"The Reid Bill Is On A Collision Course With The Constitution"

At WSJ, a capsule summary of the strong fifth amendment argument against a bill designed to ruin the insurance industry.

Quote

Seen here:

Men who look upon themselves as born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions...

Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.

--Thomas Paine

More Reason For Thinking This Infamy Will Be Killed By The Judiciary

Another excellent analysis.

They Have Sown The Wind

6 aspects of the coming backlash.

The piece ends:

Together, these actions tell quite a tale. Mr. Obama has revived the worst impressions of the Democratic party – profligate and undisciplined, arrogant, lovers of big government, increasers of taxes. The issues and narrative for American politics in the foreseeable future has been set — limited government versus exploding government, capitalism versus European style socialism, responsible and measured policies versus reckless and radical ones.

Barack Obama is in the process of inflicting enormous damage to his presidency and his party. And there is more, much more to come.

They Make A Wilderness And Call It Social Justice

Not Only Are They Delusional About The Existence Of The Problem, But Now They Want To Use The "Crisis" As An Excuse For Massively Polluting

Leftists seem to always, always have destruction as their deeply buried goal, often enough telegraphing what they intend to destroy by what "concerns" them. They claim to be worried about the contents of the atmosphere. Lo and behold, polluting the skies with sulphur particles is their "solution". Curiously, the same folks who think there is danger of a runaway greenhouse effect due to CO2 show no worry of a runaway ice age generator due to sulphur.

Somehow sulphur seems appropriate as a symbol of salvation for these people.

Link:

Nathan Myhrvold also thinks that he has found a cheap and reliable way to solve global warming, which does not involve upending and perhaps destroying the world's economy. The global warming solution proposed by Nathan Myhvold involves running a hose up to the stratosphere with balloons and using that hose to pump out enough sulfur particles to dim the sun's heat just enough to counteract the effects of global warming. The estimated cost would be about two hundred and fifty million dollars.

Nathan Myhrvold suggests that volcanoes and other natural processes already pump out sulfur into the stratosphere and that his scheme, if adopted, would increase that amount by only one percent. Nathan Myhrvold therefore thinks that there would not be any unintended consequences (like starting a new ice age.)

...

Unconstitutional For So Many Reasons

Besides the fact that ObamaCare is blatantly unconstitutional under the 10th Amendment (and the various bribes targeted to various states to get it passed are blatantly unconstitutional under the 14th amendment), the Senate Bill is also miserably unconstitutional under the 5th amendment.

Here's a good piece of legal analysis explaining why (and also explaining that there already exists plenty of constitutional case law which points to the conclusion that the monstrosity will be tied up in a tsunami of litigation, and will quite probably be voided).

A taste:

The concern that I wish to address at the outset deals with the unprecedented level of systemic coercion that the Reid Bill exerts on the various firms that supply health-insurance coverage in the small-group and individual health-insurance markets. Constitutional concerns with these provisions arise even if one assumes that Congress has the power under the Commerce Clause to pass comprehensive regulation of health care in this form. Independent of any question about the scope of Congressional power, it is critical to consider that the Fifth Amendment affords regulated health-insurance companies protection against the taking of property without compensation and without due process of law.
These overlapping guarantees bind both the federal government and the state governments in all of their activities, whether undertaken jointly or independently.

These constitutional provisions have been subject to extensive interpretation in the Supreme Court in ratemaking cases, which must be taken into account in dealing with the legislation. The Supreme Court's basic constitutional requirement is that any firm in a regulated market be allowed to recover a risk-adjusted competitive rate of return on its accumulated capital investment. See Duquesne Light Co. v. Barasch, 488 U.S. 299 (1988).

The Reid Bill emphatically fails this test by imposing sharp limitations on the ability of health-insurance companies to raise fees or exclude coverage. Moreover, the Reid Bill forces on these regulated firms onerous new obligations that they will not be able to fund from their various revenue sources. The squeeze between the constricted revenue sources allowable under the Reid Bill and the extensive new legal obligations it imposes is likely to result in massive cash crunch that could drive the firms that serve the individual and small-group health-insurance markets into bankruptcy.

...

This detailed analysis of the Reid Bill helps to set up the appropriate constitutional analysis. The applicable standards for constitutional review have usually been developed in connection with rate-making procedures in natural monopolies. Within this context, the social objective is to limit the monopoly returns to public utilities, which do not face the risk of competition from new entrants, because they operate in a market in which the declining marginal cost of the initial entrant prevents a new entrant from gaining a toehold. In such a situation, one permissible legislative response is to impose some form of regulation that brings that established player back to a competitive rate of return. I shall pass by all the difficulties in implementing such a program. It is important to note, however, that it is never a satisfactory response for regulators to drive the rates of return down to zero, for then no one would ever be prepared to provide services.

Since it is necessary to compete for capital across the entire range of activities, the constitutional protection afforded under both the Takings and the Due Process Clauses provides that the rate of return cannot fall below that which the investors in the firm could obtain in a competitive market. That calculation has to take into account the level of risk associated with the business, which in general is low with respect to public utilities that have at least de facto protection against new entry.

The hard question, therefore, is what kinds of systems of rate regulation will pass constitutional muster.

...

What is striking is how far the ratemaking system for health insurance is from all the above. There is no natural monopoly in health insurance, and there is a powerful way to open up health-insurance markets by knocking down the state barriers to entry that have been in effect since 1945 under the McCarran-Ferguson Act. Once it is clear—and it is generally clear—that the health insurance industry is competitive or could easily be made competitive, the entire rationale for government ratemaking is undermined. The point of ratemaking was to require the firm to accept competitive rates of returns in a market setting where it enjoyed monopoly power. Here, the market is either competitive already, or easily can be made so. In this environment, ratemaking no longer serves any useful function.

Contrary to the implicit assumption behind the Reid Bill, ratemaking cannot induce further efficiencies once competitive forces have driven out all elements of monopoly power. Yet all firms are trapped, for the only way in which they can escape ever more onerous requirements and restrictions is to render themselves ineligible to enroll new groups or individuals—whose health insurance, of course, their tax dollars will continue to fund. In addition, right now the Reid Bill subjects plans outside the Exchanges to certain other legal requirements, which could easily be tightened down the road. The non-Exchange health insurance issuers are, therefore, placed in an untenable position that exposes them to the multiple strategies in the Reid bill that control rates and set the terms of service and that will have three unacceptable consequences: (1) to reduce the rate of return of health insurance companies below competitive levels, (2) to pile expensive administrative mandates on them, and (3) to generate major uncertainties as to how the federal obligations on such companies will pan out.

At this point, there is a near mathematical certainty that the scheme of health-insurance market regulation contemplated by the Reid bill will reduce the risk-adjusted rate of return below the level needed to keep these firms in the individual and small-group health-insurance markets. I am not aware of a single provision in the Reid Bill that looks to ensuring a minimum rate of return. And there are countless provisions in the bill that impose new obligations to cover services while eliminating the revenue sources to deal with them. It is just this combination of regulatory programs that leads the CBO to treat private health insurance issuers as part of a federal program--as though they have been subject to de facto nationalization.

This systemic regulation of both Exchange and non-Exchange carriers shows, moreover, that those health-insurance issuers that participate in the Exchange are shorn of all constitutional rights. The requirement that the states order rebates of money spent on non-claim expenses is not constitutionally permissible unless and until the Reid Bill makes some allowance for earning a reasonable rate of return. That return, moreover, must take into account the extra riskiness that flows from the grant of broad delegated authority to the Secretary.

In addition, the decision to order rebates in good years without adjustments for the losses in bad years makes it impossible for a firm to earn a reasonable rate of return. In utility rate regulation, it is not constitutionally permissible to impose an annual rate cap just at the competitive level, while leaving the carrier obligated to eat the losses in poor years. Section 2718 of the Reid bill goes even further than such unconstitutional provisions in the utility context:[3] it imposes a hard cap, without any accurate accounting for administrative costs or any explicit recognition of the constitutional right to earn a reasonable profit.

To make matters worse, these overall caps apply on top of all the restrictions on the ability to decline coverage or vary rates that are involved in other provisions of the Reid Bill. These provisions necessarily raise the administrative costs of providing insurance. There are no upper bounds on what can be required by various federal and state officials who are charged with oversight of individual and small-group plans in many instances, and all health-care plans in others. At this point, it is only a matter of time before the cost obligations are so enormous that even complete freedom in setting prices would not allow the firm to remain in business. Nor will this problem be cured by the vast pattern of subsidies and taxes that permeate the rest of the bill. Quite to the contrary, the subsidies may put greater pressure on the capacity of health insurance companies to operate, given that these firms have no capacity to choose which plans to provide to which customers.

Given these facts, it is impossible for the rate regulation of firms in the competitive health insurance industry to recover the constitutionally permissible rate of return. So long as competitive rates of return remain the constitutional benchmark, rate regulation necessarily fails. The unregulated rates are already at the competitive level. Any system that reduces revenues, raises costs, and increases uncertainty cannot possibly meet the applicable constitutional standard.

To my mind, the only serious question about the legislation is whether a facial challenge will be allowed to the Reid Bill when it does not contain explicit price-control features. Such facial challenge are often denied in land-use cases, but in rate-regulation cases the result has usually been otherwise. To wait until the program has run its course is to consign a health-insurance company to the substantial risk of bankruptcy just for trying to stay in business. It does not have the option to hold off development until the legal uncertainties are resolved. Since neither the United States nor the individual states will pony up the huge losses sustained by the regulated firms, the challenges have to be allowed before the statute is implemented and not afterwards. How this issue will play out in litigation no one can say for sure. But it would be, in my view, irresponsible for the Senate to pass any health reform legislation that does not address the serious constitutional infirmities found in the Reid Bill.

CONCLUSION: This ill-conceived legislation has many provisions that regulate different aspects of private health-insurance companies. Taken together, the combined force of these provisions raises serious constitutional questions. I think that these provisions are so intertwined with the rest of the legislation that it is difficult to see how the entire statute could survive if one of its components is defective to its core. How courts will deal with these difficult issues is of course not known, but rate-regulation cases normally attract a higher level of scrutiny than, say, land-use decisions.

There is, moreover, no quick fix that will eliminate the Reid Bill's major constitutional defects. It would, of course, be a catastrophe if the Congress sought to put this program into place before its constitutionality were tested. Most ratemaking challenges are done on the strength of the record, and I see no reason why a court would let a health-insurance company be driven into bankruptcy before it could present its case that the mixture of regulations and subsidies makes it impossible to earn a reasonable return on its capital. At the very least, therefore, there are massive problems of delayed implementation that will plague any health-care legislation from the date of its passage. I should add that the many broad delegations to key administrative officials will themselves give rise to major delays and additional challenges on statutory or constitutional grounds.

The health of the American people should not be held hostage to such unwise legislation. The Senate should reject the Reid Bill because of the unsustainability of the statutory scheme regulating health-insurance markets. But there is also little doubt that its central arrangements are unconstitutional, and will face serious legal challenge for years to come.

You Are Here

Groove on this.

Darwinist Hacks Are Too Dim To Realize This

You can't have it both ways:

Prominent philosopher and legal scholar Thomas Nagel, an atheist, endorses an argument that is obvious: if the argument against intelligent design in biology (Darwinism) counts as a scientific argument, then the argument for intelligent design in biology must count as a scientific argument, because the two differing conclusions are just the negative and affirmative denouement of the same argument. That is of course not to say that one or the other argument about design is true; it is merely to say the obvious: that for either to be true, the question of intelligent design must be a scientific question.

Nagel applies this self-evident observation to the teaching of evolution in schools:

From the beginning it has been commonplace to present the theory of evolution by random mutation and natural selection as an alternative to intentional design as an explanation of the functional organization of living organisms. The evidence for the theory is supposed to be evidence for the absence of purpose in the causation of the development of life-forms on this planet. It is not just the theory that life evolved over billions of years, and that all species are descended from a common ancestor. Its defining element is the claim that all this happened as the result of the appearance of random and purposeless mutations in the genetic material followed by natural selection due to the resulting heritable variations in reproductive fitness. It displaces design by proposing an alternative...It is therefore puzzling that the denial of this inference, i.e., the claim that the evidence offered for the theory does not support the kind of explanation it proposes, and that the purposive alternative has not been displaced, should be dismissed as not science. The contention seems to be that, although science can demonstrate the falsehood of the design hypothesis, no evidence against that demonstration can be regarded as scientific support for the hypothesis. Only the falsehood, and not the truth, of ID can count as a scientific claim.

But what does any of this matter when they have the decisive counter-argument of shrieking "Creationist!" like scared little schoolgirls? As far as I've been able to gather the last few years, that's all they have left.

In 1994 We Went Easy On You

AJ Strata:

Thankfully, the liberals have established such a glaring example of incompetence and failure they have set the stage for wiping out the Democrat Party in the up coming elections.

Here is what one Democrat Congressman heard from We The People as he went back into his deep blue state recently for some special election campaigning:

… caucus chairman John Larson (D-Conn.) told the group he wanted them to hear first from Rep. Michael Capuano, who’d just returned from a primary campaign for the Senate seat in Massachusetts vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy.
…
and took to the microphone, looked out at his colleagues and condensed what he’d learned into two words. “You’re screwed,” …

The nation does not want DC messing with health care right now. It wants good paying, career oriented jobs (not flagman jobs on highway construction). It does not want more debt piled on our children and their children, we want to be able to make a good living and take care of our kids. We don’t want a nanny state – we want independence.

Those voters likely to come out in a rage next November, after we suffer through this holiday in a mess, are just licking their chops to throw the bums out. The Dems are screwed. If they think 1994 was bad they will soon find out what bad is really like. In 1994 we had just beaten the evil Saddam Hussein, the Iron Curtain of oppression had just fallen and democracies were blossoming all across the former Soviet Union. The need for warriors on the front lines had just dissipated massively (which had been the traditional conservative strong point).

Even more the nation was recovering from a mild recession and the nation decided to give the Democrats a shot at bringing on that Nirvana they keep claiming is only a few lefty policies away. Against this back drop the Democrats were booted from decades of control of Congress because of liberal over reaching.

But in 1994 the over reaching (and incompetence) never had a chance to stop the peace spreading across the world or the booming 1990’s dot com bubble.

2009 is not 1994 – it will be much, much worse for Democrats There is no peace spreading through out the world, there is no booming economy in motion. There is no buffer to hide the liberal insanity.

...

Now let’s fast forward to April 15th, 2010. There will still be high unemployment and underemployment. There will still be record breaking deficits. There will be no fix to health care. There will be more people fed up with liberal fiction.

Now let’s fast forward to Memorial Day weekend and the beginning of summer. Jobs will not have come back, the deficits will have grown some more and the health care taxes will be biting hard (but no fix scheduled for 3 more years). The summer economy will be in a shambles. More foreclosures, more bank closings, more angst and suffering.

Now let’s move to July 4th, where the DC democrats will be pretending they saved the planet and the country. The stagecraft will be glaringly at odds with the reality of more months of a jobless recovery.

Now forward to Labor Day. School is starting and people are struggling to afford new supplies and clothes. The underemployment picture will not have changed, and we face a fall just like the one we just went through.

Does any sane person think the Democrats will be rewarded at the voting booth by the army of seniors and independents who will be coming out in angry droves? The only question we have as a nation right now is can we survive until next Thanksgiving, when we may actually be giving thanks for a new lease on life.

...

Spelling It Out As Clearly As Possible For The Commie Scumbags

An update from the Nebraska doctor mentioned here:

To those who would accuse me of greed: I don’t make as much as you think I do. I give every one of my patients the very best care I can offer, regardless of their ability to pay. And I do NOT begrudge my mechanic or my appliance repairmen their salaries. Not one bit. I gladly pay them what I owe them. What you leftist idiots don’t understand is this: I am forced to accept $35 for an office visit by a medicaid or medicare patient. I. Can’t. Afford. It. On that enforced wage, I can’t pay my nurses. I can’t pay my billing secretaries. I can’t pay my receptionist. I. Can’t. Survive. On. Obamacare. Get it?! I. Can’t. Pay. My. Nurses. On. Ben. Nelson. Wages. Get it? I hope so. You think I’m greedy? I went to medical school as a former nurse at age 36. I have over $180,000 dollars in student loans. I. Can’t. Survive. On. Obamacare. I hope this helps. I don’t make as much as you might think. And most of what I earn goes to repaying my student loans. I love my little family medicine clinic in Friend. I love being a doctor in rural Nebraska. I love my patients and I love rural family medicine. But Ben Nelson sold me out. Thanks again for letting me vent. I’m not greedy. I don’t envy the wages of my blue-collar friends. But I can’t survive or pay my employees on Uncle Sam’s reimbursement rate for my services.

Sharpen The Pitchforks, And Start Agitating For Secession

The WSJ on the nightmare about to be inflicted on us via Obamacare.

What She Said

An open letter to Benedict Nelson:

Dear Senator Nelson:

I send this message under “Tort Reform” because the current monstrosity you have pledged your support to says nothing whatsoever about Tort Reform. You have sold the physicians of Nebraska for zilch (zilch for us, but beaucoup federal bucks for you and the liberal partisans in this state). As a family practice physician in Small Town, Nebraska, I was counting on you to be the lone voice of Democratic sanity on this issue, but you sold me out. I will dedicate
every spare minute of my time and every spare dollar I have to defeating you, should you run for re-election. The long hours I spent on my medical education and the long hours I spend treating my patients are nothing but chump change to you and your Democrat colleagues in Washington. I especially can’t wait for your equivocation and milquetoast evasion when your “compromises” on the abortion language in the bill are silently erased or quietly (on-little-legislative-cat’s-feet) eviscerated in the House/Senate give-and-take. Go on: Bet me that you won’t wuss-out on this issue!

I know you won’t give two-seconds to this letter, but I had to write it. I’m a primary care doctor in YOUR state, and you sold me out. I didn’t slog through 4 years of college and 4 years of medical school and 3 years of residency just to have you hand my career and my patient/doctor relationships over to government lifers. Your gutless acquiescence to Obama and Harry Reid and ‘Nanny’ Pelosi will NOT be forgotten.

Thank you, Ben, for forcing doctors like me to earn less than the repairmen who fix our appliances. Case in point: We recently had our dishwasher fixed. The repairman who came to our house charged $65 just to come and ‘diagnose’ the problem, then charged another $180 to ‘fix’ the problem. You and your fellow lawmakers have fixed MY going rate (Medicare) at $35 per-visit. Thank you for securing such a ‘lucrative’ rate for me! Thank you so much for making me–someone with 8 years of education!–make less than a mechanic or appliance repair technichian. And thanks especially for falling in line with Obama and the rest of the Democrats to make such a socialist system permanent.

You have my disgust and disdain forever, you socialist-coddling coward.

Sincerely,
Becky F. Hollibaugh, D.O.
Warren Memorial Hospital
Ziimmerman Clinic
Friend, NE 68359

Sucktaculicious

No, not Benedict Nelson's sell-out, but Star Wars, Episode I. I've been enjoying watching this detailed takedown.

Despite A Total Lack Of Accountability, Plunder Is Somehow Resulting

A couple of Michael Shedlock posts highlight some details of the massive looting operation now being perpetrated by government employees, many of whom aren't even showing up for work.

Link

Link

Some gems from the intro to an article cited at the first link:

Despite its good intentions, San Francisco is not leading the country in gay marriage. Despite its good intentions, it is not stopping wars. Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, its homeless problem is worse than any comparable city's. Despite its spending more money per capita, period, than almost any city in the nation, San Francisco has poorly managed, budget-busting capital projects, overlapping social programs no one is certain are working, and a transportation system where the only thing running ahead of schedule is the size of its deficit.

Despite?

There's A Simple Answer To That, Genius. Disentangle Government From Health Care Entirely.

"President Obama: Federal Government 'Will Go Bankrupt' if Health Care Costs Are Not Reined In"

This Looks Good To Leftist Eyes

All veins lead to Washington.

Coburn Pulls The Trigger

And forces the reading of a 767 page amendment no one expected to pass anyway. It took 17 minutes just to read the 6-page table of contents. I checked out the CSPAN feed, and, yes, some poor sap is reading this monster out loud.

Michelle Malkin notes that the bill is filibustering itself:

If you have cable TV, tune in to C-SPAN now. Or watch live here.

This is transparency in action.

The Senate’s chief socialist, Bernie Sanders, offered a single-payer health care amendment. It would open Medicare to all regardless of age, income, etc., and would be paid through higher income taxes. The normal procedure on the Senate floor would have been to dispense with the reading of the amendment. But “to alert taxpayers to this latest Washington scheme to take away your health care decisions,” Senator Coburn’s office writes, Sen. Coburn demanded that the full text of the 767 page Sanders amendment be read by the Senate clerk.

It’s being read now.

The clerk just read a droning bureaucratic section on government oversight of hearing aid tests and another on “dietary management” services.

(Fun fact: It took 17 minutes to read the 6 page table of contents.)

Big Nanny dreams and schemes laid bare.

***

10:55am Eastern. The clerk is now reading a section involving dental services, with specific details about “molars” and “posterior teeth.”

Ed Morrissey notes the strategy:

What does this do? It makes a hash out of Harry Reid’s plan to move the bill through the Senate by Christmas. Twelve hours of floor time for just a single amendment means that no other business can be conducted until at least Friday. Coburn apparently launched this effort in response to an attempt by Reid to shove the bill to a cloture vote without giving everyone enough time to read the bill or peruse the CBO analysis, due this week.

It’s a reminder that even with a supermajority, Reid needs to work with the minority to keep momentum. He can’t pull a Nancy Pelosi jamdown in the upper chamber, and any further attempts will mean weeks of bill reading as the legislation effectively filibusters itself.

It’s on.

Oops

Unintended consequences.

The Sane Are Slowly Starting To Back Away

The dynamic is changing:

I've just been watching this video, of Lord Monkton laying into the Climategate gang. What makes it so potent is that he is quite bluntly calling them crooks, and calling anyone who still follows their fraudulent prophecies dupes and fools. He names names, and crimes. Yes, crimes. And yes, criminals. Criminals with names. Monkton does all this in his posh British public school voice. Nevertheless, you can almost see him doing that thing that fist fighters do, but with their beckoning hands rather than with their mouths, and pointing at their own chins. Come and get me! Give me your best shot! I say you are a pack of scoundrels. Prove me wrong! I say that the logical thing to do about "climate change" is: nothing. Nothing. Why on earth do you still have the damned nerve to think anything else? Such pugilistic vulgarities are not to be found in the text of the talk. Monkton is too canny, too cool, to get that excited. But that is the subtext.

Here is some other evidence that those with the job of chasing crooks are now getting interested in this.

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

And it turns out that the rich countries do indeed wish to remain rich, as I merely hoped was the case a week ago. The underlying point being: nobody is actually as scared about climate change as they were a few months back. Doubters who feared that there might have been "something in it", "no smoke without fire", etc., now doubt far more completely. All but the craziest warmists are now going rather quieter. The people who matter no longer feel deep in their guts, those of them who ever did, that there has to be a deal, or the earth will fry. All potential parties to it are now more willing than they were to walk away from Copenhagen with no deal, because the fear of being blamed for not reaching a deal is now (in the nick of time) being replaced by the fear of being accused of having reached a bad deal...

"The Milli Vanilli Of Politicians"

The young followers of the Pied Piper are slowly learning the truth.

Clarity

Denninger on derivatives, credit insurance, slicing and dicing of risk, etc:

This scam is in fact exactly what Paul Volcker was talking about in the piece quoted on the 9th:

“I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth — one shred of evidence,” said Mr Volcker, who ran the Fed from 1979 to 1987 and is now chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

He said that financial services in the United States had increased its share of value added from 2 per cent to 6.5 per cent, but he asked: “Is that a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”

Right.

Effectively, what the financial system has done is siphon off an increasing portion of the rents charged for various activities while justifying the increasing prices (that is, lower risk and therefore less reserve against "adverse events") through concealment via bogus "risk-shifting" and "risk-management" that in fact never really occurred.

Remember, "rent" is a generic term. We think of it as what you pay to occupy an apartment, but in fact "rent" is charged for the use of capital in all of its forms - as a place to live, as a means of financing investment, as a means of financing speculation. All involve the charging of rent of one form or another, and all the financial system has done over the last 20 years is find ways to increase the amount of rent that lands in the financial system itself - instead of being distributed to the actual owners of the capital that is being lent out!

The simple reality is that CDOs, CDS and similar articles when used to hedge large quantities of financial instruments or events (such as by a bank) are an artifice. The only way that one can "deal in" CDS and make a profit, as the banks have done, is if someone is willing to sell you protection at less than the true risk-adjusted cost, or you can manage to sell it at higher than the risk-adjusted price.

Both require that someone be deceived - that is, that someone intentionally misrepresent either by commission or by intentional concealment of material facts.

This is the definition of fraud!

Fraud is generally defined in the law as an intentional misrepresentation of material existing fact made by one person to another with knowledge of its falsity and for the purpose of inducing the other person to act, and upon which the other person relies with resulting injury or damage. Fraud may also be made by an omission or purposeful failure to state material facts, which nondisclosure makes other statements misleading.

It is not possible for you to buy protection for less than the actual risk of default from a party who can pay in the event of default. This should be instantly obvious to anyone who applies more than 15 seconds of thought to the problem - on balance it is impossible to insure a pool of risks for less money than the risk of loss across the pool.

Let's assume the risk of default is 1% and recovery if there is a default is 50. Therefore, if you have $100 million of such bonds 1% of them, or $1 million worth, will default, and of that $1 million there will be a $500,000 loss.

The price of purchasing insurance against that pool must always be more than $500,000.

If it is less then the company writing it will not be able to pay. If it is in fact equal they will not be able to pay, since the company must expend some amount of money (no matter how small) employing their staff and maintaining their facilities (buildings, etc.)

It is reasonable for someone to buy insurance against a single event, as a single actor, holding a single risk. That's because their individual risk is large for the return they receive. It is why you buy insurance against a fire in your house - the risk of a fire is small, but the damage if you suffer a fire is large.

But if you own 100,000 properties dispersed across the nation with no particular concentration you're an idiot to buy insurance against each and every property having a fire. Why? Because it is axiomatic that you will pay more for the insurance than you will lose to fires! You must - otherwise the insurance company that sells you the policies will go broke and be unable to pay at all!

The key point here is that when you buy below risk-adjusted cost "insurance" you have in fact bought nothing and are just as exposed as if you had not purchased said "insurance" at all.

It is therefore never prudent and appropriate for anyone who holds a large enough pool of risk to "transfer" that risk to a third party because the cost of doing so will always be higher than the cost of simply absorbing any losses that occur.

This must always be the case unless the organization holding the large pool of risks is able to find someone who will write that insurance at a loss. This, in turn can only happen if the entity writing the insurance either (1) is unable to appropriately judge the risk compared to the person purchasing the insurance or (2) is unable to pay if the loss occurs.

This is the root of the scam folks, and that we refuse to understand and face the math is part and parcel of why it is that we continue to be abused by these large financial interests.

The sooner we wake up the better, as the math is never, ever wrong.

See original for helpful formatting.

Excellent Logo

Seen here:

Nice Whitewash Attempt

CNN!

The Wages Of Climategate

Good J.R. Dunn piece.

excerpts:

We're getting close to the point where the dictionary definition of "journalist" will have to be altered to read, "A media personality who attempts to stifle news stories out of cowardice, ideology, or for pay."

...

It may well be that both directors will be whitewashed by their respective institutions. But discredited as they are, it really doesn't matter. Neither can ever again pose as the disinterested, incorruptible scientist, and their programs will remain irrevocably tainted. Science as a discipline has its own way of dealing with these types. Papers will be returned with a thank-you note. Grant proposals will become tied up. Grad students will be advised to look elsewhere for doctoral material. Phil and Mike are now and forever climatology's used-car salesmen, and may as well get used to the plaid jacket two sizes too large and the white patent-leather shoes. Though I wouldn't put it past the Swedes to throw them a Nobel next time around.

...

At last we arrive at Copenhagen... only to discover that there's not much to address there at all. The grand climate summit, which was supposed to herald the advent of some sort of "global government", was in trouble even before Climategate, with the preliminary negotiations, intended to provide a fait accompli for the official proceedings, petering out to nothing even before the first delegates boarded the UN's solar-powered blimps for the long trip to Denmark.

...

Reports from Copenhagen since then have been muddled, confused, and deeply uninteresting. Copenhagen was supposed to be high real-world drama, with the world's leaders frantically working to stave off the Big Heat in much the same fashion as they might a menacing comet or asteroid, while the world looked on in frightened awe. The CRU e-mails, though unmentioned by anyone apart from the Saudis, have transformed it all into a cartoon, with our noble, tireless statesmen become so many Wile E. Coyotes heading off the cliff with rockets strapped to their skates.

(Another casualty is the great Al Gore, who had originally scheduled an event in which $1,200 would purchase a signed copy of his latest book, a handshake, and a personal blessing from Mother Gaia. Gore was unfortunately forced to cancel. He has to watch out for process servers now.)

...

Of course, the big target is Al. There are thousands of lawyers burning office lights until all hours figuring out how to take down Al Gore. Thousands more are being decanted from the lawyers' replication vats for the sole purpose of pleading "Gore v. Whoever". The legal aspects of the new industry of carbon-offsets remain in large part unexplored. I'm sure that Al will relish his role as a pioneer in establishing necessary legal benchmarks as he has in so much else.

...

Far from being accepted wisdom, global warming has always been viewed warily by the average American, as yet another excuse for governmental interference and pocket-picking. It won't take much in the way of reiteration to turn this into a raging conviction, with considerable ancillary damage to the progressive program as a whole.

...

But warming is politically dead. It would require a brave politician to inconvenience voters, steal their money, and ruin their jobs based on premises that may be fraudulent. That "may" is the crucial term -- fraud doesn't have to be proven. Doubt is all that's required. When fraud enters the picture, everything else -- certainty, veracity, trust -- gets up and leaves. Fakery distorts everything that it touches. To claim that, even though the last batch of data was tainted, the next batch just might be okay, is the same as saying that the last e-mail offer you got from the Nigerian President's Office may have cleaned out your bank account, but this one you just opened has got to be for real.

We're Darned Lucky It's Even This Warm

Two videos you need to see and pass on.

Quote

Seen in comment here:

“The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

— H.L. Mencken

A Memo To The Global Warming Cult

Hear, hear.

Palin/Shatner 2012

Awesome!

Go Home, Congress!

A don't-miss Anchoress post.

Purchased Indulgences

No real surprise:

SO DOES THIS MEAN ED BEGLEY, JR. EATS BABIES? Can organic produce and natural shampoo turn you into a heartless jerk? “New research by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior. In their study (described in a paper now in press at Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat and steal.”

It doesn't mean he eats babies, but it almost certainly means he supports tearing 'em apart in the womb.

Tree hugging does not atone for baby killing. But that doesn't mean a damned lot of people aren't trying.

Says Ace of Spades in response to the cited research:

Pretty interesting. Two possible conclusions:

1) Liberals just suck.

2) Liberals are effectively buying post-modern papal indulgences, they believe, by paying for their sins with minor changes in their consumer purchasing patterns. By buying this supposedly eco-friendly soup, they've saved the environment a little, and satisfied their own (apparently low) threshold of moral and upright behavior, and have a great deal of wiggle room when it comes to other areas of their lives.

I sort of buy both but especially that Number Two. I have long, and long-windedly, argued that liberals indulge themselves with a great many of Ostentatious, Conspicuous Pseudo-Moral Gestures, no different than the judgmental prig they take as representative of a "Christian," a stereotype they know almost exclusively from movies like Footloose.

The gestures are directed both outward and inward, outward to convince others of one's superior morality, but more importantly inward, to convince themselves.

Anyone who's ever talked to such a person comes away thinking, "Good Lord, you have fashioned yourself a real crazy-quilt of ad hoc, made-up, superstitious neo-pagan rules to live by! How do you keep up with all these restrictions and blather?"

It seems like a patchwork super-structure of ersatz, faddish morality designed with only one conceivable purpose: To supplant the conventional morality taught by traditional institutions. Apparently the soul still craves the feeling of living a just and righteous life, even after traditional notions of the just and righteous have been abandoned. The entire code of forbidden foods and rituals of eating in Leviticus is overwritten, line by line and jot by tittle, by some new equally oddball code: Pork is not precisely forbidden, but you can't eat pork that was acquired from a farm more than 60 miles away; and Thou Shall Not Eat Chilean Sea Bass, at least not if it has been caught by a commercial net.

In some cases it might make a lick of sense (okay, maybe the sea bass is being overfished and we hardly want that) and in other cases it's purely a neo-pagan gesture to the new gods. I really do not believe the trivial "carbon costs" of shipping some pork in by railway car are anything more than a rounding error in the carbon costs of feeding that pig and sustaining a farm in the first place.

Oh, and carbon costs are jive in the first place.

Net result? One's sense of place in the universe is affirmed, and one is given the fulfillment of knowing one is doing Gods' work (plural intended) in making rather trivial shopping adjustments. And, even better than that: One gets that crucially-important rush of feeling superior to someone else.

And one more bonus: If you're doing right by Mother Earth, it frees you up to cut corners with your fellow man.

It All Makes Sense Once You Realize The Business Isn't To Deliver News, But Comfort

A Michael Malone insight:

Newspapers too, seem to have figured out a way to limp along at least for another couple decades (at which point there will be no one left in the country who has actually read a newspaper) by slashing overhead, building marginally profitable web sites, and morphing their product to fit their remaining audiences.

What I mean by the last is that newspapers (and even more obviously, troubled national newsmagazines like Newsweek) have essentially abandoned the news business and gone into the comfort business. In other words, they have a pretty good idea now just who constitutes the heart of their loyal readership, and they write for that group, with the intent of either delivering news that fits their world view or sanitizing bad news that does not. And, since there is no way that they can deliver that information in a timely way – they assume that their readers have already learned from the Web about important events – now it is the paper’s job to reduce any discomfort or cognitive dissonance by contextualize the story into the tribe’s existing prejudices and self-image.

This goes a long ways towards explaining what, to an old newsie like me, has been some strange behavior recently by some of our most venerable and biggest national newspapers. Whatever your politics, as a reporter there are just some stories that you would be all over – and yet, in the last couple years we’ve seen one hot story after another all-but ignored by the traditional media. For example, White House scandals are always big news, yet readers of the New York Times have largely been presented with a series of departures from this Administration without ever having heard about the scandals (covered to exhaustion in the blogosphere) that lead to those departures.

An even bigger example is the so-called ClimateGate scandal of the last few weeks, where leaked emails suggested that some global warming experts were misrepresenting and fudging data, all while punishing apostasy in their ranks, to make their case. Given that we are about to turn the world economy upside-down to prevent perceived man-made global warming, this is about the biggest story imaginable. And yet, days went by before most newspapers even deigned to report the story, in many cases using the occasion to defend the scientists.

Appalling, sure, but why do it? I’ve puzzled over this for a long time. I don’t entirely buy the argument that it is politics, pure and simple. I think it is more than that: that newspapers and their editors want to give their declining pools of readers what they want to read – and when the news, no matter how juicy, is not just going to be upsetting (that’s usually okay), but challenges their sense of the way the world works, the story has to be spiked, dribbled out carefully, or swathed in more comforting ‘analysis’.

Will this new editorial model work to save newspapers? Well, it seems to be hanging on to that residual group of loyal, but aging, readers. It doesn’t seem to be capturing any new young readers.

So perhaps the real business model is simple codependancy.

"Houston, They Have A Problem"

A real rocket-scientist on the non-science of AGW. One of the best "technical" Climategate posts currently out there, and hot off the presses.

A Little Too Dim To Notice The Circularity

P.Z. Myers:

The resurrection of Jesus is not a reasonable historical event. There are no primary, contemporary accounts of his existence. The books of the Bible that describe him were written decades after the purported event, and most of the biblical accounts are second-, third-, or distant-hand hearsay written by people with a vested interest in promoting a religion [bolding mine].

So, if I understand correctly, the Bible is not reliable, because it is a lie, and we know it is a lie because it speaks of the resurrection of Jesus, which we have no evidence for, because the Bible cannot be that evidence, because the people who wrote the Bible had a vested interest in promoting a certain idea, namely that Jesus resurrected from the dead.

So I guess evidence for something cannot count as evidence for something if it purports to be evidence for something.

This is not even to speak of the inane "hearsay" accusations for which our empirical scientist has zero evidence, nor the inanity of considering something written a mere couple of decades after the fact, well withing living memory (and in a society which was much more adept at memorizing oral history than ours is), as somehow invalid on the face of it. Hey, where were you when the Space Shuttle blew up in '86, almost a quarter of a century ago? Liar.

Pure Arrogance

Read it and weep.

Blatantly Unconstitutional

The Corner:

An Unconstitutional Mandate [Hans A. von Spakovsky]

When Nancy Pelosi was asked where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance, she dismissed the question by saying, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” According to CNSNews, her press spokesman said that this authority comes from Congress’s “constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce.” However, as a new legal memorandum from Heritage points out, Speaker Pelosi is completely wrong: The individual insurance mandate is both unconstitutional and unprecedented (there is a two-page executive summary for anyone who does not have time to read the entire memorandum).

There is no question that the Supreme Court has upheld extensive regulation of economic activity through the Commerce Clause, but it has never upheld any requirement by Congress that an individual participate in economic activity. There is nothing in the Constitution that allows Congress to punish you if you don’t engage in commerce. Liberal law professors and editorial writers such as Erwin Chemerinsky of UC-Irvine and Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post try to gloss over this point, and won’t admit that the Supreme Court has never approved any such requirement.

The new Heritage paper points out that the penalty imposed on individuals who don’t comply with this mandate is also a capitation tax, and therefore unconstitutional, because it is not assessed evenly based upon population. The paper also explains why a federal mandate to buy health insurance would be totally different from state requirements to buy automobile-liability insurance. The federal government does not have the inherent police powers of the states that authorize such mandates; the state requirements are imposed on those who engage in a voluntary activity (driving a car), while the health-insurance mandate would be imposed on everyone; you only have to buy liability insurance if you drive on public roads; and finally, states only require you to get insurance that protects third parties that you may injure through your driving — you are not required to buy insurance to protect yourself from injury or your own car from damage.

If Congress can impose a health-insurance mandate, then there is no limit to what Congress can do, and the Constitution’s limits on congressional power will have essentially been eliminated. As Will Rogers once said, with Congress, every time they make a joke it’s a law, and every time they make a law it’s a joke. Unfortunately, none of us will be able to laugh over this pending abuse of power.

If Congress passes this, and the Supreme Court upholds it, that will be to what must happen next as Dred Scott was to the Civil War.

Shea On ID

Good piece.

I espcially liked the Chesterton gem in this paragraph:

But, well, I don't see the big problem with saying, "When it walks and talks like a duck, odds are it's a duck." So when I look at what the ID guys call "specified complexity," I make exactly the same inference every single time: Somebody designed this, just like the Boeing engineers did. I don't think there's any need to invoke the God of the Gaps, or to assume that the Somebody who designed it couldn't have used natural means to achieve his affect. But I do have the same sensation as Chesterton when he observed that, "One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot." When something is massively and eloquently redolent of the astounding ingenuity of the Creator, as, say, even the simplest living system is (however it may have evolved), then why not chalk it up to a Creator? I don't think that takes a God-of-the-Gaps argument. I think it just takes common sense. If an arrow in a target says "archer" and a bullet in a body says "murderer," then why doesn't that paramecium motor scream "design"?

Note: Shea's understanding of the ID argument as displayed in the piece are not exactly correct. I don't think he really understands the precise meaning of "irreducible complexity", and he speaks of paramecium motors instead of bacterial motors.

Also, one of the comments to the post sums up something very well:

Re: Methinks the lady doth protest too much

December 08th, 2009 | 1:13pm

Hey guys, if this "i.d." business is such a loser, why all the outrage and emotion? And you can forget the hackneyed, "I'm really just a superior person attempting to keep others from falling prey to superstition" routine. Your lack of charity is all too manifest in your remarks.
— dd

My sentiments exactly. Even if evolution is true, the bigotry, elitism, and arrogance of its defenders would make me want to see it fail.

Chicks Were More Sensible 15 or 20 Years Ago

They didn't fall so easily for the Emo act. Great mashup.

Shallow Thinking, Schooled

From the comments of this Anchoress post:

I don’t get it. As a Catholic I think each person has a right to proper health care, as well as proper nutrition and shelter and clothig. JP2 said as much in one of his encyclicals. The Catholic tradition is to help the poor, not to leave them in the gutter, unable to take care of themselves. In Canada (a country with a Catholic tradition) we have a very good public health care system. Rich people do not deserve better care than the poor. We are all of equal importance and dignity.

----

[Whoever said "rich people deserve better health care than the poor?" Put your straw man away, please; I have no patience for people putting words in my mouth I am in favor of everyone having health care. I just don't believe that the entire nation needs to be overhauled to do that. We have 30,000.000 uninsured? The gov't could have insured them for a comparative pittance, considering the money they've wasted on bailouts and "saving" jobs that either didn't need saving or really paid off the debts of fellow politicians. If the gov't really wanted to reform health care, they'd be talking about real industry competition, reasonable tort reform and creative measures similar to what Rudy Giuliani did in NYC, whereby uninsured were able to buy into the same insurance the city workers had. There is no reason why a sliding scale of govt assistance w/ regards to insurance could not have been developed. If you want to play "I don't understand, you must be a bad and uncompassionate Catholic if you don't want Obamacare" be my guest, but please, that argument does not play here. To suggest that the ONLY way to do this is ONE way, and that must be the OBAMA way is partisan nonsense, and nothing more. And btw, the gov't has admitted that even after all is said and done, ten million will still not have healthcare. Please forgive my tone; that was a bit less polite than I had intended.-admin]

----

But from where does that tradition get its human resources and funding? From the hearts and wallets of people who voluntarily offered up their time, talent, and treasure to support the poor.

Bishops and priests did not threaten Catholics with jail time, or exorbitant fines, or bringing the full weight of the Vatican down on individuals who do not provide enough in charitable donations.

All things that the government is doing. Buy an appropriate plan or pay a penalty. The health care bill includes provisions for home visitations for expectant parents and those with young children. Will the government social worker who comes to MY door see our wall of icons and bookcase full of religious texts and decide we’re unfit parents?

Those who seek to implement socialized medicine have an obvious disdain for human life, from conception through old age, wherein they actively seek to eliminate the unwanted, the imperfect, the undesirable. When they are in charge of the purse strings, expect the groups they do not like to face the short end of the stick. They will not respect the rights of Catholics, or any other person of sincere faith, to object to participating in abortions (which will be funded by the tax dollars of people who find abortion to be intrinsically evil), or prescribing contraception, or offering fertility services (in vitro) to lesbian couples. We are supposed to serve, in charity, a system that does not respect our beliefs and values? We cannot compromise our immortal souls for a political cause.

As for the equality of which you speak, all the socialized system of medicine will do is make a majority of us equal in sub-standard care while those who are rich or affluent enough can afford better. It will not make health care more affordable or accessible for anyone except the extremely wealthy.

Catholic teaching also speaks of the responsibility of the individual; refusing to care for yourself or your loved ones is a grave matter. I, sadly, believe a lot of people who say they can’t afford insurance could, if they prioritized their budgets. Many states have programs that insure people who make 3, 4, 5 times the poverty level (for a family of four, that’s around $20,000/year, I believe). Which means people who make $60k, $80k, $100k/ year could not have to pay for health insurance when people who make far less find a way to do it. I’m not working right now, but we figured out how to get insurance coverage even though it means we’ll have less disposable income. Could we qualify for a government program? Perhaps. Enabling people to live relying on the government’s ability to tax others does nothing for THEIR dignity or THEIR soul – there is blessing and grace achieved through hard, honest work. And we’ve lost that.

I do not disagree that those who are genuinely, truly poor should receive some form of assistance. No one is saying they shouldn’t. At this point in time, anyone can walk into an ER anywhere in this nation and – by law – receive the best care this nation has to offer for little or no cost. There are signs posted in ever ER I’ve ever been in stating this fact in plain English.

Why then, do we need to destroy a system that is maybe 10% flawed?

Because it’s about control. It’s about giving the government the ability to control our bodies, our lives, our families. And that is contrary to Catholic teaching in many, many ways.

----

"When you tell me I have the obligation to pay other people’s bills, that is where I draw the line"

So we won’t tell you, Peter.

We’ll simply take it from you.

And if there is some person out there trained in healthcare who doesn’t want to provide a particular medical service, we’ll simply force them to do it.

After all — people have a right to proper health care, nutrition, shelter, and clothing. And if they have a right to something, then they the authority to enforce that right in order to obtain it.

And if you are ever sick or hungry or want a place to stay and something to wear, simply go over to the home of those who insist that we have a right to these things and demand that they provide them to you, and if they don’t, simply go raid their medicine cabinet, eat their food, sleep in their bed, and take their clothes. After all, you have a right to these things and someone has to provide them.

What fools the Founding Fathers that you cite were. They thought that you merely had the liberty to seek these things without undue impediments, including government interference. In other words, they thought that government should get the hell out of the way to let people provide for themselves and have the ability to likewise provide for their less fortunate neighbor. They didn’t realize that we had the right to demand that other people provide these things for us.

I confess, that in reading the Gospels where Jesus tells us about doing charity (love of neighbor), I missed the part where He snatched all the money and possessions from the rich man, or where He patted the tax collectors on the back for their good work in collecting money to finance those public services that we have a right to, or where the Good Samaritan takes the wounded guy to the inn and tells the innkeeper to put him up for free before going to chase down the two who passed by to take their money as payment for his transportation services.

----

"A Foreign, Quaint And Different Era"

Says The Anchoress about a charming television clip. Watching it, and comparing it to anything today, it is very hard not to conclude that we are now in a terminal civilizational tailspin.

Consensus!

Science!

See also.

The Bandwagon

Great post. Among other things, the post highlights an excellent reader comment at another blog:

Megan,

With respect, you’re setting up a strawman. None of the scientists who have “come out” as climate skeptics allege a massive conspiracy by scientists, any more than there is a massive liberal conspiracy in Hollywood. What you have is a self-emergent, self-organizing bias. I hope I can illustrate it briefly.

I work in academic science (check my IP address if you wish). Scientists are, in general, uncompromising idealists for objective, physical truth. But occasionally, politics encroaches. Most of my work is funded by DoE, DoD, ONR, and a few big companies. We get the grants, because we are simply the best in the field. But we don’t work in isolation. We work as part of a department, which has equipment, lab space, and maintenance staff, IT, et cetera. We have a system for the strict partition of unclassified/classified research through collaboration with government labs. The department had set a research policy and infrastructure goal to attract defense funding, and it worked.

The same is true in climate science. Universities and departments have set policies to attract climate science funding. Climate science centers don’t spontaneously spring into existence – they were created, in increasingly rapid numbers, to partake in the funding bonanza that is AGW. This by itself is not political – currently, universities are scrambling to set up “clean energy” and “sustainable technology” centers. Before it was bio-tech and nanotechnology. But because AGW-funding is politically motivated, departments have adroitly set their research goals to match the political goals of their funding sources. Just look at the mission statements of these climate research institutes – they don’t seek to investigate the scientific validity or soundness of AGW-theory, they assume that it is true, and seek to research the implications or consequences of it.

This filters through every level. Having created such a department, they must fill it with faculty that will carry out their mission statement. The department will hire professors who already believe in AGW and conduct research based on that premise. Those professors will hire students that will conduct their research without much fuss about AGW. And honestly, if you know anything about my generation, we will do or say whatever it is we think we’re supposed to do or say. There is no conspiracy, just a slightly cozy, unthinking myopia. Don’t rock the boat.

The former editor of the New Scientist, Nigel Calder, said it best – if you want funding to study the feeding habits of squirrels, you won’t get it. If you wants to study the effects of climate change on the feeding habits of squirrels, you will. And so in these subtle ways, there is a gravitational pull towards the AGW monolith.

I think it the most damning evidence for this soft tyranny is in the work of climate scientists whose scientific integrity has led them to publish results that clearly contradict basic assumptions in AGW modeling. Yet, in their papers, they are very careful to skirt around the issue, keeping their heads down, describing their results in a way obfuscates the contradiction. They will describe their results as an individual case, with no greater implications, and issue reassuring boilerplate statements about how AGW is true anyway.

For the field as a whole, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s the unfortunate consequence of having a field totally dominated by politically-motivated, strings-attached money. In the case of the CRU email group, well, the emails speak for themselves. Call it whatever you want.

This Should Be Fun

Next month, Bretibart will be starting up a new site called Big Journalism:

Walsh and Breitbart share a similar distaste for the day-to-day work of “institutional journalists.” In an interview, the new editor of Big Journalism boiled down the mission of the site thusly: “Our goal at Big Journalism is to hold the mainstream media’s feet to the fire. There are a lot of stories that they simply don’t cover, either because it doesn’t fit their world view, or because they’re literally innocent of any knowledge that the story even exists, or because they are a dying organization, short-staffed, and thus can’t cover stuff like they did before.”

“Big Journalism will be the go-to site for solidly backed-up stories, sharp points of view, and really great writing,” he said. “We are defenders of the First Amendment and resolute enemies of political correctness. That’s the key to the site’s philosophy.”

Breitbart feels that “if these traditional media outlets can’t be shamed into telling the truth, diverted for doing the wrong story, for simply running defense for one party, and mocked away from creating journalistic rules that only hold those on the right accountable, then it puts us in a position to do more than we’ve done in the past with talk radio and web aggregation. The market is wide open to go on the offensive, to tell truths that aren’t being told. The center-right alternative media has been playing a passable prevent defense, constantly saying ‘that’s not right’ for consistently biased reporting. Now we aim to offer more aggressive journalism and to give the mainstream media a little dose of its own medicine.”

Thanks, Researchers

From National Geographic's Top Ten Space Finds of 2009:

1. Sun Oddly Quiet—Hints at Next "Little Ice Age"?

In May the sun was still the most sluggish it had been in decades, prompting concerns about a cooling effect on climate—but the dip in solar activity wouldn't be likely to fight global warming, researchers cautioned.

A cooling effect on climate won't help fight global warming? Obviously the term "global warming" is here being used to refer to something other than, you know, global warming. This is a bit like American journalists referring to black athletes from other countries as "African Americans", isn't it?

The Whiny CEO

GayPatriot:

Over at the Atlantic, Chris Good reports: ”only half of Americans would rather have President Obama in the White House than his predecessor, while 44 percent would prefer George W. Bush to still be president.“

He cites a Public Policy Polling survey which found:

Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama’s declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they’d rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that’s somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country’s difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited.

If Obama keeps reminding us of the “tough situation he inherited” (as he did again Tuesday), Americans might not think him up to the job. You know, when a new CEO is hired to take over a company with declining revenues, he doesn’t blame the old management, but rolls up his sleeves and figures out how to fix the mess. If he keeps blaming the old management while revenues continue to decline, the board will likely replace him at their next meeting.

Looks like the “board” of this organization is beginning to think more favorably about the old CEO, even though he has gone into a constitutionally mandated (and not entirely unwelcome) retirement. And the Constitution prevents the board from meeting for another three years. Looks like we’re stuck with the whiny CEO.

And his hapless predecessor begins to look better by contrast.

The "Journalism" Industry Goes From Strength To Strength

"Editor & Publisher closing after 108 years"

Yet another sign of the economic collapse of the propaganda industry. The causes are wholly mysterious; after all the product is fundamentally sound.

Perhaps a bailout is in order. I'm starting to get the feeling that the statists of the Press are allowing all of this to happen, because their fondest fantasy is to be owned by the state, lock, stock, and barrel.

There Can Be No Scientific Criticism Of Science

Clive Crook looks at the response of the climate science establishment thus far.

NYT Brings Us The Separate But Equal Holiday Gift Guide

Do they also have a special guide for gifts that white people would like?

Link

Link

Right....And If You Can Get A Job Building Houses, Why Can't You Get A Job Burning Them Down?

I mean it's all about making a living related to housing isn't it?

Moral nuance:

Boxer: If ObamaCare covers Viagra, why shouldn’t it cover abortion?

"That Way, You Get An Average That Looks Kinda Real, I Guess"

"The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero", takes a look at some radical and completely unexplained temperature adjustments in the GHCN climate data set.

The Answer Is To Make Sure They Never Become Worth The Risk Of Buying Them Off

An excellent piece regarding political corruption.

Riveting

A pretty amazing conversation between Shatner and Limbaugh. It's like something from a vastly more civilized era.

Panorama

Taken October 25, with the Nikon D40 and its cheap kit lens.



Big right side up version here.

A Remedial Education For Journalists

Good stuff from Rupert Murdoch who makes the case that offering something of value that people are willing to pay for can be a good way to make money. It's just crazy enough to work.

The Messiah Is Out Ahead Of All Other Presidents

In terms of low approval numbers:

President Obama's job approval rating has fallen to 47 percent in the latest Gallup poll, the lowest ever recorded for any president at this point in his term.

Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and even Richard Nixon all had higher approval ratings 10-and-a-half months into their presidencies. Obama's immediate predecessor, President George W. Bush, had an approval rating of 86 percent, or 39 points higher than Obama at this stage.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said he doesn't "put a lot of stock" in the survey by Gallup, which has conducted presidential approval polls since 1938, longer than any other organization.

"If I was a heart patient and Gallup was my EKG, I'd visit my doctor," Gibbs said in response to questions from Fox. "I'm sure a six-year-old with a Crayon could do something not unlike that. I don't put a lot of stake in, never have, in the EKG that is daily Gallup trend. I don't pay a lot of attention to the meaninglessness of it."

Demons Of The Mind

An example of art by an AGW enthusiast.

Says Instapundit:

Actually, the only people I remember seeing who looked like that were the result of a government program. . . .

Poor Thing

Perhaps the "horrific situation" she was facing was her own immorality.

From the WSJ of all places, in an article about nouveau girdles:

Before Jessica Kraus put on a tight-fitting frock one recent evening, she wriggled into a $76 piece of flesh-toned underwear that extended from the bottom of her bra to mid-thigh. She felt confident and svelte as she left her apartment to meet friends for cocktails.

Then a few hours later, the 25-year-old Boston event planner was faced with what she says was a "horrific situation." As she was embracing a man she had met that night, Ms. Kraus got to thinking about what lurked beneath her sleek exterior.

"There's no graceful way of taking the thing off," she says.

Honey, you missed the "grace" train long before that point!

As one commenter to the article said:

Pretty sad that nearly all these women were concerned about how the product interfered with their impenitent bouts of fornication.

NPR Says Fox News Must Be Biased. After All They Employ A Key NPR Personality.

Bias!.

It Really Is All Based On The Fever Dreams Of Frightened Children

Official proof.

Out With The Green, In With The Red!

No more half-measures.

And you've got to love this assertion of bona fides:

All who appreciate the enormity of the climate crisis still have a responsibility to make every change possible in their personal lives. I have, from the solar panels on my roof to the Prius in my driveway to my low-carbon-footprint vegetarian diet. But surveys show that very few people are willing to make significant voluntary changes, and those of us who do create the false impression of mass progress as the media hypes our actions.

No self-conscious irony there.

Also, we're all doomed:

As America joins the rest of the world in finally fighting global warming, we need to bring our battle plan up to scale. If you believe that astronauts have been to the moon and that the world is not flat [and that Jesus was a hoax?], then you probably believe the satellite photos showing the Greenland ice sheet in full-on meltdown. Much of Manhattan and the Eastern Shore of Maryland may join the Atlantic Ocean in our lifetimes. Entire Pacific island nations will disappear. Hurricanes will bring untold destruction. Rising sea levels and crippling droughts will decimate crops and cause widespread famine. People will go hungry, and people will die.

Not a single mention of Climategate. You'd think someone so deathly afraid of the Eco-Apocalypse would be relieved to have evidence that maybe things aren't all that bad. Wouldn't you?

See also.

Science! Has Always Been In The Business Of Burying True Knowledge About The Middle Ages

Hiding the Medieval Warm Period is just par for the course. An excellent American Thinker piece takes a closer look at "Hide The Decline".

Journalism!

"56 Newspapers to Sing As One About Copenhagen"

See also.

Politics And Male Fashion

Interesting take:

It is interesting to me that during the Bush administration the men’s fashion designers were designing for the slight and the androgynous male, but now that the slight and metrosexual male is residing in the White House, designers are trying to butch things up — just like they did during the namby-pamby Carter era.

Well, no amount of chest hair or weird NFL United We Serve commercials where the president is catching a football with smiling children, is going to make this administration suddenly macho and manly. Nancy Pelosi is the toughest politician in Washington, and it’s safe to say she’ll keep her necklines from plunging.

Real men need to fight the cultural scourge of swing fashion trends. Real men are not trendy. They’re classic. No one wants to see lithe and androgynous men. And no one wants to see a man’s chest hair, either.

More important than the silly trends and those that hawk them is the underlying cultural acknowledgment. There is no dressing up capitulating, weak behavior. Pictures of President Obama catching a football or lining up a putt with Tiger Woods or shooting a basketball with his campaign logo on it will not make up for the fact that his actions are weak and scraping. While there is no question that President Bush burnished his image with cowboy boots and brush clearing, it would have rung hollow had he not had the gumption to back up the image. President Obama’s problem is that the image and the action don’t match.

Real men demonstrate manliness — not from superficial photo ops. So men, either you got it or you don’t. Showing heavage will display nothing but insecurity or a strange disconnect from what normal women find appealing. Leave fashion trends behind. Embrace the kind of masculinity that is self-evident: decisive, common-sense action. It’s not something one wears. It just is.

Public 20 Times More Interested In Climategate Than In Tiger Woods

But who would care, except a few fringe lunatics wanting to please customers via committing journalism? Thankfully there are few of those.

Link

It's Unusual To Agree With The Saudis

But sometimes it happens:

Next week's Copenhagen conference may well see discussion of climategate, as at least Saudi Arabia is preparing to make an issue of it. It is getting harder and harder for the mainstream media to keep intact their embargo of news on the biggest scientific fraud on history. The BBC reports:

Saudi Arabia's chief climate negotiator, Mohammad Al-Sabban said that the CRU e-mail issue will have a "huge impact" on next week's UN climate summit.

Mr Al-Sabban made clear that he expects it to derail the single biggest objective of the summit - to agree limitations on greenhouse gas emissions.

"It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change," he told BBC News.

"Climate is changing for thousands of years, but for natural and not human-induced reasons."

Of course, the Saudis have an obvious interest in keeping hydrocarbon demand high. Nevertheless, with nations openly debating the issue, the coverup looks more and more ridiculous.

Spectaclism

Good philosophical post by Edward Feser.

It ends:

“But, but, but, but… naturalism just can’t be as groundless as that!” Wanna bet?

“But most contemporary academic philosophers are naturalists! How can they all be wrong?” Tsk tsk, come now, everyone knows that arguments from authority went out with the Middle Ages…

I've always found it interesting that the very same people who say, "Surely you cannot believe that an entire field of human intellectual endeavor (climate science, let us say, or Darwinism) has gotten it fundamentally wrong!" are precisely the same people who assert that essentially everyone across all fields of human intellectual endeavor got it fundamentally wrong in the Middle Ages.

Lovable Little Fuzzballs

This is news to some:

Jerry Coyne: "Atheists Have Been Humble for Centuries"--If You Don't Count the Last Three

Sometimes Jerry Coyne makes me spray my coffee. This gem from a post of his on detente in the new atheist-theist wars:

Atheists have been “humble” for centuries (who was more humble than Spinoza?) and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. It’s that crop of new atheist books that have finally created a climate in which atheists need not feel like pariahs...

Humble? Atheism's first assumption of power at the level of the nation-state was in the French Revolution. "Humility" doesn't do justice to the carnage wrought by French atheism-in-power, nor to the Napoleonic wars and millions of dead that followed in the ensuing decades of "atheist humility."

In the 19th century "atheist humility" incubated in the minds of men like Marx, and again gained the reins of power in 1917. The 20th century was the century of atheism in power. Here is the death toll of its "humility" (from The Black Book of Communism):

65 million dead from Atheism in People's Republic of China

20 million dead from Atheism in Soviet Union

2 million dead from Atheism in Cambodia

2 million dead from Atheism in North Korea

1.7 million dead from Atheism in Africa

1.5 million dead from Atheism in Afghanistan

1 million dead from Atheism in the Communist states of Eastern Europe

1 million dead from Atheism in Vietnam

New Atheists like Coyne sell a toxic ideology; atheism's transparent nastiness in "humble" exile is nothing compared to its record of totalitarianism and atrocities on assumption of power. There's a lot more to atheism than "humble Spinoza." Atheism-in-power is mankind's deadliest ideology, bar none.

"The First Lie Is The Deepest"

Excellent Vanderleun post.

To which Gagdad Bob commented:

Don't piss down my back and tell me it's acid rain...

And also comments:

The task now before the MSM is how to hide the decline. Of science.

Use Of The Term "Swifthack" Does Not Help Your Case. But You'd Know This If Science! Were Not Infested With Leftism.

Chris Mooney thinks that the use of the term "Swifthack" for the climate scandal is clever. This is because he thinks the Swiftboaters were liars. But the people who think the Swiftboaters were liars are leftist fools. Why does Chris Mooney not think he is simply digging a deeper hole for the cause of Science! ? Why does he think this attitude is going to convince those who need convincing?

Fair or not, true science is in the position of having to convincingly defend itself, if it wants to maintain its prestige. But its biggest alleged fans have gotten it into their heads that the answer to their critics is merely to shout "F*ck you! We're scientists!" Given the stakes, this attitude betrays a certain lack of wisdom and bigger-picture thinking. Folks are correct to wonder if this evident cognitive shortcoming also applies to the science itself.

The credibility inferno rages with ever greater intensity, and their only answer is to fiddle and mock. It seems that compact fluorescents are not the only dim bulbs we need to contend with.

Microsoft Helpfully Updates Excel In Wake Of Climategate

Link

Hey, Jerks, If You're So Bright And Clever, Why Don't You Create Your Own Original Symbolism Instead Of Abusing Ours?

Not an original thought to be found (NSFW).

"Joanna Krupa's Naked Crucifix PETA Ad Photo"

They Can't Even Count To Seven

Denial.

The Science Of The Saints

Mark Shea. The start of it nicely expresses (what should be) a commonplace, but the twist at the end makes it great.

But Science! Is Always Right!

Jonah Goldberg:

The Perils of Groupthink, Cont'd

My USA Today column yesterday (USAY for short) was on groupthink and the CRU debacle. Well, here's a good concrete example of what I was talking about. When an organization is plagued with groupthink, any convenient data or fact will be immediately believed without question. Contrary or inconvenient facts will be explained away.

Charlie Martin over at PJM highlights a perfect illustration of this tendency. Apparently the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, recently blew a gasket over a study that was equivocal on whether or not the Himalayan glaciers were melting due to global warming. Pachauri said: Of course they're melting! In fact, the 2007 IPCC report asserted that they are melting faster there than any place else. They'll all be gone — gone I tell you! — by 2035 if not sooner. The panel reported that: "If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."

Now, anyone who has seen a glacier up close who is not drunk on Kool Aid would have looked at a prediction that all of the roughly 10,000 Himalayan glaciers would be gone in less than 25 years with skepticism (particularly when many of them are, in fact, growing). It turns out that the 2035 prediction was a typo. The original paper on which the prediction was based had said the glaciers could be gone by 2350, but the IPCC guys read it as 2035 and Pachauri not only believed it, but when confronted with scientific evidence that even the 350 year prediction might be overblown, angrily defended the 25-year prediction as authoritative.

Nothing New Under The Sun

Ed Driscoll with an excellent video piece on how we've seen this all somewhere before.

John Stewart On Climategate

And Yet Even They Are Starting To Tire Of The Fraud

A Delingpole post rounding up latest climate scam developments.

excerpt:

Turning to the Independent for a balanced report on environmental matters is a bit like consulting Der Sturmer for a sensible, insightful view on the Jewish question. Still, for once, the house journal of eco-loonery seems to have got it right and the point made by Tory backbencher David Davis is well made:

“The ferocious determination to impose hair-shirt policies on the public – taxes on holiday flights, or covering our beautiful countryside with wind turbines that look like props from War of the Worlds – is bound to cause a reaction in any democratic country.”

Completely In The Dark And That's The Way They Like It

David Bernstein:

[L]iberal students are currently not being well-served educationally by their professors.

In particular, studies show that approximately 40% of American adults consider themselves to be conservatives. I would therefore posit that a well-educated American college graduate should have some idea of what mainstream conservatives think, and why they think it.

Yet the late controversy over Rush Limbaugh and the Rams suggests that many well-educated liberals don’t know the first thing about American conservatism. In particular, I found it extremely troubling that so many columnists, bloggers, political figures, and so on, were gullible/ignorant enough to believe that a mainstream figure like Limbaugh publicly praised the assassination of MLK, or stated that “slavery had its merits,” without any apparent controversy at the times these alleged remarks were made, with no diminishing of his 20 million strong audience, and with no harm to his political standing among conservatives and within GOP circles.

I’m a libertarian, not a conservative, and I’ve probably listened to a total of less then ten hours of Limbaugh in my life, but it was obvious to me that these alleged statements were phony. I would have hoped that they would have at least raised eyebrows among liberal commentators, such that they would have demanded a firm source before attributing them to Limbaugh. But no, apparently a significant fraction of well-educated American liberals, the products of our best universities, thought it unexceptional, indeed, completely congruous, that a mainstream conservative figure would praise slavery and James Earl Ray.

I’m not sure what the solution to this problem is, but I do think it’s clear that many product liberal-leaning institutions, starting with the universities, are sufficiently engaged in groupthink that they lack the most basic curiosity about or knowledge of what their ideological adversaries believe, and are instead inclined to dismiss them entirely as mere evil reactionaries. [And they are sufficiently isolated from contact with conservatives that they don’t have personal experiences to suggest otherwise; it’s easy enough, for example, to go to a top university, on to a major journalism school, and from there to the New York Times or MSNBC or The Huffington Post without every having had a serious intellectual discussion with a conservative colleague or mentor.] That’s not good for the universities, it’s not good for liberals themselves (isn’t easier to defeat one’s enemies if one first understands them?), and it’s not good for America.

Men Won

Only mildly satirical.

And No Doubt Capone Had Approving Peers

National Review has an excellent editorial on Climategate.

"You Want To Be On The Fun Partying Team, Don't You?"

A superb Ace of Spades post (some off color language in places).

This Is What A Real Hockey Stick Graph Looks Like

Link