Wrench in the Cogs [UPDATED]

Saturday 30 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

[UPDATE BELOW]

I bet this news is a wrench in the cogs of climatology rent seekers with their doom and gloom message. Principia Scientific International:

A recent NASA report throws the space agency into conflict with it’s climatologists after new NASA measurements prove that carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in Earth’s atmosphere.

NASA’s Langley Research Center has collated data proving that “greenhouse gases” actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun. The data was collected by Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry, (or SABER). SABER monitors infrared emissions from Earth’s upper atmosphere, in particular from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances thought to be playing a key role in the energy balance of air above our planet’s surface.

NASA’s Langley Research Center instruments show that the thermosphere not only received a whopping 26 billion kilowatt hours of energy from the sun during a recent burst of solar activity, but that in the upper atmospheric carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide molecules sent as much as 95% of that radiation straight back out into space.

The shock revelation starkly contradicts the core proposition of the so-called greenhouse gas theory which claims that more CO2 means more warming for our planet. However, this compelling new NASA data disproves that notion and is a huge embarrassment for NASA’s chief climatologist, Dr James Hansen and his team over at NASA’s GISS.

Already, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been in full retreat after having to concede a 17-year stall in global warming despite levels of atmopheric CO2 rising almost 40 percent in recent decades. The new SABER data now forms part of a real world double whammy against climatologists’ computer models that have always been programmed to show CO2 as a warming gas.

(Emphasis mine)

I wonder how long it will take the AGW religionists to somehow claim that this science is wrong.

It turns out that the interpretation of the new NASA datasets by Principia Scientific has been twisted pretty badly in order to fit the skeptic’s narrative. When one of the credible and well documented skeptics points out bias in an interpretation that would otherwise support his position, you know there’s something not quite right.

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Incentives, How do they Work?

Wednesday 27 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Dr. Ben Carson, world renowned neurosurgeon and native of Detroit on the government incentivized circle of poverty in inner city America:

There is your elite group of intellectuals who pass judgment on everything. They see the people who are on the lower end of society and they say ‘you little poor thing’ and they pat you on the head and say, ‘we’re going to take care of you.’ Of course, that just enables them to remain in that situation without real incentive to improve themselves. You need a lower class in order for you to be the elite intellectual.

The correlation between welfare and generational poverty is well documented. And government incentivizes this behavior by making it so that nuclear families can’t be recipients, keeping single mothers who might otherwise seek a father figure for their children from doing so so that welfare checks can keep rolling in, but it also serves to keep her children in poverty, and the cycle going. And the intellectual elite promotes this kind of government incentivization to remain poor.

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One Reason Why

Wednesday 27 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Here is one reason why we need the feds to ease up on pot law before it can become a non-issue in states which already allow it (for whatever reason): people who have legal medical marijuana and a legally owned firearm being arrested for federal firearm crimes. Debra J Saunders of SFGate:

Monday I came across a U.S. Sentencing Commission report that looked at federal offenders serving sentence enhancements for committing a crime with a gun present: 65 percent served five years for having a gun while committing a federal crime, 23 percent served seven years for brandishing a gun, and nine percent served ten years for firing a gun or carrying assault weapons or other proscribed firearms. It’s possible that in some of those 65 percent of cases, the guns weren’t part of the crime, but the crime was owning a gun while possessing a controlled substance. Which brought to mind the 55-year sentence meted out to Weldon Angelos, which the sentencing judge himself called “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.”

The message for Californians who use medical marijuana should be pretty clear. The federal government may go after you for using marijuana, and the penalty can be harsh if you possess both legal (in California) medical marijuana and a lawfully-owned gun.

Simply exercising one’s 2A right owning a gun and possessing marijuana, even legal marijuana, runs afoul of federal law, and carries stiff MANDATORY minimum sentencing requirements. As long as there are federal laws against marijuana, states cannot truly be free to legalize without still putting the residents of their state at risk of arrest and imprisonment. Fortunately it seems that some relief has been offered. Mike Riggs at Reason:

You may have heard recently that the number of people under correctional supervision in the U.S. has been steadily falling over the last few years–from 7.2 million in 2008, to 6.97 million in 2011. While that’s true, it’s also true that the decline is happening exclusuvely at the state and local levels. The federal prison system has only grown since 2008. Federal detention facilities are currently at 139 percent capacity, and, absent any reforms of federal mandatory minimum laws, are expected to grow indefinitely. Enter Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), and the “Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013,” which was introduced today.

Here’s why this bill is important: A guy–let’s call him Weldon–sells pot to a government informant, who notices that Weldon has a gun strapped to his ankle. The next time the informant buys pot from Weldon, he notices a gun in Weldon’s car. When police move in to arrest Weldon, they find guns in his house. Weldon has never fired these guns, never used them to coerce anyone. He has, however, sold pot three times* while in possession of a firearm, so prosecutors charge Weldon with “multiple counts of possession of a gun during a drug trafficking offense.” He is convicted. What do you think Weldon’s sentence is? Ten years? Twenty years? Try 55 years–five for the first gun-related offense, and 25 for the second and third. That’s the mandatory minimum federal sentence for Weldon’s charges, meaning the judge who sentenced him could not sentence him to less time–only more.

Though the bill is not perfect (what bill is?), it should offer a viable alternative to the current draconian system of mandatory minimum sentencing requirements which overwhelmingly affect minorities, and ruin the lives of everyone they affect. No one should go to jail for pot ever. It’s immoral to jail someone for putting something in their body that affects no one else. That aside, no one should go to for legally possessing pot in accordance with state law and possessing a firearm by right.

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Preferences Masquerading as Science

Tuesday 26 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

The culture war dressed up as SCIENCE. Nick Gillespie at Reason:

On a recent episode of Fox News Channel’s Geraldo at Large, Ann Coulter squared off against Nanny State enthusiast MeMe Roth regarding New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s crusade against just about everything. It’s an interesting segment, not least of which because Coulter is totally right (!). Here’s a partial transcript courtesy of Mediaite’s Andrew Kirell:

[. . .]

When Roth made the claim that bans on various unhealthy activities are warranted because “we pick up the tab” for other’s bad habits, Coulter countered that “I think you’re going to have to do something about the gay bathhouses.”

“AIDS is very expensive, and if I’m paying for it, how about discouraging that behavior?” she explained.

Later, while clarifying that she doesn’t actually want to ban homosexual activity, she told Roth, “If you’re argument is ‘Smoking: we all have to pay,’ then why not ‘Sodomy: we all have to pay.’” She told Roth that a consistent position on “nannying” would require her to be “anti-bathhouses” in addition to anti-smoking.

For her part, Roth sticks to the point that because of socialized medicine, we’re all picking up the tab for other people (she ignores data suggested elevated health risk factors for gay men). Coulter goes out of her way to say that she doesn’t want to ban anybody from doing anything – she wants to de-socialize health-care systems so these sorts of things are not political issues.

[. . .]

The logic of the nanny staters should compel them to target all sorts of behaviors to which they give a pass – really, why not ban skiing if you’re against activities that cost the rest of us money? That nanny staters routinely focus things such as smoking, drinking, gambling, TV watching, weight issues, and the like strongly suggests an implicit class bias in which relatively wealthy and politically connected elites are simply enforcing their preferred lifestyle choices over the less powerful. It has nothing to do with “public health” or helping people. As I suggested earlier today in regard to Bloomberg’s soda ban -which would do absolutely nothing to slim waistlines in New York – it’s about elevating personal preference to the status of scientific decree.

They aren’t concerned about waistlines or health issues; they’re concerned about forcing their predilections on the masses through the force of government. The answer is not to force or ban certain behaviors on people in order to minimize our burden in paying for their health care, but to not be forced to pay for their fucking health care. Socialized health care is not about “taking care of each other”, but about gaining more control over society in the name of minimizing costs.

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Travel Agents

Tuesday 26 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

It’s clear that one sector not harmed by the sequester are the federal travel agents who book lavish vacations for the Obamas, courtesy of the taxpayers of course. The Weekly Standard:

In the first three months of the year, members of the first family have been on three vacations, averaging a vacation a month. And now it’s being reported that the first daughters are on a spring break vacation in the Bahamas.

I thought the budget was so tight as to already be cut to the bone. That not a single dime could be shaved from the budget without planes falling out of the sky and seniors eating the dead off the streets just to survive, and yet he has the temerity to bring he and his family on multiple lavish vacations that are paid for out of said budget.

Since when do we have a king?

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The Biggest Bully

Saturday 23 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Remember, folks: government is the biggest bully of them all.

In other words, the school officials gave the Parkmans an untenable choice: keep your daughter in an unsafe environment, or men with guns might come take your daughter away. After a few trips to the doctors, the Parkmans decided to risk the possibility of the latter rather than have their daughter continue to face the certainty of the former.

It’s impossible to know why exactly the school officials behaved as they did—they clammed up when reporters started asking questions—but it would not be surprising if the officials were at least partly motivated by the state’s school funding formula, which allocates money based partially on enrollment. Fewer students mean fewer dollars. If they can’t please parents who want to leave, school officials can threaten them with a parent’s worst nightmare.

The government school system monopoly on education needs to razed to the ground.

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The Bar

Saturday 23 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Way to set the bar high on using the Federal Government’s “Insurance Exchanges”, the crown jewel of Obamacare. Peter Suderman at Reason:

What should we expect from ObamaCare’s health insurance exchanges when they go online later this year? Not perfection, that’s for sure.

“It’s only prudent to not assume everything is going to work perfectly on day one,” Gary Cohen, an official with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) who is heading up the federal government’s exchange implementation, said at a policy meeting put on by the insurance industry. “As we move closer to October, my hopes are the range of things that could go wrong gets narrower and narrower,” he said. But, he added, “everyone recognizes that day one will not be perfect.”

Congressional Quarterly, which first reported Cohen’s remarks, also quotes Henry Chao, the CMS official in charge of the exchange technology, saying that with less than 200 days before the exchanges open, he’s “pretty nervous.” At this point, Chao officials are just hoping that what they build is mostly functional. “The time for debating about the size of the text on the screen, or the color, or is it a world-class user experience, that’s what we used to talk about two years ago,” Chao is reported to have said. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.”

With expectations this high for the program that is supposed to change the face of healthcare in America, what could go wrong?

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Really?

Friday 22 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

According to an editor’s note at Harper’s Daily, Obama’s biggest problem is that he doesn’t believe in the voodoo economics of the minimum wage (supply and demand anyone?) and that he isn’t in to mercantilism enough, rather instead, he’s too much in to that whole free trade thing where consumers are able to get the products they want at affordable prices because of large pools of competitors.

Yet the address contained hardly anything progressive: On the contrary, Obama’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to only $9 an hour — and not for two years — was a populist parody. Under the president’s proposal, a minimum-wage worker supporting a family of three (two parents, one child) would make $18,720 a year in 2015 — barely above today’s federal poverty line of $18,480 and well short of the 1968 peak, inflation-adjusted, of $21,840 a year, or $10.50 an hour. Combined with Obama’s mosquito bite of an increase in the top marginal income-tax rate to 39.6 percent — restoring Bill Clinton’s top rate would still put it at way less than the Eisenhower-era top rate of 91 percent — the minimum-wage bill insults the many millions of less fortunate people who voted for the incumbent. So much for “activist government” and an “impressive” agenda.

[. . .]

Lately, besides talking up “deficit reduction” and creating a “thriving middle class,” Obama is pushing an even more ambitious and destructive “free trade” agenda certain to weaken the middle class even more. The ultra-realistic Financial Times reported last month that Obama had put “trade at the heart of” his agenda. This means we will no doubt see lovely bipartisan cooperation between the two enemy parties when there’s real money on the table for their big donors.

Of the proposed deals, the most damaging for American manufacturing and decent factory wages would be the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which if signed would follow on Obama’s 2011 job-killing trifecta — the “free-trade” agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. More Japanese and other Asian imports would result, but Obama’s cheerleaders in the media blur the debate by touting a supposed manufacturing revival they cutely call “insourcing.” The insourcing “boom” is another administration fraud (see anything written by Alan Tonelson), but it neatly distracts people from the ever-increasing foreign-trade deficit.

Why not $20 an hour? Why stop at $10.50? It’s not as if the value of money is based on its scarcity in an economy, or that the cost of living would skyrocket due to a large influx of cash, largely negating wage raises.

And I HATE how I, a representative of the middle class, am able to go out and buy the shit I want or need at decent prices due to international competition. It’s really weakening me to buy Korean-made goods at low prices. It would be so much better if I had to pay much higher prices due to the cost of American labor, especially once you factor in the extra cost that would be added on to goods by hiking the minimum wage by nearly 50%. That’ll be so much better. I definitely want to move the economic clock back 300 years to where we have government protectionism of local manufacturers in order to be on the “winning” end of the so-called “balance of trade.”

Really, John?

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How?

Thursday 21 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

How is the Stop and Frisk program where cops can stop and search any individual they choose, at any time they choose, for any reason they choose Constitutional?

Officer Adhyl Polanco, who was initially responsible for calling attention to the quotas via a series of secret recordings made back in 2009, told the court he’d been required to make five stop-and-frisks a month by union delegates and police supervisors. Polanco, who said fellow cops called him a rat after he went public with the recordings, testified officers often felt pressured to make unconstitutional stops in order to meet those quotas. “We were handcuffing kids for no reason,” he said. “I don’t want my kids to get shot by a cop who’s chasing them to write a ‘250.'”

Hint: it’s fucking not. And NYC has done 5 MILLION of them in the last ~11 years, and nearly 90% of these stops are of minorities and result in no charges filed or summonses given.

More than 86 percent of people stopped during the Bloomberg administration were black or Latino, according to an analysis by the NYCLU based on an extrapolation of Police Department data. And 4.4 million of these stop-and-frisk encounters, or 88 percent, were of innocent people who were not arrested or issued a summons. During Bloomberg’s first year in office, the NYPD conducted 97,296 street stops; last year they racked up 533,042—down from 685,724 in 2011.

It’s fucking shameful that this shit happens in America.

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Hipsters

Thursday 21 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Hipsters are not the economic saviours of America. Color me surprised.

Among the most pervasive, and arguably pernicious, notions of the past decade has been that the “creative class” of the skilled, educated and hip would remake and revive American cities. The idea, packaged and peddled by consultant Richard Florida, had been that unlike spending public money to court Wall Street fat cats, corporate executives or other traditional elites, paying to appeal to the creative would truly trickle down, generating a widespread urban revival.

Urbanists, journalists, and academics—not to mention big-city developers— were easily persuaded that shelling out to court “the hip and cool” would benefit everyone else, too. And Florida himself has prospered through books, articles, lectures, and university positions that have helped promote his ideas and brand and grow his Creative Class Group’s impressive client list, which in addition to big corporations and developers has included cities as diverse as Detroit and El Paso, Cleveland and Seattle.

Well, oops.

Florida himself, in his role as an editor at The Atlantic, admitted last month what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members—and do little to make anyone else any better off. The rewards of the “creative class” strategy, he notes, “flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers,” since the wage increases that blue-collar and lower-skilled workers see “disappear when their higher housing costs are taken into account.” His reasonable and fairly brave, if belated, takeaway: “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.”

The winners in the pussification hipsterification of America? A select few hipsters and legions of tax-leech urban real estate developers who thrive at sucking on government teat. The losers? EVERYONE ELSE. Taxpayers have lost billions on “urban renewal” projects, and many of the people who have lived in these neighborhoods for generations have been chased off because their rent and other costs of living in newly renewed white people fairly tale urban neighborhoods where “artisanal” shops that charge $7 for a ridiculously small jar of fucking mayonnaise and places where you can buy tulips and an overpriced can of Pabst abound are not fucking affordable.

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