Tag: government

One very good sign that North Korea’s recent warlike threats are merely posturing.

12:46 pm

One very good sign that North Korea’s recent warlike threats are merely posturing.

[W]e do have one pretty good metric with which to judge the country’s intentions: the Kaesong Industrial Complex. The Kaesong Industrial Complex, located just across the northern side of the border, is staffed by South and North Koreans. It can’t function without Pyongyang’s daily okay. If the North suddenly shuts down Kaesong at some point, watch out. But as long as it’s still running, as it has been throughout the provocations and tensions of the last few weeks, we can probably – probably — assume that North Korea is not actually planning to launch a war.

And the complex is still in operation.

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Science and sequestration in context

11:00 am

On March 21, the House accepted the continuing resolution proposed by the Senate for the year 2013. This continuing resolution will fund everything in the federal government though September of this year, and includes the cuts imposed on March 1 by sequestration.

As it always does, the journal Science did a specific analysis of the science portion of this budget bill. As usual, they looked only at the trees, not the forest, comparing the budget changes up or down for the 2012 and 2013 years only, noting how those changes will impact each agency’s programs. As usual, Science also took the side for more federal spending, assuming that in each case any cut was sure to cause significant harm to the nation’s ability to do cutting edge science.

I like to take a wider and deeper view. Below is a chart showing how the budgets for these agencies have changed since 2008. They give a much clearer perspective of the consequences of sequestration and the cuts, if any, imposed by Congress on these science agencies.
» Read more

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To show support for the New Jersey family that had been threatened by the government for posting a picture of their son holding a rifle, hundreds of parents post pictures of their own gun-toting kids.

8:51 am

Pushback: To show support for the New Jersey family that had been threatened by the government for posting a picture of their son holding a rifle, hundreds of parents post pictures of their own gun-toting kids.

Note also that if you look at the posed pictures, none of the kids have their hands on the trigger. Unlike Michael Bloomberg’s actor in his anti-gun ads, these kids have been taught the safe way to handle a gun.

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A Democratic voter discovers he’s actually a tea party racist.

4:48 pm

A Democratic voter discovers he’s actually a tea party racist.

Today was a bad day. After meeting with my tax accountant, I am now cutting a very large check to the State of California, all of which resulted from Proposition 30 and the “retroactive tax” that was levied on my 2012 income. This despite the fact that I already paid my 2012 taxes back in September.

While the law stipulates that I must surrender this money, I refuse to acknowledge this as a tax at all. This is not a tax. This is an asset seizure plain and simple. The term “retroactive tax” is a despicable euphemism. It is no different than when Hugo Chavez used the benign-sounding “nationalize” to describe his seizure of private property in Venezuela.

He then notes that he is not a tea party member or even a Republican and that he voted for Obama twice.

Wanna bet that in the next election he’ll still vote Democratic? Based on the history of the past three decades, I expect that even after this experience, he will still refuse to abandon the faction he has adopted (the Democratic Party) and change his vote.

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Cyprus has agreed to confiscate a percentage of the savings of large depositors in order to satisfy demands from the European Union creditors..

10:10 am

The day of reckoning looms: Cyprus has agreed to confiscate a percentage of the savings of large depositors in order to satisfy demands from its European Union creditors..

This is only a hint of what’s coming for us here in the U.S. Like the European Union, eventually the federal government is going to go bankrupt, and when that happens it (being the politicians in charge) will then decide that the savings and pensions of private citizens will have to save them somehow.

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The Democrats in the Senate passed their first budget in four years yesterday.

9:19 am

Pigs fly! The Democrats in the Senate passed their first budget in four years yesterday.

The budget cuts practically nothing while increasing taxes by almost $1 trillion, which essentially illustrates how little the Democrats want to bring the debt under control. That four Democrats who face a tough election in 2014 voted against the budget also suggests that the Democrat’s traditional spendthrift approach might finally be becoming dangerous at the polls.

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NASA has issued a clarification specifically excluding its press announcements from the suspension of all public outreach efforts.

9:00 am

NASA has issued a clarification specifically excluding its press announcements from the suspension of all public outreach efforts due to sequestration.

I am not surprised. These budget cuts are aimed at grabbing the most publicity as possible, without harming NASA’s ability to lobby for funding. Ironically, the truth is that much of NASA’s education and outreach work can be cut, will not be missed, and so these cuts should illustrate this fact quite effectively.

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Obamacare may cost small business as much as 65% of their profits.

8:44 am

Obamacare may cost small business as much as 65% of their profits.

At these levels, the question that will soon occur to the business owner is “Why am I bothering?” If he can shrink his business to less than 50 employees and avoid the Obamacare costs, he will.

And in related news: Health insurers are privately warning brokers that premiums may double next year for many individuals and small businesses due to Obamacare.

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Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has reversed course and will allow a tough gun bill to be introduced in the Senate.

9:17 pm

Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has reversed course and will allow a tough gun bill to be introduced in the Senate.

In 2010 the NRA backed Reid in a close election because they said he had an “A” rating, always defending the right to bear arms. I thought this was a very very bad mistake, as Reid is also a very partisan liberal Democrat, which generally means you can’t trust him on any conservative issue. Lo and behold, we now learn you can’t trust him on this conservative issue.

Had the NRA put its support behind Reid’s challenger, that challenger would have had a much better chance at winning. They did not, and here we are. Thank you, NRA.

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A congressional report, issued by Republicans in the House and Senate, says that Obamacare will increase healthcare costs by 200 percent.

9:22 am

A congressional report, issued by Republicans in the House and Senate, says that Obamacare will increase healthcare costs by 200 percent.

Though the report is partisan, it is worth reading because of the depth of the analysis as well as the range of its historical research. For example:

The report notes that a number of states have already imposed requirements on health coverage and the result has been fewer choices and higher premiums. In New York, for example, a 30-year-old male paid an average of $1,200 a year in annual premiums in 1993, but one month after the state passed Obamacare-like reforms, premiums soared to $3,240. At the time Washington state passed similar reforms, 19 insurance carriers wrote policies for state residents. Within six years, only two carriers remained in the state.

I was living in New York when the state legislature passed this early version of Obamacare and can attest to truth of the above facts. Costs doubled and insurance companies fled the state, reducing competition. I even wrote about an article about it. The evidence from these state efforts illustrates the likelihood that Obamacare will do the same, nationwide.

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Without a warrant New Jersey police raided the home of a firearms instructor, demanding the right to inventory his guns, after he posted a Facebook photo of his son holding a rifle.

2:13 pm

Without a warrant New Jersey police raided the home of a firearms instructor, demanding the right to inventory his guns, prompted by a Facebook photo he had posted of his son holding a rifle.

The family’s trouble started Saturday night when Moore received an urgent text message from his wife. The Carneys Point Police Dept. and the New Jersey Dept. of Children and Families had raided their home. Moore immediately called [his attorney] Nappen and rushed home to find officers demanding to check his guns and his gun safe. Instead, he handed the cell phone to one of the officers – so they could speak with Nappen.

“If you have a warrant, you’re coming in,” Nappen told the officers. “If you don’t, then you’re not. That’s what privacy is all about.” With his attorney on speaker phone, Moore instructed the officers to leave his home. “I was told I was being unreasonable and that I was acting suspicious because I wouldn’t open my safe,” Moore wrote on the Delaware Open Carry website. “They told me they were going to get a search warrant. I told them to go ahead.”

It seems to me that police across the nation are becoming increasingly nonchalant about violating our Fourth Amendment right, which states quite bluntly, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

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The Democrat mayor of Philadelphia has demanded an investigation against a local magazine because he doesn’t like what they wrote.

11:07 am

Free speech according to Democrats: The Democrat mayor of Philadelphia has demanded an investigation against a local magazine because he doesn’t like what they published.

I ask the Commission consider specifically where Philadelphia Magazine and the writer, Bob Huber, are appropriate for rebuke by the Commission in light of the potentially inflammatory effect and reckless endangerment to Philadelphia’s race relations probably caused by the essay’s unsubstantiated charges. While I fully recognize that constitutional protections afforded the press are intended to protect the media from censorship by the government, the First Amendment, like other constitutional rights, is not an unfettered right, and notwithstanding the First Amendment, a publisher has a duty to the public to exercise its role in a responsible way. I ask the Commission to evaluate whether the “speech” employed in this essay is not the reckless equivalent of “shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater,” its prejudiced, fact-challenged generalizations an incitement to extreme reaction. [emphasis mine]

Under this Democratic mayor’s standards, anything that offended anyone could be banned. In fact, it would destroy all free speech. All any bully would need to do to silence his critics would be to complain about the inflammatory nature of their statements.

You can read his entire letter here. [pdf]

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Having lost its earmarked government funding in 2011, the Pan-STARRS telescope has now replaced those funds with a private donation.

10:14 am

We don’t need no stinking government: Having lost its earmarked government funding in 2011, the Pan-STARRS telescope has now replaced those funds with a private donation.

I find it interesting that while the lost government funds equaled $10 million, they are now able to achieve essentially the same goals with a private donation of only $3 million. This suggests, not surprisingly, that there was a lot of extra pork in the government funds that the facility could manage without.

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According to a federal report, businesses nationwide remain reluctant to hire because of Obamacare.

9:51 pm

According to a federal report, businesses nationwide remain reluctant to hire because of Obamacare.

Earlier this month, the Fed released its latest “beige book” – a monthly report on economic conditions across the country. The book noted that employers across the country have “cited the unknown effects of the Affordable Care Act as reasons for planned layoffs and reluctance to hire more staff.”

And it is only going to get worse. Read the whole article. The new taxes imposed by Obamacare are going to crush the healthcare industry.

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More fraud in climate science

3:17 pm

Fraudalent data

Steve McIntyre, the man who had demonstrated that Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph was a fraud, has now demonstrated that the work of a group of climate scientists attempting to resurrect it is even more fraudulent. It seems that in order to recreate the illusion of warming in the past four hundred years, the scientists, led by geologist Shaun Marcott, changed the dates on a series of ocean cores in order to get the results they wanted.

McIntyre found that Marcott and his colleagues used previously published ocean core data, but have altered the dates represented by the cores, in some cases by as much as 1,000 years.

Most significantly, the scientists made no explanation for changing these dates. It is as if they wanted to hide this decline, y’know?

The chart on the right, by McIntyre, illustrates the fraud. The black line shows the temperature numbers of the ocean cores used by Marcott. The red line shows the temperature numbers, as originally published in the scientific literature, for these ocean cores.

The discrepancy here is so egregious that it screams at you. More important, as John Hinderaker says,
» Read more

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Physicians fight back against Obamacare.

9:11 pm

Physicians fight back against Obamacare.

Dr. Ryan Neuhofel, 31, offers a rare glimpse at what it would be like to go to the doctor without massive government interference in health care. Dr. Neuhofel, based in the college town of Lawrence, Kansas, charges for his services according to an online price list that’s as straightforward as a restaurant menu. A drained abscess runs $30, a pap smear, $40, a 30-minute house call, $100. Strep cultures, glucose tolerance tests, and pregnancy tests are on the house. Neuhofel doesn’t accept insurance. He even barters on occasion with cash-strapped locals. One patient pays with fresh eggs and another with homemade cheese and goat’s milk. “Direct primary care,” which is the industry term for Neuhofel’s business model, does away with the bureaucratic hassle of insurance, which translates into much lower prices. “What people don’t realize is that most doctors employ an army of people for coding, billing, and gathering payment,” says Neuhofel. “That means you have to charge $200 to remove an ingrown toenail.” Neuhofel charges $50.

Neuhofel is not alone in this. The article describes other doctors who have done the same. As the bureaucratic mess from Obamacare expands and becomes increasingly impossible for anyone to handle, we are going to see this happen more and more.

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NASA has clamped down on travel expenses, reducing it by 30 percent in the past year.

7:11 pm

My heart bleeds: NASA has clamped down on travel expenses, reducing it by 30 percent in the past year.

I’ve been to too many science conferences where there was a whole slew of NASA engineers and scientists from all across the country, there because they were getting a free ride from the taxpayer. Often it was absolutely worthwhile for NASA engineers or scientists to be there. More often, it was a complete waste of money that could have been used elsewhere to better effect.

In related news: NASA’s inspector general has suggested the agency could save a lot more money by closing many of its almost 5,000 facilities nationwide.

Here too I’ve visited many NASA operations and found the work being done there redundant, completely unnecessary, or there was no real work being done at all. In the last case a lot of what I’ve seen is featherbedding, this time imposed by Congress to keep the money flowing to their constituents as pork. Unfortunately this last fact will probably make it very difficult to shut any of these facilities, as our representatives, from both parties, appear completely uninterested in serving the country. They’d rather act as union reps for these government employees.

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The budget battle at NASA

10:49 am

Two stories today highlight not only the budget problems at NASA, but also illustrate the apparent unwillingness of both Congress and Americans to face the terrible budget difficulties of the federal government. In both cases, the focus is instead on trying to fund NASA at levels comparable to 2012, before the Obama administration or sequestration had imposed any budget cuts on the agency.

It is as if we live in a fantasy world, where a $16 trillion dollar debt does not exist, and where money grows on trees and we can spend as much as we want on anything we want.
» Read more

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The Democrats in the Senate are about to introduce their legally required annual budget — for the first time in four years.

9:16 am

Pigs fly! The Democrats in the Senate are about to introduce their legally required annual budget — for the first time in four years.

Not that this budget will do much to solve the federal debt, as it will likely continue the out-of-control spending and is expected to be loaded with new taxes galore.

On that note, has anyone but me noticed this tendency of the modern Democratic Party to grab and grab and grab? They want a blank check in spending, for their own uses, while repeatedly demanding as much money from everyone else as possible. In another time, this behavior would have been perceived as somewhat power-hungry, even tyrannical.

And then there’s this: “We don’t have a spending problem.” Guess who said it.

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