Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

An Example Of How Lucky We Have It

June 30, 2009 Rand Simberg 30 Comments

The worst job they could come up with:

I’ve held my silence for long enough, but my true identity (for about 2 months) was the bird at Red Robin – Red, he really has a name. It was horrible, you could only be out in the restaurant getting poked and stepped on by little kids for 15-20 minutes at a time- at which point you would overheat and the staff would waddle you back to the huge meat freezer to cool off and start all over again. Perk: free steak fries and soda.

Boo. Hoo.

I don’t want to get into a Monty Python “we had to live in a cardboard box and get killed by our father every morning, and be grateful that we had the luxury of a box” sort of thing, but I’ve had worse jobs.

But I’m not going to bother to talk about them, because I know that at the worst, I lived in a paradise compared to many millions in the world. For example, consider the people who have to work in real sweat shops, where you don’t get a break every 15-20 minutes.

But even there, I don’t think it compares to a “job” in North Korea, where your job is to go out and find something to eat that will be worth the energy that it took you to find it — forget about whether or not it will feed your family.

These people have no conception of what bad jobs are. And the frightening thing is that they may find out before the reign of The One, who many of them voted for, is over, because he seems to think that state planning, as occurs in the extreme there, should reign over the market.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Selective Meddling

June 30, 2009 Rand Simberg 15 Comments

Some questions:

Now that the president has decided it’s okay to meddle in Honduras (where they are fighting to keep preserve their democracy against the Chávez-style thug who Obama wants to re-install) but not Iran (where thousands of Iranians who seek democracy are being killed, maimed and jailed by a regime which has been at war with the United States for 30 years), the president’s tack is to say that Honduras’s action in removing Zelaya is “not legal.”

What on earth makes Obama think he knows better about what is legal under the law of Honduras than the Supreme Court of Honduras and the law-writing legislature of Honduras? The Honduran military acted after Zelaya defied an order by that nation’s highest court which pronounced his coup attempt illegal; he has been replaced under a Honduran legal process by that nation’s Congress, which essentially impeached him and democratically voted in a successor. That sounds pretty legal to me. I am the first to admit I am not an expert in Honduran law, but I’d bet the Honduran Supreme Court has a better grasp on it than President Obama. On the issue of what is legal in Honduras, as between Hugo Chávez and the Honduran Supreme Court, our president has decided to go with Chávez.

Secondly, as IBD notes, the Obama administration is now “threatening to halt its $200 million in U.S. aid, immigration accords and a free-trade treaty if it doesn’t put the criminal Zelaya back into office.” Can someone explain to me how it is that Obama is willingly giving $900M to Hamastan (i.e., the jihadist-controlled Gaza strip) but would pull back a comparative pittance of aid in order to penalize a poor country in our own hemisphere for trying to preserve its democracy against a would-be left-wing dictator?

Also, as Charles Krauthammer said last night on Special Report:

…our decision ought to be: Yes, a coup isn’t a nice thing, but it’s preferable to having Zelaya dismantle the democracy. And we should insist on the elections of a president as scheduled in November, so it is a temporary situation.

Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro twins, you ought to reexamine your assumptions.

Hey, left-wing dictators have to stick together.

[Update early evening]

Banana Democrats:

Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway.

As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.”

President Obama on Monday called the action “not legal,” and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president.

There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).

Yet the U.S. administration stood with Chavez and Castro, calling Zelaya’s lawful removal “a coup.” Obama called the action a “terrible precedent,” and said Zelaya remains president.

In doing this, the U.S. condemned democrats who stood up to save their democracy, a move that should have been hailed as a historic turning of the tide against the false democracies of the region.

They only like democracy when it gives them the right (in this case “left”) result.

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

Catastrophe Avoidance

June 29, 2009 Rand Simberg 2 Comments

…is not a one-sided threat. For those people who don’t understand discount rates, a graphical presentation.

This is a problem that just begs to have a regret analysis performed on it. Of course, we have a media that can’t even do simple division, so why would we expect them to understand net present value?

[Update on Tuesday morning]

It’s the economic growth, stupid:

Here are some other metrics. The percentage of the world’s population that is at risk for coastal flooding is well under 1% in the baseline, and is not projected to rise close to 1% in any scenario within the 95-year forecast. Malaria deaths have historically been in effect eliminated by societies that achieve several thousand dollars per year of per capita income — the key risk here is once again slower economic growth that keeps parts of the developing world poorer longer.

Again and again, we see the same pattern: At least for the next century, changes in human welfare, even on metrics that are not purely economic, are fundamentally driven by changes in economic development, not AGW damages. This is why it makes sense to be focused acutely on risks to economic growth when considering the overall effects of any emissions-mitigation program.

Most people who advocate nonsense like cap and trade are ignorant of the science, but even more are ignorant of economics, including the “scientists.”

Political Commentary

Green Nazis

June 29, 2009 Rand Simberg 3 Comments

Unlike a lot of watermelon environmentalists, they’re honest about it. They want to adopt a highway, but the state won’t let them:

Representatives of the National Socialist movement in Missouri did not immediately return calls seeking comment about the legislation Sunday. But a statement on the movement’s Web site calls the renaming “a lame attempt to insult National Socialist pro-environment/green policies.”

Birds of a feather…

Political Commentary, Space

Advice For Augustine

June 29, 2009 Rand Simberg 2 Comments

Wes Huntress has some. I agree with a lot of what he says, but not all:

The directive to land on the Moon by 2020 is not achievable given the agency’s current limited out-year budget, costs for Constellation development, and the looming requirement to support the International Space Station beyond 2015. The best approach to lower cost and sustained development is to leverage existing space transportation infrastructure to the maximum.

I absolutely agree with the second sentence, but not the first. It is possible to get to the moon by 2020, within the available funding. But in order to do so, NASA has to focus its resources on getting to the moon, in an affordable and sustainable manner, using that existing infrastructure. As long, though, as they focus on developing their own launch systems, it will never happen. And not just because they’re not very good at developing launch systems.

I wouldn’t emphasize the international part, either. I don’t mind doing partnerships, if they make sense, but we shouldn’t do things internationally for its own sake. I wouldn’t abandon the moon–I think that NASA should be developing a lander, but that’s really the only major hardware element (at least in terms of transportation) that’s lunar specific. We need to develop a general deep-space transportation infrastructure, and it NASA had focused on that instead of Ares/Orion, they’d be a good way down that road now.

Political Commentary

Wrong On Ricci

June 29, 2009 Rand Simberg 13 Comments

SCOTUS says that Sotomayor screwed up, and screwed the firefighters. Kind of frightening that it’s only 5-4.

[Noon update]

“…not a single justice thought that Judge Sotomayor acted correctly in granting summary judgment for the City of New Haven.”

But let’s put her on the highest bench in the land.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts:

She essentially committed judicial malpractice.

That even Justice Ginsberg and the dissenters would have remanded — undoing what Judge Sotomayor did — confirms that Sotomayor is a far-left liberal judicial activist who ignores the law and rules on her own personal agenda, even beyond the current liberals on the Court.

There is nothing moderate, mainstream, or nonideological about that. This demonstrates that the White House spin on this nominee is a pure fabrication.

Usually, poor performance in any profession is not rewarded with the highest job offer in the entire profession.

What Judge Sotomayor did in Ricci was the equivalent of a pilot error resulting in a bad plane crash. And now the pilot is being offered to fly Air Force One.

I hope that this is a major issue at confirmation hearings.

[Update about 5 EDT]
More thoughts from Richard Epstein.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Things That You Think Will Make You Happy

June 29, 2009 Rand Simberg 37 Comments

But won’t.

I’ve never wanted to be famous — it looks like a miserable life to me. But I would have no problem being rich. The problem with most lottery winners is that they don’t have any sort of higher purpose to life, and don’t understand how to handle sudden wealth. I have no interest in making people envious of my possessions. I’m not a very materialistic person in general. I buy things that will provide enjoyment to me, for practical reasons, and give very little thought as to what others will think about them. But the main thing is that I know exactly what I’d do if I became suddenly wealthy. I’d do the same thing that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did, but I’d do it right, because I already know what I’m doing, and wouldn’t have to hire other people to figure it out.

Oh, and the one about power?

The thing is, it’s the desire itself that’s poisonous. You find that need for power most in the type of person who hates having to obey all of society’s social contracts, particularly the ones that require them to not act like cocks all day. These are the people who are only nice guys because of fear of retribution if they do otherwise, so their main goal is to become strong enough that no retribution is possible (this is why sociopaths tend to seek positions of power, by the way).

Anybody who wants to be president badly enough to go through everything that it takes is intrinsically not to be trusted. I think that we’d be a lot better off with a search committee, who sought out someone for their competence and character, and who didn’t really want the job, but was reluctantly willing to do it. He’d probably still get corrupted eventually, but at least he wouldn’t start off that way right out of the box. Actually, I think that a Fred Thompson would be a good candidate in that scenario.

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

The Democrats’ War On Science

June 28, 2009 Rand Simberg 33 Comments

The EPA has quashed a politically incorrect study. Meanwhile, Jim Hansen, non-climate scientist, goes around shouting from the rooftops that he’s being silenced.

More here:

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward…and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”

After all the complaints about the Bush administration’s “war on science,” the self-righteous hypocrisy of these people is sickening.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Voxiversity

June 27, 2009 Rand Simberg

Chapter Two — Hitler: Man of the Left. With (as always) an interesting discussion in comments.

Transterrestrial Musings