Author: admin

The ponderous ship of science begins to turn . . .

. . . away from the increasingly dubious extreme claims of “anthropogenic climate change” and towards honestly looking at the available data–that’s all of the available data–as is required to do good science:

From Anthony Watts’ Watts Up With That blog:

The British government’s chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, has called for more openness in the global warming debate. He said climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming. He condemned scientists who refused to publish the data underpinning their reports. He also said public confidence in climate science would be improved if there were more openness about its uncertainties, even if that meant admitting that sceptics had been right on some hotly disputed issues.

This being part of a call for interested scientists to participate in increased online peer review of not only the findings of climate scientists but also a peer review of all of the data underlying those findings. As we are increasingly finding out, those data, when considered in total, do not in fact support the findings that some scientists have asserted that they do.

Needless to say, this isn’t how science is supposed to be done.

More science, less politics, please.

He-Man discourses upon a Really Bad Word

Via Topless Robot[*1] . Enjoy. Not Safe For Work, obviously:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H38VoJcxQmo[*2]

Update: The actual embedded video player featured the bad word prominently. So I took that down and substituted the link instead. Enjoy. In moderation.

“Tax The Rich” is a lie

In order to get the deficit down to 3 percent of GDP, not to balance the budget, you would have to confiscate around 80 percent of all income over $209,000–recall that the large majority of these taxpayers pay state income taxes too–which would destroy the economy . . .

Via Powerline[*1] .

An influential Silicon Valley venture capital company prepared a report entitled “USA, Inc.” which analyzed the financial state of the United States, as if the USA were a company in which they were considering investment.

Download the entire 420-slide Powerpoint presentation entitled “USA, Inc.” here. [*2]

It is not pretty. But we have to face the cold reality of the numbers.

We have promised with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid more than we can deliver. That is the bottom line. We will wind up breaking those promises. It is only a matter of when, and how. And on top of those empty promises, we lay out a new, equally undeliverable promise of universal free health care. A promise you can not deliver on has a name. That name is “a lie.”

In less than fifteen years, these “entitlement” programs will consume all of the Federal Government’s revenue. All of it. No more national defense, no more national parks, no more federal research grants, no more federal highway funds, no more air traffic control system, no more education grants, no more federally guaranteed loans or bank accounts, no more NPR, no more PBS. It will all be going to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

We need to stop lying to ourselves. We need to fix this problem.

If we do it sooner, the pain will be less for everyone. If we wait, or try to pretend that we can somehow muddle through, the pain will be much greater, and the pain will be greatest for those who are least able to bear that pain.

Compassion demands that we fix this.

Now.

Reynolds’ Law

Reynolds’ Law:[*1]

“Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.”

From The Professor himself:[*2]

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Emphasis mine.

This is what “progressives” do not understand. Wealth does not cause social conditions. Wealth is an effect of social conditions.

Don’t believe me?

Dump a million dollars on Egypt, and dump a million dollars on Utah, and see what each culture does with the money. Are you seriously willing to argue that in ten years Egypt will have turned that million dollars into a larger pile of wealth than Utah? Really?

How much foreign aid have we squandered on various totalitarian hell-holes around the world? What have we gotten for that “investment?” How much money have we spent on the “war on poverty?” Is there less or more poverty than there was when we started? (Hint: more. Go look it up.)

It’s not the money. It’s how you get it that differentiates “good money” from “bad money.” Bad money is generally obtained by pointing a gun at someone else. This is how dictators and much of the current Democrat leadership believe money is obtained. They believe in the “zero sum game.” They believe in “getting a bigger piece of the pie.” They might give lip service to “making the pie bigger” but deep in their hearts, they really don’t believe it–if they do believe it, they sure don’t act like they do.

Good money is created (or “earned”) by providing somebody else with some good or service that somebody else wants at a price that somebody else is willing to pay. This is the “classical liberal” belief, and it fueled the greatest expansion of wealth to the greatest number of people the world has ever seen.

Yes, Virginia, it really is that simple.

But, despite this dazzling success of the classical liberal economics of Ricardo and Smith and von Mises and Hayek and Friedman, we today face once more what seems to be the fundamental conflict of mankind’s nature: the tension between those who believe wealth can only be obtained by force, and those who believe wealth must be earned by mutually beneficial trade.

This conflict has been clearly illustrated by the recent unpleasantness in Madison, Wisconsin.

So, which side are you on?

The fist, the club, and the gun, or the handshake, the contract, and the trade? The time for choosing is very, very near.