‘Creating jobs’ explained

Creating ‘union government jobs’ isn’t what we had in mind

Maybe this explains why wages for federal employees have risen so fast: for the first time, the majority of union members work for local, state, or federal government.

This is not good. Unions act as clearing houses for political contributions to Democrats, and together they make deals to grow government. Now that most union members are now government workers, this is a huge conflict of interest.

So now we have a perfect storm: unionized government bureaucrats, whose salaries come from our tax dollars, and whose compulsory union dues are funneled (sometimes against their wishes) to Democrats for the purpose of growing a government that is already too big, too expensive, and a drag on the economy.

More, from the above:

Last month when the White House released its visitor log for the first six months of the Obama presidency, one name appeared far more often than any other: Service Employee International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern. Stern has every right to expect to be welcome in the Obama White House. He has repeatedly bragged about the fact that under his leadership, the SEIU spent $60.7 million to elect Barack Obama president. And what is Stern buying with his $60.7 million besides White House tours? Ever expanding federal government programs and state government bailouts which are rapidly bankrupting our country.

There was a time when unions protected working people from harsh, inhumane conditions. But do today’s government workers, who mostly sit in cubicles in temperature-controlled offices, need to be unionized? To protect them from what? Lower (and more realistic) wages?

Again, from the above:

Union membership has fallen to 7.3% of private sector workers – the lowest rate since Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law. But it is a completely different story in the public sector: 37.6% of government employees belong to unions, up almost a percentage point since last year. Those 7.9 million unionized government employees are 51% of all union members nationwide.

So when we hear Obama continually talking about “creating jobs”, we have to remember: he must mean creating government jobs. Because that’s the only kind his kind of economic policies can create.

The only government intervention that will drive the economy is “getting the hell out of the way”

I think I just found a new blog to love. It’s called Mean Street, at wsj.com, by a man named Evan Newmark. Here’s why.

He says we should be very careful about buying into this “the recession is over” stuff in A Sham GDP for a Sham Economy. Our GDP “growth” announced today is from government spending, much of it from cash for clunkers. This is just kicking the can down the road in the form of borrowing against the future. Remember how auto sales tanked horribly in September, after the program ended? That is not, by anybody’s definition, an “economic recovery”.

But even better, this post is a must-read: It’s Official — Obamanomics Isn’t Working.

You likely missed it. But Thursday’s Congressional testimony from Obama Council of Economic Adviser Chief, Christina Romer was the big story. She officially admitted what many of us already knew: Obamanomics isn’t working.

The $787 billion Obama stimulus package that was supposed to keep U.S. unemployment at under 8% will not only fail to keep it under 10%. But by mid-2010 “fiscal stimulus will be contributing little to further growth.”

As for President Obama’s big promise last January to create 3.5 or 4 million new American jobs. Forget it. “Unemployment is unlikely to end 2010 much below its current levels.”

Romer’s admission was startling. You’ll recall that it was her January 10th paper that outlined what a mighty job machine the Obama presidency would be. Every 1% boost in GDP would get a million new jobs.

Now here we are running stimulus-heavy budget deficits that will total almost $3 trillion over this year and next. GDP is on the rise again. And still, no new jobs.

What’s even more depressing, is that the Obama White House still hasn’t figured out why businesses aren’t hiring.

The White House seems pretty certain about how American businesses should behave. And it seems pretty certain that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, insurance companies and banks aren’t doing what they should be doing.

But all that joblessness? Who knows? Not Romer. It’s all a macroeconomic mystery of time-lags and GDP multipliers. In her testimony, she offers up seven different guesstimates on jobs created by the stimulus.

Does it ever occur to the White House to see the economy as businessmen do? Does it ever occur to the White House that America’s businesses aren’t hiring because they don’t trust Washington?

No. Business is E-V-I-L!

Just check out President Obama’s Saturday radio address on small business to see what I’m talking about.

The president paid tribute to small business, to “mom and pop stores and neighborhood restaurants we know and love.” Small business, he intoned, was the “engine of our economy,” “the heart of the American dream.”

So did the president propose new ways of cutting payroll taxes, employment costs and red-tape for the “engine of our economy?” Nope. Instead, he promised more federal SBA loans and health insurance reform courtesy of federal intervention and mandates.

How many small businessmen do you know that want government more involved in their business?

I know lots of small businessmen and I can’t think of one. I myself employ just one worker in New York City — and the amount of paperwork, fees, taxes and aggravation involved makes it feel like I’m employing a thousand.

I recently discovered that as a self-employed New Yorker I now have the pleasure of paying a new Metropolitan Commuter Mobility Transportation Tax. This measly 0.34% tax on wages is exactly the kind of stupidity that kills jobs. It’s the kind of tinkering that governments can’t resist. And it’s the very reason government terrifies businesses.

Read the whole thing.

How did we end up with a bunch of Keystone Cops in the White House?

 

Eric Holder: “Excellent point. Now shut up!”

Attorney General Tries to Silence School Choice Ad

Well, sure. It’s not like we have freedom of speech or anything. Wait … turns out, we do! Huh.

Very odd. I mean, this is the Attorney General of the United States we’re talking about here. He knows about the Constitution, right? The rule of law? Stuff like that?

Also, exercising restraint when you hold a huge amount of power?

Respect for the guaranteed right of others to hold their own opinions and even advocate for them, in public? How scary is that!?

So very, very odd.

Because seriously, come on now, a President wouldn’t nominate a political operative for Attorney General, would he? A guy to do his political bidding, and oh-by-the-way, also run the entire Department of Justice, where he could direct thousands of attorneys and FBI agents to harass enemies of the President?

And even, you know, make idiotic demands in public that show his true colors, along with a disgusting lack of respect for free speech and how essential that is to our overall freedoms?

Nah! That would be a big conflict of interest. So we know that is completely off the table. Phew!

Obama is a Democrat. And we all know that Democrats don’t have conflicts of interest, or a lust for power, or a tendency to tell everybody else what to do.

Bullet dodged!

Your government at work. Well, if by “at work” we mean “stealing from you”.

 

Hmmm. This seems backwards.

 

Two major things wrong here. Federal civilians not only make TWICE what those in private industry make, thereby pulling money out of the economy with higher taxes, but the rate of increase in their wages and benefits is much higher, too. Compare the slope of the two lines.

Via Illinois Policy Institute.

 

 

Pelosi and Reid: “Hey America! Don’t Like My Legislating? Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT!”

“Of the People, By the People, For the People”? Pfffffft.

Sen. Orrin Hatch: “Democrats have decided they have to pass a bill no matter how unpopular it is.”

And by “Democrats”, he obviously means “Nancy Pelosi” and “Harry Reid”.

What a stunning time we live in. Harry Reid I can understand. The Senate is composed mainly of pompous pricks.

But the Speaker of the House? The House is the most democratic chunk of our federal government. Pelosi is a Democrat. Ostensibly, this is the party of the powerless, the man on the street, Joe Six-Pack. All House members face re-election every two years, so they have to at least pretend they care about what we think. Usually, anyway. Of course, they get behind closed doors and stab us in the back when it suits them, but at least they gave the impression of caring about what we wanted in the past.

And make no mistake, the public has made it very clear—via face-to-face meetings with elected representatives, and polling data—that they don’t like the expensive, mostly-hidden piles of crap being sold to us as “health care reform”.

This must be what it feels like to wake up in hell

“Health care reform” or, as I like to call it, “another stupid idea from Washington” :

In short, the plan sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus would almost certainly lead to a death spiral in many private health insurance markets.

Insurance death spirals occur when regulators force insurers to offer coverage (“guaranteed issue”) at premiums below the known risk of those they are insuring, without any assurance that the shortfall can be made up elsewhere. When insurers comply with these rules and offer relatively low cost health insurance policies to all comers, quite predictably, many sick people step forward to sign up. When the insurers then try to turn around and charge higher premiums to the relatively healthy to cover their costs, the healthy, also quite predictably, are more reluctant to enroll because they can see the premiums they would have to pay would very likely exceed their health-care costs. So they often say “no thanks” to the insurance and decide to take their chances by going without coverage instead. As more and more healthy people exit the marketplace, insurers are then forced to raise premiums for everyone who remains, which only further encourages the lower risks to opt out. This vicious cycle of rising premiums and an increasingly unhealthy risk pool is called a ‘death spiral’ because it eventually forces the insurer to terminate the plan.

This is not a hypothetical, textbook scenario of what might happen to a poorly run insurance market. It has happened before — many times and in many places. See, for instance, the experience in Kentucky, and in Washington state, and in Maine too. There’s no reason it couldn’t happen nationwide.

The Obama White House and congressional Democrats convinced themselves months ago that they could avoid the fate of these failed state reform efforts by forcing the young and healthy to buy insurance, whether they wanted it or not. And so, all of the bills under consideration in the House and Senate would make government-approved health insurance enrollment compulsory for all Americans. Those not complying would have to pay a new tax, collected by the IRS.

Will the last resident to leave Michigan please turn out the lights?

While you were out … the state of Michigan has turned into an economic hell-hole.

It’s too bad. Michigan is a nice place, with a lot of natural beauty, and Great Lakes on three sides. But the place is slowly being destroyed economically, due to a deadly combination of too much reliance on a very sick auto industry, and high taxes, and big government, and excessive union power.

So those who can leave, do. Every 12 minutes, a family leaves the state of Michigan. 5 families per hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Do the math. That’s 840 families every week.

And it’s no wonder. Taxes are a strong disincentive to invest, to run a business, to work or raise a family. Raising taxes chases away the people who pay into the system but get very little out of it, leaving behind those who depend on that system–government largesse–for their livelihood. It’s a recipe for failure.

And Illinois, which is right now facing some big financial burdens, has the same tendency to “raise taxes first and ask questions later”. So does the U.S. government.

They might want to take a look at Michigan’s situation. And you might, as well. If raising taxes to address budget problems works so well, why do they have to keep doing it?

Assessing Chicago 2016 financial risks

Chicago learns next Friday, October 2, whether it will host the 2016 Summer Olympics. But if they do win the games, the taxpayers in Cook County won’t learn until much later just how big the bill might be.

There is a 12% profit factored into the $3.8M budget, but that pales in comparison to the potential cost overruns, as described in this eyes-wide-open article “Peeling back the coverage” at chicagobusiness.com.

For instance, while there is $1.1B of insurance promised, there is no insurance coverage (or not enough) for:

• “… the risk that private lenders won’t shell out $1 billion to finance construction of the Olympic Village”
• “… shortfalls in corporate sponsorship sales, which they predict will rake in $1.8 billion, two-thirds more than London expects to collect for the 2012 games”
• “… overruns on the construction of Olympics venues tops out at 10% over budgeted costs”
• “… $246 million in contributions from private donors, a source already tapped for $72 million to finance the city’s bid”

And that’s just the insurance piece of the pie.

Predictably, construction costs are key, with the main costs being the Olympic Village and the sports venues. The plan is to convince private developers to “transform the former Michael Reese Hospital into athletic quarters to be sold later as condominiums or rental housing”. I’m not quite sure if this means converting the actual buildings themselves–which seems sort of crazy to me–or if it means first tearing down the whole thing and building new.

As for sports venues, the 2004 Athens games went double what they budgeted. The 2010 Vancouver games are running 23% higher than projected. Chicago 2016 is only allocating a 10% overrun, plus another 10% in insurance on top of that.

Then we have concerns about revenue projections.

Just read the whole thing.

The money quote by Allan Sanderson, a sports economist at the University of Chicago: “Athens was three times over budget; London is four times over budget. I don’t see that happening here. But are they going to come in at $4.8 billion? No, I just don’t see it.”

Holy Skewed Temperature Samples, Batman!

Just because some call it “science” does not make it so:

Eighty-nine percent of official U.S. temperature measurement stations are corrupted by poor site selection that gives false warming signals, according to a new study  by meteorologist Anthony Watts.

According to the federal government’s own siting criteria, the corrupting influences at those stations create a margin of error larger than the entire asserted warming of the twentieth century.

Eighty. Nine. Percent.

For those who don’t understand how embarrassing this is for the entire CO2-is-warming-the-planet theory, let me explain.

There are two key points here: the climate data itself is corrupted, and the climate models that use that data are unproven.

Climate Data is Corrupted

Computer models are the main support for the idea that CO2 warms the planet in the first place. There is no other evidence, to my knowledge, that supports CO2 as a primary driver for warming. These models are pretty much it. In fact, historical ice cores show the opposite, that CO2 is a symptom of warming, not a cause, and that the CO2 buildup lags the warming by about 800 years.

Those computer models, of course, need a bunch of historical data points as input in order to crunch the numbers and make predictions into the future.

Among the data they need, of course, is temperature data. And apparently, 89% of that data is basically garbage.

If the input data is garbage, then it doesn’t matter how great the rest of the modeling software is, the conclusions it presents are garbage too.

Climate Models are Unproven

And as it happens, the computer models used by the IPCC are suspect as well, because they haven’t published the source code so that it can be peer reviewed. Here’s why that is important.

I’ve worked in the software industry for over 25 years, most of that as a software developer. Computers are not magic. They can only do what the code they are running tells them to do. If that code has even minor errors in logic, the results are suspect.

To accept the conclusions of a software model that predicts the future, obviously you have no reality to compare the model’s conclusions with. So you need to have a “code review” by unbiased software developers who did not write that code, in order to check for logic errors, remove potential biases, ask questions like “why are you doing this here”, etc. It has to be examined, line by line, to see exactly what is going on in there, what inputs it is using, what it does with those inputs, the assumptions it makes about the effect of the different inputs, etc.

For all we know, a climate software model that hasn’t had a code review could be reading Ted Williams’ stats from baseball-reference.com and then saying “look, the planet is heating up!”. Who really knows? You can’t. Computer software is inherently secretive unless the source code is accessible to experts who can de-cipher it.

And until that code is available for the experts to examine, the models themselves are little more than a plaything.

What Science Does and Does Not Look Like

Yet, somehow, these playthings have been accepted as proof positive by the IPCC and the various governmental agencies the world over. They are untroubled by the lack of accountability on the part of the climate modelers.

That, my friends, is “advocacy”, not “science”.

So. The temperature samples are flawed, and so are the climate models that use the temperatures samples as input. Which means we have not just one, but two layers of obfuscation hampering our predictive ability regarding climate.

And according to the article above, the margin of error just from the bad sampling methodology alone is greater than the entire asserted warming of the twentieth century. Let that soak in for a second.

We keep hearing about a “scientific consensus” that CO2 is warming the planet. What does all of the above that tell you about the “scientists” who formed that consensus? What does it tell you about the degree of confidence we can have in their conclusions?

Science isn’t about “consensus”. This ain’t American Idol.

Science is about proof, and facts, and using those facts to prove (or disprove) theories. Scientists are supposed to be their own worst critics, and turn every implicit assumption on it’s head, and try to disprove their own theory. The science itself must stand on its own, otherwise, it’s bad science, and deserves to be ignored.

Where is the skepticism, the sharing of ideas, the spirit of pushing knowledge forward for the good of all mankind?

Real scientists do not hide their methods and threaten their questioners. Real scientists welcome examination of their data and methods in a spirit of inquiry and the advancement of mankind.

But in today’s increasingly bizarre world, to question any of this is to risk being considered a lunatic. Supposedly, the sane people are the ones who believe in skewed samples and flawed models. How did that happen? It’s like Pope Benedict and Galileo all over again. As Pope John Paul said about that dark period of scientific history, “This led them unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith, a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation.” And so it seems to be happening again.

But as I must constantly remind myself, global warming isn’t about science, it’s about politics and using fear to scare us into supporting new taxes on our energy use and lifestyle.

And it is all based on the most ridiculous “science” one could possibly imagine: bad data feeding bad models. Now hand over your money!

I am always open to theories that are logically sensible and supported by evidence. And I invite anybody who disagrees with my points above to both (a) point me to a qualified review of any IPCC climate modeling source code, AND (b) disprove the conclusions of Anthony Watts regarding corrupted temperature samples. Real science requires that *all* of the steps along the way be correct. Every. Step.

Until such time, I’ll be disregarding all talk about warming the planet with CO2.

And I have to say I’m not wild about money-grubbing politicians and “scientists” using advocacy and obfuscation to deceive me into throwing money at them, on the pretense that it will fix a future problem for which there is no reliable supporting evidence.

Sorry, I’m not riding that train. Why would anybody?

Government Meddling Led to Financial Crisis? Who Knew?

Well, well, well. Lookee here. Congress agrees with me, and blames today’s financial crisis on “federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market”:

The housing bubble that burst in 2007 and led to a financial crisis can be traced back to federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market intended to help provide homeownership opportunities for more Americans. This intervention began with two government-backed corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which privatized their profits but socialized their risks, creating powerful incentives for them to act recklessly and exposing taxpayers to tremendous losses. Government intervention also created “affordable” but dangerous lending policies which encouraged lower down payments, looser underwriting standards and higher leverage. Finally, government intervention created a nexus of vested interests – politicians, lenders and lobbyists – who profited from the “affordable” housing market and acted to kill reforms. In the short run, this government intervention was successful in its stated goal – raising the national homeownership rate. However, the ultimate effect was to create a mortgage tsunami that wrought devastation on the American people and economy. While government intervention was not the sole cause of the financial crisis, its role was significant and has received too little attention.

In recent months it has been impossible to watch a television news program without seeing a Member of Congress or an Administration official put forward a new recovery proposal or engage in the public flogging of a financial company official whose poor decisions, and perhaps greed, resulted in huge losses and great suffering. Ironically, some of these same Washington officials were, all too recently, advocates of the very mortgage lending policies that led to economic turmoil. In a number of cases, political officials even engaged in unethical conduct, helping their political allies, family members and even themselves obtain lucrative positions in the mortgage lending industry and other benefits. At a time when government intervention in private markets has become alarmingly common, government “affordable housing” initiatives offer important lessons about the dangers of government efforts to manipulate or conjure outcomes in the market.

Via Doug Ross’ Twitter feed. and the Carpe Diem blog.

First Rule of Financial Holes: Stop Digging

You have to wonder if maybe Illinois wouldn’t be in such a big budget crisis right now if the state legislature didn’t routinely, and for many years, approve new programs without funding them.

Seems a little risky, no?

In a business, or even a family, non-essential expenses are the very first thing you evaluate. It’s called “cutting the fat”, and it’s how sane people try to balance budgets.

But not in government! Governments have these wonderful ATM-like things called “taxpayers”.

Governments think taxpayers are awesome because taxpayers are too busy leading their lives to learn much about how completely they get ripped off by their governments. And the media likes taxpayers too, as long as they are kept in the dark about how markets work and what taxes do to an economy.

Isn’t it funny how none of the politicians or news stories mention any of this when the going gets tough? No, it’s all about yanking food right out of the mouths of starving children.

Gee thanks, but I’m trying to cut down on my big-government platitudes and insulting emotional appeals meant to trip my trigger and open my wallet.

The Economist notes how widespread it is :

Despite allocations of federal aid to states, services are being cut, state employees are being laid off, and taxes are being raised in order to balance the budgets of local governments constitutionally unable to run deficits. It’s not at all clear that the federal stimulus will entirely compensate for state-level fiscal tightening, which means that American fiscal policy could, on net, be contractionary.

Q: Is there anybody in the room who dares to ask the obvious? That, maybe, just maybe, we’re overspending?

A: Sadly, no. Doing that would require cutting programs that benefit special-interest groups. And the media, which frames the discussion about the role of government in our lives, believes all government spending is inherently a Good Thing.

And so on and on we go. Giving government more and more power by relying on it to fix things for us.

How’s that working out so far?

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

And Waxman-Markey thinks YOU are stupid enough to support this dumb idea:

Now Congress is trying to pass a new law called ‘Cap and Trade,’ which is really just another new energy tax. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the new tax could cost you between 61 cents and $1.60 for every gallon of gas you buy. Economists think this could cost the average family $3,100 a year. I’m working hard to defeat this new tax.

Funny how that huge tax increase on everybody who drives doesn’t seem to resonate in the media. Huh.

I have a feeling it would resonate with the consumer.

That passage above is from this link at the site of my congressman, Peter Roskam (Ill.). I sent him an email today requesting that he vote no on that legislation, before I knew how strongly he already opposed it. He doesn’t like the Waxman-Markey bill. He is a smart man.

You can also find this graphic at that link, reflecting the cost of gas in Chicago, which already pays the highest prices in the nation, and which could increase by up to $1.60:

http://roskam.house.gov/Issues/Issue/?IssueID=4291

Thanks, but no. Sorry … I’m really trying to cut down.

Getting Wise Down Under

Good Beer and Demanding Evidence: Two Qualities to Admire in a Country

Australia, at least, is starting to ask serious questions about the “science” behind global warming. Heaven and Earth, a book by Ian Pilmer, is credited with starting that global warming backlash in Australia.

Quoting Rick Moran at the American Thinker piece linked just above:

Cap and trade is not about saving the planet. It is about enriching government at the expense of private industry. Obama expects that selling of carbon credits will bring in hundreds of billions of dollars that will finance his health insurance power grab and other schemes. They are not interested in the science. They are interested in the dollars.

And the American family – to the tune of at least $1300 in increased energy bills – will pay for it.

Exactly right. Same as it ever was.

Read the whole thing.

Our governments are lying to us and treating us like idiots while they prepare to forcibly take our money to pay for a “solution” that won’t work.

Putting aside for a moment all the highly-charged emotion about this … why would anybody want that?

Fight Back, or Get Used to Sending More of Your Money to the IRS to Slay Imaginary Dragons

In a stunning development, we have learned that Congress is right now crafting legislation that is not just useless, but dangerous and expensive too.

Which, like, hardly ever happens!

It’s called the Waxman-Markey bill. You might not know about it, but you should, because it is just the latest example of how government deceives you in order to take your money. It’s what they do.

It presumes a global warming crisis that is actually unraveling as we speak, as new, compelling evidence emerges nearly every week that we are now entering a historic cooling period.

It assumes that even if this climate crisis did exist, it is best fixed by … collecting money. Really. This is what Congress does: think up ways to waste our money on mostly ineffectual and sometimes downright dangerous “solutions”. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And even if you buy into all that silliness, the proposed solution hasn’t worked very well in Europe.

Summing up then:

1. A crisis that doesn’t exist,
2. used to coerce you and me into paying more money into our government,
3. to fund a solution that won’t work.

A perfect storm of pandering.

I know global warming is the current “hot button” issue of the day, and lots of people view it as a crisis that needs our attention. But it doesn’t take very long to discover that the “science” behind it is extremely shaky; in fact, it is not science at all. That’s why they use words like “global warming denier”: it’s a belief system.

Usually, investing your faith where it doesn’t belong is a pretty bad idea. Render unto Caesar, etc.

And we don’t need lies in order to pursue reasonable energy and environmental policies. There were already plenty of good reasons to support the “green” lifestyle. For years, I’ve supported recycling, fuel conservation, and research into new sources of energy. I could support things like wind farms if there was any hope that such a thing could work in a huge country like the United States. And we need to re-open drilling in places like ANWR in Alaska and offshore. The caribou and the godforsaken mosquitoes in ANWR  won’t mind, and other countries are drilling off our shores already, so what do we gain by sitting it out?

But what we don’t need is fear-mongering based on half-baked theories, and taxation that couldn’t fix it anyway. Plus, of course, the meddling in economic markets, which didn’t work out too well with the mortgages.

And even worse, all the social divisions created by all of it. You risk being called ridiculous names by “scientists” if you dare to question their methods and conclusions. Really?

Cute documentaries with polar bears is one thing; turning the junk science behind it into a demand for tax revenue is quite another.

We don’t need the Waxman-Markey bill, or anything remotely like it.

Like a Giant IQ Test … That Much of the World is Failing

Thomas Sowell, discussing Angelo Codevilla’s new book “The Character of Nations”:

While nations differ, particular kinds of behavior produce particular kinds of results in country after country. Moreover, American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative— and sometimes catastrophic— consequences in many other countries around the world.

Among these patterns have been a concentration of decision-making power in government officials, an undermining of the role of the family, a “non-judgmental” attitude toward behavior and a dissolution of the common bonds that hold a society together, leading to atomistic self-indulgences and group-identity politics that increasingly pits different segments of society against each other.

It would appear that stupid ideas have bad consequences. Who knew?

A little more awesome news for those of who think that those patterns are the wrong way to go:

Those among the intelligentsia who say that we should “learn from other countries” almost invariably mean that we should imitate what other countries have done. Angelo Codevilla argues that we should learn from other countries’ mistakes, especially when those same mistakes have repeatedly produced bad results in many countries and among many very different peoples, living under very different political systems.

Putting ever more economic decisions in the hands of those with political power is just one of those mistakes with a track record of painful repercussions in many countries around the world. These repercussions have included not only serious economic losses but, even more important, a loss of personal freedom and self-respect, as ever wider segments of the population become supplicants and sycophants of those with the power to dispense largess or to make one’s life miserable with legalistic or bureaucratic harassment.

Other than all that bad stuff, though? Puppies and rainbows for everyone!

That bolded text above, in a nutshell, explains why I don’t pay much attention to the “news” any more: it’s because the “news” actively pushes back from the other side on every one of those points in bold above by Mr. Sowell and Mr. Codevilla. It isn’t “news” at all, it’s activism. And it’s on the wrong side of history.

Global Cooling = Very Very Bad

While politicians and other silly people prattle on about global warming, the smart money is on disastrous cooling which could kill crops and people. But “green” is big business today, so that’s the important thing!

Read all of this excellent post at EU Referendum: The road to starvation.

The climate may be changing, all right, but not in the direction you might think.

We live in truly scary times.

So . . . This is Where We Are Today? Really?

Letterman last night made a disgusting joke about Sarah Palin’s fourteen-year-old daughter.

Naturally, like any sensible person, James Lileks nails Letterman to the wall.

Letterman, over the years, has become one of the biggest tools in the entertainment industry. And that is saying ALOT.

What is the matter with people today? So it’s funny now to make jokes about kids of famous people, just to score urban liberal street cred? Wow. That is a hell of a way to make a living. Proud to look in the mirror in the morning, are you?

What a sad, sorry little bunch of whiny jerks. It isn’t enough, I guess, that people are allowed to dislike Sarah Palin and her politics. No, they have to demonize her and her family to make themselves feel better about how awesome their taste in politicians is.

Every time I think we have hit bottom, some idiot comes along and finds a new bottom. Today, Letterman is that idiot. Congrats, Dave!

Too bad I already fired Letterman years ago. Can you fire somebody twice? Hey … just did!

UPDATE: James Lileks expanded the above into a New York Post opinion piece for Sunday June 14, which you can read here.

Pander to Terrorist Sympathizers? Sure!

The White House is siding with the ACLU loons in a battle over releasing more pictures of alleged mistreatment of various thugs and murderers by our uniformed armed forces personnel.

Steve Schippers at The Tank is very unhappy. His viewpoint is mine, pretty much.

Is the President still the Commander-in-Chief?

Because sometimes he seems kind of … I don’t know … anti- military.

Would seem to be a conflict of interest, no?

We’re From the Government, and We’re Here to Help You … Er, I Mean, Take Your Money by Force

Dustbury notes some problems with red light cameras in Georgia:

Where there are red-light cameras, says Georgia law, there’s supposed to be one extra second of yellow. Much of the time, though, there isn’t, and Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Cassville) wants to know why.

Like I posted in a comment there, it’s basically a tax on driving, at some point. An illegal tax, in this case.

In Illinois we have these red light cameras in some spots; I’m not sure about the law on yellow light times. Need to check on that.

And now some genius in our gubmint wants to implement traffic cameras all over the place to catch speeders.

I’m not such a big fan. 

1. Using technology to entrap de facto “normal” driving is a little too “1984″-ish for me.

2. Not only that, but lengthening yellow lights seems to reduce or even eliminate drivers running red lights.

3. Which, logically would seem to obviate the need for red light cameras in the first place.

4. Unless, of course, red light cameras are primarily a fund-raising tool, rather than a public safety measure.

As Instapundit says:

If all you care about is safety, then, you can accomplish as much by adding a second to the yellow light. If you care about revenue, though, you’ll shorten yellow-light times — as some places have done — even though that’s worse for safety.

Government and business colluding to screw taxpayers? That, like, hardly ever happens!

Obama Appears on 60 Minutes to Work on Jumper

WASHINGTON (03-23-09) - In a sign of increasing desperation, President Barack Obama appeared on 60 Minutes Sunday to work out the kinks in his jump shot.

"As you can probably guess, I'm under a lot of stress lately. I need a release, and basketball is my release. But my jumper isn't falling, and I don't know why. So I figure, if I can go on ESPN and Jay Leno, why not 60 Minutes?" said the pickup-basketball playing president.

He went 4 for 22 in the interview.