the previous record from 2006, according to information from the Web site for the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Pendleton.

Heppner and Long Creek then set new low temperatures Friday. Heppner hit 29, the coldest that date has seen since 1960 when it was 30; and Long Creek was 21, besting the 1987 record by four degrees.

And...this, too:

Temperatures dropped to 31 degrees in the Ukiah Valley on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, the coldest Oct. 12 morning since record keeping began in Ukiah in 1893, said Troy Nicolini, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Eureka. The previous record was 34 degrees in 1916.

As always, the disclaimer: Anecdotal evidence is beyond stupid as support or condemnation of global warming. I only point these out as a foil to the increasingly shrill comments and stories presented by the mainstream media linking warm-weather aberrations to global warming.

Poor form!

2008-09-29T18:05:00.000-05:00

In my own pet theory I think Pelosi intentionally goaded them with that speech, and probably had members of her caucus vote Nay as insurance, to make this bill fail. It's win-win for them: if the bill fails, and the market is ok, they don't have to sully their little patty-paws with an on-the-record vote that was fairly unpopular; however, if the market tanks (check) and continues to do so, come Thursday it is likely they will have enough political capital to do pretty much whatever they dang well please.

That? That would be bad.

Poor form, house Republicans. Poor form indeed.

Burning Down the House

2008-09-26T09:19:00.002-05:00

This shows in 10 minutes what I've posted over the past few days. Enjoy.

Also, check out the Hot Air and Biz Lizards post to see how the democrats are trying to use this crisis to:
1) Pump federal funds into sympathetic groups such as ACORN and The Urban League. This a means for them to federally fund their elections.
2) Continue their subversive campaign against free markets by slowly but surely nationalizing the finance district completely. What started in 1913 may reach fulfillment today.

Isn't it funny?

2008-09-23T21:50:00.001-05:00

When Jim Cramer said this everyone laughed. Maybe he isn't as dumb as everyone always says? Seems to me he was dead on the money...almost a year ahead of the curve of the media.

Sick of it!

2008-09-23T19:56:00.006-05:00

I'm sick and tired of hearing people -- on the left and the right -- say stupid things about the financial crisis.

First, let's get this clear. This is a problem caused by aggressive social engineering by the federal government, from Carter to Clinton. However, at this point the funds that have been poisoned by shady lending practices—tranching and re-tranching of MBS and CDOs until nearly everything carried an AAA rating—have been come so prolific that liquidity is essentially gone. We were <--this--> close to having a freeze on commercial paper last week. We almost had a $200Bn run on money market accounts, one of the most stable places for capital in our entire financial system. This is not a “small thing”. This is not the S&L crisis; this is potentially much, much worse.

Credit: Casey Research for graphs.

The bad thing about this situation, this crisis, is that it is complex—so complex that it is not easily condensed into modern news story sound bites, so that most of the people in this nation have no clue whats going on, other than a vague notion of “financial crisis". Most don't "get" what those graphs above imply.

Namely, this -- commercial paper is the grease that makes our economic wheels spin. It's what allows you to use credit cards, what enables companies to expand, to buy new assets, and to enter new income streams. It is to a major corporation what a home loan is to an individual -- a way to reach financial goals that would otherwise be completely impossible to attain. And it was getting so expensive, and so scarce, that it nearly collapsed. That would be, as they say, "bad".

Secondly, please people -- don’t bash the Paulson-Bernanke plan yet. For one, the outline proposed pre-Democratic meddling is not a bailout. It is an extension of capital in exchange for marked-to-market poisoned assets, most of which worthless and legally nonviable under current accounting rules. This allows banks to get the junk off of their balance sheets. It’s like a get-out-of-jail-for-billions-card. This is not a free pass. Banks with a lot of residential mortgage backed securities (RMBSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are going to lose a ton of money—on top of what they’ve already swallowed. This plan will pay them pennies on the dollar for assets that aren't really worthless...they're just not viable under the present financial situation and accounting rules.

For two, it stands to make the government quite a bit of money as the currently near-worthless BBB or lower rated assets will be sorted out, re-rated and sold back to the private sector, once federal intervention increases the transparencies of these securities. This is not a permanent Finance Czar, nor is it a $700Bn bailout—yet (we’ll see what Reid et al in the senate tack on to the bill). Please note that the $700 billion is a proposed spending cap, not a mandate. Additionally, the program is currently timelined at a two year horizon.

And, to answer the populists, of course people on Wall Street were complicit. These securities didn’t trade themselves, and everyone was glad to play along with the bogus rating system as long as it made them money. But make no mistake—this crisis is government caused and government reared. The Bush Administration tried no less than seventeen times in 2008 alone to fix this by, namely by increasing transparency and regulatory oversight, but Chris Dodd and others busily shoving taxpayer money into their pockets (or campaign coffers) blocked them at every turn. Aside from massive corruption, they did so because this plays right into the “capitalism is a failed system” playbook of liberals. If they can spin this as a situation that capitalism is inherently prone to suffer from, you can kiss a lot of our free-market principles good-bye. Prepare for nationalized everything, as clearly "irrational exuberance" must yield to "older and wiser heads".

Which brings up another thing that really irritates me -- on September 17, Harry Reid said this:

No one knows what to do...We are in new territory, this is a different game. [Neither Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke nor Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson] know what to do but they are trying to come up with ideas."

Well, someone must have got to him (and quick!) because he's definitely singing a different tune today:

"The Bush Administration has called on Congress to rubber stamp its bailout legislation without serious debate or efforts to improve it. That will not happen," said Reid.

Who the heck are you to criticize if just six days ago you were wringing your hands, meekly admitting that you hadn't the foggiest what to do in a situation like this?

The reason for his change of heart? Undoubtedly he got some nasty phone calls from corporate interests and lobbyists...which I imagine went something like this:

Listen you dolt, you're blowing it, blowing it! This is a chance for us to do something...[the perennial liberal mantra, of course] and get some power besides! Get back out there and do your job -- representing those who pay you best.

Sadly, it's apparent to me that people in Washington (on both sides of the aisle) are more interested in playing partisan and catering to their own interests than buckling down and getting things done.

I think the plan, as outlined thus far, is a good one. Here's to hoping they get it passed before Reid and his cronies can stick so much socialism into it (up for grabs thus far, partial nationalization of all affected banks, government mandated CEO salaries, and federal judges waiving mortgage payments) that it no longer does anything worthwhile -- or before they drop a half trillion of their own in an attempt to throw debased dollars at the problem.

Answers -- The Case Against BO

2008-09-19T13:25:00.005-05:00

As Ronald Reagan once said, "...it isn't that our liberal friends are wrong...it's just that there's so much they know that isn't so."

There's so much you know that isn't so! I'll take it point by point, because there's a lot to work with here.

First of all, the premise of my former post was that Obama has run on himself. He didn't really run on ideology because in the later stages of the primary, he was the same or left of Clinton. He ran on the idea he's created that he is the embodiment of change, that he will drastically cut military spending and move to reduce nuclear arsenals, on populist platforms (a nice word for socialism) that would increase drastically the amount of government spending, on blame-game politics that, clearly, everything that goes on in this world that is bad is the direct result of the Bush administration, and that, most of all, he isn't the same kind of politician. He's going to heal the divide (and the planet) and change Washington because he isn't really a politician...he's a community organizer.

And then we've got some liberal hack running interference for him when he reneges on all of those promises (Get Out of Iraq Now, the Post Racial Candidate, I Will Take Federal Campaign Funding, I Will Not Resort to Negative Ads, to name a few) and begins playing politics as usual saying that, somehow, that that too is reformative and changing! What a magnificent feat Obama has accomplished! He has come full circle! He has changed so much that he is now the same. How's that for a moment of zen?

But then the commenter Matt races in to denounce my idealism, my ideas of how this is to claim, somehow, that we're all the same and that the only differences between parties is who is in charge. I profoundly disagree.

To start with: bipartisan reform. There is one word for two definitions. When McCain says bipartisan, he means, in my opinion, "I don't care what letter comes after your name, if you're willing to work with me let's go...if not, get the hell out of the way". This is the attitude of a man who is above party politics in that he doesn't identify with either party; you can see this theme running through some of our founding fathers, such as Adams or Washington. Like McCain, both of these men did things that made them profoundly unpopular within their own parties. Do I agree with everything McCain has done? Good gracious no. Is he my ideal candidate? By far, no! But he has some things in common with GWB that I respect. The aspect of their character that allows them to go against the flow even when it is vastly unpopular that I respect most of all is their conviction. They believe what they believe and they don't need polls or focus groups to determine that for them -- a stark contrast to The One, who has bent and flopped and flailed with the prevailing political winds.

The second working definition of bipartisan reform is that of the left, which largely means "we're going to do this; if you don't like it, you're a partisan hack, and if you do then welcome aboard". This is the theme of Barack Obama, the Clintons, and founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson. They don't view political parties as an annoying but necessary evil to get things done. They use political parties as a bludgeon to muscle their way into getting their way. For better or worse, Democrats toe the party line far better than Republicans do. There are way more RINOs than DINOs -- because, by and large, Republicans do more cross-aisle work than Democrats. Similar to the fairness doctrine, for some, bipartisanship...isn't.

Secondly, the idea that Barack Obama isn't an idealogue is ridiculous! Look at his political connections (those he has -- his sidelines are conspicuously empty of friends, allies, or longtime supporters). His list includes folks from as far left as can be, including William Ayers and his pastor of twenty years, who is "like an uncle" to him, Jeremiah Wright. Where are his friends? His vouchers for his character? Everyone who knows him, so far, has been shushed up or totally abandoned.

There are no similarities to John McCain on this. McCain has a history of praise from both sides of the aisle over the past two decades because he does what he thinks is right -- whether it upsets his party or not. Did he vote with his party 90% of the time? Sure -- but he also stuck it to them with the Gang of Whatever the Number Currently Is when it came to judicial nominees. McCain's party voting record varies from 67% (2001) to 95% (2007). By contrast, Obama has voted with his caucus 97% of the time. Who is really the embodiment of independent, bipartisan change here?

You want me to cite examples of change? How about McCain's longtime stance against earmarks and pork-barrel spending? Or the funneling of money to candidate's campaigns and districts? Or sketchy deals with lobbyists? It's easy to contrast: Obama has requested over 740 Million dollars in earmarks in his extremely short career (including money funneled to the Hospital that employs his wife and amplifying pork to his campaign bundlers), and has become the Pork Barrel Champion. He picked a long-time porker and Washington insider for his running mate. And in his time in the senate he has managed to become the number two recipient of money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when the list is sorted on donations from 1989 to the present with $126,000 in two short years. The only person that outranks him on this list of dubious honor is Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking committee -- another case study in corruption.

By contrast, McCain has $20,000 in donations over twenty years from Fannie and Freddie, a figure which is irrelevant by comparison. Incidentally, McCain tried to reform Fannie and Freddie as a consponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, saying:

If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

Unfortunately, the bill never made it out of the committee headed by Chris Dodd.

McCain has never used an earmark and is known on both sides of the aisle as an enemy of pork. He has promised to veto any bill that comes across his desk with earmarks on it. Is this possible? I don't know, but at least it's a start.

Oh, and that bridge to nowhere that Obama is saying that Palin was for before she was against? He and Biden both voted for the earmark -- twice, the second time coming when Sen. Tom Coburn motioned to transfer the funds from Alaska to Katrina relief efforts, which they both voted down.

Moving right along:

It goes without saying (to anyone with a brain) that the current economic crisis we're in is the direct result of excessive deregulation.

I really wish you had the time, inclination, or lack of ignorance (and I mean that genuinely) to realize that the current financial situation of the US is far more complex than anyone can sum up in an short statement like that. This isn't the place to go into it, because it involves complex ideas like commercial paper, leveraging, the paradox of deleveraging, liquidity, inflation and deflation, rates, federal mandates, meddling and lawsuits -- but the short answer is you're flat out wrong. This financial situation comes from one place and one place alone: The Community Reinvestment act of 1977, pushed by Jimmy Carter and overwhelmingly voted for by Democrats. This act was later "put on steroids" by the Clinton administration in their efforts for social engineering. The essence is that the government demanded that banks find a way to lend money to poor people -- whether they could rate it or not. The quick method of how they did this was federal subsidies in the forms of low rates and loans to Fannie and Freddie, who then leveraged out the market. Was Wall Street complicit in this? Sure, takes two to tango. But the Bush Administration saw this coming and tried to fix it, 'way back in 2005, as reported by none other than the New York Times:

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios....

''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''

Which party caused this crisis again? If anything, it was government meddling in the free market, and then a lack of regulation to prevent corruption that caused this crisis. It wouldn't sting so badly if you didn't frame your opinion as if it were an obvious, absolute truth.

Next...

The only real tangible differences as far as I can tell between these two candidates are their plans for taxes and healthcare.

If you genuinely believe this then either you have no political ideology or you're completely ignorant of the ideology of the two parties. This goes as far back as 1964 when Reagan told us that Social Security, supposedly a government backed insurance program, was actually being funded as a welfare program, and was of course bankrupt -- $220 billion in the hole, 44 years ago. It comes down to who's side your on; the government's, or the people's.

Liberals believe that everything can be solved by government intervention. And when that intervention fails, by creating new and better government programs to right the mistakes of the previous intervention, and so on. Socialism in this country will never come the way you seem to expect it to, in one glorious Proletariat revolution. It comes stealthily, through foot-in-the-door tactics such as social security and medicare, nationalized healthcare, FEMA and Federal intervention to state matters in which they have no constitutional mandate, farm programs and subsidies, or the building of baseball fields, museums, parks or housing, or demanding that Wall Street loan money when and where the Fed decides.

These aren't new questions or problems. The answers offered by either campaign are recycled, too. But the point is that these changes to government are largely irreversible. We haven't seen, ever, a retraction in the size of the Federal government -- or a retraction of its sucking up of personal liberties, either. The campaign comes down to which side your on. As Reagan said, and as is true for every election year, it is "a time for choosing". Socialism or capitalism? Personal freedom or personal security?

Almost done -- stick with me. To deride McCain as a flipper is ridiculous. McCain is who he is. He's a Maverick. He isn't a strong conservative -- and that showed in the lackluster response of the base in the primaries. He's wooing conservatives through Palin, who (apparently) is a conservative. But he's more conservative than Obama, or rather, he's less conservative than Obama is socialist. As for the list of "flipper" subjects:

"pro-choice, anti-torture, pro-gay rights"

McCain has never been "pro-torture". He hasn't changed on that issue even when it meant voting against his caucus. He has a 0% rating with NARAL when it comes to being pro-life -- it doesn't get any better than that -- and exists as a sharp contrast to Obama's record of voting for infanticide, allowing babies born alive during procedures to be intentionally murdered via exposure and neglect, all in the name of supporting abortion. Obama, by the way, has 100% voting record in all three of his years in the senate with NARAL and has earned their endorsement. Who's not to the left of his caucus?

As for gay rights, I'm not sure what your point is -- McCain has a record of leaving gay rights up to the states and despises the idea of judicial legislation, as strong a conservative support of federalism as can be.

Finally...

Ever notice how our side doesn't repeat bottom-feeding, dishonest attacks like that one, even when we have more material to work with?

Are you freaking kidding me? Seriously? I mean really???

Update for 9/20: How long should I keep posting evidence?

Thanks for the laugh.

Rationalization

2008-08-08T22:23:00.004-05:00

This is the most amazing case of rationalization I've ever seen:

That attitude [of anything to win politics -Ed.] is why charges of flip flopping against Obama will not work. Voters expect the next president to be willing to change his position if necessary to get government moving again. In fact the willingness to change to adapt to new realities is viewed as strong not weak politics. What is weak politics is polarization and inflexibility. The politicians and their polarizing special interest allies who play that game will be rolled by the voters especially if the voters are encouraged to do so by a charismatic cable guy president who is seen as willing to find reasonable consensus in order to "get 'er done".

None of this is to suggest that Barack Obama lacks a moral compass. What he is blessed with rather is an internal compass with the capability to lead us from here to there. No one argues that staying where we are is acceptable. Most agree on where the there is we need to go be it healthcare reform, ending the war, protecting the country, or educating our kids. The only question is how we get there and who has the ability to lead us there. In other words, who can "get 'er done".

I really don't think most "voters" want a president who will "get 'er done" -- because that's as vacuous, vague and empty as "hope and change". What, exactly, is he promising to get done? It isn't as if conservatives and liberals are promising the same actions with different means; if that were the case, this argument would hold water. But they're literally trying to take the country in opposite directions. How can methodology and ideology be irrelevant?

One other thing -- aside from demilitarization, denuclearization, and massively socialistic policies (all of which actually put him to the left of his party), the only thing Barack Obama ran on was his lily-white political ~~naivete~~ purity and his denunciation of politics as usual. He was promising the exact opposite of pragmatism and cold, calculating political maneuvering. If Beckel is truly outlining Obama's plan then he is anything but a "new kind of politician". He's just a really, really good old style, Chicago Rules candidate.

If he doesn't have the "New Politics", and he doesn't have the liberal ideology...then why would anybody in the nation vote for him?

Oh, and read the "about the author section":

Bob Beckel managed Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign...

(Where he lost in a landslide, winning only DC and his home state of Minnesota, losing the election by a "score" of 13 - 525, making him the worst loser of the Democratic party ever: quite a feat.)

This is the guy who managed the worst campaign in modern political history. How is his opinion even remotely close to relevant?

Reformed Alarmist: Global Warming Not Anthropogenic

2008-07-24T22:06:00.003-05:00

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.:

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I've been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

In the brilliance of daylight, the straw man arguments that socialist power-grabbers like Al Gore have put up are withering away. Even ideologically motivated scientists can only lie to themselves for so long.

I wonder how long it will be, now, until the global warming movement is well known to be an utter and complete hoax? And how long from that point will it be, then, to the time of backlash and anger for the fast one they pulled on everybody? My guess is that, unfortunately, due to widespread media support it will never get that far.

Give me a Freaking Break

2008-07-18T23:09:00.005-05:00

This sob story seriously almost made me vomit. I know him a heartless and cruel person, but honestly, someone has to be with me on this one, right?

A generation ago, the livelihood of Gloria Nunez's family was built on cars.
Her father worked at General Motors for 45 years before retiring. Her mother taught driver's education. Nunez and her six siblings grew up middle class.
Things have changed considerably for this Ohio family.
Nunez's van broke down last fall. Now, her 19-year-old daughter has no reliable transportation out of their subsidized housing complex in Fostoria, 40 miles south of Toledo, to look for a job.

Sad, isn't it. Just wait, there's more:

Nunez, 40, has never worked and has no high school degree. She says a car accident 17 years ago left her depressed and disabled, incapable of getting a job. Instead, she and her daughter, Angelica Hernandez, survive on a $637 Social Security check and $102 in food stamps.
...The rising cost of food means their money gets them about a third fewer bags of groceries — $100 used to buy about 12 bags of groceries, but now it's more like seven or eight. So they cut back on expensive items like meat, and they don't buy extras like ice cream anymore. Instead, they eat a lot of starches like potatoes and noodles.

Gasp! Horrible! Outrage. Can't you read? They're starving.

...Wait til you see their picture:

Now, really. Really? Looks like they could use a little less money in food stamps to me. Or maybe less car driving and more bike riding. And definitely cut out the ice cream.

All fat-jokes aside, if her father worked here 45 years ago and they "grew up middle class" that means she has absolutely no excuse for failing to graduate high school other than flat out listless stupidity, lack of a pulse, or a head full of mush. News flash to Ohio: if you lack the gumption to graduate from school and have never had a job at the age of 40 you are simply not going to make it in this world. (Aside: So she got into a wreck that left her depressed and disabled 17 years ago, sort of the way I'm feeling after reading that article and seeing that picture, I imagine. That still leaves her with 23 empty years spent on this planet as a worthless sack of flesh that did -- apparently -- nothing but eat, sleep and exist.)

Remind me again why I should feel sorry for this family of ne'er-do-wells? Or how anyone can justify completely wasting money supporting them in their sloth? At this point it appears that the government (that's funny-talk for you and me, by the way) pays for their car, their home, their food, and their clothes...but apparently not enough for a membership to a gym, therefore making their obesity our fault, see? In the process of dropping out of public school she must have skipped the day in PE where they teach you the food pyramid -- and also the one where they went over push ups and sit ups.

Now to turn my ire upon a different target. Who the heck wrote this piece of trash? Yuki Noguchi? What can you possibly call this other than cooking the books?

Low-income families in Ohio say they are particularly hard-hit by the changes in the economy, according to a new poll conducted by NPR, The Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard School of Public Health. Two-thirds of lower-income respondents, or 66 percent, say paying for gas is a serious problem because of recent changes in the economy. Nearly half of low-income Ohioans, or 47 percent, say that getting a well-paying job or a raise in pay is also major problem.

Well, duh? If getting a well-paying job or a raise wasn't a problem, they wouldn't be low-income.

Only half of the poor people in Ohio, apparently, aren't satisfied with being poor. The only tragedy I see here (aside from the picture above) is that the other half of the "low-income" bracket, whatever that may be, apparently is fine with staying poor. If you're a low-income Ohioan, or American for that matter, that ought to be a major problem when the economy is up or down. What bigger problem could you have?

Contentment and sloth are cousins; one comes before the other.

Responding to stuff: Part 1203958123091

2008-06-12T22:22:00.006-05:00

A friend sent me this article saying:

I mean, I don’t claim to know a lot about the situation, but I DO know that 90% of those people are wrong.

I read over it, and I think he's right...the comment section (and the article itself!) is a mishmash of wishful thinking, financial super-secret advice of the type you typically receive in penny-stock spam email, and some solid points.

The article? Oh yes -- a six-pronged thrust "Plan-B" (financial, not contraceptive) akin to the Fed's bailout of the financial markets to counteract the very real threat of skyrocketing oil prices. The author suggests that

Asian countries should remove all energy subsidies from their economies, allowing the cost to rise and (hopefully?) demand to fall
The EU should set a maximum tax on "petrol"
Non-OPEC nations reduce or eliminate royalties or taxes on new oil production in their nations
American political candidates should campaign to reduce American oil imports by 5% a year
All oil tax revenues should be earmarked to "renewable" non-oil or "zero-carbon" research
All commodity speculation should be ended, now.

The author states that by following these points the market would anticipate the drop in demand, causing oil prices to fall now, not later when the drop actually hits.

(Aside: wouldn't that be speculation? This article even starts off badly, titling itself "Oil is too important to leave to market forces". In one of the many paradoxes of this rather shabbily thought-out production, the author is requiring market forces to combat market forces -- and speculation to fight speculation. Oh well, fight fire with fire, I always say! If you want to get rid of ignorance you should just...be more ignorant, perhaps.)

But the point here wasn't to fisk the article; it's bad enough as it stands. There were actually some writing-worthy comments in the section. Gleaned from the bones of this very rotten piece of typewriter excrement, I have prepared for you a smörgåsbord of worthwhile conversation topics -- and my responses to them, to boot.

We are on the downward slope of oil production (not temporary). Because various VI's including governments wont admit to this for financial and political reasons, scapegoats will abound and every pundit in the media will have a simplistic but incorrect answer.

Wrong! Massively wrong! Incalculably wrong. That is, for the reasons this person thinks. Or at least what I think they think. The usual suspect for someone spouting this drivel is that Oil Is About To Run Out. This couldn't be more wrong. Even relatively easy-to-get oil isn't going to run out any time soon -- estimates vary widely that "Peak Oil Production" is going to occur anywhere from before now to 2012 to 2112. The Society of Petroleum Engineers hangs it's hat on 44.6 more years from now...counting officially reported reserves.

However, boys and girls, this doesn't take into account unproved or unreported reserves or "unconventional oil sources", such as tar oil, heavy oil, tar sands, or the massive pile of oil that is the bedrock of the Rocky Mountains. Oil shale reserves represent anywhere from two to four trillion barrels of oil -- or at least twice that of the reserves held by Saudi Arabia. There is more oil in the tar sands of Canada than we've used so far...as the human race.

So, are we going to run out of oil? No. Will it get more expensive? Yes. But, as our reader(s? perhaps?) know, not all of this is actual supply-demand economics!

To make a long answer short, this commenter is an idiot and utterly uninformed. His excuse is contained in his comment -- he's a product of modern media information dissemination.

If you curb 'speculation' in consuming countries, 'speculation' will move t[o] bid up prices on producing nations exchanges like Russia and Iran. This would remove any incentive to keep prices down and result in much higher prices. Actually there would be much, much higher prices and shortages.

and

The last point on speculation: maybe it is the wrong way round. Consumers are disappointed by higher prices because they are unprotected. They couldn't lock-in forward prices when they were lower. Speculation in oil is much lower that other financial mkts. Broader participation is better.

These are very good, very solid comments. Bravo to them! Speculators are actually good for markets. They take on risk that larger companies won't or can't; bigger risks for potentially bigger rewards. Not to mention the fact that by taking on this risk, they allow the bigger players to "read" the market more effectively without wagering any of their own capital. A great example of this is the masterful utilization of contract-buying and speculator-using being displayed by Southwest Airlines. They bought their fuel contracts at the right time. There's a reason they're the only airline posting positive numbers.

There is more than enough sunlight to answer the world's energy needs, and the technology is there to exploit it. The electric car is already a viable form of transport and can be developed much further.

It is vested interests that are deliberately blocking such developments.

and

It seems to me that the replacement of income tax by a carbon tax on finite fossil energy resources will both remove a disincentive to work, while ecouraging the development of alternative renewable energy sources and the more prudent use of those whose supply is not limitless

This worries me. No resource is unlimited. Solar cells require gallium arsenide, cadmium telluride, or copper indium selenide, as well as massive amounts of silicon -- all of which are found in, shall we say, limited quantities lying around your garage or growing in a field. Where do people think solar cells come from? Storks? How about wind turbines? Do we find them in cabbage patches? (Actually, wind turbines come from India). It takes energy (and steel, and mining, and carbon fibers, and rare-element ores) to make these things.

If people really want to be "sustainable" we need to kick it back a few centuries, because wood grows forever. But oh-- that causes global warming! And it would be a huge step backwards towards a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".

Additionally, should US taxpayers continue to subsidize the rest of the world market by providing the backbone force protection for the major sea lanes internationally?

AK - Next you'll be saying that it should be illegal to hedge against monetary inflation. Sounds like FDR speak and oil is the new gold. Why do you avoid writing about the last few years of G8 currency debasement and the effect this has had on the price of everything?

These are three very interesting comments. They speak for themselves and really should just get gold stars for thoughtfulness.

Forgive my cynicism - but isn't a combination of weak dollar and high oil prices a very good way from the US to prevent rapid Chinese and Indian economic growth and everybody blames the Chinese anyway?

Now this is a very thought-provoking idea. I don't truly believe the Bush administration is crafty enough to pull something like this off, though I wouldn't put it past any administration. The weak dollar policy helps American trade numbers by driving up exports and pushing down imports, making it more or less expensive to trade depending on the direction.

By direct corollary, a weak dollar hurts China because it literally makes their products more expensive. Combine this with the fact that commodities such as oil and food are on the rise (due to the weak dollar, in part) and you get a lose-lose situation for China, as they must allow their currency to rise in order to stay out of the wringer -- which ties into point one of the original article. However, America is essentially a big customer to China's cheap production. While we may have geopolitical motives to prevent them from becoming an economic behemoth, we also hold the keys to their livelihood. We can take our business elsewhere. While it would hurt our economy, it would not destroy it as it would theirs.

It's food for thought, at least. The situation would play out as described, but I don't know if that is by design or by coincidence.

Finally, the winners for pure succinct literary gold:

Politicians can only block or unblock. They never create anything. Politicians caused the world's energy prices and cannot be the solution to them. I confidently predict that future generations will look back and marvel how private enterprise will have solved what will be viewed as a minor problem.

Either you're a capitalist or your're(sic) not.

Need I say more?

Oil price surge: market forces or inflation?

2008-05-22T20:03:00.007-05:00

The other day I saw a chart that showed the value of the Dow in absolute terms, by dividing it by the price of gold to remove inflation. I thought that was pretty clever, so I made one of my own using historical prices of oil and gold going back to 1975 on a percent change basis. What I found was interesting.

Methods (boring, I know...): I indexed the price of oil, the price of an ounce of gold, and the price of a gallon of gasoline in yearly increments -- December of each year, to be exact. All percent values are referenced to the original values in 1975, or $160/oz gold, $12.21/bbl oil, and $0.53/gal gas.

The first interesting thing is that when you adjust for inflation, the price of oil has not changed that much since 1975 -- about 1.8 times. It steadily dropped until the 90's, and then began to rise again (presumably on the heels of a global rise in demand from China, India, etc.). Even so, it is my observation that the drastic numbers we see today are more of a result of inflation than the rise in global demand, or at least the rise that can outpace supply or production growth.

The second interesting thing is that irrespective of oil prices, gas prices have not kept up with inflation. The cost of a gallon of gas has been more stable than the price of a barrel of oil but they don't track on a 1:1 ratio. When oil hit its lows, it fell lower than the cost per gallon...but now that oil is at its highs, it has risen more than the cost per gallon. This is strange considering the fact that the amount of gasoline produced from one barrel of oil is the same no matter the price of crude.

Gas is 1.2 times more expensive in ounces of gold per gallon now than it was in 1975...compared to 1.8 times the change in a barrel of oil. Also, it's interesting to note that on an absolute value scale, gasoline is actually cheaper now than it was in 2000. The real kicker, though, is that over the past decade the absolute value of oil has increased about six times, while gasoline's absolute value has increased by a factor of 1.6. To put these numbers in perspective, if the price change of gasoline was to match the price change of oil, gasoline would cost $5.28 per gallon.

This leads me to believe two things. One, that oil companies are somewhat immune to changes of the price of oil on the commodities market since they buy and sell from themselves, essentially making the price of oil irrelevant for oil they produce. Vertical integration is their friend. Two, that oil companies actually do control the price of gasoline, not through collusion but through market economics. And this information leads me to believe that they have intentionally stabilized gas prices over the years! I think that ExxonMobil and others understand that if the economy tanks, they tank, and vice versa. So in the 90s, the price of gas did drop as much as the price of oil did, and now they're actually subsidizing the price of gas under the shadow of forcing the economy into a recession -- and reducing their profits short term profits. "Big Oil" is in the same economic boat as all of us, and they're maximizing their profits over the long term for that reason.

Finally, the effect of inflation on the global commodities market is staggering when looking at these graphs. It is yet another reason to curb government spending and end the Fed's (and the Bush Administration's) policy of a weak dollar.

So what's the real story here?

2008-03-30T11:51:00.004-05:00

It's getting increasingly difficult to discern the true story of events going on in Iraq. Is the operation in Basrah a massive failure, or a success? Is al-Maliki fighting an enemy he can't handle, or is he acting as the executive of a free nation should?

I can't honestly tell you because I'm not there. Part of the reason its difficult to figure everything out is because the news reports coming in are massively conflicting. Take a look at these articles, for example. Bill Roggio's report from the Long War Journal is considerably more "factual" in tone while reporting more positive information, while the AP calls the situation a "mounting crisis".

Here's a taste of the cherry picking that's going on (emphasis mine):

Anti-American Shiite militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his followers Saturday to defy government orders to surrender their weapons, as U.S. jets struck Shiite extremists near Basra to bolster a faltering Iraqi offensive against gunmen in the city.

But to my eyes, Sadr's government-defying order was actually a form of pseudo-surrender:

Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, who is in Basrah supervising Operation Knights' Assault, has given the Mahdi Army 72 hours to lay down their weapons. "We are not going to chase those who hand over their weapons within 72 hours," Maliki said. "If they do not surrender their arms, the law will follow its course."

Muqtada al Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist movement, is calling for an end to the fighting, according to a statement released by Hazem al Aaraji, a close aide to Sadr. He called for "everyone to pursue political solutions and peaceful protests and a stop to the shedding of Iraqi blood."

I've never heard of someone who is winning crying "uncle" -- certainly not someone who has shown repeatedly to have no compunctions about the shedding of his follower's blood, as Sadr has.

His reason for waving a gray flag is apparent in Roggio's dispatch, but is curiously absent from any of the AP reports: 120 Mahdi army members killed, 450 wounded, another 218 captured -- and the strength of the Iraqi army presence in Basrah has been elevated to over 15,000. US forces have killed an additional 68 Mahdi soldiers in Baghdad, with similar body counts all over the country. He's not worried about shedding Iraqi blood; he's tired of the bloodshed being one-sided!

To make matters worse for the Mahdi militia, Al-Maliki is actually in Basrah, supporting his troops. And Sadr? He's a non-entity in this struggle, relying on his headquarters in Najaf to make his announcements via press release.

Maliki has given a 72 hour ultimatum for the Madhi army to lay down its arms. I'm curious to see how the situation unfolds.

Keep your anti-American propaganda filters up, kids -- this is shaping up to be another media battle a-la Tet offensive.

Global climate change strikes again!

2008-03-19T20:47:00.002-05:00

We're coming out of the coldest winter in a decade. The Washington Times runs an article on global cooling. Here's a list of other articles that cover the subject:

Earth's 'Fever' Breaks: Global COOLING Currently Under Way; Report: Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling (Daily Tech – February 26, 2008;

Forget Global Warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age (Canada's National Post – Feb. 25, 2008);Arctic Sea Ice Sees 'Significant Increase' in Size Following 'Extreme Cold' (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation -CBC – February 15, 2008);

Ice between Canada and Greenland reaches highest level in 15 years (Greenland’s Sermitsiak News – February 12, 2008);NewPeer-Reviewed Study Shows Arctic COOLING Over last 1500 years;

Antarctic Summer Thaw 'Later Than Normal' (AccuWeather Global Warming News – February 6, 2008;

Report: Sun's 'disturbingly quiet' cycle prompts fear of global COOLING (February 8, 2008 - Investor’s Business Daily);

Solar data suggest our concerns should be about global cooling – (By Geologist David Archibald of Summa Development Limited in Australia – March 2008 Scientific Paper);

Report: Too Much Ice = Polar Bears Starving? (Scientist Philip Stott’s Global Warming Politics – February 15, 2008);Report: Solar Activity Diminishes;

Researchers Predict Another Ice Age - Sunspots have all but vanished in recent years. (Daily Tech – February 9, 2008);Scientist predicts 'Coming of a New Ice Age' (Winningreen February 2008."

And now this:

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

Or, you know, it could mean that the ocean waters haven't heated up.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says.

...Don't be alarmed. Global warming is still real.

So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

That's funny. To me, cooling doesn't = less rapid warming. There's a bit of a directionality issue involved in that statement.

It's also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it's possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don't know about. It's an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate.

Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.

But don't worry -- the science is still settled. Right?

Petraeus and Hillary

2008-03-19T20:25:00.002-05:00

I almost don't even want to write this because it's so totally and completely unsurprising to me. The ultimate reason I'm doing it is because I want to gloat.

Remember, if you will, when Hillary Clinton censured Gen. David Petraeus with these words, lecturing to him as if he were a child:

"...You have been made the de facto spokesman for what many of us believe to be a failed policy. Despite what I view as your rather extraordinary efforts in your testimony both yesterday and today, I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.

In any of the metrics that have been referenced in your many hours of testimony, any fair reading of the advantages and disadvantages accruing post surge, in my view, end up on the down side."

She then proceeded to vote against the senate amendment that would have defended and honored Gen. Petraeus. Remember?

That was then, this is now:

As critical as she is about the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a relatively rare shout-out to the military’s top man in Baghdad, General David Petraeus, calling him “an extraordinary leader and a wonderful advocate for our military.”

Extraordinary leaders aren't liars or shills for other politicians as she implied. And they're certainly not so stupid as to misrepresent (or misunderstand) their own two day long statistical presentations to congress.

I wonder if her sudden change of heart has anything to do with this?

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of Multi-National Force - Iraq, spoke with reporters accompanying Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is visiting the country.

The security trend lines all are favorable (still) , the general said. “Attacks have continued to go down. We’ve had a five-month period consistently of a level of attacks we’ve not seen since spring of 2005,” he said. “This past week was the fourth-lowest since October 2004.”

Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker will explain why they believe attacks have come down when they report to President Bush and Congress (again).

The general said he is encouraged by the statistics and what he sees around the country. “In fact, the level of attacks has come down in recent weeks below a level we thought might be the ‘irreducible minimum,’” he said.

Emphasis, and italicized comments mine.

I know the guy won't be snarky in his testimony; he's too much of a professional for that. But wouldn't it be wonderful if he was? I would love to be in his shoes at the end of the testimony, just to have such a legitimate excuse to smirk.

Obama's Stupidity

2008-03-18T21:37:00.003-05:00

Obama has been trying to promote "race healing" but it occurs to me that the wound of racism in the United States has long since scabbed over...and the only time it continues to bleed is when people who stand to benefit from their vampirism (e.g., Barack Hussein Obama or Jesse Jackson) pick at it.

...See what I mean?

2008-01-27T23:53:00.000-06:00

As if to underscore the first paragraphs of yesterday's post...

They had small means and big hopes of owning a house. But African-Americans snared in the US mortgage crisis have seen the American dream turn into a nightmare many call "financial apartheid."

The storm triggered by risky "subprime" loans has left many in ruins, forced out of their modest homes and furious at falling victim to financial dealings that have taken a particular toll on minority families.

"People of color are more than three times more likely to have subprime loans," concluded the organization United for a Fair Economy in a recent report which estimated that minorities have seen between 163 billion and 278 billion dollars of their equity go up in smoke since 2000.

HUD, Racism, and lending crises

2008-01-27T00:45:00.001-06:00

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development or HUD seems to exist to sue companies on behalf of poor people. Unfortunately in this country, due to reasons we've discussed here in the past, poor folks in the US are disproportionately black. Don't forget that now. When you hear things about "unfair lending practices" what they're really talking about is race, and when you hear "racist lending practices" what they're really talking about is poor people. So re-read the first sentence of this paragraph. It's not surprising, though, when you consider that HUD is itself a massively racially motivated organization:

The U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development long has had an aggressive minority hiring quota program. An Office of Personnel Management report released this year shows that HUD has deliberately over-hired blacks by 382.9% more than their proportion in the civilian work force. White employees are routinely denied advancement within the agency in order to give preference to designated minorities.

But I digress...

So the All-Fathering Federal Government lays down a few lawsuits to fight ~~racist~~ unfair lending practices. Now, banks and real estate companies like their money and don't want to lend it to ~~black~~ poor people because traditionally poor people of all colors are very bad people to lend money to; that's why they're poor. But because poor people in this country are more often black than any other color, this is seen as banks not lending money to ~~poor~~ black people. See the game now?

The next step is for Uncle Sugar to force lenders to loan money to ~~poor~~ ~~disadvantaged~~ urban people by suing the pants off of them every time they turn someone away who is a minority, a woman, or who has bad credit. Banks react to this by a game of cover-your-tail; they'll grant a loan to anyone, provided they can make sure they get what they want out of it -- namely, some money to show for the risk they take on.

Enter the famed Adjustable Rate Mortgage! No money down, an attractive loan for folks who can't manage their money (also known as poor people). Not to mention the fact that hippies against urban sprawl have incited an near-national land crunch leading to a housing shortage which has caused a supply-side real estate bubble.

Now the stage has been set, the die cast. We've got lenders acquiescing under pressure to loan money to high-risk borrowers, people who have no business getting loans being granted credit, and pressure from the underside forcing real estate prices up. More and more people are buying stuff that they can afford today...but not tomorrow.

Because, you see, when the value of your property goes up...so do your taxes. And when the Fed raises rates to fight inflation, your payment rises with it. Just like magic, a payment that was $900 per month can blossom into the lovely figure of $1,400. Also like magic, people mysteriously disappear from their houses and once-viable loans dissolve into foreclosures.

That's the end, right? A novice may assume that the end game is economic pressure due to a reluctance to lend or invest money -- once bitten, twice shy -- which is essentially the same thing as raising the interest rate. But the discerning reader would know that this scenario is far from over.

The interest rate was cut by .75% the other day, the largest single-day decrease of my entire life. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop after hearing that. The situation was just too juicy for the government to pass up. And then it happened: George Bush and congressional Democratic leaders were going to cook up a plan for the Government to bail us out of this mess that Countrywide caused.

To the unaware, this seems great. To be sure, I'm not going to rip up my $600+ check. But I'm not thankful for it. As you now know, this whole mess is because of government meddling to begin with -- and now they presume to fix it? Isn't this the classic create-a-problem-and-then-solve-that-problem tactic people so often accuse "Neocons" of? This is a perfect chance for big-government elitists to flex their muscles and further entrench the perceived need for government bailouts. The bureaucracy must expand to meet the needs of the bureaucracy.

Here's great quote describing the scenario (from an article linked earlier):

It is time to recognize that fair housing laws have become largely pretexts to allow politicians to stretch their power and to plunder one industry or target after another. Insofar as people are schooled to believe that government power is inherently just, thus far will people be abused and exploited by the State.

And that's how race baiting can push an economy into recession...and how selective delivery of information can keep an entire nation completely in the dark as to the real reason behind the machinations of our government.

Random thoughts

2008-01-26T23:46:00.000-06:00

I never wanted to turn this into a periodic diary-blog, but I'm kind of bored with politics right now. I feel as if I'm reaching a point with the current political field that I can just link to old blog posts and save time, rather than commenting on current articles. It's a Saturday night, and some friends of mine just left. I'm flipping through Drudge and ABC to read, and I really see the same old things.

Obama vs. Hillary is a race vs. gender campaign that neither of them will take credit for or acknowledge that they're using it to their advantage while simultaneously pointing the finger at each other. The Democrats are finally seeing the nasty side of the Clintons and noticing, perhaps, what most conservatives have known all along -- they're not really nice people. They're power hungry and they'll do just about anything to get it.

The Republican side is a mess. There's only one real conservative, and he ain't doin' so hot.

The MSM has completely dropped Iraq from its focus, even though yes, there is still a war going on...and yes, we're winning. There's no articles to discuss because they're playing the politics of omission, and drooling for the chance to pound Bush on the economy.

Speaking of the economy: though waiting with baited breath to announce a new depression thanks to the Bush administration, no stories will come out about how racially motivated this whole situation is.

But Ah ha! Finally something worth writing about!

I didn't know this about myself

2007-12-19T23:25:00.000-06:00

The brush the leftists use to paint the right is large.

IN THE SPIRIT of the season, the following is an open letter to readers of the Drudge Report (that'd be me):

Gee, gang, why so angry? Every time a column or article of mine gets posted on the site, I invariably wake up to a torrent of hostile emails. For awhile, it was like a perverse "Where's Waldo?" game -- "Oh, that one's rage-filled and anti-Semitic -- I must have made Drudge!"

Frankly, all this vitriol seems slightly misplaced, given that there are so many outlets now for people who would write such things. Starting with prison.

Just for the sake of argument, let's concede you're correct in your suspicions that the traditional media -- you know, the one largely controlled by General Electric, Disney, Time Warner and News Corp. -- are completely under the thumb of left-wing anarchists. On the bright side, there's the Internet and talkradio, and you (that is, Drudge readers) clearly have access to the web, which puts you way ahead of your shoeless forebears or toothless cousins. So cheer up!

I learned a few things about myself reading that. I thought all my cousins had teeth. And here I was thinking folks on the Left were against "stereotypes" and "profiling". Apparently its OK as long as you're bashing Southerners and Republicans.

Admittedly, given the dire financial state many newspapers face, it's nice being reminded that people are reading at all out there -- even when the reaction comes in the electronic equivalent of crayon.

As far as I know, the biggest problem newspapers have is that their readers (or potential readers, or past readers) resent the constant implications that they're stupid.

Perhaps if members of the old media paid more attention to their readers instead of writing us all off as stupid, toothless, prison-bound morons they wouldn't be going bankrupt?

Interesting

2007-12-19T23:14:00.000-06:00

Time magazine is interesting. I was at first upset by their selection of Vladimir Putin as Man of the Year. I even began clicking through my links to find stories about his evil rule, stories about people like Anna Politkovskaya his "fiercest critic", about his throttling of the free press in his nation. I admit, I was indignant. Petraeus was on the list of candidates after all. How dare they?

And then I read their disclaimer:

TIME's Person of the Year is not and never has been an honor. It is not an endorsement. It is not a popularity contest. At its best, it is a clear-eyed recognition of the world as it is and of the most powerful individuals and forces shaping that world—for better or for worse. It is ultimately about leadership—bold, earth-changing leadership. Putin is not a boy scout. He is not a democrat in any way that the West would define it. He is not a paragon of free speech. He stands, above all, for stability—stability before freedom, stability before choice, stability in a country that has hardly seen it for a hundred years. Whether he becomes more like the man for whom his grandfather prepared blinis—who himself was twice TIME's Person of the Year—or like Peter the Great, the historical figure he most admires; whether he proves to be a reformer or an autocrat who takes Russia back to an era of repression—this we will know only over the next decade. At significant cost to the principles and ideas that free nations prize, he has performed an extraordinary feat of leadership in imposing stability on a nation that has rarely known it and brought Russia back to the table of world power. For that reason, Vladimir Putin is TIME's 2007 Person of the Year.

I can buy that.

If the media (including Time magazine) had proportional representation of Putin as a world-changer and actually covered his actions as a fledgling dictator rather than spend their time moaning about either the Bush economy or Iraq (depending on which one is doing poorly) perhaps this recognition would come as less of a surprise.

GCC: The problem

2007-12-16T01:57:00.000-06:00

In a continuation of a series of posts that I'm breaking up for my own purposes (specifically, so that I can reference them individually at a later date) I'll explain my take on the Big Problem with the state of affairs that exists surrounding global warming.

Communication.

There, wasn't that nice? You could probably do the same thing to define the Big Problem in a lot of areas, but you'd be speaking (writing?) more tongue-in-cheek than I currently am.

Science is a funny thing. I don't think many people understand the kooky world that is academia. To get into the club you have run a gauntlet of various tasks that will take no less than 4 years after the successful completion of a bachelor's degree. A graduate student must take the GRE, apply to a school, get in, find an adviser, figure out how to pay for school (funding, the four letter word of research), pass qualification tests which reassert the right for him to even be there, complete a rehash of his education within his field of study thus far, conduct research, write copiously about the research, have these papers subjected to the fury of his adviser, rewrite these papers, submit these papers, have them subjected to the peer review process (which can be daunting, if done correctly), write an all-encompassing description of his work known as a dissertation, and finally defend not only his dissertation but himself and his knowledge of his field in front of a jury of his superiors. This is a process that occurs in series. Any failure in any of these steps will result in the student being thrown out on his ear, or having to start all over.

So scientists are stuck up. They often develop God-complexes, especially once they're tenured. They tend to be smart, and the writing that is accepted as scientific is full of jargon, math, and is so highly stylized that it is almost its own language, which results in papers that may as well be in code to people who aren't in the club. Sometimes papers are so obscure and esoteric that a PhD isn't sufficient to gain insight or true appreciation for a paper -- but instead a thorough understanding of the basis of the research being explained is in order. Quantum physics can be explained in a matter of moments, provided you have the ten years' worth of math and physics required to understand the equations.

To be sure, you don't need a PhD to read 90% of the papers out there. You don't need to be a scientist to understand them, either. But it does require a large amount of diligence and fortitude, patience and perseverance to get through a paper which is built on a body of research that proceeds backwards through reference after reference, each with little or no explanation beyond a footnote. That is to say, most particular journal papers. And who has that kind of time on their hands? Most folks can't be bothered to read the whole newspaper, much less a fifteen or twenty page paper in two-column format written in ten-point font with itty-bitty figures (and smaller font captions that are two and three sentences long).

Unfortunately for the world, this leads to the intelligentsia making proclamations that often mean little to anyone but others in their club. They discover important stuff, and it needs to be disseminated to people who lack technical education, even to laymen. This is where the media gets involved.

I don't know if you've watched CNN lately, but those guys and gals don't have doctoral degrees. I mean, heck, Katie Couric doesn't even know what "sputum" means. The people writing the stuff that's fed into their teleprompter don't, either. This is where things like the IPCC policy committee come in.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is more than one body of scientists pounding away on their keyboards, Prometheusing us into understanding of climate change. There is a "working group" (i.e., the guys with doctorates) and then there's a committee of people dedicated to take what the scientists say and translate it into one- and two-syllable words so politicians don't get confused or scared and retreat behind their staffers. Thus, the Third Assessment Report is condensed from 1,000 pages into 20 to create the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM).

Think about that for one moment, if you will. Understand, please, that scientists may be wordy in their writing, but they're not superfluous. 1,000 pages exist in the IPCC third report because 1,000 words are necessary. It's like trying to take War and Peace and summarize in a page...you may get the gist, but you won't love Pierre Bezukhov after reading it. (A nice explanation of the variations and impact of this sort of scenario exists here. Happy reading!)

That isn't to say that the SPM is wrong. But I can tell you right away that it almost guarantees that the plethora of news articles, statements, and sound bytes it causes will have as many errors in them as an installation of 32-bit Norton antivirus onto Vista 64. (That's a lot, by the way).

And so politicians misunderestimate what the scientists say. And the Katie Courics of the world tell the laymen the wrong information with cute segues with titles like "Global Warming: Are We All Going To Die?" and you get a big, fat mess. A poster child for this scenario is the Kyoto Protocol. Another is the phrase "George Bush doesn't care about polar bears". Another is anyone who tells you that the science of climate change is settled (yes, that would be Al Gore, specifically).

And there you have it. Whatever the science may say, unless you actually read the publications or chat with the scientists who wrote them you're probably not getting the correct story.

To alleviate this problem, I try to read important or relevant journal papers. I also visit quality climate change blogs such as World Climate Report, which is written by climate scientists and describes itself as "...a concise, hard-hitting and scientifically correct response to the global change reports which gain attention in the literature and popular press. As the nation’s leading publication in this realm, World Climate Report is exhaustively researched, impeccably referenced, and always timely."

Thus, reader, my assertion is that it is absolutely vital for anyone who wanted to really argue with me about global ~~warming~~ climate change to discuss science. Not popular opinion, not "common sense", not conjecture or hearsay. Science. And that means papers, math, and logic. And that's why I always attach the following disclaimer to my posts about cold snaps, snowfall records, and unseasonably cold temperatures:

Anecdotal evidence is beyond stupid as support or condemnation of global warming. I only point these out as a foil to the increasingly shrill comments and stories presented by the mainstream media linking warm-weather aberrations to global warming.

If you want to debate GCC with me, find a journal article, read it, digest it, formulate an opinion based upon it, and get back to me. Because that's what I do.

Some Nomenclature

2007-12-16T01:42:00.000-06:00

Since people seem to want to discuss global ~~warming~~ climate change, I feel an obligation to make my position more lucid. To do so, however, requires a brief review of nomenclature as sometimes I talk like an engineer -- and I always tend to think like one.

First: data is data, theories are theories, and facts are facts. Truth is something else altogether.

Data cannot be true or not true; it simply is. There is good data and bad data, but this is a subjective measurement and usually has more to do with how the data is displayed, explained, and used than the actual numbers themselves. There is an entire field of mathematics devoted to the interpretation and use of large data samples. An overview would require defining accuracy vs. precision but I'll leave that to the reader.

Data is the one thing that is incontrovertible in the entire GCC argument. NASA has tons of it through the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) which has been attempting to compile the huge amount of data required to accurately quantify the temperature of the earth. The use of such data is what falls into the gray area of life.

Second on the list of what's what is theories. A theory is not a guess...not in science, anyway. A theory takes data (see, this is coming in handy already) to explain observed phenomena. Global warming is a theory because it explains the change in temperature as recorded by the various recording agencies.

A fact is something that doesn't really belong in a scientific discussion. One definition is a truth known by observation or recording, or something that is incontrovertible. However, "facts" are based on data which is never infallible. Thus in science, nothing is fact. Everything works more along the lines of it's working so far, and we expect it to continue to work in the future, but we can't make any promises.

Recently a blogger threw some data at me and said I was wrong for using a different data sample and making a point with it, only he called "his" data "facts". Now, perhaps, you can understand the dismay I felt upon reading

You, once again, do not do anything in the way of even attempting to challenge that fact. You simply ignore it, like 99% of the facts that I put on here.

I attack you on the merit of the facts that you present in your arguments.

How on Earth is anyone supposed to respond to something like that? I'll answer my own question: with a post like this.

Publications

2007-12-16T01:17:00.000-06:00

I have stated many times that most of what is thrown around about global warming is "smutty psuedo-science" and isn't fit to be printed in a scientific journal alongside real research. There's more than just my random opinion behind this, and I feel as if I have at least some qualification to say this as a published author (in the journals Carbon, Langmuir, and Synthetic Metals).

As a scientist, and engineer, and a researcher, I understand what goes into writing a paper. I understand what an impact factor means to people and how huge it is to be published in Nano Letters, Science or Nature. What I don't understand is how theoretical modeling with very little actual research done or any real relationship to empirical data can consistently be printed in journals with impact factors higher than 5; that is, journals that are more than topic-specific. To get into Nature for any subject other than global ~~warming~~ climate change a scientist must write a paper that has the ability to change the world (this is not a specific criterion, but Nature rejects over 90% of the submissions they receive as "not hot enough"). Papers that are only related to their specific field or which will have very little impact on a currently existing hot or important topic will be shuffled aside. Thus, broad journals such as Science and Nature publish only the cream of the crop while smaller journals such as Carbon publish only what is relevant to scientists who work with carbon based materials (e.g., polymer scientists and those who work with carbon composites).

Unfortunately, papers which do nothing to further science of climate change are submitted, "peer reviewed," and accepted into Nature all the time. More recently it appears that merely adding the phrase Global Warming to your paper will merit its printing. As a result, papers which really have no business whatsoever being printed outside of smaller periodicals (with smaller impact factors) such as the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (3.167) or the Journal of Climate (3.882) or, more appropriately, Global and Planetary Change (1.758) are instead printed in Nature (27.074) or Science (21.911).

Thus, true science is muddied by the force of politics poisoning the waters. Publications which don't "go with the flow" are ignored without review while papers that do nothing more than add yet another climate change model to the sea of models we're drowning in currently are ushered in with nary a challenge. (The peer review process itself is also highly questionable -- but thats a post of it's own).

Word of the Day, or, How Not To Look Ignorant

2007-12-14T23:43:00.001-06:00

The internet is a great place. I really love the fact that there is literally an unlimited amount of information readily available at my fingertips. It has its downsides, though. One is people who don't know how to use dictionary.com:

There's a difference between being a skeptic, and being a debunker. Skeptics will see both sides of an argument and admit the likelihood of both. A debunker will deny, deny, deny the truth, even if it slaps him across the face. Which one are you?

For your reading pleasure (and hopefully, edification):

de·bunk
–verb (used with object)
to expose or excoriate (a claim, assertion, sentiment, etc.) as being pretentious, false, or exaggerated: to debunk advertising slogans.

However wrong he may be on what the word debunk actually means, the commenter was right about one thing. There is a difference between being a skeptic and debunker. Anyone can be a skeptic. All skepticism requires is enough brain matter to choose to doubt. This doesn't necessarily include rational analysis of the subject matter or any real reason to do so.

The debunker, on the other hand, accepts the data as it becomes available and uses his own wits, intelligence, and logic to get through the claims made by others (true or false) with the express purpose of finding truth, and subsequently uses that truth to drown out the claims of the ignorant, uninformed, or intentionally disingenuous. Both parts are critical -- the man who finds truth and does not share it may be wise, but he's no debunker.

Based upon the actual definitions of the words in play, as opposed to the imagined ones of a sadly confused but nevertheless passionate poster, I'll gladly wear the mantle of Global ~~Warming~~ Climate Change debunker. It's the least I can do.

Clap clap, clap-clap-clap...

2007-12-05T11:48:00.001-06:00

....glo-bal war-ming...clap clap, clap-clap-clap:

The National Weather Service says the Grand Forks airport had 8.1 inches of snow yesterday, setting a record for the date. And Fargo set a record with 5.9 inches.

The previous mark in both cities was set back in 1926.

And this:

Portland tied the record for the date set in 1890 with 8.5 inches of snow on Monday, according to Bob Marine of the National Weather Service.

Elsewhere, Marshfield in Washington County had 18 inches of snow, Lakeville in Penobscot County 17 inches, Island Falls in Aroostook County 16, Brassau Lake near Moosehead 15.7, Farmington 14.7 inches and Andover 13, the weather service said.

The storm may have produced even more snow if it hadn't tracked farther out to sea that originally forecast, Marine said.

As ever, my disclaimer: Anecdotal evidence is beyond stupid as support or condemnation of global warming. I only point these out as a foil to the increasingly shrill comments and stories presented by the mainstream media linking warm-weather aberrations to global warming.

Don't ask, don't tell

2007-11-29T11:32:00.000-06:00

The insistence of liberals to pander to the sub-critical minority that is "alternative lifestyle" partakers -- also known as gay, lesbian and transgendered folks -- continues to irritate me.

Their latest pushing point to get the same-sex and same-sex sympathizer vote is a huge push to get rid of the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. The usual tagline is that our men and women are professional enough to deal with homosexuals being around them in their jobs.

To me, this is a totally and completely irrelevant statement. Our soldiers are professional enough to deal with a lot of things. They've gone without food, showers, basic necessities, seeing their loved ones. They've lost blood, limbs, sweated, cried, and died for this country. Can they deal with a gay man showering next to them? Of course. Would it destabilize our military to the point of collapse? No, assuredly. But that isn't the point. They're professional enough to deal with water rationing, too -- but that doesn't mean we should go ahead and do that.

There's two main problems with the idea of gays in the military. And by that I mean active, openly homosexual people. For one, it is an unnecessary strain one people who don't need more stress, and one that they are subjected to unwillingly. I don't care how non-homophobic you are, showering with a guy who you know is turned on by the sight of male genitalia is awkward. And it's something that someone who has no choice about where they live, fight, shower, eat and sleep shouldn't be subjected to. People in civilian life can choose to live in a "gay friendly" area. If they don't like the sight of men holding hands or kissing, they can leave, or move. It's their choice. Our men and women in uniform have no such luxury.

I've seen people get cute and say "oh, they can shower at different times" and "they're pros, they can deal with it". But would we let a homosexual male shower with the females? I doubt it. I doubt that our female soldiers would enjoy that particularly. But that would make "more sense" than having (letting?) them shower with men. Or if we did set them up by "gender" rather than sex...what about lying? Would the average 18 year old lie about being gay to shower with a girl? Perhaps not -- but would the occasional one? Have you ever met an 18 year old male?

Secondly, it potentially disrupts the cohesion of a fighting team. In the critical moments of combat as a commander I would want absolutely zero hesitation between private Jones and private Smith if I tell them to do something. I don't want private Jones, the stupid hillbilly he is, to even halfway start to grouse about being paired up with the Smith because Smith is gay. Furthermore, I don't even know what would happen if a homosexual relationship occurred in the barracks. That sort of thing is bad business, whether it's between a guy and a girl or two guys or two girls or whatever.

Currently the military doesn't mix quarters or (I believe) units by sex. I see no reason that this wouldn't be extended to sexual preference, as the case would become. I hate to be snide, but I can't help but imagining the homosexual unit passing in review. Parade would take on an entirely new meaning. The point being, having openly gay people in the military requires, essentially, that you provide new, separate facilities for them. It's impractical and a gigantic waste of logistic effort for a small minority to whom the question is almost entirely academic.

Finally, if our military is so dang professional, then there isn't a problem to begin with. If a gay man wants to serve, no one is stopping him. He just has to keep his mouth shut and do his job, and no one will say a thing to him. They can't even ask if he's gay (that's the first part of the rule, after all). Discretion is the better part of professionalism. If their patriotism is as fired up as their political views, then they can refrain from turning the military into yet another gay-rights battle, and leave it to do it's job.

Busy, Busy

2007-10-15T17:58:00.001-05:00

I've been kind of busy lately and I've neglected my blogging duties. Sorry! Hope to be back to regular updating soon.

Roo: It's what's for dinner

2007-10-10T15:47:00.000-05:00

This article falls under the category of "you can't make this stuff up".

MORE kangaroos should be slaughtered and eaten to help save the world from global warming, environmental activists say.

The controversial call to cut down on beef and serve more of the national symbol on our dinner plates follows a report on curbing greenhouse gas emissions damaging the planet.

It also coincides with recent calls from climate change experts for people in rich countries to reduce red meat and switch to chicken and fish because land-clearing and burping and farting cattle and sheep were damaging the environment.

They said nearly a quarter of the planet's greenhouse gases came from agriculture, which releases the potent heat-trapping gas methane.

Yes, I can see it now. No cars, no meat, no technology. And mother Earth will no longer be angry.

Can anyone take these people seriously any more?

Laughable

2007-10-10T15:45:00.001-05:00

Pot...kettle.

Former President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday denounced Vice President Dick Cheney as a "disaster" for the country and a "militant" who has had an excessive influence in setting foreign policy.

I really wish Jimmy Carter would have the decency to fade away like most former presidents do.

Decency

2007-10-10T15:43:00.000-05:00

Whoopi is way better than that nasty woman that used to be on The View.

At least she calls them like she sees them.

House Democrats

2007-10-08T21:14:00.000-05:00

...are so full of themselves it makes me sick. After droning on and on about the Bush administration's desecration of the constitution, they're going to go ahead and validated everything they ask for. Don't get me wrong; I'm not upset. I just wish they'd either get called out for their dualism or shut up.

Two months after vowing to roll back broad new wiretapping powers won by the Bush administration, Congressional Democrats appear ready to make concessions that could extend some of the key powers granted to the National Security Agency.

Bush administration officials say they are confident they will win approval of the broadened wiretapping authority that they secured temporarily in August as Congress rushed toward recess, and some Democratic officials admit that they may not come up with the votes to rein in the administration.

As the debate over the N.S.A.’s wiretapping powers begins anew this week, the emerging legislation reflects the political reality confronting the Democrats. While they are willing to oppose the White House on the conduct of the war in Iraq, they remain nervous that they will be labeled as soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on intelligence gathering.

A Democratic bill to be proposed Tuesday in the House would maintain for several years the type of broad, blanket authority for N.S.A. wiretapping that the administration secured in August for just six months. But in an acknowledgment of civil liberties concerns, the measure would also require a more active role by the special foreign intelligence court that oversees the N.S.A.’s interception of foreign-based communications.

A competing proposal in the Senate, still being drafted, may be even closer in line with the administration’s demands, with the possibility of including retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that took part in the N.S.A.’s once-secret program to wiretap without court warrants.

No one is willing to predict with certainty how the issue will play out. But some Congressional officials and others monitoring the debate over the legislation said the final result may not be much different than it was two months ago, despite Democrats’ insistence that they would not let stand the August extension of the N.S.A.’s powers.

You have to wonder

2007-10-08T21:12:00.001-05:00

Who picked the fruit before the Mexicans did?

Some farmers told Garza they expect some of their fields to remain unpicked.

Some said they believe their fields will end up filled with rotting produce.

The Bush administration has learned of the possible loss of millions of dollars for thousands of farmers throughout the country, and is attempting to loosen visa requirements for workers.

However, farmers told Garza the attempt is "too little too late."

The president has blamed Congress for failing to come up with acceptable new immigration laws.

Experts expect the impact on agribusiness to affect Americans' pocketbooks, Garza said.

Working in the fields is a hard job that few will do, according to Pete Aiello of Uesugi Farms in Gilroy.

I'll give you a hint. They weren't a minority.

Incidentally, this story is a lot of "some say" and "experts report" sort of reporting. High on speculation, low on facts.

Good Sense

2007-10-05T14:35:00.000-05:00

This is refreshing:

CNN Meteorologist Rob Marciano clapped his hands and exclaimed, "Finally," in response to a report that a British judge might ban the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" from UK schools because, according to "American Morning," "it is politically biased and contains scientific inaccuracies."

"There are definitely some inaccuracies," Marciano added. "The biggest thing I have a problem with is this implication that Katrina was caused by global warming."

The case stems from a father's claims that the film is brainwashing propaganda, who told The Telegraph, "I am determined to prevent my children from being subjected to political spin in the classroom."

Also, I'm enjoying Gore's continual refusal to debate anyone about the science he claims is so final. It's becoming rather telling, isn't it?

Seven hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money to spend to try to get someone to talk to you and not get an answer.

That's how much the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based libertarian think tank, has forked over in six months for advertisements in national newspapers trying to persuade Al Gore to debate one of its experts on global warming issues. "We have tried, repeatedly, to contact Gore directly, with registered letters and calls to his office, and have never received a reply," says Joseph Bast, Heartland president.
...
The Heartland case is not the first time Gore has ducked a forum. Earlier this year he canceled an interview with Denmark's largest newspaper when he learned it would include questions from Bjorn Lomborg, respected author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. "Gore's sermon is not one that will stand scrutiny," says Christopher C. Horner, another one of Heartland's debate candidates, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism.

Economy "Vibrant"

2007-10-05T14:32:00.001-05:00

Unemployment is up an ineffectual amount while thousands of new jobs have been added to our economy. This is good.

The national unemployment rate edged up to 4.7 percent from 4.6 percent in August and was the highest since 4.8 percent in July 2006 as the size of the labor force increased.

The department said 89,000 jobs were created in August, rather than the 4,000 that it reported last month were lost. It also said 93,000 jobs were created in July instead of 68,000 it previously reported -- a total of 118,000 more jobs in the July-August period than it had earlier estimated.

Bush lied, people found work and the economy did great.

Oops

2007-09-27T17:33:00.001-05:00

Again, her false and phony nature (she's a willow in political winds) shows through:

"It cannot be American policy, period," Clinton (D-N.Y.) told debate moderator Tim Russert, who asked if there should be a presidential exemption to allow the torture of a terror chieftain if authorities knew a bomb was about to go off, but didn't know where it was.

When Russert revealed ex-President Bill Clinton advocated such a policy on a recent NBC "Meet the Press" appearance, Hillary Clinton won huge applause from the Dartmouth College audience with a deadpan comeback:

"Well, I'll talk to him later."

She may have to give herself that talk, too.

Last October, Clinton told the Daily News: "If we're going to bepreparing for the kind of improbable but possible eventuality, then it has to be done within the rule of law."

She said then the "ticking time bomb" scenario represents a narrow exception to her opposition to torture as morally wrong, ineffective and dangerous to American soldiers.

"In the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans, then the decision to depart from standard international practices must be made by the President, and the President must be held accountable," she said.

Couric's ratings don't lie

2007-09-27T17:11:00.001-05:00

Katy Couric opened her yap in front of a bunch of other members of the press and said things that are revealing in more ways than one.

Couric was crystal-clear on both topics during a Tuesday-night seminar on "Democracy and the Press" at the National Press Club in Washington.

"Everyone in this room would agree that people in this country were misled in terms of the rationale for this war," Couric said, according to a report in the Washington Examiner.

"I've never understood why [invading Iraq] was so high on the administration's agenda when terrorism was going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan - and that [Iraq] had no true connection with al Qaeda," she said.

"The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying 'we' when referring to the United States and, even the 'shock and awe' of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable." (emphasis mine)

She reveals three things in this idiotic flow of thoughts.

Everyone in this room would agree.
Perhaps the most damning of all is the idea that a consensus of any sort exists on a topic which is still quite controversial amongst the "rest" of us in this nation. Then again, it shouldn't be surprising considering that the citizens of the United States are force fed ignorant drivel by the press all the time. Perhaps all reporters do agree that "Bush lied, people died"; if so, it gives everyone else all the more reason to mistrust their intentions and their statements.

[Iraq] had no true connection with al Qaeda.
This has been shown to be utterly and completely false. Even the One, Hillary Clinton, said:

[Saddam Hussein] has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001.

Couric and her media buddies have been peddling these lies for a long time. Again, as I find myself often saying to liberals, repeating or wishing for something doesn't make it true.

...saying 'we' when referring to the United States... was just a little uncomfortable.
Doesn't that just say it all?

Saddam and reassurance

2007-09-27T17:04:00.000-05:00

I read an article about Saddam and Bush which didn't surprise me and then read some comments that did.

"The Eqyptians are speaking to Saddam Hussein," said Mr Bush.

"It seems he's indicated he would be prepared to go into exile if he's allowed to take $1billion and all the information he wants about weapons of mass destruction."

I'm glad we didn't take him up on that. It would have been the Sudetenland of Islamic terrorism and the qualification of WMD information merely confirms it.

But the really interesting thing for me were the comments shown at the bottom of the page:

I shouldn't be shocked but I am - how deceitful. So basically we have spent the taxpayers' money and many soldiers lives on a war that could have been avoided. Blair and Bush have blood on their hands. There are many soldiers who have died fighting this war as well as many innocent citizens.

This is what I expected to see: idiots blathering about how Bush should've rolled over and given a mass murderer ample opportunity to develop a little shop of horrors on our dime. I was even going to write a post about it. But then I read another comment, and I realized I didn't have to (emphasis mine).

Political expediency is universal in every country throughout all of human history but at least democracies are capable of getting rid of their leaders.

Saddam was responsible for the development of weapons of mass destruction using materials supplied by the West which were also provided to many other countries who never chose to use them to develop weapons. Consequently Saddam became the biggest mass murderer of Muslims in the history of mankind invading Iran and Kuwait, arbitrarily attacking Israel and killing hundreds of thousands of his own innocent citizens. Whatever the arguments about the war, the world is well rid of this despicable murderous fascist who had clearly threatened the security of the entire Middle East.

I feel genuinely sorry for people who are unable to differentiate between Saddam, Bush and Blair. There were 17 (yes seventeen!) U.N. binding resolutions which Saddam ignored - more resolutions than any other country faced. The time for bland pathologic platitudes is surely over. Saddam could easily have avoided a war by acceding to the U.N's requirements for inspections. He above all others was responsible for this war - just as he was for all the other wars. The responsibility lies with him in his grave. The biggest criminal in all of this was charged and duly paid for his depravity just like those at Nuremburg 50 years ago.

Thank you, M Campbell of London. That was delightfully refreshing.

I feel bad for smokers

2007-09-27T16:53:00.001-05:00

The only reason this is a problem is because smokers are a minority.

Starting today, state Department of Revenue agents will begin stopping Tennessee motorists spotted buying large quantities of cigarettes in border states, then charging them with a crime and, in some cases, seizing their cars.

...State Revenue Commissioner Reagan Farr says his department is simply doing its job, enforcing a valid state law while protecting Tennessee retailers who properly pay state taxes.

The government is mad because they feel like these folks buying cigarettes out of state are effectively performing tax evasion. The smokers don't want to pay an arm and a leg in taxes. And the non-smokers in the state couldn't care less.

There's a few things at work. One, nobody (or not enough people to matter) complains about cigarette taxes because they're the current scapegoat for nearly all social evils in our society (alongside Big Oil). So smokers get the shaft for a lot of government spending hikes. Two, the government is the biggest thief in the world and has fooled its citizens into thinking that they "owe" things to it.

Government is by its very nature a massive parasite. It creates nothing and only exists as a necessary evil. It leeches off of its citizens solely to prevent them from killing each other or being killed by citizens of other countries. In the relationship of remora and shark, government is the remora. Unfortunately, Americans are beginning to think of themselves as the members of the Echeneididae family -- we hitch along Big Fed's back and eat the leavings Uncle Sugar tosses us.

Smokers in Tennessee are feeling it now, questioning the right of the tick to hold the reins of the dog. My concern is that no one will listen or realize that it can happen (and is currently happening) to any and all of us.

Writing for TV shows

2007-09-27T16:28:00.001-05:00

I watched Bionic Woman last night; I'll admit it. But I didn't like it.

It wasn't because it was cheesy (it was) or that the lead girl was awkward (she was) or that the blond questionably evil gal who showed up was wholly inappropriate for the part (she was neither sultry nor attractive). It was because the writing was transparent, ineffective, and off-beat.

None of the dialogue was well versed. Rather than establishing characters or background stories or, heck, just letting the show run it's course -- it is rather action packed -- the writers seemed intent on giving themselves all kinds of facets, alleyways, and straws to grasp at later. Mysterious whispers of people's fathers, hints at alliances within alliances, not-so-subtle clues to inner turmoils were all included in the minefield of television story arcs usually reserved for daytime soaps.

It just led up to a clunky, confusing, distracting hour long mess. The best part by far was the car wreck that sent the lead character into oblivion.

Shining examples include the ambiguously evil girl telling Bionic Woman "you look too innocent to be a bar tender," Bionic Woman asking Dr. Keanu-Ben (see below) "why are you with me?" and, of course, the obligatory Asian martial arts trainer telling Dr. Keanu-Ben "you scare me because you remind me of your father".

Do writers live in real life? Do they ever actually listen to how people talk to each other?

The blond and the lead doctor guy represented a growing trend I've seen in television, one I call "knock off" or "cheap version" actors. The girl was the bargain bin Angelina while the doctor looked like Keanu Reeves playing Ben from Lost. (Another example of bargain bin actors is the psychiatrist in the departed -- she's the cheaper version of Sarah Jessica Parker). That distracts me from the show, but that may be more a personal failure on my part to give these up-and-comers the benefit of the doubt.

At any rate, I don't think this is me being hypercritical. There are well-written shows out there. And there are shows that use up-and-comers without stuffing them into shoes that they just don't fit in. The Office's pilot was picture perfect -- all the characters were well-written from the start with no awkward surprises later, something rare to see. Arrested Development, though only airing for three seasons, lived and died by it's wonderful dialogue and fast-paced acerbic wit delivered by characters who were new and delightfully astereotypical.

Summary: Bionic Woman was bad. The show's writers should be...de-penned.

Bipartisan

2007-09-25T18:03:00.000-05:00

I really respect George W. Bush. He is a man of his convictions, whether or not I agree with all of them, and this story shows that his beliefs transcend his politics. For all the ballyhoo you hear about partisanship and "reaching across the aisle" I think this story is probably the best example out there of the way things ought to be (tm) in politics.

President Bush is quietly providing back-channel advice to Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to modulate her rhetoric so she can effectively prosecute the war in Iraq if elected president.

In an interview for the new book “The Evangelical President,” White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said Bush has “been urging candidates: ‘Don’t get yourself too locked in where you stand right now. If you end up sitting where I sit, things could change dramatically.’ ”

Bolten said Bush wants enough continuity in his Iraq policy that “even a Democratic president would be in a position to sustain a legitimate presence there.”

“Especially if it’s a Democrat,” the chief of staff told The Examiner in his West Wing office. “He wants to create the conditions where a Democrat not only will have the leeway, but the obligation to see it out.”

This ups his stock in my book so much. Not only does he understand what's at stake here, he also is willing to say forget the politics, here's what matters.

“Look, I’d like to make as many hard decisions as I can make, and do a lot of the heavy lifting prior to whoever my successor is,” Bush said. “And then that person is going to have to come and look at the same data I’ve been looking at, and come to their own conclusion.”

“I specifically talked about it so that a candidate and/or president wouldn’t have to deal with the issue,” he said. “The next person has got the opportunity to analyze the utility of the program and make his or her decision about whether or not it is necessary to protect the homeland. I suspect they’ll find that it is necessary. But my only point to you is that it was important for me to lay it out there, so that the politics wouldn’t enter into whether or not the program ought to survive beyond my period.”

These aren't the words of a rabid anti-Democrat. They're the words of a man who believes in our political system, and a man who is preparing for the future. That's prudence speaking.

I sincerely hope that he isn't overestimating the ability of the democratic candidates to put aside party politics - or aspirations to power - in order to secure this country.

Space bacteria

2007-09-25T18:01:00.000-05:00

Creepy.

Microbes that cause salmonella came back from spaceflight even more virulent and dangerous in an experiment aboard the US space shuttle Atlantis, according to a study published on Monday.

The salmonella sample that travelled millions of kilometers (miles) in orbit changed their pattern of certain genes compared to identical bacteria back on Earth, said the study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Following the shuttle flight, studies using mice showed the salmonella bacteria aboard the shuttle were "almost three times as likely to cause disease when compared with control bacteria grown on the ground," said a university statement outlining the study.

As if it were surprising

2007-09-24T14:05:00.000-05:00

What liberal media?

After two weeks of denials, the New York Times acknowledged that it should not have given a discount to MoveOn.org for a full-page advertisement assailing Gen. David H. Petraeus.

The liberal advocacy group should have paid $142,000 for the ad calling the U.S. commander in Iraq "General Betray Us," not $65,000, the paper's public editor wrote yesterday.

Clark Hoyt said in his column that MoveOn was not entitled to the cheaper "standby" rate for advertising that can run any time over the following week because the Times did promise that the ad would run Sept. 10, the day Petraeus began his congressional testimony. "We made a mistake," Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis was quoted as saying.

MoveOn, saying it had no reason to believe it was paying "anything other than the normal and usual charge," said yesterday that it would send the Times $77,000 to make up the difference.

The Times also violated its own advertising policy, which bars "attacks of a personal nature," Hoyt reported. He wrote that the episode "gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the 'liberal media.' "

Lies, partisanship, bias, and filth. What's new?

Hah

2007-09-24T14:02:00.000-05:00

This gave me a chuckle.

U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton said Sunday she can appeal to Republicans as well as Democrats on the presidential trail.

Yeah, and the Aggies are going to win the National Championship this year.

Stupidity and ignorance

2007-09-24T13:54:00.000-05:00

Socialism doesn't work -- the economics just don't work out. Because of this, Obama's hare brained scheme of taxing the rich and their employers to redistribute the wealth to lower income Americans is as foolish as can be.

Obama's idea, which he described on the op-ed page of Friday's Quad City Times as being "one possible option" and not a formal plan, would raise more than $1 trillion over 10 years by subjecting income of more than $97,000 to a 12.4 percent tax. Half of the tax would be paid by employees and half would be paid by employers.
Obama is floating the idea of a tax hike on the rich as a way of assuring lower- and middle-income voters that he sees an option for ensuring Social Security's solvency that would not burden them.

People need to be reminded of two things:

The government has nothing but what it has taken (stolen, if you will) from its citizens.
Companies don't pay taxes.

The government's absorbance of wages to redistribute to others in any form is the basic tenet of socialism. In my opinion, increasing the degree of socialization in this country is always bad.

More importantly, though, the idea that corporate taxes don't burden lower income Americans is utterly foolish. The truth is that companies don't pay taxes. In fact, companies don't really absorb any costs. All costs a company sees, including but most certainly not limited to taxes, are passed directly to the consumer. An increase in taxation results in an increase in costs for a company, which either results in the company cutting costs somewhere else (as in, employee beneifts or product quality) or in raised prices.

Ultimately, though, the only entity that ever benefits from raising taxes is the government. Likewise, the only entity that suffers from raised taxes are consumers -- a group to which we all belong to, like it or not.

Collectivism vs Individuality

2007-09-24T13:46:00.000-05:00

This is why I don't understand union members.

Worker Anita Ahrens burst into tears as hundreds of United Auto Workers streamed out of a GM plant in Janesville, Wis.

"Oh my God, here they come," said Ahrens, 39. "This is unreal."

Ahrens has seven years at the plant, where she works nights installing speakers in sport utility vehicles. She waited outside the building Monday for her husband, Ron Ahrens, who has worked there for 21 years.

The couple has three children, including a college freshman, and Ahrens worried about how they would pay their bills.

"This is horrible, but we're die-hard union, so we have to," Ahrens said. "We got a mortgage, two car payments and tons of freaking bills."

We're die hard union, so we have to. Collective bargaining may be a useful tool but in this day and age I believe unions have flipped the tables from their balances in the early 20th century. At that point, corporations had all the power over a work force with limited options, mobility, and education.

In this day and age no job is a mandate. It costs less money than ever to move, and more people are educated to higher levels. There really isn't a need for unions to be as all-powerful as they are provided the employment market is allowed to fluctuate and adjust. Companies who mistreat their workers simply won't find employees to work for them.

Wal-Mart is a perfect example of the market in action. Despite having no union presence in their stores their employees are happy and productive, and the company is flourishing. If Wal-Mart suddenly cut benefits or wages, their employees would leave -- plain and simple. Employment at will keeps both parties honest.

What's the point of being in a union when you get no benefit -- but suffer through shortfalls -- due to being a member? Auto workers are no more than cogs in a giant political graft machine. The sooner they figure this out and break the cycle that's killing GM and hurting their own pocketbooks, the better.

And people wonder why factories are moving overseas...

Darth Cheney

2007-09-19T22:22:00.000-05:00

This Clinton quote shows a few things to me:

"You can always tell when the Republicans are getting restless, because the vice president’s motorcade pulls into the Capitol, and Darth Vader emerges," Clinton said just now at town hall in New York, referring to Cheney's efforts shore up Republican congressional support for the Iraq war.

"I’m not invited to their meetings and I don’t know what he says or does," she said. "But all the brave talk about bringing our troops home, and setting deadlines, and getting out by a certain date just dissipated."

Clinton respects Cheney. This is pretty obvious. Her comments are snarky, but not really flippant. Call it grudging admiration -- she doesn't know how or why, but he gets the job done.
Clinton reads the DailyKos and HuffPo. 'Nuff said there.
Clinton is still (for some reason) wooing the more radical side of her party. This is interesting by itself, because it indicates one of two things: that she believes that side of her party has enough power to be worth her time, especially considering how loony it makes her look to the rest of America; or she actually is a moonbat herself and believes it, too.
When balked, she resorts to name calling. I don't ever recall a senator of the United States referring to her as Godzillary or anything like that, though the names are all over the right side blogs. This sort of thing is just childish for a person in her position to do. It's shameful for a senator -- imagine how much worse for a president!

Canada's Health care?

2007-09-19T15:15:00.000-05:00

Canada's health care system is so vastly superior to America's! At least, thats what the cronies on the Left and Michael Moore want you to believe.

If so, why would a Canadian member of parliament head to California for cancer treatment?

Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, who is battling breast cancer, travelled to California last June for an operation that was recommended as part of her treatment, says a report.

Stronach's spokesman, Greg MacEachern, told the Toronto Star that the MP for Newmarket-Aurora had a "later-stage" operation in the U.S. after a Toronto doctor referred her.

"Belinda had one of her later-stage operations in California, after referral from her personal physicians in Toronto. Prior to this, Belinda had surgery and treatment in Toronto, and continues to receive follow-up treatment there," said MacEachern.

He said speed was not the reason why she went to California.

Instead, MacEachern said the decision was made because the U.S. hospital was the best place to have it done due to the type of surgery required.
...
"In fact, Belinda thinks very highly of the Canadian health-care system, and uses it when needed for herself and her children, as do all Canadians. As well, her family has clearly demonstrated that support," MacEachern told the Star.

That's like saying "I think very highly of my wife, and I go to her when needed as do all husbands. But when she can't satisfy my needs, I pay for the good stuff".

It's a pretty hollow argument. Socialized medicine just isn't the answer -- and the elitists in the world don't care because they'll always be rich enough to get what they need.

MSM Goes to bat for their girl

2007-09-19T15:09:00.001-05:00

The MSM reveals their ~~bias~~ objective stance through Joe Klein:

I know this is old news, but this guy is shameless. The headline, with a photo of a three-quarters crazed Hillary, is HEALTH INSURANCE PROOF REQUIRED FOR WORK but the linked story says this:

At this point, we don't have anything punitive that we have proposed," the presidential candidate said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We're providing incentives and tax credits which we think will be very attractive to the vast majority of Americans."

She said she could envision a day when "you have to show proof to your employer that you're insured as a part of the job interview — like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination," but said such details would be worked out through negotiations with Congress.

What Joe Klein forgot is that the MSM is also a disgrace...because they provide out of context quotes such as his own. What Clinton went on to say was

...she could envision a day when "you have to show proof to your employer that you're insured as a part of the job interview — like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination," but said such details would be worked out through negotiations with Congress.

Which, of course, works just fine with Drudge's working headline.

So what is Klein really objecting to, Drudge's reporting or his politics?

How stupid does he think we are? Answer: Extremely dumbolic.

I'll have more about Clinton's health plan in this week's print column.

If you're going to call someone a disgrace to journalism you should at least use a word that's actually...you know...a word. In the dictionary.

Fake but accurate?

2007-09-19T15:03:00.000-05:00

Dan Rather is seeing dollar signs.

Former CBS news anchor Dan Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit Wednesday against the network, former corporate parent Viacom Inc., and three of his former bosses.

Rather's complaint stems from "CBS' intentional mishandling" of the aftermath of a discredited story about President George W. Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard.

Rather is seeking $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages.

The chump forgot that the only reason it became an issue is because he pushed it personally. You can't sue for being fired if your termination was a direct result of your own actions.

Intentional mishandling my foot. That sounds suspiciously similar to "vast right-wing conspiracy".

Pretty messed up...

2007-09-18T17:10:00.001-05:00

So as humorous as this guy's response to being hit with a taser is, the whole situation is pretty sad.

A university student with a history of taping his own practical jokes was Tasered by campus police and arrested after loudly and repeatedly trying to ask U.S. Sen. John Kerry questions during a campus forum.

Videos of the Monday night incident, posted on several Web sites and played repeatedly on television news, show University of Florida police officers pulling Meyer away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.

As two officers take Meyer by the arms, Kerry, D-Mass., can be heard saying, "That's all right, let me answer his question."

Audience members applaud, and Meyer struggles for several seconds as up to four officers try to remove him from the room. Meyer screams for help and tries to break away from officers with his arms flailing at them, then is forced to the ground and officers order him to stop resisting.

I don't think the article really captures what was going on there. If you'll watch the video here, you'll see what I mean.

The guy went over his allotted time and asked a question that prompted the Kerry aide in the background to cut off the mic. There were cops standing by who immediately grabbed his arms apparently without saying anything to the guy and started to drag him forcibly away.

Not unpredictably, the guy reacts with surprise and obstinance. The guy repeats over and over "get off of me" but also things like "If you let go of me I'll walk out of here". He literally begs the officers not to tase him.

Looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen. There was literally no reason for them to use force to begin with, much less tase him.

Even more damning, Kerry is heard saying that it's ok, he'll answer the question. What was the big deal?

Frankly, I'm kind of surprised no one started at least heckling the officers. People were looking but no one even said anything, even after the kid started screaming for help.

True, the guy should have just kept his mouth shut and walked away to begin with. But the cops are equally culpable here -- you can't just grab people and expect them to follow along meekly. We're a bunch of independent minded rebels by heritage, and it hasn't been bred out of us quite yet.

Murtha is nuts

2007-09-17T14:34:00.000-05:00

Seriously, the guy is batty. He has unlearned the toddler's lesson that wishing for something won't make it come true.

House Appropriations Defense subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D-Pa.) said Monday that he expects that Republican lawmakers will begin abandoning President Bush’s Iraq policy after the GOP picks a presidential candidate next year.

"As soon as the primaries are over, you’ll see Republicans start jumping ship," Murtha said in remarks at the National Press Club.

Murtha also predicted that, despite the unpopularity of Congress, Democrats will make broad gains in next year’s election because voters are upset with the war.

"People are frustrated, but you’re going to see a big Democratic increase," he told reporters after his speech. “I think we’ll pick up 40 [to] 50 seats."

Apparently he's forgotten that all of the Republican candidates (except for Ron Paul...heh) are decidedly pro-Petraeus and pro-"Stay the course"? And that the current congress is in shambles and has literally done nothing aside from upping the minimum wage (i.e. soothe their union cohorts)?

Not to stir up trouble...

2007-09-17T14:32:00.000-05:00

...but isn't this grounds for war a-la yellowcake?

The United States has determined that Syria has been seeking nuclear weapons from North Korea.

"We do know that there are a number of foreign technicians that have been in Syria," Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Semmel said. "We do know that there may have been contact between Syria and some secret suppliers for nuclear equipment. Whether anything transpired remains to be seen."

Fortunate

2007-09-17T14:29:00.001-05:00

We are fortunate that the pendulum in the world is swinging back to the conservative side of politics. I think that having an ally (and potential hawk?) in France may be one of the biggest boons of that swing to date -- perhaps just in time to save the world from a truly liberal/socialist American government.

France took the first steps Monday to set up a European sanctions regime against the Islamic government in Tehran, after warning that Iran's failure to renounce nuclear weapons could lead to war.

"These would be European sanctions that each country, individually, must put in place with its own banking, commercial and industrial system. The English and the Germans are interested in talking about this. We will try to find a common European position," Kouchner said.

Verhagen said the "first effort should be to convince the Security Council to apply more sanctions. But when the Security Council doesn't agree, I am prepared, I am willing, to apply European Union sanctions in common with the United States sanctions."

France has taken a more threatening posture towards Iran since the election of President Nicolas Sarkozy in May, and its willingness to promote extra-UN sanctions puts it closely in line with the position of the United States.

It's good to have allies in other places than Israel and Britain, don't you think?

If this is how it works...?

2007-09-17T14:22:00.000-05:00

If folks can self-appoint themselves as ambassadors for things, can I do it, too?

Madonna toasted the Jewish new year with Israeli President Shimon Peres and declared herself an "ambassador for Judaism," local newspapers reported Sunday.

The singer, who is not Jewish, arrived in Israel Wednesday on the eve of Jewish new year to attend a conference on Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism.

If so, I'd like to announce that I am officially the ambassador for Islam, Bacon, Baseball, College Football and Bikinis.

I pick those because if Islam would adapt to the other three, there wouldn't really be much cause for fighting any more, would there?

The crux of the matter

2007-09-17T14:12:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting point to be made after reading this article, and it really undermines everything Clinton says about the health care issue.

Addressing a crowd at a medical center in the early voting state of Iowa, Clinton laid out her proposal, with the centerpiece a so-called "individual mandate," requiring everyone to have health insurance — just as most states require drivers to purchase auto insurance. Rival John Edwards has also offered a plan that includes an individual mandate, while the proposal outlined by Barack Obama does not.

There's a staggering difference in ideology between the automotive insurance question and the health insurance questions.

Most states do require drivers to purchase insurance. However, that mandatory coverage is only for liability, not collision. I realize this isn't rocket science but the net difference is that the current state of auto insurance is the government doing its job -- that is, guaranteeing the rights of its citizens. When drivers have insurance, it protects other citizens from being wronged in such a way that they have no redress. An uninsured driver hitting someone and damaging their car essentially shoves the burden of their recklessness and irresponsibility on another person. However, they're only responsible legally for the damage to the other fellow's car, not their own.

Mandatory health insurance is the equivalent of mandatory full coverage collision on every single car. It's not in itself a bad thing -- I pay for both collision insurance and health insurance, but I do so by choice. The government should never presume to know better than its citizens, whether in matters of auto finances (sometimes it's not cost efficient to insure a vehicle) or health.

And, of course, Edwards is an idiot with idiotic, childish ideas.

Edwards said on his first day in office he will submit legislation that would pull health insurance for the president, members of Congress and all political appointees unless they pass universal health care within six months.

Annoyance

2007-09-17T14:02:00.000-05:00

I really get tired of everyone constantly disparaging Microsoft. They already got busted for including a web browser in windows -- now they can't include Windows Media Player on EU versions of Windows? And they have to release some of their source code?

It also said regulators had clearly demonstrated that selling media software with Windows had damaged rivals.

"The court observes that it is beyond dispute that in consequence of the tying consumers are unable to acquire the Windows operating system without simultaneously acquiring Windows Media Player," it said.

"In that regard, the court considers that neither the fact that Microsoft does not charge a separate price for Windows Media Player nor the fact that consumers are not obliged to use that Media Player is irrelevant."

The leeches of the world will always ride on the cart being pulled by the Do-ers. The fact that no company to date has even come close to toppling Microsoft's OS empire demonstrates to me that Microsoft is still serving the consumer in a satisfactory way. If there was a need the Microsoft wasn't filling, or if their product was inferior the market would demand that competition fill the gaps. It hasn't done so, and I must conclude that Windows is made pretty dang well. (The fact that I love Vista and all of the amazing features it has backs this up, too).

Personally I'd be pretty annoyed if I bought an operating system that came without a media player or a web browser. In fact, I'm not sure how you'd even go about getting updates when you installed the OS fresh, unless you happened to have another web browser saved to a hard disk. The whole idea is stupid.

Incidentally, OSX not only comes with a media player (Quicktime) but also a music player (iTunes), a movie editor, a web browser, a fairly advanced math program, and a plethora of other specialized non-operating system programs. Why isn't anyone whining about them? It seems to me that Matlab or Maple would have a decent court case against Apple for their math software, along these grounds.

The fact is that no one can compete with Microsoft because their product is better. This sets a bad precedent because in the end the consumer is going to suffer from this legislation. Things like this are ultimately a setback for the market -- and set a groundwork for future acts of stupidity. I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of socialist backlash to Boeing's continued trouncing of Airbus or any other of the flagship examples of why American capitalism is simply better than the EU pseudomodel of it.

I wish Microsoft were private and principled beyond fighting for profits. If that were the case they could just deny the EU use of any and all Microsoft products because of this ruling. Would it hurt Microsoft? Sure. Would it hurt the EU a whole lot more? Of course. Would it be good for the world? I think so.

I feel bad for this kid

2007-09-12T23:08:00.001-05:00

The folks using this kid as a political tool should be ashamed of themselves.

Then again, it would be kind of difficult to explain to him that Mommy is a repeat offender criminal that has no business being in this country and if it weren't for an outdated law he wouldn't be a citizen and would have no reason to stay here, either.

An 8-year-old boy whose mother was deported to Mexico led a chanting crowd of about 150 pro-immigration activists through the halls of Congress on Wednesday. Capitol Police arrested two demonstrators for disorderly conduct.

Saul Arellano and other children carried a banner that read: "Born in the USA. Don't take our moms and dads away."

The boy's mother, Elvira Arellano, was deported last month after taking refuge in a Chicago church for a year.

In Tijuana, Mexico, across the border from San Diego, Elvira Arellano spoke about her son to several dozen demonstrators. Saul was scheduled to join her there Thursday.

"He is a boy who has been suffering because the U.S. government told his mother she couldn't stay in their country anymore because she was undocumented," she said.

WRONG. He is a boy who is suffering because his mother refuses to take responsibilities for her actions.

I never quite understood the left's simultaneous view of the Federal government as both all-fathering and all-evil until I subtracted the lens of maturity. It is suspiciously similar to the way a teenager views their parents, isn't it?

Giuliani

2007-09-12T23:02:00.000-05:00

I saw Giuliuani speak early last year and at that point I'm not sure he realized that he was running for president.

He's gotten a whole lot meaner, and I think he's come to terms with it. I really like him and I like the way he presents himself and his positions. It would be a tough call between him and Fred Thompson for me at this point.

For example, I think this is spot-on:

When Army Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker came before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Clinton said that their claims of progress in Iraq require a "willing suspension of disbelief."

"Despite what I view is your rather extraordinary efforts in your testimony both yesterday and today," said Clinton, "I think that the reports that you provide to us really require a willing suspension of disbelief."

Giuliani accused Clinton of "playing into" a MoveOn.org ad that ran in the New York Times Monday that read: "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?"

After co-host Spiff Carner said, "She's trying to tell us that she knows more about the whole situation than he does,” Giuliani shot back by saying, “Doesn’t it also sound like she’s also saying that he isn’t telling the truth?”

"I really do think to accuse a general of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief,’ particular in the atmosphere that Moveon.org has created with these terrible attacks, I don’t know, I mean I think that’s not the way in a responsible way to go about , you know, forging the foreign policy of the United States and the military policy of the United States," said Giuliani. "I think this name calling, you know, saying to people, ‘willing suspension of disbelief,’ and then saying the horrible thing they said about betrayal -- that is the last thing we need right now."

First of all, what Hillary said doesn't even make sense. Read it again:

"Despite what I view is your rather extraordinary efforts in your testimony both yesterday and today," said Clinton, "I think that the reports that you provide to us really require a willing suspension of disbelief."

Not much better the second time around is it?

Secondly, Giuliani is right: making a career military officer out to be a political hack is only indicative of the lows democrats will stoop to. File this under the "we support the troops but not the war" idiocy folder.

Finally, this quote from a Clinton staffer is golden:

Senator Clinton will continue to ask the hard questions in an effort to get our troops home.

Apparently not only is Hillary unable to form grammatically correct sentences, her staff also doesn't seem to understand the difference between an assertion and a question.

Frustrating

2007-09-11T19:42:00.000-05:00

What the heck is the point of having an expert come in to brief congress if congress tells them they're wrong?

Anti-war Senate Democrats bluntly told Iraq commander General David Petraeus Tuesday his troop surge strategy was an abject failure in its prime objective -- forging an Iraqi political settlement.
...
Petraeus repeated his contention that the surge was working, and said US forces could gradually be reduced from their current 168,000 strength, to pre-surge levels of around 130,000 by mid 2008.

But committee chairman Senator Joseph Biden said: "we should stop the surge and start bringing our troops home."

Who is Joe Biden to tell Petraeus anything? And why is Petraeus' report a "contention"?

Forget congress. Let them throw their fits. They can't even play by the rules they set up. To be honest, I'd not have Petraeus do any briefings except to select committees and dare them to try another Vietnam budget cut.

Pelosi and her ilk don't have the guts or the political capital to carry it out. Why should we continue to play their stupid political game?

Thinly guised tyranny

2007-09-10T18:20:00.000-05:00

The purpose of government is not to take care of its citizens. Governments exist solely to ensure the rights of their citizens. The value of the freedom to be unhealthy far outweighs any government guarantee of health.

Consider the resulting scenario: If the government becomes sole arbiter over what constitutes physical health, anything could be deemed healthy or unhealthy for all citizens under the guise of guaranteeing health. The first to go would be smoking -- that one is under fire already, as is the freedom to eat trans fat food. But what would be next? Alcohol? Sweets? McDonald's? Shall we be forced to exercise as well as visit the doctor regularly?

Health is usually already defined as more than physical absence of disease. Consider if the government is empowered to decide what constitutes mental health? Or spiritual? Mandatory visits to a doctor presumably are not limited to a physician. What of a psychiatrist? If the government is deciding who is and who isn’t healthy, the government is choosing who can and can't be responsible for their own actions.

Don't be fooled. Behind any veil of security lies the ugly face of tyranny. Universal health care is no exception.

Watcher's Council

2007-09-10T13:54:00.001-05:00

As you may or may not already be aware, members of the Watcher's Council hold a vote every week on what they consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around... per the Watcher's instructions, I am submitting one of my own posts for consideration in the upcoming nominations process.

Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post, here is the list of results for the latest vote, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.

Headline you can smile about

2007-09-10T10:21:00.000-05:00

"Anti-war leaders stymied, frustrated"

A well-known anti-war leader has gone public with the transcript of a private conference call that shows peace activists are exasperated with the Democratic congressional leadership and at a loss for a long-term strategy.
...But the call shows the war opponents are having little success because of fears about the impact on next year’s elections if the party is seen as defeatist.

There's not a ton of need for commentary. That's just a great snapshot of what victory over treason looks like.

I hope they squirm like rats in a trap.

Interesting

2007-09-10T09:28:00.000-05:00

When Hispanics became the largest minority in America we saw some changes. McDonald's commercials no longer featured as many blacks. Coca-cola ran ads with roommates eating "Mom's home made empanadas".

Now that trend is starting to show itself in politics. Brown is the new black:

And the candidates were eager to connect their experiences with those of the Latino community.

Clinton noted that her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, is a Latina, while Obama likened the work of labor activist Cesar Chavez to that of Martin Luther King Jr.

Former senator John Edwards (N.C.) bragged that the small town where he grew up, Robbins, N.C., "is now half Latino." And Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio) said Spanish should become a second national language, a stance that Dodd and Richardson would not adopt.

Richardson, the only Latino running for president, was the most explicit he has been in this campaign in discussing his Mexican American heritage and in identifying himself with Latino issues.

"I am of the view that Latinos can make a difference in this presidential election," he said. "Forty-three million of us all around the country can decide not just what is best for Latinos but what is best for America."

I find this sort of trash offensive. I don't understand why people feel the need to vote as a faction based solely on the color of their skin.

I can understand voting for liberalism or conservativism. I can understand voting for gun rights, or for abortion. But why on earth would you ever vote because of the nationality of your parents or grandparents?

There's no Irish voting block, or German, or Italian. No one even runs as a Catholic or Protestant candidate; the Mormon in this race sure isn't calling for all Mormons to vote for him exclusively for that reason.

My mother is a naturalized citizen. My entire family on her side is from Chile, of mixed English, Spanish, and Indian descent. I feel no need to vote "Latino"; I don't understand why anyone else would.

Beautiful

2007-09-10T09:25:00.001-05:00

Radical Islam has a problem. It can't deal with sexuality in any sort of healthy psychological way.

That's why this is such a brilliant, perfect comment to respond to bin Laden:

"This is about the best he can do," Townsend said of bin Laden. "This is a man on a run, from a cave, who's virtually impotent other than these tapes."

Islam can't deal with the allegation of impotence. Marine units in Iraq literally broadcasts the Arabic equivalent of "Al Qaeda has erectile dysfunction" over loudspeakers because it sends them into a tactically worthless rage.

Americans should exploit this aspect of the enemy. It's a psychological pressure point that we can use to our advantage. I'd love to see more of this type of talk.

Colin Powell doesn't get it

2007-09-10T09:21:00.001-05:00

Or perhaps he does. In an interview released today he said

"What is the greatest threat facing us now? People will say it's terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?"

Colin Powell believes, to me, that the greatest threat facing America today is either runaway illegal immigration by folks who have no interest in preserving America or radical socialist liberalism which also has no interest in preserving America.

And to be honest with you, I agree with that statement. External threats aren't all that great. No country can invade us and destroy or conquer us through military means.

But through an invasion via injection? Can we survive the virus that is illegal immigration? Or the spreading disease of socialism and government dependency?

Who is John Galt?

Media puzzled

2007-09-10T09:12:00.000-05:00

The media is still puzzled over what to do with Fred Thompson.

Freshly minted GOP White House hopeful Fred Thompson puzzled Iowans yesterday by insisting an Al Qaeda smoking ban was one reason freedom-loving Iraqis bolted to the U.S. side.
...Thompson received mixed reviews from several listeners who had reservations about his late entry into the race.

They've called him lazy, they've said that he doesn't enjoy campaigning. They attacked his wife, they said his staff was falling apart. They said his conservative credentials were fraudulent. And none of it stuck. None of it is becoming their oft-repeated mantra.

So now they're unhappily writing things from their corner, sighing, grasping at straws.

I'm sure the media will find something. They always do; Fred Thompson will be no miracle exception.

But those "mixed reviews" he got?

Carol Perrin, 62, a retired schoolteacher, said, "I was impressed. I don't think he's selling us a bill of goods."

But Ralph Hecht, 61, a farmer and Marine Vietnam veteran whose son served two tours in Iraq with the Army, said Thompson's attempts at folksy appeal wouldn't work with him. "For me, it will be the issues stuff," Hecht said.

Those don't quite sound like the normal definition of mixed reviews. That sounds to me like full support and tentative support.

Perhaps what the reporter meant was a mix between "good" and "great"?

I got three things from this article

2007-09-07T18:51:00.000-05:00

A few observations from reading this article.

1. You can't trust The Independent to describe pictures to you. This:

At first sight, the poster looks like an innocent children's cartoon. Three white sheep stand beside a black sheep. The drawing makes it looks as though the animals are smiling. But then you notice that the three white beasts are standing on the Swiss flag. One of the white sheep is kicking the black one off the flag, with a crafty flick of its back legs.

Doesn't really describe this:If anything I think the sheep look concerned.

2. Whoever wrote this article basically made a mistake in referencing this book. The author didn't read the book, or he didn't understand it. The title is either a poor choice of words (coincidence) or indicative of stupidity.

3. I think the Swiss have it figured out when it comes to nationalism and citizenship. We would do well to follow their example.

"How direct democracy functions is a very sensitive issue in Switzerland," he says, explaining why he has long opposed joining the EU. "To the average German, the transfer of power from Berlin to Brussels didn't really affect their daily lives. The transfer of power from the commune to Brussels would seriously change things for the ordinary Swiss citizen."

Switzerland has the toughest naturalization rules in Europe. To apply, you must live in the country legally for at least 12 years, pay taxes, and have no criminal record. The application can still be turned down by your local commune which meets to ask "Can you speak German? Do you work? Are you integrated with Swiss people?"

Anti-nationalism goes right along with Marxism and the more infuriating facets of pacifism. The fact that the Swiss have pride in their country and are exclusive flies in the face of most liberals, who feel that any sort of privilege or right earned by one is earned by all.

This is stupid of them

2007-09-07T09:27:00.001-05:00

Cable companies have enjoyed the upper hand in ISP control for a long time. Things like this (along with fiber and IPTV) are going to drag them from their high:

Comcast has punished some transgressors by cutting off their Internet service, arguing that excessive downloaders hog Internet capacity and slow down the network for other customers. The company declines to reveal its download limits.

It's their prerogative, and I'm sure there's something in the monthly contract stipulating a download limit. But it's stupid of them.

Bandwidth crunch is inevitable but punishing high end users isn't going to bring any more business.

Personally I can't wait to live in a house that has fiber and IPTV so I can say goodbye to Warner / TimeWarner / Comcast forever. It's been long enough!

Ridiculous

2007-09-06T19:19:00.000-05:00

"We'll see what the 9/11 commission report says. We'll see what the Iraq Study Group says. We'll see what Petraeus says..."

When will the endless backpedaling statements end from the left?

Congressional Democrats are trying to undermine U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus' credibility before he delivers a report on the Iraq war next week, saying the general is a mouthpiece for President Bush and his findings can't be trusted.

"We know what is going to be in it. It's clear. I think the president's trip over to Iraq makes it very obvious," the Illinois Democrat said. "I expect the Bush report to say, 'The surge is working. Let's have more of the same.' "

The top Democrats — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California — also referred to the general's briefing as the "Bush report."

It's so childishly predictable. The sad thing is, they'll probably get away with this schtick eight months after they voted to confirm him.

Says Captain Ed:

Of particular note is the fact that the same Senators who didn't cast a single vote against this highly-regarded commander taking over the effort in Iraq suddenly feel that Petraeus would conspire with George Bush to deliver a dishonest report to Congress. Which is more likely -- that a career commander would deliberately lie about events in Iraq that already have garnered plenty of independent evidence for success, or that Dick Durbin and Harry Reid would smear the military for their own political gain?

The gaggle of inept congressmen also revealed their reasons for not valuing Petraeus' report -- even though they haven't heard it yet.

They also favored an analysis due today by Gen. James L. Jones, former U.S. commander in Europe, that is expected to say security gains have been "uneven" and Iraqi security forces are ill-prepared to stand alone, according to a CNN report.

Because it doesn't help them out, see? Clearly a former commander has a better perspective than the current commander, particularly when he didn't even serve in the same theater.

The fact is that no one knows what Petraeus will report yet other than him and his aides. All the guesswork and whining on the part of the democrats tells me that they expect it to be damning because of their defeatism. But even after the report is given, there are only a handful of people in the world with the ability to discredit it -- and most of them are in Iraq.

"We will see what the Bush report will be at the end of next week," Mrs. Pelosi said. "The facts are self-evident that the progress is not being made. They might want to find one or two places where there has been progress but the plural of anecdote is not data."

Pelosi needs some lessons on data. Facts are never, ever self-evident towards anything except what they represent. Data means nothing by itself; it requires interpretation. The only thing that is self-evident "that progress is not being made" is the continued litany from the left saying so.

The last bit of her statement applies quite well to global warming, too. Perhaps she is a closet Denier as well?

"The plural of anecdote is not data." I've been saying that for years.

Car salesman Obama?

2007-09-06T00:23:00.001-05:00

This tack sounds an awful lot like the schpiel they throw at you to buy a new car.

Asked if his '08 bid was just a strategic move to position himself for a run in 2012, Obama said he didn't think his wife would allow him to run again if it doesn't work out this time.
"Well, I'm not sure- I don't think my wife's going to let me do this twice. So let me be clear about that," Obama said while campaigning in Iowa.

Today Saturday and tomorrow Sunday only! Don't miss the chance to make a deal of a lifetime! Buy today or you'll regret it tomorrow!

So is it desperation or just another carefully timed maneuver? I'd lean towards the former myself.

For you but not me

2007-09-06T00:14:00.000-05:00

It's fine for me to tell you to be conscientious of your carbon footprint while I simultaneously ignore mine, because I can buy indulgences.

This is what the left says, and it doesn't stop with Al Gore.

During the year, the show has featured countless segments about everyone doing his or her part to curb the threat of global warming, but apparently they didn’t get the memo in time to apply their logic to their broadcast.
“I tallied it up and we have circled the globe 12 times, 12 times in one year, 315,688 miles,” Roberts said.
The inconvenient truth of the matter is that among the four of them, they have emitted 61.45 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere far exceeding the amount that Al Gore’s ClimateCrisis.Net allots.

If I cared about CO2 (I don't) I would be simply outraged about this. But then again, if I cared about CO2 I'd be a liberal, in which case I would trundle out the argument of moral authority (tm) and recognize the fact that by spreading the Global ~~Warming~~ Climate Change Gospel they are more than offsetting their carbon footprint.

Kind of how by spending billions of dollars in earmarks this session of congress has become the model for fiscal responsibility. Right?

Oh, was that below the belt?

UPDATE: And by the way, Good Morning America has officially contributed to the deaths of innocents.

Doctors warn that the warmer weather expected with climate change might also produce more heart problems.
"If it really is a few degrees warmer in the next 50 years, we could definitely have more cardiovascular disease," said Dr. Karin Schenck-Gustafsson, of the department of cardiology at Sweden's Karolinska Institute.
On the sidelines of the European Society of Cardiology's annual meeting in Vienna this week, some experts said that the issue deserved more attention. It's well-known that people have more heart problems when it's hot. (Duh).

Just thought I'd let you know.

And P.S. Dr. Karin Schenck-Gustafsson is apparently a fellow Denier (above, bold). Glad to have her aboard!

Looks like one, smells like one...

2007-09-05T23:29:00.000-05:00

I told you it was a rat.

Disgraced Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu was a wanted man again after he failed to show up for a court date Wednesday and a judge issued a new warrant for his arrest.

I understand you can't necessarily hold a candidate to task for the moneys they take. They aren't responsible for the actions of their supporters. But it is kind of indicative of the kind of politics the Clintons run -- and its nothing new, either.

Apples and Oranges

2007-09-04T19:25:00.001-05:00

In the wake of a recently released International Labor Organization report on world productivity and labor statistics, two articles appeared with decidedly different interpretations of the findings.

Geoff Colvin of Fortune says Americans are working less while charging more and eventually will be outpaced by the growing twin specters of China and India. However, the AP's article instead states not only are we working harder but smarter -- and I found it to be right on the money.

The Fortune article starts thusly:

We Americans pride ourselves on being a hard-working bunch, so here's a thought to spoil your Labor Day rest: By global standards, we're lazy. We've been getting lazier. And the days of the American dolce vita may be numbered.

The surprising report of our relative sloth arrives in new research from the UN's International Labor Organization, which looks at working hours around the world. When it comes to what we might call hard work, meaning the proportion of workers who put in more than 48 hours a week, America is near the bottom of the heap. About 18% of our employed people work that much.

Contrast that with the AP report, which states:

American workers stay longer in the office, at the factory or on the farm than their counterparts in Europe and most other rich nations, and they produce more per person over the year.

They also get more done per hour than everyone but the Norwegians, according to a U.N. report released Monday, which said the United States "leads the world in labor productivity."

The average U.S. worker produces $63,885 of wealth per year, more than their counterparts in all other countries.

So what gives?

Colvin's article references some anonymous study performed by the University of Chicago which I can't find. I did, however, read the International Labor Organization's report, and found it to be about as unalarming as can be.

Not only do we work more than other developed nations, but the American worker also creates more wealth per hour worked than every country but Norway, and we shatter their aspirations of first place productivity by working far more hours.

Our massive creation of wealth can't be totally written off as a result of more technical labor, either. We destroy the competition in each singular field of labor as well. For example, an American farm worker creates almost 58 times the annual wealth of his Chinese counterpart. A Chinese industrial worker produces $12,642 in wealth per year, which is absolutely demolished by the American figure of $104,606.

And the ILO report states that the productivity gap between the United States and poorer nations is widening.

This stands in sharp contrast to the crux of Colvin's article, where he says

Americans and others in developed economies are selling the world's most expensive labor. In a global market, some of those prices -- our pay -- will have to stop rising and maybe even come down, while pay in China, India, and elsewhere goes up.

Now I don't particularly want to argue with the Senior Editor-in-chief of Fortune, but I can't help but scoff at this. At best he's sorely misrepresented his argument; at worst, he's flat out wrong.

The difference lies not in the price of labor per hour but the type of labor being performed. This relates marvelously with the laws of thermodynamics, which tell us that energy has not only quantity (first law) but quality (second law).

Similarly, you can't find labor to produce what Americans will in other countries, and it has nothing to do with the price per hour. It's a case of apples to oranges, and I think Colvin knows it. The disparity between the amount of time to create wealth in a nation based on agriculture compared to that of one based on technology renders any comparison completely null and void.

The ILO report's executive summary makes this lucidly clear:

The majority of workers in most developed economies are engaged in wage and salaried employment. In contrast, the majority in the developing economies of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia continue to work as own account workers and contributing family workers.
...
In recent years agriculture has lost its place as the main sector of employment and has been replaced by the service sector, which in 2006 constituted 42.0 per cent of world employment compared to 36.1 per cent for agriculture
...
Agriculture is still the main employer in the poorest regions in the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, almost [70 percent] employed, work in this sector; in South Asia and South-East Asia & the Pacific it is almost [50 percent].

By contrast, only approximately 7 percent work in the agriculture industry in the US (21 million). The apples-to-oranges comparison becomes even more ridiculous when the cost of living in terms of food is considered: Americans, on average, spend 9.3 percent of their income on food. India spends 53.1 percent, Venezuela spends 34.3 percent, Italy spends 25.7 percent, Japan spends 19.1 percent, France spends 16.3 percent and the United Kingdom spends 11.5 percent.

Even if the productivity gap was neutralized, Americans would still be far wealthier than citizens of other nations. The "dolce vita" isn't going away any time soon.

And it's not only that Americans are doing different kinds of work. American laborers are more innovative, smarter, more competitive and just downright better than their counterparts overseas for a variety of reasons which are a study all by themselves (freedom, ability to own property, etc). What it comes down to is that Americans essentially demand higher pay for a higher quality product, something which the market understands and agrees with.

It may be true that the bulk of Americans may not be working in excess of 48 hours a week. As Colvin says, only 18% of us are workaholics enough to do that. But the vast majority of Americans (right at 80%) work the traditional full time 40 hour work week, which is actually up from a decade ago.

At this point, I'm not even sure that Geoff Colvin read the ILO report.

Finally, an interesting point is revealed when the methodology of the ILO's report is considered. They rely heavily on individual country's labor statistic offices and surveying of individual workers to report the time they spend working. What, then, constitutes work? Colvin suggests we're working less around the house as well as in the office (and links it to the rise of obesity). He also reports that Americans have more leisure time.

But is it really true?

With the rise of the work-related email address and the ever-present Blackberry, many Americans simply never stop working, whether on vacation or relaxing after 5 pm. And yet most, I believe, would not record this time as work hours when surveyed.

Again, its apples to oranges. As little as ten years ago a person was incommunicado as soon as they were on vacation -- and their work just got on without them. But, clearly, Americans still take vacation, and still count this time as "leisure" hours, whether they get a little work done or not.

I don't think the PDA craze has caught on in India just yet.

The point is pretty clear: Americans are still hard workers and are still providing not only more quantity but more quality than workers of other nations.

No matter what Geoff Colvin wants you to believe.

Watcher of Weasels

2007-09-04T18:41:00.001-05:00

Run the course

2007-09-04T18:18:00.000-05:00

The media will try to spin this as retreat, when in reality it is a continuation of an existing strategy.

The top military general in Iraq hinted to ABC's Martha Raddatz that next week's much-anticipated report on the status of the troop surge in Iraq would include a recommendation for troop reduction in March, if not sooner, to avoid a strain on the Army.
"The surge will run its course. There are limits to what our military can provide, so, my recommendations have to be informed by — not driven by — but they have to be informed by the strain we have put on our military services," Gen. David Petraeus said in the interview at Camp Victory in Baghdad. "That has to be a key factor in what I will recommend."

It should be noted that these reductions will be on the usual cycle of tours of duty in Iraq. Also note Petraeus' language: The surge will run its course. When doctors prescribe medication they do so for a specific dose and amount of time.

Iraq is a sick nation and Dr. Petraeus has prescribed medication. When the surge runs its course it will have cleaned out a lot of the sickness. Does that mean the illness is wholly cured? By no means. But we'll be a long way down that road.

Later in the article we get Petraeus' opinion on why things are heading the way they are.

"Eight of the past 11 weeks have seen the number of incidents, the number of attacks, come down, and to the point that they reached a level that's about the lowest in well over a year, I think," he said. "Civilian casualties [are] still certainly too high. But again, pretty substantial progress, and certainly, trending very much in the right direction."

He specifically points to the progress in al Anbar Province, which was once an al Qaeda hotbed.

"That was the result, not of military actions, certainly, alone. It was the result of, really, a political shift where the population led by the sheiks of major tribes decided to reject al Qaeda and its Taliban-like ideology, and the extremist behavior that they have come to associate with it," Petraeus said.

"That is what brought the level of violence down so dramatically. Because al Qaeda no longer finds a hospitable place in the Euphrates River Valley the way it did, certainly, in the past."
...
"Their sanctuaries have shrunk considerably … so, they don't have the ease of movement, the ease of locations, where they're safe the way they were before," he said.

I think his report will be very interesting and very positive. I can't wait.

Edit: Watch Katie Couric walking around in Fallujah here. She wouldn't have dared to do that even a year ago.

At what price freedom?

2007-09-03T09:47:00.000-05:00

How long will we suffer fools who encourage us to be beholden to their nanny state?

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.

"It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care," he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. "If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK."

You can't choose. That phrase damns the whole thing from one end to another.

You can't choose. It is no longer your perogative to even be sick, under Edwards' idea of America.

My own parents don't schedule doctor visits for me. Why should John Edwards?

On Freedom and Smoke

2007-08-29T16:32:00.001-05:00

Smoking is gross. I agree. I'm not interested in doing it, though I do enjoy a nice cigar or pipe now and then. Cigarette smoke is ok, but stale smoke reeks, and it's dangerous and addictive. Let's go ahead and label it "bad," even.

But sometimes bad things need to be ok. Sometimes quantity or reason should be irrelevant in the face of freedom.

This is something Hillary Clinton doesn't understand.

Hillary Clinton lavished praise on New York City's tough anti-smoking laws yesterday - and said she supports smoking bans in public places across the country.

Asked at an Iowa forum on cancer whether banning smoking in public places would be good for America, Clinton replied, "Well, personally, I think so. And that's what a lot of local communities and states are starting to do."

Incidentally I think the NY Post should re-title that article. "HILL EYES NATIONAL CIG CURB" isn't exactly truthful. I digress...

Look: the point is we should never be able to demand (via legislation) that other people do things -- even if we think they are dangerous to our fellow man -- just because they "ought" or "ought not" do this or that. Sometimes freedom is ugly. Sometimes freedom means seeing things you don't want to, or smelling things you don't like, or even dealing with people, ideas, or actions you find terribly offensive.

But the freedom itself is a beautiful thing, and reason or rationale doesn't have to enter in to that idea.

Take one example: collecting. Collecting things is truthfully about the most unreasonable thing a person can do. Gathering all sorts of trinkets or knickknacks, hoarding them, doting on them, cataloging, trading, and always acquiring more and more and more. This is not rational behavior. But when it comes down to it, freedom doesn't see quantity. Freedom doesn't ever say "Look, I understand you like stamps...but must you keep so many?". If we're free to acquire stamps, we ought likewise to be free to acquire 5,000 stamps from various nations and time periods.

Expand that to guns, another oft-collected set of items. Do we see this sort of freedom? Do people appreciate it for what it is? No. Massive gun collections of the irrational sort are "dangerous" or called "arsenals".

Now, granted, you can't kill people with stamps (at least not without great creativity), but the principle therein is the same.

And that extends wonderfully to smoking, drinking, or anything else that has quantity linked with vice. Most anyone will allow one, perhaps two uses of tobacco or alcohol a week. Very few people would argue against limitations beyond that stringent degree. But if you give an inch with liberty you must allow it to take a mile; that is its very nature.

Next time you catch yourself shaking your head at one man's irrational or even self-destructive behavior (is one skydive permissible? how about 10,600?) remember that rationale or reason exists only in the eye of the beholder -- and the next unreasonable freedom or hobby that comes under fire may be yours.

So light up, sit back, and enjoy the idea of freedom...if not its particular consequences.

John Edwards is a jerk

2007-08-29T09:17:00.000-05:00

At some point Edwards' two-faced hipocrisy will catch up to him. I just hope it's in a bad, public, embarrassing fashion.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards told a labor group he would ask Americans to make a big sacrifice: their sport utility vehicles.

Edwards says Americans should be asked to drive more fuel efficient vehicles. He says he would ask them to give up SUVs.

Sure. I'll do that when you get more money efficient haircuts and stop toodling around the nation in your private jet (which, incidentally, burns more fuel than my '76 Bronco).

It's been said before, and this is nowhere near original coming from me, but if Edwards is going to continue to tell people about the jagged rift between the "Two Americas" must he make it so disgustingly obvious that he lives in the rich one?

A Greenpeace article I can get behind

2007-08-29T09:06:00.000-05:00

Despite the near hyperventilation about CO2 in this article, I can get behind it.

North Americans are the world's largest per-capita wood consumers and yet our forests cover approximately the same area of land as they did 100 years ago. According to the United Nations, our forests have expanded nearly 100 million acres over the past decade.

There is a misconception that cutting down an old tree will result in a net release of carbon. Yet wooden furniture made in the Elizabethan era still holds the carbon fixed hundreds of years ago.

Although old trees contain huge amounts of carbon, their rate of sequestration has slowed to a near halt. A young tree, although it contains little fixed carbon, pulls CO2 from the atmosphere at a much faster rate.

When a tree rots or burns, the carbon contained in the wood is released back to the atmosphere. Since combustion releases carbon, active forest management -- such as removing dead trees and clearing debris from the forest floor -- will be imperative in reducing the number and intensity of fires.

Everything here makes sense to me, especially the part about DiCaprio not knowing what he's talking about.

I'm sure by now most people are (like me) wishing that environmentalists would just make up their minds. "Old growth is amazing, don't you dare cut it down!" becomes "Cut it down for new growth to sequester CO2!". Hands-off forestry management becomes active forest floor debris cleaning -- and either way The Man is the enemy, whether that's the government, Big Business or you and me.

The fact of the matter is, environmental activists do more harm than good. They reduce complex issues into single-facet talk or action points, and ultimately they have no idea what they're doing.

This smackdown of DiCaprio's movie from a knowledgeable environmental activist is one of the more responsible moves that's come lately out of a corrupt, nonsensical movement. If only more of the intelligent members of these organizations could (or would) hold back their intellectually less fortunate but more rabid attack dogs, we might actually be able to make some headway on conservation and responsible stewardship of our environment.

Dangerous

2007-08-28T11:01:00.001-05:00

This little blurb of a story shows why Ahmadinejad is so dangerous: he speaks frankly and blends just enough truth into a statement to make you want to buy it.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday brushed off a warning by Nicolas Sarkozy that Iran risked being bombed over its nuclear drive, saying his "inexperienced" French counterpart did not know what he was talking about.

"He (Sarkozy) only recently came to power and wants to find a place for himself in the world," Ahmadinejad told reporters.

"He is still inexperienced, meaning that maybe he does not really understand the meaning of his own words.

"I think what he said is for the consumption of his inner circles. For us, it is of no political value."

And, you know, what he's saying is probably true. However, there are some politicians who don't just say things for "consumption of [their] inner circles". Sarkozy may be honest, and in that case he would be something utterly foreign to President Ahmadinejad but familiar to us here in the States.

An easy way to rewrite the story to better understand the players is to "plug in" different people in character roles. This works well in literature, theater, and politics. It helps take personal favorites or subtle perceptions out of the mix to enable the viewer (or writer) to form his own opinions using characters he knows.

Utilizing that, let's change Sarkozy to, say, Hugo Chavez...and Ahmadinejad to Bush. Is the reaction correct now? Most certainly.

But more interestingly, let's sub in Dubya for Sarkozy. Can Ahmadinejad so certainly dismiss his remarks out of hand? Might we conclude that perhaps, here, Ahmadinejad is the one feeding rhetoric to his supporters?

If it looks like a rat, smells like a rat...

2007-08-28T10:56:00.000-05:00

...then it's probably a rat.

One of the biggest sources of political donations to Hillary Rodham Clinton is a tiny, lime-green bungalow that lies under the flight path from San Francisco International Airport.

Six members of the Paw family, each listing the house at 41 Shelbourne Ave. as their residence, have donated a combined $45,000 to the Democratic senator from New York since 2005, for her presidential campaign, her Senate re-election last year and her political action committee. In all, the six Paws have donated a total of $200,000 to Democratic candidates since 2005, election records show.
...
No one in the Paw family had ever given a campaign contribution before the 2004 presidential election, according to campaign-finance reports. Then, in July 2004, five members of the family contributed a total of $3,600 to the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat. Five of the checks were dated July 27, 2004. About the same time, Mr. Hsu made his first donations to a political candidate, contributing the maximum amount allowed by law to Mr. Kerry in two separate checks, on July 21, 2004, and on Aug. 6.

From then on, the correlation of campaign donations between Mr. Hsu and the Paw family has continued. The first donations to Mrs. Clinton came Dec. 23, 2004, when Mr. Hsu and one Paw family member donated the then-maximum $4,000 to her Senate campaign in two $2,000 checks, campaign-finance records show. In March 2005, the individuals gave a total of $17,500 to Mrs. Clinton.

Yet again, though, we'll see the media cover their darling. There will be no outrage, no follow-up to this story. But imagine the sputtering if a Giuliani donation racket like this was uncovered?

For the record I think anyone ought to be able to give as much money as they like to anyone else. The only reason I think this is "bad" is because these folks are breaking the rules and lying about it.

Watcher's Council

2007-08-28T00:14:00.001-05:00

Sarkozy: Hawk

2007-08-27T21:04:00.000-05:00

France's new president Nicolas Sarkozy is further redefining France's global positioning:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Monday a diplomatic push by the world's powers to rein in Tehran's nuclear program was the only alternative to "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."

In his first major foreign policy speech, Sarkozy emphasized his existing foreign policy priorities, such as opposing Turkish membership of the European Union and pushing for a new Mediterranean Union that he hopes will include Ankara.

That's great and all but his stance on Russia is sketchy at best. Admonishment doesn't do a whole lot.

He also presented some new ideas, such as...expanding the Group of Eight industrialized nations to include the biggest developing states.

Sarkozy criticized Russia for its dealings on the international stage. "Russia is imposing its return on the world scene by using its assets, notably oil and gas, with a certain brutality," he said.

"When one is a great power, one should not be brutal."

Rather than expanding the G-8, why don't we remove Russia and add someone more worthy? Brazil, South Korea and Australia all come to mind. That goes double for the UN Security Council.

Interesting economic ramifications

2007-08-27T09:17:00.000-05:00

Manpower is a commodity. It functions on scarcity just like all other resources. Its price fluctuates in value on the market based on supply and demand. We often speak of "shortfalls" in this country -- oil, credit, natural gas -- and we understand the consequences: higher prices, potential unavailability of things we need.

However, because of the general availability of labor people tend to forget that it is something which functions on the open market. These misconceptions are what cause illogical economic inanities such as the minimum wage and socialistic job security laws. Violating employment at will violates the free market principals with workers just as it does with buying popsicles or computers (can you imagine being told when and how often you could buy, say, steaks at the market?).

This excerpt is interesting.

Unemployment rates have been as low as 2 percent this year in places like Montana, and nearly as low in neighboring states. Economists cite such factors as an aging work force and booming tourism economies for the tight labor market.

The U.S. Department of Labor reports the mountain West region - covering eight states along the Rocky Mountains - has the lowest overall unemployment rate in the nation. The region hit an all-time low of 3.4 percent in May.

The effects are everywhere. Logging equipment in Idaho sits idle as companies have a tough time finding workers. A shortage of lifeguards has forced Helena to shorten hours at children-only pools. A local paper in Jackson, Wyo., has page after page of help wanted ads.

The idea of a gasoline shortage is frightening. Cement shortages have caused paralysis of construction industries (and local economies). Because of the forgetfulness of our society when it comes to labor, we don’t realize that a labor shortfall can be every bit as devastating – if not more.

After all, concrete shortages hurt only construction primarily, and those effects are only felt by the average consumer through a series of economic links. Labor shortfalls would acutely damage every industry directly.

Knowing that, how does it change your views of the illegal immigrant situation in America? “Kick ‘em all out” is good: great, in fact. It’s a start. But the fact that such a large black market for labor exists, and flourishes, is an indication of a disconnect between supply and demand. In a “correct” market, black markets have no reason to exist.

This story demonstrates to me, at least, that we need a better answer to the illegal immigrant situation than just round them up or let them in. We need a method to bring workers in – if and when we need them.

It’s a complex issue, and we need to acknowledge that there is no one-sided answer. Open borders is the equivalence of allowing steroids in baseball. You change the rules to accommodate dirty behavior. This makes it legitimate, but it isn't a fix -- it's moving the foul line to accept the position. Kick 'em all out is a rational response, but ending there isn't sufficient. It's temporary at best.

Castrating a broken market without rectifying the forces that caused it to break isn't a fix -- it isn't even a band aid. Instead, lets find why the labor market became so muddled, why the forces driving it are so strong, and apply logical controls to rectify the situation.

The demand for labor isn't going to go away; nor is the need for border security. And I fear the next non-fix bill that comes through congress may be just as ineffective as the last while having the redeeming quality (legislatively) of fewer enemies.

Nice folks...

2007-08-23T09:07:00.000-05:00

Iranians are such nice people.

It was unclear exactly what his offense had been as the country's strict morality laws cover many areas, but it was reported he had been convicted of abusing alcohol and having sex outside of marriage.

The public lashings have been endorsed by the judiciary as a way of deterring alcohol abuse at a time when it is on the increase among young men but some religious leaders are said to be questioning their validity, fearing they have an adverse impact on the country's image abroad.

No kidding? Nice justice system when even the police are wearing masks. On another note, apparently black bikini briefs are "in" in Iran...

Romney goof on abortion

2007-08-23T08:12:00.000-05:00

Romney can't make up his mind about abortion. Earlier he said

We support a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution and we endorse legislation to make it clear that the 14th Amendment's protections apply to unborn children.

And yet Tuesday he said

I'd let states make their own decision in this regard. My view, of course, is I'm a pro-life individual. That's the position I support. But, I'd let states have this choice rather than let the federal government have it.

Either view is appropriate in my mind for a Republican candidate. I would prefer a national amendment because it matches my view. However, I think Roe v Wade should be overturned regardless because it was a terrible decision with a legal basis that was tenuous at best.

To be honest, Romney's latest line sounds like something directly out of Fred Thompson's mouth. I think thats rather odd because Romney is pretty much the only Republican candidate with a leg to stand on when it comes to conservative credentials.

Smile

2007-08-23T08:07:00.000-05:00

This story brings a smile to my face.

Tehran has threatened to bar major German banks that are pulling out of Iran due to US pressure and steep administration costs from returning to the country.

A number of European banks, such as Credit Suisse and UBS, have already taken similar decisions, paring back or ceasing altogether their operations with Iran.

The FTD said that European financial institutions feared losing out on lucrative business with the United States if they remained active in Iran, after US officials threatened the banks' boards with consequences.

They may not like us, they may not think we're great...but they know we don't fool around. And they want the money.

The whole idea of a financial war is similar to that of a cold war -- and it plays to our strengths. Just as Reagan understood that the USSR could not keep up with the muscle of capitalism (if it were only allowed to flex!) our leaders understand now that the rest of the world can't stand up to us financially. I'm glad we're using that strong position. It's certainly more "diplomatic" than guns or embargoes, and that's something even liberals can get behind.

Potential

2007-08-22T15:21:00.000-05:00

This story has a lot of potential to change things in Iraq on a large scale:

The leader of Iraq's banned Baath party, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, has decided to join efforts by the Iraqi authorities to fight al-Qaeda, one of the party's former top officials, Abu Wisam al-Jashaami, told pan-Arab daily Al Hayat.

"AlDouri has decided to sever ties with al-Qaeda and sign up to the programme of the national resistance, which includes routing Islamist terrorists and opening up dialogue with the Baghdad government and foreign forces," al-Jashaami said.

Al-Douri has decided to deal directly with US forces in Iraq, according to al-Jashaami. He figures in the 55-card deck of "most wanted" officials from the former Iraqi regime issued by the US government.

Recent weeks have seen a first step in this direction, when Baathist fighters cooperated with Iraqi government forces in hunting down al-Qaeda operatives in the volatile Diyala province and in several districts of the capital, Baghdad.

This is not the end. But it could be the beginning of the end. The Baath party was Saddam's people. His instructions to them to disband, fall back and fight another day were the beginning of this whole headache. Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda were easily revealed in his party members cooperating with AQI. Without the Baath support, things are going to get mighty shaky for AQI.

This is entirely speculation, but the timing of this event could be brilliant for al-Maliki. The Iraqi people would not have accepted reintegration of former Baathists into their newly formed government. Decades of fear took that option off the table. However, with the new demon of AQI, al-Maliki may have done a master stroke in allowing the Baathists a means to redeem themselves -- and reconcile their past transgressions.

If the Baath party can be formerly reconciled with the legitimate government in such a way that leaves no potential for eventual takeover and a fall back into despotism, the Iraqi government's perceived legitimacy will soar.

Checkmate? Perhaps not. But check for sure.

Update: Ed over at Captain's Quarters has more (and better) on this topic.

Debunked

2007-08-22T10:35:00.000-05:00

This is an excellent article debunking two things you hear parroted in the MSM everyday: Hillary has experience and Obama is for change:

But this season's premier political cliche is already both hackneyed and trite, while having no obvious truth to it. I am referring to the claim that Sen. Barack Obama would bring real change to America, while Sen. Hillary Clinton would bring extensive experience to the office.

First, it is interesting to note where this cliche came from. As far as I can tell, its origins are nothing more than the campaign claims of the two candidates.

This is the sort of political commentary I would like to see. The article doesn't attack either candidate. It doesn't favor one or the other. It doesn't make any comment whatsoever on either of their political stances.

It merely shows fact -- true facts -- and lets the reader come to his own conclusion. This is what is severely lacking in the media these days, and this article is a breath of fresh air.

We're in trouble

2007-08-22T10:02:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty sure Russia has gotten rid of Vladimir Putin and replaced him with some sort of zombie-clone of Yul Brynner.
"No elephants? No wonder he is not winning war!" -- this explain's Russia's recent increase in arms and armament. You cannot win a war without elephants. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

"So let it be written, so let it be done".

This is bad news for the safety of the free world. Bad, bad news.

New Heights of Brilliance

2007-08-22T10:01:00.000-05:00

I think it must be time for the moose to go the way of the dodo.

Norway is concerned that its national animal, the moose, is harming the climate by emitting an estimated 2,100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year through its belching and farting.

Norwegian newspapers, citing research from Norway's technical university, said a motorist would have to drive 13,000 kilometers in a car to emit as much CO2 as a moose does in a year.

Its the only way to save them.

I'm beginning to like him

2007-08-22T08:20:00.000-05:00

I never thought too much of al-Maliki. His ties to Sadr and a seeming refusal to do something grated.

Something has changed now. He's got a little fire in his belly, and its hard not to like someone who will tell the US to shove it. After all, that's the attitude that got us where we are today -- and I wish we still had more of it.

"No one has the right to place timetables on the Iraq government. It was elected by its people," he said at a news conference in Damascus at the end of a three-day visit to Syria.

"Those who make such statements are bothered by our visit to Syria. We will pay no attention. We care for our people and our constitution and can find friends elsewhere," al-Maliki said.

This is what sadness looks like

2007-08-22T07:49:00.001-05:00

I've been blogging for over a year and following politics for quite a bit longer than that, but this has to be the most disgusting thing I've ever come across.

Democratic leaders in congress had planned to use August recess to raise the heat on Republicans to break with President Bush on the Iraq war. Instead, Democrats have been forced to recalibrate their own message in the face of recent positive signs on the security front, increasingly focusing their criticisms on what those military gains have not achieved: reconciliation among Iraq's diverse political factions.

...The first installment of Petraeus's testimony is scheduled to be delivered before the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks...

The leading Democratic candidates for the White House have fallen into line with the campaign to praise military progress while excoriating Iraqi leaders for their unwillingness to reach political accommodations that could end the sectarian warfare.

Advisers to both said theirs were political as well as substantive statements, part of a broader Democratic effort to frame Petraeus's report before it is released next month by preemptively acknowledging some military success in the region. Aides to several Senate Democrats said they expect that to be a recurring theme in the coming weeks, as lawmakers return to hear Petraeus's testimony and to possibly take up a defense authorization bill and related amendments on the war.

I've long understood, mentally, that democrats are invested in defeat when it comes to the war. That much is easy to see. But I don't think it really hit home, ever, until I saw my own predictions of reversal, maneuvering, and flag-waving come true.

There are things you come to expect in politics: lies, bragging, half-truths and illusions. These, unfortunately, appear to be "necessary evils" of the game. I would hope that an honest person could win a campaign without them; but then again why would an honest person run for office?

Normally these things don't bother me. It's par for the course. You may as well get upset at the rain or the sun. Politicians lie, and Sunday comes before Monday. I get that. We can all accept lies and pandering: these are small evils.

But there are things which should be inviolate. I know, invoking words like "should" and "ought" involve all sorts of moral complications that liberals (and politicians) aren't too concerned with. And yet the point remains. There are topics, actions, and positions which really should be taboo.

One of these is treason. Define it any way you like: I'll stick with my pet definition of "performing acts with a conscious effort to undermine one's own nation or group". Treason for political gain shouldn't be on the table.

Still, there it is. On the news, in the paper, on their blogs. Political double talk that displays, if not outright treason, a callous indifference to toeing the line. A willingness to fight the war (as opposed to fighting the war) for no other reason than to gain votes.

Victory at any cost is usually ugly; victory at the cost of national flagellation doubly so.

At some point it begins to wear on me. I can't really stomach that level of duplicity. And obsequious repetition of the party line seems to me to be an empty excuse. Some things are just wrong.

The quotes tell the whole story. Two politicians speak out, one because she doesn't want to sound as if she's on board with this whole "winning" thing, and another because, perhaps, he's slowly waking to the reality, the dull, aching horror of what the democrats are actually doing here.

"I don't know of anybody who isn't desperately supportive of the military," she said. "People want to say positive things. But it's difficult to say positive things in this environment and not have some snarky apologist for the White House turn it into some clipped phraseology that looks like support for the president's policies."

"We should sit down with Republicans, see what would be acceptable to them to end the war and present it to the president, start negotiating from the beginning," he said, adding, "I don't know what the [Democratic] leadership is thinking. Sometimes they've done things that are beyond me."

If you're willing to sacrifice the nation that birthed you, that shelters your ambition, that promotes and enables your freedom (even the freedom to attack and destroy) what won't you do?

What good is ruling a nation that you ruined along the way to the throne?

Enjoyable read

2007-08-21T15:35:00.001-05:00

This is a good article, even if it does come from Canadia. Enjoy.

As Paul Feyerabend, one of my scientific heroes, wrote in his 1975 essay, How to defend Society against Science: “In society at large the judgement of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. Science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer.”

Read the rest, its thought provoking.

Watcher's Council

2007-08-21T15:04:00.001-05:00

The members of the Watcher's Council hold a vote every week on what they consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around. Per the Watcher's instructions, I am submitting one of my own posts for consideration in the upcoming nominations process.

The first time I submitted my writing I got zero votes. The next, a paltry 2/3 (by the recondite voting system this means one first place or two second place votes). Finally, last week I was fourth place in the non-council or "Nouncil" posts, receiving 1 1/3 votes and losing to Small Wars Journal and Captains Quarters, among others.

At any rate perhaps a more scientific approach this week will net me an ever increasing bounty of votes -- by my consensus-backed scientific methodology (tm) I should receive just over 78 votes by sometime next year, obliterating the weekly winning average of 3-4.

Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post, here is the list of results for the latest vote, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.

"Consensus": Wrong

2007-08-21T13:27:00.002-05:00

For the most scientific report ever made, the IPCC sure seems to have a lot of dissent in the climate community. Just a warning -- this has some science in it. I'm making an effort at putting everything in layman's terms, so you ought to be able to follow along.

ABSTRACT. The equilibrium sensitivity of Earth's climate is determined as the quotient of the relaxation time constant of the system and the pertinent global heat capacity. The heat capacity of the global ocean, obtained from regression of ocean heat content vs. global mean surface temperature, GMST, is 14 ± 6 W yr m-2 K-1, equivalent to 110 m of ocean water; other sinks raise the effective planetary heat capacity to 17 ± 7 W yr m-2 K-1 (all uncertainties are 1-sigma estimates). The time constant pertinent to changes in GMST is determined from autocorrelation of that quantity over 1880-2004 to be 5 ± 1 yr. The resultant equilibrium climate sensitivity, 0.30 ± 0.14K/(W m-2), corresponds to an equilibrium temperature increase for doubled CO2 of 1.1 ± 0.5 K. The short time constant implies that GMST is in near equilibrium with applied forcings and hence that net climate forcing over the twentieth century can be obtained from the observed temperature increase over this period, 0.57 ± 0.08 K, as 1.9 ± 0.9 W m-2. For this forcing considered the sum of radiative forcing by incremental greenhouse gases, 2.2 ± 0.3 W m-2, and other forcings, other forcing agents, mainly incremental tropospheric aerosols, are inferred to have exerted only a slight forcing over the twentieth century of -0.3 ± 1.0 W m-2.

Ok, I'm sorry, that was a little uncalled for. It can be heady if you're not used to it.

In all seriousness: Stephen Schwartz of the Atmospheric Science Division of Brookhaven National Laboratory has used empirical data (that is, actual recorded measurements) from the 1800s onward to develop some pertinent bits of information.

Time constant / heat capacity = equilibrium sensitivity.
Heat capacity = 14 ± 6 W yr/(m^2 K)
Time constant = 5 ± 1 year.
Equilibrium sensitivity = 0.30 ± 0.14 K/(W m-2)
This implies that doubling CO2 increases global temperatures by 1.1 ± 0.5 degrees C.

The time constant indicates a constant, usually denoted by τ, that solves the equation

r(∆ t)= exp(-∆t/ τ)

for time required to move from a random perturbation back to the mean position (generally described as the time to 63% of the step function). In other words, its a constant that describes how long it takes for a system to "get to normal" after a given disturbance is introduced.

Heat capacity is also known as specific heat, and is defined simply as the amount of heat or energy required to raise a specified amount by a specified temperature. Some things are easier to heat up -- the metal in a skillet vs the plastic in the handle, for instance.

Equilibrium sensitivity gives an indication to the amount of time a system requires to respond to stimuli when the magnitude of these stimuli are taken into account -- big cups of coffee take longer to heat up than small ones, and boiling water changes at a different rate than lukewarm water. So far so good.

The big picture, then, is that he's modeling the system by the laws of thermodynamics. Just as you can model your skillet over the oven by taking the specific heat and thermal conductivity of the metal, the air between the burner and the pan, and the food inside it and determine scientifically how long it takes to cook some bacon, you can give an estimate for the ocean, the sun, and the Earth's climate.

Obviously this isn't a simple process, and he literally goes on for pages about how he arrives at these figures, but the net result is a relatively simple equation: Indeed, the overarching concepts involved in both climate change and heat transfer aren't terribly complicated. Energy in, energy out.

Some things I found very interesting in his paper follow.

Estimates of the effective ocean heat capacity have previously been presented by Andreae et al. (2005) and by Frame et al. (2005), in neither instance with description of how the quantity was calculated or any statistical analysis.

This is something which the "Peer reviewed" crowd should take careful note of. Many of the values used in science are often uncorroborated and are accepted on faith in the veracity and competence of the author. In this case the author is somewhat bemused as to how to compare his data to other results because of the lack of substantiation available in the literature for others who have performed similar work.

The relaxation time constant of Earth's climate system determined from this analysis, τ = 5 ± 1 yr, is essentially the same as that given by the energy balance model in the absence of feedbacks (Sec. 3), τ0 = 5 ± 2 yr. This result would seem to be indicative of little net feedback inherent in Earth's climate system.

This commentary is significant in a few ways.

A short time constant indicates that if we were to stop increasing CO2 levels magically, the Earth wouldn't continue to heat up. There's no heat "[coming down] the pipe".
The Earth was designed well: small fluctuations in forcing variables won't send it into a deathspiral or unstable condition.
Feedback mechanisms such as increased water vapor, albedo and ice melting apparently don't play as much of a role as is commonly suggested.

Finally, the kicker:

...The corresponding equilibrium increase in global mean surface temperature for doubled CO2, is ∆T2× ≈ 1.1 ± 0.3 K. (These and other results are summarized in Table 3). This climate sensitivity is much lower than current estimates, e.g., the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC, 2007], ∆T2× ≈ 3 K.

He cuts the IPCC's latest estimate for the temperature change due to a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere in half from 3K to 1.1K. 1.1K of change is well within the natural variability of the system -- even as short as 100 years ago we had temperature anomalies well in excess of -1K globally.

Al Gore and his cronies can stop trumpeting their paranoid delusional vision of global catastrophe now. For one thing its unsubstantiated in the literature: a quick glance of Schwartz' paper reveals how much raw research is still being done on global climate change with a wide degree of disagreement between studies.

Additionally, this paper reveals many of the flaws in the modeling systems the IPCC relies so heavily upon. When compared to real, recorded data the predictions simply don't match up.

Finally, this paper relies heavily upon the GISS data for global surface temperatures. As noted previously on this blog, this data set is somewhat suspect after recent amateur scientists found massive errors in normalization and recording of data. Whenever you see Hansen, et al in a climate paper, remember that the data was just fixed last week -- and has been used repeatedly in its incorrect form, which massively exaggerates upward temperature anomalies.

Woohoo!

2007-08-21T13:15:00.000-05:00

Michelle Malkin reports that GreenStone media of Hanoi Jane fame has gone out of business!

What was expected to be a relatively quiet shutdown of the failed GreenStone Media feminist talk radio network has instead turned into a noisy flap over the way its founders are treating outgoing employees.

According to two new reports, the Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem and Rosie O'Donnell- backed outfit appears ready to ditch its staff without providing severance payments or offering other assistance.

In addition, there have been accusations that the firm is utilizing questionable financial tactics in order to avoid giving staffers their fair due.

I'll admit it. I'm gloating right now. Not only because their stupid sexist idea didn't work, but also because they can't even go out nicely. Powerful women stiffing "empowered" women, a commentary which is trite but true.

I love it.