Category Archives: Politics – international

US middle class at 1970s poverty level

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This is Jimmy Carter we’re talking about here and this is what he said:

Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday that the income gap in the United States has increased to the point where members of the middle class resemble the Americans who lived in poverty when he occupied the White House.

Carter offered his assessment of the nation’s economic challenges Monday at a Habitat for Humanity construction site in Oakland – the first of five cities he and wife Rosalynn plan to visit this week to commemorate their three-decade alliance with the international nonprofit that promotes and builds affordable housing.

The “income gap”, nonsense concept though it may be, used to be constructed to highlight the difference in living standards between rich and poor. Now the middle class has fallen into the lowest class, with all the insecurity and uncertainty that all of it entails. The producing middle classes are being plundered and robbed and it has gotten beyond a joke. And it is the lying despicable media in the US that is covering up every inch of the way. It hasn’t happened here, at least it hasn’t happened yet, because we still have means to fight back.

But there is no reason to be too smug about it. We all have a political class who knows better than us what to do for our own good. How they can be prevented from ruining us by their priorities and expenditure is a conundrum that may yet prove to have no answer.

Conclusions first, rigged evidence to follow

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Not news to us, but Melanie Phillips says it so well:

It’s over – but its adherents will never admit it. Just as the exposure of the excesses of Stalinism drove many true believers into an ever more fanatical and deluded defence of Soviet communism, so the conclusive destruction of anthropogenic global warming theory is provoking ever more fantastical contortions by warmist zealots who, contrary to all reputable evidence, claim that the planet is about to turn into a furnace and (pace Bob Geldof) it’s all over for the human race.

The recent release of the IPCC’s Final Draft Report of the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis revealed, beyond any measure of doubt, the intellectual vacuity, sophistry, and outright corruption of the AGW industry. Presented as an authoritative statement of the current state of climate change evidence, it was nothing of the kind. Indeed, it wasn’t even any kind of statement of evidence. It was instead a politicised draft summary of evidence that was to be amended to ‘ensure consistency between the full Report and the Summary for Policy-Makers’. As Lewis Carroll might have said: conclusions first, rigged evidence to follow.

Her conclusions are also sobering in another direction, not just the effect on the poor which have been devastating and are likely to get worse, but on the standing of science, which the AGW crowd have taken down with them:

But the implications of this epic scam are even more serious and wide-ranging. For what the warmists have done is nothing less than to undermine public confidence in science itself. Science is a synonym for truth-telling, for the exercise of reason, for open-eyed inquiry and the absolute integrity of following where the evidence leads.

But wrapping themselves in the mantle of science, the warmists have utterly corrupted it: making the evidence fit prior conclusions, suppressing inconvenient truths that blow AGW theory into the stratosphere, tampering with and distorting the facts in order to serve a political agenda, pressurising and intimidating scientists who have tried to tell the truth about nothing-out-of-the-ordinary climate change. With AGW zealots pumping out propaganda under the guise of ‘science’, how is the public to be expected to believe scientists when they do tell the truth about where the evidence leads?

For ultimately, this is not even just about science. It is about truth, evidence and rational thought. The real casualty of the AGW scam is surely reason itself.

The “science is settled” has become a laugh line for a reason.

Where’s the RSPCH?

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bear food stamps

The American system treats its people worse than it treats its animals in the woods. If by some personal disaster you become dependent on the state in the US, the odds that you will ever make it on your own thereafter become long indeed. The theory of welfare dependency is clear enough, as is the evidence, but for those who fall into the trap, their only option, they feel, is to continue to vote for a living for the rest of their lives.

Well maybe Obama can’t put you in a concentration camp . . .

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But there are other things he can do and he’s doing them. This is so brazen that Obama obviously could not care less who you are or what you do. If you are his enemy then you will be done over and what are you or anyone else going to do about it?

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know that the IRS audit of Dr. Ben Carson can’t be a mere coincidence. . . .

Carson on Wednesday told Fox’s Bill O’Reilly that the IRS began examining his real estate holdings after his speech to the National Prayer Breakfast in February, in which he used tithing in the Bible to make a compelling case against progressive taxation. A humiliated Obama sat steaming a couple of seats away.

Then there’s the NSA Surveillance program that not only can but does track phone calls and emails. I just tried googling “NSA Surveillance” to find a statement of the problems it causes and it creeps me out to find that I could not easily locate a posting that was critical of the program. This is the best I could find and this was in an article defending the NSA:

The NSA has been in the centre of a firestorm since the Snowden leaks, which revealed wide-ranging programs which scoop up data on telephone calls and Internet activity.

I’m sure we all feel protected by governments that know what we are saying to each other by phone, fax or email.

And then, with the closing of non-essential government services there are many instances just like this:

The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the lots are jointly owned with the Mount Vernon ladies. The rangers are from the government, and they’re only here to help.

‘It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,’ an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. ‘We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.’

Sure it’s disgusting but it’s not just politics as usual or at least it wasn’t until now. The full resources of the American government are being used in a punitive way against individuals and groups, against American citizens who disagree with the President. In reading not just the American media but even the right side blogs, the most astonishing part is the absence of expressions of genuine outrage. Maybe with the American media as latently totalitarian as it is there is nothing that can be done, and maybe no one writing a blog wants to be done over by the tax office, but if it doesn’t make you seriously angry, and not just a little frightened, I don’t know what would.

Rand Paul for President

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The American economy, indeed its entire network of social relations, is in the bin and getting worse by the day. Between uncontrolled debt and deficits, a quantitative easing which in effect means flooding the market with money, the nationalisation of the health care industry, and the debate over the closing of the Federal Government, the US will soon be about as free market as Russia. Convergence theory seems to be coming about not quite as expected but history is filled with surprises. But maybe there’s hope (why not live in hope, after all?). It’s early, of course, but Ron Paul is ahead for the Republican nomination for President.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) narrowly leads the pack of potential GOP contenders in 2016, according to a new poll.

If the GOP presidential primary were held today, 17 percent of GOP voters would elect Paul, according to a new Quinnipiac Poll released Wednesday. He leads among Tea Party Republicans as well with 22 percent.

The next presidential election is not till 2016, Obama will remain president till then no matter what and the offer of free health care and etc is pretty attractive to the sorts of people the Democrats count on for their presidential majority. But the reason it matters is because Rand Paul can become an early focus of Republican discontent. There is no official leader of the opposition in the US but he will fill that role more and more as time goes by if he gets the kind of support he is starting to generate. Here he steps in to bring reason to the closing of the American government:

Sen. Rand Paul on Tuesday said he would support a short-term funding measure ‘to keep the government open while we negotiate.’

‘I think what we could do is pass a very short term, maybe not six weeks, but what about one week, so we could negotiate over a week,’ the Kentucky Republican told CNN’s ‘New Day.’ ‘I think a continuing bill to keep the government open while we negotiate is a good idea. I do agree that negotiating with the government closed probably to [Democrats] appears like strong-arm tactics.’

If he continues like this he will be a hard man to ignore and the more he becomes a lightening rod for opposition to Obama, the more focus he will get. Early days but I am hopeful in what is really a hopeless cause.

Beyond Betrayal

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No book has ever frightened me as much as this. The only thing wrong with reading it is that you find yourself so surrounded by impossible odds that it seems there is no way you can go that isn’t in the wrong direction. Trying to fix things is as bad as just leaving them alone. If I were to write this up, these are the elements that would go into the story.

1) Ronald Radosh’s review of American Betrayal was so scathing I knew it had to be worth reading. He is a leftist plant who is so patently not on our side that the only wonder is that he is not universally recognised for who and what he is.

2) My own background living with my father who was a lifelong dedicated communist. I grew up understanding that the international communist conspiracy does not require everyone to receive a set of instructions to tell them what to do. They merely have to understand what the rules are and from then on they can be left on their own to play their part as they interpret it.

3) Reading the book which has been a dispiriting experience. Maybe I should just stop reading long books since they take so long but I do think it was the content.

4) What’s the content? When we were in New Orleans in 2010 I found for $3 a book titled The Politician by Robert Welch. Welch was the central figure in the John Birch Society which was this ultra-looney group on the far right when I was growing up. If you wanted preposterous then they would supply it. But between then and now my politics have moved from the left where they were then to the right where they are now. But even as I picked it up, my expectation would be that I am dealing with beyond the pale. Instead, I found Welch to be as moderate and reasonable as one could want, fully understanding who he was and how he would be viewed by others and portrayed by his enemies. He just took up the fight because he knew what he knew and could see no alternative but to try to do what he could to fix things. For what it’s worth, I still think Welch is looney and his views extreme but that he saw communism as a mortal enemy of freedom is to his credit.

5) And what Diana West writes across 400 pages might be summed up in a single sentence from The Politician.

The American people have not yet waked up to the clear evidence that Harry Hopkins, instead of being the fumbling half-mystical dogooder for which they took him, was one of the most successful Communist agents the Kremlin has ever found already planted in the American government, and then developed to top-level usefulness.” (217-218)

Diana West’s book is about Harry Hopkins, his role as a Stalinist agent and the influence he had over Roosevelt. It’s much more than that but on its own that is more than enough to make you see the world in a very different way. Weird even to write this down but it is the very implausibility that makes this an idea worth pondering. Radosh certainly had no arguments that would counter what West wrote.

6) In a nutshell, with Hopkins literally (as in actually, he really was) living in the White House during World War II, virtually the whole of American policy and strategy was designed with one purpose in mind – to allow the Russians to expand their grip on the rest of the world. Both the tyrannies of Eastern Europe after the war and the communist takeover in China were caused by these agents of influence who set American foreign policy and determined the allied war strategy. She may be wrong but she does tell an incredibly plausible story that fits with everything I already know. And if it is true, you can hardly see how an enemy this powerful can ever lose. I take the same view as Whittaker Chambers, we are on the losing side.

7) All of which West ties to the present struggle with Islamic jihad where those within our political elites who you would think ought to be alerting us to the dangers of letting down our guard are instead conspiring with the Islamists to create a world in which the rest of us will come under their sway. I cannot understand why they would do it but there seems too little evidence of resistance and plenty of evidence of collaboration.

8) As with Communism, the only saving grace in the end is just how repulsive the Islamic enemy is. But if the fifth column is as relentless and as well placed as the communists were (and are) I do not see how this can be overcome. Hence depressing but I do not wish to be so defeatist. But it’s a war that now that I see the dimensions of makes me tired and fearful. It also makes everything else seem so minimal.

Maybe I’ll be more rested tomorrow but tonight it has gotten right on top of me.

“One big lie, not one word of it is true”

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When you have even Seymour Hersh saying this about Obama then we have come to a defining moment in the history of media’s lying for the left. Having been one of the worst of them himself, but from a previous generation, he finds the present generation even more despicable than his own. Yet in this instance I am sure he is pretty right about most of what he says:

On the subject of the Navy Seal raid that supposedly resulted in the death of the Al-Qaeda terror leader, Hersh remarked, ‘Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true.’

Hersh added that the Obama administration habitually lies but they continue to do so because the press allows them to get away with it.

‘It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama],’ Hersh told the Guardian.

And what is the title of that Guardian interview: “Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the ‘pathetic’ American media“. He is savage about what is a true crime but what’s new. His answer:

‘I’ll tell you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can’t control,’ he says. I saw it in the New York Times, I see people who get promoted are the ones on the desk who are more amenable to the publisher and what the senior editors want and the trouble makers don’t get promoted. Start promoting better people who look you in the eye and say ‘I don’t care what you say’.

Nor does he understand why the Washington Post held back on the Snowden files until it learned the Guardian was about to publish.

If Hersh was in charge of US Media Inc, his scorched earth policy wouldn’t stop with newspapers.

‘I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let’s start all over, tabula rasa. The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won’t like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing,’ he says. . . .

‘The republic’s in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple.’ And he implores journalists to do something about it.

Yeah, sure. The journalists will fix it! They are liars for the left and nothing will change until journalists begin to report without their ideological filters firmly in place. This side of never seems a long time to wait but that’s how long I suspect it’s going to take. Solutions? I cannot think of a single one.

Betting on global warming

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A very perceptive comment about betting at the track by Armadillo who for some reason put it on a post dealing with global warming and the IPCC.

I confess to know very little about climate change science. The left keeps urging me to ‘trust the experts’ – they have reviewed all of the data and they alone are best placed to make a judgement on this very complex area. Fair enough. But I have been pondering where I have seen something very similar? When I purchased today’s Daily Telegraph, it suddenly dawned on me. It was sitting right there in the middle of the paper, staring me in the face.

I love to have a punt. Every week, there are about 5 professional tipsters willing to predict what is going to happen. They are paid full time to do it. They have all the relevant information at their finger tips. The breeding, the jockey, the trainer, the track conditions, the horse, it’s last run and even down to the break-up of what times the horse ran over a particular section of it’s last race (right down to a tenth of a second). The facts are indisputable. It’s all there in black and white.

These professional tipsters spend their entire week reviewing the data. They watch every race in minute detail, re-playing them over and over. They observe the evidence. They even load all the known information into complex computer models to assist in their analysis. These people are experts in their field. They know much more about horse racing than I ever will. They should be trusted.

Sometimes these guys disagree on their conclusions. Other times, they are in total agreement. Geez, if they are all saying that a certain horse is going to win based on the evidence, I can be 97% sure that the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Surely? However, there are also ‘known unknowns’ – other information and factors that they are unaware of or don’t completely understand (such as who’s putting money in who’s hands).

Tomorrow, I shall do as I always do. I will look at todays tips and compare them to the actual results. As always, I’m likely to be disappointed and poorer for the experience. With all the available data, how could these experts get it so wrong? What will they tell their boss on Monday morning? What excuse will they offer? Never fear, they will be back in my newspaper next Saturday morning, offering the same expert analysis and still getting paid.

I wonder. What would be more difficult to predict if you had all the information in front of you? If you had the facts? If you had all the tools? If you knew there were ‘known unknowns’? Would it be predicting the outcome of a simple horse race? Or would it be predicting the climate of an entire planet?

I’m probably going to have a few bets today based on what the experts tell me. But don’t panic, I’m not going to ask everyone else to throw in a couple of hundred billion dollars just in case these guys are actually right (for a change).

Righto then, I’m off to Sportsbet. Enjoy your day.

Such disgusting liars

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temp confidence limits

The only thing they can predict with any accuracy is that if the global warming scare went away their grants would absolutely disappear. Dishonest to the core of their lying hearts.

And that’s just their own self interest at work. Far more to the point is the actual harm they do in lowering living standards where they could be raised and not just by small amounts. Every action taken to reduce the use of the cheapest possible technologies lowers the ability to produce. The higher the cost of energy, the more living standards must fall. For us in the developed world, the effect will be gradual and in the end we will probably refuse to endure any of this nonsense any more assuming the moment hasn’t arrived already. But in less developed economies, or even amongst those at the lower end of the income distribution in our richer societies, the harm done is extravagant for absolutely no positive good that they or anyone else is able to show.

We should refuse to tolerate the harm they cause. We should call them out on it. We should not let them get away with pretending that they are just taking a long term safer option while new technologies are found and proved. The hunt for newer, cheaper technologies is never ending with or without the obscene subsidies the alternative energy industry may receive. They will arrive as they are discovered and made commercial. The need for carbon abatement taxes is just an opportunity for political elites to steal money from the poor, extremely poor and destitute. This is the moral issue of our time and it is that brigade of global warming buffoons who are the most immoral group of thieves living on this planet today.