Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Obama’s Five-Year Plan

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…for the climate:

Speaking at Georgetown University on Tuesday, President Barack Obama outlined his “new national climate action plan,” which amounts to a federal top-down five-year plan—although he has only four years to implement it. Obama’s plan ambitiously seeks to control nearly every aspect of how Americans produce and consume energy. The goal is to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases and thus stop boosting the temperature of the earth. The actual result will be to infect the economy with the same sort of sclerosis seen in other centrally planned nations.

This is doubly hubristic: that he thinks he knows what’s happening with the climate, and that he thinks he know what best to do about and that it will work.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Food Stamps And Farms

This is long overdue:

The plan being contemplated by Cantor closely tracks an earlier proposal by Indiana Republican Marlin Stutzman. In a press release issued last week, Stutzman pointed out that “Eighty percent of the spending goes toward food stamps” in the original farm bill. He called on the House to “do our work in the full light of day by splitting this bill and having serious debates on both farm and welfare policy.”

It’s a shame that Congress doesn’t seem capable of having a serious debate about anything.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Climate Models

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On the verge of failure.

It’s an interesting exercise to attempt to model climate, but the notion that we should base public policy on these toys, particularly given the incompetence of many of those doing it, is insane.

[Update a while later]

It’s worth quoting the conclusions here:

It is impossible to present reliable future projections from a collection of climate models which generally cannot simulate observed change. As a consequence, we recommend that unless/until the collection of climate models can be demonstrated to accurately capture observed characteristics of known climate changes, policymakers should avoid basing any decisions upon projections made from them. Further, those policies which have already be established using projections from these climate models should be revisited.

Assessments which suffer from the inclusion of unreliable climate model projections include those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program (including the draft of their most recent National Climate Assessment). Policies which are based upon such assessments include those established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pertaining to the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

In other words, all of the president’s latest job- and wealth-destroying power grab.

[Update a few minutes later[

Failure deniers– the problem with public-sector science:

Private companies which kill products or ideas administer the pain quickly and move on. If government ever tries to end a program or operation — “ever” is the operative word, as Ronald Reagan frequently noted: ”The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program” — they go about it slowly, in hopes that outraged politicians or constituents will come to their rescue. If total termination ever occurs, they call it “a learning experience,” which of course was carried out with other people’s money, and rarely includes any learning.

Because they can do it with other peoples’ money. Time to take their (that is, our) money away.