Global Warming Hoax Redux

It will come as no surprise that the Regular Guy thinks that the "global warming" scare of the past two decades has largely been a hoax.   I thought so, and said so, early and often, for a lot of good and sufficient reasons:

1.  The same cabal of leftists, activists and "scientists" in academia told us when I was a teenager that the world was cooling and descending into an ice age.   The prescription:  more government intervention and less evil capitalism.   Funny how they always have the same prescription, no matter what the diagnosis is... it's almost as if selling the prescription matters more than whether the science is right.

2. The notion that the earth is "warming" or "cooling" over a short period makes no sense to me, and never did.   The planet is 5 billion years old.   It has warmed or cooled in cycles throughout that period.   Human life is a blip.   The industrial age is a blip of a blip.   It's arrogance to think that we're having an important effect on climate compared to, oh, the freakin' Sun, for instance.

3.  I don't trust professional scientists:  they, like anyone else, have career incentives that are geared toward getting appointments, getting grants, getting money.   Once they're down the path toward a theory of global warming, it becomes hard to break through that institutionalized set of incentives.   Haven't these people ever read freakin' Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?

4.  Human error and human laziness.   Are you telling me that there's no chance that the people who are reporting temperatures at thousands of locations across the globe aren't making routine mistakes all the time?   That the thermometers aren't getting out of calibration?  That the locations of the thermometers aren't changing their characteristics?  (A thermometer located in a field in 1950 is read every day by an ever-changing series of technicians who are more and less dedicated and more and less intelligent and more and less precise and more and less attentive to details; meanwhile, the field gradually is surrounded by buildings and parking lots and cars and activity.   Voila!   The average temperature changes over time.   Surprised?   I'm not, and I don't think anyone with a remote sensitivity to human nature should be.   But that doesn't mean that the actual temperature has changed a whit.

So this article from Forbes struck me funny today, and particularly the sentence I've bolded below:

There is no statistically significant warming trend since November of 1996 in monthly surface temperature records compiled at the University of East Anglia. Do we now understand why there’s been no change in fourteen and a half years?

If you read the news stories surrounding a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Boston University’s Robert Kaufmann and three colleagues, you’d say yes, indeed. It’s China’s fault. By dramatically increasing their combustion of coal, they have increased the concentration of fine particles in the atmosphere called sulphate aerosols, which reflect away solar radiation, countering the warming that should be occurring from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide....


Reality may be a bit simpler, or much more complicated.  But the reason this is all so important is that if there is no good explanation for the lack of warming, then an increasingly viable alternative is that we have overestimated the gross sensitivity of temperature to carbon dioxide in our computer models.

One problem is that we really don’t know how much cooling is exerted by sulfates, or whether they are just a convenient explanation for the failure of the forecasts of dramatic warming.  The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which grants itself climate authority, states that our “Level of Scientific Understanding” of the effects range between “low” and “very low,” with a possible cooling between zero (none)  and a whopping 3.5 degrees (C) when the climate comes to equilibrium (which it will never do).  That’s a plenty large range from which to pick out a number to cancel about as much warming as you’d like.

On the one hand, the amount of sulphate aerosols from coal-burning power plants in rapidly industrializing China (and presumably India too) are presumed to have a significant effect on temperature.   On the other hand, the very people who have foisted "global warming" on us, the UN's IPCC, don't have the foggiest idea of what the nature and magnitude of those effects are.   Somewhere between 0 and 3.5 degrees (C)?   Really?   When the whole theory of global warming is based on a one-century temperature change of less than 1 degree (C)?   Really?

Science depends on having its hypotheses be falsifiable when confronted with evidence.   A belief that cannot be falsified is not science, but religion.   The global-warming religion won't let its hypothesis be falsified; it demands that we accept it as "settled."   But we can't make serious political and economic decisions based on a hypothesis that is, at bottom, a tenet of faith, not science.  And we certainly can't bet our world economy (and the lives of real, not hypothetical, human beings) on a conjecture that depends on measurements that include a factor (the effect of sulphate aerosols) that we don't understand and can't measure within, oh, 350% of the magnitude of the thing we're trying to measure (global temperature).

Girls of the Day - U.S.A. Soccer Version (Hope Solo and Alex Morgan)

The Regular Guy and the Regular Son don't like soccer much, and we especially don't like women's sports that much.   The WNBA, for instance, seems to me to be a bit of an affirmative action program for women in sports, getting TV time (but not much TV audience), when a good boys high-school team could likely demolish the best WNBA team (too much size, too much strength, too much speed).  

But we loved watching the women's World Cup this past week, ever since seeing (almost by accident) the thrilling end of the U.S.-Brazil quarterfinal.   It was sad to see the U.S. lose to Japan yesterday in the final, but it was a great game, decided after extra time on penalty kicks, and the U.S. women should be proud of how they played and how far they got. 

So, for our girls of the day, here are Hope Solo, the team's goaltender, and Alex Morgan, a young striker who scored a beautiful goal yesterday to put America ahead 1-0 in the second half.  

Here's Alex Morgan's goal from yesterday:

Malaise.... the Sequel

Goldman Sachs has revised it's forecast for unemployment at the end of 2012 to 8.75%.   This is extraordinarily bad for President Obama and while he may try to blame the Republican House, there is literally no way he can get re-elected if unemployment is still that high on election day in November 2012.  

Meanwhile, Laura Ingraham on her radio show here perfectly captures the Carteresque feel of Obama's Presidency, comparing Obama's rhetoric to Carter's famous "malaise" speech:




Great stuff. 


Hat tip: Ace of Spades.   

Girl of the Day - More Sedate Than Yesterday's (Barbara Stanwyck)

The Regular Wife brought the heat for yesterday's gratuitous Jayne Mansfield shot, so we'll go more sedate today.   It's Barbara Stanwyck's birthday.  Stanwyck starred in at least a couple of my absolutely favorite old movies, Frank Capra's Meet John Doe with Gary Cooper and Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve with Henry Fonda.   Here's a great scene from the latter with Fonda, where a con-artist (Stanwyck) romances a nerdy scientist (Fonda):

Saturday Morning Doom and Gloom from Mark Steyn

Gloom and Doom!  I love Mark Steyn, but reading him on a Saturday morning can make you want to raid the liquor cabinet and get an early start on the Bloody Marys.  

Anyway, Steyn lays it on thick this morning about the debt ceiling "negotiations," capturing the essentially Through-the-Looking-Glass aspect of the whole affair:  

There is something surreal and unnerving about the so-called “debt ceiling” negotiations staggering on in Washington. In the real world, negotiations on an increase in one’s debt limit are conducted between the borrower and the lender. Only in Washington is a debt increase negotiated between two groups of borrowers.

Actually, it’s more accurate to call them two groups of spenders. On the one side are Obama and the Democrats, who in a negotiation supposedly intended to reduce American indebtedness are (surprise!) proposing massive increasing in spending (an extra $33 billion for Pell Grants, for example). The Democrat position is: You guys always complain that we spend spend spend like there’s (what’s the phrase again?) no tomorrow, so be grateful that we’re now proposing to spend spend spend spend like there’s no this evening.

On the other side are the Republicans, who are the closest anybody gets to representing, albeit somewhat tentatively and less than fullthroatedly, the actual borrowers — that’s to say, you and your children and grandchildren. But in essence the spenders are negotiating among themselves how much debt they’re going to burden you with. It’s like you and your missus announcing you’ve set your new credit limit at $1.3 million, and then telling the bank to send demands for repayment to Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s kindergartner next door.

Nothing good is going to come from these ludicrously protracted negotiations over laughably meaningless accounting sleights-of-hand scheduled to kick in circa 2020. All the charade does is confirm to prudent analysts around the world that the depraved ruling class of the United States cannot self-correct, and, indeed, has no desire to.

When the 44th president took office, he made a decision that it was time for the already unsustainable levels of government spending finally to break the bounds of reality and frolic and gambol in the magical fairy kingdom of Spendaholica: This year, the federal government borrows 43 cents of every dollar it spends, a ratio that is unprecedented. Barack Obama would like this to be, as they say, “the new normal” — at least until that 43 cents creeps up a nickel or so, and the United States government is spending twice as much as it takes in, year in, year out, now and forever. If the Republicans refuse to go along with that, well, then the negotiations will collapse and, as he told Scott Pelley on CBS the other night, Gran’ma gets it. That monthly Social Security check? Fuhgeddabouddit. “I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven’t resolved this issue,” declared the president. “Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”

But hang on. I thought the Social Security checks came out of the famous “Social Security trust fund,” whose “trustees” assure us there’s currently $2.6 trillion in there. Which should be enough for the August 3rd check run, shouldn’t it? Golly, to listen to the president, you’d almost get the impression that, by the time you saw the padlock off the old Social Security lockbox, there’s nothing in there but a yellowing IOU and a couple of moths. Indeed, to listen to Obama, one might easily conclude that the whole rotten, stinking edifice of federal government is an accounting trick.

We have rooms full of millionaires talking about how they are going to pretend to "cut" spending in the "out" years -- meaning years after they are out of office and already soaking in the plush federal pensions they will have "earned" -- all the while piling roughly $10,000 of new federal debt on every one of the 150 million American workers every year.   But even that's not quite right, since half of the federal workers pay no federal income tax and won't be paying off any of that debt.   So $20,000 per worker who pays taxes.   But that's not quite right either, since most of those pay only a small percentage of the total federal income tax.  At my income level -- not great, but safely inside the top 5% or so -- we pay roughly 60% of federal income taxes and so will be expected to pay off that amount of the federal debt.   Hmmmmm.... 60% of the $1.6 trillion deficit the feds are expected to run this year?   That's about $1 trillion in debt this year.   5% of workers.... that's about 7.5 million people.   So the federal government just laid, oh, about $133,000 in debt on me and people like me.   This year.   And every year as far as the eyes can see.

That's more than I still owe on my house, in case you were wondering.   Care to take odds on me paying that back anytime soon?

Doom!   And gloom!

Girl of the Day - Okay, So This Is Just Gratuitous (Jayne Mansfield)

So sue me.

Syria On the Radar Screen?

Is Syria on America's radar screen yet?   A million protestors in the street, according to this article at least, and the government firing into the crowd, killing 17?   Do we care?  Or do we only care about freedom for Middle Eastern peoples when it's in the President's short-term political interest to care (Libya) and he thinks he can do the job on the cheap?   (Hasn't worked out that way in Libya, which is now in the fourth month of a non-war with a non-assassination assassination strategy, but still.... it was supposed to be easy and quick, which is how Obama appears to like things.)   

I'm Alarmed, Are You Alarmed? (The Real Federal Debt)

When we think of our personal finances, we ought to think, not just about what we legally owe, but what we would inevitably be obliged to pay.    That's our "real" debt.   I don't legally owe my children a college education, but I am saving for it as if it were a debt I will be obliged to pay.  

That's a concept that we need to keep in mind as we think about the federal government's debt.  The federal government debt is much in the news, but the federal government also has what is known as "agency debt" that isn't talked about as being part of the picture.   But it is, as Andrew Pollock at AEI shows:

Over the last four decades, the U.S. government has engaged in a financial experiment, or adventure, of exploding agency debt relative to Treasury securities.

The huge debt of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, other government-sponsored enterprises, and other off-budget government agencies (“agency debt”) fully relies on the credit of the United States. This means it by definition exposes the taxpayers to losses, but it is not accounted for as government debt. As the Federal Reserve carefully notes in its “Flow of Funds” report, non-budget agency and GSE debt is not “considered officially to be part of the total debt of the federal government.”

Not “considered officially,” as they say—but what is it really? It puts the federal budget at risk, subjecting it to uncertainty of defaults. It has proven its ability to generate huge losses for the taxpayers. In other words, it is really, if not “officially,” government debt.

The vast majority of agency debt goes to subsidized housing finance though Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Banks, and the FHA/Ginnie Mae combination. It represents off-balance sheet financing and hidden leverage for the government. Fannie and Freddie in particular have reasonably been characterized as “government SIVs,”  (“structured investment vehicles”) which failed, just as did the SIVs of Citibank and other bailed out banks.

In 1970, Treasury debt held by the public (“Treasury debt”) was $290 billion. Agency debt was small by comparison: it totaled only $44 billion.

But by 2006, at the height of the housing bubble, while Treasury debt was up to $4.9 trillion, agency debt had inflated to $6.5 trillion. Treasury debt had increased 17 times during these years, but agency debt had multiplied 148 times!

At the end of 2010, Treasury debt was $9.4 trillion, and agency debt was $7.5 trillion.

As I said, I'm alarmed.   Are you?

***

UPDATE:

Then, of course, there's Kevin Williamson's view of the federal debt:

The debt numbers start to get really hairy when you add in liabilities under Social Security and Medicare — in other words, when you account for the present value of those future payments in the same way that businesses have to account for the obligations they incur. Start with the entitlements and those numbers get run-for-the-hills ugly in a hurry: a combined $106 trillion in liabilities for Social Security and Medicare, or more than five times the total federal, state, and local debt we’ve totaled up so far. In real terms, what that means is that we’d need $106 trillion in real, investable capital, earning 6 percent a year, on hand, today, to meet the obligations we have under those entitlement programs. For perspective, that’s about twice the total private net worth of the United States. (A little more, in fact.)

Suffice it to say, we’re a bit short of that $106 trillion. In fact, we’re exactly $106 trillion short, since the total value of the Social Security “trust fund” is less than the value of the change you’ve got rattling around behind your couch cushions, its precise worth being: $0.00.

Be afraid.   Be very afraid.

Girl of the Day - Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Program (Rita Hayworth)

Enough with celebrities playing softball, give me some actual star-power!

There, that's better.

Girl of the Day - Last All-Star Celebrity Softball Version (Jenna Fischer)

The girl from "The Office."   I never got into the show (sort of like "Seinfeld" in that way... it just always seemed a little to self-consciously "hip" to me), but Jenna Fischer has some virtues:

Real baseball starts again tomorrow.   Go Cards!

Little League World Series

If you ever wonder where the teams that play in the Little League World Series come from, well I can tell you.   They start where our team starts -- as an All-Star team for a local league playing in a district-level tournament.   Our team, the North Central (Milwaukee) Little League All-Stars at the "Juniors" level (13-14 year olds), has advanced from "pool play" to a single-elimination tournament in "District 1," one of six districts in Wisconsin.   If we win three straight games on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we advance to the state tournament.   From there we would go to a regional tournament, and, from there, to Williamsport, PA.

Well, that would sure be fun, but to do it we would have to win 13-15 games over the next four weeks or so against increasingly stiff competition.   We're an OK league, but we're not that good.

Still, I love coaching boys in baseball, and particularly love watching the Regular Son, who has been hitting the ball a ton in the tournament, and did a great job catching last night in a big win.   There's nothing quite so gratifying as watching your son play really well at a high level in baseball when it seems like only yesterday you were tossing the ball into his little glove from three feet away in the backyard and telling him to "squeeze it!"

They don't call it the National Pastime for nothing.   Anyway, that's why the Regular Guy hasn't blogged much the last three days.  

Girl of the Day - More Celebrity Softball Please! (Jennie Finch)

Jennie Finch actually is a world-class softball player, so this isn't entirely a gratuitous cheesecake post:

Not entirely anyway.  

Narcissus on the Potomac

Pete Wehner has a brilliant post on Commentary this morning on our President's seemingly boundless self-love:

At one point I thought it could be attributed to an unusual degree of cynicism, but now I wonder if it goes deeper than that. What I have in mind is President Obama’s obsession with portraying himself as our moral superior. Virtually every time he speaks these days, we are treated to another journey through what William Makepeace Thackeray aptly dubbed Vanity Fair.

For example, if you listened to the president’s news conference today, a theme we are by now wearily familiar with was repeated with numbing repetition: Obama, according to Obama, is quite simply better, much better, than those around him. He is a man of pure motives and unparalleled reasonableness, extraordinary intellectual depth, and unsurpassed seriousness. Others are driven by narrow self-interest, by the political calendar, by outside pressures. They are too ignorant or too weak to do the right thing, the good thing, the hard thing.

Not Obama.

Members of Congress, from both parties, are trapped by their own ideological predispositions. Obama, according to Obama, is not. He is free from bias, able to see reality whereas others merely see shadows. It is not easy to be Obama in a fallen world.

Politics tends to draw into its orbit people who are inordinately impressed with themselves and caught up in excessive self-love. But in Barack Obama we have stumbled across someone unlike anyone we have seen before. This is a man, after all, who believed he had it within his powers to heal the planet and reverse the ocean tides. And as the hopes and dreams of his 2008 campaign continue to crash down around him — as his popularity wanes, as some of his most worshipful followers turn from him, as he is  unable to extract himself from the results of his failed policies — his narcissism seems to grow, not diminish. It is hard to tell where this will all end. But I suspect it won’t be pretty. Watching what happens to those who fall in love with their own reflection rarely is.

There's something classically tragic about Obama just about now.   A man who has never been called to account, a man who therefore has never had to deal with public failure, a man who has been told practically since birth that he is the greatest thing since sliced bread... who are plebeians like John Boehner or Eric Cantor or Paul Ryan to challenge him?   None of them were editors of the Harvard Law Review, after all!*   Don't they know who Obama is?**

His fall, when it comes, as it inevitably will, promises to be very painful.  


* Cantor (George Washington, William & Mary Law), Boehner (Xavier), Ryan (Miami of Ohio).  

** This seems to be the mantra of liberal elitists like Obama, Kerry and Al Gore... "don't you know who I am?"

Birthday Today - Suzanne Vega

Suzanne Vega to me epitomizes a certain sad truth about the arts, and particularly the music industry:  for every superstar there are thousands upon thousands of wanna-bes who never make any money in music, but who squander some of the best years of their lives trying.   But, even sadder, to me anyway, are those who, like Vega, have a moment of fame in their youth and then are forgotten almost entirely.   Perhaps they are making good music still, perhaps even better music, but it goes largely unheard.  

Vega had one "hit" in "Luka" in 1987, an odd little folk tune about an abused child.   Why did such a song hit it big?  That's the question that I'm sure songwriters always ask themselves:  what is the magic ingredient to a pop song?  The instrumental hook?  The lyrics?  The subject matter?   The sound of the voice singing?  The arrangement?   Hard to say.   My son and I often talk about Bruce Springsteen ("often" actually doesn't begin to capture the level of the Regular Son's obsession with the Boss), and we have noted that even Springsteen had trouble identifying which of his songs would be hits, leaving "The Fever," "Pink Cadillac," "Because the Night," and "Fire" off his early albums.   (He also left off one of our favorites, a long song called "Thundercrack," but that one wouldn't have been a hit, it's just really cool.)

Anyway, Vega is my age, 52, today.   Here's "Luka" from way back when, back when I was a bartender and ne'er do well graduate student at Duke in English:

Girl of the Day - All-Star Break Edition (Kate Upton) and a Cardinals Mid-Season Update

The Cardinals are tied for first place in the NL Central at the All-Star break, which seems to bode well for them given the number of injuries they've had, and how poorly they've played at times compared to career norms.   Pujols had a terrible start and was on the 15-day DL; David Freese, our best third baseman, was out for six weeks; Holliday was on the DL; Schumaker, Punto, Craig have all been on the DL; Colby Rasmus, who I thought would have a breakout year, has gone into a deep slump and may get benched soon; the bullpen has been horrible and half of our relievers have been released or sent down; our starting pitching has been poor over the last month, etc.   And yet:  there we are in first place.   If Pujols becomes Pujols again (at least for the last three months he may be a Cardinal), and Berkman and Holliday can continue their fine seasons; and if the Cardinals' starters can hold up decently and LaRussa lets the new young bullpen arms do their thing (Salas, Sanchez, Boggs, Motte, Lynn, all of whom are young, power pitchers), I think the Cardinals pull away in the second half.

For now, it's the All-Star break, with the attendant festivities, including the celebrity softball game.   Apparently SI swimsuit model Kate Upton was playing.   That's wise marketing by MLB:

Accelerating Towards the Falls

We've all met people who seem to wallow in their own failures, who start down a path of failing, and then do things that are so self-destructive that it's almost as if they're actively trying to hasten their personal catastrophe.   Those kinds of people must at some point say to themselves: "Things are so bad, what does it matter if they get worse?"   And so the chronic gambler blows through the last of his life savings; or the alcoholic gets behind the wheel one more time; or the man who has been caught cheating on his wife and has sworn it will never happen again goes out and actively makes it happen again.   It's like they're in a canoe, drifting downstream toward a waterfall, and they're frantically paddling downstream trying to get there faster.  

Have we become a country of such self-destructive losers?   Well, you might think so.   Apparently Roger Kimball does, writing today the following:

There is no point in trying to imagine what a $1.5-trillion deficit means.  For most of us mortals, it is simply unimaginable.  All the more is a total federal debt of $14.3 trillion (and counting). And I haven’t even broached what I think of as the Williamson Warning (after Kevin Williamson, who gave prominence to the dour fact), namely that the real out-the-door, all-in price of U.S. debt is something closer to $130 trillion, a sum that, if you can bear to think about it, is Book-of-Revelations, Seventh-Seal, Four-Horsemen-of- the-Apocalypse scary.

Consider:  there are roughly 150 million workers in America.   A $1.5 trillion deficit means that our federal government borrowed $10,000 for every person in the American workforce!   In one year!  Where do they think that money will come from?   It can only come from those same workers, can't it?   And yet:  it can't.   American workers can't possibly generate that kind of extra wealth to pay off just this year's debt.   And what about next year's?   And the year after that?  

To paraphrase Scott Fitzgerald:   And so we beat on, boats borne along ceaselessly toward Niagara Falls.   Can't you hear the roaring downstream as the water crashes on the rocks?   I can.

Connect the Numbers

As I noted below, today the unemployment rate for June was released, and it was up 0.1% to 9.2%.   Not good, to say the least.    But it's likely worse than what's reported.... if the employment participation rate was as high today as it was in Jaunary 2009 -- meaning the percentage of the population who are in the job market -- then the unemployment rate would actually be 11.2%.   In other words, with a work force of approximately 150 million people, we've lost 2% -- 3 million or so -- who have simply left the work force.  

On the other hand, consider three other numbers:  (1) the minimum wage, which was $5.15 until July 24, 2007, ratcheted up over the next two years until it reached its current figure of $7.25 in July 2009; (2) federal  unemployment benefits are now extended to a maximum of 99 weeks, or nearly two years; and (3) the number of Americans on food stamps has increased 37% since January 2009.   Couple these with the federal mortgage assistance available, where homeowners behind on their mortgages can refinance, lower payments, lower interest rates, etc., and what have you got?   Simultaneously you have government programs which:

• reduce incentives for employers to hire new people (high minimum wage); and
• reduce incentives for the unemployed to accept new jobs, even at low wages (free food, help with housing, free money in unemployment insurance).

Now that's a bad equation:   Employers who don't want to hire plus employees who don't want to work.  Not too surprising that the unemployment figure has stayed high. 

Funemployment!   It's the new normal.  

Birthday Today - Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

It's Kevin Bacon's 53rd birthday today.   Let's see if we can play the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" and get to the Regular Guy.   Here goes:

1. Kevin Bacon was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Pollack.
2. Kevin Pollack was in That Thing You Do directed by Tom Hanks.  
3.  Tom Hanks was in You've Got Mail with Michael Badalucco.
4.  Michael Badalucco was in the TV series "The Practice" produced by David Kelley
5.  David Kelley played hockey in college with Jimmy Farrell.
6.  Jimmy Farrell was one of the Regular Guy's best friends in college. 

See, it's amazing!

Here's one of Bacon's coolest scenes, from one of his first movies, Diner, where he plays a drunk college kid who's in the process of squandering his intellectual gifts (which hits close to home for me):

Chris Christie and the Politics of Clarity

Chris Christie is a clear thinker and a plain speaker, and it's working in New Jersey.   Here he is on the normally risible "Morning Joe" on MSNBC:




Not sure I can wait until 2016, Chris. Maybe you need to set your sights higher, now.

Girl of the Day - Krysten Ritter

Krysten Ritter played the girlfriend of Jesse Pinkman, the young partner of the meth-cooking ex-chemistry teacher, Walter White, on AMC's Breaking Bad.   Her character died in season 2, but hopefully she'll live on in flashbacks (as many of the characters on the show do):

9.2%

We have a tendency to think of politics as a game.  We want our "team" to win, and so we cheer errors by the other team that allow our team to score points.   Thus, when the unemployment data comes out, and shows that unemployment has increased under a President of the opposing party, we might have an initial impulse to feel good, since it makes our winning the next election more likely.   What's bad for him is good for us, in other words.

That's in the abstract, however, and we should always try to force ourselves to think outside of the abstract in politics.   Today, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly data showing an anemic 18,000 new jobs created, and the unemployment rate inching back upwards to 9.2%, that's not just bad for Barack Obama.   That's bad for us as Americans.   Those are real people, our neighbors, out of work, struggling to pay bills, perhaps losing their homes, with more stress in their marriages, fewer new clothes and toys for their kids, more depression, more crashed dreams.  

Our team is America.  Team USA.  Right now our coach, the President, is letting us down by calling plays (policies) that don't work.   Our team is losing.   There's still time to pull the game out, but we're late in the third quarter, and we'd better start switching things up soon.

Birthday Today - Ringo!

Want to feel old?   It's Ringo Starr's birthday, and he's turning 71!

Starr was obviously the fourth most important Beatle, but amazingly enough, he wrote and sang some pretty decent songs that have managed to last, which not a lot of people can say.   Here he is with his best song, "It Don't Come Easy," which it has long been rumored was co-written by his co-Beatle, George Harrison:

I Have Broadband Already, Can I Just Have the $7 Million in Cash?

Here is an article that encapsulates everything you need to know about Obama's stimulus plan:

In an important and eye-opening new paper, Jeffrey Eisenach and Kevin Caves of Navigant Economics, a consulting firm, recently examined ARRA’s subsidization of rural broadband. The ARRA stimulus funds for broadband constitute “the largest Federal subsidies ever provided for broadband construction in the U.S.” An explicit goal of the program was to extend broadband access to homes currently without it.

Eisenach and Caves looked at three areas that received stimulus funds, in the form of loans and direct grants, to expand broadband access in Southwestern Montana, Northwestern Kansas, and Northeastern Minnesota. The median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900.  The median home prices are between $94,400 and $189,000.

So how much did it cost per unserved household to get them broadband access?  A whopping $349,234, or many multiples of household income, and significantly more than the cost of a home itself.

Sadly, it’s actually worse than that. Take the Montana project. The area is not in any meaningful sense unserved or even underserved. As many as seven broadband providers, including wireless, operate in the area. Only 1.5% of all households in the region had no wireline access. And if you include 3G wireless, there were only seven households in the Montana region that could be considered without access. So the cost of extending access in the Montana case comes to about $7 million for each additional household served.

That's $7 million of our money wasted so that some rube up in rural Montana who probably went there to get away from things like the Internet can now have wireless Internet in his outhouse.  

But, but, but, the Keynesians will cry, injecting money into the economy is a good thing, no matter what we do with it!   That's why they call it stimulus, not because we buy anything useful with it, but because, when we waste it, the money goes out into the economy and starts circulating!  

Well, maybe, but consider:   wouldn't the money still be circulating if the government had purchased something useful with it?  Wouldn't the money still be circulating if the government had left it in the hands of taxpayers and let them spend it on things that they thought were useful?   For that matter, wouldn't the money still be circulating in the form of loans (to job creating entrepreneurs and small businssmen?) if, instead of the government borrowing it, the money had stayed with banks who could then make loans for real enterprises?

This is the myth of the Keynesians:  that money only circulates if the government spends it, and doesn't circulate if individuals make their own choices on how to spend it.

The stimulus was never about stimulating consumption by injecting money into the economy.   It was about stimulating government to grow ever more powerful as the dispenser of favors to favored constituencies.  

Girl of the Day - Eleanor Powell

I love the name Eleanor so much that I named my last daughter Eleanor Jane.   So, while Eleanor Powell may not be the greatest Hollywood beauty, she's got her name going for her and, oh, by the way, she's probably also the greatest female tap dancer ever.   Here she is with Fred Astaire in "Begin the Beguine":




I mean, really, holy cow!   That's really Entertainment!   Is there a Hollywood star today who has that kind of talent?   I don't think so.  

The Audacity of Hope and the Jewish Vote

Here are two stories that are obviously connected.   First, you have the story of the "flotilla" of activists bringing "humanitarian" aid to Gaza, which entails running a blockade set up by Israel to keep weapons and other potential terrorist supplies out of that territory.   The name of the boat trying to run the blockade:  The Audacity of Hope.   Ring a bell?   But, of course... it's the name of Barack Obama's campaign autobiography.   To draw the obvious conclusion:  the left-wing activists who support Palestinians against Israel are Obama supporters.  

Here's the second story:  apparently Obama is shedding supporters from the American Jewish community, supporters who heretofore have been staunch liberal democrats.   Where Democratic presidents can typically count on upwards of 75% of the Jewish vote, Obama is down to 56%.   Surprised?  I'm not.   Obama is the most anti-Israel (read:  anti-Semitic) President we've ever had, and his hard-left minions are openly pro-terrorist, at least with regard to the Palestinians.   American Jews are finally catching on.  

Girl of the Day - Elizabeth Taylor

An appealingly summery picture of Elizabeth Taylor as a relatively young actress.   Makes me want to have a picnic:

Mobsters

A story in the Milwaukee paper today about an attack last weekend should be shocking, but isn't:

Shaina Perry remembers the punch to her face, blood streaming from a cut over her eye, her backpack with her asthma inhaler, debit card and cellphone stolen, and then the laughter.

"They just said 'Oh, white girl bleeds a lot,' " said Perry, 22, who was attacked at Kilbourn Reservoir Park over the Fourth of July weekend.

Though Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn noted Tuesday that crime is colorblind, he called the Sunday night looting of a convenience store near the park and beatings of a group of people who had gone to the park disturbing, outrageous and barbaric.

Police would not go quite as far as others in connecting the events; Flynn said several youths "might" be involved in both.

"We're not going to let any group of individuals terrorize or bully any of our neighborhoods," Flynn said.

Perry was among several who were injured by a mob they said beat and robbed them and threw full beer bottles while making racial taunts. The injured people were white; the attackers were African-American, witnesses said.

Store video of the BP station at E. North Ave. and N. Humboldt Blvd. shows the business being ransacked. A clerk at BP confirmed to the Journal Sentinel that he was busy waiting on customers when one or two people held the door open to let others rush in and steal snacks and candy.

Not far away, 20 to 25 friends from Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood had gathered at the park shortly before midnight to watch some fireworks set off by a neighbor. In interviews with 11 people who said they were attacked or witnessed the attack, a larger group of youths appeared in another section of the park around midnight and were joined by more young people running up the park's stairs.

At some point the group of friends and the group of youths intersected; those interviewed said the attack appeared to be unprovoked.

I'll just say it:  "youths" without fathers around to tell them when to come home tend to get into this kind of trouble.   The problem is exacerbated by the ubiquitous presences of cell phones, which enables "organizing" a mob much more easily.   It's also exacerbated by the fact that "youths" don't have summer jobs, primarily, IMHO, because the idiotic Democrats set the minimum wage so high they might as well have called the bill the No Black Teenagers Shall Be Employed Act.   I think we'll see more of this sort of thing this summer, in Milwaukee, and elsewhere.

It's also getting tiresome to complain that, if the races of the mob and the victims were reversed, this would be a national news story, rather than a story where the local police don't appear to want to "connect the events."  

Birthdays Today - Sly

It's Sylvester Stallone's birthday.  At one point, Stallone was the Regular Son's favorite Hollywood star, and Rocky was his favorite movie.   He could have done worse.   Stallone famously sold his screenplay for Rocky for much less than he could have in order to ensure that he could also star in the movie.   I suspect that there are more than a few stars, like Stallone, who got their beginnings through sheer will and daring -- risk-taking, in other words, just like other entrepreneurs.   And, of course, they work in an industry where they are constantly judged on performance, fired (or not hired) for non-performance, and generally required to compete all the time for scarce roles.   Weird how so many of them then become liberals.  Stallone didn't, which is to his credit.

Here is a trailer hyping Stallone as the next Brando for his role in Rocky:





Oh, by the way, he's 65. Man, does that make me feel old.

Girl of the Day - Katy Perry

Not a big Katy Perry fan, but, I don't know, this works for me on the Fourth of July:

Mark Steyn Throws Some Cold Water on My Fourth of July

I've read Mark Steyn for a long time, and admire his mind and wit very much.  Steyn, a legal immigrant to America, loves the American idea of a self-reliant citizenry, but he also has his eyes open, and sees that our Obama-led devolution into Big, Bigger, Biggest Government and a dependent people has made the Founders' principles a dead letter.   Here he is, in an essay on NRO that throws a lot of cold water onto my Fourth of July holiday cheer:

Dozens of countries have “Independence Days.” November 25th, for example: Independence Day in Suriname. In that instance as in most others, the designation signifies nothing more than transfer of de jure sovereignty and de facto operational control from a distant European capital to a more local regime. 1975 in Suriname’s case. They had the first military coup seven years later.

But in America “Independence” seemed as much a statement about the character of a people as a designation of jurisdictional status. The first Americans were British subjects who had outgrown a British king as benign and enlightened as any ruler on the planet. They demanded “independence” not from foreign rulers of another ethnicity but from their own compatriots with whom they had a disagreement about the nature of government. Long before the Revolutionary War, small New England townships governed themselves to a degree no old England towns did. “Independence” is not about the replacement of a king in London with a president in Washington but about the republican virtues of a self-reliant citizenry free to exploit its own potential.

Please, no snickering. The self-reliant citizen? In the damning formulation of contemporary American vernacular, he’s history — as in over and done with, fuhgeddabouttim. What’s left of that founding vision on this less than Glorious Fourth of July 2011 in the Brokest Nation in History? “You go talk to your constituents,” President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, “and ask them, are they willing to compromise their kids’ safety so that some corporate-jet owner continues to get a tax break?”

In the Republic of Brokistan, that’s the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification! In his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate-jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” — i.e., the stimulus. The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic-party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama–Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an “economic forum.”

Charles Krauthammer did the math. If you eliminate the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Corporate Jet Tax Break, you would save so much dough that, after 5,000 years, you would have clawed back enough money to cover one year of Obama’s debt. Five thousand years is the year 7011. Boy, our kids’ll really be safe by then. I see some leftie at MSNBC has just been suspended for characterizing the president’s performance on Wednesday as that of a demotic synonym for the male reproductive organ. So I shall be more circumspect and say only that even being a hollow unprincipled demagogue requires a certain lightness of touch Obama can’t seem to find.

As they say, read the whole thing.  It's so sobering that I may need an extra gin and tonic or two just to get me through the weekend's fireworks.