XDA

Our President's often repeated lie about keeping the policy and doctor you like has received sufficient coverage. Let's move on to the new ones. Here's a sample of several from the extreme left wing paper the Guardian:

In fact, it's yet another reminder that, for all its hiccups, Obamacare is well on its way to transforming how Americans receive healthcare – and almost certainly for the better. For most Americans, Obamacare will mean little evident change. If, like the vast majority of Americans, you receive your insurance through your employer today … you will continue to receive it from them tomorrow. And you will do so with greater security and more flexibility if you leave your job.

Almost certainly the mandated coverages will not be for the better. The policies and plans will certainly cost more and contain things that many individuals don't need or want. Oh, and the deductibles will almost certainly rise. Making you pay more for things you don't want is not better coverage. I'm the best judge of what I need for coverage. Not Ms. Sebelius, not the President, not a faceless bureaucrat--me.

I'm not sure the Guardian is keeping up on current events but many businesses are dropping health insurance coverage for their employees' family or for the employees themselves. This had already been happening. It's been in all the media. Also, in case the Guardian writer is not aware, the employer mandate was illegally delayed for a year so the real scope of what will happen as it finally kicks in is unknown, although we have a lot of clues and it appears very unlikely that a "vast majority" of Americans will continue to receive health insurance from their employers. I'm not sure I would call my job more secure if I'm the 51st employee who puts the company into the maw of Obamacare. There's more.

Forcing insurance companies to offer better coverage – and a minimal set of benefits with no trapdoors for consumers – is an unqualified good.

This is merely tautology. Better is good. But, aside from who gets to decide which is good or better,  there is the cost to contend with. A policy that covers everything but costs $200,000/yr. is not an unqualified good for someone making $94,200. It gets worse.

Of course, there will be some Americans who will end up experiencing actual sticker shock in the form of higher premiums. But let's be clear, this is an incredibly small segment of the population. It's basically healthy, young people who earn enough money not to qualify for subsidies (which are available to Americans who make up to 400 times the poverty level, or $92,000 for a family of four) and still buy their insurance on the individual market. But even if you do end up paying higher premiums, you will have coverage that actually can be described as insurance, with broader benefits and actual security if you become seriously ill.

Let's first take up the genius author's math problem here. $92,000 divided by 400 is $230 which is not the poverty threshold in America (perhaps in Haiti or Somalia). I think he means 400% or four times the poverty threshold. Let's see: The poverty threshold for a family of four is $23,550 times 4 is $94,200. He said $92,000--close enough. I see, the higher premiums that poorer people won't be able to pay won't merely represent spreading the cost to the pool of pre-existing condition sufferers and old people not yet on Medicare, and for certain mandated coverages neither needed nor necessary. No, this added expense will be because the health insurance that was cheaper was so bad it wasn't actually insurance and the moronic losers who chose it will have been saved from being defrauded by the super terrific Obamacare. It's so simple. Obama care is better no matter how expensive, unwanted, or unpopular most people perceive it to be, because the superior genius class (except for math) Guardian staff says so. Any evidentiary support beyond merely repeating it's better?

None.

Here's another telling paragraph about lying:

Still, President Obama is hardly off the hook here. When he sold healthcare reform, he promised "nothing … requires you to change what you have." That wasn't exactly true. But it was indicative of the rosy manner in which the administration described a post-Obamacare America.

It was just a little lie, no doubt caused by well meaning exuberance over all the good the ACA was going to do. Wanker. Final lie.

Obamacare's current problems, while frustrating, shall pass. What we'll be left with is very likely a profound transformation in America's healthcare system. The changes wrought by Obamacare are already leading to historic reductions in healthcare costs.

You think that the link embedded in the claim that Obama care is already leading to historic reductions in healthcare costs would lead to a site where there was some evidence that healthcare costs had actually reduced. No such luck. The costs of the approved insurance is merely less than expected.So if they got the expectations wrong then health insurance premium costs could have risen a lot but still be below the inflated expectations. Beating expectations is simply not evidence that costs have been reduced, historically or otherwise. Double wanker.

I have to think the lies upon lies are like cuttlefish ink. Or panic.

Labels: Obamacare Lies

Milbank: “There has been an element of sabotage in slowing these (exchanges) down, the exchanges are not working in states where there are Republican governor not participating in the exchanges. In the larger picture here, if the Republicans continue to cast doubt on Obamacare, make it look like a disaster in all areas and all its manifestations, it means the young people they need to get to enroll in the program don’t want anything to do with the disaster an it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So there is logic to having hearings and complaining about the thing…”

Apparently Republican “doubts” forced Sebelius to botch her gazillion-dollar website. Republican “doubts” forced Obama to lie about his law for three years. Republican “doubts” are forcing insurance companies to cancel insurance, driving doctors out of practice, and making Obama’s defenders say plainly idiotic things.

The force is strong with these Republicans

Bryan Preston, who used to produce Laura Ingraham's radio show.

I added the last line as a geeky upgrade of what Bryan wrote.

Labels: Bryan Preston quote; Wreckers, Hoarders, Republicans, Saboteurs

Reading the Stupid Articles so that you don't have to.

Jonathan Bernstein, a person wholly unknown to me, writing at the Marion Davies of Web Magazines, Salon, does exactly what I predicted, a few weeks ago here, the Democrat Myrmidons would do.

I guess I have to link to him. Go here if you have the time to waste.

Mr. Bernstein accuses the Republicans of "sabotaging" Obamacare. His arguments in support therefor are pitifully weak. Here we go.

He narrows his accusation against the Republicans.

I’m talking about actions designed — usually openly — not to make the law work better in their view, but to make it harder for the law to work well.

Open sabotage. Wow, the Republicans sure are brazen wreckers. How did they do this wrecking Mr. Bernstein? I don't think there has been any amendment by Congress to the original bill, passed with no Republican support, which is now the 'law of the land.'

While some of these [Republican acts of sabotage] had obvious direct effects, most of them did not. And it’s hard, in most cases, to draw a direct causal line between disruptive actions and specific malfunctions in the Web site.

I'm sure Mr. Bernstein will tell us the obvious direct effects. It is hard to draw a direct casual line between any Republican action and the horrible train wreck of the Web site roll out, because any rational person would admit that there isn't any. The development of the Web site was 100% controlled by the current Administration. There was more money available (and spent) than it should have cost. There were thousands of underworked government employees in the HHS and elsewhere to help. There was the super genius in the White House to help with the tricky parts. Sorry, laddie, this is solely the Democrats' baby. But wait, Bernstein has an explanation for not being able to support his accusation with any, uh, actual evidence.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe that any of these actively helped make the program run smoothly, and very easy to believe that the cumulative effect had at least some part to play in the October fiasco. So with all that said, here’s a very incomplete set of eight ways that Republicans attempted, perhaps successfully, to undermine the ACA:

 Wait, the Republicans only tried to undermine a law they all opposed and this attempt was "perhaps" successful. These waffle words are not filling me with a lot of confidence that you have any case at all. Let's see.

In particular, Senate Republicans prevented the confirmation of an Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid until May, 2013. That’s the agency that has the lead in getting things running. The general conventional wisdom, almost certainly true, is that neither an acting director or a recess appointed director has the clout within an agency of a properly nominated and confirmed presidential appointee.

Wait, Marilyn Tavenner is now the Administrator of the CMS and was the acting administrator before Donald Berwick was "recess" appointed as the administrator from July 7, 2010 to December 2, 2011 and then it was Tavenner again as acting Administrator until she was confirmed. Before she was acting Administrator the first time, she was the Principal Deputy Administrator. If the CMS itself had anything to do with picking or supporting the Canadian firm, Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique,(which screwed the IT pooch here, as is its wont), which is doubtful, the longtime Principal Deputy and Acting Administrator may well have had things well under control. It is the worst sort of speculation to say that the leadership the President has picked for CMS was somehow made worse by the Republicans. Usually you start and end an argument with your best shot. This is a whiff. Does it get any better?

Passing on state-run exchanges: With over half the states refusing to set up their own marketplaces, the job of the federal government was much larger than originally envisioned. And this was clearly not done with good intentions: ask 100 Republicans whether they believe the states or the federal government does a better job running things, and at least 99 are going to say the states.

Now hold on there, kitty cat. Did the Republicans amend the ACA to let the states opt out of the exchanges? No, that ability was in the original genius class scheme and it had to be in order for that part of the act to pass constitutional muster. It's the law of the land that the states did not have to set up exchanges. Bernstein is blaming the Republicans for making choices the Democrats gave them when crafting the law. Some states do administer programs better than the feds and that's mainly because the state programs are smaller than the federal program. Choosing to opt out and make the feds do it is a rational choice for some states who so choose. For the Democrats scrambling to find someone else to blame, a governor or state legislature doing just what the Democrat authored bill allows for good reasons is now sabotage. Not that compelling, Bernie. Not compelling at all.

Defunding: While the recent major defunding push failed, House Republicans successfully restricted funding for Health and Human Services and the agencies in charge of implementing the ACA, forcing Secretary Sebelius (and presumably various others at the department and various agencies) to scramble to make up for it.

Sorry, no sale, Bernie. There was never less money for the HHS than there was the year before and the year before that; and there was plenty of money to overpay the Canadian webmasters. The horrible, no good, awful sequester merely slowed the rate of growth of the government. There hasn't been a budget passed by both houses in 4 years and the funding of the government has continued by CRs which have never defunded a thing outside the military and that only marginally. Are you just making this stuff up?

Myths and lies: How many times since March 2010 has someone at the White House or a Democrat in Congress called over to HHS to ask about some crazy rumor that the press or a constituent was asking about? How much time was dedicated to figuring out what it was all about so that it could be properly refuted?

I don't know, Bernie, how many times? So the agency (with nearly 65,000 employees) was hamstrung by occasional, theoretical calls from Democrats and therefore the Canadians couldn't do their code writing business. Is that your argument? I am laughing out loud at you, right now.

The big lawsuit: Granted, there’s some legitimacy in challenging the Constitutional status of a law, as long as it’s not frivolous, and the partial success of the lawsuit is sufficient to show it wasn’t entirely frivolous. Still, the type of attack involved in the lawsuit made it clear that reform opponents, if they couldn’t defeat the law, would be happy to leave it dysfunctional.

Wait, in Marbury v. Madison over two hundred years ago, the Supreme Court declared that it is the sole arbiter of Constitutionality of an Act or Executive action, as a co-equal third branch of government. So if there was a partially successful, non-frivolous lawsuit about the constitutionality of the ACA, all that shows is that the Republicans were right to challenge the law. So how did the lawsuit cause the Canadians to write bad code? I'm not really following the argument here. I doubt anyone is.

Other lawsuits: There have been plenty of these, and many of them really have been frivolous. As with the one that reached the Supreme Court, all of these have had the effect of delaying implementation, given that the status of the law was under fire.

Does he mean the largely successful so far cases about the ACA's unconstitutional attack on religious liberty and the law of the land that protects it? How has that delayed implementation? It's the office of the Solicitor General that argues in the Supreme Court for the government. Was he or any of his staff slated to help the Canadians write code but couldn't make it because her or she had a brief due? This is not so much argument as desperation.

Medicaid expansion: Not only did the state-by-state fights over Medicaid expansion mean that the program could not work as intended — the ability of states to opt out opens up a large hole for the not-quite-poor — but again, just dealing with this must have been yet another distraction.

 The successful part of the non frivolous lawsuit the Republicans properly brought against the ACA was mainly that the feds could not force the states to expand Medicaid. Some governors have taken the bait and some have wisely refused the generous federal offer to expand it and pay, for now, some of the cost of the expansion. What does that really have to do with the Canadians writing code for the Web site? This accusation is like the dog in Up saying 'squirrel.' Medicaid has figuratively nothing at all to do with the Web site or the creation of the Web site. OK, big finish:

Suppressing outreach: The administration knew that it had a major task in publicizing the rollout. What made that harder (and, presumably, distracted them from the critical task of making everything work smoothly) was a bizarre and perverse effort to undermine outreach: organizations such as the NFL were threatened if they helped to publicize the law, and an advertising campaign attempted to scare young people away from wanting to carry any health insurance.

I'm laughing at you again, Bernie. Good that you obliquely admit that the ACA is singularly unpopular with American citizens and needed a Madison Ave. type ad campaign to try to make it popular, but who undermined the outreach program (which, in Bernstein's twisted logic, somehow distracted the Canadians from writing good code)? Who threatened the NFL? How did running political ads telling the young voters for Obama the truth that it was a very bad deal for them to buy ACA approved health insurance suppress the Obama Administration's ability to make its pitch? Let me help you out there, nothing prevented the Obama Administration from making a pitch for the glorious roll out of the Web site. The Democrat alone controlled and produced the Web site development and roll out which were such failures because of nothing at all the Republicans did. This last argument is so thin and pathetic that I think I'm developing a case of rickets from having read it. Your arguments that anyone other than the Democrats is to blame for the problems with the ACA as written and the stupendous failure of the Web site wholly lacks any supporting evidence. You have wasted every reader's time. He keeps digging.

Again: it’s hard to draw a straight line between any of these efforts and the administration’s failures.

That's because there is no connection between the Republican's efforts and the Administration's abject failures. No straight line, no crooked line, no dotted line-- no connection whatsoever. It's all on the Democrats.

What we do know, however, is that time is limited; any day that a department secretary spends on one part of her job is a day she can’t focus on a different part. And then some of these had direct effects of increasing the amount of work the federal government had to do (such as the decisions not to run state exchanges) or to delay when they could do that work (such as the lawsuits). Others restricted the resources available. And some were just distractions.

That's right Sebelius and her civil servants cannot chew gum and walk at the same time. They had to read about the lawsuits, for example, before the work day began and were thereafter demoralized and distracted from making the Canadians write better code. It must be a nice planet that Mr. Bernstein lives on--one free of the requirements of logical connections that exist here on Earth, no doubt. Last paragraph.

Which leaves the question: how does the October rollout go if none of this had happened?

Exactly as bad as it did--a complete clusterf***--because nothing you have mentioned, not a single thing, had or could possibly have had any effect on the Canadians' code writing skills.

If there had been aggressive oversight by Republicans in the House, and perhaps a few repeal votes, but otherwise elected Republicans had done their best to carry out the law even if they disagreed with it? We’ll never know the answer, and again this kind of question is definitely not intended to deflect the share of the responsibility that the president and his administration should take. But my guess? It would have been a whole different ballgame.

I'll forgive the bad grammar that your first 'sentence' is all dependent clause. But wait, were the Republicans supposed to have helped the Canadians write code? And if you're not trying to deflect the blame for the failure onto the Republicans, then what have you been writing about for the whole of this wretched article? It's not a guess you're peddling here, it's an illusion.

The Democrats wrote Obamacare without any input from Republicans. There were no hearings on any part of the bill as is usual with new legislation. Not a single Republican voted for the ACA. The Administration took over 3 years and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the super terrific Web site for the hundreds of Americans eager to sign up and it doesn't work. It may never work. Indeed, the number of people who have lost health insurance coverage solely because of the semi-intended consequences of the ACA hugely outnumber the number of people trying to get health insurance through the Web site that doesn't work. All of that is all the Democrats' fault and there is not a single jot of blame rationally to be put on the loyal opposition. Not a jot.

Come back, Bernie. Come back to a place where facts and logic matter and rational people don't try to blame the blameless for their own blunders and failures. It's a good place here on Earth.

Labels: Democrat Accusations of Republican Sabotage

The official unemployment figures are mere shadows, penumbras, if you will, of the misery of the masses who need work. Let's compare apples to apples and look at the percentage of the population actually employed during the Reagan and Obama recessions and the dissimilar recoveries from each recession.


Under Obama and the Democrat policies starting in '06, it is a valid question to ask, "What recovery?"
More of the recession Reagan inherited took place under Carter and the Democrat policies of '74 but it was worse than the Obama recession yet it has the V shape that generally outlines the boom and bust cycle of free markets.

Not now.

Elections have consequences.

In our particular case, election of Democrats has dire consequences.

It is a nearly natural phenomenon that the deeper the fall the more rapid the recovery. It takes a lot of effort to prevent that from happening.

Labels: Obama; Recovery from Recession, Reagan

Mommas, don't let your babies grow up to be cattle-handling persons.

Pettifogger

Is there anything that PC idiots won't try to ruin? There is a Constitutional right to free expression. There is no right not to be offended (otherwise the free expression right would be unconsitutionally chilled). Jeez,do I have to do all the thinking around here?

Labels: University of Colorado PC idiocy

Chris Mooney, Yalie English major and Alarmist AGW true believer, has taken a break from being horribly wrong about the weather and continued the left's attack on the Republican Party at the ever slightly unhinged Mother Jones magazine. Read it here.

You see, most leftists' world vision is so narrow that they cannot comprehend the actual fact that other rational people might not share their political beliefs. Because the left tends to totalitarianism, it is not possible in their minds that their opposition might be moral, well-educated, and compassionate--for the left the opposition is always evil and stupid, or perhaps somewhat insane. The Soviet Union, for example, once they stopped merely murdering those who did not toe the Communist line, put the opposition in mental hospitals. Mooney seems to be championing that position regarding Republicans by leaning heavily on fellow Yalie "moral psychologist" Jonathan Haidt who has pioneered work in this social science field.

Here are some tid-bits:

My analysis is that the Tea Party really wants [the] Indian law of Karma, which says that if you do something bad, something bad will happen to you, if you do something good, something good will happen to you," says Haidt. "And if the government interferes and breaks that link, it is evil. That I think is much of the passion of the Tea Party.”

In other words, while you may think your political opponents are immoral—and while they probably think the same of you—Haidt's analysis shows that the problem instead is that they are too moral, albeit in a visceral rather than an intellectual sense.

Yeah, the tea party is made up of morons who are moral. Got it. The psychobabble continues.

"The rage on the Republican side is stronger, the Republicans have gotten much more extreme than the Democrats have," Haidt says.

Rage or the deadly sin 'ira' is generally found in slightly insane morons, you see.

I hate to break this to you, pal, but if you're not enraged by our nation's leadership lately, you haven't been paying attention.

I think Mooney's and Haidt's opinions about the Tea Party would be much more credible if they had ever actually talked to one.

Labels: Chris Mooney; Jonathan Haidt; Republicans are mentally ill

In the course of a defiant speech at the White House, the president rode bravely into the realm of magical thinking: “It’s time for folks to stop rooting for its failure,” Obama said, adopting the panicked tones of a cheap infomercial salesman. Why? “Because hardworking middle-class families are rooting for its success.” For her part, Nancy Pelosi offered her own insinuation yesterday, suggesting that Republicans who continued to oppose the law were guilty of “sabotage.”

I should make it clear that I have precisely no intention whatsoever of ceasing to “root for failure.” I am actively hoping for the abject and embarrassing deterioration of Obamacare and I am not remotely ashamed to admit it. I loathe the law as a piece of public policy, as a means by which federal involvement in health care and society is being expanded rather than reduced, and as an unlovely example of the arrogance that presidents in the modern era have come to exhibit. Like Ed Rogers, “I would like to see the project’s collapse deter those who think a bigger, more domineering U.S. government is the answer to our problems.” And, like David Harsanyi, I want the project to fail “so hard that any residual perception among voters that any part of it was prudent policy is completely eliminated.”

Charles Cooke, noticing, as I have, that the left nearly always blames its failures on someone else--wreckers, hoarders, saboteurs, Kulaks, Kochs or Republicans.

Labels: Charles Cooke quote

I'm almost certain that the President was born in Hawaii, although I do think he's lied about where he was born in the past. I don't need to see his birth certificate to answer the question of where was he born. I'm just curious and I'm made even more curious by my inability to get the information. What's he hiding? For many, it's the media black-out over his past and past lies (and current lies) that bugs the heck out of them. For our normal curiosity, we're listed as nuts or racists. Bite me. So the controversy has not gone away for the bulk of Americans with any interest in politics, I believe, despite the release years ago of the current form of President Obama's birth certificate. We're still curious. Let me explain with examples of my own. Here is a copy of my so called long form birth certificate, preserved through the copy technology of the early 1950s.



I thought I had lost that one (turns out my ex-wife took it with her by mistake) so, more recently, I wrote to my home state for a replacement and received this.



The new version is a "sanitized" version of the old one but printed on new technology paper. Clearly the original has a lot more information than the current form, although the current one is much more handsome an official document (although mine is a little worn).

I still want to see the President's early 1960s copy technology, so called long form birth certificate and the information it contains which the current one does not have, if any. Don't bother calling me a nut or a racist. I just want to see it because it's there (hidden).

I also want to see the President's grades (as I've recently looked at Romney's in high school; and I also know McCain's awful class rank and I previously saw President Bush's and John Kerry's grades at Yale). Part of the reason for my curiosity is that I strongly suspect the President's grades were bad and thus Obama's ability to get into good schools becomes nearly inexplicable. Nearly.

Isn't more information always better than less?

Labels: Birther Curiosity

Here is my Spring prediction of the Arctic sea ice extent at the end of Summer this year. I said 4.6 Million square kilometers. It was 5.35, an area the size of India plus Mexico plus Cyprus. Two days later, the Antarctic reached the highest sea ice extent ever measured, 19.47 Million square kilometers, an area the size of the United States plus Australia plus Oman.

Yeah, global warming climate change is certainly causing the world's sea ice to melt away to nothing.

Labels: Arctic Sea Ice, Global Warming Hoax: Prediction Failure

Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore

Virgil, Georgics, Book III, ll. 248-9

But time runs away, irretrievable time runs away, while we mill about prisoners of each obsession

Labels: Georgics, Virgil quote

Here is an article in the paper for the masses USA Today that compares skeptics about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming to the industry spokespersons in the '60s who denied smoking was bad for one's health. It is not a very apt comparison. The cancer denialists for the cigarette industry were attempting to keep that industry going strong. Who or what are the global warming deniers trying to preserve. The alarmist true believers say the global warming deniers are funded by Big Energy. This isn't true in the main. The overwhelming majority of deniers, like me, don't get a dime from the energy producers. The little bit of support (measured in thousands of dollars) that goes to a few is completely overwhelmed by the many hundreds of millions of dollars the alarmist get from the government and from tree hugger organizations. But let's get to the meat. Here are the "lies" the brain trust authors of this slanted piece actually deign to mention:

• Bob Carter, Heartland Institute: "Currently the planet is cooling." Wrong. The last decade (2000-2009) was the hottest on record; 2010 was the hottest year recorded.
• Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project: "Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant." Nope. Acting under U.S. Supreme Court direction, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that CO₂ is a pollutant because of the harm it causes.
• Joseph Bast, Heartland Institute: "Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth's climate." Misleading, to say the least: 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming.

Let's start with Dr. Carter. Is it possible for a decade of average global temperature to be both downward trending and, on average, hot? Of course it can. This is not refutation but misdirection or comparing apples to oranges. Here is a graph from alarmists true believers at the Hadley Climate Research Unit at East Anglia U. Does it show cooling or not? Don't get me started on the myriad reasons to have healthy doubt about the accuracy of the global temperature data sets. Moving on.



Dr. Singer happens to be correct about the beneficial trace gas necessary for nearly all life here on Earth (the animals around deep sea hot vents don't need CO2 but everything else alive does). To say the EPA has declared the gas a pollutant is pure argumentum ad verecundiam, the authorities say it, so it must be true. Even five year olds know the parental 'because I say so' is not a compelling argument and is indeed the same sort of fallacy the genius writers use here.

Economist Joseph Bast is correct about most climate scientists not being alarmist about anthropogenic CO2. The 97% figure used by the authors here has a well known, sordid story of origin. In 2009 two researchers at the University of Illinois working for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) sent a two question survey to 10,257 earth scientists. Only about 3,000 responded. The first question was: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” and most people, even the most stubborn of deniers, admit that much of the 19th and 20th Cs. have been recovery from the Little Ice Age. The second question was pretty vague: "Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?" 82% of the less than 30% who responded said yes to this question, but notice that it does not ask if the change is warming or cooling of if the change is good or bad. This is not a question whether the current change in temperature is so alarming that we need to curb CO2 emission right freakin' now. But it gets worse. Only 24% of the surveys sent out were affirmative on that question. Nearly 71% were no answer/unsure. But of the yes answers the survey only counted the answers of 77 scientists who had published on the subject (and 75 of them said yes) and 75 of 77 is 97.4%. I for one am underwhelmed by this survey but look again at the statement of Mr. Bast. He says most scientists do not believe that human activities "threaten to disrupt the Earth's climate." That's different from the second question of the near joke survey. Mr. Bast says there is no alarmism in the main, the authors of the USA Today article say 97% of scientists think humans have a significant effect on climate. I'm not seeing a refutation in the manipulated (and to my mind false) 97% "consensus" number. The Bast statement and the survey question are separate things. You can believe that humans have an effect but not be alarmed by that effect.

The authors of the piece want denier's 'stakes in the action' reported on so that you know the bias of the oil coal and natural gas myrmidons. (There is no mention of the Billions in government grants and private charity stakes the researchers finding alarming changes have). But the revelation after the article tends to undercut the disinterested journalist mask the authors had maintained through out the article. Revealed was this:

Dan Becker directed Sierra Club's Global Warming and Energy Program for 18 years before founding the Safe Climate Campaign. James Gerstenzang, who covered the environment for the Los Angeles Times is the campaign's editorial director. 

Oh, so by their standard we should dismiss their article without examining their arguments because they are alarmists supported by those who believe in the alarmism.

I'd rather look at their arguments, such as they are, and let the bias alone. That's what I hope I have done here.

Labels: False Evidence, Global Warming Hoax; Invitation to Ignore; Failing

Labels: Cell Phone and Aircraft

Labels: Burning Man 1/3

Here is a rather shrill article on global warming climate change from a true believer. It's interesting to note that most of the article is generally a complaint that no one seems to care about global warming any more. The author seems to think that the Tsunami in Japan in 2011 was caused by global warming when it was wholly the result of an undersea earthquake which even theoretically has nothing whatever to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. Perhaps I read that paragraph wrong.

Then comes the alarmists' new position: A tiny increase in the tiny amount of the beneficial trace gas CO2, necessary for almost all life here on Earth, is causing ever more extreme weather. It's a complete lie. The weather is not getting more extreme. See for yourself.

I unfortunately can't seem to copy any part of the article so I'll paraphrase.

She says the recent Boulder floods were "probably" the result of global warming, as were recent floods in Pakistan, India and Mexico. Likewise the fire in Arizona last year which killed 19 firefighters was "likely" enhanced by global warming. That's not very good proof.

Then she admits this: "For the record, climate change is clearly helping to produce many of the bigger, more destructive, more expensive, more frequent disasters of our time, but it is impossible to point to any one of them and say definitely, this one is climate change." (Emphasis added).

OK, if that is true, and it is, then how can you be sure, as she is about medium hurricane Sandy last year, that any particular weather event was fueled, caused, enhanced or contributed to by global warming? She answers: "It's like trying to say which cancers in a contaminated area were caused by contamination; you can't, but what you can say is that the overall rise in cancer is connected."

So (like seeing if cancer rate increasing) one looks at the traditionally extreme weather events recorded over time, 50 years is a good time axis, 100 years is better (last week is not long enough) and see if the number of extreme events has risen in frequency, or in destructive power. Are any?
The answer is not one measurement of traditional extreme weather over 50 years in length shows any such rise in frequency or power or destructive results (measuring increased damage in today's dollars merely records the shrinking of the dollar's buying power and is not a measure of the extreme nature of a natural disaster).

You see, the alarmists, which Ms. Solnit certainly is, have had to paint themselves into this corner of "extreme weather" increase because the climate models are all wrong and the global average temperature (such as it is) has not increased in nearly two decades and has actually gone down in the last decade. There is no alarmism available in a falling temperature (although there should be as the inevitable return of the glacial period will be far worse for us than any warming scenario made up from whole cloth by the alarmists). The trouble is, there just isn't any, you know, evidence that extreme weather is increasing over the long haul. None. Indeed, what all the measurements show is the normal sine curve all weather related phenomena show over long periods of time. Actually, lately the weather is getting less extreme.

Ms. Solnit unconsciously reveals why ever fewer believe in the alarm the true believers are raising. Hint: It's not disinformation from skeptics.

Ever more shrill and ever more inaccurate and ever more sure. That's the climate change alarmists' position in 2013 and in the foreseeable future.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax: The Big Lie of Increasing Extreme Weather

Most Americans now have absolutely no idea what the Soviet "Gulag" was. Those who survived political imprisonment there know exactly what it was. Between these two extremes are, among others, the feebly aware, the expert historians and, by far the majority of these middle tiers, those who read some Solzhenitsyn, like me.

When the socialist paradise began to decay and fail because socialism is anti-human nature and can never work (Sweden being an exception to this general rule), those in power used to blame the natural failure on wreckers and hoarders. A lot of innocent people went to prison for the imaginary crime of wrecking some subset of the current master economic plan.

I've been waiting for some years for charges of wrecking and hoarding to be made by Democrats here in the United States. Now, that the roll out of Obamacare is a general train wreck, I'm beginning to get some whiffs of the old charges, here, here and here, to link to only a tiny sample. The modern American socialists use the French word sabotage instead of wrecker but the charge is exactly the same with exactly the same validity as in the Soviet Union many decades ago.

Look for yourselves.

UPDATE: Meghan McArdle debunks the "sabotage" claim here.

Labels: Blame For Socialism's Failure: Wreckers, Hoarders

Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.

Labels: Coffee Cup; Thermochromism

The NOAA website showing the extent of the permanent southwestern drought (and elsewhere) is down because of the 13% government shutdown, but here is another site with last week's show of drought using the Palmer Drought Index.

I have to ask it: What drought?

Labels: Global Warming Hoax: Impermanent Southwestern Drought

(h/t This Isn't Happiness)

Labels: Conspiracy Theory Take Down

Vo Nguyen Giap has died. Verses of Kipling's Fuzzy Wuzzy keep running around my interior. I agree that he was the architect of the Viet Minh's defeat of the French to end that 8 year war (I'm unclear how much he is to be credited for destruction of Groupement Mobile 100 in the central highlands in 1954, the second of the one two punch (with Dien Bien Phu) to drop the French). He was also the architect of the seemingly disastrous Tet Offensive in our 8 year war there. The VC were rendered combat ineffective for the rest of the war by this stand and fight strategy and we absolutely stomped them and the hoped for general uprising in the South never came within a mile of happening. But the American media gave this defeat for the Vietnamese Communist just the sort of coverage that turned it into a Phyrric Victory, as we suddenly lost the stomach to go the real distance to enforce the Truman Doctrine. Despite our winning the war and getting a peace treaty signed by the enemy, Democrats stabbed the South Vietnamese in the back and threw away our hard fought victory; and the source of that desire was Giap's Tet plan.

Then the real suffering started. However, despite his willingness to take horrendous casualties, his horrible politics and the good fortune our press gave to turn his worst mistake into victory, he was a first class fighting man.

Well done, on that score. RIP.

Labels: Viet Nam War History; General Giap

She said it, not me.

(h/t This Isn't Happiness)

Labels: Anxiety Girl

My apologies to Eric Blair for screwing up his quote. I notice that a lot of my stories now start with, "When I was a young man..." Such is the way of 60-year-olds, which I am, so suck it up.

When I was a young man, we used to have a federal budget process. Elected officials and their clever staff would look at the leviathan spending as the blind men examined the elephant and would debate in committee and on the floor some very slight fine tuning to the ever increasing spending, much of it completely wasted.

But even that modest effort ended with the Obama Administration. Although required by law to present and pass a budget, the Democrat controlled Senate refused. They did so for political reasons, for to reveal to potential voters their tax and spending desires would have hurt them in election years. There was no budget for 4 years and therefore certainly no discussion or debate about any of the several Trillion dollars of federal spending. The President has to present a budget by a deadline as well. President Obama rarely completed his task on time and most of his budgets were bad jokes; the 2013 fiscal year received not a single favorable vote in the Senate, not even one from yellow dog Democrats.

So we've been running the federal government for a half decade by continuing resolution, the CR. It's a vote to keep going or stop. We keep going. We keep going with ever more spending and we outspend even that increase.

Since any rational person with this historical knowledge would put the blame for this sad state of affairs on the people who caused it, the Democrats, that's whom I'll blame. I know that the Democrats finally did what the law requires last Spring and put together a bad joke budget which went nowhere but I argue, with no small amount of reason and fact behind me, the Democrat-caused reliance on the CR allowed them to pass a Potemkin Village budget which was never intended to be presented to the President for his signature and which understated the actual spending and overspending. They now rely politically on the CRs through which the Democrats "sneak" their massive spending past the voters.

Having an all or nothing outcome is not optimal. We sucked at keeping the budget cut nearer the bone (we rarely exfoliated a few dead skin cells) even when we had a working budget process, but without one, our increase in spending and borrowing shifted into high gear. See chart below.



The all or nothing nature of the CR also caused the loyal opposition (Republicans) to try to slow spending and borrowing by attaching some restraint to the wording of the CR. The House is Constitutionally required to start all spending bills. But now the President and Senate say the CR is some kind of constitutional Scapular and it must continue to be all or nothing, otherwise something bad will happen. They long ago wouldn't allow the normal give and take of building a budget and now they won't even countenance any political opposition to the overspending being contained in the CR. They call the Republicans, responding to their constituents and trying to slow spending and borrowing by the only method left, bad names. Typical Democrat argument, go ad hominem early and often, because nothing can convince an opponent to agree with you like calling him or her a terrorist or other criminal. I'm no big fan of the Republican leadership, but my contempt for the Democrats is growing exponentially.

So are the largely made-up government shut down horror stories recently in the media putting the blame for the deadlock primarily on the Republicans. Yes, as usual. Is it working to hurt Republican election chances next year? At this point, I don't think so. Unless you are employed by the Government, nothing much bad is happening with the partial shut-down. The non-essential part of the Government is wholly foregoable it seems. We see the silly horror stories being shopped by the media more as liberal vindictiveness than Republican extremism or, gasp, anarchy. I guess that could change. I'm hoping, but not betting, that the Republicans hold firm and the Democrats cave. Might be wishful thinking there.

As a closing thought, please know that because of tax and FICA withholding of part of nearly every American paycheck each week or two weeks or month, the federal government takes in a couple hundreds Billion dollars each month. This amount of withheld tax money is much greater than the monthly debt service, (about $40 Billion/month). So there is no possibility of a debt default. Even the shut-down government can pay the vig. So if anyone says the Republicans in the House are risking debt default by our federal government by their not presenting a "clean" CR, as the Democrats demand, that person is lying to you. Default on the debt is not yet remotely possible for lack of a budget, CR or debt ceiling raise. Please remember the people who are lying like this and don't trust them to tell you the truth. Things will be slightly clearer to you in the future.

Labels: Budget, CR, Democrat Fault and Lies

Way back in January, when it emerged that Beyoncé had treated us to the first ever lip-synched national anthem at a presidential inauguration, I suggested in this space that this strange pseudo-performance embodied the decay of America’s political institutions from the real thing into mere simulacrum. But that applies to government “crises,” too — such as the Obamacare “rollout,” the debt “ceiling,” and the federal “shutdown,” to name only the three current railroad tracks to which the virtuous damsel of Big Government has been simultaneously tied by evil mustache-twirling Republicans.
This week’s “shutdown” of government, for example, suffers (at least for those of us curious to see it reduced to Somali levels) from the awkward fact that the overwhelming majority of the government is not shut down at all. Indeed, much of it cannot be shut down. Which is the real problem facing America. “Mandatory spending” (Social Security, Medicare, et al.) is authorized in perpetuity — or, at any rate, until total societal collapse. If you throw in the interest payments on the debt, that means two-thirds of the federal budget is beyond the control of Congress’s so-called federal budget process. That’s why you’re reading government “shutdown” stories about the PandaCam at the Washington Zoo and the First Lady’s ghost-Tweeters being furloughed.
[...]
The perfect symbol of the shutdown-simulacrum so far has been the World War II Memorial. This is an open-air facility on the National Mall — that’s to say, an area of grass with a monument at the center. By comparison with, say, the IRS, the National Parks Service is not usually one of the more controversial government agencies. But, come “shutdown,” they’re reborn as the shock troops of the punitive bureaucracy. Thus, they decided to close down an unfenced open-air site — which oddly enough requires more personnel to shut than it would to keep it open.
So the Parks Service dispatched their own vast army to the World War II Memorial to ring it with barricades and yellow “Police Line — Do Not Cross” tape strung out like the world’s longest “We Support Our Troops” ribbon. For good measure, they issued a warning that anybody crossing the yellow line would be liable to arrest — or presumably, in extreme circumstances, the same multi-bullet ventilation that that mentally ill woman from Connecticut wound up getting from the coppers. In a heartening sign that the American spirit is not entirely dead, at least among a small percentage of nonagenarians, a visiting party of veterans pushed through the barricades and went to honor their fallen comrades, mordantly noting for reporters that, after all, when they’d shown up on the beach at Normandy it too had not been officially open.
[...]
The World War II Memorial exists thanks to some $200 million in private donations — plus $15 million or so from Washington: In other words, the feds paid for the grass. But the thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today’s America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government’s pleasure, whether it’s your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades. The Barrycades are such a perfect embodiment of what James Piereson calls “punitive liberalism” they should be tied round Obama’s neck forever, in the way that “ketchup is a vegetable” got hung around Reagan-era Republicans. Alas, the court eunuchs of the Obama media cannot rouse themselves even on behalf of the nation’s elderly warriors.



Mark Steyn


"court eunuchs of the Obama media" is quintessential Steyn, memorable in its stark allusion and dead-on politically

Labels: Mark Steyn quotes

Every time someone signs up on the Obamacare website, an angel gets his wings.

tweeter Razor

Labels: Razor quote

I admit that I did not do very well with my prediction about the final episode of Breaking Bad. I believed he regained a purpose after seeing Elliot and Gretchen on TV dis his contribution to Grey 
Matter and that purpose was revenge. How wrong was I. However, I was missing some information and as neatly as the final episode tied up loose ends it never let us know what caused Walt to leave suddenly Gretchen's parents' place and buy out of the company for a pittance. Did he feel cheated or was it personal, an affaire de coeur? Nobody knows.

This guy at the NYT gets it. Money quote:

The finale circled back to Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz, Walt’s former partners at Gray Matter. Walt broke into their mansion and cleverly blackmailed the couple into providing his children with the millions he couldn’t give them directly. And it was a delicious scene: When Elliott fearfully brandished a small blade, Walt said gently, “Elliott if we’re going to go that way, you’ll need a bigger knife.”

But the show never fully spelled out why Walt broke away from Gretchen and Elliott in the first place.

There were hints throughout the series. On several occasions, Walt accused them of cheating him out of his share; that bitterness seemingly helped steer him into his life of crime. But it wasn’t clear that his version was correct — in an episode where they confront each other at a restaurant, Gretchen said that Walt left her without any explanation. And the true story never came out.

“Breaking Bad” brilliantly tracked Walt’s transformation from teacher to criminal mastermind. But it’s still a mystery why that talented chemist turned his back on fame and fortune and became a humble high school chemistry teacher.

That is one secret Walter White took to the grave.

I also thought they'd let Todd survive just to mess with our sense of justice, in order to be an anti-Hollywood ending. Sorry to say, Hollywood is a very powerful and pervasive influence. Not that I liked Todd or any of the neo-Nazis for that matter.

This paragraph from the NYT is also a hidden criticism of the show, usually more realistic about Walt's abilities.

Then again, the episode began with Walter still alive but already a ghost, walking in and out of secured mansions, public diners and even Skyler’s house undetected, almost as if invisible.

Labels: Breaking Bad; Final Episode