Sunday, March 18, 2012


Four hard truths of health care reform
President Barack Obama promised over and over during the health care debate that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

It turns out that, for a lot of people, that isn’t true.

A Congressional Budget Office report issued this week says that 3 to 5 million people could move from employer-based health care plans to government-based programs as the Affordable Care Act takes effect. And in the worst-case scenario, it could be as many as 20 million.

For Obama, it’s an inconvenient truth at a really inconvenient time — coming less than two weeks before the Supreme Court begins oral arguments on the law and just as the administration touts the law’s early benefits on its second anniversary.

And it’s not the only hard truth Obama and the law’s supporters are facing. No matter what they said about rising health care costs, those costs aren’t actually going to go down under health care reform. The talk about the law paying for itself is just educated guesswork. And people aren’t actually liking the law more as they learn more about it — and some polls show they are just getting more confused.

But it’s Obama’s signature promise — “If you like it, you can keep it” — that’s most likely to get thrown back in his face. Here are the four hard truths of health care reform as the law approaches its March 23 anniversary:...

Aussie government proposes unlimited speech regulation, names climate skeptics and Labor critics as targets
...Really? In a country that has no constitutional or statutory protection for speech, how are non-governmental “bodies and persons in the community” more than adequate to protect speech from a governmental body that is endowed with unlimited power to regulate speech?

The report explicitly calls for opinion to be regulated along with news (§11.64, p. 294) , and while low-readership blogs would possibly be exempted, Bolt notes that the suggested threshold for regulation would cover any blog that averaged even one reader a day, and even that would be at the complete discretion of the Council (§11.59, p. 293)....

...To an American, what is most striking about the Australian plan is the complete absence of any statement of negative rights, or freedom from restrictions on speech. Our entire concept of free speech is framed in negative terms: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” The Australians have no constitutional protection for speech, but it is still astounding to see how readily the left would overthrow this pillar of Western liberty in exchange for partisan advantage.

The same totalitarian ambitions are at work in America too. They face greater legal obstacles here, but key actors are powerfully placed. Obama’s “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein wants to use the system of “notice and takedown” from copyright law to shut down “conspiracy theories.” As an example, he wants to suppress claims that:

the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud.

If SOPA had passed then all of the necessary machinery would have been in place, ready to expand from copyright infringement to the suppression of conspiracy theories at the drop of a one-line rider on any bill....

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Steven Greenhut: What's a little fraud to save the Earth?
..."Peter Gleick lied, but was it justified by the wider good?" asked James Garvey of the liberal British newspaper the Guardian. He compared Gleick's action to that of a man who lied to keep his friend from driving home drunk. "What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action," Garvey argued. "If his lie has good effects overall – if those who take Heartland's money to push skepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press – then perhaps on balance he did the right thing.
... It depends on how this plays out."

In his view, anything that gets in the way of "consensus" – i.e., everyone agreeing with Garvey – is dangerous, so why not cheat, as long as it "has good effects"? Let's reserve judgment based on how it plays out.

What would these people argue if a conservative who argues that, say, public-sector unions are bankrupting the state, pulled a similar fraud to get his hands on documents from union officials? Would they be defending that? Of course not. These writers are advancing a Machiavellian political agenda, not advancing a consistent ethical principle.

When it comes to global warming, the ends apparently justify the means. People from all political persuasions do stupid things to advance their cause, but what bothers me most are respectable people who justify behavior they would never tolerate from their foes. That type of ideological fanaticism is corrosive of our democratic society....
Forget climate change, we must focus on the real issue
...Ultimately if it is not climate change it will be some other vehicle connected to ‘sustainability’ that will be used as a means of controlling the population and redistributing wealth from the industrialised world to the developing world in a way that enriches the corporates....

Why Alarmists Can’t Be Trusted
...I overlaid RSS satellite data on to the bogus graph. Temperatures peaked 14 years ago, and are cooler in 2012 than they were in 1980....

50% of UK Nursing Home Patients Abused By Government Health Care
Fans of government health care keep telling us that government can do the job, and they point to countries like the UK as examples where single payer, government run health care systems deliver high quality, compassionate care.

They are either grossly ignorant or they are lying through their teeth.
A recent study by a British healthcare regulator finds that half of all elderly people in Britain’s nursing homes are being denied basic health services.

Half....

Saturday, March 03, 2012

POLITICO Morning Energy
...Peter Gleick’s career isn’t over despite the big scar linked to his duping the Heartland Institute, says Kevin Trenberth, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "I think this pushes Peter in the direction of getting even more involved on the side of being an advocate," Trenberth told ME on Friday. "He's had a strong science background, especially related to water. I don't see this as the end of the road for Peter by any means."...

Where Do Gleick’s Apologists Draw the Line?
...In the view of “anthropologist and science communicator” Greg Laden, for example:
My respect for Peter Gleick is unmoved. He is a great scientist, an excellent communicator, a brave guy…...

...In Tobis’ view, Gleick’s behaviour may serve “the greater good” by raising awareness....

...Even more bizarrely, he says that New York Times‘ journalist Andrew Revkin should be defending [Gleick] for taking personal risks in the pursuit of what, in the end, was a journalistic endeavor....

...the fact that [Gleick] had the courage to stand up to rich, powerful and increasingly belligerent nay sayers on climate change is an inspiration to all who care about the breakdown of discourse in America. More important, here was a renowned scientist standing up to bullying by right-wing ideologues who are intent on helping self-serving corporations destroy our environment. What he did was unorthodox and clearly beyond the bounds of journalistic transparency, but the people he was fighting have done much worse without any criticism or scrutiny. ...

...Gleick’s intentions matter when we try to work out whether he was wrong to lie. It’s worth noticing that he wasn’t lying for personal gain. What resonates for me, though, are the consequences of his action. If Gleick frustrates the efforts of Heartland, isn’t his lie justified by the good that it does?...

...What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action. Was Gleick right to lie to expose Heartland and maybe stop it from causing further delay to action on climate change? If his lie has good effects overall – if those who take Heartland’s money to push scepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press – then perhaps on balance he did the right thing. It could go the other way too – maybe he’s undermined confidence in climate scientists. It depends on how this plays out....

Meanwhile, on another planet...
So, it turns out that Heartland was behind the Heartland leak after all.
The evidence seems to suggest that Heartland's Joe Bast wrote a memo, then he and/or Heartland-symp blogger Steven Mosher sent it secretly to Peter Gleick. ...

Michael Mann's counterstrike in the climate wars
... "Something is different now," Mann concludes. "The forces of climate change denial have, I believe, awakened a 'sleeping bear.' My fellow scientists will be fighting back, and I look forward to joining them in this battle."

That's something Mann might want to rethink. Peter Gleick, a MacArthur "genius" grant recipient for his work on global freshwater challenges and president of the Pacific Institute, admitted earlier this month to borrowing a page directly from the denialists' playbook. Posing as someone else, he obtained internal documents from the Heartland Institute and distributed them to journalists, a tactic little different from the hack attack at the University of East Anglia that has been decried by environmentalists. ...

Fakegate: The Obnoxious Fabrication of Global Warming
...The root of the global warming confusion is that the UN is not a disinterested party that can be trusted to compile and interpret the climate science on which the world’s policymakers can rely. The UN sees the theory of man caused catastrophic global warming as a tremendous opportunity for gaining the regulatory and taxation powers of a world government.

It is at least as self-interested on the subject as oil and gas companies. It has used its role as grand overseer of climate science to advance its own agenda. The result has been a great disservice to the scientific community and to policymakers. It fueled a global panic and mass delusion that has cost hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars, and is likely to cost trillions more before it finally runs its course.

That is why Gleick’s Fakegate memo is actually a perfect metaphor for the entire fabrication of global warming. It and the entire Fakegate scandal provide a window, much like Climategate did, into the global warming movement, and what we see is ugly indeed. Peter Gleick’s misconduct is repeated a hundred times every day, in the same dishonest, cynical, and corrosive way, by global warming advocates around the world....