American Elephants


Seattle City Council In a Fit of Political Correctness Abolished Columbus Day by The Elephant's Child
October 7, 2014, 7:42 pm
Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Education, Freedom, History, Politics, Regulation, Socialism, The United States | Tags: , ,

The Seattle City Council is on track to rival the Berkeley City Council for sheer lunacy. They have just declared that the upcoming Columbus Day shall be abolished in favor of a renamed “Indigenous Peoples Day.” Newly elected Socialist City Council member Kshama Sawant, is an Indian immigrant, a part-time instructor in economics at Seattle Community College, and a bit of a firebrand.

Ms. Sawant’s first big issue was the minimum wage, and she demanded that the Seattle minimum wage at $9.32 (significantly higher than the national minimum) be raised to $15.00.  It passed, but has not yet gone into effect. Highly celebrated by fast food workers and by the folks at Momentum Machines who have a robotic machine that can produce 360 custom hamburgers to order an hour, custom meat grinds for every customer, and never complains, demands a higher wage, nor more benefits or time off.

The Indigenous People’s Day idea suffers from a common Leftist delusion. They choose to judge the people of the past by today’s morality, and flawed ideas of history.  Columbus wasn’t particularly nice to the native people he encountered, but Columbus Day was never a celebration of the man, but of the “discovery” of the Americas. Columbus had nothing to do with North America, anyway. First encounters between stone age native peoples and more advanced Europeans often did not go well. Europeans assumed that illiterate people who could not speak their language or understand their ways were somehow inferior. You can be indignant about that, but it was an understandable reaction.

Contemporary Leftists sneeringly condemn George Washington, the indispensable man, without whose valor and probity, the country we love would not be the country we know today—because he was a slave owner. Slavery, at that time, was the way of the world and completely normal. Machines that replaced human labor were still far in the future.

Blacks owned slaves. Native Americans owned slaves. It was the way things had always been in the world, and was not thought to be wrong or unusual.  Oddly enough, Leftists are very contemptuous of George Washington, but have no problem with Andrew Jackson  (the Father of the Democratic Party) who was one of the largest slave owners in the South, and responsible for the “Trail of Tears” as well. They were citizens of their world and their time, and cannot be judged by today’s morality, or more properly today’s political correctness.

Canada more correctly calls their aborigines “First People,” or “First Nation,” which is more accurate. Native Americans kept slaves, took scalps, lit forests on fire for fun, fought bloody wars, and in some cases were cannibals. Human nature is messy, and that goes for all races. Some are good people, some are not. We struggle to improve, and morals change. Unfortunately, changes are often accomplished by force by the courts or by city councils or state legislatures, who take it upon themselves to force their own ideas on everybody else.

Kshama Sawant, who got her PhD in economics from North Carolina State, apparently joined a movement called “The Socialist Alternative” devoted to “Struggle, Solidarity and Socialism,” fairly recently,  and neglected the part of her economics education devoted to Free Markets and Free People — or considering the state of today’s universities, perhaps that’s just not included anymore. Pity.

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That Missing Global Warming Isn’t Hiding In The Oceans After All! by The Elephant's Child
October 7, 2014, 5:42 pm
Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, Science/Technology | Tags: , ,

Anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming has always been right up the Left’s view of the world and humanity. We are bad people , despoiling the earth, and it has to be fixed. I think of the Left as the “perpetually discontented.” But when the wise experts in government get the right laws and the right regulations in place, we will have sustainability, and world peace, and greedy rapacious corporations in search of profit will no longer be able to destroy nature, and social justice will reign over all.

It has now been a full 18 years with no global warming. None. That is an unacceptable idea for the Left, and the causes of warming and what warming has caused continue to occupy the green mind. If the warming is missing, where has it gone? What is going on?

The theory was that the “missing heat” is supposedly hiding in the deep oceans. Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) told National Geographic in February that:

“Strong trade winds are bringing cooler water to the surface in the equatorial Pacific and mixing more heat into the deeper ocean.”

This meant, National Geographic helpfully summarized, that “the missing heat from global warming is being stored in a deeper warm pool in the western Pacific.”

Kevin Trenberth, father of the deep ocean hidey-hole for missing heat theory, spoke last year to Bloomberg:

In fact, there is mounting evidence that deeper regions of the ocean, down to 2000 meters, are absorbing heat faster than ever, Trenberth said in a phone call. His research shows the oceans began taking on significantly more heat at around the same time the surface warming began to slow in 1998. His widely cited work was published just after the cutoff to be included in the IPCC report.

The irony, says Trenberth, is that when the surface of the planet is unusually sweltering, the Earth actually radiates more heat into the atmosphere, in effect slowing the long-term warming of the planet. And in “hiatus” years, when the surface is cooler, the Earth absorbs more of the sun’s heat deep the oceans, slowly cooking the planet. What you see isn’t always what you get.

Nice try. A new study from a NASA research team, “using a combination of satellite observations and direct measurements taken by a network of 3,000 floating Argo temperature probes, the NASA team set out to calculate temperature changes and thermal expansion in the deep ocean (below 1.24 miles).” It finds that the deep oceans have not warmed since 2005.

James Delingpole explains:

What has happened here, in other words, is that for years the warmists have been fobbing off their teachers with the excuse that “the dog ate their homework.” But it simply won’t wash any more because the teacher has now discovered that they don’t actually own a dog.

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