Quick Hitters

Attendance at Tax Day Tea Parties appears to be significantly up.  MSM are changing their depiction of tea partiers from stupid angry rural male racists to upper class angry evil businessmen racists.  Sure is hard to account for all the women pushing strollers in the photos I see. Polls show that anywhere from 25-35% identify with tea party, in some surveys out-polling both dems and republicans.

Congress meanwhile polls about a 20% positive while the tea party has 40-50% positives.  The MSM - 10%.

Number of house races now considered in play? Over 80.  Republicans are predicted to pick up anywhere from  25-40 by "experts".  If nothing significant happens to change the political landscape between now and November, I predict a minimum of 35 and possibly 60 seats change to the R column.  40 is now the magic number for control of house to change, with a couple of special elections coming in next few months.  Magic number could be as low as 38 come November.

NBA Finals prediction: Cavaliers vs. Mavericks.  (Yes, I'm a Mavs fan).

Have a Nice Tea Party!

"The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional discourse by boorish expressions of doubt."   John Ralston Saul 

Leftist like Mr. Saul should be celebrating!  Huge numbers of citizens have risen from their slumber and are voicing many expressions of doubt.  The liberal press certainly thinks them boorish and rude (not to mention racist) so Mr. Saul and his ilk should be doubly happy.  I suspect he isn't.

We all recall that our founding fathers were suspicious of government, even, or perhaps especially,  the one they were creating.  Their  greatest fear was that the government would grow too large or too powerful. No doubt they would be shocked at the leviathan we have today.  Untiring vigilance is required to keep the monster in check, and as citizens we have failed over the last couple of decades to exercise that vigilance.  It is human nature to relax and enjoy when things seem to be going well.  Reagan brought the beast, if not into submission, at least to heal, and conservatives became complacent with more than fifteen years of economic growth.  While 9-11 was the wake up call to the dangers we had invited in our foreign policy, we did not understand the economic problems that both democrats and republicans in Washington were creating with their policies of promoting risky lending and investment, and ignoring and even adding to burgeoning entitlement programs.

Now the citizenry is awake in the form of the Tea Parties!  Too much spending, too much debt, too many taxes, a government completely out of control and even less honest now than in the past.  Once again we must put on armor and take up sword and fight the good fight against an out of control congress and entrenched bureaucracy.  We must once again bring the dragon under our control, rather than allowing it to run loose as we have the last decade.  Besides the brewing tea party that is coming the first week of November, there is no better time than April 15th to find a tea party to attend.  Join your fellow countrymen and rally support for fiscal responsibility.  Have a great tea party!

And as Mad Eye Moody admonished: Constant vigilance!

Do It At the Ballot Box

What a difference a year makes.  Just a little over a year ago pundits were predicting the demise of the GOP.  Now, control of the House will be the goal for the Republican party this November.  Even the Senate is not out of reach, though actually winning control of either chamber will be a challenge.

In the House, a net gain of 41 gains control, and in the Senate 10 seats must change hands.  Figure one or two more party switches and the number is less than 40 in the House.   And the raw numbers show the possibilities.  There are Democrats in 49 districts that McCain carried in 2008, plus there will probably be three or four open seats that Obama carried that will be in play.  The GOP will loss three or four so that means a pick up of around 45 is needed.  In the current environment, this is eminently doable. In fact, if you include districts where McCain was within 4 points, there are over 60 Democrat seats that are potentially in play.  It will happen.

While everyone seems to think the Senate will be more difficult, the chances may not be much worse.  Things will have to break right, but there are ten seats seriously in play.  While the Republicans are to defending two more seats this year, 18-16,  it now looks probable that the  GOP will hold all of their seats.  A pick up of seven or eight of the Democrat seats appears likely with probable wins in Arkansas, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Dakota, Delaware, and possible victories in Illinois, Wisconsin,  and Connecticut .  Running the table in those states puts the Senate at 50-50.  The win to break the tie will be more difficult, but possible in Washington State where the incumbent Patty Murray won with only a 5% margin last election.   That would put the republicans over the top. 

But that is not the only scenario for the GOP to gain control. First, figure that Lieberman may changes parties if the Republicans reach 50.  How sweet would that revenge be?  Then there is the ailing 86 year old Lautenberg who may have to step down, and whose replacement would be appointed by the newly elected Republican governor.  But here is my prediction: the conservative tide rides so high, swelled by resentment for the Health Care bill, that both New York and California also fall into Republican hands, and the GOP ends up with a 53-47 majority, including Lieberman.

Learning From Coaches

I would like to write a book about what kids learn from sports.  The title would be, "All the Life Lessons We Learn from Sports," with the subtitle, "That the Coaches Never Intended to Teach."  As a parent who has been through a lot of sports, (I'm including dance along with traditional sports), with three children, it is amazing what difficult situations they have had to grapple with.  (Disclosure: I have coached multiple sports through the middle school level for over ten years and am guilty of some of the things I complain about).

Most coaches are not honest about their goals and expectations.  Especially at the non-varsity level, when you hear a coach say that winning is not the most important thing, and then watch some players sit on the bench game after game, those kids on the bench think that winning is the most important thing, and that the coach is a not quite honest.  I have also seen coaches make promises they can't keep, trying to encourage the less talented kids, "If you'll just do so and so, you'll get into the game."  But somehow the game comes and goes and nothing changes. 

The most common lie is that hard work pays off.  Now, sure, we want to instill this idea into our kids, but it turns out that this is only true for those whose hard work produces superior results.  If hard work means you're still only the 9th best player on the basketball team, you probably won't see the court except in mop up time. And it turns out that at work, the same thing is true.  If you are the hardest working salesman, but only the 9th best producer, you don't get the big bonus, so this teaches a good life lesson.  (The trick there is to work different, not harder).

Many kids, who are not the stars and the starters, can come away from sports learning that life is unfair, that you can't take at face value what you're told, and to experience great disappointment and frustration.  These really are valuable life lessons.  Plus, they learn to figure out for themselves what they enjoy without external praise, to be confident about who they are rather  they can do for others.  Under the "makes you stronger if it doesn't kill you" category, they can emerge wiser, more self aware, and more confident about what is important in life.

These examples only touch the surface of how coaches often teach the opposite of what they imagine.  But with good parental involvement, everything can be turned to a positive.

Remember the Swine Flu Crisis?

Or Lessons In How Well Our Government Will Be Able to Run health Care

I completely forget about it until the WSJ ran a story today, The Flu Season That Fizzled.  While the article spoke of the lack of severity of the H1N1 flu this past flu season, it failed to comment on what should be the big story.  How could the experts be so wrong?  These government run or sponsored experts, who so badly handled Swine Flu, should be put in charge of our entire health care system?

Do you remember the hysteria? Pandemic! Large death toll!  Actually, the WHO and the CDC and everyone who has a budget that depends on the worst possible news, made H1N1 sound worse than they knew it to be.  The official predictions by health experts, very wrong as it turns out, of 90,000 deaths in the US is not much more than twice the normal number of fatalities from the flu each year.

BUT they were still miserably wrong.  Lose your job in the private sector wrong.  It has been a completely normal, perhaps even subnormal year in terms of deaths from flu. 

Now this season's "pandemic" was expected.  Last year when H1N1 reappeared,  the warning went out, and the announcement of a huge vaccine program was made.

Ahhhh, the vaccine.  Massive doses were being produced under government auspices.  And how did that work out?  Good thing the H1N1 was a bust or we'd have been it big trouble.  Rather than massive doses we had massive shortages.  By October, when the 40 million doses were supposed to be ready, less than 6 million doses were shipped.   Barely ten per cent? 

The predictions were very wrong.  Vaccine planning and production was criminally inept.  Do we really want these kinds of people in charge of our entire health care when they can't manage a small bit of it? 

Global Warming: Garbage In, Garbage Out

With So Much Tainted Data ...

Doubt has been raised about essentially all the data used by CRU and NASA in their claims of AGW.  Due to the opaque operations, ill-kept data, and unsupported manipulation of data, it is probably impossible to duplicate the research and results that are claimed to be settled science.  The inability to reproduce a scientific study is grounds for its repudiation.

There is a fundamental reason for this:  CRU and NASA have done what every 8^th grade science fair participant is tempted to do, cherry picked and massaged the data to make it fit the hypothesis.  The integrity of their research has been shattered by the continuously unfolding story of manipulation and selection bias of the inputs, the process, and the conclusions.  Whenever a researcher independently looks at the underlying data, a different picture emerges from that of  the warmists. 

Within the last few months, the data used by CRU and NASA has been challenged in Russia, China, Canada, Australia, and the United States.   In each of these challenges, selection bias is demonstrated, and large error margins demonstrated.  In some cases, temperature measuring stations with favorable readings are included, and those which show less or no warming excluded.  Some stations are included during the periods they support warming and then mysteriously disappear for years when their inputs would be inconvenient.  Some station data were completely made up from non-existent stations.

Additionally, the process of “normalization” or "homogenization" of the data have consistently meant upward revision of readings.  For stations where urbanization has clearly caused an increase in temperatures, and normalization means lowering the measured temperature some, the result somehow is still always an upward trend, even thought there is no scientific basis for knowing what the appropriate adjustment should actually be.  Further, while NASA maintains that urbanization has little overall affect on the data, other research clearly shows evidence to the contrary. 

Even with the best research methodology (for example using station data that actually exists), trying to prove something about temperature trends with the available data is next to impossible.  It all comes back to the measuring stations.  Few have complete known histories, many have been moved multiple times, been subject to urban sprawl,  discontinuous service, or perhaps unknown  temperature affecting phenomena.  Even in the US, most of the recording is done by volunteers taking manual readings, so imagine what it is like in the rest of the world.  Here is a great report on the absurdity of some of the stations and how their measurements are used.  This is only thirty miles from where I live so I found it particularly interesting. And remember, if measurements can be so messed up in the US, what is the rest of the world like?

Creative Destruction In the Republican Party

We see the results of creative destruction all around us as new innovative businesses take market share and profits from older complacent companies.  Walmart displacing Sears and the business centers of small towns, Compaq and Dell unseating IBM, Microsoft rising and now Google ascending to challenge them.  Amazon changing an entire industry, and lest we forget, electronic media usurping print media in news delivery.

The Republican party is, hopefully, undergoing this type of reinvention right now.  This would be the third time the GOP has seen this happen in modern political times (since the Great Depression), while the Democratic party has remained essentially unchanged as demonstrated by the current administration's policies which hearken back to FDR and his grand coalition.

The first occurrence began with Reagan running in 1976 and resulted in his election in 1980.  Many events coalesced to bring about a sea change in the way Americans thought about themselves and their country.  The Republicans were at their lowest ebb after Watergate, but the 70's brought stagflation on the economic front, international failures from Vietnam to the Iranian hostage situation, a president in Jimmy Carter who was not up to the task and one who lost hope for America, and a nationwide frustration as the consequences of the anything goes 60's resulted in a loss of a sense of moral direction.  Roe v. Wade was the last straw for many religious Americans who had never been involved in politics before. 

Then, in the early 90's something else began to happen.  Newt Gingrich began to believe that Republicans could actually eat into the Democrat majority in the House and began to recruit exciting new candidates to run as Republicans.  Newt pushed aside the lame leadership of Bob Michaels and came up with the Contract With America, stating explicitly what the Republicans would do if they had the power to do it.  The GOP picked up 54 seats in the 1994 elections and ended forty years of Democrat control of congress.  While Newt spearheaded the revolution, it was once again main street Americans, tired of business as usual, who decided to get involved and vote for change.

Now, here we are at another cusp.  Even without a leader to rally around, main street has met the grass roots and we are all Tea Partiers now.  As in the late 70's, we have a president who seems in over his head, who scolds rather than inspires, we have dangers internationally that the administration bumbles and falters over, and a bad economy suffering from a hopefully brief return to failed Keynesian policies of the past.  And as in 1994, we have a horrible national health care plan that Americans know intuitively will be a budget breaker and boondoggle.  The stage is set.  Will the Republican party respond as it has in the past with creative destruction?  Or will it try to play both sides, hoping to benefit from the Tea Partiers without actually embracing the reason for the Tea Parties.  Let's hope history repeats itself.

Calvin and Keynes

I read The Institutes of the Christian Religion long ago and  I came away convinced that Calvin was not a Calvinist, or least would not be willing to boil his theology down to the five points of Calvinism. 

Reading recently about Keynes, I have come to a similar conclusion.  He introduced the concept of macroeconomics, which has become a fundamental part of everyone's thinking about economics.  And he thought deficit spending during downturns would mitigate unemployment.  But he also assumed  that surpluses during expansions would pay back any debt accumulated by the government.

Further, he thought Hayek's Road to Serfdom was a great book.  Hayek asked Keynes just weeks before his death "... if he wasn't getting alarmed about what some of his pupils were doing with his ideas. And he said,' Oh, they're just fools. These ideas were frightfully important in the 1930s, but if these ideas ever become dangerous. you can trust me--I'm going to turn public opinion around like this.'" (Reason interview ) In light of this, I imagine Keynes would be horrified to see how his theory has become an excuse for redistributing wealth, and for bloated, deficit financed government, in good times and in bad.

Neo Keynesians have gone far beyond what Keynes would have found acceptable, just as latter day Calvinists have gone far beyond what John Calvin believed.

With Climategate, The Other Shoe Begins To Fall Quietly, But With Inevitability

Will MSM Hear It?

Phil Jones, former head of the East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, and one of the world’s leading proponents of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) has finally started to come clean concerning the supposed soundness of the “underlying science.”  Not that he would put it that way, of course.

But before we get to what he revealed to the BBC yesterday, we need to take a look at the way the mouthpieces for the fraud that is AGW have emerged from one embarrassment after another with a common reassurance.  As if reading from talking points, warming alarmists worldwide have repeated the mantra that the basic science is sound, and all these errors are merely fringe stuff, nothing that affects the basic premise that man-made carbon emissions are creating a green house effect that will cause global temperatures to rise several degrees over the next century and result in massive catastrophes of many sorts.

So, let me get this straight.   The part of the 2007 IPCC report that dealt with actual physical predictions is fraught with errors, but that is not important.  The underlying science is still good.  The stuff about glaciers melting, rainforests vanishing, Africa frying, the frequency and severity of hurricanes and storms escalating, all within the next few decades was wrong, (not to mention the inability to understand geography enough to figure out how much of Holland is below sea level), but, ah, don’t be alarmed, everything else in the report is accurate. 

We shouldn’t worry about other parts of the report?  What about  NASA being forced to revise their figures when caught dishonestly claiming all the warmest years of the last century were recent, when in fact they were not.  Or the fact that the CRU’s own programmer could not figure out how to make the original temperature data transmogrify into the data set used to produce the infamous “hockey stick?”

Which brings us back to Mr. Jones latest revelations.  He now admits that the data were not “well organized,” and that is why he has refused to let anyone else look at it.  Nice euphemism, very scientific indeed.   Then he goes on, now that someone is going to actually look at real data and not just their manipulated data, and fesses up that maybe, just possibly, the medieval warming period might actually exist.  If the science is not settled about the medieval warming period, then the science is not settled at all, since if that that period were as warm or warmer than the last few decades, AGW is left with very little support on which to rest.  Unless we were producing a lot of greenhouse gases back in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

It is entirely possible that humans have contributed to some warming, but it appears the amount will eventually be found to be insignificant compared to the natural but poorly understood cycles the earth goes through.   AGW is another Piltdown Man.   Al Gore, please return all Oscars, Nobels, etc.  And all of you on the AGW gravy train please return those trillions of dollars to the tax payers; and let us pray we don’t get fooled again.

Burning Question: Is Obama a Socialist?

Despite what many conservatives would like to think, the short answer is no.  Obama, at least from what we know, is not a socialist.  A true socialist believes that workers should control the means of production, (whatever that may actually mean).  Obama clearly believes that there should be a private sector from which the government harvests huge tax revenues to stoke the engine of the state.  Yet he is clearly not a free market capitalist as he favors vigorous regulation and supervision of the private sector to the point that the state is superior to, and involved in, much of corporate governance.   So what is he?

In Europe, many who identify themselves as socialist are not true socialists either, but the name is not political poison there.  They do not want the state to run everything, just the important industries such as health care, education, and utilities , but they do want the state to have control over other industries so that state goals can be met   Government spending of the average EU country accounts for slightly more than half of their GDPs.  This is not true socialism but certainly not capitalism either.  Those who favor this mix are called both socialists and social democrats.

But the inconvenient and uncomfortable truth is that these policies resemble the economic theory of corporatism more than anything else.   While EU countries evolve towards corporatism, China is the most notable example of modern state corporatism as it moves from a pseudo-socialist economy to a mixed economy.  (Some highly regarded liberals in our country longingly survey China as a model for us to move towards both politically and economically).  Modern corporatism puts the state either directly or indirectly in control of the vast majority of the economic output of a country.  If one were to notice Chinese xenophobia, eugenics tendencies, nationalistic spirit (which was greatly disappointing to the USSR) and combine that with its current economic trends ... well, I won't mention what one is reminded of.  Theses same tendencies are growing in Europe, the nationalism being to the EU of course.

If you wnat to know what Obama is, well look this way. 

Once More Into The Breach

I began my first blog in 2004 and managed to make into the Large Mammals section of the Blogosphere.  In 2005 I had to give it up for a variety of reasons, but now I am back in business.  Guess we'll see what happens.