The Earth is "carbon starved"

Trillion dollar question

Someone at our local "tea party" group did this video. I thought it was pretty good.

What's the difference between Obama and Jesus?

Stop me if you've heard this one...

What's the difference between Obama and Jesus?

One thinks he's the Messiah, the other was a carpenter who could assemble a cabinet.

It is pretty astounding that Obama has not yet filled all the openings in his cabinet. He was supposed to be the uber-competent President, but clearly is inexperienced and not a good judge of governing talent.

He is a good judge of political talent. He spins a good spin. He is great at getting people to feel enthusiasm. He makes a good campaigner.

Too bad he was elected to govern.

At this time in his Presidency, Bush had filled his cabinet. And remember that Bush had 41% less time to prepare to be President because of the Florida recount. Obama does not have all the top spots filled and still has most of the lower level Treasury spots to fill (which one would think would be the highest priority spots to fill).


Also, Bush had to deal with a Democratic majority in the Senate (thanks to the non-entity from Vermont who switched parties). Obama has a lopsided majority in the Senate from his own party who would confirm anybody (even tax cheats like the Treasury Sec'y).

But then none of this really surprises those of us who warned against Obama. Does anybody really think McCain would be at a loss finding people to run the gov't? Does anybody think that if he'd appointed Phil Gramm we would be two months into the Presidency without a plan to right the economy? Does anybody suspect that a conservative Treasury Sec'y would advocate huge deficits and sanction the Federal Reserve creating $1.2 Trillion out of thin air (as the Fed did yesterday).

People are griping (rightly) about the $165 million in AIG bonuses, but $1.2 Trillion of insta-cash is a huge pile. To put it in perspective, you'd be pretty ripped if somebody misspent $1,000 of your mone. $165 million is to $1.2 Trillion as $1,000 is to $7.28 million.

Hello Mr. Inflation, how long do you intend to stay in the United States?

I used to think of Obama as Carter 2.0, but now I am confident that people will eventually stop comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter out of respect for Jimmy Carter.

Asking others to pay for themselves is not immoral

Eugene Robinson wrote, "The way we ration health care now -- according to the individual's ability to pay -- is immoral", and he goes on to advocate higher taxes to pay for the uninsured.

First of all, it is an exaggeration to say that such health care is rationed because some cannot pay for it. Rationing is a system whereby one's access to a good or service is controlled despite one's ability to pay, not because of it.

There is nothing immoral about letting one's ability to pay determine whether one gets health care. I would argue that it is morally hazardous to make others pay for all, while some escape payment altogether. Today, 40% of Americans pay no federal income tax at all. Are we now to give them a free ride on all their health care costs as well, while placing a higher burden on others (some of whom are struggling as well)?

We already pay for the health care of the indigent. I balk at paying for the health care of those who merely wish to pay less than health care actually costs. Many people forgo health care insurance despite the fact that they can afford it because they prefer to pay for cell phones, manicures, private school, etc. Health care is essential, these others are not. They choose not to pay for health care insurance because it is very expensive. This is irresponsible. I don't like that it is expensive, but I know that paying out of pocket is even more expensive. One must prepare for the worst and hope for the best -- or take responsiblity for one's gamble.

If Eugene Robinson wants to help those who fall into the gap between medicaid and affordable health care, I urge him to spend his time and money supporting a charity that will help such people. Some exist. If they are not to his liking, he should start one of his own.

However, to demand that I contribute to his charity is theft. To make gov't tax collectors force me to contribute to his charity only makes it legal theft -- it does not change what it is.

When I was poor, I depended on charity and was grateful for it. I pay the gift forward. That is the proper response. To suggest that the gov't do my work for me would be laziness.

I see two problems with gov't run health care insurance:

• It eliminates the incentive to spend health care dollars wisely. Even though my company pays for less than half of my premium, as a payer, I remain motivated to keep health care costs down so as to keep next year's premium reasonably priced. Participants in a guaranteed health care system who themselves pay little tax to begin with, have no such incentive. It would soon make health care much, much more expensive than today. Unless taxpayer funded health care maintains an incentive to use health care wisely (and counting on the good behavior of others is folly) then the system will not work. We cannot hope to insulate people from the costs of living. We must encourage people to take part in hoisting the burden, not attempt to shift it from them.
  
• Because we have a progressive tax system, most people would end up getting a discount on their health care insurance. Those who pay no federal tax would get free health care and have no idea who was paying their bills for them. They would be unlikely to recognize the gift, but would come to expect it as an entitlement. It is one thing to provide health care insurance to people in the gap, it is folly to provide it at a discount and make others pay far more than their fair share. It encourages irresponsiblity. Charity is fine, but reckless charity damages the recipient by discouraging self-care, lowering self-esteem and cementing dependence.

I have never seen a proposal for taxpayer funded health care that addresses these concerns. I am waiting.

Why I believe in the death penalty

When I contemplate what this man did to his own daughter and grandchildren, I have the urge to bring an end to his breathing (after due process of law).

The Pope is off his rocker

Speaking in Africa today, Pope Benedict XVI said that the distribution of condoms is not the answer in the fight against AIDS in Africa. "You can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem."

This is factually incorrect. Condoms may not entirely eliminate the problem of AIDS, but the fact is that unprotected sex is the major vector for the disease and condoms almost entirely shut down that vector (except that they can break or be used incorrectly).

What if the Pope were to say, "You cannot resolve the problem of germs with antiseptics. On the contrary, it increases the problem." Would you then insist that surgeons stop scrubbing before operations? that hospitals stop using alcohol, iodine and betadine?

The Catholic church has made a fetish of opposition to contraception. I will grant that human life begins at conception. That is a scientific fact. It does not follow that all conceptions must be protected against safe abortion, but it is impossible to argue that once sperm hits the egg it is anything other than a human being. I am sympathetic to those who wish to protect such innocent lives, even though I do not entirely agree with the position.

But to argue against preventing such human life is a step too far. It makes no sense, especially if one believes that human life should be protected from the moment of conception. The fact is that preventing conception also prevents the subsequent abortion of that human being. To the hypothetical person in question, the matter is moot whether she is conceived and killed or never conceived at all. But to most of us on this side of the womb, the distinction is considerable. Most of the eggs that erupt from a woman's ovaries are shed without conception. What is true for women's eggs is many orders of magnitude truer of sperm.

It is hard to argue the value of any of them until they are united -- not brought within close reach of one another -- united as one genetic whole. Nature does not value them. Nature does not even value fertilized eggs unless they manage to implant themselves in a receptive womb. Many fertilized eggs are spontaneously aborted. What value then do they have before they even come into being?

Leave aside that argument and assign some value to potential, preconceived human life for the sake of argument. Does such life then take priority over adult human beings? That is what the Pope is arguing -- that the use of condoms is worse than protected sex. He says, despite the obvious scientific contradiction, that they make the problem of AIDS worse. This is completely irresponsible.

Yet because of this fetish against contraception, the Pope is unwittingly (or perhaps disingenuously) encouraging unprotected sex. One cannot dispute that abstinence is the perfect contraception and prophylactic, when practiced without failure. But to suppose that abstinence is going to be successfully practiced in a majority of cases, much less 100% of the time, is to ignore the fact that human copulation has been popular for millions of years prior to the Christian Era -- popular since the species first emerged, in point of fact. To argue in favor of abstinence only is to guarantee conception will occur and disease will be spread. This, in turn, leads to at least some abortions, some unwanted births and some very unfortunate deaths from AIDS.

Just as environmentalists who oppose a dam must take responsibility for any deaths that result from a subsequent uncontrolled flood, the Pope and his fellow fetishists must take responsibility for the abortions and AIDS deaths that result from the unprotected sex that will inevitably occur amongst those they teach to avoid condoms.

Unintended consequences

My uncle was an engineer maintaining the facilities at Ohio University. He built a little suspension bridge to connect the campus to the golf course. They had no budget, so he scrounged together parts and they built the bridge for about $500 in the 1960s. It was replaced 30+ years later by a bridge that cost about $500,000 -- 1000 times more. Your gov't spenders at work.

But my uncle's bridge was not built far enough over the river. They figured that if the water came up more than four feet, no one was going to go golfing anyway. One winter day, the bridge started catching the ice that was floating down the river, turning it into more of dam than a bridge. It's hard to think of every contingency when designing something. That's true even of something as simple as a 150 foot suspension bridge.

They watched as the water backed up behind the accumulating ice. What to do? One fellow suggested that maybe they could use dynamite to break it up. That seemed a bit dangerous, so they decided to go to breakfast and talk about it.

An hour or so later, they returned to the bridge to find that the water had risen while they were at breakfast and pushed the ice chunks over the bridge and downriver. Problem solved.

Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all. Have a nice breakfast.

The velocity of money

I got a letter from a relative who says that she does not want to buy from companies like Nike because they exploit their workers. There seems to be a bit of a contradiction in what she said, in that she said she doesn't care about these people but she does not want to buy anything made by slaves or children or sweatshop workers (presumably because such work exploits them). Let us leave aside the notion that these people work voluntarily under such conditions in order to avoid worse conditions, that what is seen as a miserable existence to us is a step up for them from an even more miserable existence. I am focusing on this paradox: that she seems to care more about punishing those who make a profit from these people then she does about the people they are supposedly exploiting.

As for jingoism, my father's father ran for Congress in the 1930s and his number one issue was to preserve American jobs by raising tariffs. This was the accepted Republican doctrine of the day, a contrast to today's Republicans who tend to support free trade. Economists agreed then as now that raising tariffs was one of Hoover's big mistakes (another mistake was raising taxes quite a bit in a slow economy, when money was already tight).

But trade barriers, like union labor barriers, look good only when you consider their effect on a subset of people. When you consider the universe of people, they don't look so good. It is true that a union raises the wages of its members, but that also limits the number of people a business can hire at that wage (assuming that the business had already determined what fraction of its budget to devote to labor costs). This means that some people who would be available and willing to work at that company, even at a lower wage, will go unemployed. Is it better for 75 people to get 100 quatloos per month or for 100 people to get 75 quatloos (a quatloo being a Star Trek unit of currency).

The union worker says, "Yeah, it's better to have only 75 workers making a higher wage because I'm amongst the lucky 75 and the other 74 are my brothers and sisters in the union." The poor, unemployed schmucks on the outside have a different opinion. It is obvious they will never agree. But theirs is not the only consideration. Presumably, a group of 100 employees are more productive than a group of 75. All other things being equal, they are 33% more productive and produce 33% higher profit. A company with 33% more profit can afford to either hire more workers (if the market warrants it) or pay higher wages to its workers in order to secure its productive labor force in a competitive market. Or it might not expend the additional profit in labor, but might invest it in equipment. In this case, the benefit spills out of the company and into the coffers of its vendors. Conversely, when that profit is not earned as in our example where the company is restricted to 75 workers, this hurts not only the 25 workers who did not get hired today, but the various vendors who did not sell their wares.

Lowering labor costs is just one of many ways of boosting productivity, but higher productivity is good for society. It is what grows the economy. There was a time when people feared that automation would put people out of work and eventually only the employed elite would be able to survive (the rest, presumably, would have starved). In retrospect, we see that this did not happen. Not only do workers have a higher standard of living than 100 years ago, but we work fewer hours to make that living (and live longer).

As workers, we would prefer that productivity be increased through other means than having our wages cut, but the economic forces have no preference. I am not arguing that unions do not have the right to agitate for higher wages, and I certainly understand the reason for it. It's just that the effect of unions is higher wages and the effect of higher wages is also lower productivity and less than optimal economic growth.

The same principle undergirds trade barriers and union labor barriers: Both restrict the flow of capital. The union constrains capital to be spent on a less productive workforce. Trade barriers constrain capital to be spent on more expensive goods, presumably made by less productive workers. This depresses the economy by keeping money from getting re-spent. If I have to buy more expensive American-made goods, I might run out of budgeted money in the first store, so I never get to the next store to buy something from them. When money is concentrated with one entity, the more likely it is to be saved instead of spent.

Going back to my simplistic union example, the union shop supports 75 spenders and the non-union shop supports 100 spenders. Just as a sieve with 100 holes lose water faster than an equal-sized sieve with 75 holes, a community with 1,000,000 spenders spends money faster than a similar community with 750,000 spenders.

Economists speak of the velocity of money, which measures the rate at which the same dollar gets re-spent. They call this measure the M1 money multiplier. You can see what happened to the velocity of money this fall in this chart. It depicts a historic drop-off in the velocity of money. It would seem to me that the last thing you would want to do at this time is decrease the number of spenders in the global economy by restricting the flow of capital.

This is not just theory, either. America tried protectionism in the 1930s, the very sort of protectionism my grandfather espoused. We see where that got us.

Dancez

I just rewatched the video for "The Safety Dance", a video from 1982. There's a word whispered by a breathless woman in the background before the first chorus. I never understood what she was saying. It's not repeated in the song. I had to look up the lyrics. It's voiced by a rather attractive blonde in the video.



I also ran across this homage to "The Safety Dance" from the TV comedy scrubs. Clever how they worked that in.

Baby boomer Obama

My brother just wrote an email suggesting that Obama was not a baby boomer and that he will distinguish himself from his predecessors because he is of Generation X, not a selfish baby boomer. Well, Obama is technically a baby boomer, if you believe that hooey. I think astrology is more useful as an indicator of human behavior. What sign is he?

[I have an old girlfriend who just told me she is Aquarius with Scorpio rising. Well, she certainly made this Scorpio rise, but that had more to do with her birthday suit than her birthday.]

Anyone who looks at Bill Klinton and George W. Bush and sees them as alike because of their relative nearness in age is not a serious onlooker of history.

And if we're going to use hyphenated prefixes to describe Obama's particular flavor of American, then let's not stop at African. We must describe him as half-African-American. I don't know what the other half is and it does not seem to matter to most people. Even though the African parent spent less than a day with him after he had left Obama's mother, and it was his non-African mother and grandparents who raised him, his father's line gets top billing. How patrimonial!

We bother to distinguish between French and Italian and Irish and German Americans (although we do rightly tend to lump English, Scots and Welsh into the group British-Americans). We don't call all white people Euro-Americans. No one would mistake a Russian accent for a Mexican one (although we probably would not pick up Alsatian as Robert Redford does at the end of "Three Days of the Condor" when he confronts hit man Max Von Sydow). And yet we are to believe that all Africans are the same; Kenyans, Tunisians, Hutu and Tutsi They seem to distinguish each other somehow, sometimes cleaving the difference with a machete, but they all look alike to us (except those descendants of Boers, like Teresa Heinz Kerry; she's white! How dare she call herself African-American just because she actually came to America from South Africa).

I remember my niece excitedly talking about the international students at her college and how some of them were African-Americans (not blacks and not Africans -- "African-Americans from other countries!"). Look, if we really intend to remark upon a person because of the color of his skin, and I see no reason to, let's refer then to his skin color and not the continent where some of his descendants came from. And let's be more accurate about it. Barack and Michelle are not the same color, and neither is black.

I am not impressed with Barack Obama. He voted present more often than not in his short and undistinguished career. When and if he actually does something, I shall judge him on that basis and not on his relative age or skin color.

As for his wife, she received a $195K raise after her husband became a US Senator, probably solely because of his new position. Obama obliged by granting her employer $millions in earmarks. She went on to spend most of her time on the campaign trail and could not have done much real work for them as "VP of community affairs". Not a problem, she had already done her job (or I should say, Barack did it for her) by securing the money. Her raise in pay was a kickback. Nice kickback. Perfectly legal, too. And it turns out that, now that she has moved on to Washington and resigned her position, the hospital has decided that it really does not need a "VP of community affairs" after all and is not going to replace her, not even with someone willing to work for less than $317K.

With her, I'm impressed, but not in a nice way -- and I think it has nothing to do with her skin color, nor her relative age.

But these are our overlords. They live by their own rules. They are better than us, or they think they are. Obama's pick for Treasury Sec'y used to work at the International Monetary Fund -- what better qualifications for overlord? He had to be reminded by the IRS to pay his self-employment taxes (Social Security and Medicare) for 2003 and 2004. And he did pay them... late. Even though the IMF had promptly reimbursed him for those payments, making him sign a paper promising to use the money to pay his taxes -- he forgot somehow and pocketed the money. This is the guy we want in charge of the Federal fisc? A guy who forgets what money was supposed to go where? A guy who thinks paying his taxes is optional? This is the guy we want solving the Social Security crisis, a guy who forgets that Social Security is funded by taxes?

And, after the IRS reminded him of his 2003 and 2004 obligations, did he go back and pay his 2001 and 2002 obligations? He did not. Those were beyond the statute of limitations. He still owed the taxes, but could not be legally compelled to pay them. So he didn't (even though, he had been reimbursed by the IMF and signed the same notice saying that he understood what the reimbursements were for). He has paid them now, of course. Paid them while he was being vetted for the Treasury job. But would he have paid them otherwise? What reason do we have to believe he would? Under oath, speaking to Congress, he refused to answer the question. Well, at least he had the decency not to lie under oath. That's a step up from past Democratic administrations.

Shouldn't the same rules apply to all? And shouldn't the rules apply more strictly to those who seek to administer them?

But have no fear, Obama has signed a paper saying that he expects his administration to uphold high ethical standards. Of course, that is probably just lip service to soothe those who need such soothing, who hear words and feel no need to watch to see if actions match. He said the right thing. That's what matters, right?

And so, Obama promises to go beyond partisanship -- this after he trashed the previous administration and the opposition party in order to get elected. Oh yeah. The Congressional Republicans probably won't remember any of that. And they're mostly old baby boomers anyway.

We Are the Ones Who Are No Longer Waiting for Ourselves

They sent out a memo at work saying "We recognize that Inauguration Day is going to be a historic day, but we caution against watching the event on streaming video. Thank you for respecting our bandwidth issues".

Had they been on the ball, they would have set up a video feed in the largest conference room and played the inauguration on big screen TV. I guess that's only for official executive use, though.

Not that I would be watching at that historic noon. I'll be in the bathroom retching.

Chris Matthews, whose leg tingles when Obama speaks, does not feel that way about Bush. After Bush's farewell address, he claimed that Bush was responsible for 100,000 deaths in Iraq. If that is the case, then FDR and Truman were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions (including 6 million Jews). Doesn't that get things backward? Is there not at least some intellectual rigor left amongst the media (not at MS-NBC, apparently). Most of the deaths in the Iraq War were caused by the insurgents. They planted the IEDs and they were the suicide bombers. They blew up the mosques and marketplaces. It was not coalition forces killing these people.

That's not to say that no innocents were killed, but anyone who understands the concept of a just war realizes that innocents may be killed. One cannot fight a just war if one is afraid of dying oneself, nor if one is afraid of accidentally or inadvertently killing the wrong person (including killing one's co-warriors in friendly fire). Of course one strives not to make these mistakes, but one cannot remain paralyzed in fear of making them.

Nonetheless, it was not by coalition forces that the majority of such innocents perished. It was at the hand of the enemy that they perished. It is calumny to suggest that it is Bush's fault. And it is blindness to fail to realize that Iraq is far better off today than under Saddam Hussein. Moreover, Saddam was a murderous bastard in his own right, a prolific killer who would have killed and tortured almost as many as the nearly vanquished enemy unleashed by his capture.

But these people are blind to true suffering. Obama will be responsible for more than 100,000 deaths in his first year in office if he fulfills his promises to reverse Bush's anti-abortion policies, such as funding for the UN's family planning agency, which helps fund forced abortions in China and China's one-child policy -- don't let anyone tell you they're pro-choice when in fact these people are pro-abortion, even when it is not the choice of the mother. Ironically,many of the aborted babies are female since Chinese prefer males, thus the feminists support the death of future women.

This is just one of the reasons I'll be quelling my nausea on Inauguration Day.

Doctor Doctor

I tried to comment on a blog post at New English Review, but can't see the reply. I don't want to lose it, so here it is:

In Westport, Connecticut works a physician named Doctor. He is Dr. Doctor. His wife is a doctor. Together they are the Doctors Doctor. The physicians who treat them when they are ill are the Doctors Doctor's doctors. Not exactly "onions, onions, onions", but factual.

Conan Doyle chose Watson to be a doctor. It convinces because we know some doctors to be clear and precise.

James Michener described his success as being able to get people to read to the end of the page. Not a fan myself, but his popularity and the heft of his tomes suggests that he had found the knack.

Are clarity and precision essential in getting people to read to the end of the page? Usually, I would say, even when seeming to write about nothing. The writing may be desultory, or have no main topic whatsoever, may have no point or direction, yet capture and hold the reader's attention. Still, on that random walk, one expects clear and precise narration.

Exceptions abound. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" comes to mind. Wonderful, but in part because of what is left unreported and unclear. "A pair of ragged claws" is imprecise, but effective.

Drill and conserve

Obama claims that we who support drilling in the outer continental shelf (OCS) are ignorant and that we are proud of being ignorant. Why? He claims (wrongly) that Americans could save as much oil by properly inflating their tires as could be produced by drilling for it offshore. He claims that to deny this is ignorance and to flout one's denial is to be proud of being ignorant.

He implies that those of us who support offshore drilling oppose proper tire inflation. As McCain said about inflating tires (and conservation in general), "Do that. But also drill". Obama assumes we are too stupid to realize that we can do both.

I guess his argument works with some people. It's very simple to contradict:

Consider what a child would do. Tell the child you've hidden a candy bar in the kitchen and a candy bar in the bedroom. Which will he search for? Well, some children would search in the kitchen. Some would search in the bedroom. But 99.999% of the children would search both rooms and get both candy bars. Because even little children know that if some is good, more is better.

Can Obama show one good reason why drilling offshore would prevent us from also properly inflating our tires (or vice versa)? If not, he is presenting us with a false choice.

You'd have to be ignorant to fall for that false choice. Obama assumes we are.