Category Archives: Science And Society

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

Faith-Based Deficit Reduction

30 Comments

Note: I’ve been continually updating this post, and will probably continue to do so all day, and keep it at the top. New posts are below it.

Thoughts on the health-care deform by Jimmy Pethokoukis.

[Update a few minutes later]

Nationalizing health care by proxie:

Insurance companies are now heavily regulated government contractors. Way to get big business out of Washington! They will clear a small, government-approved profit on top of their government-approved fees. Then, when healthcare costs rise — and they will — Democrats will insist, yet again, that the profit motive is to blame and out from this Obamacare Trojan horse will pour another army of liberals demanding a more honest version of single-payer.

The Obama administration has turned the insurance industry into the Blackwater of socialized medicine.

Like the financial crisis, it’s right out of the standard fascist playbook. Screw up the market with government regulations, then claim that government regulations are required to fix it. Rinse, repeat, until they control every aspect of our lives.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Is the tax power infinite?

Americans today are not bound to meekly accept the most far-ranging assertions of congressional power based on large extrapolations from Supreme Court cases that themselves come from a short period (the late 1930s and early 1940s) when the Court was more supine and submissive to claims about centralized power than was any other Supreme Court before or after in our history. American citizens, in the political process and in their personal lives, will ultimately have the final word on the Constitution.

Let’s hope that ultimately comes soon.

[Update a while later]

“Every power grab is the base camp for the next power grab.”

[Update a while later]

Ten Obama promises that reached their expiration date this morning.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Americans: the health care debate wasn’t about health care at all.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, but not all of them.

[Update mid morning]

Dennis Prager: the Cold Civil War has begun:

Thank God this civil war is non-violent. But the fact is that the Left and the rest of the country share almost no values. The American value system and the leftist value system are irreconcilable. If the Left wins, American values lose. If American values win, the Left loses.

I like his idea of calling the Democrats “Social Democrats.”

And Mark Steyn has some depressing thoughts on our accelerating journey to Declinistan.

[Update a while later]

Awakening a sleeping giant:

Instead of being discouraged by passage of health care reform, tea party activists across the country say the defeat is a rallying cry that makes them more focused than ever on voting out any lawmaker who supported the measure.

“We’re not going to stop. Obviously, the whole tea party movement started because we’re about smaller government and less spending and less taxes. There is absolutely no way we can pay for this,” said Denise Cattoni, state coordinator for Illinois Tea Party, an umbrella group for about 50 groups from around Illinois.

Cattoni says the health care defeat doesn’t deflate tea party activists. “We couldn’t stop it because of the shenanigans that went on in Washington,” Cattoni said. “People are definitely more driven today than they were yesterday without a doubt.”

Actually, the giant awoke last year, as we saw in Virginia, New Jersey and (most of all) Massachusetts. And it’s not going back to sleep any time soon, contra the fantasies of the Democrats. It’s not only awake, now — it’s enraged. The retribution in November will be huge.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I just noticed this quote at the end of the article from an idiot:

While tea party activists have made themselves heard, University of North Florida political science professor Matthew Corrigan said the movement alone won’t be enough to oust incumbents.

“Do they have energy? Yes. Have they been getting into the media? Yes, but they still haven’t sold me on the fact that they can swing elections,” Corrigan said.

Tell it to Martha Coakley. If I were one of his students, I’d want my course tuition back.

[Update a few minutes later]

Kevin Williamson says that ObamaCare will never happen. Unfortunately, it’s not as good a news as it sounds:

Our budget deficit is currently about 10 percent of GDP and going higher. Greece’s is 12.7 percent of GDP — significantly higher, sure, but not outrageously so. At the end of fiscal 2009, U.S. federal government debt equaled 83 percent of GDP, 53 percent of which is held by the public. (Another 30 percent is “intra-government” debt, meaning money owed to the mythical Social Security trust fund and the like. The usual approach is to talk only about publicly held debt and to pretend that the rest does not represent real obligations, which is malarkey.) But even that does not tell the whole story: Official government debt figures do not account for the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac obligations taken on by the government, and those amount to $5 trillion, i.e. more than all 2009 federal spending. They also don’t count remaining liabilities related to the Wall Street bailout.

So here’s a prediction for you: Obamacare is not going to happen, regardless of the fact that the president is going to sign it into law today, regardless of what happens in the 2010 and 2012 elections, and regardless of any speech given anywhere in Washington. The government’s ability to simply say “Make it so!” and ignore economic reality is coming up against its limit. If Nancy Pelosi thinks the Republicans are obstructionists, wait until she wants to borrow money from people who don’t want to lend it to her and don’t have to run for reelection.

[Bumped]

Political Commentary, Science And Society

“Settled Science”

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Discover has an interview with Judith Curry, who has been one of the few people in the climate “science” community behaving with any integrity:

Are you saying that the scientific community, through the IPCC, is asking the world to restructure its entire mode of producing and consuming energy and yet hasn’t done a scientific uncertainty analysis?

Yes. The IPCC itself doesn’t recommend policies or whatever; they just do an assessment of the science. But it’s sort of framed in the context of the UNFCCC [the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change]. That’s who they work for, basically. The UNFCCC has a particular policy agenda—Kyoto, Copenhagen, cap-and-trade, and all that—so the questions that they pose at the IPCC have been framed in terms of the UNFCCC agenda. That’s caused a narrowing of the kind of things the IPCC focuses on. It’s not a policy-free assessment of the science. That actually torques the science in certain directions, because a lot of people are doing research specifically targeted at issues of relevance to the IPCC. Scientists want to see their papers quoted in the IPCC report.

But don’t say there’s confirmation bias.

Science And Society, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society

Back To The Drawing Board?

21 Comments

I’ve never been a big fan of nuking asteroids, but this test should cause some concern:

Don Korycansky of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Catherine Plesko of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico simulated blowing up asteroids 1 kilometre across. When the speed of dispersal was relatively low, it took only hours for the fragments to coalesce into a new rock.

“The high-speed stuff goes away but the low-speed stuff reassembles [in] 2 to 18 hours,” Korycansky says. The simulations were presented (pdf) last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

So you have to have a big enough bomb to really do the job. I think there are better, more controllable ways.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Climate Hoax

10 Comments

Like Joe Katzman, I don’t think that’s too strong a word for it any more. Steve Hayward has an extensive roundup of all the problems at the IPCC (though I could have done without the naked Al Gore picture).

Also, remember how we were told, even by warm mongering commenters here, that the CRU data didn’t matter because we had GISS?

Nope.

The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database.

These emails, obtained by Christopher Horner, also show that the NASA GISS dataset was not independent of CRU data.

Further, all of this information regarding the accuracy and independence of NASA GISS data was directly communicated to a reporter from USA Today in August 2007.

The reporter never published it.

Of course not. Didn’t fit the template.

Hansen should be drummed out of the global “science” community, if they want to regain any credibility.

[Update a few minutes later]

As I’ve noted before, this isn’t just a science scandal, it’s a media scandal. If they were fooled by these charlatans, it’s because they wanted to be.

[Late morning update]

More from Chris Horner — three of the four data sets are irrevocably tainted. But the faithful will not waver in their religion.

[Early afternoon update]

A video interview with Chris Horner — the climate cover up spreads to NASA.

Media Criticism, Science And Society

The Science Is Settled

24 Comments

A giant asteroid hit really did kill the dinosaurs.

OK, the title is a joke (on the warm mongers) — the phrase “the science is settled” is an oxymoron, and goes against the very nature of science. But there does seem to be a growing “consensus” (another scientific oxymoron) that Louis Alverez got it right three decades ago. The initial resistance, it always seemed to me, to be resistance to the notion by paleontologists, who were extremely terracentric, that something extraterrestrial could have such a sudden and catastrophic effect on the planet and its most dominant order. It didn’t help that it was in a field far outside their domain.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

“The Science Is Settled”

5 Comments

…they told Copernicus.

[Late morning update]

Several “scientists” are continuing to plot attacks on the “deniers.” And they’re being led by Paul Ehrlich, one of the most discredited pseudoscientific totalitarian doom’n’gloomers in modern history? It doesn’t help that the president’s current science advisor was one of his protégés.

These folks have apparently never learned the old rule about holes.

Education, Political Commentary, Science And Society

It Should Have Been Folklore And Mythology

8 Comments

Notorious con artist and fraud Al Gore is going to be given an honorary doctorate by the University of Tennessee:

Gore will receive the degree — an Honorary Doctor of Laws and Humane Letters in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology — at the spring commencement exercises of the College of Arts and Sciences on May 14.

Instapundit is likely quite embarrassed.

[Late afternoon update]

You know, I think that this is pretty much a guarantee that UT commencement is going to be snowed out this spring.