Manny Klausner sends along commentary and items on ObamaCare. He writes...
Today's Two items on ObamaCare:
1. Today's Wall Street Journal's editorial, "March Madness -- Scenes from a devolution as Democrats writhe toward 216 votes." (See below for full article) 2. Tony Blankley's aptly-titled post from FrontPageMagazine.com, "The Democrats' Putsch Against the Constitution." (See below for full article)
Plus three quotes that are triggered by the current spectacle on Capitol Hill:
1. "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."-- Thomas Jefferson 2. "Eternal vigilance is required -- and there have to be people who step up to the plate, who believe in liberty, and who are willing to fight for it." -- Milton Friedman 3. "The notion that the IRS should be able to seize your assets if you don’t arrange your health care to the approval of the federal government represents the de facto nationalization of your body, which is about as primal an assault on individual liberty as one could devise." -- Mark Steyn
The Wall Street Journal March 19, 2010
March Madness Scenes from a devolution as Democrats writhe toward 216 votes.
Has there ever been a political spectacle like the final throes of ObamaCare? We can't recall one outside of a banana republic, or, more accurately, Woody Allen's 1971 classic "Bananas." Capitol Hill resembles nothing so much as that movie's farcical coup d'etat in San Marcos as Democrats try to assemble the partisan minimum of 216 House votes—if only for an hour or so at some point on Sunday—and no bribe is too costly, no deal too cynical, no last-minute rewrite too blatant.
Yesterday, Democrats defeated 222 to 203 a GOP resolution that would have required them to vote up-or-down on the text of the Senate's Christmas Eve bill. Big Labor hates that bill's tax on high-cost health coverage, and rank-and-file Members are so embarrassed by its kickbacks that Democrats are resorting to the procedural trick of "deeming" it passed instead. Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually told reporters this week that "nobody wants to vote for the Senate bill," but she'll do what it takes to impose it anyway.
The Commander in Chief even felt obliged to cancel his overseas trip so he could personally explain to Members why this Presidential legacy project is worth their defeat in November. Four separate workout sessions, including an Air Force One trip to hometown Cleveland, were enough to convert Dennis Kucinich. The supposedly principled Ohio liberal had opposed ObamaCare in the House's November vote because it still preserves a vestige of a private health-care industry. But a vast expansion of the welfare state as a consolation prize is now good enough for his government work.
That's only the start of the logrolling, if that's not an insult to logs.
One benefit of trading a real commodity is that it's somewhat difficult to counterfeit. If someone uses a ton of coal, or a bushel of wheat, you can easily distinguish the "used" product from, say, unburned coal or uneaten wheat.
Europe's emissions trading system was in uproar yesterday amid a mounting scandal over "recycled" carbon permits.
Two carbon exchanges were forced to suspend trading as panic hit investors fearful that they had bought invalid permits.
BlueNext and Nord Pool, the French and Nordic exchanges, suspended trading in certificates of emission reduction (CERs) when it emerged that some had been illegally reused.
Concern that used and worthless permits were circulating caused the spot price of the certificates to collapse, from €12 per tonne of carbon to less than €1 .
The scare erupted after Hungary said last week that it had sold 2 million CERs submitted by Hungarian companies to satisfy their carbon emission allowances under the EU's emission trading system (ETS).
Two items of note: the culprit was a government, not a private enterprise; and the scam worked by exploiting a loophole in the rules created by -- you guessed it -- government. Which makes one wonder if they can be trusted to manage this trillion-dollar boondoggle.
The carbon-permit market would be one gigantic Parker Brothers game were it not for the fact that the rest of us are forced, by the power of the State, to trade our real wealth for their phony paper. Or should I say, recycled phony paper?
Never let it be said that the recession has no upside:
The Swedish tax authority is struggling with deficits, and will have to lay off over a thousand of its staff, Swedish Radio reports. Without another 56 million US dollars annually, the Tax Office would have to lay off one in five of its employees, according to its own calculations.
I suspect this is a gambit to get more funding. Like the Kidney Machine Gambit, only aimed at politicians rather than the public.
Let the Sinfest wars begin. Not to be outdone by SkippyBob who has been scouring cartoon archives to send in fantastic Sinfest strips, Brad has dipped into his own reserves. If I can spark SkippyBob's competitive spirit, this may end up to be the only war in which the civilians (you and me) reap the benefits.... The cartoons: State-Sponsored Comic Strip; I'm Still the Greatest; Service; Domestic Spying; and, Cheating 3.
Heaven help us, we're ruled by innumerates. Said Obama, while pushing for the health plan:
"Your employer, it's estimated, would see premiums fall by as much as 3,000 percent"
Which is of course a mathematical impossibility, unless they're going to start charging negative premiums. The White House was quick to cover the gaffe:
A White House press spokesman later said the president misspoke; he had meant to say annual premiums would drop by $3,000.
I'm not sure what's less comforting: a president who doesn't know the difference between percent and dollars, or a president who knows so little math -- or is so used to wild exaggeration -- that he can blurt out "fall...3,000 perecent" without immediately realizing the error.
Or perhaps he'll read whatever is put in front of him.
Excerpt: The reign of Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, was different. England was threatened by Catholic France, and the great families of Ireland had a history of forming foreign alliances. To slam shut a back door for invasion, Elizabeth devastated the island, burning crops and slaughtering herds. As the Irish starved, their land was reassigned to prominent Englishmen -- such as Sir Walter Raleigh — who established a form of feudalism by which the Irish lived as tenants on land they had formerly owned. The estates were known as “plantations." The “wild Irish” — so named because of their reputed savagery — rebelled and were brutally crushed. The experience of the English landowners in Ireland greatly influenced their later treatment of Indians in America. Many of the British who became prominent in the American colonies had been connected with the Irish experience. For example, the first Indian reservation agent — Gookin of Massachusetts — had seen military service in Ireland, as had many of the leaders of the original Virginia Company. Thus, the Irish “plantation” experience was transported onto American soil.
You know that climate alarmists are getting desperate when they enlist the aid of "thought leaders and practitioners from the fields of neuro, behavioral and evolutionary economics, psychology, policy, investing and social media" in order to find a way to convince people that We're All Gonna Die Unless You Shape Up. One attendee, John Horgan, reports:
Basically, this was a brainstorming session on how to market "solutions" to global warming more effectively. ... The Garrison meeting explored whether neuroscience and other fields that probe the physiological underpinnings of human belief and behavior can help environmentalists frame issues more persuasively. Let's call it "neuroframing."
Let's call it spin on hyperdrive. Super-spin? Horgan continues:
...many people already view environmentalists as self-righteous and manipulative. This is a framing problem that neuroframing may exacerbate. The message is that environmentalists will go to extraordinary lengths--seeking guidance from cutting-edge brain science!--to help the dim-witted public see the world in the same enlightened way that environmentalists do.
...As naïve as this may sound, I believe environmentalists should try to influence public opinion by laying out the facts as clearly and honestly as possible and refraining from rhetorical trickery.
I agree with that; but the environmentalists apparently don't. The problem for them is, when the facts don't support your case, rhetorical trickery -- or neuroframing, spinning, or con artistry, whatever you want to call it -- is all you have.
So be on guard. The connivers are now going to use every trick of marketing research and neuropsychology to sell their "science."
I am sorry to announce the death of Steve McIntosh. Steve and his wife Sandy were anchors of the AnarchoVillage that grew up around Samuel E. Konkin III in Long Beach, California in the late '70s and through the '80s. Together they brought benevolence and stability to what could be a sometimes-harsh and fast-moving scene. Brad and I hoisted a beer to Steve's memory last night. Good journey, my friend.
Our semi-fast connection to the Internet has been restored. Why does it seem like we have regained our link to reality itself? (I need Spring to arrive, I need to sink my fingers into the soil and re-establish a connection with earth and rock, with something more essential.) FYI...after leaving his level here two visits ago and leaving his gloves here the last time, the repairman was careful to scan every surface for wayward possessions before heading out the door. Of course and nevertheless, he forgot something...but this time, he could not leave without it. The keys to his vehicle. This fellow is a genuine character. I was shut away in my workroom while he dealt with Brad but, at one point, I started to go downstairs because I thought he and Brad were in a heated quarrel. Not so. The fellow is what Jerry Seinfeld calls "a loud talker" -- he shouts sentences as though he were speaking to a deaf world. Wow was he loud! But I don't care. I am connected. We're back, baby, we're back!
Our internet woes continue...but a shaft of light pierces the darkness in our souls. The repairman is due back on our farm this afternoon to replace the defective replacement unit he installed on Friday. If he does a good job, we will return to him the gloves he left behind. On Friday, we returned the level that he'd forgotten the time before. Apparently we are to be spared nothing. I don't know about you but I could use some 'toons....
Again my hat is doffed in the direction of SkippyBob who continues to send the Best of Sinfest along with commentary. He writes, Since I recently received a letter from the Census Bureau telling me that in about a week I would get the actual census form in the mail (apparently so that I can be angry a week early?), I looked for both "census" and "poll" on Sinfest....Here are the two with at least some governmental relevance (although they are from the Bush years). They are: Poll 2 and Poll 3.
SkippyBob continues, As for the census letter itself, it has some interesting characteristics. The source address is: UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau. The census...is apparently now just a minor function of a larger administration that gathers other statistics. I think it was your blog, or a link from your blog (click here for referenced blog post), that pointed out that this same bureau now plans to poll every American once every five years with the equivalent of the long form of the census. That is probably why all the census forms this year are "short". When I was reading about the alternate survey, I remember thinking that the penalties for refusing to answer (or answer truthfully) were much more severe than the ones they threaten to impose for not fully filling out the census. Also, since the five year survey isn't the Constitutionally authorized census, I don't know that the promise (broken many times, of course) to keep the data secret for 75 years still applies.
As for the next two cartoons, which aren't census related, I can only say "If it were only that easy ..." They are: I Like You and Devil Surveillance (my personal favorite).
Our various internet connections, our websites and our servers seem to have come together in a perfect storm that has left us scrambling to perform mundane tasks like sending out an email that actually arrives. The latest: this morning, I noted a dearth of incoming messages. I often receive hundreds of emails a day -- many of them spam -- and I had only received 4 or 5. Upon checking our back-up mail system (to which we switched in desperation yesterday), Brad noticed that the spam filter had been set at the highest level of 1 whereas we generally set it at the rather permissive 8. Now that it has been reset, the email flow is back to normal.
In the best of circumstances, I am not a prompt correspondent but I generally respond within a few days as my time frees up. If you are awaiting a response or if an email to me has bounced back, please drop me a line or resend the message as I believe many emails have fallen victim to our internet woes. BTW we have reason to hope that another big chunk of the problem will be resolved on Monday. Thanks for your patience! And while you are at it, lend me some because, God knows!, I don't have any left.
Another hat tip to SkippyBob who sends along the following Sinfests with commentary. He writes, As I still live in the U.S., I found this one to be touchingly tender. And this one has nice full-color artwork, and was written when there was a chance that Obama really wanted to change things and didn't turn out to be a copy of the "same old same old". Of course, anyone who reads your blog will already have recognized that any of the major party candidates are two sides of the same coin, but assuming Obama wanted change lets the artist make the statements he is making.
Thanks to Brian C. on the forum for posting the link to this very readable (if somewhat long) article on Science News, "Odds are, it's wrong". I particularly liked the discussion of how "statistical significance" is frequently misused:
Correctly phrased, experimental data yielding a P value of .05 means that there is only a 5 percent chance of obtaining the observed (or more extreme) result if no real effect exists (that is, if the no-difference hypothesis is correct). But many explanations mangle the subtleties in that definition. A recent popular book on issues involving science, for example, states a commonly held misperception about the meaning of statistical significance at the .05 level: "This means that it is 95 percent certain that the observed difference between groups, or sets of samples, is real and could not have arisen by chance."
That interpretation commits an egregious logical error (technical term: "transposed conditional"): confusing the odds of getting a result (if a hypothesis is true) with the odds favoring the hypothesis if you observe that result. A well-fed dog may seldom bark, but observing the rare bark does not imply that the dog is hungry. A dog may bark 5 percent of the time even if it is well-fed all of the time.
Put mathematically: P(A|B) does not equal P(B|A). (The probability of A, given that B is true, is not the same as the probability of B, given that A is true.)
Furthermore: the calculation that there is only a 5% chance of some effect happening by chance, does not mean that there's a 95% chance that it was caused by the hypothesized mechanism. The P value only suggests that the result was not caused by chance; it does not suggest which causal mechanism is at work, and it offers no guidance as to competing hypotheses. And there's still a possibility that the result is random, which increases as more tests are performed (the subject of my previous post).
Read the full article, including "Box 2" and "Box 4" for some simple examples of how the statistics may not mean what you think they mean.
SamIam writes in, After noticing that some of the numbers in the interest rate comparison grid I furnished [in the post "Interest, Coming and Going...You are Scewed"], which are supposed to represent week-on-week changes, seemed too stable, I did vet the numbers, at least to the extent of going to the sources (bankrate.com and creditcards.com) claimed by Yahoo. Typical of Yahoo's apparently pervasive incompetence, they aren't updating their numbers to reflect changes in those sources. However, the gist of my rant regarding the delta between interest charged and paid remains valid: the actual current "low interest" credit card rate according to creditcards.com is 12.41%, not 12.23%; the US national average interest rate on all categories of credit cards is a whopping 14.56%!
I also found the following informative article about the myth of a middle-class recovery sourced from Baron's this morning. The most startling revelation is the sheer magnitude of the destruction of wealth instigated by our public serpents on behalf of their banksta masters. The net asset value of real estate held by US households has declined from its peak at the end of 2006 by 53.3%!!!
"Even more stunningly, households' net worth in real estate was down by more than half -- 53.3%, to be exact -- from the end of 2006" (Source, click here.)
Here is yet another interesting article found on kitco.com, the precious metals trading site. Now, there are always a few gold bugs featured there who try to use hyperbole to promote sales. However, Roger Wiegand is usually one of the more level-headed columnists. When a financial nerd whose usual territory is advising clients on what financial instrument to buy or sell, and when, turns to publishing missives on the practical aspects of surviving the crash of an entire civilization, perhaps it is time for all of us to pay heed. The article: "This is a new era as we have been irrevocably destroyed."
If it has seemed quiet here for the last few days, well, there's a story.
It began Wednesday evening when the ifeminists site got hacked. It happened as I was on the road to a meeting; I had to turn around and come back, and spend an hour and a half repairing and hardening the site.
Then, Thursday afternoon, our Internet service failed. Completely. Our wireless ISP scheduled a service appointment for Friday afternoon. Meanwhile, we had to switch to Plan B -- dial-up -- which we keep ready for such contingencies.
Except, last fall the phone company performed a few splices and laid a new phone line, which I presume to be the reason we could only get 14 Kbps of dial up speed. That's barely fast enough to collect email, and Wendy struggled to put up some news items on ifeminists.
Late Friday afternoon the service tech arrived, and after many tests concluded that our 3.5 GHz wireless module was defunct. Fortunately he had a spare 900 MHz module in the truck. (Why he didn't travel with a spare 3.5 GHz module is a mystery to me; we were his last service call of the day, and it's possible he'd used his spares earlier.) At 5:30 he had installed and commissioned the new unit, and decamped quickly for his weekend off, leaving me to reconfigure our router.
Except, the new unit refused to work with our router. And refused to work with my laptop. We still had no Internet service.
So it was time for Plan C: when we got wireless Internet, I left our old satellite dish installed and kept the equipment, just in case. (There was no cost to keep it.) A short call to the satellite ISP and I was able to get the service reactivated, and, mirabile dictu, it powered right up and began working after nine months' inactivity.
So I collected my waiting email, checked that our web sites were still active, and enjoyed a late dinner. Then a visit to the loo. And just as I had seated myself on the toilet...the entire house blacked out. 850 homes, including ours, had just lost power.
We're back now, while our luck holds out. "What a week I'm having!"
