Progressive = Totalitarian

This is a nice piece by Johah Goldberg of National Review:

"I had to chuckle at a lengthy post on a [liberal] website by a guest blogger named Sara Robinson:

'Every American over the age of 10 knows what the GOP and the conservative movement stand for. [...] low taxes, small government, strong defense, traditional families. See? You know the tune, and the harmony line, too. Ok, now: What do Democrats and progressives stand for? Take your time. It's a tough question. Give up? So have most progressives. Even the movement's most deeply committed members often have a hard time answering this one. And that is the problem. [...]'

Robinson goes on and on in this vein, as if hers were a new observation. The reality is that this is one of liberalism's mossier cliches. Whenever liberals get in trouble, [they will argue] it is not because they are wrong, it is because they have not communicated their [ideas] sufficiently. A few years ago, this claim was best reflected in the writings of George Lakoff, the linguist who thinks everyone will love trial lawyers if we just call them "public protection attorneys". This idea has great and obvious appeal to liberals [democrats] because it places the blame on the public for failing to appreciate just how right [the liberal elite] are, while offering themselves a backdoor compliment: we are too smart to talk at the hoi polloi's level.

That said, i think Robinson is right about one thing. Progressives do have a branding problem. But it stems from the nature of progressivism. What progressivism stands for is having progressives be in charge. Period. Progressivism stripped of all its pretensions and its many good intentions (and it does have many good intensions) is at its core the dogmatic belief that the familiar band of technocratic egalitarian statists [democrats] should be calling the shots.

This is the upshot of liberalism's much vaunted "empiricism" and hostility to labels, ideology, etc. When liberals [democrats] claim they do not believe in labels, what they are saying is that they don't want to be locked into a view, an idea, a principle, that will constrain them later.

This view is what defined FDR's "experimentalism" and JFK's "cool pragmatism." JFK argued that "political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution" of contemporary challenges. "Most of the problems...that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems." These problems "deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men" and therefore should be left to the experts. These days, if you hear a libearal invoke pragmatism, you can reliably translate his statement into "shut up we know what to do." This has more or less defined Obama's 'pragmatism' since he took office.

Even where progressives claim to be laissez-faire - say in matters of sexuality or abortion - there is always an implied expiration date (does anyone believe that progressives will remain so dogmatically pro-choice the day homosexuality can be prevented in utero?). It is very hard to find an area where liberals claim to be truly liberal (by which i mean libertarian) and their love of freedom is not conducive to their preferred outcome. Personal liberty is awesome, so long as you eat the right food and smoke fashionable plants. They are for free speech in principle, but would define away disagreement as a 'hate crime'. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism when it is liberal dissent, while the dissenting tea partiers are [called] plain old racists.

This arrogant double dealing mindset is what creates progressivism's branding problem. They cannot admit to their real slogan: "shut up, we are in charge."

Johan Goldberg, National Review, Nov. 2010

Climate-mania over?

From the March 8 issue of National Review......

"Exaggeration and alarmism have been a chronic weakness of environmentalism since it became an organized movement in the 1960's. Every ecological problem was instantly transformed into a potential world-ending crisis, from the population bomb to the imminent resource depletion of the 'limits to growth' fad of the 1970's to acid rain to ozone depletion, and there was always an overlay of moral condemnation for anyone who dissented. With global warming, the environmental movement thought it had hit the jackpot - a crisis sufficiently long-range that it could not be proved nonexistent and broad enough to justify massive political controls on resource use at a global level. Former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth was unusually candid when he remarked in the early days of the climate campaign that:

'we've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing - in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.'

Not surprisingly, after Wirth left the Senate and the Clinton administration, he ended up at the UN.

The global-warming thrill ride looks to be coming to an end, undone by the same politically motivated serial exaggeration and moral preening that discredited previous apocalypses. On the heels of the East Anglia University 'Climategate' scandal have come embarassing retractions on an almost daily basis from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding some of the most loudly trumpeted signs and wonders of global warming, such as the ludicrous claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear within 30 years, that nearly half of the Amazon jungle was at imminent risk of destruction from a warming planet, and that there was a clear linkage between climate change and weather-related economic losses. The sources for these claims turned out to be environmental advocacy groups, not rigorous peer-reviewed science. Then Phil Jones, the scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University (he is the author of the now infamous phrase 'hide the decline') dropped several bombshells in a surprisingly candid interview with the BBC. He admitted that his surface temperature data are in such dissarray that they probably cannot be verified or replicated; said the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today; and agreed that there has been no statistically significant warming for the last 15 years - three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting.

To be sure, these revelations do not in and of themselves mean that there is no anthropogenic global warming. But this is probably the beginning of a wholesale revision of the conventional wisdom on climate change. Al Gore and the climate campaigners cannot go on saying with a straight face that the matter is 'settled science'. One of the central issues of Climategate - the veracity and integrity of the surface temperature records used for our estimates of warming over the last few decades - is far from resolved. The London Times ran a headline last week: 'World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists'. The next frontier is likely to be a fresh debate about climate sensitivity itself. There have been several recent peer-reviewed papers suggesting much lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than the IPCC 'consensus' computer models predict. And alternative explanations for observed climate change in the Arctic and elsewhere, such as shifts in ocean currents and wind patterns, should receive a second look.

Dissenters who pointed out these and other flaws in the IPCC consensus were demonized as deniers and ignored by the media, but they are now vindicated. The American media are still averting their gaze, though the British press - even the left-wing Guardian and The Independent - is turning on the climate campaigners with deserved vengeance. The IPCC is mumbling about non-specific reforms and changes to the process by which it will produce its next massive climate report, due otu in three or four years. It should emulate a typical feature of American government commissions and include a minority report from dissenters or scientists with a different emphasis. But the next report may not matter much, with the collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen talks, and the likely rejection of cap-and-trade in Congress, climate mania may have runs its course."

Swiss ban islamic minarets

This is another great article by one of my favorite pundits, Mark Steyn, who is a writer for National Review magazine....

"The Swiss minaret ban and the leaked climate e-mails are really the same story - or, more precisely, are symptoms of the same disease. In the Times of London, Olive Kamm deplored the results of Switzerland's referendum, consigned it to the garbage can of right-wing populism, and for good measure dismissed my analysis of euro-demographics. Instead, Mr. Kamm called for a 'secularist and liberal defense of the principles of a pluralist society'.

"That's not the solution to the problem, but one of the causes. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for liberalism and pluralism and whatnot. And, in the hands of a combative old bruiser like Christopher Hitchens, they're powerful weapons. But most people are not like Mr. Hitchens. And so in much of the post-Christian West 'a pluralist society' has subsided into a vast gaping nullity too weak to have any purchase on large numbers of the citizenry. In practice, the 'secularist and liberal defense' is the vacuum in which a resurgent globalized Islam has incubated."

"It is only human to wish to belong to something larger than oneself, and thereby give one's life meaning. For most of history, this need was satisfied by tribe and then nation, and religion. But the Church is in steep decline in Europe, and the nation-state is all but wholly discredited as the font of racism, imperialims, and all the other ills. So some (not all) third-generation Britons of Pakistani descent look elsewhere for their identity, and find the new globalized Islam. And some (not all) 30th generation Britons of old Anglo-Saxon stock also look elsewhere, and find global warming. 'Think globally act locally' works for environmentalism and jihad. Adherents of both causes are saving the planet from the same enemy - decadent capitalist infidels living empty consumerist lives. Both faiths claim their tenets are beyond discussion. Only another climate scientist can question the climate-science 'consensus':you bus-boys and waitresses and accountants and software designers and astronomers and physicists and meteorologists are unqualified to enter the debate. Likewise, on Islam, for an unbeliever to express a view is 'islamophobic'. As to which of these competing globalisms is less plausible, I leave it to readers: Barack Obama promises to lower the oceans; Hizb ut-Tahrir promises a global caliphate. The Guardian's ecopalyptic Fred Pearce says Australia will be uninhabitable within a few years; Islam4UK says Britain will be under Sharia within a few years. I'm not a betting man but if i had to choose....."

"Think globally, act locally, but if you're on the receiving end of globalized pathologies, it's very hard to act locally. A conventional if tyrannical nation-state is free to act against both Islam and 'the environment'. China is happy to stick it to the Uighurs and to turn the Yangtze into a frothing toxic cauldron. But these days non-tyrannical nation-states are barely nations at all, and certainly not to the extent of having anything so declasse as a 'national interest'. If the Swiss are indeed the raging right-wing populists Oliver Kamm says they are, their knuckle-dragging neofascism is a limp and effete strain. If you truly believe Islam is the cuckoo in your clock, you might ban new mosque construction or even muslim immigration. Instead they have banned a symbolic architectural flourish, while the mosque building and the immigation continue, which means that one day the minaret ban will be overturned. And were the country a member of the European Union, even this forlorn gesture would not be permitted."

"In Switzerland's defense, it was pointed out that Saudi Arabia prohibits not just church spires but churches. But this argument went nowhere, except to give detractors an opportunity to tut that the Swiss had chosen to become Alpine Saudi. To progressive opinion, it's taken as read that 'multiculturalism' is a one-way street: it seems entirely reasonable for a Wahhabist to say an Anglican church in Riyadh would see, gee, i dunno, just somehow kinda un-Saudi, whereas it is entirely unacceptable for Heidi's grandfather to say a Deobandi mosque in Lucerne is un-swiss. In contemporary Western discourse, a commitment to abstract virtues - secularism, pluralism - must trump any visceral sense of ethnocultural allegiance."

"That's a very shifting patch of sand to draw a line in. Recently, the writer Barbara Kay testified to the House of Commons in Ottawa about a jewish teacher at a francophone school in Ontario. Around 2002 she began to encounter explicitly anti-semitic speech from muslim students: 'Does someone swell a Jew? It stinks in here'. 'You are not human, you are a jew.' Had Anglo-Saxon skinheads essayed such jests, Oliver Kamm's warriors of pluralism would have crushed them like bugs. But when the teacher went to the principal, and the school board, and the local 'hate-crimes unit', they all looked the other way and advised her that it would be easier if she retired. 60 out of 75 French teachers at the school opted to leave: a couple were jewish, a few more practicing catholics, and most of the rest were the liberal secularists on whom Oliver Kamm's defense of the west rests. The francophone children withdrew too. And now the principal and most of the students and faculty are muslim."

"Maybe it would have wound up like that anyway. But having nothing to stand in your way except liberal progressives certainly accelerated the progress. And as it went at one schoolhouse, so will it go on the broader horizon: if you believe in everything, you're unlikely to stand for something."

Democrat Economic Policies Doomed to Failure

This is an article by Brian Riedl (National Review), it was so good I had to post it.

"Conservatives have correctly declared [the economic stimulus policy of the democrats and President Obama] a flop. [...] Yet few have explained correctly why the stimulus failed. By blaming the slow pace of stimulus spending, many conservatives have accepted the premise that government spending stimulates the economy. [...]"

"In 1939, after a doubling of federal spending failed to relieve the Great Depression, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau said that 'we have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work...After eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started...and an enourmous debt to boot.' Japan made the same mistake in the 1990's (building the largest government debt in the industrial world), and the USA is making it today."

"This repeated failure has nothing to do with the pace or type of spending. Rather, the problem is found in the oft-repeated Keynesian myth that deficit spending injects new dollars into the economy, thereby increasing demand and spurring economic growth. According to this theory, government spending adds money to the economy, taxes remove money, and the budget deficit represents net new dollars injected. Therefore, it scarecely matters how the dollars are spent. John Maynard Keynes famously asserted that a government program paying people to dig and then refill ditches would provide new income for those workers to spend and circulate through the economy, creating even more jobs and income. Today, lawmakers cling to estimates by Mark Zandi of Economy.com that on average $1 in new deficit spending expands the economy by roughly $1.50. If that were true, the record $1,600,000,000,000 deficit spending over the past fiscal year would have already overheated the economy. Yet despite this spending, which is equal to fully 9% of GDP, the economy is expected to shrink by at least 3% this fiscal year. If the spending constitutes an injection of 'new money' into the economy, we may conclude that, without it, the economy would contract 12%, hardly a plausible claim.

If $1,600,000,000,000 in deficit spending failed to slow the economy's slide, there is no reason to believe that adding $185,000,000,000 - the 2009 portion of the stimulus bill - will suddenly do the trick. But if budget deficits of nearly $2 trillion are insufficient stimulus, how much would be enough? $3 trillion? $4 trillion?

This is no longer a theoretical exercise. The idea that increased deficit spending can cure recessions has been tested, and it has failed. If growing the economy were as simple as expanding government spending and deficits, then Italy, France, and Germany would be the global economic kings. And there would be no reason to stop at $787 billion: Congress could guarantee unlimited prosperity by endlessly borrowing and spending trillions of dollars.

The simple reason government spending fails to end recessions is that Congress does not have a vault of money waiting to be distributed. Every dollar Congress 'injects' into the economy must first be borrowed or taxed out of the economy. No new income, and therefore no new demand, is created. They are merely redistributed from one group of people to another. Congress cannot create new purchasing power out of thin air.

This is intuitively clear in the case of funding new spending with new taxes. Yet funding new spending with new borrowing is also pure redistribution, since the investors who lend Washington the money will have that much less to invest in the economy. The fact that borrowed funds (unlike taxes) must later be repaid by the government makes them no less of a zero-sum transfer today.

Even during recessions, when total production falls, leaving people with less income to spend, Congress cannot create new demand and income. Any government spending that increases production at factories and puts unemployed individuals to work will be financed by removing funds (and thus idling resources) elsewhere in the economy. This is true whether the unemployment rate is 5% or 50%.

For example, many lawmakers claim that every $1 billion in highway stimulus will create 47,576 new construction jobs. But Congress must first borrow that $1 billion out of the private economy, which will then lose a roughly equivalent number of jobs. As transportation-policy expert Ronald Utt has explained, 'the only way that $1 billion of new highway spending can create 47,576 new jos is if the $1 billion appears out of nowhere as if it were manna from heaven.' Removing water from one end of a swimming pool and dumping it in the other end will not raise the overall water level. Similarly, moving dollars from one part of the economy to the other will not expand the economy. Not even in the short run.

Consider a simpler example. Under normal circumstances, a family might put its $1000 savings in a CD at the local bank. The bank would then lend that $1000 to the local hardware store. This would have the effect of recycling that spending around the town, supporting local jobs. Now suppose that, induced by an offer of higher interest rates, the family instead buys a $1000 government bond that funds the stimulus bill. Washington spends that $1000 in a different town, creating jobs there instead. The stimulus bill has changed only the location of the spending.

The mistaken view of fiscal stimulus persists because we can easily see the people put to work with government funds. We don't see the jobs that would have been created elsewhere in the economy with those same dollars had they not been lent to Washington.

In his 1848 essay 'What is Seen and What is Not Seen', French economist Frederic Bastiat termed this the 'broken window' fallacy, in reference to a local myth that breaking windows would stimulate the economy by creating window repair jobs. Today, the broken window fallacy explains why thousands of new stimulus jobs are not improving the total employment picture.

Keynesian economists counter that redistribution can increase demand if the money is transferred from savers to spenders. Yet this 'idle savings' theory assumes that savings fall out of the economy, which clearly is not the case. Nearly all individuals and businesses invest their savings or put it in banks (which in turn invest it or lend it out), so the money is still being spent somewhere in the economy. Even in this recession, with tightened lending standards, banks are performing their traditional role of intermediating between those who have savings and those who need to borrow. They are not building extensive basement vaults to hoard cash.

Since the financial system transfers savings into investment spending, the only savings that drop out of the economy are those dollars literally hoarded in matresses and safes - and there is no evidence that this is occurring en masse. And even if individuals, businesses, and banks did distrust the financial system enough to hoard their dollars, why would they suddenly lend them to the government to finance a stimulus bill?

Once the idle-savings theory collapses, so does all the intellectual support for government spending as stimulus. If there are no idle savings to acquire, then the government is merely borrowing purchasing power from one part of the economy and moving it into another part of the economy. Washington becomes nothing more than a pricey middleman, redistributing existing demand.

Even foreign borrowing is no free lunch. Before China can lend us dollars, it must acquire them from us. This requires either attracting American investment or raising the Chinese trade surplus (and the American trade deficit). The balance of payments between America and other nations must eventually net out to zero, which means government spending funded from foreign borrowing is zero-sum.

I've purposely ignored the Federal Reserve, which actually can inject cash into the economy, but not in a way that constitutes stimulus. Congress can deficit-spend, Treasury can finance the deficit spending by issuing bonds, and the Federal Reserve can buy those bonds by printing money. Any economic boost is then due to the Federal Reserve's actions, not the deficit spending - and of course the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates, slowing the economy again, to bring the resulting inflation under control.

If government spending doesn't cause economic growth, what does? Growth happens when more goods and services are produced, and the only true source of this is an expanding labor force combined with high productivity. High productivity in turn requires educated and motivated workers, advanced technology, adequate infrastructure, physical capital such as factories and tools, and the rule of law.

Government spending could boost long-run produtivity through investments in education and infrastructure - but only if politicians could target those investments better than the private sector would. And it turns out that politicians cannot outsmart the marketplace. Mountains of academic studies show that government spending generally reduces long term productivity.

The only policy proven to increase productivity in the short term is to lower tax rates and reduce regulation. Businesses can grow only through consistent investment and an expanding, skilled workforce. Cutting marginal tax rates promotes these conditions, by creating incentives to work, save, and invest.

It's happened before. In 1981, President Reagan inherited an economy stagnating under the weight of 70% marginal income-tax rates. Under Reagan, the top rate fell to 28%, and the subsequent surge in investment and labor supply created the strongest 25-year economic boom in American history.

Such tax-rate reductions are superior to tax rebates designed to 'put money in people's pockets'. Rebates - like government spending - simply redistribute existing dollars. They don't increase productivity because they don't change incentives: no one has to work, save, or invest more to get a tax rebate. The 2001 and 2008 rebates failed because Congress borrowed money from investors and foreigners and redistributed it to families. Not surprisingly, any new personal consumption spending was matched by corresponding declines in investment spending and net exports, and the economy was stagnant.

Congress can only redistribute exisitng demand, it cannot create new demand. [...] The more serious, long-term danger is that President Obama's Europeanization of the economy will bring the same slow growth, stagnant wages, job losses, high taxes, and lack of competitiveness that have plagued Western Europe, leaving the USA at an ever-growing disadvantage with Asian countries not so afflicted.

[Conservatives and free-market supporters - Republicans - must be elected into Congress to put the brakes on the deficit spending and high taxation, and return the money to the private sector where it can grow the economy and improve our standard of living.]

Joe Wilson said "You Lie", and he was right.

This is an excerpt from Ralph Reed's commentary on Sept. 13, 2009. Although shouting out in the middle of a speech is poor manners, our Congress is still fantastically proper relative to legislatures such as those in South Korea or Great Britain. Joe Wilson did, however, make a correct statement.

"[...] Consider just a few of the dishonest statements in Obama's speech:

First: He said "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits - either now or in the future." If so, then the President should have announced his public opposition to the Senate leadership bill and HB3200 months ago [the democrat health care plan]. In June the Congressional Budget Office found that the legislation would increase the budget deficit by $240,000,000,000 over the next 10 years. That's just the beginning. A new study by the Lewin Group finds that in the second 10 years, it will increase the deficit by $1,000,000,000,000. The White House has publicly praised and supported both [democrat] bills. So Obama stated a whopping $1,240,000,000,000 falsehood.

Second: [President] Obama said he would not cut Medicare and affect basic care for seniors. But the Obama plan includes $600,000,000,000 in UNSPECIFIED Medicare cuts. It destroys Medicare Advantage with $250,000,000,000 in cuts, decimating a pro-consumer option that 25% of seniors [use] and allows them to choose the best insurance and doctor for them. Even the Associated Press [dominated by democrat reporters] has called Obama on this lie. AP reported that "although wasteful spending in Medicare is widely acknowledged, many experts believe some seniors almost certainly would see reduced benefits from the cuts. That's particularly true for the 25% of Medicare users covered through Medicare Advantage.

Third: [President] Obama said that Sarah Palin and others have claimed that "we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens." [...] What critics have pointed out is that seniors will be required to submit regularly to "end of life" counseling sessions (page 425 of HB3200) that, combined with cost controls and rationing of care, could lead to them being denied life-saving treatment. As healthcare expert Betsy McCaughy, chairwoman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, has pointed out, the bill includes "substantial funding for "comparative effectiveness research" which is generally code for limiting care based on a patient's age. Economists are familiar with the formula, where the cost of treatment is divided by the number of years (called QUALYs, or quality adjusted life years) that the patient is likely to benefit.

Fourth: [President] Obama claimed that the bill does not use taxpayer funds for abortion. This is also false. The Democrats rejected amendments in the House committee that would have specifically excluded abortion from coverage under the so-called government option. In its place, Democrats took the private portion of the premium (not the public subsidy) and specified that only those funds could be used for abortion services. This is an accounting gimmick. The fact is that abortion will be massively subsidized with billions of dollars in taxpayer funds for the first time in US history.

Fifth: [President] Obama claimed that his plan did not provide care for illegal immigrants. Here again, false. By rejecting a Republican amendment requiring proof of legal residence prior to receiving care under the government-run plan, the Democrats have opened the door for non-citizens and non-legal residents to receive care for which they have not paid into the system. If one refuses to require proof of citizenship or legal residence, one cannot claim to limit benefits to only USA citizens. [wait times and costs increase with increses in demand from illegals].

Healthcare services and industries should not be managed by the federal government. This is a mistake that our kids and grandkids will pay for if this democrat plan goes through and is not sunset by the next republican Congress.

Canadian Healthcare: Free but Slow (see investigative video)

This is a 20 minute video but it is worth watching if you want to see what government managed healthcare is like. This is what will happen to us in the USA if we allow Democrats to pass federal government managed healthcare:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2jijuj1ysw&feature=related

The feds need to stay out of the healthcare industry except for regulation to prevent fraud and unreasonable litigation.

Stossel also put together a shorter piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJgkvF19QA&feature=related

Quote of the Day: Governor Rick Perry

"There are certain truths that have to be agreed to. One is that economies grow when they are free from over-taxation, over-regulation, over-litigation, and they have a skilled workforce. Government is not difficult in theory, don't spend all the money, keep taxes low, have a fair and predictable regulatory climate, keep frivolous lawsuits to a minimum, and fund an accountable education system so that you have a skilled workforce available. Then get the hell out of the way and let the private sector do what the private sector does best. It's simple in theory, but it's difficult to accomplish. In Texas, we've implemented that theory, and it's produced an economy that has no match in America."
--- Texas Governor Rick Perry, Republican

This quote was published in the National Review article "Going Alamo" by Kevin D. Williamson, which talked about why so many people are moving to the republican controlled state of Texas: great economy because of great republican economic policies and limited government interference. Texas has a divided executive branch (Lt Governor and Governor have distinct powers)and a weak legislature because of strict constitutional limits, preventing government from causing too much harm :)

"The Texas experience suggests that the more government you say no to, the more investment you say yes to."
--- Kevin Williamson

Wind Farms: All hype and ill effects

The public or media enthusiams for wind farms (large tracts of land taken up by huge wind turbine towers, some 400 feet tall) needs to come to an end. Consider the following:

1. Property values in areas where wind turbines are visible decrease, negatively impacting everyone who lives within the line of sight of these ugly turbine towers.



2. Tourism in areas where their originally pristine natural views are changed by the installation of wind farms goes down. See study done in Scotland www.viewsofscotland.org/library/tourism.php



3. The air pressure difference in front of and behind a turbine blade are strong enough to cause lung blood vessel bursting in bats. Wind turbines are responsible for the killing of thousands of bats every year. A Tennessee windfarm study found an annual bat kill rate of 64 bats per turbine.



4. A study of Denmark windfarm industry found that the large wind turbines had serious negative environmental impacts, insufficient production reliability, and high production costs. Conventional power plants (ie coal powered) cannot be simply turned on and off as the wind comes and goes, so the wind farms have not led to any notable decrease in coal powered energy consumption.



5. Infra-sound emitted by turbines can pose a hazard to human health. I didnt believe this either until a european doctor started collecting data on cases of health problems for residents near turbines.



6. Lights on the turbine towers ruin night sky visibility for star gazers and astronomers.



7. Deforestation and/or the large footprint taken up by large numbers of wind turbine towers create terrible negative environmental impacts on local wildlife and recreational land users.



8. CO2 emission savings is only equal to one 18-wheeler truck PER TURBINE, that is it. Canadian study discovered this fact which all but makes wind farms appear to be a waste of time and money and land: www.aandc.org/research/wind_pec_present.html

Cartoon of the day

Obama apologizes for America's history

More evidence republican governance is better than democrat

The chart plots the average unemployment rate in April 2009 for different categories of democrat (blue) and republican (red) controlled states defined as having voted for the democrat or republican presidential candidate. States where a democrat or republican candidate win reliably are good correlators to same party governor and legislature control. The first column for example consists of states where the democrat candidate won the vote ever since the 1980's.

States that are traditionally republican controlled (governor, legislature) do better economically than democrat controlled states. This is simply because republicans provide a pro-business environment while democrats produce oppressive enviroments for business to operate, whether it has to do with lack of lawsuit tort reform, oppressive taxation, excessive regulation, etc. Republican economic policies have been beneficial to the economic condition of their states, while democrat policies have been poison. Facts dont lie, only politicians and their PACs do. Vote smart, vote republican.

Booker T. Washington: First Black Republican

Excepts from David Beito and Jonathan Bean's article in National Review (March 2009).

"In 1899, as Americans looked forward to a new century of progress, Booker T. Washington published 'The Future of the American Negro'. A reporter asked him whether that future would include a black man as president. 'I should hope so' Washington responded. He did not expect to see it in his lifetime: Black [Americans] could not vote in the South, Jim Crow laws enforced rigid segregation, and lynching was rampant. Even so, Washington envisioned a day when black Americans would achieve political equality - and he believed he had a role to play in making it come about. 'One generation lays the foundation for succeeding generations' he wrote. By laying that foundation, Booker T. Washington helped make the election of Barak Obama possible.

That is not to say he would have entirely approved. Washington was a rock-ribbed Republican, and arguably America's first black conservative. Obama's brand of politics would have disappointed him deeply. On Election Night last November [2008] it was John McCain - not Obama - who invoked Washington's name. Liberals, it turns out, don't have much use for Washington. Yet he has much to teach, especially as we enter the Age of Obama.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) possesses one of the best-known names in the history of black America. He was president of the renowned Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an influential advocate for civil rights, and the most admired black man of his generation. For most of the 20th century, however, certain black leaders and academic liberals rejected his vision of racial advancement. Its emphasis on self-help, faith in entrepreneurship, and abject refusal to embrance victimhood seemed to demand as much from blacks as from whites. For these later figures, Washington was simply too conservative [...].

For years [...] the standard view was that white racism was the primary reason for black misfortune. That is an increasingly difficult case to make now, when the main afflictions of black America [and any poor community regardless of race] are the breakdown of 2 parent families, crime, drugs, lousy public schools, and unprecedented dependency on [government]. The time may have come to revive Booker T. Washington as an inspirational figure.

He was born a slave in Virginia [...]. Shortly after the Civil War, he went to work as a child laborer in a salt works. His sharp mind greatly impressed the wife of his employer, who taught him to read and opened the door to what would become his first great opportunity. Washington's hunger for learning led him on a 500 mile trek to the Hampton Institute, a school that allowed black [Americans] to to work for their education. There, he came under the influence of the school's founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a former Union officer who had commanded black troops at Petersburg during the Civil War. Armstrong tried to instill the habits of hard work and good character in his students and admonished them to "live down prejudice". Under his mentorship, Washington excelled in school. In 1881 when Armstrong received an inquiry from a white man founding a school for black [Americans] in Alabama, he recommended his star pupil.

Washington became the first president of Tuskegee Normal & Industrial Institute, orginally founded as a teachers' college. Under Washington, the school trained students in the liberal arts and industrial labor. They learned to respect knowledge and hard work as requirements for becoming good teachers, craftsmen, and civic leaders. [...] [the] school was grounded in a philosophy of self improvement. [...] By the turn of the century, Tuskegee was enrolling 1,000 students, all of them black. Tuskegee has more students than the two leading white institutions in the state - the Univ. of Alabama and Auburn - combined.

When Frederick Douglas died in 1895, Washington immediately succeeded him as black America's most prominent figure - a role in which he would continue until his own death two decades later. [...] Tuskegee's requirement that students learn highly paid industrial skills fostered [...] goals of self-help and capitalist uplift.

Booker T. Washington authored 'Up From Slavery' in 1901, a book that inspired generations of black Americans with his personal account of success. [...]

One of the most important contributions of [Robert J. Norrell, Univ. of Tennessee]'s book is to show how the leading racists of the day, such as Rep. J. Thomas Heflin (Democrat, Alabama) and Sen. Benjamin 'Pitchfork' Tillman (Democrat, South Carolina) feared and denounced Washington's strategy to educate blacks and equip them with economic skills. In 1901 [...] democrats raged when Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington, the leading black republican, to dinner at the White House. [...]

In a hostile environment [of the early 1900's] Washington repeatedly spoke out against lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation. [...] Economic hisorians have documented the progress of black farmers, workers, and business owners - progress made possible because conservative courts (republican appointees) upheld the right to work against the lily white unionism of the time. In his 1977 book Competition and Coercion, Robert Higgs showed that the % of black farmers in the South who were landowners increased from virtually zero in 1865 to 25% by 1910. [...] Nationwide, the number of black businesses skyrocketed from 4,000 to 50,000. Washington played a key role in nurturing these enterprises by creating the National Negro Business League in 1900. [...]

As Norrell describes, gains in education provide perhaps the clearest vindication of Washington's efforts. He had no small role in the spectacular increase in the literacy rate for blacks in the South from 5% in 1865 to 70% in 1910. Although white politicians [...] shunted blacks into inferior schools, Washington was instrumental in providing them with alternatives in the private sector. It was largely because of his influence, for example, that Julius Rosenwald financed the building of 5,500 black schools throughout the South (known as the Rosenwald schools.)

[...]

Obama's worldview is profoundly different from that of Washington. Washington repeatedly emphasized that thrift was the basis of advancement. [...] The secret of success was to shun excessive debt, delay gratification, and 'learn the saving habit, until we learn to save every nickel.' Washington rejected the philosophy that people could spend their way to success. While Obama believes that government can create jobs simply through spending, Washington put his trust in the resourcefulness of individuals to accomplish this goal. He had, he said, 'little patience with any man, white or black, with education, who goes through the country whining and crying because nobody will give him a job of work. A man with education should be able to create a job for himself, but in doing so he may have to begin at the very bottom.' Progress ultimately rested on a solid foundation of hard work, thrift, and production. Excessive debt, especially without the means to repay it, only created a trap leading to more debt and regress. It is doubtful that Washington could have imagined the endless bailouts of our own day. They certainly would have appalled him.

Why we must reduce illegal and legal immigration

The laws of economics cannot be violated:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6633620258136248169

Abraham Lincoln and Republican Ideology

President Obama has likened himself to Lincoln, but apparently Mr. Obama cannot read...

Poly tennis strings do break

Although "poly" tennis strings are very durable, you can still break them by "shear" force applied when you hit an off-center shot along the edge of the frame. The edge of the frame at the grommett is very rigid, so the potential shear force is high if you hit the string hard right near that point.

If you are a "string breaker" you have to use either a hybrid stringjob with poly on the mains and something softer on the crosses, or even consider Kevlar for the mains, or poly on the whole stringbed. But a poly can still break via this shear mechanism so do not be surprised if you break a poly string after 1 match when you thought the string would last several months.

George W. Bush Foreign Policy Triumph

I just read a great article by Duncan Currie of National Review magazine, I thought I'd pass along some of the highlights.....I wont get into details about U.S.-India relations in 2000-2008 but you can do the research yourself if you are interested.

"Shortly before George W. Bush left office, Harvard historian Sugata Bose told me that strengthening U.S. relations with India 'may turn out to be the most significant foreign policy achievement of the Bush administration.' It is an achievement that Indians greatly appreciate: in mid February [2009], a spokesman for the ruling Congress party said that Bush deserves India's top civilian award, the Bharat Ratna ("Jewel of India"), an honor rarely conferred on non-indians."

"The most historic element of Bush's India policy was a bilateral civilian nuclear agreement, which received final approval from U.S. lawmakers in the fall of 2008."

"The U.S. and India share a host of values and interests. Both are wary of [communist] China, and both are fighting Islamist terrorism that emanates from Pakistan. The Indian diaspora has bolstered cultural linkages, and in recent years bilateral economic cooperation has flourished. Stephen Cohen, a South Asia specialist at the Brookings Institute, reckons that U.S.-India economic connections are 'so strong that they stabilize the overall relationship.'

"In June 2005 [under the Bush administration] U.S. and Indian officials signed a joint defense framework that stated 'as the world's two largest democracies, the U.S. and India agree on the vital importance of political and economic freedom, democracy, the rule of law, security, and opportunity around the world."

"Bush's India outreach was part of a broader Asia strategy that involved engaging China while boosting relations with democracy powers such as India, Japan, and Australia. These countries conducted a joint relief mission with the U.S. following the 2004 Asian tsunami. In 2007 these 4 democracies along with Singapore held [joint] naval excercises."

"In his 2008 book Rivals, former Economist editor [...] Bill Emmott writes that Bush's 'bold initiative' to enhance U.S.-India relations 'may eventually be judged by historians as a move of great strategic importance and imagination.'

Milton Friedman on the old Donahue Show

Milton Friedman on the Donahue Show, just a small segment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p31-xQ2Rrz4&feature=player_embedded

Tennis racquet frame selection

Tennis racquets are made in many different models and come in different specifications. Finding out which specs best suit your swing style and swing speed is something only you can ultimately determine. Learn about specs and demo (test out) different frames. Always keep track of the specs of the frames you use (i switch frames every 3 years or so). To learn more about specs, learn about racquet tables such as those at http://www.nothingbuttennis.com/ (see links at bottom of their homepage).

Will renewable energy save us?

You may have heard over the past few years the term "smart grid" used by pundits on TV. The term typically refers to installing small computer-thermostats in every home to measure electricity use remotely (as opposed to a meter reader having to visit every property to record meter readings). Access to immediate electrical use information will allow utility companies or government controlled utility entities to alter rates hour by hour, charging higher rates at peak times and lower rates at low demand times to encourage a more distributed use of electricity. The hope is that people will postpone chores like running dishwashers until off-peak hours like the evening. The "smart grid" centralized data program, however, will not solve the supply-and-demand problem, it just tries to encourage spreading out the demand over the 24-hour day.

To increase power supply, you need new power plants. With Democrats in power, power plants such as coal, natural gas (fossil fuel), and nuclear are off the table because they believe in utopian concepts of energy use and consumption. So what does that leave us? Wind and solar and thermal. Thermal is expensive to setup so i wont go into that here, maybe in another post. But the concept is interesting and involves heating water down in the earth to generate steam that can power turbines at the surface to produce electricity. I will comment on solar and wind only for now.

The first problem with trying to develop renewable energy sources is the electrical grid system. You have to be able to transport electricity from the power plant to the consumer, and electricity has to be used as it is produced. If electricity supply drops by more than 5%, blackouts or brownouts can occur. If it goes up by 5%, it can damage electrical equipment. Power plants produce finite electricity but do not produce it like a manufacturing plant. Wind and solar energy is intermittent, the wind does not blow all the time and the sun does not shine all the time (night and overcast conditions). The huge mismatch between supply and demand during certain conditions is the big problem. Estimates are that the typical electric grid cannot have more than 20% coming from a wind power plant because it cannot handle the fluctuations in supply.

Wind and solar power plants have to be built in remote areas where there is lots of raw land and no neighbors or environmental groups to complain. But alas solar arrays or wind turbine towers are all ugly (poor aesthetics) and destroy quite a bit of real-estate, so therein lies a perennial battle.

There is currently one practical technology for storing electricity called "pumped storage". It uses hydrodynamics by pumping water uphill during low demand periods, then when demand is high the water flows down and drives hydroelectric turbines to produce electricity to meet peak demand levels. There are limited sites where this can be done however so this is not widescale product that can solve our problem.

Transporting electricity from solar or wind power plants to the urban grids is a problem. After 300 miles transmission lines start exhibiting serious losses, so the voltage of the lines would have to be increased by 2 (demolish existing lines and build new ones, talk about an expensive undertaking). The cost on a nationwide scale would be in the trillions of $.

In 2008, the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA, estimated that even with smart grid leveling of demand and even with a potential reduction of current and voltage (from 120V to 114V), electricity use by 2030 would only be 7% less than currently projected. Compared with the cost to install household monitoring, the savings just do not appear to come close to matching the cost.

One possible solution is developing a combination of new nuclear power plants and new solar arrays. Nuclear power can handle the base load, while peak demand is met with the help of solar power during the hot summer days when ACs are running. This solution would not require a costly new grid or costly home monitoring systems. Small solar arrays can be built near urban centers, and today's technology can install a nuclear reactor the size of a garage into a small power plant facility.

The current hype is to "go green" and be energy independent by using solar and wind sources. Nice thought, but we live in the real world, not la-la land, and have to obey the laws of physics and economics. Solar and wind can provide us with at most 30% of what we need, the rest will have to come from somewhere else unless you want to live with daily power outages (no AC, no computers, no internet access, no lights) and high electric bills. Natural gas and oil are still available in abundance here in the USA, clean coal concepts are being developed (still need work), and new nuclear power plants should be considered. When someone invents solar panels that are affordable enough to put on everyone's roof, durable enough to resist hail damage, and with durable batteries in the home, then the equation might change, but by how much, and until then?

Traiger and Hinckley Study: Smoke and Mirrors

Some of you may have seen reference to a study by Traiger & Hinckley by liberals-democrats trying to deflect attention away from the fact that the liberal affordable housing laws were the catalyst to the recession of 2008-2009 (+?). Some go so far as to say the study proves that the affordable housing laws had nothing to do with the economic downturn. Unfortunately these same people appear to just be "grasping" to engage in a debate to defend liberal government intrusion and only give the report a cursory review and do not research more explicit facts, such as:

(1)The "study" has not been published by any economics/financial journal, so without peer review one must read such "white papers" with an open mind concerning its reliability.

(2)Traiger & Hinckley is a law firm, what exactly are their economics credentials? This law firm works for banks by providing them counceling on "fair lending" to obey the affordable housing laws and anti-discrimination laws. This is a conflict of interest: write a paper saying the CRA is just fine and dandy, and get paid by clients who must meet CRA laws that provide the client base to the legal firm.

(3)The study does not indicate if "CRA banks" have a higher foreclosure rate than banks that did not have branches in CRA "assessment areas". I wonder why?

(4)The study talks about "high cost loans". But a high-cost-loan is not the same thing as a subprime loan. A high-cost-loan as defined in the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act of 1994 is only a small fraction of total subprime loans. Why did the legal firm only focus on high-cost-loans and not all subprime loans? The answer appears obvious, the results would have negated the biased conclusion of the study.

(5)The study focuses on things as obscure as a relationship between foreclosure rates on high-cost-loans with concentration of bank branches. This is a subtle sign of "grasping" for ways to deflect the attention away from the damning facts.

The Traiger & Hinckley study does not relieve the democrats of the blame for creating the catalysts for this recession: the affordable housing laws, the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the resistance to regulating Fannie and Freddie.