No Oil for Pacifists

Don't miss Iowahawk's brilliant "Man, Do I Hate Holiday Travel".

(via reader Doug J.)

Econ prof Mark Perry compares U.S. manufacturing output with the total GDP of the five next largest economies in the world:


source: Carpe Diem via Federal Reserve and Wikipedia

As Perry explains:

If the U.S. manufacturing sector were a separate country, it would be tied with Germany as the world's third largest economy. It would also be larger than the entire economies of India and Russia combined. As much as we hear about the "demise of U.S. manufacturing," and how we are a country that "doesn't produce anything anymore," and how we have "outsourced our production to China," the U.S. manufacturing sector is alive and well, and the U.S. is still the largest manufacturer in the world.

Of course, the numbers are down in 2009, yet -- despite the loss of domestic manufacturing employment caused by productivity gains -- America hasn't been "de-industrialized."

I'm traveling for the holidays, then off to the Consumer Electronics Show (I'm helping organize a panel there). So I'm taking a few week break from blogging. There may be an occasional post, but normal pace will resume in mid-January.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

NOfP May 19, 2007: "The good news: Because the Dems are scared of screwing up the economy, we won't have to hear anything about global warming after January 20, 2009."

Washington Post graphic, December 18, 2009:


source: WaPo

See also Leon de Winter: "Mr. President, You Can’t Save the Economy and Save the Planet."

(via Instapundit)

UPDATE: See also Barton Hinkle and Heather MacDonald.

From the FBI's Semiannual Uniform Crime Report for the first half of 2009:


source: FBI December 21st Press Release

As Tigerhawk says, "So much for the theory that economic hardship causes crime."

From Ross Douthat's essay about Hollywood's latest blockbuster, in Monday's New York Times:

"Avatar" is [director James] Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism -- a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the "All Mother," described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like "The Lion King" and "Pocahontas." And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force "surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together."

Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the "religion and inspiration" section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the "spiritual energy" of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi. . .

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs -- a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,' and a piping-hot apocalypse.

At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions -- with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps "bring God closer to human experience," while "depriving him of recognizable personal traits." For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can support.

For lefties, gazing at Gaia means never having to say you're sorry. Or even asking about ethics or morals. Rather, they seemingly see "nature" as a pre-monotheist angry spirit -- to be appeased by windmill totems, emissions wampum trading, a collection plate for the third world, an energy hair-shirt, and perhaps even suicide.

For a New York Times article actually about theology, see the Sunday magazine's surprisingly fair portrait of Princeton prof Robert George. I don't always agree with George, but he's among the most interesting Christian thinkers today.

(via reader Marc, Wolf Howling)

At TV By the Numbers, the "Long Term Trend of O’Reilly vs. Olbermann vs. Campbell Brown TV Ratings":


source: Bill Gorman and reader MikeS

Not surprising--except for Doug Ross's hilarious graph label: "hockey stick." Chortle.

(via Berman Post)

From the AFP:

Judge Richard Posner's book "A Failure of Capitalism" famously blames the financial crisis on deregulation. In the Fall 2009 Claremont Review of Books, James Keller demolishes the claim:

There is a widespread view that the derivatives market is the Wild West, and that it is nobody's job to know who owes what to whom. Many seem to believe there are vast exposures lurking undetected by regulators. This view is nonsense. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) publishes a Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities that lists this information for the nation's largest banks, the top five of which represent 96% of the total amount. Want to know the volume of credit derivative contracts entered into by the Regions bank of Alabama? It's in Table 12. . .

The anticipated chain of events was a large hedge fund failing and taking down its lenders in a chain reaction. Instead, the banks failed, threatening the hedge funds. The rush to re-regulate ignores the reality that the least-regulated entities in the system--hedge funds--fared far better than the highly regulated entities like banks and insurance companies.

One would have expected this negative correlation between regulation and success in weathering the storm would have leaped out at Posner. It is the type of interesting insight he normally pounces on. He does notice that hedge funds fared a good deal better than banks, but rather than explore this interesting point, he uses the Bernie Madoff affair as further proof of the need to regulate hedge funds.

The lessons from Madoff seem very different from the ones Posner wants to draw. First, in a nation with over 8,000 hedge funds managing more than $1.3 trillion, cases of undetected fraud like this one appear to be extremely rare. Second, it is now well known that the SEC had clear warnings of problems with Madoff's funds--whistles were blown--but failed to act on them. In fact, the relatively good performance of hedge funds in general could force the conclusion that the informal networks regulating hedge funds--the scrutiny of funds of funds, outside consultants employed by pension fund investors, credit departments of bank lenders, and rigorous internal risk management--did a far better job sniffing out risk than the regulators keeping watch over banks.

Posner is so sure that deregulation caused the crisis, he hardly bothers to offer any evidence that it did. It didn't. There are really no linkages between specific deregulatory actions and the current crisis. Unfortunately, his admonition to go slowly in crafting new regulations is likely to be ignored, and the failed regulators are busy drafting new rules to cover past incompetence. To the extent Posner provides ammunition for the re-regulators, he does us all a disservice.

Agreed. Keller's conclusion is worth highlighting:

The Obama Administration's latest proposals for financial reform seem to envision a superhuman regulator who will catch excesses before they occur. This is naïve. Regulators need not be heroes if creditors have an interest in being vigilant; and creditors will have such an interest if recklessness faces the penalty of real loss. Unfortunately, we have just assured all creditors that their interests will be protected, no matter how reckless they are.

(via Powerline)

Two years ago, I wrote:

From here in D.C., many seem to believe bureaucrats and science trump popular sovereignty. It shouldn't be so.

Critics have it completely backwards. Government is about policymaking. And while science and data gathering may be "independent" in some sense, policy is not.

[I]t simply isn't the case that science settles the question--if their populations truly are declining, "preferring pipelines to polar bears" isn't necessarily irrational.

Daniel Sarewitz and Samuel Thernstrom make s similar point in Wednesday's LA Times:

[B]oth parties have agreed, although tacitly, on one thing: Science is the appropriate arbiter of the political debate, and policy decisions should be determined by objective scientific assessments of future risks. This seductive idea gives politicians something to hide behind when faced with divisive decisions. If "pure" science dictates our actions, then there is no need to acknowledge the role that political interests and social values play in deciding how society should address climate change.

The idea that pure, disinterested science should decide political disputes was a staple of Democratic politics during the George W. Bush administration. Now it's payback time, as Republicans gloat over an alleged "smoking gun" of scientific misconduct provided by recently released e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. After decrying the "Republican war on science," Democrats are hard-pressed to explain the discovery of their own partisans in the scientific trenches.

We do not believe the East Anglia e-mails expose a conspiracy that invalidates the larger body of evidence demonstrating anthropogenic warming; nevertheless, the damage to public confidence in climate science, particularly among Republicans and independents, may be enormous. The terrible danger -- one that has been brewing for years -- is that the invaluable role science should play in informing policy and politics will be irrevocably undermined, as citizens come to see science as nothing more than a tool for partisans of all stripes. . .

Thus, we write neither to attack nor to defend the East Anglia scientists, but to make clear that the ideal of pure science as a source of truth that can cut through politics is false. . .

The real scandal illustrated by the e-mails is not that scientists tried to undermine peer review, fudge and conceal data, and torpedo competitors, but that scientists and advocates on both sides of the climate debate continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science. This charade is a disservice to both science and democracy. To science, because the reality cannot live up to the myth; to democracy, because the difficult political choices created by the genuine but also uncertain threat of climate change are concealed by the scientific debate.

What is the solution? Let politics do its job; indeed, demand it.

(via Volokh Conspiracy)

From John Graham's new Pacific Research Institute study called Medicare Advantage or Medicare Monopoly: Protecting Seniors’ Choices and Taxpayers’ Wallets in the Federal Government’s Largest Entitlement Program:


source: Graham at 28

The study explains:

Table 4 shows payment-to-cost ratios for inpatient care by payer in California in 2005. Private insurers paid $129 for every $100 of hospital costs. Meanwhile, traditional Medicare paid only $74, and other government payers also fail to cover the cost of treatment. Although Medicare Advantage HMOs in California did not pay as well as fully private payers, they did not impose the hidden tax of either traditional Medicare or other government plans. Obviously, hospitals could not deliver the care they do if they relied fully on traditional government payers.

It appears that Medicare’s failure to pay its way poses a dilemma: We can pay for its shortfall either through the hidden tax (or cost shift) levied on private payers, or via direct taxation, by subsidizing Medicare Advantage plans.

(via reader John K.)

Brian Micklethwait:

You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof. Unfair to all the fraud detectives (Watts, McIntyre, and the rest of them, including Monkton himself) though it undoubtedly was, those noble toilers, until the Climategate revelations erupted, had to prove everything, in defiance of the default position. Their every tiny blemish was jumped upon. Their major claims were ignored. Now the default position is slowly mutating into: It's all made-up nonsense. And the burden of proof is shifting onto the shoulders of all those who want to go on believing in such ever more discredited alarmism. In short, our side is winning this argument, big time.

UPDATE: below

From the recent Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform report:


source: Peterson-Pew report at 8

As the report explains:

Under the Commission’s fiscal baseline, the public debt is expected to grow to 85 percent of GDP by 2018. Beyond 2018, the situation will deteriorate with the debt surpassing 100 percent of GDP in 2022 and reaching 200 percent in 2038.

The widening gap between spending and revenue will result from the growth in government spending, driven primarily by the aging population and growing health care costs, and a revenue base that grows more slowly. As projected by the Commission’s fiscal baseline, non-interest spending will grow to 22 percent of GDP in 2018 and to 27 percent in 2038. This higher spending would also cause interest payments to grow dramatically, adding nearly 4 percentage points of GDP to spending in 2018 and almost 9 points in 2038.

MORE:

MaxedOutMama:

In 36 pages this report lays out the fiscal situation, which is serious. We have about ten years, and we need to take action during those ten years.

(via Washington Examiner)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez quoted in the Australian, speaking at the Copenhagen climate conference:

When he said the process in Copenhagen was "not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really and imperial dictatorship. . .down with imperial dictatorships" he got a rousing round of applause.

When he said there was a "silent and terrible ghost in the room" and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.

But then he wound up to his grand conclusion -- 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ -- "our revolution seeks to help all people. . .socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell. . . let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us." He won a standing ovation.

As Rick at Wizbang says:

You have to be an idiot, a blooming friggin' fool, not to see the global warming movement now for what it truly is.

This is largely about ideology. This is largely about that which communists/Marxists/socialists have been after for as long as those ideologies have been around. This is largely about ending Western (capitalist) exceptionalism.

When Hugo Chavez gets a standing ovation for decrying capitalism while praising socialism and Marxism, then understand this has little to do with weather or man-made global warming.

If you're not seeing this now. . . you never will.

Back in September, Barack Obama admitted that "President Bush was right that Iran's ballistic missile program poses a significant threat." Obviously, Iran with nuclear weapons -- which violate that nation's safeguard and treaty obligations -- would amplify that threat. And, according to the London Times, there's little doubt Iran's headed there:

Confidential intelligence documents obtained by The Times show that Iran is working on testing a key final component of a nuclear bomb.

The notes, from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project, describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. Foreign intelligence agencies date them to early 2007, four years after Iran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme.

An Asian intelligence source last week confirmed to The Times that his country also believed that weapons work was being carried out as recently as 2007 -- specifically, work on a neutron initiator.

The technical document describes the use of a neutron source, uranium deuteride, which independent experts confirm has no possible civilian or military use other than in a nuclear weapon. Uranium deuteride is the material used in Pakistan’s bomb, from where Iran obtained its blueprint.

"Although Iran might claim that this work is for civil purposes, there is no civil application," said David Albright, a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, which has analysed hundreds of pages of documents related to the Iranian programme. "This is a very strong indicator of weapons work."

Indeed, some believe Iran may be on the way to testing a bomb.

Irresponsible liberals downplay the threat, some by (hilariously) misreading the Non-Proliferation Treaty, others labeling America the aggressor. Such voices can't grasp the danger of a mad-man with the bomb.

But even more thoughtful progressives push "containment." How could one contain a country committed to proliferation? Think I'm exaggerating? Read the December 15th Palestinian Information Center:

The political leadership of Hamas Movement on Monday met with Sa’eed Jalili, the chief negotiator of Iran’s nuclear file, Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the expediency discernment council, and Manouchehr Mottaki, the minister of foreign affairs.

Ezzat Al-Resheq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said that the Hamas delegates briefed the Iranian officials on the latest developments in the Palestinian arena and discussed with them the failure of the settlement process.

He pointed out that the Iranian officials congratulated the delegation on the 22nd anniversary of its Movement’s inception and hailed its steadfastness and adherence to the rights of the Palestinian people, adding that the officials promised to increase Iran’s support for the Palestinian people.

In the same context, Khaled Mishaal, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, said during his meeting with Jalili that the steadfastness and fortitude of the Palestinian resistance would never hold back until the achievement of victory and expressed his appreciation to Iran for its ongoing support for the Palestinian people against the Israeli occupation.

In addition, Iran's nuke negotiator "met with members of the Islamic Jihad, [as well as the] Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command [and] said his government continued to support the 'resistance,' or the armed battle against Israel, and was determined to push ahead with its nuclear ambitions." Oh, by the way, Iran already has been caught shipping conventional missiles to Hezbollah, and just tested a medium-range missile capable of reaching Eastern Europe.

Real sanctions have been blocked; rogue lefties in our intel community undermined Bush's attempted response. Containment's impossible. The world is running out of options to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons -- except for the Obama Doctrine of "just war."

(via Berman Post, Elder of Ziyon, Wolf Howling)

From Harvard econ prof Greg Mankiw in the December 13th New York Times:

When devising its fiscal package, the Obama administration relied on conventional economic models based in part on ideas of John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian theory says that government spending is more potent than tax policy for jump-starting a stalled economy. The report in January put numbers to this conclusion. It says that an extra dollar of government spending raises GDP by $1.57, while a dollar of tax cuts raises GDP by only 99 cents. The implication is that if we are going to increase the budget deficit to promote growth and jobs, it is better to spend more than tax less.

But various recent studies suggest that conventional wisdom is backward.

One piece of evidence comes from Christina D. Romer, the chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. In work with her husband, David H. Romer, written at the University of California, Berkeley, just months before she took her current job, Ms. Romer found that tax policy has a powerful influence on economic activity. According to the Romers, each dollar of tax cuts has historically raised G.D.P. by about $3 -- three times the figure used in the administration report. That is also far greater than most estimates of the effects of government spending.

Other recent work supports the Romers’ findings. In a December 2008 working paper, Andrew Mountford of the University of London and Harald Uhlig of the University of Chicago apply state-of-the-art statistical tools to United States data to compare the effects of deficit-financed spending, deficit-financed tax cuts and tax-financed spending. They report that "deficit-financed tax cuts work best among these three scenarios to improve G.D.P."

My Harvard colleagues Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna have recently conducted a comprehensive analysis of the issue. In an October study, they looked at large changes in fiscal policy in 21 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. They identified 91 episodes since 1970 in which policy moved to stimulate the economy. They then compared the policy interventions that succeeded -- that is, those that were actually followed by robust growth -- with those that failed.

The results are striking. Successful stimulus relies almost entirely on cuts in business and income taxes. Failed stimulus relies mostly on increases in government spending.

As I've said.

(via Mankiw's Blog)

Former DNC chair and medical doctor Howard Dean came out against the draft Senate healthcare bill this week, giving his reasons in a Thursday WaPo op-ed. Much of Dean's disgust arises from Harry Reid's dropping of the "public option" and the now apparently dead plan to lower Medicare eligibility to age 55, amid teeth-gnashing about "private insurers' monopoly over health care" (he's wrong about that). Yet Dean also complains about eliding controlling costs, predicting that "the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced." So Dean's half right.

Lowering healthcare spending was the original impetus for the Administration's health reform advocacy. Yet, as MaxedOutMama concludes, "none of these bills do anything but accelerate our budget problems." This explains Senator Lieberman's defection -- leaving Senate Democrats short of the 60 votes required to end debate and bring a bill to the floor.

This has left reform proponents such as Atul Gawande defending the proposed plethora of pilot projects. But, as Critical Condition's Paul Howard says:

If that were all the debate was about, they could've done that easily, with bipartisan support from Republicans -- and for a lot less money than the trillions Democrats plan to spend. Instead, they wanted to create a new government-run entitlement program to cover the uninsured.

The good news is that the Senate won't pass a bill this year: on Thursday, Senator Reid's office released a "Possible Path to Adjournment," a proposed legislative timeline, including:

Thursday (12/24) (30hrs) (note that this vote could occur on 12/25, depending on when each 30 hour period begins to run):

• After 30 hours has expired or been yielded back after the cloture vote on the underlying bill, final passage vote on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as amended

I don't have a hyperlink, but based on my 30 years in Washington, there's no way the Senate stays in session 'till Christmas eve (much less Christmas day). Meaning that healthcare legislation will be delayed beyond recess to early next year.

By then, be sure to read the excellent editorial in the December 14th Wall Street Journal:

ObamaCare's core promise--better quality care for everyone at lower costs--is being exposed as an illusion as it degenerates into the raw exercise of political power. Naturally, the White House and its media booster club are working furiously to prop up this fiasco, especially on cost control.

As Obama budget director Peter Orszag put it at a revealing media breakfast earlier this month, the Senate bill does everything the experts recommend to "get at the underlying drivers of health-care costs." While he admitted that "we don't know enough" to produce results right away, the key is to encourage "continuous improvement" through pilot programs and demonstration projects. Cost containment will actually take "years to decades," Mr. Orszag conceded.

The torch was then passed to Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic Monthly, David Leonhardt of the New York Times and editorial writers for the New England Journal of Medicine, among others. Last week the New Yorker ran a 5,000-word apologia from Atul Gawande, who likewise owned up to the fact that there is "no master plan for dealing with the problem of soaring medical costs," only "a battery of small scale experiments." Keep in mind, this is an argument in favor of ObamaCare.

They might have piped up earlier: What they're finally admitting is that all the grandiose talk about "bending the curve" used for months to sell ObamaCare really comes down to their hope that bureaucratic improvisation will make a difference over the long term. Yet the liabilities of the greatest social spending program in American history will be added to the budget almost immediately, and what happens if Mr. Orszag's technocratic revolution doesn't work as promised? Or rather, when it doesn't? . . .

The new cost-control apologists concede that there isn't any actual plan for controlling costs: Throw enough speculative policies against the wall, they say, and some breakthrough will stick. Yet Mr. Orszag's no-less-confident predecessors spent decades trying to pull down Medicare spending with little to no success. Technocracy rarely if ever works as intended. Mr. Gawande points to the case study of U.S. farm policy, and if politically sacrosanct agriculture subsidies and rural price-supports are the best to hope for, then what's the worst? . . .

One liberal sage noted in a 2007 paper that "four decades of empirical research" have shown that insulating people through third-party insurance coverage "from the full cost of health care has been responsible for anywhere from 10% to 50% of the large increase in health expenditures." Ultimately, he concluded, increasing cost-sharing would give individuals a direct stake in more prudent purchasing, as opposed to today's invisible health dollars that vanish as more expensive premiums, foregone wages and higher taxes.

Those are the words of Jason Furman, now the White House deputy economic director who seems to have been put into witness protection. Every serious health economist in the country recommends reforming the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance, perhaps by converting it to a deduction or credit. Cost control will never stick unless it is extricated from politics and transferred to individuals to make their own trade-offs. . .

The White House hawked a permanent entitlement expansion on flimsy and speculative theories that its own partisans now admit--albeit when it is nearly too late--aren't more substantive than the triumph of hope over experience, while simultaneously writing off the one policy that has been effective in the real world. The cost control mantra of ObamaCare was always a political bill of goods, and its result will be the opposite of its claims: poorer quality care at higher costs.

In sum: Medicare starts running short of money in just six years, and many complain about increased medical expenditures, while private insurance still sheds most incentives toward cost control. So we respond with bills spending at least $500 billion more -- likely well more than that -- freighted with racially discriminatory provisions, while jettisoning cost-cutting targets, to the detriment of the middle class. Sounds great!

Told ya so. No wonder it won't be wrapped by Christmas: bait-and-switch requires more salesmanship.

(via reader Thai, EconLog, The Corner, Berman Post)

The Obama Administration claims its stimulus package "created or saved" 640,000 jobs. That assertion is overstated and, concluded the GAO, unverifiable. But even accepting those data, Veronique de Rugy's analysis in Reason magazine is stunning:

A deeper look into the job creation data reveals that most of the jobs were "created or saved" in the public sector. Based on data from Stimulus Watch, we find that of the jobs the administration claims to have created with stimulus funds, only some 140,765 of them were private jobs.

That's 22 percent. As "Astro" would say, "rut ro." This can't be good -- except for the SEIU.

UPDATE: read Matthew Dowd in Thursday's WaPo.

Byron York in the December 15th Washington Examiner:

To some observers, the Democrats' race to pass national health care seems irrational -- even suicidal. Don't party leaders understand how much the public opposes the bills currently on the table? Don't they know that voters are likely to take their revenge at the polls next year? Given that, why do they keep rushing ahead? . . .

I put the question to a Democratic strategist who asked to remain anonymous. Yes, Democrats certainly understand that voters don't like the current bills, he told me, and they are fully aware they will probably pay a price next year. But they have found a way to view going ahead anyway as the logical thing to do, at least in their eyes. . .

In the end, perhaps the most compelling explanation for Democratic behavior is that they are simply in too deep to do anything else. "Once you've gone this far, what is the cost of failure?" asks the strategist.

At that point -- Republicans will love this -- he compared congressional Democrats with robbers who have passed the point of no return in deciding to hold up a bank. Whatever they do, they're guilty of something. "They're in the bank, they've got their guns out. They can run outside with no money, or they can stick it out, go through the gunfight, and get away with the money."

That's it. Democrats are all in. They're going through with it. Even if it kills them.

New York Times: "China and the United States were at an impasse on Monday at the United Nations climate change conference here over how compliance with any treaty could be monitored and verified."

BBC: "Negotiations at the UN climate summit have been suspended after developing countries withdrew their co-operation."

Heritage Foundation:

These poorer nations demanded that richer nations sign a treaty that includes a large transfer of wealth to the developing world to compensate for the developed world’s historical contribution to global warming. The G-77 countries ended their walkout after less than two hours, perhaps because global warming has had no apparent impact on December Copenhagen temperatures.

Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post:

Among the tens of thousands demonstrating outside the climate change summit, some were carrying giant clocks set at 10 minutes to midnight, indicating the imminent end of the world. Elsewhere, others staged a "resuscitation" of planet Earth, symbolically represented by a large collapsing balloon. Near the conference center, an installation of skeletons standing knee-deep in water made a similar point, as did numerous melting ice sculptures and a melodramatic "die-in" staged by protesters wearing white, ghost-like jumpsuits.

Danish police arrested about a thousand people on Saturday for smashing windows and burning cars, and on Sunday arrested 200 more (they were carrying gas masks and seem to have been planning to shut down the city harbor).

EU Referendum:

As reported by Reuters -- with a slight correction: "The head of the Asian Development Bank (ADP), Haruhiko Kuroda, warned governments that a failure to reach a climate deal in Copenhagen could lead to a collapse of the carbon market, which would hit efforts to deal with climate change make carbon traders very rich."

It helps of course to know that Mr Kuroda is best known in greenie circles for setting up the ADB Advisory Group on Climate Change -- chaired by millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri, part-time chairman of the IPCC.

The Daily Telegraph:

The world has only seven years before climate change causes a "point of crisis" that will drive food shortages, terrorism and poverty, the Prince of Wales has warned.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the ministerial segment of the Copenhagen climate conference, the Prince said the "survival of the species" was in peril. . .

The Prince, who flew in by private jet, joined Arnold Schwarzenegger the Governor of California and Al Gore, the former US Senator, who also flew in to add impetus to the talks.

The Daily Telegraph:

The world must take action on climate change at Copenhagen even if the science is not correct, Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister has suggested.

Following the 'climategate scandal', Mr Blair said the science may not be "as certain as its proponents allege".

But he said the world should act as a precaution against floods, droughts and mass extinction caused by climate change, in fact it would be "grossly irresponsible" not to.

Ron Bailey in Reason magazine:

I spent the day waiting with thousands of others in subfreezing cold to try to get into the proper building to obtain credentials for the official United Nations Climate Change Conference. I clocked about five hours in line while my housemate, in town representing a Colorado NGO, waited 10.5 hours and was also turned away. The conference chaos makes one wonder how anyone expects the U.N. to run the world's climate if it can't manage a queue?

Korea Times:


source: Dec. 14th Korea Times

(via Planet Gore, Instapundit, Just One Minute, Watts Up With That?, Best of the Web, James Delingpole)

Many on the left fear righties as religious fanatics. President Bush, they wrongly insisted, claimed to have invaded Iraq on instructions from above. Yet progressives have been complacent about Iran, opposing efforts to halt that country's apparent efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

Should they seek an actual religious zealot, lefties need look no further than the Arab news service Al Arabiya's December 7th story:

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he has documented evidence that the United States is doing what it can to prevent the coming of the Mahdi, the Imam that Muslims believe will be ultimate savior of mankind, press reports said Monday.

"We have documented proof that they [U.S.] believe that a descendant of the prophet of Islam will raise in these parts [Middle East] and he will dry the roots of all injustice in the world," the hard-line president said, addressing an audience of families of those killed during the 1980’s war against Iraq.

"They have devised all these plans to prevent the coming of the Hidden Imam because they know that the Iranian nation is the one that will prepare the grounds for his coming and will be the supporters of his rule."

Remind me why those still favoring nuke negotiations with Iran think we can trust Ahmadinejad? The same reason they thought Bush = Hitler perhaps?

A new University of California, San Diego, paper entitled "How Much Information?," calculates that in 2008,

Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes.

Disaggregating, the study compared the content source per word:


source: How Much Information at 12

Nick Bilton from the New York Times Bits blog explains that this "doesn’t mean we read 100,000 words a day -- it means that 100,000 words cross our eyes and ears in a single 24-hour period."

Measuring per word attempts to "normalize" for the differing information bandwidths involved, though that undercounts television and movies (where dialogue isn't continuous) and video games (where dialogue is rare). Still, it's interesting:

computers have had major effects on some aspects of information consumption. In the past, information consumption was overwhelmingly passive, with telephone being the only interactive medium. Thanks to computers, a full third of words and more than half of bytes are now received interactively. Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet.

(via Carpe Diem)

UPDATE: below

The right-o-sphere is buzzing about Willis Eschenbach's guest post on Watts Up With That? looking at Australian climate records. The piece purports to compare temperature data as reported by the IPCC with the unadjusted records first in northern Australia (defined by the IPCC (SM.9-9) as land measurements between 110E to 155E, 30S to 11S) then, second, at a particular station in that region, Darwin airport.

Ed Morrissey and others see it as Climategate's "smoking gun", establishing that warming stems from shadowy "manipulation" of the underlying temperature data. This is a point I've made before -- that the climate models are all wrong, if not phony -- particularly about measurements from the U.S. and New Zealand. But on initial inspection, I don't think Eschenbach makes an air-tight (ha!) case.

The first part of the analysis, covering the northern Australia region, is the most troublesome. Eschenbach accurately reproduces the IPCC's "global mean temperature changes (°C) from 1906 to 2005" in Northern Australia, from its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report:


source: IPCC Fourth Report, WG1 at 695


Next, Eschenbach plots the raw data from the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), i.e., the average temperature anomaly actually recorded at all 222 stations in the same geographic region:


source: Eschenbach Figure 4


Eschenbach indignantly concludes that the latter chart "looks nothing like the UN IPCC data, which came from the CRU, which was based on the GHCN data." But in truth, the broad "Northern Australia" anomaly reported by IPCC and Eschenbach's raw plot in figure 4 show about the same temperature anomaly -- a half of a degree C. Initially, this isn't much (unless it's per decade), which could be an argument in itself; but Eschenbach doesn't make that point. More importantly, much of the difference between the charts flows from the IPCC's decision to start its series in 1906, which is the lowest year of the raw data. Eschenbach starts his in 1880. Eyeballing Eschenbach's plot from 1906 on makes the two charts appear far more similar.

So Eschenbach's analysis mostly demonstrates the significance of where one starts plotting trend lines, a deception often practiced by warming alarmists. That itself is a bias -- cherry picking -- but Eschenbach doesn't address it. And it falls short of showing that the subsequent adjustments to the data are a smoking gun.

Eschenbach's analysis of the adjustments made to temperatures recorded at Darwin airport is, in some ways, more probative. His two plots compare the averaged raw and adjusted temperature anomaly numbers at that site:


source: Eschenbach Figure 7



source: Eschenbach Figure 8

I haven't double-checked Eschenbach's calculations, which I presume are correct. If so, the warming appears to derive solely from post-recordatation manipulation of the data. And, to the extent that typical "adjustments" are applied to historical records to lower them -- as apparently done in New Zealand -- or delete them -- as apparently done in Orland, California -- that's particularly suspicious (and potentially illegal under various freedom of information laws). Still, Darwin airport is just one station. Meaning, a logical response from warming zealots is that this, too, is cherry picking. Ken Hall suggests as much in comments on WUWT? (4:50am on December 8th).

Don't mistake my argument. I think it far from certain that warming is caused by man-generated greenhouse gas emissions, that the urban heat island effect accounts for much of the asserted increase, and, in any event, that warming has plateaued lately -- as even the IPCC chairman admits. And the media's behavior -- the New York Times, Washington Post (Ebell letter to editor) and even Google -- has been shameless.

Given the manipulation of the data and peer review by supposed scientists, the IPCC and other warming alarmist data must be fact checked before being the basis for treaties or EPA regulation. If they rush ahead regardless, that tends to confirm that enviros' real agenda is socialism, not science.

Yet, that doesn't prove a widespread conspiracy faking the data. As Tiger Hawk says:

The more partisan skeptics who have argued the conspiracy theory, or at least alluded to it, are setting themselves up for the obvious response, which is that true conspiracies involving thousands of people are virtually impossible to organize, sustain, and cover up. Megan McArdle describes the much more probable case, which is that the community of climate scientists are practicing a subtle sort of collegiality bias, in which nobody wants to find large errors in the reasoning of their colleagues.

As Richard Fernandez concludes, the likely culprit is a form of confirmation bias, where supposed scientists -- like this one -- only seek answers conforming to their pre-conceived warming theory.

That's bad enough; indeed, it makes alarmism dubious. But, without more evidence, conspiracy assertions make warming skeptics vulnerable to accusations of the opposite confirmation bias. So turn down the hype and concentrate on getting a consensus to let the numbers speak for themselves. Put differently, insist everyone share the data--and eat it raw.

MORE:

They're not taking my advice; indeed, the CRU may now be hiding data formerly available on the web. Prompting a "litigation hold" notice (prohibiting document destruction) to United States Department of Energy employees regarding CRU data.

(via reader OBloodyHell, Wolf Howling, twice, Berman Post)

Warren Meyer (who also runs Coyote Blog) on his Climate Skeptic site:

I am sort of the anti-conspiracy theorist. I have written a number of times that events people sometimes explain as orchestrated conspiracies often can be explained just as well by assuming that people with similar preferences and similar information and similar incentives will respond to these incentives in similar ways.

I think the great herd-think around climate alarmism is a good example, and the Bishop Hill blog brings us a specific illustration from the comment section of Watts Up With That. A commenter observed that it was pretty hard to believe that thousands of scientists could be participating in a conspiracy. Another commenter [Paul Vaughan] wrote back:

Actually not so hard.

Personal anecdote:
Last spring when I was shopping around for a new source of funding, after having my funding slashed to zero 15 days after going public with a finding about natural climate variations, I kept running into funding application instructions of the following variety:

Successful candidates will:
1) Demonstrate AGW [ed: Anthropogenic Global Warming]
2) Demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of AGW.
3) Explore policy implications stemming from 1 & 2.

Follow the money -- perhaps a conspiracy is unnecessary where a carrot will suffice.

If only alarmist results are funded, then it should not be surprising that only alarmist studies are produced.

Read the whole thing.

The "peak oil" thesis remains popular among greens, though vigorously disputed. I'm not sufficiently skilled in petro-geology to be certain--but believe economics sufficiently accounts for shortages via the price mechanism. So we will "gradually will shift to whatever substitutes are cheaper at the time." Thus, as MaxedOutMama says, "[t]he peak oil thing never made any sense." Regardless of the volume of oil reserves.

The flip-side of that point is reflected in how we use fossil fuels. A fall-off in oil production could be offset by increased energy efficiency. Data from the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration provides common-sense confirmation, as econ prof Mark Perry shows at Enterprise Blog:


source: Enterprise Blog via EIA data

Perry explains:

[T]he energy consumption required (measured in thousands of Btus) to produce a real dollar of output (Gross Domestic Product) fell to an all-time record low of 8.52 in 2008 (see chart above). Compared to 1970 when it took 18 Btus to produce a real dollar of GDP, today’s economy is more than twice as energy-efficient.

Indeed, in 2008, America consumed about the same amount of energy as 2000, yet upped output by nearly $2 trillion (in 2000 dollars).

Whether or not oil supply declines in the short term, economics and technology ensure the "pie" isn't fixed.

(via Carpe Diem)

President Obama accepting his Nobel Peace Prize:

[O]ver time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence. . .

The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.

Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.

I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war. What I do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision, hard work, and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago. And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace. . .

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason. . .

But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions -- not just treaties and declarations -- that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity. . .

I believe that all nations -- strong and weak alike -- must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I -- like any head of state -- reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation. . .

I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That's why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.

I salute the "Obama doctrine" -- as Wolf Howling says, "best speech he has given, to date." Especially because it's strikingly similar to what I've articulated here before.

As Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds says, "We’re all Neo-Cons now!"

George Will from a 2004 article:

In 1940 a British officer on Dunkirk beach sent London a three-word message: "But if not." It was instantly recognized as from the Book of Daniel. When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are commanded to worship a golden image or perish, they defiantly reply: "Our God who we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods."

Britain then still had the cohesion of a common culture of shared reading. That cohesion enabled Britain to stay the hand of Hitler, a fact pertinent to today's new age of barbarism.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News published his 8th annual Conservative Blog Awards, including the Funniest Blog (Iowahawk), the Most Annoying Left-Of-Center Blogger (Charles Johnson), Favorite Columnist Who's Not A Blogger (Charles Krauthammer), the Best Original Content For A Blog (Big Government) and the Best Blog Overall (Hot Air).

I was among the bloggers polled and agree with some of the results (but will keep my vote private). Surf over to Right Wing News to see all the winners.

Barack Obama famously opposed the Iraq invasion and said the surge wouldn't work. [Then,] Obama dissented from the surge after it succeeded. Early this month, the President admitted that "we've achieved hard-earned milestones in Iraq" and essentially replicated the surge strategy in Afghanistan, effectively conceding Bush was right.

Almost as impressive is the flip-flop by the New York Times. Like most of the liberal media, the Times opposed Bush's surge, advocating instead exiting Iraq "without any more delay." Indeed, the paper spiked Senator McCain's suggested op-ed defending the surge. And for years, they (wrongly) insisted that the Iraq insurgency was overwhelmingly "homegrown."

More recently, the Times touted several Iraq surge opponents who were skeptical about increasing troop strength in Afghanistan. Especially given its penchant for printing classified intel damaging to national security, it's hard to not to conclude that the NYT scorned most initiatives against global terror because Bush backed them.

That was then. This is David Sanger's "news analysis" from the December 5th Times:

No one in the Obama White House voices much admiration for the inheritance left by Mr. Bush, so it was probably unintentional that when the Afghanistan strategy was announced on Tuesday, the rollout had echoes of the earlier one. Mr. Bush’s fact sheet on the surge carried the headline "The New Way Forward in Iraq." Mr. Obama’s speech carried the title "The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

But the commonalities end there. The Iraq surge worked in large part because there was powerful support in Anbar Province from the so-called Awakening, the movement by local Sunni tribes who rose up against extremists who were killing people, forcibly marrying local women and cutting off the hands of men who smoked in public. In Iraq, American officials believed that most leaders of a vigorous opposition, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, were foreigners.

The United States remains hopeful that it can capitalize on Afghan militias that have taken up arms against the Taliban in local areas, but a series of intelligence reports supplied to Mr. Obama since September found no evidence in Afghanistan of anything on the scale of the Iraqi Awakening movement. What’s more, in Afghanistan the extremists, the Taliban, are natives.

Conclusion: Bush was right, but this Administration will flip-flop forever. Meanwhile, the Times always alters facts to fit Democratic party politics.

(via Best of the Web, NY Sun)

Last month, I quoted Assistant Village Idiot on the routinely-overlooked intolerance of the secular left. AVI, alas, is blogging no more, but I hope he read the advice a lawyer sought from "ethicist" Randy Cohen in Sunday's New York Times:

While interviewing law students for jobs as paid summer interns and full-time associates for my firm, I noticed several had résumés listing their activities in the Federalist Society. Some of my partners have conservative views similar to those of the society, but I do not. These students’ politics would not affect their professional function, but my review is meant to consider their judgment and personality (though I don’t need to give reasons for the assessments given). May I recommend not hiring someone solely because of his or her politics? NAME WITHHELD, GREENWICH, CONN.

Though Cohen advised "abandon[ing] your mini-McCarthyism and cease denying employment to those you deem politically misguided," the lawyer nonetheless "recommended rejecting each member of the Federalist Society."

Don't even feign surprise.

(via TaxProf Blog)

UPDATE: below

Steven Den Beste -- a retired engineer who was among the earliest and best bloggers, sadly, long retired -- distinguishes between "materialists" and "teleologists" at Hot Air:

One way to compare and contrast those two world views is to consider what they think about socialism. Materialists look at history since Marx and point out that socialism has been tried many times, in many nations, in various forms, and it has always failed. In places where it was fully implemented the result was decline and economic collapse. When it was only partially implemented you got slower decline. It often looks like it’s working in the early stages, but in the longer term it has never succeeded.

So to materialists, it’s apparent that socialism is a nice idea, but one that doesn’t work and shouldn’t be adopted.

To teleologists, none of that matters. What matters is the fact that it’s a beautiful idea. It’s how things should be. In a world in which socialism was implemented and which worked the way the teleologists think it should work, you really would have a utopia. The fact that it’s invariably failed when used doesn’t change any of that. (When asked to explain all the failures, usually the answer is, "They didn’t do it right." But for teleologists, a long string of failures doesn’t matter because fundamentally teleologists don’t believe things like that make any difference.)

It’s teleologists who drive around with bumper stickers that say, "Imagine world peace." I can imagine it just fine. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime, though. Why would they want me to imagine it?

It’s because teleologists believe that human thought truly affects things. Of course it does; thought precedes action, and actions change history, right? Yeah, but that’s not the point. Teleologists believe that thought directly affects things. The mere act of thinking about something and wanting it a lot directly changes reality, even if the thought doesn’t get translated into action.

It was teleologists who were mainly involved in the anti-war movement about five years ago when it was at its greatest. I remember reading about how they’d have a demonstration somewhere. Lots of people would come out. They’d parade about carrying signs saying, "End the war!" Someone would burn a giant mockup of President Bush’s head. And afterwards they’d all talk about how successful the demonstration had been.

Successful how? It didn’t have any political effect that I ever noticed. The war didn’t end because of the demonstrations. So what was it that they thought was successful? Well, if you asked them they’d talk about how there was all sorts of positive vibes. How good it felt to be out there. And how so many people were feeling the same thing. Which sounds like masturbation, if you’re a materialist, but genuinely makes sense for a teleologist. They really thought that if enough of them got together and wanted the war to end strongly enough, it would spontaneously end. Not because getting enough voters on their side would have electoral consequences, but because the act of wanting it would directly bring that about.

To a materialist this sounds like insanity.

Agreed.

MORE:

Wolf Howling:

I wonder how we get so many "teleologists" in America? Is it a defective gene, or are they made that way by nurture, by a "social justice" education system, and disneyfication. That is a question for psychologists. Regardless, it does explain why socialism has repeatedly risen from its grave.

(via Instapundit)

According to the Associated Press:

The Obama administration conducted a workshop on government openness for federal employees behind closed doors Monday, a private training session for freedom-of-information officials to learn about a new U.S. office that settle disputes between the bureaucracy and the public.

The decision to preclude the public and the media from attending Monday's workshop left open government advocates scratching their heads, given President Barack Obama's campaign promise to make his administration the most transparent ever. A reporter for The Associated Press was turned away from the door Monday.

"If they're getting marching orders, why shouldn't the public be there?" said Jeff Stachewicz, founder of Washington-based FOIA Group Inc., which files hundreds of requests every month across the government on behalf of companies, law firms and news organizations. . .

The workshop was organized by the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy for agency public liaisons, who serve as ombudsmen and who "play a vital role in the administration of the FOIA at each agency," the government said. . .

The official in charge at the conference, Melanie Ann Pustay, offered these reasons to explain why it was closed: She wanted government employees to be able to speak candidly, and the conference would be in an auditorium at the Commerce Department, where she said a government ID was required to be admitted.

The AP and other news organizations routinely enter government buildings to cover the government.

On a related issue: Last October, the Bush Administration finalized a rule (29 C.F.R. § 403.2) requiring unions to disclose contributions to "trusts" that benefit members and are union-controlled. This was meant to cover "'slush' funds and front groups [funded by] forced union dues . . . transferred to groups like ACORN and the AFL-CIO’s American Rights At Work." The Obama Labor Department sought to repeal that rule but hasn't completed the process. So, on December 3rd, the DoL proposed staying the initial disclosure deadline, providing a scant 11 day comment period.

As Big Government's Don Loos says:

It is not surprising that Obama’s Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis would rescind these financial disclosure rules since she is the former treasurer of the Big Labor funded American Rights at Work (ARAW) lobbying and political group. These disclosures would reveal much about the group’s expenditures on behalf Big Labor’s agenda; the very types of expenditures Solis would have signed-off on as ARAW Treasurer.

Union officials have fought these financial disclosures since 2003. One of the AFL-CIO lawyers involved in opposing these disclosure requirements was Deborah Greenfield. Now, Greenfield is the Obama Administration’s Acting Deputy Solicitor of Labor and Director of the Office of the Secretariat. As Deputy Solicitor, Greenfield oversees these regulations.

This looks like the same old Washington insider influence that Presidential Candidate Obama, President-Elect Obama, and President Obama promised that he would not allow.

Transparency for thee but not me?

(via Instapundit)