Leave Climate Science to the Scientists From Now On

Doug Ross points out this howler.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), a global warming alarmist bureau, predicted in May of 2008 that the North Pole would be free of ice last summer.

But it seems they underestimated the extent of Arctic ice by 500,000 km². That's about 190,000 square miles, an area the size of the States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland combined — with room left over for West Virginia, South Carolina, and Indiana, to boot.

They weren't using the most accurate methods to measure, but were using older, inaccurate methods because they were in line with their earlier data.

In other words, even though they knew that the methods used to gather their earlier data were inaccurate, they continued to use them for prediction.

Sphere: Related Content

The Coming Incorrect Response to the Wrong Problem

In all likelihood, when the Electoral College of the United States meets in December, Barack Hussein Obama will be elected President. Despite his unproven eligibility, Obama is very good at behind-the-scenes political arm-twisting and race-baiting, and will probably garner enough votes push aside his closest competitors.

But leaving aside how we got to this point, Obama will live in the White House.

So what is he going to do? He's going to respond to the economic "crisis" as FDR responded to the depression of 1929: spend like mad, in an effort to get reelected. But as Yid With Lid puts it, that won't help us recover:

As late as 1938, nine years into the depression, almost one out of five workers remained unemployed. What the government gave with one hand, through increased spending, it took away with the other, through increased taxation, and the increased power of labor. But that was not an even trade-off. As the root cause of a great deal of mismanagement and inefficiency, government was responsible for a lost decade of economic growth.

And this is not the depression of 1929, or even 1932. It's a crisis in credit confidence brought on by years of systemic government over-regulation and intervention.

Companies have been burdened with reporting requirements that cost them millions in accounting charges, for little tangible benefit. Compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley rules alone costs a business about a million dollars a year, and for the small-to-medium businesses that are the backbone of the economy -- where the jobs are -- that's a serious hurdle. And it's for nothing more than paperwork.

After forcing banks to make loans to people who couldn't afford them, Congress and the Obama-led forces of political correctness are now going to double down to keep people in the homes they still can't afford, in the name of pain avoidance. It will lead to the same place it did before: default and crash.

Now as each new company deemed too big to fail teeters on the brink of failure, rather than allowing them to fail and trusting that the system which has worked for hundreds of years will continue to work, we assume that we are smarter than our forbears. We can succeed in directing from Mount Etna the affairs of men. Yes, we can.

So rather than admit the failure of the Community Reinvestment and Sarbanes-Oxley Acts, we expand government without care or concern as to what the long-term effect of doing so may be.

It's a crisis!
We must to something!
This is something!
This must be done!

In reality we are not addressing the same problem they were faced with in 1929 or 1932. Even if we were faced with the Great Depression, imitating Hoover and Roosevelt would not solve it. The only answer is to first stop doing, with excessive intervention and regulation, the damage we are doing, and allow the natural wonder that is the American economy again to display its awesome powers.

Sphere: Related Content

Keeping the Tigers Away

Man: Hey, little fella, why are you banging those sticks together?
Boy: To keep the tigers away.
Man: There are no tigers around here!
Boy: Works, don't it.

Writing at Cato, Jim Harper notes that the airport security behavioral profiling program is a failure on multiple levels:

According to this story in USA Today, interviewing or patting down 160,000 people with (unreported) indicia of suspicion at airports has resulted in 1,266 arrests. It has failed to find wrongdoing 99.3% of the time. Occassionally, investigations based on behavioral profiling have turned up such things as drug possession and the use of fake identification.

Behavioral profiling has never turned up someone planning harm to aviation security. It has never turned up a person with weapons, guns, bombs, or any other implement that would cause a flight to be delayed, much less brought down.

A 0.7% success rate in finding crime is not relevant. Behavioral profiling has a 0% success rate in finding threats to aviation. Behavioral profiling does not have a proximate relationship to securing against harm coming to commercial aviation.

Works, don't it.

Behavioral profiling, as used by the the Department of Homeland Security, violates the principles of good criminal profiling: DHS is not validating a suspect against a list of known qualifiers in a particular case; they are searching with a broad net, and advertising that they're doing so. It's an improper use of profiling.

The purpose is not to find anyone; the purpose is to keep the bad guys from trying to fly.

Works, don't it.

It may work, but at a tremendous cost. We passengers lose our liberty and personal dignity, while the bad guys are forced merely to choose another vector of attack. And the point of the joke about keeping the tigers away is of course that we don't know if the terrorists would ever again plan to use the air system to carry out an attack.

What DHS has done is to assert governmental authority to inspect our persons, papers, and effects without probable cause, while ensuring that fewer people can effectively use the airways for legitimate purposes.

Works, don't it.

Sphere: Related Content

Hilllary Abandons Senate for Secretarial Position

Hillary Rodham Clinton, former star in the Democratic Party, is leaving the Senate after what some say is little accomplished except a failed attempt to capture her Party's nomination for President. Clinton will accept a job as Secretary in the administration of the very candidate that Party bosses selected over her.

The move gives Ms. Rodham Clinton a chance to gain executive experience. Previously, political opponents pointed to her lack of executive experience.

Saddled with campaign debt, Clinton is leaving the Congress to join the Executive Branch. Clinton accepted millions in loans from her New York-based charitable foundation to finance her White House bid. While foreign citizens are forbidden to make campaign donations to Presidential candidates, donations to her charitable foundation can come from anywhere.

Clinton won't be forced to work on a day-to-day basis in the White House, which she occupied in her youth with her husband Bill Clinton, but in the State Department. As an older woman, she no longer has children at home, and so is free to travel.

Sphere: Related Content

Soakitalism

What you get when government takes ownership in companies to "save" them.

w/t FrankJ

Sphere: Related Content

The Tyranny of Small, Featureless Men.

I'm not ready to annoint Michael Steele as head of the RNC, any more than I am ready to endorse Sarah Palin for President in 2012.

This, however, is a portrait of the Republican Party, and to say that it falls short of greatness is something of an understatement:

As to the new chair, don’t pay any attention to people who aren’t on the RNC,” he told me. “This is not a good thing, but the current RNC believes only one of their own should be chair. Maybe a dozen have a clue politically — and that’s being very kind. None (as chairman) could be an ideas leader or command the substantive respect of Republican senators or representatives.”

If Michael Steele isn't a member of the RNC by Tuesday, you're all a bunch of idiots.

Sphere: Related Content

They Are Not The Public's Airwaves

With all of this talk of the Censorship Doctrine (from which the Democrats may be backing away), it seems like no one can talk about the topic without using the phrase "public airwaves".

Maybe it's a fine point, and I'm just picky. But while the public "owns" the air, the public doesn't own everything transmitted over that air.

You can put up a sign in your yard, and unless you obscure someone else's view or something, you don't have to present an opposing view. And yet, you are transmitting, in a very real sense, the images over the exact same air as a radio show uses. It's just that we can see light with our eyes, but radio waves are of too long a wavelength for us to detect with the naked eye.

What the public owns is spectrum. The set of frequencies allowable to radio broadcast is controlled by the FCC, so that radio stations close together don't broadcast on the same frequency, and so bureaucrats have something to do.

But the actual radio waves being propagated are not the property of the government nor the public, but of the broadcaster. You could say they are no longer even the broadcaster's property in any real sense, either, but they certainly don't belong to you and me.

So while I get the idea that idioms don't have to make sense, this is a case where the idiom has the potential to deceive.

Just saying.

Sphere: Related Content

No more bailouts.

Writing at Redstate, Francis Cianfrocca analyzes the proposed (or wheedled) bailout of GM, saying a bunch of smart things, including this:

If I were handling this for the US Treasury, I’d insist on a total wipeout of GM’s shareholders and management, force them to liquidate assets over perhaps a two-year period, and take a slug of preferred stock with a very large annual interest rate. Because you know there will be no possibility of making money on this bailout. The auto industry has too much of the wrong kind of production capacity, and it needs to disappear.

If I were in charge of handling this for the Treasury, I'd either say "We don't do this, or I walk."

The government has to stop meddling in the economy. People argue that something must be done to keep the economy moving, and I say: No! We've been spoiled by 20 years of good economies, except for hiccups, to the point where we think we've figured it out.

We can't outlaw pain. Attempts to try are leading us to a situation in which the government, soon to be led by a Marxist, controls the strategic direction of our biggest industries.

I have no doubt that GM failing would have a ripple effect on the rest of the economy. I also have no doubt that some of that effect would be seen as positive, especially by those at Ford and Chrysler.

Something has to be done all right. Something needs to be done to turn around this notion that our elections are about the economy. Something needs to be done to separate government and business. Something needs to be done to return us to the understanding of success as the result of repeated failure, that learning from mistakes doesn't happen unless we are forced to deal with the consequences of those mistakes.

GM has become too big to move quickly in response to changing market conditions. Their union membership, including retirees, is so large as to be its own voting bloc, exercising inertia of its own. Some say they have become too big to fail; I say they have become too big to succeed.

Pluck the cancer? That's the wrong metaphor. The proper one is to let the students succeed or fail based on their abilities, not slip them answers to the test so they don't fail.

Because in the end, none will study as hard or pay attention at lecture if they know that the teacher will bail them out in the end.

Sphere: Related Content

Jury Duty is Patriotic

I sat on a jury once. I'd always been curious about what went on in the jury room, and so when called, I didn't take any of the several opportunities they give you to drop out. If you really don't want to serve on a jury, for whatever reason, just say "I heard about this case, and can't be objective."

But the people on my jury made me proud to be an American. Each one of us sat in the jury box, taking notes or simply watching, as the prosecution and defense walked us through the intricacies of forms and procedures used by the Illinois Department of Public Health. A local administrator was accused of fraud in allegedly cheating the State out of $10,000 or so (for the County's benefit).

The prosecution presented all kinds of evidence about how this lady put dubiously official meals on the county credit card, operated the soda machine petty cash fund in some way that was supposed to be inappropriate, and wasn't liked by the people in her office. They succeeded in making me, and I think the rest of the jury, dislike the defendant.

But, in the end, they had to show that she deliberately tried to claim money for the County that belonged to the State.

We poured over the records. It turned out that there was over $10,000 in mistaken charges, in various categories of mistakes (which we had to learn to recognize as if we were Medicaid auditors). But in every case, comparing the dates of when we were told she was informed of some class of errors to the records, that class of errors would virtually disappear.

We asked the judge if we could count the credit card junk and soda machine "slush fund" in with the Medicaid fund, and he said to read the charges: they were about Medicaid, not credit card abuse.

Having worked for State government, I know how ugly the paperwork is. I'd hate to be charged with fraud, lose my job, and be sent to jail just because I incorrectly filled out the paperwork.

Sphere: Related Content

Department of Kumbaya

Department of Peace? Please, let's strangle H.R. 808 at birth:

(a) In General- The Secretary shall--

1. work proactively and interactively with each branch of the Federal Government on all policy matters relating to conditions of peace;
2. serve as a delegate to the National Security Council;
3. call on the intellectual and spiritual wealth of the people of the United States and seek participation in its administration and in its development of policy from private, public, and nongovernmental organizations; and
   
4. monitor and analyze causative principles of conflict and make policy recommendations for developing and maintaining peaceful conduct.

The Secretary of Peace will have the authority to bureaucratically muck around with the entire government, including the judiciary. The Secretary will be on the NSC, and able to leak anything that goes on there. The Department will give a cabinet-level megaphone to every lunactivist academic kook who claims to oppose something bad, though that may be trice redundant.

Kum Ba Ya.

Sphere: Related Content

Yes, Nicole, You Are A Racist

Over at Ace of Spades HQ, commenter Nicole writes:

Today I referred to my hair as "brown" ("dark brown" to be exact). I then proceeded to say "I hate the color brown--it's not strong enough; it's boring."

Am I a racist?

The obligatory reply from Scott in OC:

Yes, Nicole, you are a racist. Not for hating the color brown, but because you used the word "dark" in a potentially insensitive manner that could incite hatred. Shame on you. The only way to absolve yourself from this unspeakable act is to dye your hair blue and vote for Obama.

But neither Nicole nor Scott fully plumb the depths of the PC pogrom which would take place in the event of an Obama Administration, enjoying majority support in both Houses of Congress.

Nicole used the word 'color' and even labeled something a particular color. Obviously racist.

Nicole noted that something being a particular color was not 'strong' enough. Truly racist.

Nicole said she hated something for being a particular color. Clearly racist.

In the looming Obama Administration, no mention of color, except perhaps in the abstract, will be acceptable. A notable exception to this will be teaching preschoolers the names for all the colors, which will be seen as the fulfillment of a basic human right to be maintained by a Children's Administration, with a Cabinet-level Secretary of the Child.

Sphere: Related Content

Obama's ACORN Denial of Service Attack

Barack Obama knows ACORN from the inside. He trained them.


So now that ACORN is submitting fraudulent voter registration forms in over a dozen States, the reason his $800,000 campaign expense for front work went at least partially to ACORN is now clear.

The purpose of an Internet Denial of Service attack is usually not (just) to disable the particular computer or network under direct attack, but either to draw response resources (troubleshooters) to the attacked system, or to force secondary systems to be used. Sometimes the DOS attack is merely designed to create the appearance of poor performance, so that users of the system turn to competitors or in any case away from the service it provides.

And so it is with the ACORN attack.

Rather than merely registering new Democratic voters, ACORN so clogs the system with phony registrations that it becomes nearly non-functional.

This is a result of ACORN employing people of questionable character (e.g., felons) to strong-arm and wheedle ordinary citizens into registering -- whether or not they are already registered voters (in the same district or another). Further, ACORN assigns to these unvirtuous employees quotas, making it virtually certain that the employees will submit fake registrations, en masse.

So across the country in battleground States, voter registration has ground to a halt, or limps along with demoralized staff and tarnished public image. ACORN is doing direct damage to confidence in the sanctity of our electoral process, in an attempt to destroy its overall integrity. Rather than being content to register new voters, perhaps ACORN wants to make the registration process unnecessary. After all, if the system cannot be trusted, why use it?

And remember, Barack Obama trained them.

Sphere: Related Content

Obama's False Hope

Yes, it's a struggle to raise a family, pay the bills, do right by our neighbors, and keep the bottom line of net worth going up. But I do not think that our struggles are anything like those of our forebears who tamed a continent, fought world wars, and passed it all on to us.

Barack Obama, more than most politicians, is making his name on the scurrilous notion that only the government can provide for us. Rather than providing hope, he is actually crushing the hopes of those who follow him. He offers a block of government cheese, when a seven-course meal is waiting for those who will but learn to shop, cook, and set their own tables.

The fact is that while a "sluggish" economy may be a more difficult environment in which to succeed, there are always places that are booming in the midst of the bust. There are always people who need services, and things which need to be made. So even in a tough economy, the will to succeed and the right plan can overcome the obstacles.

And it's supposed to be a struggle. If it were easy, or if success were as simple as choosing it, with no more effort required than for failure, then everyone would do it.

But in this world, and not that fantasy one, the rewards of success, on whatever scale we measure it, are usually in some way proportional to the amount of work, luck, skill, or determination put forth to achieve it. "Get rich quick" schemes usually only enrich the early adopters at the top of some pyramid, and then only until those at the bottom find out. Wealth is built by hard word, saving and investing. Every successful entrepreneur has to face the question, at some point, of whether to spend now to make his life easier or to invest in his business.

And the decision to invest for the future is the essence of virtue. While failing to feed one's family is not virtuous, choosing to plow profits back into the business rather than buying the family a fancy car or new television is.

Something on the order of 100% of the people who have ever lived have had life very much worse than the most desperate American of today. People are capable of surviving and thriving without many things considered essential by moderns. Television, computers, lawnmowers, and even indoor plumbing are not essential to survival, though to one degree or another each is considered so.

Deciding what is a luxury and what is essential will reveal how a person views the future. If the future is seen to contain rewards for which a person needs to work, then he will turn aside from acquiring the nonessential items of personal recreation but will insist on having the items which are required to achieve his goals. A mobile telephone is a frivolous toy in the hands of the slothful, but the link to a future empire for the industrious.

Parents need to instill in their children the belief that success is in their power to achieve if they follow the rules and work harder than the next person. Reward success, and children learn that to get the reward they must work and achieve. That is the wellspring of true self esteem. That's real hope. And it has nothing to do with whether the overall economy is booming or busting, because people succeed in bad times and fail in good ones.

Sphere: Related Content

The Katrina Narrative

The criticism of the Bush Administration for its handling of hurricanes Katrina/Rita was, in my increasingly lonely opinion, unjustified Democrat and liberal media opportunism. I am disappointed, but unsurprised, that John McCain has made that narrative his own, and is running against President Bush's unpopular reputation. As I said, my voice is joined by few others.

I will agree that government, at all levels, failed to solve the problems created by nature.

But before Katrina, the expectation of the Federal role was as a backup to local authorities, rather than as a front-line emergency response agent. Katrina marked a turning point, after which disaster response will be henceforth primarily a Federal responsibility.

Government cannot solve every problem, nor can it solve any problem overnight. In particular, natural disasters, even ones for which we have some warning, are going to happen. Government will fail to address them. It's going to happen again, and moving the problem up the food chain from local to Federal will not help.

Whether or not government responds well to an emergency is subject to a toss of dice. Some local officials on the Gulf Coast responded well, for instance, while others worried about disarming the citizenry. Tasking the Federal government with emergency response will make a single toss of the dice matter much more. Each local agency might succeed or fail, but the failure would be limited to only the area of their jurisdiction. A Federal failure is a failure for all.

I understand the political reality: McCain (even if he were not genetically predisposed to solving problems with governmental action) must take responsibility for every woe that falls to Man, and especially for this particular woe.

It would be nice to hear him praise the individuals, who are legion, and local officials, if such there be, who responded with selfless courage to the challenges they faced in the hour of disaster.

It would be even nicer to hear a Federal official make a stand against the growth of Federal power at the expense of State and local authority.

This is one more area in which we've ceded more power to the State to do us good, which power will eventually be used, with the best of intentions or the worst of malice, to do us harm.

Sphere: Related Content

A pound of prevention barely worth an ounce of cure

Michael F. Cannon has a blog post at Cato.org about preventive medicine.

While I've always thought that prevention of disease would be less costly than treatment, that is only true, when we stop to ponder it, when the total cost per person treated with some preventive measure is less than the savings in cure costs. That means that the total cost per person treated or per preventive measure would have to be lower than the difference between the cure expenditure with and without prevention. Furthermore, those costs have three categories: direct costs, indirect costs, and abstract costs.

You there at the back! Please don't yawn unless you've got enough for the rest of us.

Where was I? Oh, yes. The direct costs are the costs of shots, educational materials, and so on.

The indirect costs include the time off work going to get some preventive treatment, the loss of efficiency when some supposed safety control is implemented, and the added bureaucratic sludge that happens whenever we try to prevent something bad by changing the behavior of everyone.

Abstract costs include the loss of freedom for the individuals who are given the prevention.

Nestled invisibly between the indirect and abstract costs of preventative medicine is what it does to people's opinion. Much of preventative medicine consists of "raising awareness" of the problem, so that people can avoid stepping into open pits and so forth.

But if told too many times about an open pit, or a hot stove, or dangerous intersection, people will be filled with thoughts only of safety and precaution, aftraid to risk opening their eyes lest ultraviolet radiation damage their unprotected corneas. They exist only to be safe.

Alternatively, the more preventive measures we implement, the more jaded the people become and the more difficult it becomes to raise their awareness to a preventive level.

But the key problem is that for prevention to work, the pool of those treated with the preventive measure must be larger than the number cured, in many cases far larger. Taken together, and since prevention must be applied to the wider pool while remediation only to those affected, the cost of the prevention must be very low, and its effectiveness very high, for prevention to make sense.

Depending on the depth of the pit and the type of snakes at the bottom, it may be more cost-effective and indeed more humane to wait for someone to step into the pit and throw them a rope. Put a sign on the pit perhaps, but don't develop a slick ad campaign to tell people to avoid the pit, which will likely draw more people to it anyway.

This all yields the best quote ever on socialized medicine:

The point of the medical-care system is to serve people. It is not the point of people to serve the medical-care system.
-- Louise B. Russell

Sphere: Related Content

Education

Ironically, I do not believe that I have ever in the halls of the Academy touched on the topic of education, that is, what the government proffers as such.

For it is galling that the State should be a provider of education at all.

We have in the free world in general and the United States in particular a fine tradition of the free press, which institution generally operates as a check against government excess. If there is a hint of the personal peccadilloes of an elected official or if someone claims that the single most nationally unifying event in the last 50 years was the product of a government conspiracy of absurd design and dubious motivation, our faithful media are there to report it.

But the media have shown themselves completely unable to fulfill this function in one key aspect. While the press do jealously guard their own sacred cows in the First Amendment, they fail miserably as guardians of the others. Pointedly, they fail to question the legitimacy of government involvement in new ventures as they come along. They regard their role as ensuring proper government function and spreading truth, yet they disregard the fundamental truth of our republic, that government should only be allowed to interfere in certain matters, but no others. While they seem to understand particular limits on government, the more general concept of a limited government eludes them.

And I place the blame for this failure at the feet of government-run education. Whatever else a government school teaches, the superiority of private education is not it. Rather, the goal of public education is to socialize, to create a population that is not wary of government intrusion but accepting and welcoming, even demanding of it.

The schools should teach basic skills in letters and numbers, literature, the sciences, and mathematics. They should provide knowledge about our history and that of the wider world. And they should teach critical thinking skills such as logical analysis and the spotting of demagoguery. But there ought to be a wild diversity of political, religious, social views taught, and none to the exclusion of the others. When the State hires the teatchers and the State mandates not just what is to be taught but how, no doctrine which is contrary to its expansion can long expect currency.

So the problem isn't merely, or precisely, that the media is full of liberal hacks, which it incontrovertibly is. The problem is that thanks to years of government training, it's full of closed-minded liberal hacks.

Sphere: Related Content

Mandatory Medical and the Welfare State

Over at left-wing blog Talking Points Memo, the highest-rated reader blog currently is ObamaCare: American Incrementalism. It's a fine analysis of the difference between Hillary Clinton's socialized medicine plan and Barack Obama's socialized medicine plan. The difference? The anonymous blogger thinks Americans will swallow Obama's plan, since it's for the children.

For centuries, Americans have proven resistant to governmental provisions of welfare. The quintessentially American ethos of self-sufficiency and independence leads many voters to recoil from the very notion that the government should take a prominent role in their lives. Many Americans would prefer to shoulder greater risks and maintain their independence, than to surrender their freedom of choice and gain greater security. But there has always been an important exception to this general rule. Americans feel a collective obligation to care for the vulnerable and the defenseless. When proposals are advanced to care for those believed unable to care for themselves, they have almost always enjoyed tremendous support. Moreover, almost every major expansion of the welfare state has followed the same path - reforms initially proposed to benefit the most vulnerable are gradually expanded to benefit all Americans.

Make no mistake, friends: the left wants all doctoring to be done by the government. Adapting the current system of employment-based medical insurance to that scheme is just the first step.

The current system is the best there is. People come here to be trained, and they come here to be healed. Mandatory medicine will fix that, surely.

It sounds nice: protecting children and making them well. But mandatory medical insurance will quickly become mandatory medical practice; and some procedures, too expensive or inconvenient for the system, will have to be denied.

I just hope Americans are smart enough to see that, not swept along by wishful thinking.

Sphere: Related Content

Ceding power to the State

The quote from William F. Buckley, "I will not cede more power to the state.", gave me reason to recall a principle that is not spoken enough. Whenever we ask the government to do anything for us that we like, we are giving it the power to do something we don't.

If we wish to keep our freedoms of speech, press, and public meeting, we cannot allow the freedom of religion to be curbed, for it is only by limiting the first three that the fourth can be impinged.

Ask government to limit freedom of speech, press, art, or any other freedom in the interest of morality, and you also give it the power to limit your own freedom of speech, press, or art when next the pendulum of change swings against you.

We cannot demand a war on drugs without losing the battle for liberty. And if one poor lifestyle choice is so illegal as to allow the police to seize your assets without due process, why are the other poor lifestyle choices any different? Should drinking, smoking, gambling, pornography, foul language, overeating or speeding on the highway be any different?

We cannot ask the government to spend money it doesn't have without incurring a higher tax burden. While it's true that government revenues tend to increase over time when taxes are lowered, that is not a reason to increase spending in anticipation of higher revenue. Government spending requires that the government get funds via taxation at some point. If we lower taxes and wait for the increased revenue (from greater economic activity), increased spending counts against a future tax cut.

Looking at the bigger picture, many people entertain the fantasy that only certain parts of government are problematic. Some wish to increase defense spending, or farm subsidies, or education funding, or some other portion of government, without realizing the implications for the rest of government. Any increase in spending, unless it is accompanied by an equal cut in another area, increases the size of government. That increase requires increased taxation, and neither the increase in spending nor the taxation required to achieve it will ever go away even once the problem they ostensibly address is no longer a concern.

If you ask the government for "free" health care (or even "free" health insurance), be prepared to have government then control your behavior in the interest of decreasing medical costs.

Not only must we not cede power to the state, we must not ask of it any favors.

Sphere: Related Content

Cratocracy

Faith in the power of government. Governing (especially attempting to govern well) for the sake of gaining and preserving power.

Sphere: Related Content

Media, Government Tell Us Weather to Panic

Here in sunny Illinois we have a summer weather pattern that includes a wet period in late April or early May, followed by an extended period of a few weeks without much rain. Then, just as farmers are starting to worry a bit, we'll get a nice thunderstorm. That pattern of warm, humid, rainless days interrupted by periodic thunderstorms continues throughout the summer until late August or early September, when the first fall cold front passes through.

But it seems that the media, in cooperation with the National Weather Service, think people don't know what rain is. If there's a thunderstorm cell, announcements interrupt whatever TV and radio programming to tell everyone to take shelter. That's in addition to the top-of-the-hour weather brief and the list of affected counties scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

It's Illinois. It's summer. We know it will be hot outside, and where to find shade. We also know what to do if the sky gets dark and water starts coming out of it.

I think since 9/11, and especially Katrina, the government has become more and more safety conscious. And the Global Warming hype draws in aspects of the Earthism religion, so that broadcasting public safety notices becomes an exercise in spiritual action. The media enable this, possibly because many media types are practitioners of Earthism, but mainly because it's their business to get people worried while making themselves feel good. In a giant game of CYA overkill, they trumpet every passing cloud or hot summer day as a source of danger -- and look in on your neighbors. And if your house gets blown away, well, Nanny government told you.

It's spread to ordinary folks, as well. Global Warming disaster movies and that fearmonger Al Gore have convinced people that the weather just has to be about to kill them. There may no longer be a Red under your bed, but now there is a hurricane on your TV.

Come on. Mankind survived for years and years without knowing which counties could expect thunder, and while Dorothea needs help raking her leaves, she doesn't need me scaring her when a cloud passes by.

As for that stupid klaxon sound the NWS plays both before and after their announcements, with the volume up even higher than commercials: is there anything to do but turn the sound down?

If there's a tornado, let me know. Otherwise, leave me alone.

Sphere: Related Content