Health Care or Freedom??

A really good post at Reason's hit and run blog, on the freedoms we will not enjoy with healthcare reform. ( I bold-ed my favorite paragraph)

Kiss Your Freedoms Goodbye If Health Care Passes
Why we cannot afford to sit out this fight
Andrew Napolitano November 16, 2009


Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights. If this health care bill becomes law, America, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, and privacy as you have enjoyed it will cease to be.
Last week the House of Representatives voted on a 2,000 page bill to give the federal government the power to micromanage the health care of every single American. The bill will raise your taxes, steal your freedom, invade your privacy, and ration your health care. Even the Republicans have introduced their version of Obamacare Lite. It, too, if passed, will compel employers to provide coverage, bribe the states to change their court rules, and tell insurance companies whom to insure.
We do not have two political parties in this country, America. We have one party; called the Big Government Party. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. The Democratic wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. Both parties like power; and neither is interested in your freedoms.
Think about it. Government is the negation of freedom. Freedom is your power and ability to follow your own free will and your own conscience. The government wants you to follow the will of some faceless bureaucrat.
When I recently asked Congressman James Clyburn, the third ranking Democrat in the House, to tell me "Where in the Constitution the federal government is authorized to regulate everyone's healthcare," he replied that most of what Congress does is not authorized by the Constitution, but they do it anyway. There you have it. Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights, it doesn't care about the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, it doesn't even read the laws it writes.
America, this is not an academic issue. If this health care bill becomes law, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, privacy as you have enjoyed it, will cease to be.
When Congress takes away our freedoms, they will be gone forever. What will you do to prevent this from happening?
We Can't Sit Back and Allow the Loss of Our Freedoms
We elect the government. It works for us. As we watch the Democrats' plans for health care take shape, we can only ask how did our government get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives?
On Saturday November 7, at 11 o’clock in the evening, the House of Representatives voted by a five vote margin to have the federal government manage the health care of every American at a cost of $1 trillion dollars over the next ten years.
For the first time in American history, if this bill becomes law, the Feds will force you to buy insurance you might not want, or may not need, or cannot afford. If you don’t purchase what the government tells you to buy, if you don’t do so when they tell you to do it, and if you don’t buy just what they say is right for you, the government may fine you, prosecute you, and even put you in jail. Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost. The privacy of your communications and medical decision making with your physician will be gone. More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal of federal bureaucrats.
It was not supposed to be this way. We elect the government. It works for us. How did it get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives? Evil rarely comes upon us all at once, and liberty is rarely lost in one stroke. It happens gradually, over the years and decades and even centuries. A little stretch here, a cave in there, powers are slowly taken from the states and the people and before you know it, we have one big monster government that recognizes no restraint on its ability to tell us how to live. It claims the power to regulate any activity, tax any behavior, and demand conformity to any standard it chooses.
The Founders did not give us a government like the one we have today. The government they gave us was strictly limited in its scope, guaranteed individual liberty, preserved the free market, and on matters that pertain to our private behavior was supposed to leave us alone.
In the Constitution, the Founders built in checks and balances. If the Congress got out of hand, the states would restrain it. If the states stole liberty or property, the Congress would cure it. If the president tried to become a king, the courts would prevent it.
In the next few weeks, I will be giving a public class on Constitutional Law here on the Fox News Channel, on the Fox Business Network, on Foxnews.com, and on Fox Nation. In anticipation of that, many of you have asked: What can we do now about the loss of freedom? For starters, we can vote the bums out of their cushy federal offices! We can persuade our state governments to defy the Feds in areas like health care—where the Constitution gives the Feds zero authority. We can petition our state legislatures to threaten to amend the Constitution to abolish the income tax, return the selection of U.S. senators to state legislatures, and nullify all the laws the Congress has written that are not based in the Constitution.
One thing we can’t do is just sit back and take it.
Judge Andrew Napolitano is Fox News' senior judicial analyst. This article originally appeared in two parts on FoxNews.com.

Crunchberry Fields Forever

It has been a long time since my last post. Partly it has been because I have been pretty busy at work, but also I kind of lost interest in blogging (not as though the audience on this blog ever execeeded 3-4 people).

However I did find a good blog post on another site that I had to pass on.

From Coyote blog:

A portion of my novel BMOC was satire of oddball lawsuits. In that book, for example, I had a woman suing Disney because she found that the characters at Disney World were people in costumes rather than the actual animated characters she had expected. I thought that was enough beyond reason and reality to constitute satire, but I guess I was wrong:

On May 21, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of
California dismissed a complaint filed by a woman who said she had purchased
“Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries” because she believed “crunchberries” were real
fruit. The plaintiff, Janine Sugawara, alleged that she had only recently
learned to her dismay that said “berries” were in fact simply brightly-colored
cereal balls, and that although the product did contain some strawberry fruit
concentrate, it was not otherwise redeemed by fruit. She sued, on behalf of
herself and all similarly situated consumers who also apparently believed that
there are fields somewhere in our land thronged by crunchberry bushes.

Doesn't XANGO contain a certain amount of cruchberries? I mean it can't be pure mangostean can it?

I'll Take The Chance If You Take The Blame

From Coyote's Blog how we are being robbed.

Privitizing Gains, Socializing Losses
April 2, 2009, 8:59 am
Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz has a great deconstruction of the Geithner toxic asset plan in the NY Times. If you want to see how the new corporate state works, where the government works with a small group of powerful insiders to the benefit of those insiders and the detriment of everyone else, this is a great example.
Stiglitz walks through how the Geithner plan will operate, and I want to do so as well. I have added a few tables to help illustrate his example a bit better.
Let’s begin with a financial asset that was originally worth $200. To make things simpler, we’ll assume that with the current economy there are now two outcomes for this asset — a 50% chance it recovers and eventually pays off its full value of $200, and a 50% chance it becomes effectively worthless (more realistically, there is a range of outcomes, but this does not really effect the following analysis).
The average “value” of the asset is $100. Ignoring interest, this is what the asset would sell for in a competitive market. It is what the asset is “worth.”
This is a classic expected value analysis. At business school, you spend a lot of your time doing these (trust me). Expected value is just the percentage chance of each outcome times the value of the outcome, on in this case 50% x $0 + 50% x $200 = $100.
So Stiglitz hypothesizes a situation under the new Geithner plan where a private entity might be willing to pay $150 for this $100 asset. That’s certainly a windfall for the financial institution that owns the asset currently, since the asset is only worth $100 on the open market. But why would someone pay $150? Well, it starts with this:
Under the plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the government would provide about 92 percent of the money to buy the asset but would stand to receive only 50 percent of any gains, and would absorb almost all of the losses
The actual percentages are 8% from the private purchasers, 8% “equity” from the government, and 84% in a government-guaranteed loan (Equity is in scare quotes because most investors learned long ago that if you provide 80%+ of the capital in a risky venture, you can call the investment “debt” all day long but what you have really done is made an equity investment).

But we have already posited how this will come out: a 50/50 chance of $0 and $200 for the final asset value. So we can compute the outcomes.
50% Chance Investment = $0
50% Chance Investment = $200
Expected Value
Taxpayer
-138
+25
-56.5
Investor
-12
+25
+6.5
Bank
+150
-50
+50
So there is a huge built-in subsidy here. Now, I don’t personally think the government needs to be injecting equity in banks. But I understand there are a lot of people who support it. So perhaps the $50 subsidy of the banks in the above example is warranted. But why the $6.5 subsidy of Geithner’s old pals in the investment world? This is a pure windfall for them, like finding money laying on the street. Even Vegas does not tip the odds so far in favor of the house.
I agree with Stiglitz’s analysis:
What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a “partnership” in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships — with the private sector in control — have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess.
So what is the appeal of a proposal like this? Perhaps it’s the kind of Rube Goldberg device that Wall Street loves — clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets. It has allowed the administration to avoid going back to Congress to ask for the money needed to fix our banks, and it provided a way to avoid nationalization.

Bush to Obama = More Of The Same

Here is a good article on how Obama is continuing on with what Bush II did. I really believe that GWB did more for the Democrats cause that for the Republicans. His so called "Compassionate Conservatism" is code for social programing and government growing. That is where many Republicans became disenfranchised with their party, myself included. I for one would like to see a new Libertarian-Republican hybrid party emerge and take over.

from the National Post, by Chris Edwards:

The point here is not to condemn president Bush, but to illustrate that
party labels have meant very little in recent federal expansions. Each recent
president has added new subsidy programs, expanded existing ones and imposed new
mandates on the states. Those changes have been usually retained by later
presidents, resulting in outlays growing ever larger. Recently, Republicans have
opposed some “pork” spending, but unless they challenge programs in a more
fundamental way, spending will be a runaway freight train under President Obama.

President Obama thinks that he can improve federal efficiency, and perhaps
he can somewhat. But he cannot change the fundamental factors that make the
government such a poor allocator of resources. If Mr. Obama succeeds in
expanding the government, it will probably function worse than under president
Bush because it will be even harder for administrators to keep track of all the
spending. Sadly, President Obama’s first budget sets a course for more
government bloat, more economic distortions and ultimately lower standards of
living for everyone who is not living off of federal handouts.

That's the problem with politicians; they all think they can do it better. The only importance to them is staying in office/power.

Green Jobs

This may not be perfect for full time work, with all the bed sores and the what nots, but part time on the weekends, sign me up.

Chinese Exports (other than Yao)

An interesting post from Coyote Blog regarding trade with China and an historical comparison with Japan.

China bashing during the past decade is reminiscent of the Japan bashing that
occurred during the 1980s. It turned out that Japan’s substantial export surplus
with the US, its extensive accumulation of US Treasury bonds, and its purchases
of assets in the US did not hurt the United States, but were for the most part
foolish actions on the part of the Japanese government and businesses. I believe
that similar conclusions will be reached about the parallel Chinese practices.

He posted a hypothetical from a Chinese citizen:

It is important to note that each and every one of these government
interventions subsidizes US citizens and consumers at the expense of Chinese
citizens and consumers. A low yuan makes Chinese products cheap for
Americans but makes imports relatively dear for Chinese. So-called
“dumping” represents an even clearer direct subsidy of American consumers over
their Chinese counterparts. And limiting foreign exchange re-investments
to low-yield government bonds has acted as a direct subsidy of American
taxpayers and the American government, saddling China with extraordinarily low
yields on our nearly $1 trillion in foreign exchange. Every single
step China takes to promote exports is in effect a subsidy of American consumers
by Chinese citizens.

It is an interesting thought. Certainly we know what happened to Japan. Could China really be in store for an economic downfall? It stands to reason that if/when china's economy gets to that point where the wealth in country exceeds that of export productivity the US will find another developing country to feed our insatiable desires for cheap goods. Hencho En Guatemala???

Weapon Ban

At the Cato Institute Blog David Rittgers talks over a renewed assault weapon ban. In the name of Mexico's war on the drug cartells, the Obama administration wants to ban similar assault weapons banned during the Clinton era.

The ban would be a revival of a law passed in the early years of the
Clinton administration that expired in 2004. The law prohibited the sale
of newly-manufactured magazines holding more than ten rounds of ammunition and
having two of five cosmetic features on semi-automatic rifles. If you had
a pistol grip and a detachable magazine, you couldn’t have a bayonet lug. More recent proposals have attempted
to ban “barrel shrouds,” which the rest of the world calls “handguards” - the
place you put your hand (instead of on a hot barrel) to prevent burning it while
firing.
The emphasis here is on the cosmetic - any rational discussion of the
issue ought to note that an “assault weapon” is any object you use to assault
someone with - and banning the presence of a bayonet lug on the barrel of a
rifle is senseless. Knives, tire irons, and bricks can all serve as
“assault weapons.” This is an instance where quotation marks are not just
appropriate, they are required.

Predictably, both Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have temporarily quashed the issue. Let’s hope
they keep it out of the halls of Congress, and focus instead on a sensible drug policy that impacts the demand created by an illicit drug market.
Pelosi and Reid realize
that this proposal will do is come back to haunt Democrats in the 2010 mid-term
elections, which historically trend against the president’s party anyway.
Many Democrats attributed the flip of the House of Representatives
to Republican hands in 1994 to the first “assault weapons” ban. Numerous
experts believe that the reason Al Gore could not carry his home state of
Tennessee in the 2000 election was his push for broader gun control.
Blue Dog Democrats that ran on pro-gun platforms in conservative districts must
be rolling their eyes. The rest of the country should do so as well, and
send this proposal to the dustbin

.

It seems Ironic that the gun lobby's faith lies in Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid. Apparently staying in power is more important that acting on your beliefs.

Porn in Utah

Over at Reason (Hit and Run) they link to an article that studied porn viewership across the US. Funny enough, they found Utah had the highest rate per populace (except on Sundays).

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per
1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The
differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have
old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions
per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference
emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual
behaviour."

Although this study makes a lot of assumptions about the data inferring that it's mostly the religious conservative making the subscriptions, I would think it more evenly distributed throughout society without much difference in belief system. It might just be that conservative states tend to be less open about their porn consumption, whereas in more liberal areas there is just as much or more porn viewership, but done in a more public way. Very interesting none the less.

The Down Turn

An interesting article about what caused the economic down turn

From Cato:
The U.S. Didn’t Cause the World Recession
Posted by Alan Reynolds

In the Washington Post, Ricardo Caballero of MIT has a novel and promising idea about “How to Lift a Falling Economy.” Unfortunately, he echoes the mantra that all the world’s economic problems can be traced to the U.S. in general, and to big U.S. banks in particular. “Already,” he says, “this illness has spread to the global economy.”

Already? Industrial production in Japan began collapsing in November 2007, two months ahead of the U.S., and the Japanese industrial decline has been twice as fast.

Unlike the U.S., real GDP began falling in the second quarter of 2008 in Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. By no coincidence, that was when the price of oil rose as high as $145 a barrel. Soaring oil prices raise the cost of production and distribution for many industries, and reduce real household incomes and therefore consumption. Nine of the ten postwar U.S. recessions were preceded by a major spike in the price of oil.

In a piece for the Claremont Review of Books (written last November), I conclude , “This recession is not just a U.S. problem, not just about housing, and not just financial.”

Compare the decline in real GDP over the past 4 quarters (from The Economist):
U.S.
-0.2%
France
-1.0
Germany
-1.6
Britain
-1.8
Italy
-2.6
Japan
-4.6


Does it make sense to blame the largest declines in GDP on one country with the smallest decline? If so, then we need some explanation of how some uniquely American “illness has spread” to so many innocent victims.

If the explanation is supposed to be falling U.S. imports, then the worst decline by far would have been in Canada and Mexico (where real GDP was rising even in the third quarter). If the alleged causality is supposed to be because of some undefined links between financial centers, then Italy would not be among the hardest hit.

When it comes to trade, in fact, the shoe is mainly on the other foot: Collapsing foreign economies crushed U.S. exports.

In the second quarter of 2008, U.S. exports accounted for 1.54 percentage points of the 2.83% annualized rise in real GDP. But falling exports subtracted 2.84 percentage points from fourth quarter GDP. Falling exports, not falling consumption, were the biggest single contributor to the overall drop of 3.8%.

After looking at which economies fell first and fastest, it might be more accurate to say that some foreign illness has spread to the U.S. economy than to assert or assume the causality ran only in the opposite direction.

GM

From Hit and Run on the GM, Chrylser Bailout:

GM, Chrysler to Gov't: Give Us More Money Now. Or More Money Later. But Definitely Give Us More Money.
Posted on February 18, 2009, 8:30am Nick Gillespie
There's a reason why GM and Chrysler announced their long-awaited, much-anticipated restructuring plans (the homework requirement for taking taxpayer loot last year): The plans pretty much model the Saturday Night Live sketch in which automakers explain to Congress that they will need more federal dollars even or especially if there's an uptick in the car business.
From the Detroit Free Press:
General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC summoned the prospect Tuesday of their collapse unless they get $7 billion in federal aid within six weeks—part of a dramatic plea for a total of up to $39 billion to survive the worst economic crisis in the history of Detroit's signature industry.
Yet the automakers warned that any new money from the federal government would be much cheaper than the staggering cost of bankruptcies and forced liquidation of the two companies. By their estimates, bankruptcies would cost a combined $124 billion in federal loans and up to 3 million lost jobs.
Saints preserve us, I've seen junkies with better raps than that one. Among the options outlined by Chrysler is a merger between it and GM, thus producing the fugliest business baby since Kmart and Sears hooked up.

Rampant Consumerism, The Cure/Disease

I got this from Coyote blog.

I had a blog topic talked about in the video (towards the end): The Republic Of Yellowstone

“Because there is no disaster that immediate, decisive, wrong action cannot make worse”

Now Is Not The Time For Profit, Its Time To Spend

Matt Welch at Hit and Run writes about the bailout of the banks. He has a good summation paragraph on how it's going down:

As President Obama said,

There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for
them to get bonuses--now is not that time.

It will likely never be that time, as long as the government is in the
business of running private commerce. Banks will be forced to write 4 percent
mortgages. Automakers will be forced to build magical green cars that spew out 3
million jobs from their exhaust pipes. Airlines will be forced to Buy American,
governors will be forced to spend their budget-filling bounty on unionized
teachers, and newspapers will be forced to run Rahm Emanuel columns. Local
commercial decisions will be made in Washington, based on politics, instead of
by business-owners, based on consumers. As a direct result, the once-autonomous
firms, despite all that fancy money, will get less and less competitive, spend
more and more of their time trying to please Washington instead of their
customers, and will continue coming back for more as long as the well doesn't
run dry. Even if some of the details are off, the general results are as
preditable as a Beltway school closing early on a snow day. Nationalizations
have happened time and time again over recorded history, and their rate of
success is not ambiguous.

I think Nationalization is the crux of the matter. People tend to loose trust in democracy when they realize that what gets them into office (power) can also replace them. Honestly I don't think 90% of the politicians in Washington even realize that what they are doing right now is very close to what was done in the great depression, and will probably ultimately lead to the down fall of our country as we know it. I firmly believe that we are heading for a Soviet Union like crash.

4% mortgage, must be time to buy. Except wait, what happened when low interest rates go back up and the people that overextended themselves getting into the perfect house can't make the new higher interest rate payment? We would all be better off, instead of a 1-2 trillion stimulus to be spent on making sure UAW still gets paid $75/hour, if the government paid off everybodys mortgage.

The Ants Go Marching

At the Cato Blog, there is a good post on the new bail out (since the first 700 billion didn't get the job done). It's mostly about all the lobbyists lining up to get a piece of the pie.

The Stimulus Lobbying Frenzy
Posted by David Boaz

Every company and industry wanted to be sure that it would be eligible for some of the money, and members of Congress worked to slip their constituents and campaign donors into the bill’s 451 pages. By the time it passed, it included special provisions for Puerto Rican rum producers, auto race tracks, and corporations operating in American Samoa (such as Starkist, which is headquartered in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district). It required that insurance companies pay for mental health benefits and granted tax benefits for victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and makers of children’s wooden arrows….

No sooner was the article published than more examples fill the media: “A Republican [in Ohio] called it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” “Cities, towns ready to vie for stimulus funds.” “Road Builders Compete for Slice of Stimulus.” “West Michigan’s stimulus wish list.” “A State with a Wish List for Stimulus Spending.” “Steel industry lobbyists seem to have persuaded the House to insert a “Buy American” provision in the stimulus bill it passed last week.” “JetBlue Goes to Washington to Discuss Economic Stimulus Plan.”

When you lay out a picnic, you get ants. And this is the biggest picnic in the history of pork-filled picnicking.

The reason government bail-outs (in the form of spending) doesn't work is because the more the gov spends the more people save (and thereby don't spend). I believe that spending is what gets out of a recession, but only when the people spend, and that wont happen until the government stops digging us into an insurmountable hole.

For Natalie The Salt Hater

Again a nice gem from hit and run:

Can a New York Bureaucrat Put the Whole Country on a Low-Salt Diet?
Jacob Sullum January 29, 2009, 11:34am
Having taken on smoking, trans fats, and calories, New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden is poised for an assault on salt. He wants packaged food producers and restaurant chains to cut the salt content of their products by 25 percent during the next five years and another 25 percent in the five years after that. "If there's not progress in a few years," he warns, "we'll have to consider other options, like legislation."

Since salt is linked to dangerously high blood pressure in only a small subset of the population, Frieden's proposal is the very model of a modern "public health" intervention. It disregards individual preferences and goes over the heads of consumers, treating the population as a collective. To its credit, The New York Times, toward the end of its story about what Frieden ambitiously calls his "national salt-reduction initiative," notes that not everyone thinks it's a good idea:

Beyond the technical hurdles, Dr. Frieden might encounter resistance on scientific grounds. Some medical researchers question whether a mass reduction in sodium is the best way to spend public-health resources when losing weight and quitting cigarettes would do more for the country's heart health.
Genetics dictate that different people have different reactions to sodium. Some people are more sensitive to high levels of salt. For others, low levels of sodium can be unhealthy.
But public health officials say there is a strong consensus that salt leads to higher rates of heart attacks and strokes.

That consensus alarms Dr. Michael Alderman, editor in chief of the American Journal of Hypertension, who thinks more clinical studies need to be done.

In a 2002 review of the research, Alderman, a past president of the American Society of Hypertension, concluded that "existing evidence provides no support for the highly unlikely proposition that a single dietary sodium intake is an appropriate or desirable goal for the entire population." Despite the weakness of the evidence, Alderman noted, the dogma of less salt is still "preached with a fervour usually associated with religious zealotry."

I noted the controversy over low-salt prescriptions in my 2003 Reason story about the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has been railing against the "deadly white powder," a.k.a. "The Forgotten Killer," since the 1970s. In 2005 CSPI filed a lawsuit aimed at forcing the FDA to stop considering salt an ingredient "generally recognized as safe."
[Thanks to Tricky Vic for the tip.]

This gives new meaning to the Pro-life / Pro-choice debate. If I am prolife then I must support a salt reduction/ban initiative. However, if I am prochoice I can simply choose not to eat salt, or to eat salt and live with the consequence. What a conundrum!!!!!

Economists Against The Economic Stimulous Bill

From Hit and Run:

"With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true."
Posted on January 28, 2009, 11:28am Damon W. RootAs Nick Gillespie noted Monday, Nobel Prize-winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claims that only a "dishonest flack" would dare say anything bad about the so-called stimulus bill. Well, more than 200 distinguished economists, including Nobel Laureates James Buchanan, Edward Prescott, and Vernon Smith, beg to differ. They've signed an open letter opposing the bailout that appears in today's New York Times. From their letter:
Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan's "lost decade" in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

The Whole thing here

Do the powers that be really think that this stimulus is right for the country and that it will lead to pure economic growth? Or is it simply a conspiracy that will lead us to socialism, a one world monetary system, government so big that the leaders are ever closer to dictators? Why don't we just elect Pres Obama now for 2 more terms (and change the 2 term limit law), after all he can do no wrong.

Our Way Of Life

At the Cato Institute Blog I read a post talking about our response to the terror threat. It rips on government agencies for using "chicken-little" alarmist scare tactics to promote policy.

1. Senator Kit Bond, at Dennis Blair’s confirmation hearing as Director of
National Intelligence, said the following:

Our entire way of life is just a few moments away from annihilation if
terrorists succeed in obtaining a weapon of mass destruction.


Nonsense. Our way of life survived various wars, the virtual destruction of
a large swath of New Orleans, and other disasters. It would survive even nuclear
terrorism. Incidents of chemical or biological terrorism are unlikely to cause
mass casualties, although they could, and will not collapse our institutions.
The danger to American values comes more from our reaction to terrorism than the
thing itself. What’s more, these sorts of incidents are not nearly as likely as you generally
hear.

It got me to thinking about our way of life. I really think it is in jeopardy. Not due to the terror possibilities, but by our government's reaction to them, and to any type of bump in the road (ie this whole financial mess).

Stephen Moore (an economist) in talking with Glenn Beck Put it this way:

What everything the government is doing right now is exactly the wrong thing. It's exactly the wrong thing. I really believe, Glenn, if the government would just stop doing anything, if congress would just stop passing laws, no new bailouts, no new stimulus plan, no more debt, no more money creation, I believe within nine months or so we could get out of this, the weak would die, the strong would survive, the process, but then we would go back to growth. But they are not going to let that happen, Glenn.

That is has to happen. Let the weak die and the strong survive. Economic Darwinism! The government can't let that happen. After all it is their constituents. It may sound harsh and that I don't care about the "little guy", I am the little guy. I could very well fail if the government did nothing. What would I do then? Same thing people have done for centuries, pick up the pieces and start over. Besides I really don't think the way things are going look any better.

The light at the end of this tunnel is bigger and bigger government and more and more taxes. Just look at what happened with gas/oil for an example of how government reacts.

Through out the 90's gas was in the $1.00-$1.50 / gallon range. And even through most of the 2000's. Then with the Iraq/Afghanistan wars it shoots up to $2.00, $3.00, even $5.00/gallon. Outrage ensued, government wanted a gas tax holiday. But now that gas is back down to $1.50/gallon, the government can't seem to deal with the lower tax revenue, and wants to raise the gas tax to pay for roads. How was it that road maintenance was just fine for the last 30 years, but now we can't afford to replace a manhole cover???

The Little Girl Is Back, So Get Your Ski On

From WUWT blog I learned that La Nina is back. Since I am not much of an expert (hardly even a layman) on the Pacific Decadal Ossilation and all that I had to wikipedia it. The keys are, that while El Nino spawns from warming in ocean surface temperatures, La Nina is the opposite. What does this mean, well among other things El Nino is bad for Rocky Mountain Skiing, La Nina good.

So with all this Global Warming how can things like a cooling La Nina happen?
answer: nobody seems to know

Climate Skeptic has a good post on what the relevant questions are.


-Is this upward trend unique or is it within the range of normal natural fluctuations?

-Is this trend exaggerated by upwards biases in surface temperature measurements?

-What proportion of this trend is due to anthropogenic factors (e.g. Co2) and what proportion is due to natural variations (e.g. unusually strong solar cycles in late 20th century)?

-How can one reconcile the trend over the last 100 years with climate models, which use assumptions that imply that past warming should have been much higher?

All Hail Obama

At the Cato Institute blog there's an article on what Obama can learn from Bush. Here is a snipet:

Bob Woodward offers 10 lessons Obama could learn from the
mistakes of the Bush administration. One of them is “Righteous motives are not
enough for effective policy.” Woodward directs all his lessons at foreign and
defense policy, but that’s a good rule for domestic policy too. The fact that a
policy sounds right-minded — create jobs, raise the minimum wage, ban sweatshop
products, mandate energy efficiency — doesn’t mean that it will work. Economic
processes are dynamic, not static. Benefits have costs. Another of Woodward’s
rules is “A president must do the homework to master the fundamental ideas and
concepts behind his policies.” Again, that applies to economic as well as to
foreign policy. Has Obama read any thoughtful criticisms of Keynesian economics
or of “job creation” schemes or of renewable-energy mandates? He met with
conservative pundits, but has he sat down and listened to any of the many
economists who oppose his stimulus plans?


He also points out that Obama's approval rating is higher than anhy other modern pres except Jimmy Carter. If Obama is halfthe pres Carter was we are all infor a treat.



I get the historical nature of the first black pres, but have people lost all common sense, that regardless of race he is a man that has been tempted with power and will most likely do anything he can to avoid losing it, and do whatever it takes for self preservation?

Why Work???

What I do to waste time:

http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/game.asp

My high score is somewhere in the 2000 range.

Post Script: If you would like to compare scores look it up under group name "Red Pine"