Doing the reporting American journalists won’t do: “Why did I have to go to Pravda to get my op-ed about TSA rape published?”
The newly named “associate dean for equity and inclusion” at the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, is promising “disruptive progress” in his effort to increase minorities at the school.
The plan [pdf] includes more money for staffing and facilities for the “equity and inclusion” department, plus more money and power for student organizations. Sadly, this is money and facilities that will no longer be available for actual education or research.
» Read more
Focusing in on the theft of customer funds at MF Global.
Not surprisingly, this article from the liberal New York Times plays the game of “Name that party!”, conveniently forgetting to mention anywhere that Jon Corzine and all his associates just happen to big-time Democratic Party players. To remind them, and everyone else, here’s a little video illustrating how closely linked the Democrats and Jon Corzine are:
You would think a piece of legislation more than a thousand pages long would at least be clear about the specifics. But a lot of those pages say: “The secretary will determine …” That means the secretary of health and human services will announce the rules sometime in the future. How can a business make plans in such a fog?
Repeal this abomination already before it destroys the country.
Here are two stories that illustrate why we shouldn’t be in a panic over climate change. Though it is important to study the climate and to learn as much as we can about it, it is at this time inappropriate to impose draconian regulations on the world’s populations so that whole economies are destroyed out of fear of climate change. We just don’t know enough about the consequences of climate change. Global warming might even be beneficial!
First, from Nature this story: Global warming wilts malaria. It appears that the assumption that warmer climates would increase malaria epidemics is completely wrong. Instead, warmer temperatures act to hinder the survival of the malaria parasite in mosquitoes.
» Read more
The disaster of Obamacare: 2011 in review.
The Daily Caller does an excellent job reviewing the key events during 2011 relating to Obamacare. In toto what this history tells me is that this law continues to be serious political problem for Democrats: the law isn’t doing what it was touted to do while doing serious harm to both the economy and the healthcare industry, the public hates it and wants it repealed, and everyone knows that it was the Democrats who forced it on us.
Government spending at its stupidest: the top ten projects.
I like #6 the best, $484,000 to help finance a pizza restaurant in Arlington, Texas, because every business should get its own free pile of cash from the government!
Russia’s GPS system, Glonass, has returned to full operational capability, lost shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union.
We’re here to help you: The EPA is considering expanding its regulatory power in the name of “sustainable development.”
In related news: New EPA pollution rules will force the shutdown of dozens of coal-fired power plants.
Excellent choice: Former astronaut John Grunsfeld has been picked to take over NASA’s chief science post from Ed Weiler.
Not only is Grunsfeld an excellent choice, his experience as an astronaut repairing Hubble will help improve relations between the science and manned space programs. In the past, scientists have often argued against manned space, trying to get that money for their unmanned research probes. Instead, when manned space got cut, so did science, and no one won. Grunsfeld’s leadership I think will forestall these short-sighted complaints.
State governments have eliminated thousands of public employees since the beginning of the recession.
The astonishing collapse of MF Global.
The failure of broker MF Global is a unique event in the annals of American corporate history: To my knowledge, it’s the first time a CEO singlehandedly bankrupted his firm through actions that the board of directors was not only knowledgeable of, but had indeed expressly sanctioned. “That takes some talent!” quipped Roderick Hills, a former chairman of the SEC.
The article is long, detailed, and thorough. It describes a deep corruption that should chill the spine of anyone who has money in the investment world.
I must note that I do not advocate more regulations to eliminate this corruption. Such regulations never work. Take for example this quote from the article, describing the accounting systems that are required by law to prevent a client’s funds from being misused:
As noted above, it’s a major part of the CEO’s job to put the proper systems in place. In fact, regulations implemented through Sarbanes-Oxley — a bill that Corzine co-wrote while he was a senator — require that the CEO and CFO sign off on the effectiveness of the controls over financial reporting. … If those proper “controls and procedures” were in place, a breach of segregated client funds should have set off loud, blaring, obnoxious alarms that would have alerted management to that breach.
In the case of Jon Corzine and MF Global, those controls were obviously not in place, and thus the Sarbanes-Oxley bill wasn’t worth the paper that Corzine used to write the bill.
Rather than more regulations, what works is very simple and can be summed by two words: “Buyer beware.” Investors (as well as voters considering the political ambitions of Corzine and his friends) have to be more skeptical of whom they put their trust in. You have to protect yourself. You can’t ask others to do it for you.
Well duh! Deficit may be biggest threat to ObamaCare.
I always opposed ObamaCare because I oppose the use of government to run our lives. But putting that minor point aside, it made absolutely no sense for the government to add this entitlement to the nation’s balance sheet at a time when that balance sheet is so completely in the red. The only time these kinds of government programs can possible work (if ever) is when there is lots of spare cash in the bank, something we definitely don’t have right now.
Over Friday and Saturday, 61% of House Republicans and 34% of Senate Republicans voted for the omnibus megabus bill. In doing so, not only did they violate their pledge pertaining to bundled (1200-page) bills and the 72-hour layover rule and agree to fund Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, Planned Parenthood, the EPA, the PLO and the UN; they actually agreed to spend almost $9 billion more than last year. Overall, budget authority will be $33 billion higher than the House budget, while appropriations for non-defense spending will be $45 billion more. One of the members who voted in the affirmative even agreed that he had voted for a “crap sandwich.”
One reason the budget is still growing is that two-thirds of the government is still controlled by the spendthrift Democratic Party. A second reason is that there are too many wimpy Republicans willing to compromise with these spendthrifts.
Which is why we have elections. 2012 should help fix this problem.
Ain’t democracy a bitch? Virginia residents loudly oppose their local government’s preparations for climate-related sea-level rise, and neither the bureaucrats or this Washington Post journalist like it!
More bad news for the global warming crowd: Russia has announced it fully supports Canada’s decision to pull out of the Kyoto accords.
Operation Fast and Furious was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and overseen by the Justice Department. It started under the leadership of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Fast and Furious enabled straw gun purchases from licensed dealers in Arizona, in which more than 2,000 weapons were smuggled to Mexican drug kingpins. ATF claims it was seeking to track the weapons as part of a larger crackdown on the growing violence in the Southwest. Instead, ATF effectively has armed murderous gangs. About 300 Mexicans have been killed by Fast and Furious weapons. More than 1,400 guns remain lost.
From Bill Wittle: “EVERYBODY knows that Republicans are EVIL! What kind of Evil? Greedy, Fascist, Racist evil — the worst kind!”
Climategate 2: Did the Department of Energy help Phil Jones hide climate data? Inquiring minds want to know.
Another science budget update from Nature states that the budget deal will cut EPA by three percent.
This cut reduces EPA’s budget from its 2011 numbers by about $400 million. However, the agency’s total 2012 budget of $8.4 billion is still $1 billion more than it got in 2008, hardly what I’d call a draconian cut.
Once again, the inability of Congress to seriously face the deficit issue threatens to eventually destroy the U.S.’s ability to do any science. A bankrupt nation can’t do much but feed itself, as the scientists in the Soviet Union learned back in the 1990s.
The Wisconsin teachers union is trying to get a teacher fired for doing a commercial in support of Governor Scott Walker.
At home, the American people are less free, less prosperous, more bitterly divided, and much less hopeful in 2011 than in 2001 because a decade of the War on Terror brought a government ever bigger and more burdensome, as well as “security” measures that impede the innocent rather than focusing on wrongdoers. Our ruling class justified its ever-larger role in America’s domestic life by redefining war as a never-ending struggle against unspecified enemies for abstract objectives, and by asserting expertise far above that of ordinary Americans. After 9/11, far from deliberating on the best course to take, our rulers stayed on autopilot and hit the throttles.
An fascinating and amazing essay. I don’t agree with everything in it, but can’t deny the strength of its general points. For example:
Because the Bush Administration took CIA director George Tenet’s snap judgment that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible “game, set, and match” for 9/11 as a warrant for identifying them with America’s terrorist problem in general, it failed to ask the classic headwaters question: what is the problem? Had it done so, it might have noticed that the 9/11 hijackers were part of a wave of deadly disrespect for America that had been growing throughout the Muslim world—and not just there—for a generation. Had the Bush team focused on the realities that fed growing images of America as “the weak horse” (to use Osama bin Laden’s words), they would have had to consider who were the major contributors to that disrespect, what they and their predecessors had done to incur it, and then to decide what actions would restore it.
That would have pointed to the Middle East’s regimes, and to our ruling class’ relationship with them, as the problem’s ultimate source. The rulers of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority had run (and continue to run) educational and media systems that demonize America. Under all of them, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Wahhabi sect spread that message in religious terms to Muslims in the West as well as at home. That message indicts America, among other things, for being weak. And indeed, ever since the 1970s U.S. policy had responded to acts of war and terrorism from the Muslim world by absolving the regimes for their subjects’ actions. For example, when Yasser Arafat’s PLO murdered U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel, our government continued building friendly relations with Arafat, and romancing the Saudi regime that was financing him. Since then the U.S. government has given $2.5 billion to the PLO. Part of the reason was unwarranted hope, part was fear, and part was the fact that many influential Americans were making money in the Arab world.
I have always believed that when we went to war after 9/11, we needed to clean out all of the corrupt regimes in the Middle East, much as we did after World War II. Sadly, Bush did not. Had Bush fought World War II like he fought the “War on Terror” he would have stopped at the German border after Normandy and declared victory.
Read the whole thing. There is a lot more there, about freedom, government oppression, the TSA, and much else. The read is definitely worth it.
Climate theater of the absurd.
The key thing to understand about the climate talks is that they’re not really about the climate. They’re about power and money. They are about the desire of fast-growing emitters such as Brazil, South Africa, India and China to extract billions in so-called climate reparations from rich countries, especially the United States. These and other so-called developing countries now account for more than half of greenhouse gas emissions. They want the rich countries to start cutting large amounts of carbon right away, while they do nothing. The rich countries are understandably reluctant. Hence the impasse.
One congressman’s take on climate change and climategate.
And it ain’t good for science. If anything should convince scientists that they have to clean up their act, it should be this interview. Here is a congressman who seems truly interested in the field, but who has grown skeptical of anything climate scientists say because he simply doesn’t believe them.
Germany’s space chief yesterday said he expected big battles in Europe over future funding for ISS and Ariane.
Ariane is a serious problem, as it is expensive and a money-loser, despite dominating the commercial market in recent years. And worse, it will be difficult to make Ariane competitive in the future:
ESA in 2010 hired an outside auditor to review the current Ariane 5 system to look for ways to save money. Its principal conclusion was that very few savings were possible without scrapping the forced geographic distribution of industrial contracts that preserves the political and financial support needed for the Ariane system.
Another perspective: The Gingrich Gamble.
Yet for the all sloganeering and invective, the truth is that voting for Gingrich or Romney is not so much an ideological as a personal choice, and one that says as much about the psychological make-up of the individual conservative voter as it does about the choices before him. The risk-takers, romantics, and ideologically pure have concluded that Gingrich unleashed is worth the gamble, and that it is better to win big or lose big than to plan on just squeaking by. They welcome the unending contact sport that we could expect from a President Gingrich, who would not just beat Obama, but repudiate Obamism itself. These are the guys who like passing on third down on their own ten-yard line with a seven-point lead; to them, going on fourth-quarter defense is not only not smart, it is a sure way to lose. In contrast, the more calculating know that romance and rhetoric can often disguise reality, and that it is always wiser to down the ball and run the clock out when you’re ahead.
And I must admit, I prefer the gamble. I’ve had enough of “safe” Republican candidates designed to please the moderates who only end up losing because they can’t express what they believe in with any clarity or force.
[W]e have a president who wants us to stay there, who is banal, irritating, humorless, reactionary, self-righteous, and narcissistic all at once. He hasn’t said one interesting thing or proposed one creative idea since being in office.
Unfortunately, the Republican candidates aren’t much better. Romney, Perry, Santorum, Bachmann, Huntsman, even Paul, are no more than critics of a system gone moribund. They do not inspire us. Their ideas, even when worth investigating (flat tax, etc.), are no more than rehashes of proposals we have heard for decades.
Only Newt dances. Only Newt, on occasion, is original. Only Newt — and here is the important part — has the capacity to wake us up. What attracts me about the man is the very thing that Romney criticized, the part that wants to explore the moon and stars, maybe even mine them.
Sure Gingrich has an idea a minute, many of which are bad, but at least he has ideas. At least he is thinking. And — guess what — he says what he thinks. Politicians aren’t supposed to do that.
Read the whole thing.
A Maryland post office bans Christmas carolers.
“He told them that they had to leave immediately because they were violating the post office’s policy against solicitation,” Duffy said. “He told them they couldn’t do this on government property. He said: ‘You can’t go into Congress and sing and you can’t do it here either.’”
I like this from the comments:
So our freedom of speech is suspended upon entering government property?
A deal has been reached on a Department of Defense authorization bill that had included language allowing the military to hold U.S. citizens indefinitely without charge, both in and outside the U.S.
Not surprisingly for a modern journalist (who routinely miss the lead in their own stories), this article really doesn’t tell us whether that language is still in effect.
Bad news: A deal has been struck at Durban.
The proposed treaty sounds so complicated and obtuse that I can’t see how it can be enforced. More importantly, I don’t see the U.S. Senate ever agreeing to it, even today’s Democratically controlled Congress.
