In Washington, he used his BlackBerry to determine the bailout sum presented to Congress. His arithmetic: “We have $11 trillion residential mortgages, $3 trillion commercial mortgages. Total $14 trillion. Five percent of that is $700 billion. A nice round number.”
Looking back, he says, he is more confident about the two-by-sixes.
“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’ We didn’t know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.”
I’m glad he got out, and wish him well in his new life in California. But it doesn’t instill confidence in the government, nor should it.
Crafty use of statistics, lack-of-transparency, wild projections about future calamity requiring government intervention now…Hmmmm.
If all of this is sounding familiar there’s a reason. Stefan Rahmstorf is one of the CRU e-mail clatch and a contributor to Real Climate. For instance, here is an e-mail in which he is desperately seeking help writing a reply to a critic.
Based on this alarmist study, Schwarzenegger and the State of California have put together…a…video which includes the Rahmstorf’s prediction of a 4 foot sea level rise by 2100 and images of San Francisco inundated by rising seas.
By the way, the California Energy Commission which is pushing this is the same group that outlawed future sales of my TV a few weeks ago. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it since TVs don’t work well underwater anyway.
I’ll be OK. We’re a couple dozen feet above at least, with dunes between us and the beach a mile and a half away.
While it’s great fun — and entirely worthwhile — to make a big stink about Climategate, it would be a shame if people believed that Copenhagen’s inevitable failure hinged on this one scandal. Even if the CRU researchers were the model of scientific dispassion, these schemes are pointless. Indeed, even if global warming is the threat the alarmists claim it is, it makes no sense to waste trillions of dollars on “fixes” that will do little to fix the alleged problem.
I like the reference to Canada as the Richie Cunningham of the UN.
Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to have scientific equipment on them to gather data, and that data studied by men with computers. Who’s going to do it? A layman like you? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for the global warming skeptics and curse the climatologists. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know — that the crushing of data contrary to global warming, while tragic, probably saved grant money. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to the layman, creates scientific consensus. You don’t want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about on Twitter, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall studying those measurements you can’t even begin to comprehend.
I’m ashamed to have questioned such noble and selfless people.
Does anyone really think that NASA PAO’s Mark Hess is “unfamiliar” with the British climate controversy? If so, he should be canned for rank incompetence. NASA (and of course Dr. Hansen) are starting to look as dirty as the CRU.
An interesting post. I’d be happy to make the distinction, but as Cliff May notes, the Islamists are eager to blur it, so that they can be viewed as the “vanguard of the proletariat,” so to speak. And yes, the Fort Hood shooter wasn’t just a Muslim, but an Islamist. And if he’s insane, then so are millions of others.
