Fed Tories, pork-barrelling and the G8

Praise to the NDP’s Charlie Angus! I hope all of the opposition keeps hammering away at this crap from the Conservatives:

The NDP said one of the emails suggests Clement (then federal industry minister) concurred with a local Huntsville official that federal bureaucrats at Infrastructure Canada were getting in the way by conducting a review of planned G8 spending.

The local official wrote to Clement, saying “this is totally unacceptable — I am sure you agree,” according to the email. Clement responded right away, saying, “I agree. I’m working on it.”

People wonder why young kids have no interest in voting. It is pretty hard to blame them when the Tories act like the Libs and the Libs act like the Tories.

Neo-Con and Global Warming parallels in hysteria and morality

I heard the Canadian and British prime ministers ring the bells of doom and gloom yesterday:

“Neither of us will be accused of exaggeration if we acknowledge that the most immediate test confronting us all is to avoid the devastating consequences of a return to global recession,” he said. Governments must commit to cutting their debts and deficits and to resisting protectionism or a recession won’t be avoided, he warned.
In his speech, Cameron issued similar warnings and said Canada and Britain must face this year’s biggest challenge together: securing global economic growth.

This neo-con plee to support government intervention in the economy parallels what I recently encountered from the global climate warming change crowd. Actually, we hear this urgency from them all of the time but a very curious article about a physicist named Ivar Giaever who resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society to condemn the group’s official stand on global warming went on to quote from the APS group’s website:

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Sounds desperate — like the desperation of the neo-cons trying to print more money and expand credit for their own benefit.

I can assume that global warming is occurring. However, the final statement from the APS quote does not logically follow from the preceding statements. The global warming crowd aggressively promotes ethical conclusions based solely on natural facts. That is insane on the face of it and insulting to anybody who understands the nature of science, philosophy and logical reasoning. There is no need to even question the integrity of their research because an ethical conclusion can not be deduced solely from science. These scientists are out of their league when they make policy prescriptions.

Both the neo-cons and the climatologists may be right. I am not sure. One thing of which I am certain is that I do not support the neo-con policy interventions. I thought it was an interesting parallel. I have attacked the hypocrisy of neo-con strategy of printing money many times before. Now, I want to dissect the climatological hysteria.

Why must we reduce emissions?

That is not a rhetorical question. I am not suggesting that emissions are all good. I am just questioning whether the pros of reducing emissions outweight the cons. There is no universally objective reason why we should reduce emissions.

I know this will sound callous and heartless but I do not believe that the responsibility for making these changes are with the general public. Thus, it is unfair to compel the public to finance or accommodate those changes because the underlying premise — i.e., global warming is bad — arguably is false if people are choosing to contribute to the problem. It is through human choice that we can identify what people prefer.

What if global warming is inevitable?

Maybe there is nothing we can do to stop these significant disruptions because maybe the global warming can not be stopped no matter what we do? That is a likely possibility because opponents will delay global warming policy interventions. Enough delays means that the doom and gloom scenario will happen sooner or later.

If global warming is inevitable, efforts to stop global warming would be wasteful. Those efforts would be put to better use if people were re-located to newly temperate parts of the planet.

Proof

Just like the neo-cons, the global warming crowd seriously insist that something must be done now. Not next year. Right now. If you question that urgency, you are treated like an evil demon. God forbid that they should continue to force their agenda — it is actually just a wily scheme to enrich the pocket-books of the elite parasitic rich class but for the sake of argument, we can pretend that their motives are genuine — on all of us, you can bet they will drain every last penny out of us to stop their imaginary apocalypse.

The burden of proof is on the global warming advocates that their policies really do achieve their goals. That is a huge burden. Currently, the climatologists are incapable of predicting the future with any precision nor can they predict the outcome of any preventive measures. Nobody has any idea what temperature changes will occur with any particular policy. Nobody has any idea what to do to hit a target temperature. The science is not mature enough yet to meet that burden of proof.

This will sound callous but I honestly do not believe the majority of the public really cares either. If my perception is right then who are we to insist that everybody does anything about it?

I tell you, I love the comforts and the accessibility of modern technology. I would hate to have grown up with the generation of my parents and I am sure that my children will say the same one day. My parents had to move away from their native land. Had they stayed in their homeland, they would be dead. So, the challenges of people in coastal regions today vis-a-vis the coincidence of global warming are the same that most of our forefathers faced before as did their forefathers before them. People moving away from destitute parts of the world represents the entire history of mankind. Yet, we are leaving them with more material and informational wealth with each passing day.

I keep hearing people say that we should leave the planet to the future generations in the best shape possible. Well, I think we can arguably say that we are doing that in spite of the environmental degradation. In balancing the pros against the cons, I think our choices in life are much greater now than before and that they will be even greater in the future.

Imagine this: One day, there will be a cure for cancer, the development of which was dependent on the same industrial economy that produced this supposedly man-made global warming. Future generations will be cured of cancer in exchange for having a degradation of the coastal regions. Maybe that is a reasonable trade-off for these future people — who knows? By the way, a lot of previously cold barren lands will likely become fertile and habitable. People may be happier and life may possibly be easier with the changes. The science says nothing about how people will judge the changes for themselves.

Imagine now this: one day BEFORE the cure of cancer is found, the industrial economy is stunted by anti-global warming policies and the cancer research institute had to be shut down.

My point is that with so much unknown in the economy and in the field of meteorology, it is foolish to insist that the future will be worse. We have no idea who people will subjectively evaluate their lifestyles.

One thing about global warming and economic interventions that bother me is the moral dissonance. In a culture where an obligation to protect a future person’s survival is not even extended to somebody as real and concrete as an unborn child, there is a bit of a dissonance in policy that demands EVERYBODY has a moral obligation to protect the survival of people who do not even exist.

Oh, well.

If global warming is really a threat worthy of being stopped, then go ahead and keep convincing people of this incontrovertible science but promote interventions in a voluntarist manner. For instance, take the owner of a polluting industrial plant to court. Sue him for dropping soot on neighboring land. Sue him to the point where his only response is to stop operations. Alternatively, buy up industrial plants and then shut them down. Keep doing that. Buy surrounding properties and limit access to the plants.

People should pay for their own charitable campaigns. We generally have the same attitude towards the diversity of religious practice. Dealing with global warming should be no different.

New math or old math?

It seems like youngsters these days are not taught mathematics the regular old way and instead, they have been taught some new age techniques. We are only learning now that these new discovery-based teaching methods are failing to teach kids math:

The study, titled Math Instruction that Makes Sense, “demonstrates conclusively that traditional math education methods are superior to the highly ineffective, discovery-based instructional techniques that are in vogue now in educational curricula,” said a news release from the public policy think tank.

There you have it.

Now, get your rotten tomatoes out. You are going to want to toss them at me.

Ready?

I am not convinced that having the entire general population learning all of this mathematics is a good thing. In this day and age of technology, expecting high school graduates to devote their mental capacities to be able to do what can be done instantly with a calculator sounds like a waste of effort and a burning of what little creativity the average high school graduate still possesses.

By way of analogy, we no longer teach kids how to weave wool and knit clothing. Maybe it is time to upgrade our old-fashioned culture of mathematical education to the modern century?

I had a high school teacher who insisted on teaching us how to use a slide-rule, for goodness’ sake! A slide-rule, can you believe it?? Surely we can agree that teaching kids how to resolve or simpifly long arithmetic expressions with a slide-rule is a waste of educational effort? By the same token, I am saying that maybe, just maybe some fat can be trimmed from the old-fashioned mathematical curricula and teaching method.

Thus, conceivably, the poor performance of the discovery-based education in mathematics may not be such a bad thing. Instead of expecting A+++ performance, we may be fine with just an A level of knowledge.

Let us face fact: kids learn stuff fast when they are interested. Once a post-secondary student finds a field of study that interests him, he will learn the math on his own as a means to reach his goal.

For all we know, students from discovery-based teaching are far superior in other skills, namely, discovery. So, they could be far better off than other students in the pursuit and research of their interests.

Online Poker Fraud

Tough luck to the people who lost their money, I say.

The fact remains:

“This is gambling,” said ex-federal prosecutor James Montana, now a partner in Chicago’s Vedder Price LLC.

The people who got scammed took a ridiculous chance. They trusted people they did not know and got ripped off. I see no reason why the tax-payer should fund the mediation of a dispute between the loser customers of these online poker games and the owners of these games. The government should stay out of it just like the government should stay out of doping nonsense in professional sports.

I certainly have sympathy for people who got ripped off but they ought to be more prudent with their recreational wasting of money before they are entitled to tax-payer funded justice — assuming such an entitlement could possibly exist. In the grand scheme of things, theses poker losers are low on the totem-pole of people whose money warrants righteous protection.

Justice can be cheap, swift, non-violent and natural. The only weapon that is necessary is information. Once people find out that a particular online game is a scam, the customers will drop it and the scammer will sink rapidly. The poker company knows that and has every interest to make right of any possible or perceived wrongdoing.

Public dissent in American monetary policy

Dissent in The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy is becoming public. Finally, the otherwise-insulated crony capitalists are feeling market pressure! There is hope to believe that monetary policy will change before everything crashes and burns.

Until August, no Fed decision since 1992 had caused as many as three dissents on the policy committee. Economists say the level of disagreement isn’t surprising: It’s far from clear what more, if anything, the Fed should be doing to help lift the economy out of a low-growth, high-unemployment rut.

This dissent would not be news if it was not serious.

Maybe one day, all honest economics classes will teach that printing money does not create wealth.

Gov. Rick Scott steals from the poor to give to the rich

I knew something stank and it was not just the dead rat my cat delivers to me on a daily basis. What a buffoon. Here is a politician who pretends to champion a hard line against drug abuse and targets the poorest of the poor so that he can appear to prevent wasting taxes. What happens? His program wastes more money in a hypocritical display of trying to save money.

When I first read about this twisted nonsense today, from every angle, it seemed too absurd even for the anti-welfare crowd. [CAVEAT: I do not believe in welfare mainly because I do not believe in taxation. That is a different story altogether. There is no point me using this opportunity to preach charity.] For an anti-welfare guy myself, I must say that I felt a little sick to my stomach learning that these poor people had to fork out the $30 themselves. I had just come back from grocery shopping and I had spent $60 for the coming week.

Not to get too weird on you all but people on welfare spending their welfare money on drugs does not bother me much at all. Starving them is not going to help. However, putting the boot to drug dealers will help. If the statesmen really honestly wanted to fight The War On Drugs, they could put a stop to it overnight. The police know all of the who, what, where, why and how. It does not stop because there is just too much money to be lost by stopping the drug trade.

A keel-hauling is in order and it has to start from the top. I predict that this stupid mandatory drug testing program will continue to yield 98% drug-free rates but as long as Gov. Scott is in office, the program will never stop. Here is why:

Scott’s sale of the company comes as he attempts to distance himself from repeated conflict-of-interest questions about whether the company he started in 2001 — and hoped to develop into a national chain — would benefit from the aggressive health care changes he wants state lawmakers to approve.

First, I was angry. Now, I am fuming. This is crony-capitalism at its worst. The free marketeers keep demanding less government intrusion in the market place and they are right, as far as I am concerned. The socialists point to this cronyism and say: “See! See! The free market is failing! We have to regulate the market!” but they fail to recognize that we do not live in a free market.

I want a free market. I want the backroom thievery of Rick Scott to stop. I want his pharma-friends to starve. They leach out more corporate welfare than all of the poor welfare recipients combined! The money saved by stopping all of the corporate welfare would make it so that poor people would not need hand outs.

I have to go out and cool off. Hat tip to Jane for bringing attention to this story.