... the traditional American economic model based on small government and private initiative has been under attack for a long time.
Europe's social democracies themselves, however, are also undergoing change. While the Bush and Obama administrations may have increased the size and scope of government in the United States, a number of European countries have turned to free- market solutions.
True, the European left sees social-democratic Europe as the antithesis of America's "cutthroat capitalism." Germany's left uses the term "American conditions" as shorthand for a total lack of a social safety net.
In reality, the annual price tag of anti-poverty programs ($600 billion), unemployment insurance ($60 billion) and Social Security payments and Medicare benefits ($1.2 trillion) in the U.S. is staggering.
The American left sees Europe as an inspiration. Earlier this year, Paul Krugman declared European social democracy as "a success" that "demonstrates ... (that) social justice and progress can go hand in hand." In reality, the left on both sides of the Atlantic hangs onto an image of a Europe that no longer exists — if it ever did.
First, in terms of social and economic policy, there is no such thing as "Europe." The European Union is an association of 27 independent countries that have pooled their sovereignty in a number of important policy areas, including trade relations with the rest of the world.
The EU "government" in Brussels remains less powerful in terms of its competencies than the U.S. federal government, though, as is the case with Washington, much of what the bureaucrats in Brussels do is either unnecessary, such as regulating the curvature of cucumbers, or possibly harmful, such as a common fisheries policy that has resulted in massive depletion of fish stocks in the waters around Europe.
Second, European nation-states still retain a great deal of independence in social and economic decision-making. That independence leaves national governments substantial room to maneuver. Some have used it to surprising ends.
For example, seven EU countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia) have introduced a flat income tax, which has proven so popular and economically beneficial that three more EU members (Hungary, Poland and Greece) are considering it.
Meantime, the U.S. is stuck with a tax system so complicated that the cost of compliance is estimated to reach $483 billion per year by 2015.
Similarly, driven by falling birth rates and rising costs, seven EU countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Sweden) have reformed their unsustainable pay-as-you-go pension systems. These countries now allow or mandate their citizens to invest a portion of their retirement contributions in private pension funds.
In the U.S., Social Security reform remains highly contentious, worsening demographics and $16 trillion in unfunded liabilities notwithstanding.
Another seemingly unsolvable problem in the United States is the country's appallingly expensive but underperforming system of state-run primary and secondary education. In the 1990s, one European Union country embraced a radical reform that saw the establishment of private for-profit but taxpayer-funded schools that succeeded in raising education standards in both private and state-run schools. That country is Sweden — the supposed paragon of social democracy.
Sweden is not the only Western European social democracy with some surprisingly free-market characteristics. The World Bank's annual Doing Business report, which looks at the ease of doing business around the world, shows that while the U.S. has the fourth-most-welcoming business environment, Great Britain, Denmark and Ireland come in 5th, 6th and 7th place, respectively.
Are we witnessing a convergence of the two models? It may seem that way now, but the future of the social democratic model seems doomed. Just as the crisis of the early 1990s forced the Swedes to curb government spending and intervention, the current crisis is forcing the Greeks to reevaluate the balance between government spending and private-sector growth. READ "Europe Embraces Free-Market Reforms" at IBD.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Japan Asks: Will Obama Honor It's Commitments to Our Allies?
Thugs of the world like China smell weakness and probably celebrated the election of Obama as President of the United States. Do you see Obama defending and standing up for Japan's right to the island under dispute? Probably not. He bows to kings and dictators and shrugs off democratically elected leaders of nations like England. We elected, for the first time since Wilson and Roosevel,t the worst anti-American President in our history. Now we have to pay the piper for another 2 years then undo all the damage Obama has left in his path.
Obligations: A seemingly minor collision off an obscure Pacific island chain may mean nothing. Then again, it may be about China seeing just how serious we are about our treaty commitments to Japan.
It would be easy to dismiss the recent collision of a Chinese fishing boat with two Japanese Coast Guard vessels as a minor altercation between two former adversaries with a contentious and often bloody history. Easy, that is, if it weren't a continuation of incidents testing Western reaction and will.
The incident occurred off a group of uninhabited rocky outcroppings in the East China Sea just south of Okinawa called the Senkaku Islands. They are called the "Diaoyutai" by the Chinese, who claim them as China's territory largely based on legend and old drawings and paintings depicting the area
....Worth noting is that the waters off the Senkaku Islands are not only rich fishing grounds. They also sit atop significant oil deposits vital to a China scouring the world for energy for its growing economy. Possession of these uninhabited rocks would be the basis for declaring an exclusive economic zone around the islands.
Japan claims that aside from the dispute over who first discovered the islands, the Senkakus became Japanese territory after Japan defeated China in their 1894-95 war. Japan points out that neither Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China nor Mao Zedong's People's Republic of China protested at the post-war placing of the islets under American administration.
It was only after a 1968 U.N. survey reported the huge oil and gas potential of the area that both competing Chinese governments began to protest against the scheduled 1972 U.S. return of the islets to Japanese control.
So far, the U.S. government has taken no position on ultimate ownership of the Senkakus. But it has noted that, as things currently stand, the islands would be under the purview of the 1960 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty that covers all territories under Japanese administration.
We should make our commitment to Japanese security and sovereignty unmistakably clear. The West failed to do so in 1938, when Nazi Germany claimed sovereignty over a faraway place called the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. And the rest, as they say, is history. READ "Testing an Alliance" at IBD.
Obligations: A seemingly minor collision off an obscure Pacific island chain may mean nothing. Then again, it may be about China seeing just how serious we are about our treaty commitments to Japan.
It would be easy to dismiss the recent collision of a Chinese fishing boat with two Japanese Coast Guard vessels as a minor altercation between two former adversaries with a contentious and often bloody history. Easy, that is, if it weren't a continuation of incidents testing Western reaction and will.
The incident occurred off a group of uninhabited rocky outcroppings in the East China Sea just south of Okinawa called the Senkaku Islands. They are called the "Diaoyutai" by the Chinese, who claim them as China's territory largely based on legend and old drawings and paintings depicting the area
....Worth noting is that the waters off the Senkaku Islands are not only rich fishing grounds. They also sit atop significant oil deposits vital to a China scouring the world for energy for its growing economy. Possession of these uninhabited rocks would be the basis for declaring an exclusive economic zone around the islands.
Japan claims that aside from the dispute over who first discovered the islands, the Senkakus became Japanese territory after Japan defeated China in their 1894-95 war. Japan points out that neither Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China nor Mao Zedong's People's Republic of China protested at the post-war placing of the islets under American administration.
It was only after a 1968 U.N. survey reported the huge oil and gas potential of the area that both competing Chinese governments began to protest against the scheduled 1972 U.S. return of the islets to Japanese control.
So far, the U.S. government has taken no position on ultimate ownership of the Senkakus. But it has noted that, as things currently stand, the islands would be under the purview of the 1960 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty that covers all territories under Japanese administration.
We should make our commitment to Japanese security and sovereignty unmistakably clear. The West failed to do so in 1938, when Nazi Germany claimed sovereignty over a faraway place called the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. And the rest, as they say, is history. READ "Testing an Alliance" at IBD.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Sarkozy Can Teach Obama A Thing or Two About Facing the Truth About the Need to CUT GOVERNMENT
France's Sarkozy is doing the right things to get control of runaway pensions, spending and unions - even in the face of severe protests by the French and his lowering popularity. But sometimes in life just as fathers and mothers must do the tough disciplining of their children in order that they straighten up so must a country that has run awry of their duty to govern within their mandates and means. Sarkosy deserves kudos and applause and Obama should learn a lesson in leadership - that is honest leadership.
Leadership: France's President Nicolas Sarkozy signed off on pension reform Wednesday, winning big and saving his nation's system. But the obstacles he stared down went beyond anything average politicians will tolerate.
Ever since he was elected in 2007, the conservative French president has vowed to "modernize" France's stagnant, noncompetitive, socialist economy.
So in just three years, Sarkozy extended the work week, changed laws to permit overtime, scrapped retail price controls, simplified business formation, tamed unions and yanked benefits from work-shirkers.
But his biggest victory to date was this week's reform of France's lavish pension system that was fueled by endless deficit spending.
Naturally, the usual mix of communists, union thugs, illegal immigrants, students and criminals sprang into action to protest any cuts in entitlements, rioting night after night. They did this in the hopes that Sarkozy would roll over for them — just as past French presidents, particularly Jacques Chirac, always did.
When car burnings and street blockades didn't work, they shut down transport, including even air traffic. When that failed, they shut down oil installations, bringing on fuel shortages.
And in the worst blow for a politician, Sarkozy's popularity dropped, precipitously, falling from the high 60s to the low 20s, as the public balked at the reforms he promised.
As the invective and Molotov cocktails flew, Sarkozy refused to back down. "I am fully aware that this is a difficult reform," Sarkozy said. "However, I always felt it was my duty, and the government's duty, to carry it out. With this law, our pension plan by equal division is saved."
He's right that it's not easy to tell workers anywhere that their retirement age must be raised by two years to 62 for a partial pension, or 67 for a full one if the system is to stay solvent.
But it's even harder to argue with economic numbers, which unflinchingly warned that the demographic curve in France was falling and, unless adjustments were made, the system would crash.
Sarkozy, who had held top positions in budget, economy and interior ministries, fully grasped that the situation in France was unsustainable and chose reality over the false promises of socialism.
It was leadership at its finest and a wake-up call to the U.S. that courage will be needed from our own political leaders to stop the flood tide of spending. As incoming U.S. congressional leaders confront runaway spending and the urgent tasks of entitlement reform, including Social Security, Sarkozy provides a useful lesson.
His big message: To win, it takes courage. Will Congress have it? (READ AT IBD Sarkozy's Boldness)
Leadership: France's President Nicolas Sarkozy signed off on pension reform Wednesday, winning big and saving his nation's system. But the obstacles he stared down went beyond anything average politicians will tolerate.
Ever since he was elected in 2007, the conservative French president has vowed to "modernize" France's stagnant, noncompetitive, socialist economy.
So in just three years, Sarkozy extended the work week, changed laws to permit overtime, scrapped retail price controls, simplified business formation, tamed unions and yanked benefits from work-shirkers.
But his biggest victory to date was this week's reform of France's lavish pension system that was fueled by endless deficit spending.
Naturally, the usual mix of communists, union thugs, illegal immigrants, students and criminals sprang into action to protest any cuts in entitlements, rioting night after night. They did this in the hopes that Sarkozy would roll over for them — just as past French presidents, particularly Jacques Chirac, always did.
When car burnings and street blockades didn't work, they shut down transport, including even air traffic. When that failed, they shut down oil installations, bringing on fuel shortages.
And in the worst blow for a politician, Sarkozy's popularity dropped, precipitously, falling from the high 60s to the low 20s, as the public balked at the reforms he promised.
As the invective and Molotov cocktails flew, Sarkozy refused to back down. "I am fully aware that this is a difficult reform," Sarkozy said. "However, I always felt it was my duty, and the government's duty, to carry it out. With this law, our pension plan by equal division is saved."
He's right that it's not easy to tell workers anywhere that their retirement age must be raised by two years to 62 for a partial pension, or 67 for a full one if the system is to stay solvent.
But it's even harder to argue with economic numbers, which unflinchingly warned that the demographic curve in France was falling and, unless adjustments were made, the system would crash.
Sarkozy, who had held top positions in budget, economy and interior ministries, fully grasped that the situation in France was unsustainable and chose reality over the false promises of socialism.
It was leadership at its finest and a wake-up call to the U.S. that courage will be needed from our own political leaders to stop the flood tide of spending. As incoming U.S. congressional leaders confront runaway spending and the urgent tasks of entitlement reform, including Social Security, Sarkozy provides a useful lesson.
His big message: To win, it takes courage. Will Congress have it? (READ AT IBD Sarkozy's Boldness)
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Obama WANTS to Ruin America-There is No Other Explanation
Obama is about all that is negative. There is nothing positive for our country coming from the Oval Office. And one has to ask himself if this is by design. The answer after 2 years of spending and talking down this great country is a resounding yes. He definitely has an agenda and in many areas he is incompetent. This last one, incompetence was obvious during the gulf oil spill. What a difference to Bobby Jindal and his proactive attention to the oil spill getting people working on the situation and talking to the affected people trying to allay their fears. But we don't have Jindal for President we got Obama and what a disaster it has been so far. So now we have another wave of printing money which is backed by nothing not even the productivity of the American people because there are so many out of work.
This was written back in June of 2010 by Rob Tracinski at TIADaily.
...Everywhere you look, wherever there is a crisis, Obama is not simply doing nothing. He's making things worse. America is about to plunge into unsustainable deficit spending? Obama got us started early with the stimulus package and the health care bill. Big states are being bankrupted by public employee unions? Obama wants to increase the unions' power. Not enough power plants? Obama wants to restrict them further. Iran is seeking nukes? Obama gave them a reprieve against a popular uprising. Karzai doubts America's resolve in Afghanistan? Obama wavers on our strategy and declares our intention to bug out, no matter how much disarray there is in our strategy and command.
There's an old saying: When you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But the pattern of the Obama administration has me wondering if we're seeing the inverse: when you plan to fail, you fail to plan. That is, if American contraction and retreat is your goal, why would you make any plans to revive the economy or win wars?
I think what we're seeing here is something worse than just a failure of leadership by a disengaged president. We have to ask ourselves why he is disengaged. Why, when multiple alarm bells are ringing, is he spending more time on his hobbies than the rest of us? Or more to the point, when existing policies lead to failure, why does he double down and make things worse?
From the beginning, we've been warning that Barack Obama is an anti-American president, that he believes in American decline on principle—that he thinks we're too wealthy, too powerful, and too free and need to be taken down a peg. His policies are achieving that goal.
Americans are learning that Obama is an ineffectual leader by the standard of achieving America's success, prosperity, and security. What they need to learn next is the terrifying truth that these are not his standards. Everything is still true today. Obama is a dedicated socialist who wants to bring America to her knees. Go to www.TIADAILY.com for more from Rob Tracinski.
This was written back in June of 2010 by Rob Tracinski at TIADaily.
...Everywhere you look, wherever there is a crisis, Obama is not simply doing nothing. He's making things worse. America is about to plunge into unsustainable deficit spending? Obama got us started early with the stimulus package and the health care bill. Big states are being bankrupted by public employee unions? Obama wants to increase the unions' power. Not enough power plants? Obama wants to restrict them further. Iran is seeking nukes? Obama gave them a reprieve against a popular uprising. Karzai doubts America's resolve in Afghanistan? Obama wavers on our strategy and declares our intention to bug out, no matter how much disarray there is in our strategy and command.
There's an old saying: When you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But the pattern of the Obama administration has me wondering if we're seeing the inverse: when you plan to fail, you fail to plan. That is, if American contraction and retreat is your goal, why would you make any plans to revive the economy or win wars?
I think what we're seeing here is something worse than just a failure of leadership by a disengaged president. We have to ask ourselves why he is disengaged. Why, when multiple alarm bells are ringing, is he spending more time on his hobbies than the rest of us? Or more to the point, when existing policies lead to failure, why does he double down and make things worse?
From the beginning, we've been warning that Barack Obama is an anti-American president, that he believes in American decline on principle—that he thinks we're too wealthy, too powerful, and too free and need to be taken down a peg. His policies are achieving that goal.
Americans are learning that Obama is an ineffectual leader by the standard of achieving America's success, prosperity, and security. What they need to learn next is the terrifying truth that these are not his standards. Everything is still true today. Obama is a dedicated socialist who wants to bring America to her knees. Go to www.TIADAILY.com for more from Rob Tracinski.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
What 52% of The Electorate Wanted For the Past Two Years Was Ice Cream
From a teacher in the Nashville area.
"We are worried about 'the cow' when it is all about the 'Ice Cream.'
The most eye-opening civics lesson I ever had was while teaching third grade this year.
The presidential election was heating up 2 years ago and some of the children showed an interest. I decided that we would have an election for a class president.
We would choose our nominees.
They would make a campaign speech and the class would vote.
To simplify the process, candidates were nominated by other class members.
We discussed what kinds of characteristics these students should have.
We got many nominations and from those, Jamie and Olivia were picked to run for the top spot.
The class had done a great job in their selections. Both candidates were good kids.
I thought Jamie might have an advantage because he got lots of parental support.
I had never seen Olivia's mother.
The day for their speeches arrived.
Jamie went first.
He had specific ideas about how to make our class a better place. He ended by promising to do his very best.
Everyone applauded and he sat down.
Now is was Olivia's turn to speak. Her speech was concise.
She said, "If you vote for me, I will give you ice cream."
She sat down.
The class went wild. "Yes! Yes! We want ice cream."
She surely would say more. She did not have to.
A discussion followed. How did she plan to pay for the ice cream?
She wasn't sure.
Would her parents buy it or would the class pay for it? She didn't know.
The class really didn't care.
All they were thinking about was ice cream.
Jamie was forgotten. Olivia won by a landslide.
Every time Barack Obama opened his mouth he offered ice cream and 52 percent of the people reacted like nine year olds.
They want ice cream.
The other 48 percent know they're going to have to feed the cow and clean up the mess.
"We are worried about 'the cow' when it is all about the 'Ice Cream.'
The most eye-opening civics lesson I ever had was while teaching third grade this year.
The presidential election was heating up 2 years ago and some of the children showed an interest. I decided that we would have an election for a class president.
We would choose our nominees.
They would make a campaign speech and the class would vote.
To simplify the process, candidates were nominated by other class members.
We discussed what kinds of characteristics these students should have.
We got many nominations and from those, Jamie and Olivia were picked to run for the top spot.
The class had done a great job in their selections. Both candidates were good kids.
I thought Jamie might have an advantage because he got lots of parental support.
I had never seen Olivia's mother.
The day for their speeches arrived.
Jamie went first.
He had specific ideas about how to make our class a better place. He ended by promising to do his very best.
Everyone applauded and he sat down.
Now is was Olivia's turn to speak. Her speech was concise.
She said, "If you vote for me, I will give you ice cream."
She sat down.
The class went wild. "Yes! Yes! We want ice cream."
She surely would say more. She did not have to.
A discussion followed. How did she plan to pay for the ice cream?
She wasn't sure.
Would her parents buy it or would the class pay for it? She didn't know.
The class really didn't care.
All they were thinking about was ice cream.
Jamie was forgotten. Olivia won by a landslide.
Every time Barack Obama opened his mouth he offered ice cream and 52 percent of the people reacted like nine year olds.
They want ice cream.
The other 48 percent know they're going to have to feed the cow and clean up the mess.
Monday, November 01, 2010
The American Revolution at the Ballot Box
Regarding our Constitution the prohibitions are on the government NOT THE PEOPLE! Let's remember this as we go to the polls tomorrow November 2, 2010 - Americans have their revolution in the ballot box. And this one is going to be big.
Puerto Rico Comes on Board the Lower Taxes Bandwagon
There comes a time in the life of every government at least in freedom loving countries when the people must decide enough with the taxation already! That time has come for our country. Are we to live as slaves to a state that has no compunction about seizing a part of our wealth to fund idiotic and expensive politically motivated schemes whose end goals are always to control the "little people"? After all, according to their ideology, people do not know what is best for themselves or for the nation. Well, governors like Chris Christie and apparently Luis Fortuno in Puerto Rico are thinking over that perhaps politicians should not be taking control over the any economy.
Move over, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. You've got a tax-cutting, pro-growth competitor who may be even bolder than you. His name is Luis Fortuño and he is the governor of Puerto Rico, a place that, if you can believe it, is in worse fiscal shape than the Garden State.
When Mr. Fortuño took office in January 2009, Puerto Rico had a 46% budget shortfall equal to $3.3 billion. Things were so bad, he told me in a telephone interview from San Juan on Tuesday, that he had to fly to New York while still governor-elect to explain his fiscal plan to the investment community in order to avoid a sharp downgrade of Puerto Rican debt. "We were one step from junk status," he says.
After 22 months in office and a boatload of spending cuts, the deficit is now down to about 11%. That achievement notwithstanding, the commonwealth still is spending more than it takes in. In the Washington political handbook this means Puerto Ricans are not paying enough in taxes.
Mr. Fortuño has a much different view of the problem: He thinks high taxes have destroyed the Puerto Rican economy. He has already signed into law a five-year property tax holiday for real estate purchased through June of next year and waivers on fees for those transactions. Last week he handed his legislature a radical plan to simplify the tax code and sharply reduce corporate and individual rates.
Mr. Fortuño says that Puerto Rico's recession—which began two years before the U.S. recession—only partly explains the current crisis. "If you look at the past decade, Puerto Rico has had negative growth for the entire period." (According to his office, the economy contracted 0.2% in the 2000s.) This shows, he argues, that "we are in need of a major overhaul. If we just tweak it a little, we won't accomplish what we need."...
READ AT The Wall Street Journal
Move over, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. You've got a tax-cutting, pro-growth competitor who may be even bolder than you. His name is Luis Fortuño and he is the governor of Puerto Rico, a place that, if you can believe it, is in worse fiscal shape than the Garden State.
When Mr. Fortuño took office in January 2009, Puerto Rico had a 46% budget shortfall equal to $3.3 billion. Things were so bad, he told me in a telephone interview from San Juan on Tuesday, that he had to fly to New York while still governor-elect to explain his fiscal plan to the investment community in order to avoid a sharp downgrade of Puerto Rican debt. "We were one step from junk status," he says.
After 22 months in office and a boatload of spending cuts, the deficit is now down to about 11%. That achievement notwithstanding, the commonwealth still is spending more than it takes in. In the Washington political handbook this means Puerto Ricans are not paying enough in taxes.
Mr. Fortuño has a much different view of the problem: He thinks high taxes have destroyed the Puerto Rican economy. He has already signed into law a five-year property tax holiday for real estate purchased through June of next year and waivers on fees for those transactions. Last week he handed his legislature a radical plan to simplify the tax code and sharply reduce corporate and individual rates.
Mr. Fortuño says that Puerto Rico's recession—which began two years before the U.S. recession—only partly explains the current crisis. "If you look at the past decade, Puerto Rico has had negative growth for the entire period." (According to his office, the economy contracted 0.2% in the 2000s.) This shows, he argues, that "we are in need of a major overhaul. If we just tweak it a little, we won't accomplish what we need."...
READ AT The Wall Street Journal
Sunday, October 31, 2010
The President as Transformer and Redeemer Explains Obama
Shelby Steel has an interesting take on Obama and how he's governing...as a transformer and redeemer. He sees America not as exceptional but as needing of transformation and redemption for all our evils. But that is not the America I know. Even with our warts and mistakes America and Americans is and are good and have been a force for positive change in the world. That cannot be denied however one wants to bend and twist history. America is a force for good and everything that is decent in this modern world. And on Tuesday we the people are poised to prove that that is what we believe and what we stand for.
Whether or not the Republicans win big next week, it is already clear that the "transformative" aspirations of the Obama presidency—the special promise of this first black president to "change" us into a better society—are much less likely to materialize. There will be enough Republican gains to make the "no" in the "party of no" even more formidable, if not definitive.
But apart from this politics of numbers, there is also now a deepening disenchantment with Barack Obama himself. (He has a meager 37% approval rating by the latest Harris poll.) His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were good; their vote helped make history. But for Mr. Obama himself there is no road back to the charisma and political capital he enjoyed on his inauguration day.
How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then, in less than two years, find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?
The first answer is well-known: His policymaking has been grandiose, thoughtless and bullying. His health-care bill was ambitious to the point of destructiveness and, finally, so chaotic that today no citizen knows where they stand in relation to it. His financial-reform bill seems little more than a short-sighted scapegoating of Wall Street. In foreign policy he has failed to articulate a role for America in the world. We don't know why we do what we do in foreign affairs. George W. Bush at least made a valiant stab at an American rationale—democratization—but with Mr. Obama there is nothing.
...But Barack Obama is not an "other" so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying "otherness" but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.
Bad faith in America became virtuous in the '60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the "imperialism" of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the '60s: that America was characterologically evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America's natural default position...
"Hope and Change" positioned Mr. Obama as a conduit between an old America worn down by its evil inclinations and a new America redeemed of those inclinations. There was no vision of the future in "Hope and Change." It is an expression of bad faith in America, but its great ingenuity was to turn that bad faith into political motivation, into votes.
But there is a limit to bad faith as power, and Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party may have now reached that limit. The great weakness of bad faith is that it disallows American exceptionalism as a rationale for power. It puts Mr. Obama and the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great nation. They bet on America's characterological evil and not on her sense of fairness, generosity or ingenuity.
When bad faith is your framework (Michelle Obama never being proud of her country until it supported her husband), then you become more a national scold than a real leader. You lead out of a feeling that your opposition is really only the latest incarnation of that old characterological evil that you always knew was there. Thus the tea party—despite all the evidence to the contrary—is seen as racist and bigoted.
But isn't the tea party, on some level, a reaction to a president who seems not to fully trust the fundamental decency of the American people? Doesn't the tea party fill a void left open by Mr. Obama's ethos of bad faith? Aren't tea partiers, and their many fellow travelers, simply saying that American exceptionalism isn't racism? And if the mainstream media see tea partiers as bumpkins and racists, isn't this just more bad faith—characterizing people as ignorant or evil so as to dismiss them?
Our great presidents have been stewards, men who broadly identified with the whole of America. Stewardship meant responsibility even for those segments of America where one might be reviled. Surely Mr. Obama would claim such stewardship. But he has functioned more as a redeemer than a steward, a leader who sees a badness in us from which we must be redeemed. Many Americans are afraid of this because a mandate as grandiose as redemption justifies a vast expansion of government. A redeemer can't just tweak and guide a faltering economy; he will need a trillion- dollar stimulus package. He can't take on health care a step at a time; he must do it all at once, finally mandating that every citizen buy in.
Next week's election is, among other things, a referendum on the idea of president-as- redeemer. We have a president so determined to transform and redeem us from what we are that, by his own words, he is willing to risk being a one-term president. People now wonder if Barack Obama can pivot back to the center like Bill Clinton did after his set-back in '94. But Mr. Clinton was already a steward, a policy wonk, a man of the center. Mr. Obama has to change archetypes. READ AT WSJ
Whether or not the Republicans win big next week, it is already clear that the "transformative" aspirations of the Obama presidency—the special promise of this first black president to "change" us into a better society—are much less likely to materialize. There will be enough Republican gains to make the "no" in the "party of no" even more formidable, if not definitive.
But apart from this politics of numbers, there is also now a deepening disenchantment with Barack Obama himself. (He has a meager 37% approval rating by the latest Harris poll.) His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were good; their vote helped make history. But for Mr. Obama himself there is no road back to the charisma and political capital he enjoyed on his inauguration day.
How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then, in less than two years, find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?
The first answer is well-known: His policymaking has been grandiose, thoughtless and bullying. His health-care bill was ambitious to the point of destructiveness and, finally, so chaotic that today no citizen knows where they stand in relation to it. His financial-reform bill seems little more than a short-sighted scapegoating of Wall Street. In foreign policy he has failed to articulate a role for America in the world. We don't know why we do what we do in foreign affairs. George W. Bush at least made a valiant stab at an American rationale—democratization—but with Mr. Obama there is nothing.
...But Barack Obama is not an "other" so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying "otherness" but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.
Bad faith in America became virtuous in the '60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the "imperialism" of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the '60s: that America was characterologically evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America's natural default position...
"Hope and Change" positioned Mr. Obama as a conduit between an old America worn down by its evil inclinations and a new America redeemed of those inclinations. There was no vision of the future in "Hope and Change." It is an expression of bad faith in America, but its great ingenuity was to turn that bad faith into political motivation, into votes.
But there is a limit to bad faith as power, and Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party may have now reached that limit. The great weakness of bad faith is that it disallows American exceptionalism as a rationale for power. It puts Mr. Obama and the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great nation. They bet on America's characterological evil and not on her sense of fairness, generosity or ingenuity.
When bad faith is your framework (Michelle Obama never being proud of her country until it supported her husband), then you become more a national scold than a real leader. You lead out of a feeling that your opposition is really only the latest incarnation of that old characterological evil that you always knew was there. Thus the tea party—despite all the evidence to the contrary—is seen as racist and bigoted.
But isn't the tea party, on some level, a reaction to a president who seems not to fully trust the fundamental decency of the American people? Doesn't the tea party fill a void left open by Mr. Obama's ethos of bad faith? Aren't tea partiers, and their many fellow travelers, simply saying that American exceptionalism isn't racism? And if the mainstream media see tea partiers as bumpkins and racists, isn't this just more bad faith—characterizing people as ignorant or evil so as to dismiss them?
Our great presidents have been stewards, men who broadly identified with the whole of America. Stewardship meant responsibility even for those segments of America where one might be reviled. Surely Mr. Obama would claim such stewardship. But he has functioned more as a redeemer than a steward, a leader who sees a badness in us from which we must be redeemed. Many Americans are afraid of this because a mandate as grandiose as redemption justifies a vast expansion of government. A redeemer can't just tweak and guide a faltering economy; he will need a trillion- dollar stimulus package. He can't take on health care a step at a time; he must do it all at once, finally mandating that every citizen buy in.
Next week's election is, among other things, a referendum on the idea of president-as- redeemer. We have a president so determined to transform and redeem us from what we are that, by his own words, he is willing to risk being a one-term president. People now wonder if Barack Obama can pivot back to the center like Bill Clinton did after his set-back in '94. But Mr. Clinton was already a steward, a policy wonk, a man of the center. Mr. Obama has to change archetypes. READ AT WSJ
Monday, October 25, 2010
It's Not Extremist Muslims-It's The Everyday Muslims
Maybe our television commentators should know what they are talking about. Take the example of the latest blow up on the small screen. Two women who know nothing about what they are talking about - most of the time - blew up and walked out on O'Reilly who was a guest on their "The View" show. Why? Because he dared utter that Muslims did 9/11 and did not say "extremists". Let's get one thing straight. The Muslim religion demands Jihad from all Muslims. It is part of their religion. While the West has tamed Cristianity, Muslims have NOT tamed their religion. It is part of their duty to do Jihad.
A shocking statistic states that some 43,000 people have been murdered worldwide by about 17,000 Jihadists. That is a slaughter and the West is not doing enough to squelch this scourge. Los Angeles Times national correspondent Terry McDermott writes the following at Investors.com
Islamofascism: O'Reilly, Whoopi and Joy are all wrong. The 9/11 terrorists weren't "Muslim extremists" or just plain "Muslims." A liberal newspaper reporter says they were model Muslims.
More precisely, they were "perfect soldiers" for Allah, says Los Angeles Times national correspondent Terry McDermott.
He would know. After traveling to the hometowns of the Muslim hijackers and investigating their family backgrounds, McDermott discovered they were not heretics or even "extremists," but in fact good, pious Muslims. And their families and communities encouraged them to join the never-ending Islamic holy war, or jihad, against us.
The lefties at NPR who fired analyst Juan Williams and the cackling hens on "The View" who walked out on his Fox colleague Bill O'Reilly would benefit enormously from reading his book, "Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It." It would open their PC-encrusted eyes to a truth that is already self-evident to most Americans.
The detail-rich book — which is endorsed by anti-war gadfly Seymour Hersh, no less — reveals that the 19 hijackers did not "hijack Islam," as conventional East Coast wisdom would have it. They weren't career criminals using the religion as an excuse to wantonly murder people. Nor were they misled into martyrdom by Osama bin Laden or other Svengali personalities.
On the contrary, they were deeply religious Muslims following the tenets of their faith, McDermott found. Most of them were from well-off families.
"Several were described as among the best boys — bright, respectful — in their towns," he reports in his book. "Many had gone to university," he adds. "Three had studied Islamic law." At least one, Ahmed al-Haznawi, had memorized the Quran, a sign of deep devotion much respected by Muslim elders. In fact, he earned the honorary religious title of "hafiz" at a young age.
McDermott describes how another hijacker, Wail al-Shehri left home to train for jihad in Afghanistan after a long period of recitation of Quranic verses. He had the approval of a local imam.
But he wasn't the only one who knew what they were planning. "Two-thirds of them told their families they were leaving to join the jihad," McDermott writes, adding that their families did not discourage them. "They went where they were called by their religion."
That's not the story we heard after 9/11. In media interviews, the parents of the hijackers expressed shock about the deeds of their sons. We must have the wrong men, they insisted. Their boys could never do such a thing. Jihad? What jihad?
Take Egyptian Mohamed el-Amir, father of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta. Right after 9/11, he denied knowing anything about his son's activities. Then in 2005, after the London bombings, he confided to a CNN producer in his apartment in the upper-class Cairo suburb of Giza that his son had done a good thing and that the London suicide bombers were following in his footsteps. He said all this was just the start of a 50-year religious war, and that there would be many more fighters like his son.
El-Amir, a "skilled lawyer" by McDermott's account, declared that terror cells around the world were a "nuclear bomb that has now been activated and is ticking." He passionately vowed that he would do anything within his power to encourage more attacks.
Instead of mouthing tolerant-sounding platitudes and misleading their audiences about the true nature of the threat we still face, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar and NPR's executives should educate themselves. They can start with McDermott's "Perfect Soldiers," which punctures the politically correct mythology surrounding 9/11.
A shocking statistic states that some 43,000 people have been murdered worldwide by about 17,000 Jihadists. That is a slaughter and the West is not doing enough to squelch this scourge. Los Angeles Times national correspondent Terry McDermott writes the following at Investors.com
Islamofascism: O'Reilly, Whoopi and Joy are all wrong. The 9/11 terrorists weren't "Muslim extremists" or just plain "Muslims." A liberal newspaper reporter says they were model Muslims.
More precisely, they were "perfect soldiers" for Allah, says Los Angeles Times national correspondent Terry McDermott.
He would know. After traveling to the hometowns of the Muslim hijackers and investigating their family backgrounds, McDermott discovered they were not heretics or even "extremists," but in fact good, pious Muslims. And their families and communities encouraged them to join the never-ending Islamic holy war, or jihad, against us.
The lefties at NPR who fired analyst Juan Williams and the cackling hens on "The View" who walked out on his Fox colleague Bill O'Reilly would benefit enormously from reading his book, "Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It." It would open their PC-encrusted eyes to a truth that is already self-evident to most Americans.
The detail-rich book — which is endorsed by anti-war gadfly Seymour Hersh, no less — reveals that the 19 hijackers did not "hijack Islam," as conventional East Coast wisdom would have it. They weren't career criminals using the religion as an excuse to wantonly murder people. Nor were they misled into martyrdom by Osama bin Laden or other Svengali personalities.
On the contrary, they were deeply religious Muslims following the tenets of their faith, McDermott found. Most of them were from well-off families.
"Several were described as among the best boys — bright, respectful — in their towns," he reports in his book. "Many had gone to university," he adds. "Three had studied Islamic law." At least one, Ahmed al-Haznawi, had memorized the Quran, a sign of deep devotion much respected by Muslim elders. In fact, he earned the honorary religious title of "hafiz" at a young age.
McDermott describes how another hijacker, Wail al-Shehri left home to train for jihad in Afghanistan after a long period of recitation of Quranic verses. He had the approval of a local imam.
But he wasn't the only one who knew what they were planning. "Two-thirds of them told their families they were leaving to join the jihad," McDermott writes, adding that their families did not discourage them. "They went where they were called by their religion."
That's not the story we heard after 9/11. In media interviews, the parents of the hijackers expressed shock about the deeds of their sons. We must have the wrong men, they insisted. Their boys could never do such a thing. Jihad? What jihad?
Take Egyptian Mohamed el-Amir, father of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta. Right after 9/11, he denied knowing anything about his son's activities. Then in 2005, after the London bombings, he confided to a CNN producer in his apartment in the upper-class Cairo suburb of Giza that his son had done a good thing and that the London suicide bombers were following in his footsteps. He said all this was just the start of a 50-year religious war, and that there would be many more fighters like his son.
El-Amir, a "skilled lawyer" by McDermott's account, declared that terror cells around the world were a "nuclear bomb that has now been activated and is ticking." He passionately vowed that he would do anything within his power to encourage more attacks.
Instead of mouthing tolerant-sounding platitudes and misleading their audiences about the true nature of the threat we still face, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar and NPR's executives should educate themselves. They can start with McDermott's "Perfect Soldiers," which punctures the politically correct mythology surrounding 9/11.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Is Our Science Getting "Sovietized"?
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.<
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.<
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The Day Of Reckoning - November 2, 2010
November has to be a referendum on FREEDOM! Freedom from government messing with our lives and our futures. Get out of our lives and leave us alone ....Here is an essay by Rob Tracinski at "The Intellectual Activist".
Time to Show the Democrats Who's Boss
by Robert Tracinski
With only two weeks left until November 2, it's time to give my official election recommendation.
For regular readers, there will hardly be any suspense about what I'm going to say. I advocate a straight Republican vote, across the board. It is imperative to vote the Democrats out of power and to do so by a historic margin, as a sweeping and unmistakable national repudiation.
November 2 is not just an election day. It is a day of reckoning.
The Democratic Party faces a reckoning for using the financial crisis as a pretext for a government takeover of the economy and for the exercise of raw, unchecked, arbitrary power. It faces a reckoning for spending trillions of dollars of money we haven't even earned yet on a wish-list of big-government programs and paybacks to the public employees' unions. It faces a reckoning for engineering the government takeover of whole industries and for expropriating the rights of bond-holders in order to favor the interests of unions. It faces a reckoning for acting as if there are no constitutional limits on government power, as if they can do anything they like to us so long as they tell us it's for the "general welfare."
The Democratic Party faces a reckoning for not being "shovel-ready"—for being effective only at preventing private economic activity—for enacting, in the first weeks of the new Congress, a stimulus bill that swiftly succeeded in bankrupting the country, but which failed to stimulate anything other than the bloated pensions of state employees and the six-figure incomes of federal bureaucrats.
And most of all, it faces a reckoning for passing a trillion-dollar takeover of our health care against our will and over our loudly expressed objections.
The Democratic Party faces a reckoning for showing contempt for the governed—for telling us that they had to pass the bill so that we could find out what was in it, as if we were too stupid to analyze it for ourselves—for smearing ideological opponents as racists—for regarding all the bitter clingers in flyover country as mentally defective because, in the words of President Obama, they're "hard-wired not to always think clearly" when the issues get too difficult for their poor little heads.
The Democrats face a reckoning for trying to revive the basic principle of aristocracy: the idea that there is a small elite in the nation's capital who know better than us how we ought to work and think and who are therefore entitled to run our lives and spend our money.
This is what needs to be repudiated. If the Democrats are allowed to keep control of Congress after so openly defying the will of the American people, then they will be emboldened to initiate a new and even broader round of assaults on our liberty. And at this point, with expectations high for Republican gains, if Democrats lose control of Congress by a small margin, they will think they got a reprieve and they may be motivated to cling to their agenda for the final two years of Obama's presidency.
They need to be shown who's boss. They need to taught, in a way they will remember for decades, that they answer to the people. We need a Democratic loss that will go down in the history books, one that will stun even the most pessimistic Democrats. They have to realize they are up against a broad historical movement and not just a temporary off-year protest against incumbents.
We need to make this election into the opening shot of a second American Revolution.
This is why I'm offering my recommendation two weeks before election, because it is important not just to vote for Republican and against Democrats. It is important to make November's victory as big as possible by doing whatever you can to aid Republican congressional campaigns. There is still time for your campaign donations to make a difference in close races, and now is the perfect time to offer your services as a volunteer, particularly for the "get out the vote" operation. We need to bring as many pro-liberty voters to the polls as possible, to ensure a massive advantage in turnout that buries the Democrats.
This is also no time for third-party protest candidates. If you want to send a message to the Republican Party to reform itself—well, we already had an opportunity in the primaries, and we did a pretty good job of it. We'll get another good opportunity in the 2012 primaries. But now is the time to support your local Republican candidate even if he is uninspiring—because at least he will be susceptible to pressure from the Tea Parties and from pro-liberty voters, whereas the Democrats have demonstrated that they will simply ignore us.
And he will be susceptible to pressure from a Tea Party Caucus of small-government radicals in Congress, including a number of congressmen who are influenced by Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. These are the Republicans—I've profiled many of them in TIA Daily, and I'll continue to do so in the final weeks—who deserve our positive, fully enthusiastic support. One of the ways you can support them is to send them to Congress as part of a strong congressional majority in which they will wield outsized influence.
With a committed leftist still in the White House, it is crucial to have a powerful, radicalized Republican majority in Congress as a counter-balance to the vast arbitrary authority of the modern presidency. We can expect an unrepentant and unreformed President Obama to try to bypass the new Congress, imposing his agenda through the vast authority of executive-branch regulatory agencies. The EPA is already preparing a system of energy rationing more draconian than "cap-and-trade," which they are ready to impose with no specific authorization from Congress. The only thing that can prevent this is a significant effort by the Republicans to reclaim that constitutional authority of Congress. The REINS Act would be a good start.
The issue here is whether there are any limits on government power—whether the Constitution is a limit and whether the consent of the governed in a limit. In the past two years, the Democrats have made their position on constitutional government clear: they are against it. The Republicans are mixed, but their party contains the only Washington contingent of constitutionalists, and they must be put into power.
The best analogy to the current situation is the old story about the frog in a pot of water, who doesn't notice as the heat is gradually turned up until he is boiled alive. President Obama turned up the heat a little too fast, and a lot of voters have suddenly begun to notice: this water is boiling. And they're not going to be content with just turning it down to a low simmer. I think a significant portion of the public has woken up to the fact that we've been losing our liberty for a century and we're on the brink of socialism. The first step is the pull back from the brink, and the next step is to begin pulling back the government to within its narrow constitutional limits.
In that respect, this election not the end of the struggle for liberty. It is the beginning—and let's make it a strong beginning.
Time to Show the Democrats Who's Boss
by Robert Tracinski
With only two weeks left until November 2, it's time to give my official election recommendation.
For regular readers, there will hardly be any suspense about what I'm going to say. I advocate a straight Republican vote, across the board. It is imperative to vote the Democrats out of power and to do so by a historic margin, as a sweeping and unmistakable national repudiation.
November 2 is not just an election day. It is a day of reckoning.
The Democratic Party faces a reckoning for using the financial crisis as a pretext for a government takeover of the economy and for the exercise of raw, unchecked, arbitrary power. It faces a reckoning for spending trillions of dollars of money we haven't even earned yet on a wish-list of big-government programs and paybacks to the public employees' unions. It faces a reckoning for engineering the government takeover of whole industries and for expropriating the rights of bond-holders in order to favor the interests of unions. It faces a reckoning for acting as if there are no constitutional limits on government power, as if they can do anything they like to us so long as they tell us it's for the "general welfare."
The Democratic Party faces a reckoning for not being "shovel-ready"—for being effective only at preventing private economic activity—for enacting, in the first weeks of the new Congress, a stimulus bill that swiftly succeeded in bankrupting the country, but which failed to stimulate anything other than the bloated pensions of state employees and the six-figure incomes of federal bureaucrats.
And most of all, it faces a reckoning for passing a trillion-dollar takeover of our health care against our will and over our loudly expressed objections.
The Democratic Party faces a reckoning for showing contempt for the governed—for telling us that they had to pass the bill so that we could find out what was in it, as if we were too stupid to analyze it for ourselves—for smearing ideological opponents as racists—for regarding all the bitter clingers in flyover country as mentally defective because, in the words of President Obama, they're "hard-wired not to always think clearly" when the issues get too difficult for their poor little heads.
The Democrats face a reckoning for trying to revive the basic principle of aristocracy: the idea that there is a small elite in the nation's capital who know better than us how we ought to work and think and who are therefore entitled to run our lives and spend our money.
This is what needs to be repudiated. If the Democrats are allowed to keep control of Congress after so openly defying the will of the American people, then they will be emboldened to initiate a new and even broader round of assaults on our liberty. And at this point, with expectations high for Republican gains, if Democrats lose control of Congress by a small margin, they will think they got a reprieve and they may be motivated to cling to their agenda for the final two years of Obama's presidency.
They need to be shown who's boss. They need to taught, in a way they will remember for decades, that they answer to the people. We need a Democratic loss that will go down in the history books, one that will stun even the most pessimistic Democrats. They have to realize they are up against a broad historical movement and not just a temporary off-year protest against incumbents.
We need to make this election into the opening shot of a second American Revolution.
This is why I'm offering my recommendation two weeks before election, because it is important not just to vote for Republican and against Democrats. It is important to make November's victory as big as possible by doing whatever you can to aid Republican congressional campaigns. There is still time for your campaign donations to make a difference in close races, and now is the perfect time to offer your services as a volunteer, particularly for the "get out the vote" operation. We need to bring as many pro-liberty voters to the polls as possible, to ensure a massive advantage in turnout that buries the Democrats.
This is also no time for third-party protest candidates. If you want to send a message to the Republican Party to reform itself—well, we already had an opportunity in the primaries, and we did a pretty good job of it. We'll get another good opportunity in the 2012 primaries. But now is the time to support your local Republican candidate even if he is uninspiring—because at least he will be susceptible to pressure from the Tea Parties and from pro-liberty voters, whereas the Democrats have demonstrated that they will simply ignore us.
And he will be susceptible to pressure from a Tea Party Caucus of small-government radicals in Congress, including a number of congressmen who are influenced by Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. These are the Republicans—I've profiled many of them in TIA Daily, and I'll continue to do so in the final weeks—who deserve our positive, fully enthusiastic support. One of the ways you can support them is to send them to Congress as part of a strong congressional majority in which they will wield outsized influence.
With a committed leftist still in the White House, it is crucial to have a powerful, radicalized Republican majority in Congress as a counter-balance to the vast arbitrary authority of the modern presidency. We can expect an unrepentant and unreformed President Obama to try to bypass the new Congress, imposing his agenda through the vast authority of executive-branch regulatory agencies. The EPA is already preparing a system of energy rationing more draconian than "cap-and-trade," which they are ready to impose with no specific authorization from Congress. The only thing that can prevent this is a significant effort by the Republicans to reclaim that constitutional authority of Congress. The REINS Act would be a good start.
The issue here is whether there are any limits on government power—whether the Constitution is a limit and whether the consent of the governed in a limit. In the past two years, the Democrats have made their position on constitutional government clear: they are against it. The Republicans are mixed, but their party contains the only Washington contingent of constitutionalists, and they must be put into power.
The best analogy to the current situation is the old story about the frog in a pot of water, who doesn't notice as the heat is gradually turned up until he is boiled alive. President Obama turned up the heat a little too fast, and a lot of voters have suddenly begun to notice: this water is boiling. And they're not going to be content with just turning it down to a low simmer. I think a significant portion of the public has woken up to the fact that we've been losing our liberty for a century and we're on the brink of socialism. The first step is the pull back from the brink, and the next step is to begin pulling back the government to within its narrow constitutional limits.
In that respect, this election not the end of the struggle for liberty. It is the beginning—and let's make it a strong beginning.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Just as Freedom and Prosperity are Linked - Unfreedom and Poverty are Linked as Well
The top 10 countries in economic freedom and prosperity. Are you surprised that America is not in 1st place? Really - you are surprised? Where have you been the last 80 years?
Rank Country Overall Change
1 Hong Kong 89.7 -0.3
2 Singapore 86.1 -1.0
3 Australia 82.6 0.0
4 New Zealand 82.1 0.1
5 Ireland 81.3 -0.9
6 Switzerland 81.1 1.7
7 Canada 80.4 -0.1
8 United States 78.0 -2.7
9 Denmark 77.9 -1.7
10 Chile 77.2 -1.1
View full list »
Rank Country Overall Change
1 Hong Kong 89.7 -0.3
2 Singapore 86.1 -1.0
3 Australia 82.6 0.0
4 New Zealand 82.1 0.1
5 Ireland 81.3 -0.9
6 Switzerland 81.1 1.7
7 Canada 80.4 -0.1
8 United States 78.0 -2.7
9 Denmark 77.9 -1.7
10 Chile 77.2 -1.1
View full list »
Friday, October 15, 2010
An Excellent Analysis of Why Open Borders Work
The Future of Freedom Foundation has done an incredible job explaining to us why open borders work and how closed borders are harming our country and harms any country trying to force people out. Another way of putting this is that America does not belong to anyone in particular - but it does belong to anyone who wants to work and live in freedom. There are two parts to this article and you can find it at THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM FOUNDATION.
Imagine you were born in a part of the country where farming was no longer productive, or in a rust-belt town where the local factories had closed. You hear of good jobs in California and Colorado, so you decide to move. How would you feel if, when you arrived at the state line, you were denied the opportunity of a better life because you happened to have been born in a different state? Welcome to what it is like to be Mexican.
Freedom of movement is one of the most basic human rights, as anyone denied it can confirm. Yet governments obstruct people’s movement across borders in all manner of arbitrary and iniquitous ways. They require that people prove — how? — that their lives are in danger before admitting them. They determine which family members are permitted to join their relatives and which are not; Danes’ non-European spouses cannot come to live with them in Denmark unless both are age 24 or more. Americans’ foreign girlfriends and boyfriends also struggle to gain admission; the rules for foreign pets are laxer. Those seeking to come to work are vetted through a byzantine set of rules and quotas that delight bureaucrats, lawyers, and lobbyists, but deny most people the opportunity to better themselves and do untold damage to the U.S. and global economy.
Immigration controls are generally seen as normal, reasonable, and necessary, but in fact they are economically stupid, politically unsustainable, and morally wrong. For a start, the freedom to leave a country and enter another is the ultimate safeguard against tyranny. Throughout history, emigrating has often meant the difference between life and death: remember the Pilgrims who set sail on the Mayflower, the Huguenots who fled France to take refuge in England, and the Jews who escaped Nazi Germany. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the shameful recognition that governments had conspired to send countless Jews to their deaths by denying them refuge led to their signing on to Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” In practice, though, this right is often honored in the breach.
While it is vitally important that asylum-seekers are able to seek refuge abroad, fear of persecution is not the only legitimate reason that people might want to cross national borders. They might be seeking a better job. They might want to be with the ones they love. They might simply want to experience something different. And why shouldn’t they be able to?
Those fortunate enough to be rich and highly educated take it for granted that they can move around the world more or less as they please. They vacation in Mexico, safari in Africa, even go on trips around the world; they increasingly work abroad for periods of time; and some end up settling elsewhere — like the many Americans who now live in London, and the many Londoners who now live in the United States. Why, then, do we seek to deny this right to others?
Opponents of open borders often respond that Americans aren’t actually free to go where they choose. They point out, correctly, that one needs a visa to go to many countries and that the Chinese government, for instance, may very well deny you one. But why should America be basing its policies on what the Chinese government does? Should the United States deny people freedom of speech because the Chinese government does so? The point about universal human rights is not that they are necessarily universally applied, but that they ought to be. That others fail to apply them is not a reason for the United States to fail to do so too.
Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own.” But what is the right to leave a country if one cannot enter another? Since even international human-rights law does not give people the right to cross borders freely, the United States should lead by example, by passing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing open borders. READ THE REST - Open Borders Work- part 1
Then read Open Borders Work - Part 2.
Imagine you were born in a part of the country where farming was no longer productive, or in a rust-belt town where the local factories had closed. You hear of good jobs in California and Colorado, so you decide to move. How would you feel if, when you arrived at the state line, you were denied the opportunity of a better life because you happened to have been born in a different state? Welcome to what it is like to be Mexican.
Freedom of movement is one of the most basic human rights, as anyone denied it can confirm. Yet governments obstruct people’s movement across borders in all manner of arbitrary and iniquitous ways. They require that people prove — how? — that their lives are in danger before admitting them. They determine which family members are permitted to join their relatives and which are not; Danes’ non-European spouses cannot come to live with them in Denmark unless both are age 24 or more. Americans’ foreign girlfriends and boyfriends also struggle to gain admission; the rules for foreign pets are laxer. Those seeking to come to work are vetted through a byzantine set of rules and quotas that delight bureaucrats, lawyers, and lobbyists, but deny most people the opportunity to better themselves and do untold damage to the U.S. and global economy.
Immigration controls are generally seen as normal, reasonable, and necessary, but in fact they are economically stupid, politically unsustainable, and morally wrong. For a start, the freedom to leave a country and enter another is the ultimate safeguard against tyranny. Throughout history, emigrating has often meant the difference between life and death: remember the Pilgrims who set sail on the Mayflower, the Huguenots who fled France to take refuge in England, and the Jews who escaped Nazi Germany. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the shameful recognition that governments had conspired to send countless Jews to their deaths by denying them refuge led to their signing on to Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” In practice, though, this right is often honored in the breach.
While it is vitally important that asylum-seekers are able to seek refuge abroad, fear of persecution is not the only legitimate reason that people might want to cross national borders. They might be seeking a better job. They might want to be with the ones they love. They might simply want to experience something different. And why shouldn’t they be able to?
Those fortunate enough to be rich and highly educated take it for granted that they can move around the world more or less as they please. They vacation in Mexico, safari in Africa, even go on trips around the world; they increasingly work abroad for periods of time; and some end up settling elsewhere — like the many Americans who now live in London, and the many Londoners who now live in the United States. Why, then, do we seek to deny this right to others?
Opponents of open borders often respond that Americans aren’t actually free to go where they choose. They point out, correctly, that one needs a visa to go to many countries and that the Chinese government, for instance, may very well deny you one. But why should America be basing its policies on what the Chinese government does? Should the United States deny people freedom of speech because the Chinese government does so? The point about universal human rights is not that they are necessarily universally applied, but that they ought to be. That others fail to apply them is not a reason for the United States to fail to do so too.
Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own.” But what is the right to leave a country if one cannot enter another? Since even international human-rights law does not give people the right to cross borders freely, the United States should lead by example, by passing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing open borders. READ THE REST - Open Borders Work- part 1
Then read Open Borders Work - Part 2.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Another Scientist Resigns From the Fraud that is "Global Warming"
TIA's Rob Tracinski reported on the resignation of an eminent physicist from a prestigious scientific society because they upheld the fraudulent Global Warming scam.
Rob writes:
A distinguished older scientist, physicist Hal Lewis, has resigned from the American Physical Society, one of the nation's most prestigious scientific associations, in protest over its support for the global warming hysteria. Lewis's open letter explaining his resignation shows how Climategate has radicalized many scientists, who now see the integrity of science itself as under attack.
Hence, Lewis denounces global warming, not just as an unproven theory, but as a "scam" and a "pseudoscientific fraud"—and as a corruption of science by enormous sums of government money.
Here is the letter, by way of Anthony Watts, who introduces it with only a little bit of hyperbole, "This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science."
"Hal Lewis: My Resignation from The American Physical Society—an Important Moment in Science History," Anthony Watts, Watts Up with That? October 8
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago)....
For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety....
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all.... To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members' interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment.... The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council....
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?...
There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst.... Since I am no philosopher, I'm not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation.
Rob writes:
A distinguished older scientist, physicist Hal Lewis, has resigned from the American Physical Society, one of the nation's most prestigious scientific associations, in protest over its support for the global warming hysteria. Lewis's open letter explaining his resignation shows how Climategate has radicalized many scientists, who now see the integrity of science itself as under attack.
Hence, Lewis denounces global warming, not just as an unproven theory, but as a "scam" and a "pseudoscientific fraud"—and as a corruption of science by enormous sums of government money.
Here is the letter, by way of Anthony Watts, who introduces it with only a little bit of hyperbole, "This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science."
"Hal Lewis: My Resignation from The American Physical Society—an Important Moment in Science History," Anthony Watts, Watts Up with That? October 8
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago)....
For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety....
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all.... To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members' interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment.... The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council....
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?...
There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst.... Since I am no philosopher, I'm not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation.
Friday, October 08, 2010
The Constitution Is For Everyone's Use Not Just Judges
For those who do not understand ANYTHING about that document called the Constitution here is an excerpt from TIA by Rob Tracinski. Let's remember that the Constitution is a restraint on government NOT the People.
The most revealing phrase here is Adler's description of any attempt at legislative self-restraint as "an extraconstitutional attempt to limit the powers of Congress." Extraconstitutional? But what does he think the Constitution is for, anyway? The whole purpose of the Constitution is precisely to limit the powers of Congress, and of the government as a whole.
What the left does not want to admit is that the Constitution is a charter for a government of limited powers. It is a constitution for a nation founded on the principles of liberty and individual rights. So the whole purpose of our system is for every branch of government to be limited in as many ways as possible, in order to prevent encroachments on the rights of the people.
The essence of the Constitution is to say, to the people: you may do whatever you want, and government can only interfere with you insofar as it is executing of a small number of specifically defined powers. And to the government, it sends the opposite message: you cannot do whatever you want, but are limited in your powers. And in case you have any doubts about what these limits are, we the people have written down in this document what you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do.
The left's view of the Constitution is to turn this on its head. The people are to be extensively regulated in every aspect of their lives—but as to the government, nothing should be interpreted as creating any additional limits on its powers.
Other commentators have already pointed out the concrete meaning of Lithwick's standard of constitutionality: that the legislature should take as much power as it can grab and wait until the Supreme Court slaps its down, on the theory that it's not a crime if you don't get caught. It is a legal theory of lawlessness.
On a deeper level, it is a theory of amorality. The root of limited government is the subordination of might to right, the idea that government coercion may only be used for specifically delimited purposes. This is what I call "the constitutional creed"—the idea that the Constitution serves as a guide to the only appropriate moral justifications for the use of government coercion. Yet the left's view, expressed by Lithwick and her colleagues in the mainstream media, is that government coercion can be used at whim, with the only limitation being what each branch of government thinks it can get away with in a continual power struggle with the other branches.
There is an old saying that "liberty for the wolves is death for the lambs." This is a constitutional theory of liberty for the wolves, a grant of unbridled power to those who want to wield force.
With less than a month before the election, we must remember that this is what is at stake: not just health care or the economy or anything so nebulous as "jobs." What is at stake is whether there are any limits on the power of the state. Lithwick has just given us a reminder of the fact that the left recognizes no such limits in theory, and the past two years have reminded us that the left sees no such limits in practice.—RWT
The most revealing phrase here is Adler's description of any attempt at legislative self-restraint as "an extraconstitutional attempt to limit the powers of Congress." Extraconstitutional? But what does he think the Constitution is for, anyway? The whole purpose of the Constitution is precisely to limit the powers of Congress, and of the government as a whole.
What the left does not want to admit is that the Constitution is a charter for a government of limited powers. It is a constitution for a nation founded on the principles of liberty and individual rights. So the whole purpose of our system is for every branch of government to be limited in as many ways as possible, in order to prevent encroachments on the rights of the people.
The essence of the Constitution is to say, to the people: you may do whatever you want, and government can only interfere with you insofar as it is executing of a small number of specifically defined powers. And to the government, it sends the opposite message: you cannot do whatever you want, but are limited in your powers. And in case you have any doubts about what these limits are, we the people have written down in this document what you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do.
The left's view of the Constitution is to turn this on its head. The people are to be extensively regulated in every aspect of their lives—but as to the government, nothing should be interpreted as creating any additional limits on its powers.
Other commentators have already pointed out the concrete meaning of Lithwick's standard of constitutionality: that the legislature should take as much power as it can grab and wait until the Supreme Court slaps its down, on the theory that it's not a crime if you don't get caught. It is a legal theory of lawlessness.
On a deeper level, it is a theory of amorality. The root of limited government is the subordination of might to right, the idea that government coercion may only be used for specifically delimited purposes. This is what I call "the constitutional creed"—the idea that the Constitution serves as a guide to the only appropriate moral justifications for the use of government coercion. Yet the left's view, expressed by Lithwick and her colleagues in the mainstream media, is that government coercion can be used at whim, with the only limitation being what each branch of government thinks it can get away with in a continual power struggle with the other branches.
There is an old saying that "liberty for the wolves is death for the lambs." This is a constitutional theory of liberty for the wolves, a grant of unbridled power to those who want to wield force.
With less than a month before the election, we must remember that this is what is at stake: not just health care or the economy or anything so nebulous as "jobs." What is at stake is whether there are any limits on the power of the state. Lithwick has just given us a reminder of the fact that the left recognizes no such limits in theory, and the past two years have reminded us that the left sees no such limits in practice.—RWT
Saturday, October 02, 2010
"The Only Policy Left: Growth" by Daniel Henninger
Great piece at the Wall Street Journal regarding the fact that an economy needs to GROW!!! in order for the citizens to prosper. Have forgotten this?
Sunday, September 26, 2010
"Learning the Language of Obama" - Center For Individual Freedom - Video
Just like dystopian novels of yore like Anthem and 1984...one can't help but think of Obama when it comes to "newspeak". Using code words to hide hidden intentions.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Obama "Absorbs" Terrorist Attacks - Colombia Crushes Them
As Mexico's war against the drug lord terrorists goes on and on, year after year with the government showing weakness, the "lords" get ever more brazen in their ferociousness to annihilate anyone who stands in the way of their pocketing the illicit gains of the Coca trade. Colombia has for the last few decades fought their own war with jungle guerrillas. But the last two Presidents have shown a determination and cojones to rid their country of this evil plague and lawlessness. The Colombian people are to be commended for backing the government in their fight against this evil. LESSON: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR A COMPLETE VICTORY OVER THE ENEMY: ONE MUST BE DEDICATED TO THIS ONE ABSOLUTE.
VITORY: Colombia's army blew away the field marshal of FARC's narco-terror war Wednesday, showing with a jolt that to win, it's terrorists who must "absorb" attacks, not innocents. Mexico and the U.S. have much to learn.
Seems the adage that Colombia is the only country where guerrillas die of old age isn't true anymore.
On Thursday, Colombia celebrated news of the demise of Jorge Briceno, military commander and second-highest chief of FARC. The 57-year-old terrorist went down in a hail of bombs and gunfire over three days in a jungle bunker near La Macarena.
The Colombian army suffered no deaths and left at least 20 guerrillas dead on the jungle floor. Briceno's demise marks the fourth knockout of FARC's seven-man "Politburo"since 2008.
"This is the most crushing blow against the FARC in its entire history," said Colombia's president, Juan Manuel Santos, speaking from the sidelines at the United Nations in New York.
To every other nation out there fighting a terror war, it's a lesson showing how it can be done.
First, it shows that in winning, history and continuity matter to the enemy. FARC, a Marxist terror group, has plagued Colombia since 1964. Briceno joined in 1975 and introduced cocaine trafficking to FARC's activities, extending the war.
He became a legend to many on the international left in the same way as FARC's original guerrilla mentor, Fidel Castro. Now that he's dead, there's no clear successor, leaving guerrillas to question what they fight for.
Briceno's demise also comes as the Colombian army has pounded the terror group in the south in a recent surge.
If this doesn't signal the end of Colombia's long-running guerrilla war, it's at least the beginning of the end — and its lessons should be heeded beyond Colombia's borders.
Colombia's war is in reality the southern flank of the same war that Mexico is fighting with its cartels — and that war is spilling over into the U.S. This is why Americans must pay attention.
The growing lawlessness on our border encompasses drugs, but also alien smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting and other acts of organized crime, with ties to global terror.
In Colombia's case, it brooks no talk about "absorbing" terror attacks, as President Obama recently suggested in the U.S. If anything, Colombia seems to have taken lessons from Gen. David Petraeus' surge in Iraq that took the war to the terrorists — and made sure they were the ones to worry about "absorbing" the attacks.
Second, the denial of any resemblance between the war Colombia fights and the war Mexico fights looks downright counterproductive. That's especially true since Colombia is winning its war, and decisively.
A mere two weeks ago, U.S. and Mexican leaders seemed to be going out of their way to deny that similarity.
President Obama attempted to soothe Mexico's hurt feelings by absurdly claiming that Mexico's economy was "progressive" — a ludicrous economic assertion — so there was no real comparison.
Instead of pretending they're above learning anything from Colombia, U.S. and Mexican leaders should closely watch how the leadership, determination, training and unified support from the public led to Colombia's victory.
Instead of responding to repeated political snubs and criticisms, Colombia took out Briceno, the terrorists' leader — and quietly showed the rest of the world how terror wars can be won.
It would be nice if the leaders of Mexico and the U.S., facing rising violence across their own border, showed the same will to win. READ "Colombia Shows Mexica How to Do It".
VITORY: Colombia's army blew away the field marshal of FARC's narco-terror war Wednesday, showing with a jolt that to win, it's terrorists who must "absorb" attacks, not innocents. Mexico and the U.S. have much to learn.
Seems the adage that Colombia is the only country where guerrillas die of old age isn't true anymore.
On Thursday, Colombia celebrated news of the demise of Jorge Briceno, military commander and second-highest chief of FARC. The 57-year-old terrorist went down in a hail of bombs and gunfire over three days in a jungle bunker near La Macarena.
The Colombian army suffered no deaths and left at least 20 guerrillas dead on the jungle floor. Briceno's demise marks the fourth knockout of FARC's seven-man "Politburo"since 2008.
"This is the most crushing blow against the FARC in its entire history," said Colombia's president, Juan Manuel Santos, speaking from the sidelines at the United Nations in New York.
To every other nation out there fighting a terror war, it's a lesson showing how it can be done.
First, it shows that in winning, history and continuity matter to the enemy. FARC, a Marxist terror group, has plagued Colombia since 1964. Briceno joined in 1975 and introduced cocaine trafficking to FARC's activities, extending the war.
He became a legend to many on the international left in the same way as FARC's original guerrilla mentor, Fidel Castro. Now that he's dead, there's no clear successor, leaving guerrillas to question what they fight for.
Briceno's demise also comes as the Colombian army has pounded the terror group in the south in a recent surge.
If this doesn't signal the end of Colombia's long-running guerrilla war, it's at least the beginning of the end — and its lessons should be heeded beyond Colombia's borders.
Colombia's war is in reality the southern flank of the same war that Mexico is fighting with its cartels — and that war is spilling over into the U.S. This is why Americans must pay attention.
The growing lawlessness on our border encompasses drugs, but also alien smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting and other acts of organized crime, with ties to global terror.
In Colombia's case, it brooks no talk about "absorbing" terror attacks, as President Obama recently suggested in the U.S. If anything, Colombia seems to have taken lessons from Gen. David Petraeus' surge in Iraq that took the war to the terrorists — and made sure they were the ones to worry about "absorbing" the attacks.
Second, the denial of any resemblance between the war Colombia fights and the war Mexico fights looks downright counterproductive. That's especially true since Colombia is winning its war, and decisively.
A mere two weeks ago, U.S. and Mexican leaders seemed to be going out of their way to deny that similarity.
President Obama attempted to soothe Mexico's hurt feelings by absurdly claiming that Mexico's economy was "progressive" — a ludicrous economic assertion — so there was no real comparison.
Instead of pretending they're above learning anything from Colombia, U.S. and Mexican leaders should closely watch how the leadership, determination, training and unified support from the public led to Colombia's victory.
Instead of responding to repeated political snubs and criticisms, Colombia took out Briceno, the terrorists' leader — and quietly showed the rest of the world how terror wars can be won.
It would be nice if the leaders of Mexico and the U.S., facing rising violence across their own border, showed the same will to win. READ "Colombia Shows Mexica How to Do It".
Friday, September 24, 2010
The Last Place On Earth
Everyday politicians and busybodies chip away at our freedoms. One of the most vital is our right to live and build where we want. The article below is really unbelievable in its outrageous taking our right to work and live where we want . We must fight this anti-American attitude. There are very few places in the world where there is any freedom anymore. We must preserve the last place on this earth as a haven for freedom lovers. Those who like to control other people can move to Russia or Venezuela.
Earlier this month, Wayne Garcia walked across a stalled housing development in Land O' Lakes, Florida just north of Tampa. "It's an outrage," he said as he strolled past dozens of empty home sites. "This should never have been approved. This should never have happened."
Five years ago, architects promised "Connerton" would become the largest city in Pasco County. Today it looks like a graveyard of unfinished and unoccupied homes.
"There were supposed to be 15,000 homes here," Garcia explained as he stepped over the unhooked plumbing of one side street. "Today's there's 233." And Connerton isn't alone. Florida now has hundreds of stalled building sites. It also has a record 300,000 vacant homes.
"This is all because of unchecked development," said Garcia who represents Florida Hometown Democracy, Inc., an environmental group that's trying to control growth in Florida.
In fact, Hometown Democracy now has an initiative on the November ballot that some call the farthest reaching anti-growth measure in the country. "Amendment 4 will finally address the problem," he said.
"The problem," according to Garcia, has been the state's local community boards, which approve or deny large developments. He says these boards in the last ten years simply approved everything put before them, basically caving to the powerful construction interests. "It's because the public didn't have a vote and didn't have a say in the matter." Amendment 4, he says will give the public that say, mandating a local public vote for every proposed large development in the state.
Garcia calls it "Democracy." Developers call it a "nightmare."
"If you like the recession, then you will absolutely love amendment 4," says Ryan Houck, a spokesperson of Citizens for Lower Taxes and a Stronger Economy, the main opponent of the amendment.
Houck says Amendment 4 will create a bureaucratic blockade that will make it impossible of any future development in the state. And he doesn't stop there. "Amendment 4 is going to cost tens of thousands of jobs," he said, "raise taxes on working Floridians, and make it more expensive to live in our state."
Garcia obviously disagrees, "I say that the opposition and the system that they want to keep going, is what got us in this recession in the first place." READ at Florida: The Vacant-Home State?
Florida law requires the amendment to receive 60 percent of the vote to pass.
Read more: http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/09/24/floridathe-vacant-home-state#comments#ixzz10TCLvRmh
Earlier this month, Wayne Garcia walked across a stalled housing development in Land O' Lakes, Florida just north of Tampa. "It's an outrage," he said as he strolled past dozens of empty home sites. "This should never have been approved. This should never have happened."
Five years ago, architects promised "Connerton" would become the largest city in Pasco County. Today it looks like a graveyard of unfinished and unoccupied homes.
"There were supposed to be 15,000 homes here," Garcia explained as he stepped over the unhooked plumbing of one side street. "Today's there's 233." And Connerton isn't alone. Florida now has hundreds of stalled building sites. It also has a record 300,000 vacant homes.
"This is all because of unchecked development," said Garcia who represents Florida Hometown Democracy, Inc., an environmental group that's trying to control growth in Florida.
In fact, Hometown Democracy now has an initiative on the November ballot that some call the farthest reaching anti-growth measure in the country. "Amendment 4 will finally address the problem," he said.
"The problem," according to Garcia, has been the state's local community boards, which approve or deny large developments. He says these boards in the last ten years simply approved everything put before them, basically caving to the powerful construction interests. "It's because the public didn't have a vote and didn't have a say in the matter." Amendment 4, he says will give the public that say, mandating a local public vote for every proposed large development in the state.
Garcia calls it "Democracy." Developers call it a "nightmare."
"If you like the recession, then you will absolutely love amendment 4," says Ryan Houck, a spokesperson of Citizens for Lower Taxes and a Stronger Economy, the main opponent of the amendment.
Houck says Amendment 4 will create a bureaucratic blockade that will make it impossible of any future development in the state. And he doesn't stop there. "Amendment 4 is going to cost tens of thousands of jobs," he said, "raise taxes on working Floridians, and make it more expensive to live in our state."
Garcia obviously disagrees, "I say that the opposition and the system that they want to keep going, is what got us in this recession in the first place." READ at Florida: The Vacant-Home State?
Florida law requires the amendment to receive 60 percent of the vote to pass.
Read more: http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/09/24/floridathe-vacant-home-state#comments#ixzz10TCLvRmh
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Larry Silverstein - The Builder and Creator at the 9/11 Site - We Thank you!
You thought some smarmy middle easterner was going to build a mosque near the 9/11 site? Wrong - he has no money and it seems it was all a gimmick to get money. Anyway of more interest is that they are building already the "Freedom Tower" at that site. How awesome is that! That's a stick in the eye of all those half human terrorists! Thank you Larry Silverstein - you are a hero! This article is at "The Intellectual Activist Daily" or TIA daily - put out by Rob Tracinski. Great site.
About a month ago, I linked to a good column by John Podhoretz excoriating New York's politicians for obstructing the rebuilding of the WTC site for nine years. But a few weeks after that op-ed was published, it was made obsolete by news that—quietly, while we weren't paying attention—there is something being built to replace the Twin Towers.
Various legal and political disputes have been resolved, and the structure for the new One World Trade Center—the pretty good design for the 1,776-foot-tall "Freedom Tower"—is already more than 36 stories tall. Follow that link for a few pictures of the construction in progress. But also go to the official WTC website for some very nice renderings of what the final project will look like when it is completed in 2013.
When this is happening, it's inexcusable that we're all talking about that two-bit con-man Feisal Rauf, when the real story here is the enormous achievement of Larry Silverstein, the owner of the WTC site and the developer who has devoted the past nine years of his life to a crusade to rebuild. He fought against self-aggrandizing politicians who tried to oust him from the project, against defeatists who wanted to turn the whole site into a memorial, against the little minds who wanted to build small. Thanks to him, it looks like the Freedom Tower will be standing tall before they even break ground on the Ground Zero Mosque, if they ever do.
On September 11, the Wall Street Journal published a terrific profile of Silverstein in which he described his motive for rebuilding the site. Silverstein is 79 years old and has taken this on as the last project of his life, in the hope that he will be around long enough to enjoy seeing it completed.
About a month ago, I linked to a good column by John Podhoretz excoriating New York's politicians for obstructing the rebuilding of the WTC site for nine years. But a few weeks after that op-ed was published, it was made obsolete by news that—quietly, while we weren't paying attention—there is something being built to replace the Twin Towers.
Various legal and political disputes have been resolved, and the structure for the new One World Trade Center—the pretty good design for the 1,776-foot-tall "Freedom Tower"—is already more than 36 stories tall. Follow that link for a few pictures of the construction in progress. But also go to the official WTC website for some very nice renderings of what the final project will look like when it is completed in 2013.
When this is happening, it's inexcusable that we're all talking about that two-bit con-man Feisal Rauf, when the real story here is the enormous achievement of Larry Silverstein, the owner of the WTC site and the developer who has devoted the past nine years of his life to a crusade to rebuild. He fought against self-aggrandizing politicians who tried to oust him from the project, against defeatists who wanted to turn the whole site into a memorial, against the little minds who wanted to build small. Thanks to him, it looks like the Freedom Tower will be standing tall before they even break ground on the Ground Zero Mosque, if they ever do.
On September 11, the Wall Street Journal published a terrific profile of Silverstein in which he described his motive for rebuilding the site. Silverstein is 79 years old and has taken this on as the last project of his life, in the hope that he will be around long enough to enjoy seeing it completed.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
A Young Boy's View of America As He Grows up In England
I just read a fantastic book called "Uncle Tungsten" by Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist. It is a memoir about growing up in England during the war years and after, surrounded by chemistry and a family filled with doctors and chemists all intensely interested in this subject. His love for learning and his hands on adventures with chemistry as he was growing up makes his life so fascinating and interesting. But here is what he writes about how he felt and viewed America from afar. We should not forget that we do live in a most wonderful country in the world. Let's not forget it as politicians try to destroy what our ancestors have tried to create.
"...I thought that I, too, would like to have a life like him, to live in magical, mythical California (already, with cowboy films, a land of fantasy for me). America was increasingly in my thought as I entered my teens - it had been our great ally in the war; its power, its resources, were almost unlimited. Had it not made the world's first atomic bomb? American soldiers on leave walked the streets of London-their gestures, their speech, seeming to emit a self-confidence, a nonchalance, an ease almost unimaginable to us after six years of war. Life Magazine, in its large spreads, pictured mountains, canyons, deserts, landscapes of a spaciousness and magnificence beyond anything in Europe, along with American towns full of smiling, eager, well-nourished people, their houses gleaming, their shops full, enjoying a life of plenty and gaiety unimaginable to us, with the tight rationing, the pinched consciousness of the war years still upon us. To this glamorous picture of transatlantic ease, and bigger-than-life spontaneity and splendor, musicals like Annie get Your Gun and Oklamhoma! added a further mythopoeic force. It was in this atmosphere of romantic enlargement that Cannary Row and (despite its sickliness) its sequel, Sweet Thursday, had such an impact on me."
"If I had ...sometimes imagined a mythical past, I now started to have fantasies of the future, to imagine myself as a scientist or naturalist on the coasts or in the great outback of America. I read accounts of Lewis and clark's journey, I read Emerson and Thoreau, and above all, I read John Muir. I fell in love with the sublime and romantic landscapes of Albert Bierstadt and the beautiful, sensous photographs of Ansel Adams ..."
"...I thought that I, too, would like to have a life like him, to live in magical, mythical California (already, with cowboy films, a land of fantasy for me). America was increasingly in my thought as I entered my teens - it had been our great ally in the war; its power, its resources, were almost unlimited. Had it not made the world's first atomic bomb? American soldiers on leave walked the streets of London-their gestures, their speech, seeming to emit a self-confidence, a nonchalance, an ease almost unimaginable to us after six years of war. Life Magazine, in its large spreads, pictured mountains, canyons, deserts, landscapes of a spaciousness and magnificence beyond anything in Europe, along with American towns full of smiling, eager, well-nourished people, their houses gleaming, their shops full, enjoying a life of plenty and gaiety unimaginable to us, with the tight rationing, the pinched consciousness of the war years still upon us. To this glamorous picture of transatlantic ease, and bigger-than-life spontaneity and splendor, musicals like Annie get Your Gun and Oklamhoma! added a further mythopoeic force. It was in this atmosphere of romantic enlargement that Cannary Row and (despite its sickliness) its sequel, Sweet Thursday, had such an impact on me."
"If I had ...sometimes imagined a mythical past, I now started to have fantasies of the future, to imagine myself as a scientist or naturalist on the coasts or in the great outback of America. I read accounts of Lewis and clark's journey, I read Emerson and Thoreau, and above all, I read John Muir. I fell in love with the sublime and romantic landscapes of Albert Bierstadt and the beautiful, sensous photographs of Ansel Adams ..."
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Is Obama's Goal to Bring Down America? It's not as Farfetched as You Think
People are getting tired of Obama and his policies that don't make sense. Or do they? Glen Beck is putting forth the idea that what Obama is trying to do as he tries to make a one world government is to make America poor so that we are like most of the rest of the world. Don't dismiss this out of hand. I would think and research about this. There's no other way his policies and what he's done since in office make sense. Apparently he is paying 2 billion dollars to Brazil to find oil in their deep waters and another huge wad of cash to Mexico to find oil in the gulf. Why is he doing this while he prohibits drilling here in America? Think of all the leftist powerlusters surrounding Obama who have much to gain if America's rough and tumble free-market capitalism is brought down. Listen to this woman as she proclaims her exhaustion of waiting for Obama to fix the economy.
"I'm one of your middle class Americans. And quite frankly, I'm exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for," a woman told President Obama at a town hall.
"My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot dogs and beans era of our lives, but, quite frankly, it's starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we're headed again, and, quite frankly, Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly. Is this my new reality?," she added. Listen to her confront Obama here.
"I'm one of your middle class Americans. And quite frankly, I'm exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for," a woman told President Obama at a town hall.
"My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot dogs and beans era of our lives, but, quite frankly, it's starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we're headed again, and, quite frankly, Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly. Is this my new reality?," she added. Listen to her confront Obama here.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Tea Party Spreads to Other Countries - Are the People Getting Fed Up with Powerlusting Politicians?
"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be—to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all—the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government."Thomas Jefferson
Even the Aussies are getting into the limited government mode. Here is an article in AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL AFFAIRS. Is the desire for freedom FROM government spreading around the globe? Will it last? Time will tell.
TEA PARTY COMES TO AUSTRALIA
..."What should be the role of the government in the economy, what should be the role of government in people’s lives and do you believe that you can spend your money better than government?"
The T.E.A. Party in Australia announces on its website that it is a "worldwide movement united for free markets, fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited small governments and individual freedom".
The modern US Tea Party movement draws inspiration from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which was a protest by American colonists against British taxes and emerged in the United States in 2009. READ HERE.
Even the Aussies are getting into the limited government mode. Here is an article in AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL AFFAIRS. Is the desire for freedom FROM government spreading around the globe? Will it last? Time will tell.
TEA PARTY COMES TO AUSTRALIA
..."What should be the role of the government in the economy, what should be the role of government in people’s lives and do you believe that you can spend your money better than government?"
The T.E.A. Party in Australia announces on its website that it is a "worldwide movement united for free markets, fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited small governments and individual freedom".
The modern US Tea Party movement draws inspiration from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which was a protest by American colonists against British taxes and emerged in the United States in 2009. READ HERE.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Punishing the Private Sector For The Sins of The Federal Government
We have been killing free enterprise, individualism and the American can-do spirit for over 8 decades. But it hasn't always been this way. From 1850 to 1930 the US went from a second rate economy to a leader in the world in crucial industries from chemicals to car manufacturing. Famous industrialists like Ford, Durant, Crapo, Astor and Kellogg built huge businesses and in the process raised the standard of living for all Americans. And they did it without government help or intervention. These men did it with their ingenuity and the freedom which abounded during those years. Then the government stepped in with their controls and prohibitions shackling the men that would have continued in the entrepreneur tradition. And it hasn't changed ever since.
Americans today can't even realize how they are shackled and managed and sermoned to by government bureaucrats. Now for several generations we have been led with rings in our noses to toe the government line and without a whimper we oblige. Are we turning into cows? A wonderful book written by Burton Fulsom, Jr called "EMPIRE BUILDERS" is well worth your while. You will see that once Americans were builders and creators of empires during a short interlude of 8o years when the government was kept at bay.
The following is an article in Investor's Business Daily describing how low we have fallen as we ever continue to allow these politicians to tie us up and strangle us with regulations, taxes and prohibitions. We are no longer the spirited American of yore, we are humble servants led by the nose by government hacks and politicians. It's time to find some spirit and energy and put government back in it's place - which is the job of ensuring the defense of this country against our enemies and criminals but to otherwise "leave us alone"!
Poverty: A new report comes as a punch in the gut for proud Americans: One in seven of us is poor, government data show. Surprised? Don't be. It's what happens when you kill the most productive parts of a country.
An estimated 14.3% of the population, or 43.6 million people, were considered poor in 2009 up from 13.2% the year before, the Census Bureau reports. This is the highest share living in poverty since the government began keeping records half a century ago.
How can this be in the richest nation on Earth?
Since Democrats took power — Congress in 2007, the White House in 2009 — policies that punish the productive private economy have become the norm.
Meanwhile, government wastes massive sums bailing out failed businesses, purchasing bad loans and rewarding those who borrow too much, make bad economic decisions or belong to unions.
Knowing this, no one should express shock that 15 million Americans don't have jobs, and that perhaps another 14 million or so are working only part time when they'd prefer to be working full time.
Persistent unemployment from misbegotten government policies is why we have this poverty. And it leads, inevitably, to dependence on government. As recently as 2006, federal payments to individuals as a share of GDP — a proxy for welfare — stood at 12%. Now it's 16.4%, a 37% rise in three years and the highest level ever.
Our own IBD/TIPP Poll of 908 Americans across the country, taken last week, shows that 39% of all American households and 22% of all individuals today receive some kind of federal aid.
Why? For three years now, the private sector has been systematically punished for the sins of the federal government with higher taxes and greater regulation. Businesses, though sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash, won't invest in such an environment.
Washington's response? Spend hundreds of billions more on ill-considered "stimulus" plans and consign millions more to unemployment and poverty.
In the past two years we've witnessed a breathtaking expansion of federal government. And it'll only get worse, with a planned $44.8 trillion in spending over the next decade, an 83% rise. This new spending will add $13 trillion to our debt, pushing the total to $23 trillion by 2020 from just $7.5 trillion as recently as 2008.
Contrary to the repeated assertions of our nation's Keynesian elites in the media, Washington and academia, all this spending and debt doesn't create jobs. It kills them. The money siphoned from the economy destroys investment and consumer spending, leading to slower growth, higher joblessness and lower incomes... READ the rest here at IBD.
Americans today can't even realize how they are shackled and managed and sermoned to by government bureaucrats. Now for several generations we have been led with rings in our noses to toe the government line and without a whimper we oblige. Are we turning into cows? A wonderful book written by Burton Fulsom, Jr called "EMPIRE BUILDERS" is well worth your while. You will see that once Americans were builders and creators of empires during a short interlude of 8o years when the government was kept at bay.
The following is an article in Investor's Business Daily describing how low we have fallen as we ever continue to allow these politicians to tie us up and strangle us with regulations, taxes and prohibitions. We are no longer the spirited American of yore, we are humble servants led by the nose by government hacks and politicians. It's time to find some spirit and energy and put government back in it's place - which is the job of ensuring the defense of this country against our enemies and criminals but to otherwise "leave us alone"!
Poverty: A new report comes as a punch in the gut for proud Americans: One in seven of us is poor, government data show. Surprised? Don't be. It's what happens when you kill the most productive parts of a country.
An estimated 14.3% of the population, or 43.6 million people, were considered poor in 2009 up from 13.2% the year before, the Census Bureau reports. This is the highest share living in poverty since the government began keeping records half a century ago.
How can this be in the richest nation on Earth?
Since Democrats took power — Congress in 2007, the White House in 2009 — policies that punish the productive private economy have become the norm.
Meanwhile, government wastes massive sums bailing out failed businesses, purchasing bad loans and rewarding those who borrow too much, make bad economic decisions or belong to unions.
Knowing this, no one should express shock that 15 million Americans don't have jobs, and that perhaps another 14 million or so are working only part time when they'd prefer to be working full time.
Persistent unemployment from misbegotten government policies is why we have this poverty. And it leads, inevitably, to dependence on government. As recently as 2006, federal payments to individuals as a share of GDP — a proxy for welfare — stood at 12%. Now it's 16.4%, a 37% rise in three years and the highest level ever.
Our own IBD/TIPP Poll of 908 Americans across the country, taken last week, shows that 39% of all American households and 22% of all individuals today receive some kind of federal aid.
Why? For three years now, the private sector has been systematically punished for the sins of the federal government with higher taxes and greater regulation. Businesses, though sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash, won't invest in such an environment.
Washington's response? Spend hundreds of billions more on ill-considered "stimulus" plans and consign millions more to unemployment and poverty.
In the past two years we've witnessed a breathtaking expansion of federal government. And it'll only get worse, with a planned $44.8 trillion in spending over the next decade, an 83% rise. This new spending will add $13 trillion to our debt, pushing the total to $23 trillion by 2020 from just $7.5 trillion as recently as 2008.
Contrary to the repeated assertions of our nation's Keynesian elites in the media, Washington and academia, all this spending and debt doesn't create jobs. It kills them. The money siphoned from the economy destroys investment and consumer spending, leading to slower growth, higher joblessness and lower incomes... READ the rest here at IBD.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
We Want Government Shrinkage - Enough is Enough!
An interesting article by Daniel Henninger at The Wall Street Journal.
...In a note on last week's poll, Rasmussen points out that the only time it recorded a higher shrink-the-government number, at 70%, was in August 2006. That was just ahead of the famous off-year election in which Republican voters withheld support for their party's free-spending members in Congress.
The Obama White House holds that the spending concerns Mr. Obama cited Monday—the stimulus, TARP, the auto bailout—were necessary. Whatever any individual merit in this stuff, it hit most voters at a moment when nearly any big government outlays were going to be written off as "more spending." When Mr. Obama said the health bill was "paid for," naturally polls showed that no one believed him. Why should they?
This loss of faith predates the Obama presidency.
I called Scott Rasmussen this week to discuss the roots of the anti-spending mood, and he suggested that the American electorate's desire for pushback against the growth in federal spending dates at least to 1992 and Ross Perot's third-party presidential bid, which drew 18.9% of the popular vote. Indeed, Mr. Rasmussen argues, you can find evidence of the turn in Jimmy Carter's "efficiency in government" efforts.
Until Barack Obama, the only Democrats who had a chance of winning the presidency were Southern governors with a reputation for fiscal moderation. But after Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, he immediately tried to pass the mammoth health-care entitlement known as HillaryCare. After 17 acrimonious months, it died in August 1994. That November, voters gave control of the House to the GOP for the first time in 40 years. It was about more than Newt Gingrich's charm....READ Here: "It's The Spending, Stupid" at WSJ
...In a note on last week's poll, Rasmussen points out that the only time it recorded a higher shrink-the-government number, at 70%, was in August 2006. That was just ahead of the famous off-year election in which Republican voters withheld support for their party's free-spending members in Congress.
The Obama White House holds that the spending concerns Mr. Obama cited Monday—the stimulus, TARP, the auto bailout—were necessary. Whatever any individual merit in this stuff, it hit most voters at a moment when nearly any big government outlays were going to be written off as "more spending." When Mr. Obama said the health bill was "paid for," naturally polls showed that no one believed him. Why should they?
This loss of faith predates the Obama presidency.
I called Scott Rasmussen this week to discuss the roots of the anti-spending mood, and he suggested that the American electorate's desire for pushback against the growth in federal spending dates at least to 1992 and Ross Perot's third-party presidential bid, which drew 18.9% of the popular vote. Indeed, Mr. Rasmussen argues, you can find evidence of the turn in Jimmy Carter's "efficiency in government" efforts.
Until Barack Obama, the only Democrats who had a chance of winning the presidency were Southern governors with a reputation for fiscal moderation. But after Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, he immediately tried to pass the mammoth health-care entitlement known as HillaryCare. After 17 acrimonious months, it died in August 1994. That November, voters gave control of the House to the GOP for the first time in 40 years. It was about more than Newt Gingrich's charm....READ Here: "It's The Spending, Stupid" at WSJ
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Reality Will Continue to Punish Americans Until They Realize that We have to Clean Up Washington
- Economic growth is not driven by soaring government spending, deficits and debt. It is driven by incentives to work, save, invest, start businesses, expand businesses, create jobs, and take on the risks of entrepreneurship. Keynesian economics does not work because borrowing or taxing another $50 billion out of the private economy to spend another $50 billion into the economy does not add anything to the economy on net. Nor does it do anything to change the fundamental incentives that do drive the economy, except maybe make them worse. The American Spectator (2010/09/08).
Just as Japan suffered under the illusion back in the 90's that it could "stimulate" the economy by doing the Keynesian thing, i.e. government spending, deficits and debt with a focus on big spending on infrastructure we are repeating the same mistakes. But with the example of Japan one has to ask why is Obama and his minions doing the same thing that dumped Japan into two decades of stagnation? There is only one answer: Washington bureaucrats want control of our lives and they are doing this by making us poor and dependent on Washington handouts. Is this what we want? To live a life of kow-towing to bureaucrats? I don't think Americans have yet lost the can-do, leave me alone spirit that tamed and settled this vast country we patriots like to call America the beautiful. To understand the mindset of the bureaucrat hack read the article 'AMERICA'S RULING CLASS" by Angelo M. Codevilla in the July-August 2010 issue of The American Spectator.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Thinking for Oneself and Bearing the Consequences
My brother had an interesting assessment of Obama and the probability of his understanding that maybe it's time for him to stand up and be counted as one who supports the ideals of America as espoused by our founding fathers. No, Americans do not like whole swaths of other Americans living off the dole. No, Americans do not like our President to be wishy washy about the ideals and freedoms that the rest of us so cherish. And yes, we want our leader to be firm and determined to destroy without hesitation the fanatics and lunatics who want to kill us. And that is precisely Obama's problem. He has shown us that he is NOT interested in defending our interests and he is ambivalent about the nobleness of the American ideals: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Here is a letter he wrote to me a couple of days ago.
There was one interesting statement at the end of an Op Ed in the Sunday NY Times (Week in Review section), by Sam Tanenhaus: “God and Politics, Together Again” (he is a liberal I believe). He said that Obama was connected through his Ivy League background to the super-privileged and by his “community organizing” to the poor, but he has no idea of the lives of the vast middle class.
I think that Obama, like most people, takes Altruism as a given (as he says “we are our brothers keeper”) and he takes it seriously, and because of his disconnect from working Americans has no idea that a modern industrial economy is fueled on production not pity, and production is fueled on the self-interest of individuals – people who work and earn their keep. Altruism gives him the permission to run everybody else’s life and distribute the fruits of their labor.
Well the economy is wrecked and he had a large hand in it, and now we’ll see if he’s got any brains at all in the next two years…if he continues his suicidal course or not. Men will not make the effort to plan and work if some third party can come along and dispose of their hard earned wealth down an endless drain to serve the so-called “underprivileged”.
The problem is he was raised in that liberal, Keynesian environment which he takes as gospel. If he has brains then maybe what he needs is courage. It would take courage, especially for a black man brought up in the liberal establishment, to renounce the liberal agenda and espouse some rational economic ideas. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but it is my understanding that Keynesianism is pretty discredited these days.
I think it’s too much to hope that he’ll surprise us - people don’t change easily – or rather it takes courage to think for oneself and bear the consequences. Richard Winkler
There was one interesting statement at the end of an Op Ed in the Sunday NY Times (Week in Review section), by Sam Tanenhaus: “God and Politics, Together Again” (he is a liberal I believe). He said that Obama was connected through his Ivy League background to the super-privileged and by his “community organizing” to the poor, but he has no idea of the lives of the vast middle class.
I think that Obama, like most people, takes Altruism as a given (as he says “we are our brothers keeper”) and he takes it seriously, and because of his disconnect from working Americans has no idea that a modern industrial economy is fueled on production not pity, and production is fueled on the self-interest of individuals – people who work and earn their keep. Altruism gives him the permission to run everybody else’s life and distribute the fruits of their labor.
Well the economy is wrecked and he had a large hand in it, and now we’ll see if he’s got any brains at all in the next two years…if he continues his suicidal course or not. Men will not make the effort to plan and work if some third party can come along and dispose of their hard earned wealth down an endless drain to serve the so-called “underprivileged”.
The problem is he was raised in that liberal, Keynesian environment which he takes as gospel. If he has brains then maybe what he needs is courage. It would take courage, especially for a black man brought up in the liberal establishment, to renounce the liberal agenda and espouse some rational economic ideas. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but it is my understanding that Keynesianism is pretty discredited these days.
I think it’s too much to hope that he’ll surprise us - people don’t change easily – or rather it takes courage to think for oneself and bear the consequences. Richard Winkler
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
"Parroting a Load of Poppycock From Van Jones"
Funny this article should have been written. I have been wondering for over a year how the fawning media can call this man so intelligent. He seems to have no idea what he is doing. Either that or there's something more nefarious - like he knows exactly what he's doing and his goal is to ruin America. Here is a very good article by Mr. Howard expressing everything I've felt but much more eloquently. This is part of the article which can be read at IBD.
...Sharp presidents do not dive into lose/lose situations with such gusto.
How is Obama's foreign policy working out? The U.S. needs strong allies to defeat monstrous enemies. Dissing the British, scolding Israel, canceling the missile shield in Eastern Europe and groveling to foreign royalty do not bode well. Our enemies, from Iran to Venezuela, smell weakness and timidity. Ignoring cold reality and dreaming that personal charisma is the solution to international tensions is probably on the daft side of the intelligence continuum.
The "4 million green jobs" mantra espoused by the president is a canard when examined closely. Renewable energy technology exists only due to huge government subsidies. Ethanol is inefficient, raising the prices of gasoline and corn. Wind farms produce intermittent power that flummoxes the grid and requires conventional power plants to run continuously as backup. The net carbon reduction is miniscule.
Both schemes are massive misallocations of resources better used elsewhere. An astute president would inform himself on both sides of the issue rather than blatantly parrot a load of poppycock from the Van Jones crowd.
A Republican president who parties far more than he works would be trashed by every media outlet in the land. But Obama is a Democrat who enjoys the media's deep support. He escapes any serious questions about his busy golf schedule, multiple vacations, endless fundraising and campaigning, constant banquets and concerts in the White House, and his obvious detachment from the people he supposedly leads.
He appears more of a dilettante than a leader. A smart fellow would move to de-emphasize his privileged lifestyle instead of flaunting it in front of a nation mired in a recession.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, maybe Obama is smart. Then again, Jimmy Carter was intelligent but proved to be the worst president of our lifetimes — up to now.
READ the complete essay here: "How Brilliant Can President Obama Be?" by Jeffrey S. Howard at Investor's Business Daily.
...Sharp presidents do not dive into lose/lose situations with such gusto.
How is Obama's foreign policy working out? The U.S. needs strong allies to defeat monstrous enemies. Dissing the British, scolding Israel, canceling the missile shield in Eastern Europe and groveling to foreign royalty do not bode well. Our enemies, from Iran to Venezuela, smell weakness and timidity. Ignoring cold reality and dreaming that personal charisma is the solution to international tensions is probably on the daft side of the intelligence continuum.
The "4 million green jobs" mantra espoused by the president is a canard when examined closely. Renewable energy technology exists only due to huge government subsidies. Ethanol is inefficient, raising the prices of gasoline and corn. Wind farms produce intermittent power that flummoxes the grid and requires conventional power plants to run continuously as backup. The net carbon reduction is miniscule.
Both schemes are massive misallocations of resources better used elsewhere. An astute president would inform himself on both sides of the issue rather than blatantly parrot a load of poppycock from the Van Jones crowd.
A Republican president who parties far more than he works would be trashed by every media outlet in the land. But Obama is a Democrat who enjoys the media's deep support. He escapes any serious questions about his busy golf schedule, multiple vacations, endless fundraising and campaigning, constant banquets and concerts in the White House, and his obvious detachment from the people he supposedly leads.
He appears more of a dilettante than a leader. A smart fellow would move to de-emphasize his privileged lifestyle instead of flaunting it in front of a nation mired in a recession.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, maybe Obama is smart. Then again, Jimmy Carter was intelligent but proved to be the worst president of our lifetimes — up to now.
READ the complete essay here: "How Brilliant Can President Obama Be?" by Jeffrey S. Howard at Investor's Business Daily.
Sunday, September 05, 2010
"Will We Become Zimbabwe or Will We Be Japan? by Merle Hazard
This guy is a financial advisor and gives us some comic relief from these depressing, government induced troubled times.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
Listen to Bill whittle's Impassioned Speech on Why We Must Not Be Cowards Before Islamic Terrorism
Are you bewildered and sick of mealy mouthed politicians who won't stand up and do what's necessary to defend America and the ideas we stand for? Have you been wondering how a New York Mayor can defend the building of a hugh mosque in the middle of 9/11 New York? Are you perplexed why we stand idly by as Iran build nukes? Who does Washington think these nukes are intended for? America wake up before World war II will look like a walk in the park. Listen to Bill here.
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=56&load=4031
A Tyranny Excercised for the Good of its Victims
Think "the Left" as you read this quote by C.S. Lewis.
"A tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will, torment us without end, for they do so for the approval of their own conscience."
C. S. Lewis
"A tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will, torment us without end, for they do so for the approval of their own conscience."
C. S. Lewis
Friday, September 03, 2010
We Lose Money Every Time Congress is in Session: Let's Tell Them to Go Home and Stay Home!
If you're over 35 years old you probably know this fact: that when the politicians hightail it out of Washington for one of their recesses the markets do well. When they're in Washington taxing and legislating the markets do poorly. Read the article below.
With Congress out of session for its August recess, one innovative fund manager is busy making money for clients who share his view that an inactive government is good for the stock market. Armed with data and a successful track record, Eric Singer is using his unique strategy to make profits and a point about avoiding the most dangerous element in any investment decision: political risk.
Singer’s Congressional Effect Fund takes its name from the phenomenon he helped prove: when Congress acts, markets suffer. In 1992 while working for a New York investment firm, Singer noticed a recurring pattern of exceptional stock performance. The “January effect,” was followed by stock market “rallies” during the summer, at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It occurred to him that in each boom period Congress was out of session.
So, he looked at the data to see if there was a correlation. Going back to January 1, 1965, Singer studied the performance of the S&P 500 Index on days when at least one house of Congress was in session compared to when neither house met for business. The results confirmed his intuition. On days when at least one house was in session, the S&P 500 had an average annualized price gain of +.94%. Alternatively, the Index gained +16.04% when neither house was in session.
The explanation is simple. Investors fear government action because it always involves change. Changes in rules and regulations cause uncertainty. That uncertainty leads to risk-averse behavior like banks reducing lending, landowners refusing to develop real estate and employers refusing to hire more staff. By driving wealth creators to the sidelines, government action makes the nation poorer.
Though intuitive to most business owners, the “congressional effect” is hardly conventional wisdom with financiers or academics. When Singer first published his findings a team of experts tried to disprove him.
They ended up making an even stronger case for Singer’s position.
In a 1997 study titled, “The Congressional Calendar and Stock Market Performance,” three university professors and a private financier concluded:
“Almost the entire advance in the market since 1897 corresponds to the periods when Congress is in recess. This is an impressive result, given that Congress is in recess about half as long as in session. Furthermore, average daily returns when Congress is not meeting are almost eight times greater than when Congress is in session. Throughout the year, cumulative returns during recess are thirteen times that experienced while Congress is in session.” ...READ "Investment Funds Show that Betting Against Congress is a Great way to Make Money" at Center for Individual Freedom.
With Congress out of session for its August recess, one innovative fund manager is busy making money for clients who share his view that an inactive government is good for the stock market. Armed with data and a successful track record, Eric Singer is using his unique strategy to make profits and a point about avoiding the most dangerous element in any investment decision: political risk.
Singer’s Congressional Effect Fund takes its name from the phenomenon he helped prove: when Congress acts, markets suffer. In 1992 while working for a New York investment firm, Singer noticed a recurring pattern of exceptional stock performance. The “January effect,” was followed by stock market “rallies” during the summer, at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It occurred to him that in each boom period Congress was out of session.
So, he looked at the data to see if there was a correlation. Going back to January 1, 1965, Singer studied the performance of the S&P 500 Index on days when at least one house of Congress was in session compared to when neither house met for business. The results confirmed his intuition. On days when at least one house was in session, the S&P 500 had an average annualized price gain of +.94%. Alternatively, the Index gained +16.04% when neither house was in session.
The explanation is simple. Investors fear government action because it always involves change. Changes in rules and regulations cause uncertainty. That uncertainty leads to risk-averse behavior like banks reducing lending, landowners refusing to develop real estate and employers refusing to hire more staff. By driving wealth creators to the sidelines, government action makes the nation poorer.
Though intuitive to most business owners, the “congressional effect” is hardly conventional wisdom with financiers or academics. When Singer first published his findings a team of experts tried to disprove him.
They ended up making an even stronger case for Singer’s position.
In a 1997 study titled, “The Congressional Calendar and Stock Market Performance,” three university professors and a private financier concluded:
“Almost the entire advance in the market since 1897 corresponds to the periods when Congress is in recess. This is an impressive result, given that Congress is in recess about half as long as in session. Furthermore, average daily returns when Congress is not meeting are almost eight times greater than when Congress is in session. Throughout the year, cumulative returns during recess are thirteen times that experienced while Congress is in session.” ...READ "Investment Funds Show that Betting Against Congress is a Great way to Make Money" at Center for Individual Freedom.
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Doctors Are Starting to Speak Out Against Obamacare - Hurray!
Perhaps there is hope afterall of getting America back to being America which means getting back our "life, liberty and happiness" which we have lost ever since Obama got into office.
Facing a nationwide backlash, Democratic congressional candidates have a new message for voters: We know you don't like ObamaCare, so we'll fix it.
This was the line offered by Democrat Mark Critz, who won a special election in Pennsylvania's 12th congressional district after expressing opposition to the law and promising to mend it—but not to repeal it. As a doctor I know something about unexpected recoveries, and this latest attempt to rescue ObamaCare from repeal needs to be taken seriously.
For Democrats who voted for ObamaCare, this tactic is an escape route, a chance to distance themselves from the president with a vague promise to fix health-care reform in the next Congress.
To counter this election-year ruse, my colleagues and I at Docs4PatientCare are enlisting thousands of doctors in an unorthodox and unprecedented action. Our patients have always expected a certain standard of care from their doctors, which includes providing them with pertinent information that may affect their quality of life. Because the issue this election is so stark—literally life and death for millions of Americans in the years ahead—we are this week posting a "Dear Patient" letter in our waiting rooms.
"Dear Patient: Section 1311 of the new health care legislation gives the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and her appointees the power to establish care guidelines that your doctor must abide by or face penalties and fines. In making doctors answerable in the federal bureaucracy this bill effectively makes them government employees and means that you and your doctor are no longer in charge of your health care decisions. This new law politicizes medicine and in my opinion destroys the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship that makes the American health care system the best in the world."... Read Dear Patients: Vote to Repeal ObamaCare WSJ.
Facing a nationwide backlash, Democratic congressional candidates have a new message for voters: We know you don't like ObamaCare, so we'll fix it.
This was the line offered by Democrat Mark Critz, who won a special election in Pennsylvania's 12th congressional district after expressing opposition to the law and promising to mend it—but not to repeal it. As a doctor I know something about unexpected recoveries, and this latest attempt to rescue ObamaCare from repeal needs to be taken seriously.
For Democrats who voted for ObamaCare, this tactic is an escape route, a chance to distance themselves from the president with a vague promise to fix health-care reform in the next Congress.
To counter this election-year ruse, my colleagues and I at Docs4PatientCare are enlisting thousands of doctors in an unorthodox and unprecedented action. Our patients have always expected a certain standard of care from their doctors, which includes providing them with pertinent information that may affect their quality of life. Because the issue this election is so stark—literally life and death for millions of Americans in the years ahead—we are this week posting a "Dear Patient" letter in our waiting rooms.
"Dear Patient: Section 1311 of the new health care legislation gives the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and her appointees the power to establish care guidelines that your doctor must abide by or face penalties and fines. In making doctors answerable in the federal bureaucracy this bill effectively makes them government employees and means that you and your doctor are no longer in charge of your health care decisions. This new law politicizes medicine and in my opinion destroys the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship that makes the American health care system the best in the world."... Read Dear Patients: Vote to Repeal ObamaCare WSJ.
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