Friday, December 31, 2010
Eight Botched Environmental Forecasts
1. Within a few years "children just aren't going to know what snow is." Snowfall will be "a very rare and exciting event." Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, interviewed by the UK Independent, March 20, 2000.
2. "[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots…[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers." Michael Oppenheimer, published in "Dead Heat," St. Martin's Press, 1990.
7. "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.
8. "In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish." Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970
Ezra Klein: the Constitution is Impossible to Understand Because its Over 100 Years Old
...By the way, in case it isn’t clear, the reason these two liberals want people to believe the constitution is impossible to decipher is because they despise the constitution. Liberals want the government to have limitless power and that is in direct contrast with what the founders designed the constitution to do. Of course the constitution allows for its own amendment but liberal policies simply aren’t popular enough to garner constitutional amendments thus simply ignoring the constitution is the next best step....
The ObamaCare Fraud
...When the government hands out subsidies, it will use a household’s income in the previous year as the basis for guessing what the household is qualified to get in the current year. But if the household’s income grows midyear, the subsidy recapture provision will require it to repay anywhere from $600 to $3,500, compared to the $450 that the law originally called for.
This will make it very hazardous for poor working families to get ahead. In the original law, the loss of subsidy with rising income already meant absurdly high effective marginal tax rates—the implicit tax on every additional dollar of income earned. How high? The Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon puts them at 229 percent for families of four who increase their earnings by an amount equal to 5 percent of the federal poverty level or $1,100. In other words, a family that added this amount to an income of $44,700 would actually see its total income fall by $1,419 due to the loss of subsidies.
The subsidy recapture provision—essentially a tax collection scheme—means that low-wage, cash-strapped families will have no escape from these perverse tax rates. Many of them will find themselves owing the government thousands of dollars in back taxes. Since it is unlikely that they will have this kind of money sitting around, they will face a massive incentive to either fudge their returns or work for cash to avoid reporting additional income. Either way, Uncle Sam will come after them, just as it does with recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the negative income tax scheme that is the inspiration behind Obamacare’s subsidies. In 2004, EITC recipients were 1.76 times more likely to be audited than others, no doubt because it is easier for the government to recover unpaid taxes from poor people than “lawyered up” rich people. In other words, Obamacare will first create the temptation for low-income families to commit fraud, and then penalize them when they do....
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Sanitation Department's slow snow cleanup was a budget protest
Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.
Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.
"They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important," said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot. ...
..."The snitches "didn't want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation," Halloran said. "They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file."...
How Government Failure Caused the Great Recession
...Bank misregulation, in particular the international Basel capital rules, including a U.S. adaptation to them—the 2001 Recourse Rule—and the outsourcing of risk assessment by regulators to government-sanctioned rating agencies incentivized (not merely “allowed”) the creation and highly-leveraged systemic accumulation of the highest yielding AAA- and AA-rated securities among banks globally. ...
...Continually increasing leverage—driven largely by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac credit policies and the political obsession with taking credit for increased homeownership—into the U.S. mortgage system. Reduced down payments and loosened underwriting standards were a matter of government policy throughout the housing boom. The two nearby charts illustrate the leverage trends from 2001 to 2007—residential mortgage debt as a share of GDP rose from less than 50 percent in 2001 to almost 75 percent by 2007 (top chart); and the percent of residential real estate sales volume with loan-to-value ratios of 97 percent or higher (down payments of 3 percent or less) increased from about 10 percent in 2001 to almost 40 percent by 2007 (bottom chart). Taken together, these graphs show that housing leverage was increasing to historically unprecedented levels by 2007 at the same time that the quality of housing debt was deteriorating considerably due to an erosion of sound underwriting standards and lower down payments, as discussed above....
...The enlargement of the riskier subprime and Alt-A mortgage markets by Fannie and Freddie through the abandonment of proven credit standards (e.g., dropping proof of income requirements) during the 2004-2007 period, and their combined accumulation of a $1.6 trillion portfolio of these loans to meet the affordable housing goals Congress mandated....
...The FDIC, Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and Congress undertook explicit or implicit creditor bailouts for large financial institutions starting in the 1980s (First Pennsylvania, Continental Illinois, the thrift industry, the Farm Credit System, etc.) and continuing to 2008 (Bear Stearns). These regulatory decisions led to an absence of creditor discipline of financial institution leverage and risk-taking (especially at Fannie and Freddie) and the “too big to fail” expectation of a government bailout....
...The increase in FDIC deposit insurance from $40,000 to $100,000 per account in 1980 combined with the unchecked expansion of coverage up to $50 million under the Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service beginning in 2003. These regulatory errors of commission and omission reduced the incentives of business, institutional, and high net-worth depositors to monitor and discipline excessive bank leverage and risk-taking....
...Artificially low and sometimes negative real federal funds rates from 2001 to 2005—a result of expansionary Fed monetary policy—fueled the subprime and Alt-A mortgage boom and widened the asset-liability maturity gap for banks (see chart below). Most subprime and Alt-A mortgages carried low initial rates made possible by low federal funds rates, which spurred borrower demand for these mortgages. ...
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
The Real Reason Amazon Dropped WikiLeaks? Taxpayer Money
Earlier this month, online retail giant Amazon.com portrayed its decision to drop the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks from its servers as a brave, moral stand prompted by its tremendous concern for protecting innocent lives.
But New York University journalism professor Dave Winer thinks he's stumbled across the real reason the company moved so quickly to boot WikiLeaks, “the 800 pound gorilla in the room”: Amazon's desire to secure lucrative government contracts that could've been jeopardized had it agreed to host a website whose founder has been labeled a “high-tech terrorist” by the vice president.
“Today I got a promotional email from Kay Kinton, Senior Public Relations Manager for Amazon Web Services [AWS], entitled 'Amazon Web Services Year in Review,'” Wisner recounts on his blog -- an email that heralded the company's financially lucrative and growing ties to the federal government....
Thomas Sowell: The Progressive end run around the Constitution
...Whatever the merits or demerits of the proposed provision in Medicare legislation, the Constitution of the United States makes the elected representatives of "we the people" the ones authorized to make such decisions. But when proposals explicitly rejected by a vote in Congress are resurrected and stealthily made the law of the land by bureaucratic fiat, there has been an end run around both the people and the Constitution.
Blumenauer's office praised the Medicare bureaucracy's action but warned: "While we are very happy with the result, we won't be shouting it from the rooftops because we are not out of the woods yet."
In other words, don't let the masses know about it.
It is not only members of Congress or the administration who treat "we the people" and the Constitution as nuisances to get around. Judges, including justices of the Supreme Court, have been doing this increasingly over the past 100 years.
During the Progressive era of the early 20th century, the denigration of the Constitution began, led by such luminaries as Princeton scholar and future President of the United States Woodrow Wilson, future Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.
As a Professor at Princeton University, Wilson wrote condescendingly of "the simple days of 1787" when the Constitution was written and how, in our presumably more complex times, "each generation of statesmen looks to the Supreme Court to supply the interpretation which will serve the needs of the day."
This kind of argument would be repeated for generations, with no more evidence that 1787 was any less complicated than later years than Wilson presented-- which was none-- and with no more reasons why the need for "change" meant that unelected judges should be the ones making those changes, as if there were no elected representatives of the people.
Professor Roscoe Pound likewise referred to the need for "a living constitution by judicial interpretation," in order to "respond to the vital needs of present-day life." He rejected the idea of law as "a body of rules."
But if law is not a body of rules, what is it? A set of arbitrary fiats by judges, imposing their own vision of "the needs of the times"? Or a set of arbitrary regulations stealthily emerging from within the bowels of a bureaucracy?
Brandeis was another leader of this Progressive era chorus of demands for moving beyond law as rules. He cited "newly arisen social needs" and "a shifting of our longing from legal justice to social justice."
In other words, judges were encouraged to do an end run around rules, such as those set forth in the Constitution, and around the elected representatives of "we the people." As Pound put it, law should be "in the hands of a progressive and enlightened caste whose conceptions are in advance of the public."...
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
AEI: How the Government Is Creating Another Bubble
The administration has quietly shifted most federal high-risk mortgage initiatives to the government's original subprime lender.
It is hard to believe, but it looks like the government will soon use the taxpayers' checkbook again to create a vast market for mortgages with low or no down payments and for overstretched borrowers with blemished credit. As in the period leading to the 2008 financial crisis, these loans will again contribute to a housing bubble, which will feed on government funding and grow to enormous size. When it collapses, housing prices will drop and a financial crisis will ensue. And, once again, the taxpayers will have to bear the costs.
In doing this, Congress is repeating the same policy mistake it made in 1992. Back then it mandated that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac compete with the Federal Housing Administration for high-risk loans. Unhappily for both their shareholders and the taxpayers, Fannie and Freddie won that battle.
Now the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed far-reaching new regulation on the financial system after the meltdown, allows the administration to substitute the FHA for Fannie and Freddie as the principal and essentially unlimited buyer of low-quality home mortgages. There is little doubt what will happen then....
The administration has quietly shifted most federal high-risk mortgage initiatives to the government's original subprime lender.
It is hard to believe, but it looks like the government will soon use the taxpayers' checkbook again to create a vast market for mortgages with low or no down payments and for overstretched borrowers with blemished credit. As in the period leading to the 2008 financial crisis, these loans will again contribute to a housing bubble, which will feed on government funding and grow to enormous size. When it collapses, housing prices will drop and a financial crisis will ensue. And, once again, the taxpayers will have to bear the costs.
In doing this, Congress is repeating the same policy mistake it made in 1992. Back then it mandated that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac compete with the Federal Housing Administration for high-risk loans. Unhappily for both their shareholders and the taxpayers, Fannie and Freddie won that battle.
Now the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed far-reaching new regulation on the financial system after the meltdown, allows the administration to substitute the FHA for Fannie and Freddie as the principal and essentially unlimited buyer of low-quality home mortgages. There is little doubt what will happen then....
WaPo suddenly discovers ObamaCare costs more, helps fewer than predicted
...Er, that’s a rather strange understatement. The announced expectations was that it would attract 375,000 people by the end of the year. It has only 8,000 enrollees, which means it missed its mark by 97.9%. If any other major and controversial government program missed its delivery goals by 97.9%, would the Post report it in such anodyne terms? For instance, if 97.9% of a military-weapons system failed to get delivered on time, how would the Post report that? I doubt that the opening paragraph would be that “the Pentagon didn’t get as many artillery weapons as expected.”...
...It’s important to remember that the $5 billion allocated to PECIP was based on … nothing at all. Congress had no real evaluation of cost; they picked a number to get the bill passed while pretending that it wouldn’t increase deficits. The Medicare actuaries predicted that the $5 billion, which was supposed to float PECIP for five years, would run out at the end of one. HHS admitted that they had no idea how much PECIP would cost. And instead of acting as a buffer for those turned down by insurance companies for their pre-existing conditions, the government might have to act just like an insurer by keeping sick people out of the pool....
Health plans for high-risk patients attracting fewer, costing more than expected
An early feature of the new health-care law that allows people who are already sick to get insurance to cover their medical costs isn't attracting as many customers as expected.
In the meantime, in at least a few states, claims for medical care covered by the "high-risk pools" are proving very costly, and it is an open question whether the $5 billion allotted by Congress to start up the plans will be sufficient. ...
...Twenty-seven states have created their own high-risk pools. The rest used an option in the law to let their residents buy coverage through a new federal health plan.
In the spring, the Medicare program's chief actuary predicted that 375,000 people would sign up for the pool plans by the end of the year. Early last month, the Health and Human Services Department reported that just 8,000 people had enrolled. HHS officials declined to provide an update, although they collect such figures monthly, because they have decided to report them on a quarterly basis. ...
HHS falls short of pre-existing coverage prediction by … 97.8%
255 million: The number of Americans with existing health insurance coverage.
20 million: The number of Americans without any health coverage at all due to economic circumstances.
375,000: The number of Americans with pre-existing conditions HHS said would apply for coverage in the first year of ObamaCare, one of the main political arguments for its implementation.
8,011: The number that actually did....
Correcting Krugman
...Critics were quick to point out that Krugman had his facts wrong. As Charles Calomiris, a professor at Columbia University, and Peter Wallison, of the American Enterprise Institute (and member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission), explained, “Here Krugman demonstrates confusion about the law (which did not prohibit subprime lending by the GSEs), misunderstands the regulatory regime under which they operated (which did not have the capacity to control their risk-taking), and mismeasures their actual subprime exposures (which he wrongly states were zero).”
So Krugman shifted his emphasis. In his blog critique of a Financial Times op-ed I wrote in June 2010, Krugman no longer argued that Fannie and Freddie could not buy sub-prime mortgages. Instead, he emphasized the slightly falling share of Fannie and Freddie’s residential mortgage securitizations in the years 2004 to 2006 as the reason they were not responsible. Here again he presents a misleading picture. Not only did Fannie and Freddie purchase whole sub-prime loans that were not securitized (and are thus not counted in its share of securitizations), they also bought substantial amounts of private-label mortgage-backed securities issued by others. When these are taken into account, Fannie and Freddie’s share of the sub-prime market financing did increase even in those years....
...Clearly, Fannie and Freddie did not originate sub-prime mortgages directly — they are not equipped to do so. But they fuelled the boom by buying or guaranteeing them. Indeed, Countrywide was one of their largest originators of sub-prime mortgages, according to work by Ed Pinto, a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae, and participated from very early on in Fannie Mae’s drive into affordable housing....
...Interestingly, before the housing market collapsed, HUD proudly accepted its role in pushing low-income lending through the various levers that Krugman now denies were used. For instance, in 2000 when it announced that it was increasing Fannie and Freddie’s affordable housing goals, it concluded:
Lower-income and minority families have made major gains in access to the mortgage market in the 1990s. A variety of reasons have accounted for these gains, including improved housing affordability, enhanced enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, more flexible mortgage underwriting, and stepped-up enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. But most industry observers believe that one factor behind these gains has been the improved performance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under HUD’s affordable lending goals. HUD’s recent increases in the goals for 2001-03 will encourage the GSEs to further step up their support for affordable lending.” ...
...If the government itself took credit for its then successes in expanding home ownership, why is Krugman not willing to accept its contribution to the subsequent bust as too many lower middle-class families ended up in homes they could not afford? I agree there is room for legitimate differences of opinion on the quality of data, and the extent of government responsibility, but to argue that the government had no role in directing credit, or in the subsequent bust, is simply ideological myopia. ...
...A second argument that Krugman makes is that Europe too had bubbles and the European Central Bank was less aggressive than the Federal Reserve, so monetary policy could not be responsible. It is true that the European Central Bank was less aggressive, but only slightly so: It brought its key refinancing rate down to only 2 percent, while the Fed brought the Fed Funds rate down to 1 percent. Clearly, both rates were low by historical standards. More important, what Krugman does not point out is that different Euro-area economies had differing inflation rates, so the real monetary policy rate was substantially different across the Euro area despite a common nominal policy rate. Countries that had strongly negative real policy rates — Ireland and Spain are primary exhibits — had a housing boom and bust, while countries like Germany with low inflation, and therefore higher real policy rates, did not. ...
Monday, December 27, 2010
A remedy for beggar states
...Principal author of the Public Employee Pension Transparency Act is Rep. Devin Nunes, a Republican from California, where about 80 cents of every government dollar goes for government employees' pay and benefits. His bill would define the scale of the problem of underfunded state and local government pensions and would notify states not to approach Congress like Oliver Twists, holding out porridge bowls and asking for more.
Corporate pension funds are heavily regulated, including pre-funding requirements. A federal agency, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., copes with insolvent ones. By requiring transparency, the government gave the private sector an incentive to move to defined contributions from defined-benefit plans, which are now primarily luxuries enjoyed by public employees.
Less candor, realism and pre-funding are required of state and municipal governments regarding their pension plans. Nunes's bill would require them to disclose the size of their pension liabilities - and the often-dreamy assumptions behind the calculations. Noncompliant governments would be ineligible for issuing bonds exempt from federal taxation. Furthermore, the bill would stipulate that state and local governments are entirely responsible for their pension obligations and the federal government will provide no bailouts.
Nunes's bill would not traduce any state's sovereignty: Each would retain the right not to comply, choosing to forfeit access to the federally subsidized borrowing that facilitated their slide into trouble. ...
Hospitals Send Bill if Mental Patients Win Suits
...Slip and fall in a New York prison, or suffer abuse by its guards, and inmates can keep whatever they win in court. But for patients in state-run mental hospitals — people too ill to live on their own and too poor to pay for their care — the state can drain court-awarded damages, effectively deducting the cost of their stays in the very hospitals that failed or abused them.
“It’s a Catch-22, isn’t it?” said Leo G. Finucane, the lawyer who represented Mr. Langevin. “I need to go to this facility because I’m sick. But if they hurt me worse, they’re immune.”
Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo’s office, which handles these kinds of cases for New York State, declined repeated requests to discuss the matter.
It is not uncommon for public hospitals to lean hard on patients found to have assets. But New York squeezes patients who sue for injuries more consistently and harder than many other states, according to lawyers and others who represent the mentally ill. ...
Obama Returns to End-of-Life Plan That Caused Stir
WASHINGTON — When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.
Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.
Congressional supporters of the new policy, though pleased, have kept quiet. They fear provoking another furor like the one in 2009 when Republicans seized on the idea of end-of-life counseling to argue that the Democrats’ bill would allow the government to cut off care for the critically ill. ...
...After learning of the administration’s decision, Mr. Blumenauer’s office celebrated “a quiet victory,” but urged supporters not to crow about it.
“While we are very happy with the result, we won’t be shouting it from the rooftops because we aren’t out of the woods yet,” Mr. Blumenauer’s office said in an e-mail in early November to people working with him on the issue. “This regulation could be modified or reversed, especially if Republican leaders try to use this small provision to perpetuate the ‘death panel’ myth.”
Moreover, the e-mail said: “We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists, even if they are ‘supporters’ — e-mails can too easily be forwarded.”
The e-mail continued: “Thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it, but we will be keeping a close watch and may be calling on you if we need a rapid, targeted response. The longer this goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.” ...
Why the Terrorists Can Never Win
The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.
Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.
But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world....
USA Buys Enough Guns in 3 Months to Outfit the Entire Chinese and Indian Army
The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.
Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.
But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world....
USA Buys Enough Guns in 3 Months to Outfit the Entire Chinese and Indian Army
Friday, December 24, 2010
The Great College-Degree Scam
...First, the push to increase the number of college graduates seems horribly misguided from a strict economic/vocational perspective. It is precisely that perspective that is emphasized by those, starting with President Obama, who insist that we need to have more college graduates.
Second, the data suggest a horrible decline in the productivity of American education in that the “inputs” used to achieve any given human capital (occupational) outcome have expanded enormously. More simply, it takes 18 years of schooling (including kindergarten and the typical fifth year of college to get a bachelor’s degree) for persons to get an education to do jobs that a generation or two ago people did with 12-13 years of education (graduating more often from college in four years and sometimes skipping kindergarten).
Third, a sharp rise in the dependency ratio—those too old or too young to work relative to the work age population is coming because of the aging of the American population. This means we need to increase employment participation in younger ages (e.g., 18 to 23) where participation is low today because of the rising college participation rate. The falling productivity of American education is aggravating a serious problem—a shortage of workers to sustain a growing population of those unable to care for themselves.
Fourth, all of this supports the notion that credential inflation arises from a perceived need by individuals to demonstrate potential employment competence through a piece of paper, i.e. a college diploma. Employers are using education as a screening and signaling device, at a low cost directly to them (although not costless because of the taxes they pay to sustain much of this), but at a high cost to the prospective employees and to society as a whole....
Union Visits Private Home To Intimidate, Local Media Calls It “Caroling”
...Are you kidding me? A caravan of 80 people to sing insults and, according to eyewitnesses, shouting “F*CK YOU” at various houses right before Christmas? This isn’t “caroling,” this is intimidation. On private property. I’m told by locals that one of the houses they visited was down a private lane of an elderly couple whose granddaughter often stays with them (and luckily wasn’t the night the union struck) – the union trespassed....
...And where is the local media on union members reportedly trespassing onto private property to terrify and intimidate private citizens? They’re fellated by WGEM in one of the most egregious examples of media bias I’ve seen in some time....
Thursday, December 23, 2010
UN mulls internet regulation options
The United Nations is considering whether to set up an inter-governmental working group to harmonise global efforts by policy makers to regulate the internet.
Establishment of such a group has the backing of several countries, spearheaded by Brazil.
At a meeting in New York on Wednesday, representatives from Brazil called for an international body made up of Government representatives that would attempt to create global standards for policing the internet - specifically in reaction to challenges such as WikiLeaks....
The Net Neutrality Coup
...The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."
A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist." ...
...After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to "media reform"—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct "Fairness Doctrine" that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and "said let's get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making." Together the two founded Free Press....
Facing the pension mess
... * Unfunded liabilities for public pensions run by the 50 states total $3.23 trillion -- $21,500 per household.
* Underfunded pensions for municipal and local government employees add another $574 billion of hidden debt -- $14,000 per household.
The data from federal sources is also grim:
* Unfunded US military-retirement obligations now amount to $30,000 per household.
* Unfunded federal civilian-employee pension obligations represent another $16,000 per household.
That means every US household (including the half that normally pay no taxes) would have to kick in $81,500 today to enable federal, state and local governments to meet just their cur rent pension commitments.
For residents of some big cities, the news is much worse. For example, New York City's unfunded pension liabilities alone are nearly $39,000 per household, second only to Chicago at $42,000 per household.
And while many of the 107 million private workers have seen their 401(k)s decimated by investment losses, public employees haven't had a hair on their heads touched. Because their pensions are fixed, when public-pension investments go south -- they underperformed by 30 percent in the first two years of the recession -- the taxpayers have to make up the difference. ...
Calif. Police Officers Kill Man Pointing Water Nozzle, Not Gun
Long Beach police officers shot and killed a man Sunday when they apparently mistook a pistol-grip water nozzle he was holding, for a gun.
Now family members of the man, 35-year-old Douglas Zerby, are lashing out at the police, saying they made no attempt to contact him before opening fire.
Zerby was gunned down at an apartment building Sunday after two people reported a man with a gun sitting on a backyard porch landing, according to authorities.
Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell said officers took positions to observe Zerby, who appeared intoxicated, and believed he had a "tiny six-shooter" as described by a male caller.
Zerby reportedly pointed the black metal-tipped nozzle at one of the officers, and two officers fired a handgun and a shotgun. A total of eight shots were fired - six from a handgun and two from shot guns, said McDonnell. ...
Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That's a problem.
...A Pew Research Center Poll from July 2009 showed that only around 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans; 55 percent are Democrats, 32 percent are independent, and the rest "don't know" their affiliation.
This immense imbalance has political consequences. When President Obama appears Wednesday on Discovery Channel's Mythbusters (9 p.m. ET), he will be there not just to encourage youngsters to do their science homework but also to reinforce the idea that Democrats are the party of science and rationality. And why not? Most scientists are already on his side. Imagine if George W. Bush had tried such a stunt—every major newspaper in the country would have run an op-ed piece by some Nobel Prize winner asking how the guy who prohibited stem-cell research and denied climate change could have the gall to appear on a program that extols the power of scientific thinking....
...Consider the case of climate change, of which beliefs are astonishingly polarized according to party affiliation and ideology. A March 2010 Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Democrats (and 74 percent of liberals) say the effects of global warming are already occurring, as opposed to 31 percent of Republicans. Does that mean that Democrats are more than twice as likely to accept and understand the scientific truth of the matter? And that Republicans are dominated by scientifically illiterate yahoos and corporate shills willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term economic and political gain?
Or could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride? For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.
Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. ...
Oregon's Millionaires' Tax Drives Millionaires Out of State
John Galt Tells Oregon Politicians to Screw Off
...In 2009 the state legislature raised the tax rate to 10.8% on joint-filer income of between $250,000 and $500,000, and to 11% on income above $500,000. Only New York City’s rate is higher. Oregon’s liberal voters ratified the tax increase on individuals and another on businesses in January of this year, no doubt feeling good about their “shared sacrifice.” Congratulations. Instead of $180 million collected last year from the new tax, the state received $130 million. The Eugene Register-Guard newspaper reports that after the tax was raised “income tax and other revenue collections began plunging so steeply that any gains from the two measures seemed trivial.” One reason revenues are so low is that about one-quarter of the rich tax filers seem to have gone missing. The state expected 38,000 Oregonians to pay the higher tax, but only 28,000 did. Funny how that always happens. …The tax wasn’t enacted into law until June 2009 but was retroactively applied to January 1, 2009. So for the first half of the year wealthy Oregon residents weren’t able to take steps to avoid the tax ambush because they didn’t see it coming. This suggests that a bigger revenue loss from tax mitigation strategies will show up on tax return data in 2010 and 2011. …All of this is an instant replay of what happened in Maryland in 2008 when the legislature in Annapolis instituted a millionaire tax. There roughly one-third of the state’s millionaire households vanished from the tax rolls after rates went up. If Salem officials want to find where the millionaires went, they might start the search in Texas, the state that leads the nation in job creation—and has a top income and capital gains tax rate 11 percentage points lower than Oregon’s....
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Chavez to rule by decree
...The National Assembly granted President Hugo Chávez broad powers on Friday to enact laws by decree, undermining the power of a new Congress that takes office next month with a bigger opposition bloc. Mr. Chávez, left, has argued that he needs decree powers to fast-track financing to help the victims of recent floods and landslides, and to hasten the transition to socialism. … The assembly approved the powers for 18 months. ...
Hugo Chavez: CommuNazi
...Also happy will be former Nation publisher and editor-in-chief Victor Navasky, now a major professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Sent to Venezuela in in 2007 by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a group that set up an investigation of Chavez’s war against a free press, Navasky reported that he would go, although he explained, “I knew Chávez was overwhelmingly popular with the poor and I wasn’t interested in participating in an anti-Chávez hit job, even in the worthy cause of human rights.” Notice how Navasky, the very model of a New York City leftist, puts human rights by the wayside when it comes to extolling the revolutionary virtues of a would-be Communist dictator. As Navasky sees things, the threat to a free press was not Chavez, but the “media owners.” To criticize Chavez, evidently, amounts to nothing but a “hit-job.” No wonder Chavez loves the likes of Navasky and Oliver Stone. Navasky must pine for the day when The Nation would be mandatory reading in this country and Fox News would be closed down. As he wrote, Chavez’s goal of “socialism in the 21st Century” is one “to be nourished as an ideal to pursue rather than a policy to be mocked.”...
...There is one good historical precedent for what Chavez is attempting, and it does not come from the history of Communist countries now long gone. Rather, it comes from the policies established by Adolf Hitler after the burning of the Reichstag by an arsonist in 1933. Arguing that the Communists were trying to subvert the German government (Chavez, of course, says the anti-Communists are doing the same in Venezuela), Hitler asked President von Hindenburg to pass an “emergency decree” to allow the Nazi government to have full emergency powers. All civil liberties were suspended, and mass arrests followed of Communists, socialists, trade unionists and other opponents of the regime. Opposition delegates were removed from the Reichstag, giving the Nazis a legislative majority that did not exist before.
New elections were set for March 5, 1933. By passing the Enabling Act — the same term used by Chavez today — Hitler sought to abolish democracy by formally democratic means. ...
Pastor Charged with Over 100 Counts of Child Porn
...The church's website talks about Griggs' "commitment and love of children."...
...The church's website talks about Griggs' "commitment and love of children."...
Mao's Great Leap to Famine
HONG KONG — The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere, was the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962, and to this day the ruling Communist Party has not fully acknowledged the degree to which it was a direct result of the forcible herding of villagers into communes under the “Great Leap Forward” that Mao Zedong launched in 1958.
To this day, the party attempts to cover up the disaster, usually by blaming the weather. Yet detailed records of the horror exist in the party’s own national and local archives. ...
...In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.
Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement. ...
Yet another reminder: Communism kills people.
...Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life. Literally....
HONG KONG — The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere, was the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962, and to this day the ruling Communist Party has not fully acknowledged the degree to which it was a direct result of the forcible herding of villagers into communes under the “Great Leap Forward” that Mao Zedong launched in 1958.
To this day, the party attempts to cover up the disaster, usually by blaming the weather. Yet detailed records of the horror exist in the party’s own national and local archives. ...
...In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.
Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement. ...
Yet another reminder: Communism kills people.
...Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life. Literally....
Former Pastor to Serve 20 Years for Sexual Abuse
FAYETTE COUNTY, Iowa - A Westgate pastor was sentenced Monday in Fayette County District Court to 20 years for sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl in June 2009.
Timothy Parker, 40, a former pastor with St. Peter Lutheran Church in Westgate pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree sexual abuse in November. Each abuse charge carries a 10 year prison term and judge ran them consecutively.
According to the criminal complaint, on three separate occasions, Parker fondled or performed oral sex on the girl. Deputies said the alleged incidents took place at the church parsonage in early June 2009....
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Atheists and believers: Let’s worry about ‘government as God’
...Before the Tea Parties, it seemed Americans had found something new to believe in. Government seemed to offer everything a hungry spirit requires. Consider the parallels (X = God or Government):
1. In times of crisis, people turn to X to give them comfort and pray X will solve all their problems.
2. X possesses special knowledge about the affairs of ordinary people, which these ordinary people do not possess.
3. X has a special power to intercede in their affairs to positive effect, as long as they are faithful and obedient.
4. Forces beyond anyone’s control can be tamed by the will of X.
5. X can work through proxies and agents to exert its will. The agents and proxies are anointed by X.
6. X requires sacrifice, whether in tithes (taxes) or submission to its will.
7. Such sacrifices to X are rewarded tenfold (by X), because it has infinite resources.
8. People organize and evangelize to their fellow men in order to convert them.
9. Raids and crusades have been justified in the name of X, particularly during times of crisis.
10. X is personified in the form of a messiah....
...Worshipers of government are not so tolerant. They’re not nearly as concerned with your intentions. They have apotheosized compulsion itself, which means they’re worshiping government power. Despite all the talk of “social justice” and the “common good,” they cannot escape the fact that politics is the means by which men bend other men to their will and call it “good.” The casualty is liberty....
Friday, December 10, 2010
New poll indicates 40% of physicians will retire or find other work under ObamaCare
... Now a Merritt Hawkins survey of 2,379 doctors for the Physicians Foundation completed in August has vindicated our poll. It found that 40% of doctors said they would “retire, seek a nonclinical job in health care, or seek a job or business unrelated to health care” over the next three years as the overhaul is phased in.
Of those who said they planned to retire, 28% are 55 or younger and nearly half (49%) are 60 or younger.
A larger portion (74%) said they plan to make “one or more significant changes in their practices in the next one to three years, a time when many provisions of health reform will be phased in.”
In addition to retirement, and finding nonclinical jobs elsewhere, those changes include working part time, closing practices to new patients, employment at a hospital, cutting back on the number of patients and switching to a cash or concierge practice....
Jeremy Marks "Attempted Lynching" Case
On Dec. 2, Jeremy Marks, a Verdugo Hills High School special education student, was offered a new plea offer by the L.A. County District Attorney: If he pled guilty to charges of obstructing an officer, resisting arrest, criminal threats and "attempted lynching," he'd serve only 32 months in prison.
That actually was an improvement from the previous offer made to the young, black high schooler — seven years in prison.
The D.A. then handed Angela Berry-Jacoby, Mark's lawyer, a stack of 130 documents, and the message within those thick files was clear: She says District Attorney Steve Cooley's prosecution team plans to try to discredit Marks, and several other Verdugo Hills High School students on the witness stand, by dragging out misbehavior incidents from their school records over the years.
Marks, 18, has been sitting in Peter Pitchess Detention Center, a tough adult jail, since May 10. Bail was set at $155,000, which his working-class parents can't pay to free their son for Christmas. His mother is a part-time clerk at a city swimming pool, his father is a lab tech.
The first thing to understand is that Jeremy Marks touched no one during his "attempted lynching" of LAUSD campus police officer Erin Robles.
The second is that Marks' weapon was the camera in his cell phone.
The third is that Officer Robles' own actions helped turn an exceedingly minor wrongdoing — a student smoking at a bus stop — into a state prison case....
Aurora: $190k seized because brothers were drug suspects
Two brothers who say police unlawfully seized more than $190,000 from them during a traffic stop had been under surveillance and were suspected of drug-dealing, a lawyer for the city of Aurora said today during a court hearing.
Though neither Jose nor Jesus Martinez is charged with a crime, authorities are seeking forfeiture of $190,040 found in Jesus' truck when he was stopped by an Aurora police officer on Oct. 18.
A Kane County judge ordered the money returned, but the city has refused....
...Aurora police were only involved in an intermediary fashion, Murphey said. After questioning Jesus Martinez at the Aurora police department and giving him a receipt for the money, Aurora police say they transferred the money that same night to the drug task force, which reported handing the money over the following day to the Department of Homeland Security....
Cancun: scavenging around for scientific fact
...The problem for those seeking a deal at this year’s Cancun COP meeting (Convention of Parties [to the UNFCC]) has been that the climate change debate has changed. The COP15 meeting in Copenhagen was a disaster. It revealed disagreement about how best to respond to the science, and showed that the ostensible desire to save the planet barely conceals the same ruthless agendas which have always dominated global politics. The ‘Climategate’ emails revealed that scientists are as human as the rest of us. And just to prove it, the IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri branded as ‘voodoo science’ any criticism of the mainstream view of climate change and its consequences. But the criticisms turned out to be valid. More troubling still, the rate at which the world was warming seems to have slowed considerably, leading sceptics to ask whether global warming is still happening.
The trouble with evidence-based policymaking is that, when doubt about the evidence emerges, the policymaking grinds to a halt. In order to continue with the creation of environmental bureaucracies and political institutions, fresh certainty has to be supplied. As the talks in Cancun opened, so ‘new’ evidence emerged from two of the UK’s biggest climate-research organisations, the Tyndall Centre and the Met Office, amidst a flurry of headlines.
‘World is warming quicker than thought in past decade, says Met Office’, reported Damian Carrington in the Guardian. This spoke to the sceptics who had argued that there had been no significant warming. According to Carrington, the Met Office had discovered that a change in the way sea surface temperatures were measured introduced a cool bias. This was significant, said Carrington, ‘because the rate of global warming from 2000-2009 is lower than the 0.16C per decade trend seen since the late 1970s [...] the warming rate for the past 10 years is estimated at 0.08-0.16C’. Global warming alarmists could breathe a sigh of relief; the world was doomed after all.
But other newspapers reported the story differently. ‘Global warming has slowed down over the past 10 years, say scientists’, said the Daily Mail. ‘Global warming has slowed because of pollution’, said the Telegraph.
The reality was that the scientists involved didn’t know whether the rate of the world’s temperature rise had increased, decreased or stayed the same. Nor did they know what the causes of its change were. But there was evidence of less warming. The Met Office’s own data suggested that the last decade had seen temperatures rise by 0.05 degrees Celsius. This is significantly less than the 0.16 degrees rise per decade seen since the end of the 1970s. However, the research by NASA GISS suggested a rise of 0.13 degrees. The Met Office held a briefing for the press to explain that the reduction in warming might be natural variation, or could be accounted for by a mixture of a decrease in stratospheric water vapour and the cooling bias introduced by new methodology. It might even be pollution. What they were sure of, however, was that climate change was still happening, but that 0.08 degrees of climate change had gone missing. In the words of Chris Morris, ‘there’s no evidence for it, but it is a scientific fact’; the world was still warming really....
...That’s not to say that ‘climate change isn’t happening’, nor to suggest that it won’t be a problem. However, the alarmist narrative which created the basis for international climate policy has exhausted itself. By over-stating things in the past, it created the conditions for its later embarrassment. In order to sustain the political momentum, science has had to do PR. And the effects are all too plain. Few of the many claims in either of the Met Office’s reports cite any ‘peer-reviewed’ scientific literature, and therefore stand only as statements of opinion, not of science. I asked the Met Office about the confused messages that they seemed to be delivering. A press officer told me that the papers had got the stories broadly right, and the differences between the headlines reflected different editorial agendas.
Actually it reflects more than editorial agendas.The problem is the broader expectation that science can be instructive; that ‘what to do about climate change’ can be simply read off from clear scientific evidence. The evidence isn’t clear. It is contradictory. It changes. Science is confused by the political demand for certainty, for the true story. Thus any new study or review of the science creates a narrative about the future which is either ‘worse than previously thought’ or lends credibility to the sceptic’s arguments. The entire UNFCCC process is not unlike 24-hour live rolling coverage of a natural disaster. The same scenarios are endlessly repeated while news anchors and pundits speculate wildly about the significance of the latest images drip-fed into lifeless depictions of carnage. There is no story… but there might be one, at any moment… Stay tuned.
Science and policymaking are imitating the news. Rather than waiting for genuine scientific development, scientific organisations engaged in the policymaking process produce summaries of the latest speculation on demand. This speculation is intended to add urgency to the process by defeating the doubt that besets the policymaking. But it does so at the expense of a sober understanding of the climate and our relationship to it. This is acceptable under the rubric of the precautionary principle, which allows policymakers to aim to be safe rather than sorry by accepting approximations of ‘science’ in lieu of certainty. But this reveals that science – as an institution, rather than a process – is much less involved in discovery than in supplying climate politics and its bureaucracies with legitimacy.
Top political scientist: U.S. voters are 'pretty damn stupid'
Political reporters often rely on University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin for expertise. In just the past few months, his insights have appeared in articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Associated Press, Politico, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications. He's also a co-founder of the influential website Pollster.com, as well as co-director of the Big Ten Battleground Poll.
So Franklin answered with considerable authority when he was asked, at a recent forum on the November 2 election results, why Republicans emerged victorious in so many races. "I'm not endorsing the American voter," Franklin said. "They're pretty damn stupid."...
Daniel Rubin: An infuriating search at Philadelphia International Airport
...What happened next, she says, was more than embarrassing. It was infuriating.
That same screener started emptying her wallet. "He was taking out the receipts and looking at them," she said.
"I understand that TSA is tasked with strengthening national security but [it] surely does not need to know what I purchased at Kohl's or Wal-Mart," she wrote in her complaint, which she sent me last week.
She says she asked what he was looking for and he replied, "Razor blades." She wondered, "Wouldn't that have shown up on the metal detector?"
In a side pocket she had tucked a deposit slip and seven checks made out to her and her husband, worth about $8,000.
Her thought: "Oh, my God, this is none of his business."
Two Philadelphia police officers joined at least four TSA officers who had gathered around her. After conferring with the TSA screeners, one of the Philadelphia officers told her he was there because her checks were numbered sequentially, which she says they were not.
"It's an indication you've embezzled these checks," she says the police officer told her. He also told her she appeared nervous. She hadn't before that moment, she says.
She protested when the officer started to walk away with the checks. "That's my money," she remembers saying. The officer's reply? "It's not your money."
At this point she told the officers that she had a good explanation for the checks, but questioned whether she had to tell them.
"The police officer said if you don't tell me, you can tell the D.A."...
New NASA model: Doubled CO2 means just 1.64°C warming
A group of top NASA boffins says that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy, and have failed to properly account for an important cooling factor which will come into play as CO2 levels rise.
According to Lahouari Bounoua of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and other scientists from NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), existing models fail to accurately include the effects of rising CO2 levels on green plants. As green plants breathe in CO2 in the process of photosynthesis – they also release oxygen, the only reason that there is any in the air for us to breathe – more carbon dioxide has important effects on them....
...The NASA and NOAA boffins used their more accurate science to model a world where CO2 levels have doubled to 780 parts per million (ppm) compared to today's 390-odd. They say that world would actually warm up by just 1.64°C overall, and the vegetation-cooling effect would be stronger over land to boot – thus temperatures on land would would be a further 0.3°C cooler compared to the present sims....
Has Environmentalism Lost Its Spiritual Core?
Environmentalism began as a religion. Certainly that's how paleo-greens like John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, would have seen it. Muir was awakened to nature when he first explored Yosemite in the 1860s, and he felt it in a religious way — he called what would become one of the nation's first national parks "the grandest of all special temples of Nature."
Muir's biographer, Donald Worster, has written that Muir saw his mission as "saving the American soul from total surrender to materialism." David Brower, a spiritual successor to Muir who would found Friends of the Earth, would say of his staunchest green allies that they had "the religion." Environmentalism — rooted in nature and the outdoors — was an antidote to secular, technological modern life. ...
...Now Maathai has a new book called Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World, and she's preaching a green gospel. To Maathai, environmental work needs to be linked to spiritual values — and spiritual values should drive us to care about the environmentalism, contributing to what's called in Judaism tikkun olam, the healing of the world. ...
...She found what was driving those who joined the Green Belt Movement — and in time, what was driving Maathai herself — wasn't just about fixing material needs. It was about meeting something intangible within people. The poisoning of the earth, the destruction of the forest — Maathai came to believe that human beings could feel these losses. "If we live in an environment that's wounded — where the water is polluted, the air is filled with soot and fumes, the food is contaminated with heavy metals and plastic residues, or the soil is practically dust — it hurts us, chipping away at our health and creating injuries at a physical, psychological and spiritual level," Maathai writes. "In degrading the environment, therefore, we degrade ourselves."
Maathai came to understand, however, that the opposite is true as well. As we work to heal the earth, we heal ourselves as well. There's even an emerging field of treatment behind this — "eco-therapists" have begun prescribing nature walks and time spent outdoors for the depressed. ...
The ethics of climate change
...The difficulty in facing the long-term future comes from the dominance of (even enlightened) economists in the discussions. The bedrock of economics is cost-benefit analysis with the benefits defined by the freely chosen, subjective preferences of living individuals, integrated through markets. The preferences themselves are generally taken as given, rooted in some unchanging psychology. These choices are said to progressively discount the future, which becomes less valuable to us the further away it is. On this logic, resources are less valuable to us twenty years hence than they are today (so savings must be rewarded), wealth we pass on to our children or grandchildren is worth less than that we consume ourselves, and the welfare of our unborn descendants drops off the map. If we did not discount in this way, the rights of multiple future generations, for centuries or millennia, must surely outweigh any current rights, and have first priority. By contrast, even though concerned economists argue about the appropriate rate, even the smallest discounting of the future progressively attenuates the interests and rights of posterity and eventually reduces them to zero....
...Climate Change and Social Justice, edited by Jeremy Moss, contains twelve chapters in sections dealing with ‘Science, fairness and responsibility’ (covering issues of responsibility, ethics and justice, intergenerational equity and distributional questions in greenhouse and carbon trading policy design); ‘Climate change and vulnerable groups’ (including discussions of justice and adaptation, primary health care and climate refugees), and ‘policy implications’ (covering key debates on climate justice, the importance of equity in international adaptation strategies and the relation of climate justice to other equity goals). It is a much needed and valuable contribution to this neglected dimension of the climate change discussion...
Warren Buffett, Robber Baron?
...Did you know that the life insurance lobby is actively lobbying to restore the estate tax?
Why would the life insurance industry care about that? It turns out that ten percent of life insurance industry revenue is related to the estate tax. Wealthy people take out life insurance in order to reduce estate taxes because when you die, your life insurance payout doesn't count as part of your estate.
Did you know that Warren Buffett owns six life insurance companies? Did you know he supports the estate tax? You do now....
... A family business owner or farmer takes out a large life insurance policy which he sinks tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into each year. When he finally passes away, the life insurance pays out his policy to his family--tax free...
Even as Mr. Buffett's insurance companies are "protecting" family businesses from the IRS, he is buying companies that are forced to sell themselves to pay the death tax. Mr. Buffett's ability to buy family businesses at bargain basement prices depends on families being desperate to sell-and nothing produces family businesses desperate to sell quickly like a 55% bill from the IRS on all of the businesses' assets. ...
Is Congress Above the Law?
...But apparently this result was not intended, so the Obama administration has decided to ignore that part of the law.
No joke. Here is the Congressional Research Service report on the provisions that oust members of Congress from their health insurance. And here is the letter in which an Obama appointee announces that the administration will ignore the law. These two New York Times articles also provide important information. ...
Woman dies waiting in ER as AG finds little movement
It’s no surprise to Thelma Lee that emergency room wait times are not meeting provincial targets.
Lee said her 41-year-old daughter, Marlene Stephens, died Saturday after waiting nearly 90 minutes at the William Osler Health Centre’s Etobicoke campus emergency room with breathing problems.
Lee feels her daughter was not seen fast enough by medical staff.
“They didn’t touch her,” said the grieving Lee. “She was crying out, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe’. . . Nobody attended to my daughter.”
On Monday, Auditor General Jim McCarter released his annual report which found that despite putting an extra $200 million into shortening emergency room wait times over the last two years, “significant province-wide progress has not yet been made.”
“Complaints about overcrowding and delays in hospital emergency rooms have persisted for years,” McCarter told a news conference on Monday.
Emergency room waits for people with serious conditions sometimes reached 12 hours or more, the report said. That is far greater than the province’s 8-hour wait time target, the report found.
And for emergency patients who need a hospital bed, they waited on average for about 10 hours but some waited 26 hours or more, according to the 2010 Annual Report. ...
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Woah!… Wikileaks Documents Show Obama Administration Used Spying, Threats & Bribes to Get Support for Copenhagen Accord
... Embassy dispatches show America used spying, threats and promises of aid to get support for Copenhagen accord
Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.
The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.
Seeking negotiating chips, the US state department sent a secret cable on 31 July 2009 seeking human intelligence from UN diplomats across a range of issues, including climate change. The request originated with the CIA. As well as countries’ negotiating positions for Copenhagen, diplomats were asked to provide evidence of UN environmental “treaty circumvention” and deals between nations.
But intelligence gathering was not just one way. On 19 June 2009, the state department sent a cable detailing a “spear phishing” attack on the office of the US climate change envoy, Todd Stern, while talks with China on emissions took place in Beijing. Five people received emails, personalised to look as though they came from the National Journal. An attached file contained malicious code that would give complete control of the recipient’s computer to a hacker. While the attack was unsuccessful, the department’s cyber threat analysis division noted: “It is probable intrusion attempts such as this will persist.”
The Beijing talks failed to lead to a global deal at Copenhagen. ...
More on the Wikileaks Climate Cables
Reading through the few Wikileaks cables related to climate, the tip of the iceberg becomes visible. ...
...But this is starting to change: “The Danes said they are “fed up”” because the reasons behind the show are no longer climate: “Gisela Ulloa, a member of Bolivian delegations to earlier COP meetings told us the GOB’s position is aimed at creating an alternative development model consistent with Morales’s anti-capitalist philosophy.“...
...And than we see “that Pope Benedict had firmly established his “green” reputation“, which “even if discreetly, is significant because the Vatican is often reluctant to appear to compromise its independence and moral authority by associating itself with particular lobbying efforts“. Religion, at it’s best...
Saturday, December 04, 2010
We're waiting, Mr President
A US government report on a pressing environmental issue is edited to falsely imply that scientists had peer-reviewed and supported the central policy recommendation. Almost 1 in 4 government scientists working on food safety say they have been asked by their bosses to exclude or alter technical information in scientific documents during the past year.
These incidents sound as if they come from the dark days of George W. Bush's presidency, when complaints about political interference in government science reached a crescendo. But in fact, both refer to the behaviour of the current US administration, led by a president who famously promised to "restore science to its rightful place" in his inauguration speech of January 2009....
...While some other constituencies are deserting him, Obama largely still has the support of the scientific community. He is seen as a friend of science, who with his allies in Congress ensured that a generous dollop of stimulus spending was devoted to research....
The Tribe of Young Unbelievers Increases
Christianity Today recently documented the fact that America’s churches are not only “failing to attract younger worshipers,” but they are also “not holding on to the ones” raised in the church. Research studies indicate that “70 percent of young people leave the church by age 22” and that figure “increases to 80 percent by age 30.” The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) revealed that the “percentage of Americans claiming ‘no religion’ almost doubled in about two decades” (8.1 percent in 1990 and 15 percent in 2008). Among the young (18 to 29 years old) the number doubled (11 percent in 1990 to 22 percent in 2008), with 73 percent coming from religious homes and 66 percent describing themselves as “de-converts.” Consequently, according to the Southern Baptist Convention (America’s largest Protestant denomination), church growth is not keeping up with the birth rate.
According to Christianity Today, most current unbelievers are, in fact, church dropouts; the “vast majority” are former believers who have quit going to church. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported in May 2009 that “young Americans are dropping out of religion at a disturbing rate of five to six times the historic rate (30 to 40 percent have no religion today, versus 5 to 10 percent a generation ago).” ...
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Fun new climate change solution: Let’s impose rationing on the developed world
Something to chew on from this week’s summit/tropical getaway in beautiful sunny Cancun...
...Yeah, really? Rationing electricity doesn’t necessarily mean a worse lifestyle? Every year, environmentalists organize an ambitious global warming protest that calls on people to turn their lights off for one hour. Even among eco-nuts, that’s as much as they feel safe in asking people to sacrifice. Good luck with that rationing idea, gang. Besides, assuming this dopey idea were ever attempted — which it never, ever would be — does anyone expect the world’s number one greenhouse-gas emitter to voluntarily retard its roaring economic growth with rolling blackouts for the sake of slowing global warming? That was one of the grim lessons from Copenhagen, as I recall. Ah well, at least no one’s called for population control. Yet.
Incidentally, here’s how the conferees celebrated a hard day’s worth of deliberations over shared sacrifice and learning to make do with less: With a big party...
Union Drops Health Coverage for Workers’ Children
One of the largest union-administered health-insurance funds in New York is dropping coverage for the children of more than 30,000 low-wage home attendants, union officials said. The union blamed financial problems it said were caused by the state’s health department and new national health-insurance requirements.
The fund is administered by 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. ...
Bad news: Bills receiver blames God after dropping game-winning TD pass
...Watch the clip and behold a pro wideout letting a highlight-reel-worthy game-winner clank right off his fingers. Frankly, I’m not sure I’ll ever get over it either. How shaken was the poor guy after the game, won by the Steelers on a field goal on the ensuing drive? This shaken:
I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…...
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Our puritanical progressives
...In 1954, Fredric Wertham brought science - very loosely defined - to the subject of juvenile crime. Formerly chief resident in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, he was politically progressive: When he opened a clinic in Harlem, he named it for Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law who translated portions of "Das Kapital" into French, thereby facilitating the derangement of Parisian intellectuals.
Without ever interviewing the convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg, Wertham testified on her behalf concerning what he called her "prison psychoses." Since 1948, he had been campaigning against comic books, and his 1954 book, "Seduction of the Innocent," which was praised by the progressive sociologist C. Wright Mills, became a bestseller by postulating a causal connection between comic books and the desensitization of young criminals: "Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry."
Wertham was especially alarmed about the one-third of comic books that were horror comics, but his disapproval was capacious: Superman, who gave short shrift to due process in his crime-fighting, was a crypto-fascist. As for Batman and Robin, the "homoerotic tendencies" were patent. ...
...Progressivism is a faith-based program. The progressives' agenda for improving everyone else varies but invariably involves the cult of expertise - an unflagging faith in the application of science to social reform. Progressivism's itch to perfect people by perfecting the social environment can produce an interesting phenomenon - the Pecksniffian progressive.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
UCLA researcher says he won't be deterred by animal activists' attacks
When UCLA neuroscientist J. David Jentsch was a grad student, he never expected his life as an academic would require around-the-clock armed guards, or a closed-circuit TV inside his bedroom so he could keep constant watch over his home.
But the high-powered security proved necessary again this month when the researcher, who experiments on monkeys, opened a letter left in his mailbox to discover razor blades and a death threat.
"We follow you on campus," Jentsch recalled the note reading. "One day, when you're walking by, we'll come up behind you, and cut your throat."
Activists claimed the razors were tainted with AIDS, though it hasn't been confirmed by officials. University officials have said the latest threat, confirmed by UCLA on Tuesday, is under investigation by the FBI and UCLA police.
But the 38-year-old professor has been through this before. Last year, he woke up to an orange flash and a car alarm. He ran outside to find his car had been blown up.
Twice a month, animal rights activists in ski masks gather outside his home, chanting "murder." On Halloween, neighborhood trick-or-treaters were handed flyers with images of bloodied animal subjects.
"If you go to the house down the street, there's a monster who lives there," children were told.
The tactics, Jentsch said in an interview inside his office, are part of an intensifying effort by extremists to halt animal research at the university. Molotov-cocktail-like devices have been left near researchers' homes and under their cars, and in one case, a professor's window was smashed and a garden hose inserted to flood her home....
Health law snag may cost hospitals
...The error was a simple and unintentional omission in the final, frenetic days of drafting the landmark legislation and reconciling House and Senate versions. Con gressional staff intended to allow children’s hospitals continued access to the portion of a federal program that offers below-market prices on 347 specific medicines for rare, life-threatening conditions. But that language was accidentally altered.
“It was a drafting error,’’ said a congressional aide familiar with the writing of the bill but not authorized to speak publicly....
Friday, November 26, 2010
These kids today are so afraid of looking stupid that they won't get serious, collectivize, and change the world — declaims Mark Ames, spittle flying.
...Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare....
...That’s why they’re following a clown like Stewart, whose entire political program comes down to this: not being stupid, the way the other guys are stupid–or when being stupid, only stupid in a self-consciously stupid way, which is to say, not stupid. That’s it, that’s all this is about: Not to protest wars or oligarchical theft or declining health care or crushing debt or a corrupt political system or imperial decay—nope, the only thing that motivates Liberals to gather in the their thousands is the chance to celebrate their own lack of stupidity! Woo-hoo!...
...Ames is still playing on his audience's fear of being the stupid ones — even as he spews some crazy shit he wants us to hear as brilliant. Don't be a dumb fuck, believe me when I tell you: This individualism is a trick the billionaires are playing on you. Come together, live as One.
Ames boldly palms this off as constitutional interpretation. The "more perfect union" in the Preamble isn't the reallocation of powers between the federal government and the state governments to deal with the problems that arose under the Articles of Confederation. No, Ames's big, serious lie — and you should worry that you're a dumb fuck if you don't believe it — is that the Constitution compels us to set aside our individual pursuit of happiness and dedicate ourselves to the collective.
Liberals resort to conspiracy theories to explain Obama's problems
...So Matt Yglesias warns the White House to be prepared for "deliberate economic sabotage" from the GOP - as though Chamber of Commerce SWAT teams, no doubt funded by foreigners, are preparing attacks on the electrical grid. Paul Krugman contends that "Republicans want the economy to stay weak as long as there's a Democrat in the White House." Steve Benen explains, "We're talking about a major political party . . . possibly undermining the strength of the country - on purpose, in public, without apology or shame - for no other reason than to give themselves a campaign advantage in 2012." Benen's posting was titled "None Dare Call it Sabotage."
So what is the proof of this charge? It seems to have something to do with Republicans criticizing quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve. And opposing federal spending. And, according to Benen, creating "massive economic uncertainty by vowing to gut the national health care system."
One is tempted to respond that it is $1 trillion in new debt, the prospect of higher taxes and a complicated, disruptive health-reform law that have created "massive economic uncertainty." For the purposes of this argument, however, it is sufficient to say that all these economic policy debates have two sides.
Yet this is precisely what the sabotage theorists must deny. They must assert that the case for liberal policies is so self-evident that all opposition is malevolent. But given the recent record of liberal economics, policies that seem self-evident to them now seem questionable to many. Objective conditions call for alternatives. And Republicans are advocating the conservative alternatives - monetary restraint, lower spending, lower taxes - they have embraced for 30 years.
It is difficult to overstate how offensive elected Republicans find the sabotage accusation, which Obama himself has come very close to making. During the run-up to the midterm election, the president said at a town hall meeting in Racine, Wis.: "Before I was even inaugurated, there were leaders on the other side of the aisle who got together and they made the calculation that if Obama fails, then we win." Some Republican leaders naturally took this as an attack on their motives. Was the president really contending that Republican representatives want their constituents to be unemployed in order to gain a political benefit for themselves? No charge from the campaign more effectively undermined the possibility of future cooperation.
The sabotage accusation, once implicit, is now direct among panicked progressives....
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Facebook-banning NJ pastor acknowledges threesome
NEPTUNE TOWNSHIP, N.J. — A pastor who said Facebook was a "portal to infidelity" and told married church leaders to delete their accounts or resign once testified that he had a three-way sexual relationship with his wife and a male church assistant.
The Rev. Cedric Miller confirmed the information reported Saturday by the Asbury Park Press of Neptune, which cited testimony he gave in a criminal case in 2003. The relationship had ended by that time.
Miller gained national attention when he issued the Facebook edict this week. He said it came about because much of the marital counseling he has performed over the past year and a half has concerned infidelity stemming from the social-networking website.
The 48-year-old leader of Living Word Christian Fellowship Church in Neptune Township had claimed Facebook ignites old passions, and he ordered about 50 married church officials to delete their accounts with the social networking site or resign from their leadership positions.
Miller had previously asked married congregants to share their login information with their spouses — as he does — and now plans to suggest that they give up Facebook altogether. The minister also said he would leave the site this week.
In court testimony he gave in April 2003, Miller said his wife had an extramarital affair with the church assistant. Miller said he participated in many of the sexual encounters and said the assistant's wife was sometimes present, too.
Miller said the dalliances — which occurred in the Millers' home — sometimes took place during Thursday Bible study meetings and Sundays after church. But the minister said the encounters "came to a crashing halt" when several women in the church accused the assistant of having sex with them....
Saturday, November 20, 2010
The Climate Cash Cow
...Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change (say that twice), told the Neue Zurcher Zeitung last week: "The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War." After all, redistributing global wealth is no small matter....
On the anniversary of Climategate the Watermelons show their true colours
...First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole....
...Lord Stern said that Europe and the Far East (sic) were forging ahead of the US in controlling emissions and switching to low carbon sources of energy. They would not tolerate having their industries undermined by American competitors that had not paid for their emissions. “If you are charging properly for carbon and other people are not, you will take that into account,” he said. “Many of the more forward-looking people in the US are thinking about this. If they see a danger on the trade front to US exports that could influence public discussion.”
Asked what type of US products could face restrictions, Lord Stern said: “Aircraft, clearly, some cars, machine tools — it’s not simply what’s in the capital good, it’s what kind of processes the capital good is facilitating.”...
Thursday, November 18, 2010
California Suggests Suicide; Texas Asks: Can I Lend You a Knife?
reply to this
...A vast difference in economic performance is driving the demographic shifts. Since 1998, California’s economy has not produced a single new net job, notes economist John Husing. Public employment has swelled, but private jobs have declined. Critically, as Texas grew its middle-income jobs by 16%, one of the highest rates in the nation, California, at 2.1% growth, ranked near the bottom. In the year ending September, Texas accounted for roughly half of all the new jobs created in the country. ...
MIT's Dr. Richard Lindzen's 48-page Congressional Testimony: 'Increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming' -- 'Data is being analyzed with aim of supporting, rather than testing models'
...'Incontrovertibility' belongs to religion where it is referred to as dogma...Cicerone [of NAS] is saying that regardless of evidence the answer is predetermined. If gov't wants carbon control, that is the answer that the Academies will provide...We should stop accepting term, 'skeptic.' Skepticism implies doubts about a plausible proposition. Current warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition.'...
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Washington's Wealth Boom
Take a look at this map. The areas shaded in red are the 100 wealthiest counties in America according to per capita income. At first glance, it's a little misleading, because in the American West, counties tend to be larger in geographic area. But look closely, and you'll see that after the New York City metropolitan area, the largest cluster of wealth in the U.S. is huddled around Washington, D.C.
If we look at household income, the picture grows starker. After the 2000 Census, the richest county in America was Douglas County, Colorado. By 2007, Douglas County had fallen to sixth. The new top three are now Loudon County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Howard County, Maryland. All three are suburbs or exurbs of Washington, D.C. In 2000, 14 of the 100 richest counties were in the Washington, D.C., area. In 2007, it was nine of the richest 20.
All of this is fine if you happen to live in the D.C. area. It's not so great for the country as a whole.
While the D.C. metro area hasn't completely escaped the recession, it's doing much better than most everywhere else. Real estate advisers Grub & Ellis Company recently ranked the D.C. metro area the top market in the country for commercial real estate investment. Investment advisers are high on D.C. area real estate even in down times, because they know the federal government's only going to get bigger. That means more federal employees, more grantees and contractors, and more wealthy lawyers and lobbyists setting up shop inside the Beltway — both to get a piece of the federal budget (or, more recently, the $7 trillion-and-growing pot of federal bailout honey), and, as the federal regulatory state expands, to lobby for regulations most favorable (or, least unfavorable) for their clients.
The problem is that, save for the tech corridor in D.C.'s Virginia exurbs, the Washington Metro area doesn't actually produce anything. Washington doesn't create wealth, it just moves it around — redistributes it. As government grows and takes control of more and more of the private economy — either through spending, regulation, or taxes — more and more wealth that's created elsewhere comes to Washington to be devoured.
The Washington wealth boom is the result of the massive expansion in government over the last 10 years, which has populated the region with an increase in well-paid federal employees, and wealthy federal contractors and lobbyists....
You live in nation's richest counties
WASHINGTON - The D.C. area makes plenty of Top 10 lists, and this one shows its residents make the big bucks.
According to a new report from Newsweek, seven of the nation's 10 richest counties are in this region.
Virginia's Loudoun County takes home the top spot, with its median household income exceeding $114,000 per year. Seventeen percent of Loudoun households make more than $200,000, while only 16 percent earn less than the national average household income of $50,000.
The survey, based on 2009 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, names Loudoun neighbor Fairfax County the No. 2 breadwinner in the country. The county was the first in America to hit six figures with its median household income, and more than half its homes make more than that number now.
"Fairfax County has traditionally been home away from home for many diplomats and officials who want to live in a rural community close to Washington, D.C.," Newsweek explains. ...
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Statism, the Greatest Threat
...The state has been by far the largest recipient of intellectual charity during the past hundred years. The issue of government coercion has been taken off the radar screen of politically correct thought. The more government power has grown, the more unfashionable it becomes to discuss or recognize government abuses -- as if it were bad form to count the dead brought about by government interventions. There seems to be a gentleman's agreement among some contemporary political philosophers to pretend that government is something loftier than it actually is -- to practice noblesse oblige and to wear white gloves when discussing the nature of the state.
The great political issue of our time is not liberalism versus conservatism, or capitalism versus socialism, but statism -- the belief that government is inherently superior to the citizenry, that progress consists of extending the realm of compulsion, that vesting arbitrary power in government officials will make the people happy -- eventually.
What type of entity is the state? Is it a highly efficient, purring engine, like a hovercraft sailing deftly above the lives of ordinary citizens? Or is it a lumbering giant bulldozer that rips open the soil and ends up clear-cutting the lives of people it was created to protect?
The effort to find a political mechanism to force government to serve the people is the modern search for the Holy Grail. No such mechanism has been found, and government power has been relentlessly expanded. Yet, to base political philosophy on the assumption that government is inherently benevolent makes as much sense as basing geography on the assumption that the Earth is flat. Too many political thinkers treat government like some Wizard of Oz, ordaining great things, enunciating high ideals, and symbolizing all that is good in society. However, for political philosophy to have any value, it must begin by pulling back the curtain to bare the nature of the state.
Trusting contemporary governments means dividing humanity into two classes: those who can be trusted with power to run other people's lives, and those who cannot even be trusted to run their own lives. Modern Leviathans give some people the power to play God with other people's lives, property, and domestic tranquility. Modern political thinking presumes that restraints are bad for the government but good for the people. The first duty of the citizen is to assume the best of the government, while government officials assume the worst of him. ...
Interior inspector general: White House skewed drilling-ban report
The White House rewrote crucial sections of an Interior Department report to suggest an independent group of scientists and engineers supported a six-month ban on offshore oil drilling, the Interior inspector general says in a new report.
In the wee hours of the morning of May 27, a staff member to White House energy adviser Carol Browner sent two edited versions of the department report’s executive summary back to Interior. The language had been changed to insinuate the seven-member panel of outside experts – who reviewed a draft of various safety recommendations – endorsed the moratorium, according to the IG report obtained by POLITICO.
“The White House edit of the original DOI draft executive summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer-reviewed by the experts,” the IG report states, without judgment on whether the change was an intentional attempt to mislead the public. ...
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