Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear | Tags: Common Sense Causes Panic, Forget Decarbonizing, Global Warming Is a Religion
Well, well,well. The Wall Street Journal opinion page had a headline today “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.“
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2. …
Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to “decarbonize” the world’s economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.
This kind of statement from major newspapers has been long overdue. The evidence has been incontrovertible, and building, but somewhere along the line “global warming’ became a religion, and its adherents tolerated no dissension. Many prominent scientists have long been skeptics, for science is a discipline built on skepticism. If you don’t constantly question your assumptions, you are going to reach a lot of dead ends, and maybe be deeply embarrassed at some point.
The rewards of being a true believer, however, trumped many lingering doubts. The skeptics were attacked, called “Deniers,” and supposedly intelligent beings suggested that anyone who denied global warming should be shot. The ClimateGate emails were not only revealing, but after the first release was fully digested, another batch appeared and the powers that be sicced the constabulary on finding the thief or hacker who stole the emails.
The revelations were becoming seriously troubling. Combine that with an out-of-control EPA in the United States, eager to eliminate any trace of the carbon dioxide we all exhale. The more ludicrous the power plays get, the more people are apt to start paying attention.
Budgets deeply in the red tend to concentrate the mind; and projects that seemed perfectly designed to demonstrate the forward thinking of promoters of everything ‘green’ and ‘clean’ started going belly-up in increasing numbers. You can shrug off a few bankruptcies as accidents due to factors beyond one’s control — but when the numbers pile up, it raises some real questions. Not everyone can be good at both economics and science — or math too, as far as that goes — but at some point those flashing red numbers on the budget should garner attention. Can that possibly be why President Obama’s budget is late again this year? Not likely, he just has trouble getting them in on time.
The Journal’s editorial was signed by sixteen prominent scientists from all over the world with sterling qualifications, representing some of the World’s most prominent institutions. They will be described as crackpots by the true believers, or on the payroll of the Koch brothers.
Filed under: Capitalism, China, Economy, Science/Technology | Tags: Obama Wants Jobs Insourced, Shipping Jobs Overseas, Trade and Manufacturing
What about manufacturing, aren’t all the jobs going overseas where people work for extremely low wages? How can we compete with that? It’s true that fewer people are employed in manufacturing plants, but we’re still manufacturing lots of stuff. We’re just doing it with fewer people.
The production line has been changing ever since Henry Ford invented it after visiting a meat-packing plant that was already using the concept. For simplification sake, at one time someone stood at a particular spot along the assembly line and separated the stream of parts into two different streams, but they developed gates or electric eyes that would do that without a constant attendant, eliminating the need for a worker. But that step was a long time ago. These two videos explain how the world has changed.
Here is a BMW USA manufacturing plant, in 2009. Body shop: spot welding by robots. Mounting of side sills on body structure. Hot-stamping: Heating, compression molding, quenching. Wedding: Drive unit engine, transmission, axle, exhaust system is bolted to the body. Final assembly: BMW 5 Series Sedan rolls out of factory.
There are lots of decisions built into every manufacturing plant, and every product. Skilled workers or cheap workers who can be trained to be skilled. Energy costs. Some manufacturing processes need to be located next to water. Some need rail transportation. Some big things need to be moved, and freeway overpasses are a problem. Is shipping a major expense or minor — depends on the size, fragility and weight of the product. Raw materials: where do they come from, what kind of transportation is needed — some manufacturing plants need to be close to the source of their raw materials. Some need to be close to their market. Where is speed a factor? Regulations play a part. Unions v. right-to-work.The decisions are complex, and involve far more than greedy businessmen looking for cheaper labor.
The New York Times recently explained why Steve Jobs bragged when Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983 that it was “a machine that is made in America.” Today, the iPhone is made in China, and the Times article explains the details:
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”
After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.
The facility in Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled, has 230,000 employees, many work six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of the workforce lives in company barracks, and many workers earn less than $17 a day, a good salary in China. When the first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City, in the middle of the night, thousands of workers were aroused and lined up to assemble iPhones by hand. Since then they have assembled more than 200 million iPhones.
China could also supply engineers at a scale the US could not match. Apple executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly line workers. Do read the whole article. It offers a valuable insight into manufacturing and trade that really helps to explain a very complex problem. Not all of it, certainly, but it’s a help in telling when the politicians are knowledgeable or just pandering.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Foreign Policy, National Security, The United States | Tags: An Unprepared America, Rely on Special Forces, We'll Have More Drones.
—Melanie Phillips is a longtime British author and columnist, and someone well worth paying close attention to. Iran, she says, will not “come it it’s senses.”
War with Iran is a truly fearsome prospect.
Its likely consequences would include attacks on US air bases from thousands of Iranian missiles, the unleashing of terrorist attacks within the US and Europe, the rocketing of Israeli towns from the tens of thousands of missiles trained on Israel from Lebanon, the closing of the Straits of Hormuz thus paralysing western oil supplies, and doubtless other horrors.
The West has put tough sanctions on Iran, they have been urged for years, but the UK and the EU made threatening statements, and the Obama administration proved American weakness by extending his hand in friendship to a regime that was busy blowing up American soldiers in Iraq. Now the regime has built a secret nuclear plant inside a mountain where it is supposedly impervious to bombing raids.
The regime are religious fanatics driven by a belief in the return of the Mahdi, the last Islamic Messiah, which will take place soon either as a result of the end of days, or to bring it about. They do not worry that half of Iran might be obliterated as a result of their efforts. They would welcome that. They believe that continuing the nuclear program will facilitate his coming. The West, she says, is incapable of recognizing or understanding religious fanaticism. They insist on treating the fanatic as a rational actor, which they are not.
— No need to worry about Latin America, the president said — “Our ties to the America are deeper.” But oddly enough, the administration has no ambassadors in five Latin American countries. Our Latin American neighbors are building a regional organization — the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) which pointedly excludes the U.S. There was no mention of Ahmadinejad’s January visit to South America nor of the deepening ties of Iran and Venezuela. Iran wants diplomatic cover and international support against increased sanctions. Ahmadinejad plans to visit Nicaragua, Cuba, Ecuador and Guatemala. No mention of the war going on just on the other side of the border with Mexico with criminal organizations, that has cost nearly 50,000 lives.
Egypt is celebrating the first anniversary of the country’s revolt against the Mubarak regime. Ed Husain, author of The Islamist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says “Granted, it is necessary to analyze America’s influence in the world, but it is quite another matter to almost campaign for a less powerful America, believing that somehow this spells progress.”
I am not an American, but I firmly believe that, on balance, American power is a force for good in the world. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was right to remind us repeatedly in Britain that the modern world is led by a free nation, a democracy, and not Russia or China.
Yet it’s American conventional wisdom to believe that the fall of Arab dictators, particularly Egypt’s, weakens American leverage in the Middle East. And this thinking risks becoming self-fulfilling prophecy unless the U.S. government finds its backbone and recognizes that U.S. power is not limited to backing tyrants. The current trajectory—of dancing around developments, leading from behind and expressing defeatist thinking—needs to stop.
President Obama said:”The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe. Our oldest alliances in Europe and Asia are stronger than ever. Our ties to the Americas are deeper. Our iron-clad commitment to Israel’s security has meant the closest military cooperation between or two countries in history. We made it clear tha America is a Pacific power, and a new beginning in Burma has lit a new hope. From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we’ve led against hunger and disease, from the blows we’ve dealt to our enemies, to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back.”
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta laid out details of a plan to cut a half a trillion dollars from defense spending, in addition to the half-trillion in cuts required under the Budget Control Act. Defense cuts already exceed 50 percent of deficit-reduction efforts. For every dollar the President hopes to save in domestic programs — he plans on saving $128 in defense. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Election 2012, History | Tags: Blaming Banks for Congressional Fraud, Economic Consequences, Unlawful Agency to Track Down Fraud
President Barack Obama announced a new unit to be devoted to major financial crimes during his State of the Union speech. The Orwellian sounding “Financial Crimes Unit” is to be staffed with “highly trained investigators” and charged with tracking “large-scale fraud.”He also urged Congress to strengthen the penalties for financial wrongdoing.
The president also announced that Attorney General Eric Holder has been tasked with establishing a special team of federal prosecutors and state attorneys general devoted to investigating abusive mortgage lending and the packaging of risky mortgages that contributed to the financial crisis. He is apparently not going after Barney Frank and others in Congress who forced banks to lend to borrowers who did not qualify for mortgages under normal prudent rules of banking.
Banks are the most heavily regulated entities in the business world. The Democrat Congress used suspicions of “redlining” as an excuse for requiring banks to make mortgages more available for minorities, and to specifically to reduce their standards to encourage home ownership. Obama said:
I am asking my attorney general to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis.
We’ve all paid the price for lenders who sold mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them.” Now, it’s lenders’ turn to pay the price.
It was Washington that ordered lenders to make those risky loans. Now they are to be punished for doing too well what they were ordered to do before the crisis. Democrats injected risk into the financial system. Beginning in the 1990s they socialized the mortgage industry after declaring that traditional prudent standards of lending were “racist.”
Obama doesn’t care if it drives many banks out of business. That will further his claims of predatory lending and class warfare where rich bankers made fraudulent loans — as they were required to do by Congress. These risky loans were bundled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and sold as high-yielding securities to Wall Street and other nations as worthy investments in an era of fairly low-interest rates.
At a time when money is tight for small business, this will help to dry up credit at a time when contractors, entrepreneurs, growing small businesses are already having a hard time securing credit. Financial institutions will be even more afraid to deplete their capital, at a time when they might need it to pay protection money to this governmental scam. It’s an Alice in Wonderland world, Chicago version.
We even have an entrepreneur locally advertising on the radio seminars on how to make money “flipping houses.” Washington is still pushing for lowered mortgage requirements, which are what got us into this mess in the first place. What you are supposed to understand is that none of this is Obama’s fault — it’s the banks, it’s Wall Street, it’s the rich, and our valiant president is trying really hard to save us from predatory lenders who are trying to get rich by making loans that won’t be paid back. Though just how that works remains a mystery.
Filed under: Economy, Environment, Law, Socialism, Statism | Tags: Silly Green Dreams, Who Pays For It?, Won't Be Any Rich People
Someone named Jill Stein is running for president on the Green Party ticket. To join in the conversation, she has published “A Green New Deal for America.” It’s even more tiresome than the president’s version, but you might get a few chuckles.
She writes:
The Green New Deal is an emergency four part program of specific solutions for moving America quickly out of crisis into the secure green future….
For this reason, The Green New Deal begins with an Economic Bill of Rights that recognizes our rights to an economy that serves people. This means that everyone willing and able to work has the right to a job at a living wage. All of us have the right to quality education, health care, utilities, and housing. Each of us has the right to unionize, to fair taxation, and to fair trade. …
We will end unemployment in America once and for all by ensuring a job at a living wage for every American willing and able to work. This includes jobs that improve our environment, like clean manufacturing, organic agriculture, public transportation and clean renewable energy. It also includes jobs that provide urgently needed social infrastructure – for public education, health care, child care, elder care, youth programs, and arts and culture. …
Our Full Employment Program will create 16 million jobs through a community-based direct employment initiative that will be nationally funded, locally controlled, and democratically protected against conflicts of interest and pay-to-play influence peddling. The program will directly create jobs in the public and the private sector. Instead of going to an unemployment office when you can’t find work, you can simply go to the local employment office to find a public sector job.
We will honor the right to a tuition-free, quality public education from pre-school through college at public institutions. And we will forgive student loan debt left over from the current era of unaffordable college education.
We will honor the right to decent affordable housing, including an immediate halt to all foreclosures and evictions. We will create a federal bank with local branches to take over homes with distressed mortgages and either restructure the mortgages to affordable levels, or if the occupants cannot afford a mortgage, rent homes to the occupants. We will expand rental and home ownership assistance, create ample public housing, and capital grants to non-profit developers of affordable housing until all people can obtain decent housing at no more than 25% of their income. …
The 16 million jobs created by the Full Employment Program mentioned earlier will be the core of the Green Transition Program. It will provide jobs in sustainable energy, transportation and manufacturing infrastructure: clean renewable energy generation, energy efficiency retrofitting, intra-city mass transit and inter-city railroads, weatherization, “complete streets” that safely encourage bike and pedestrian traffic, regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture, and clean manufacturing of the goods needed to support this sustainable economy.
A new world really is possible. We can, and must, shift to an economy in which 100% of our electricity is generated renewably. We can and must leave the old economy behind – which was based on mining, extraction, and dirty dangerous expensive nuclear power. We can and must stop poisoning ourselves, our children, and other living beings.
How is it possible for any sentient human being to be so ignorant of basic economics, math or history that they swallow this crap? The longing for Utopia persists, but they never, never understand what their Utopia would look like:
Filed under: Capitalism, Conservatism, Economy, Election 2012 | Tags: A Growing Private Economy, An America of Promise, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels
From Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’ response to the the State of the Union Speech:
“An opposition that would earn its way back to leadership must offer not just criticism of failures that anyone can see, but a positive and credible plan to make life better, particularly for those aspiring to make a better life for themselves. Republicans accept this duty, gratefully.”
“The routes back to an America of promise, and to a solvent America that can pay its bills and protect its vulnerable, start in the same place. The only way up for those suffering tonight, and the only way out of the dead end of debt into which we have driven, is a private economy that begins to grow and create jobs, real jobs, at a much faster rate than today.”
“Contrary to the President’s constant disparagement of people in business, it’s one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs – what a fitting name he had – created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew. Out here in Indiana, when a businessperson asks me what he can do for our state, I say ‘First, make money. Be successful. If you make a profit, you’ll have something left to hire someone else, and some to donate to the good causes we love.”
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Election 2012, Politics, Progressivism, Statism | Tags: The CATO Institute, The State of the Union Speech, The Truth Will Keep You Free
Especially for those folks who watched the State of the Union and shrieked back at the TV: “That’s NOT True.” You could call it’ putting things in a more favorable light’, you could call it ‘sheer demagoguery.’ but the good folks at the CATO Institute weren’t inclined to let the president get away with it. Enjoy.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Election 2012, Politics, Progressivism, The United States | Tags: No Hope/ No Change, Same Story Different Year, The State of the Union
I watched it so you wouldn’t have to, but Obama summarized it better himself.
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Energy, Health Care, Progressivism | Tags: All About the Obama Agenda, Cost More Than Expected, Larry Summers Secret Memo
A lengthy piece in The New Yorker by Ryan Lizza uncovered a 57-page “Sensitive and Confidential” memo by economist Lawrence Summers written in December 2008. Summers was soon to be appointed head of the incoming president’s National Council of Economic Advisers. The memo provided a blueprint for the new administration’s policies. James Pethokoukis listed eleven points that explain the economic stimulus package that the Democrat-controlled Congress passed at Obama’s request.
All that hoopla about “inheriting the worst economy since the Great Depression,” rising unemployment being a number one concern, fixing a damaged economy — all pure road apples. Hogwash. Most, if not all, we were told about the stimulus was a flat-out lie.
The stimulus was about implementing the Obama agenda and making sure that federal dollars flowed to pet projects, especially in the clean energy sector. The administration knew the deficits they were piling up were dangerous, and that the spending was not realistic, but they had no plan to deal with that danger.
They knew that the price tag for this political boondoggle was higher than they said it was. They thought they needed a stimulus larger than $1 trillion but were afraid it would spook financial markets and send interest rates soaring.
Questionable government force was a tactic from the first— they wanted to use the courts to force massive mortgage principal write-downs, and the Independent Pay Advisory Board (IPAB) to bring down health care costs was there right at the beginning.
President Barack Obama has had an agenda that has nothing to do with “the worst economy since the Great Depression” or the plight of unemployed Americans, or lowering the national debt, and nothing whatsoever to do with bringing Americans together or improving the political discord in the nation’s capitol.
The plans to raise revenue didn’t raise as much as the campaign assumed. The proposals of the campaign cost way more than the campaign assumed. Repealing the tax cuts would raise about $40 billion less than assumed, and the health savings were way lower. They couldn’t even figure out ways to spend the money quickly enough. Even Washington can only spend so much money so fast.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Election 2012, Progressivism, Taxes, The United States | Tags: A Constitutional Republic Isn't Fair, Campaign 2012, The State of the Union
What will the President say tonight? The first clue is always — who will be sitting in the first lady’s box? Warren Buffett’s secretary, Debbie Bosanek, who Buffet says paid a higher tax rate than he did. This is the keynote of Obama’s “Class Warfare” campaign theme. This is complete hooey, but is supposed to drive the response — “That’s not fair!” Much of the campaign State of the Union speech will be devoted to what’s fair and what’s not in the president’s lexicon, and how we should change the nation from a bastion of liberty — to a nation of redistribution in the name of “fairness.”
Also in the first lady’s box will be outgoing Rep. Gabby Gifford’s husband, Mark Kelly; Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow; and Adam Rapp, a cancer survivor that the administration claims was helped by ObamaCare. So something about administration efforts to stimulate innovation in technology, what we learned from the Tucson shooting, and something about the effectiveness of ObamaCare.
Expect a dull and divisive speech. Will the Supreme Court attend after being insulted before the nation last year?
Will there be any mention of the fact that the White House budget will be late again this year — again missing the deadline of the first Monday in February, required by law? This will mark the third time in four years that the president has missed his statutory requirement to present a budget on time. Heck of a way to run a government. Today will also mark the 1.000th day since Congress passed a budget. The last budget that was passed by Senate Democrats was in 2009 to set the stage for the health care bill’s passage in early 2010. Republicans sent a budget up last year, but Senate Democrats never brought it to the floor.
The Republican response to the State of the Union will be delivered by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. Here’s a report from the Republican Governors’ Association on what can be accomplished by people with principles:
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Law, Progressivism, Statism, The Constitution | Tags: Liberty and Justice, Life Isn't Fair!, Who is Qualified to Fix That?
The State of the Union speech tomorrow night will be in some ways a recap of the President’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas — populist, progressive and increasingly revelatory of what lies at the core of the progressive movement.
Obama importantly said during his campaign that he proposed to “fundamentally transform America.” Silly us. We thought he was going to Washington DC to be more bipartisan, to cure the divisions in America, to stop the quarrels and arguments and get things done, but that wasn’t what he had in mind at all.
America was founded on the principle of individual liberty and unalienable rights of to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our very wise founders believed that there was not much else a government could guarantee to one person without trampling on the rights of another.
That promise of individual liberty gave us the greatest burst of freedom and opportunity, innovation, wealth creation, creativity and success that the world has ever known, and the envy of the world. If the first promoters suggested that the streets of America were paved with gold and the woods teemed with game, it turned out that the streets were instead paved with opportunity, a more valuable commodity.
But of course the perpetually discontented noticed that not everyone prospered, that life was not equally fair to everyone. They were quite sure that a little more regulation would fix that, and they wanted government to create a better society. They believed that the founders were wrong about the need for limited government, because what was needed were some wise laws to make things more fair. Government could eliminate inequalities of wealth and property with a little economic regulation. What was needed was not equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome. America should be Fair.
It turned out that the founders were right. There is not much else government can guarantee to one person without abridging the rights of someone else. Every time the bureaucrats made another regulation, it made things unequal for someone else. So they had to make new laws to make things more equal, but they weren’t very good at devising equality-type regulations, and things had to be fixed again and again.
The fixers don’t give up easily. It turns out that a progressive America requires a vast expansion of the state and an even more vast expansion of control, regulation, mandates and rules to make America more fair — but whose “fair?” Turns out that my idea of “fair” is not the same as your idea of “fair” and Obama’s idea of “fair” is something else entirely.
Somewhere in each Progressive, there’s a little tyrant lurking in the shadows.
Irving Kristol once said this, and I think he got it right:
In every society the overwhelming majority of people live lives of considerable frustration and if society is to endure, it needs to rely on a goodly measure of stoical resignation.
In other words, you not only can’t fix everything, you can’t fix very much. People will still make bad choices, good people will be fired, bad people will sometimes triumph, terribly unfair things will happen. Like your mother or grandmother said “Life isn’t fair.” The business of government is to protect property rights, try to eliminate artificial barriers to opportunity, and to uphold the rule of law.
Why would anyone think that they can make the rules that will make life “fair” for 330 million striving, hard-working, free people, each with their own ideas and dreams? Takes quite a bit of arrogance to assume that you are that smart.
If you think that life is unfair, wait until you have a vast bureaucracy earnestly working to correct that natural condition. Oh wait…
