Political Class Dismissed

In light of the survey of 238 scholars ranking FDR the best President, I thought illustrating the popular misconception worthwhile.

In 2004, two UCLA economists decided to study the Great Depression, under FDR, to find out why it lasted as long as it did.  Here are their conclusions:

“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

Empirical evidence is proving them correct.  Bush started, and Obama has continued, another ill-conceived set of stimulus policies and we are in the midst of another protracted recession/depression.

The politicians are more than willing to go along with this charade.  It enables them to increase their power over businesses and individuals while rewarding favored segments of the economy and placating the foolish cry of voters who believe the government needs to “fix things”.

The big news today is that The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the stimulus bill, has created millions of jobs and in fact has had an even bigger economic impact than expected.

If you actually read the report, you will find some troubling statements, including:

Estimating the law’s overall effects on employment
requires a more comprehensive analysis than the recipients’
reports provide. Therefore, looking at recorded
spending to date as well as estimates of the other effects of
ARRA on spending and revenues, CBO has estimated the
law’s impact on employment and economic output using
evidence about the effects of previous similar policies on
the economy and using various mathematical models that
represent the workings of the economy.

I’m sure every democrat from Obama down will be screaming to the heavens about what a wonderful job they did.  Perhaps I missed something, but the phrase various mathematical models could mean just about anything they want it to mean.  It appears that an old adage applies here - Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure!

Court rooms are unwieldy devices. They often let truths emerge that are inconvenient. This seems to have been the case in the trial this month (April 2010) of Najibullah Zazi, who admitted to dumping his likely ineffectual bomb-making materials (made from beauty salon products) after he changed his mind about bombing the NYC subway system. He then flew home to Denver.

Zazi is a citizen of Afghanistan, but a legal permanent resident of the United States, who is accused of planning to commit suicide with a bomb in a crowded train. His arrest was famously broadcast with video footage of him buying hydrogen peroxide in a Denver beauty supply store. He has plead guilting to planning the crime. What is at issue is the fact that he chose not to commit the crime.

So, what does this mean to jurisprudence in America? It means that the government is now arresting people, not for something they actually did, or even for things they were actively planning to do, but for things that they formerly considered doing, but decided not to. This is alarming enough in itself, but more frightening still is the likelihood that this is only a tiny step away from arresting people for things they might do — given their ethnicities, cultures, religion, personal histories, and personality traits.

While this scenario may sounds like a bad mashup of 1984 and Minority Report, it is, unfortunately, fast becoming the reality of the present-day justice system in post 9/11 America. Only this month (April, 2010), it was reported that the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice has begun using software from a private company, IBM, to do predictive modeling of whom is most likely to commit a crime. Citizens of Florida, be very afraid.* Citizens of Missouri should likewise be worried. Even though it was withdrawn following controversy, the Missouri Fusion Center MIAC report classified entire categories of Americans as potential terrorists. Actually, citizens of the whole country should be alarmed. A report from the Department of Homeland Security also identified whole classes of citizens, as disparate as returning veterans, Ron Paul supporters, and born-again Christians, as potential terrorists. Phillip K. Dick’s nightmares are fast becoming our daily realities.

For decades now, scientists have been failing in efforts to use computers to model the behavior of the economy and the weather — both of which are far less complex than the human mind. Using such modeling tools, both the SEC and Federal Reserve put our economy exactly where it is today — mostly broke, and broken. When the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) models get it wrong, the consequences can be even worse. The list of disasters resulting from bad weather predictions is simply too long to enumerate. In either case though, a person — you — can’t end up in jail as the result of a missing variable or a computer bug.

All this technology aside, there is an even more basic, and far larger problem with the concept of pre-emptive prosecution: it undermines civil society. Where is the motive, under such a system, for people to reconsider the consequences of their actions if they can be held equally accountable for committing or not committing the crime? By the same standard being pursued in trying Mr. Zazi, a good percentage of all people are guilty of some crime or another — whether that be having thought of jaywalking or of having considered eliminating their mother-in-law. Predictive prosecution is’t a recipe for a safer society, it is a recipe for turning half the country into a detention camp and the other half into mindless, soulless, unquestioning automatons of the state whose highest common denominator matches the lowest common denominator of the committee of unelected bureaucrats who dictated the parameters of a computer program.

We should not forget that Mr. Zazi was previous investigated and cleared as a threat by the F.B.I. It was only after the Obama administration felt the need to demonstrate a political victory in the war on terror that the case was reevaluated and a plea agreement was extorted out of Mr. Zazi by the Justice Department’s threat of charging his relatives with miscellaneous charges of dubious credibility. As a result, he has plead guilty to charges of having aiding al-Qaeda. Of course, the truth of any matter can never be known with any degree of certainty in plea arrangement situations, which are notoriously abused by overzealous prosecutors.

President Obama where is the change? Under your guidance, America is now not only putting people on trial for “thought crimes,” it is now  extending that abuse of justice to putting them on trial for “past thought” crimes — and that puts us on the slippery slope to far worse: pre-emptive prosecution. Is an Obama Doctrine of Predictive Prosecution, to match the Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War, really the legacy you want to leave America? Is it not crystal clear to you that African-Americans and other minorities will most certainly be disproportionately victimized by such a system?

This is not quite the change we were expecting.

The Obama Ministry of Propaganda has been quite busy recently ratcheting the fear campaign to new levels.  At stake is greater government control over our lives and distractions from real problems, like impending socialized health care.

The following video is a sad testament to the police-state that is evolving around us.

HT LRC Blog.

With the number of government-sponsored events, legislative agendas, and international treaty negotiations regarding climate change climbing, the political debate regarding the environment grows ever hotter – far faster than the climate itself. That’s a bit of a wonder given a rather amazing discovery this past month in England.

The University of East Anglia (UK) hosts one of the world’s foremost respected climatology research centers, so the discovery of massive scientific fraud by climate scientists at that institution should have thrown a cold dose of reality onto the debate.

Surprisingly, it did not.

The daily onslaught of global warming propaganda continues unabated. Neither the media, politicians, popular celebrities, the educational establishment, or global warming “scientists” appear to be the least bit interested with the issue of corrupted data. The truth, it seems, is irrelevant. Scientific integrity, a quaint anachronism, is to be likewise discarded.

If we need evidence of the degree to which environmentalism has become a religion, here we have it.

So the public debate on global warming continues, in barbershops, beauty salons, cafés and kitchens, all across America, indeed across the globe, based on significant amounts of false information.

Worse yet, educational standards in most of the West are now so low as to render sensible debate on the subject pointless, even if the data were reputable. But let’s set that lamentable fact aside. Let’s assume we are all geniuses from Punahou or Andover. There is still a critical problem in addressing the issue: We are a society of specialists.

Since the industrial revolution very few of us know much about anything in great detail, except for the professional specialty in which we majored in college, if we attended college. The Renaissance man (with pardons to Christine de Pizan) went out with, well, with the Renaissance. Sure, there are a few autodidacts of great knowledge still lingering about, who managed to slip though the system, their minds undimmed, but they are the exception, not the rule.

With that in consideration, wouldn’t it be in everyone’s best interest to recognize that most of us are NOT qualified to intelligibly discuss the finer points of climatology, but to also recognize that we ARE being stampeded into doing so?

Those who will benefit through the political process of climate change legislation, and the economic adjustments that would follow, have much to gain in manipulating our fears. We must then assume they are doing so. To do otherwise would be to ignore an inconvenient truth: power corrupts and it even corrupts environmentalists. That corruption will grow far worse once they become carbon billionaires.

Should we not be asking ourselves, are we to be as cattle stampeded over a cliff by unknown forces, or are we to stand as men and women and rationally determine our own course through informed assessment of credible data? Are we truly willing to lay aside all that we have gained since the Enlightenment to return to a Dark Age where superstition and fear trumps science and reason, or are we willing to fight for an Enlightened future based on reason and verifiable evidence?

Global weather patterns are immeasurably complex, so much so that chaos theory suggests that we cannot yet begin to understand them accurately. This is why the weather forecasts are so often wrong. It becomes hubris then to presume that any one species (i.e. Man) can impact such a complex system in a way that the system cannot adequately mediate. The biosphere has been mediating the eruption of super volcanoes and the impact of massive meteors for as long as there has been an atmosphere to support life – and yet life has survived.

So, admittedly, there is much we do not know, perhaps cannot know.

The hysteria of the climate change fear mongers is all based on this lack of knowledge, not on knowledge itself. Many of them will even admit to this, rationalizing their position as, “it is better to be safe than sorry.” That can be translated as, “it is better to stay in bed than to risk getting hit by an asteroid if you go outside.”

Nonetheless, there are a few simple things that we do know.

All historical evidence regarding climatology indicates that long-term warming and cooling periods are normal cyclical events that have occurred regularly throughout earth’s history – and that they occur over periods of millennia (not decades, or even centuries). For those who say, “I remember winters were colder when I was a kid, that is confabulation – which is another natural phenomenon, of the psycho-physiological variety.”

Historical evidence also demonstrates periods where the climate has changed radically in one direction or another for short periods, sometimes due to volcanic activity, possibly due to sunspots, and in many cases for reasons unknown.

But here is the critical point: These short-term and long-term shifts have been occurring in the historical record long before the arrival of the industrial revolution – which is what the folks at East Anglia were trying to hide. In short, while the evidence that we are in a period of global warming is fairly incontrovertible, the evidence that it is caused by man (is anthropogenic) is rather less clear – some would argue without support at all. More investigation is clearly needed, and it needs to be conducted with more scrutiny, in an environment of scientific integrity.

Sadly, the East Anglia incident isn’t even the first of its kind. Similar discoveries regarding fraudulent temperature and sea-level data were discovered as early as 2006. Those incidents failed to gain traction as the result of a coordinated counterattack by the climate-change industry on the scientists who questioned the validity of the data. Now, however, thanks to the efforts of some socially responsible hackers – who were clever enough to upload the East Anglia evidence simultaneously to multiple public servers beyond the jurisdiction of American and European law enforcement – clear evidence of premeditated climate-change fraud is finally being brought to light in a manner which doesn’t allow for the vested interests to cover it up.

Somehow, I suspect that wasn’t the kind of transparency that President Obama was expecting when he was preaching transparency on the campaign trail. It may be the kind of transparency we need though.

The ethical issue of “transparency sourcing” aside, here is the crucial point to be learned from the East Anglia incident: many scientists are no longer scientists. The easy spoils of government funding has turned far too many scientists into activists; activists who are all too willing to abandon scientific method in order to guarantee next year’s round of government funding.

As long as political popularity is distorting the scientific process in this manner, we must recognize that we have no reliable way to know whether there is long-term global warming, or not, and whether it is anthropogenic, or not. As well, we have no way to assess whether any warming process might even be beneficial – something that everyone appears to assume to be untrue simply because they cannot imagine positive change (more evidence of an approaching Dark Age). That is something that no real scientist would accept as a given.

Life is changing, and life is adapting. It is almost impossible to define life without those qualities. Changing and adapting is what man has been doing on this planet since long before we crawled out of the oceans and later swung down from the trees – both of which occurred in a world that was rather hotter than the one we know today.

It is at the point when we stop changing, when we stop adapting, that we should begin to worry. It is at the point when our environment stops challenging us to change that we should begin to fear.

Stasis is what we should be afraid of, not change. Change is what keeps us alive. It is what defined us as we are now, and it will define what we become in the future – if we let it. The alternative is every bit as unthinkable as would have been choosing to stay in the caves.

Not all hope is lost as Obama continues his Bushian march of Empire-building and war. It appears that some on the left are actually standing up to him unlike the knee-jerk, mindless militarism of the Right during the Bush years.

From Politico:

On Monday morning, Michael Moore wrote an open letter calling on Obama to hold off on escalating the war in Afghanistan during his prime-time speech at West Point. And by the evening, it was another leading liberal voice joining the anti-war chorus: MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

Even though the comments are weak and sniveling, this is a good start that some lefties will challenge the chicken-hawk, warmonger-in-chief as he sends more off to die and to kill in a no-win quagmire. I only expect the opposition to grow as things dramatically deteriorate.

By Ed Crane

Which brings us to the war in Afghanistan. The neocons are predictably enthused about the prospect of a prolonged U.S. occupation there. A dozen or so of them recently sent a letter to President Obama urging him to up the ante. Astonishingly, the president who was elected as the antiwar left’s protest candidate appears poised to take the neocons’ advice and commit tens of thousands more troops to a conflict in which immediate U.S. interests are unclear at best.

Meanwhile, Obama’s domestic agenda is in shambles. Americans are outraged at the prospect of trillion-dollar deficits, auto bailouts and the subsidies to irresponsible bankers. And they don’t want socialized medicine.

The “tea parties” and town hall meetings are essentially libertarian. There is no conservative policy agenda — only a demand that the government stop trying to run our lives.

Republicans should take this opportunity to return to their traditional noninterventionist roots and throw their neoconservative wing under the bus. The Republicans have a chance at this moment to reclaim the mantle of the party of nonintervention — in your healthcare, in your wallet and in the affairs of other nations. Click here for more…

Back in January, el Presidente told the country that we must pass the $787 billion bailout to spark the economy and keep unemployment under 8%.  Here’s the latest update on those plans.

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) — Employers cut more jobs than forecast last month and the unemployment rate rose to a 26-year high, calling into question the sustainability of the economic recovery.

The unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, the highest since 1983, from 9.7 percent in August, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Payrolls fell by 263,000, following a revised 201,000 decline the prior month that was less than previously reported.

 

There isn’t a single major issue that Obama has affected positively.  He is escalating the war in Afghanistan.  The number of troops has been more than doubled since he took office at a monthly cost over $2.5 billion per month.  His current plans are to increase troop strength further.

He has approved the continuation of Bush’s unconstitutional domestic Homeland Security policies.  He completely ignores real solutions for the problems in our health care system.

About the only accomplishments Obama has had is setting new records for the rate of increase in the federal deficit and coming up with new ways to take money from people to redistribute it, both to other people and failed private companies.

In the works, he is pushing for a Cap and Trade policy which would dramatically increase utility bills and have a devastating affect on private industry economic activity.

To sum up, describing Obama’s presidency as anything other than an abysmal failure is delusional and disingenuous. 

Obama bans candy cigarettes — and it only took 8 months to accomplish. Wow, change and efficiency in one fell swoop!

At least what Obama thinks is fit to print.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called "Newspaper Revitalization Act," that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations.

As if the MSM isn’t slanted enough already, now the President is thinking about a bill that would make newspapers subservient to the whims of bureaucracy.

"I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them," Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

What’s next?  Bailing out churches for a bit of control over religion?

Setting aside the morality of one man planning the lives of 300 million (more if you include his significant foreign policy aspirations), the futility of it all should be obvious. The central planner always runs into this irritating economic brick wall called "scarcity." As individuals, we all have to deal with this – limitations in our talents, resources, time, energy, and ambition. So we constantly make tradeoffs, based on our own unique preferences and the supply of possibilities. "Should we have cheeseburgers or filet mignon for dinner tonight?" "Should we take the kids to Disneyworld or Niagara Falls?" "Should we tell Johnny to skip plans for college, go up to our eyeballs in debt, or pull the plug on Grandma?" How can the planner know enough to make such decisions for a single person, much less take into account the hopelessly complex interactions of billions?

. . . Barack Obama may know how to give a speech or win an election, but he doesn’t know economics. Neither did practically every president from William McKinley to George W. Bush. Neither do most of the mainstream media, political pundits, and voting population who expect their government to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. As Murray Rothbard wrote, "It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."

HT Kevin Duffy

The reason the health care debate is such a fiasco is because neither side is dealing with reality.  We are bombarded with rhetoric and scare tactics from the right and left.

Any attempt to “fix” health care without acknowledging the self-evident fact that health care is comprised of goods and services will result in failure.  The current left/progressive position is grounded in emotion and denial.  The right wing position identifies inherent problems with the left but does not strongly advocate real solutions.  What passes for debate most of the time is completely worthless.

If, and only if, the politicians realize that the most effect way to provide good quality, efficient and cost friendly health care is through proven principles of economics, will we then have real reform.

You’ve been swindled by grownups kiddies.

An Address To Our Schoolchildren

My Fellow Americans.

Today you heard from our President, Barack Obama. Some of your parents voted for him, and most of the rest of the country voted for his opponent, John McCain.

What you heard from President Obama today was a plea for you to pay attention in school and finish your education.

What you did not hear from President Obama today was that your government, together with your school, has refused to provide you with the knowledge necessary for you to understand what has happened to this nation and its economy over the last 30 years.

READ ON AT THE MARKET TICKER

Where did it start?

It started with the White House breaking the federal CAN-SPAM law in order to fill our e-mail inboxes with their health care agenda propaganda. It is one thing to have some fly-by-night shyster spamming you with medical nostrums and shady, too-good-to-be true financial deals; it is quite another to have the President of the United States spamming you with his equally questionable schemes. The spamming eventually blew up in the Obama Administration’s face and finally, after months of public controversy, the program was stopped.

Or did it?

Now the White House is skipping the home and going straight to the schools, to the impressionable, easily led astray minds of children.

This Tuesday, President Barack Obama is planning to broadcast a message directly into schools in order to sway the next generation to his Progressive agenda. [To be fair, it needs to be noted that President George H.W. Bush abused his position in a similar fashion back in 1991.] Ostensibly, Obama’s message will be about volunteerism, which any descent person supports, but as anyone who has seen the video that will accompany the President’s message knows, it is volunteerism with a twist – a twist of the arm that is.

Although the video if front-loaded with lots of benign statements and even noble sentiment, as it advances it descends into an appeal for far more than volunteerism. This is not a public service announcement; this is bald-faced propaganda. Except for the use of English and the lack of Brown Shirts, the video could easily have been produced in 1930’s Germany. If you are not convinced, go watch it.

The video is available on You Tube, the on-line video sharing service, at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqcPA1ysSbw

Read more »

For the federal debt ceiling that is…

The Ever Increasing Debt Ceiling

Sadly, Geithner’s entire argument is that the only thing preventing the U.S. from meeting its obligations is a statutory limit arbitrarily set by Congress. If only things were that simple. There is much more involved in maintaining the solvency of the U.S., and very little of that has to do with the debt ceiling. The so-called debt ceiling was enacted when Congress passed the Second Liberty Bond act in 1917. It has since been raised repeatedly to accommodate Washington’s profligate spending. Constitutionalists hear such things and ask themselves “what does the Constitution have to say?” More…

The mindless militarism of the GOP and its bobble-headed followers. Nothing helped elect Obama more than the neocons and the big-government “conservatism” of Dubya. It appears the Republicans have learned nothing as they still try to out-hawk the already hawkish Barack. The pro-war, pro-torture GOP will continue to be treated like pariahs by the voters & rightfully so. Too bad the alternative is pro-war, pro-torture Dems who are just more deceptive and disingenuous about it.

President Barack Obama said he renominated Ben Bernanke for another term as chairman of the Federal Reserve because of Bernanke’s role in helping the nation avoid another Great Depression.

“Ben approached a financial system on the verge of collapse with calm and wisdom; with bold action and out-of-the-box thinking that has helped put the brakes on our economic freefall,” Obama said Tuesday morning.

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