Radioactive Communist Zombies

OWS Demands

In an earlier post I debunked some of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) crowd's economic demands.  And I used this picture to illustrate the post.

What I didn't do is talk about any of those demands.  So let's talk about that.

• Healthcare for All

We have almost achieved this. By law, any person who walks into an emergency room of a hospital will be treated regardless of their ability to pay.  But we can do better with some market reforms.  First, make the minimum deductible on health insurance $1,000.  Let people buy health insurance from anywhere so there's market competition.  Then make the premiums tax-deductible for individuals.  Then allow anyone to have a Health Savings Account (HSA) where they can put in pre-tax dollars and spend them paying for health care.  People will want to put in at least $1,000 a year at first to cover their deductible.  Have a provision that that money becomes theirs after . . . five years?  People will spend their health dollars wisely, shop around for lower prices, and market competition will bring down health costs.  Have high-risk pools (probably subsidized by government) for people with pre-existing conditions and have charity care for those who can't pay but there will be less of those as the prices of care and insurance drop due to market forces.

• Jobs with Dignity

Not quite sure what that means.  Any job that is honest and pays the bills is a good job.  You want more employed people, then release the entrepenurial spirit of America through lower taxes, lower regulations, and tort reform.  Make it easier to hire people.  And eliminate the minimum wage so that young, unskilled persons can get jobs, period.  Shoveling manure for $4 an hour beats unemployment every time (unless the government is paying $5 and hour to do nothing, which is why we need to re-reform welfare).

• Quality Public Education

Hilarious that this is a liberal demand.  It's their policies of cow-towing to the teachers unions that have made public education the expensive, worthless boondoggle it is today. We should simple eliminate public education and let people buy education like they buy food, clothes, housing (with government vouchers for the poor to help pay for it).  See here for more details.

• A Healthy Environment

The environment is healthy.  Go to Mexico or Peru to see an unhealthy environment.  We have probably invested trillions in cleaning up our environment.  Now the liberals want us to stop spewing carbon dioxide.  Frankly I think they just want us to stop anything beyond living like the Amish.  I'm glad the U.S. has, because of capitalism, enough money to clean the environment.  I've been to Mexico and Peru.  But once you take care of the low-hanging fruit, each step closer to "clean" becomes more and more expensive.  We are reaching the asymptote of where we'll spend bunches for a tiny improvement.  The problem is, the EPA has to justify its existence so it have to come up with new environmental threats even if they cost trillions of dollars that could be used to grow the economy and create jobs.

So the OWS crowd is still making demands that are still stupid.  What a shock.

Rapes Up; Police Blame Penises

Seattle has had an unprecedented increase in rapes this year: 15 already when last year there was only 21 all year.  Police officials talking to the city council blamed penises:

"A person who has a penis is more likely to use a penis," Metz said after the weekly council briefing.

Oh, wait, I'm sorry, I read that wrong.  Here's what it actually said:

Deputy Police Chief Nick Metz and Assistant Chief for Operations Paul McDonagh said that, while gang activity has played a role in the jump in homicides this year — 15 to date compared with 21 in all of 2011 — the common denominator is the use of firearms.

"A person who has a gun is more likely to use a gun," Metz said after the weekly council briefing.

What Deputy Police Chief Metz said was what is called prima facie (obvious on its face).  If you have a gun you are more likely to use a gun than someone who does not.  And if you have a penis you are more likely to commit rape than someone who does not (yes, I know there's a rare phenomena of female rape).  But having a penis dose not cause rape anymore than guns cause violence.  You might as well ban condoms to prevent sex as ban guns to prevent killings.

You'd think police officers would know better.  But big-city police officials are generally hired for their adherence to political correctness and not their policing skills.  I'm sure the rank and file don't agree with Metz.

You want to stop violence: control criminals.

Global Warming Skeptics Know Their Science

Despite the mainstream media and the global warming climate change true believers out there trying to portray global warming skeptics as ignorant yahoos, a new study shows that skeptics are as knowledgeable about science as believers, if not more so.  And, of course, only Fox News would report this:

A study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change finds that people who are not that worried about the effects of global warming tend to have a slightly higher level of scientific knowledge than those who are worried . . .

They determined this by asking respondents basic scientific questions such as is the electron smaller or bigger than the atom:

"As respondents’ science literacy scores increased, their concern with climate change decreased," the paper, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, notes.

So the more you know about science the less you believe global warming hype?  Makes sense.  And the more collectivist a person was, the more they worried about global warming:

That people’s cultural views – how much they value things like individualism and equality -- affect their views on global warming much more than actual knowledge about science. Regardless of how much they know about science, individualists were relatively unconcerned about global warming, whereas those who value equality were very concerned.

Thus it seems believe in global warming as something that will kill us all is more prone to those who a) are less scientifically literate and b) more liberal.

OWS Economics

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement (which occupies other places, too) is decidedly left-socialist.  It seems to be populated with the usual suspects of trustifarians, paid protesters, astroturfed union thugs, and of course, hard-core utopian idealists.  My thought was to take their economic ideas and debunk them.  The problem is, there doesn't seem to be one, coherent Occupy economy idea.  I found this "American Peoples New Economic Charter" but it is long, complicated (as it would have to be because for a leftist you have to consider every possibility and even then you'll miss something), and I got bored after the first paragraph (of many).

So let's talk about two things I saw in reports about the Occupy movement.  One was, I saw a girl say we should get rid of money.  And the other was a guy saying everything should be free.  So let's take that as a basis of OWS economics.  For one thing, if everything were free, you wouldn't need money.  QED.

So everything is free.  I assume that means your labor.  You go do whatever work you want to do for as long as you want to do it, and then you go to the store and get what you need from people doing the same.  That would work, if only humans weren't lazy butts.  For instance, I love to write.  I can and do do it all day long.  But it's hard work even though I love it.  I can't do it constantly.  So I take days off (like Saturday and Sunday).  The other problem is, my books sell okay, but they aren't best sellers (of course, if they were free, "best seller" would be an oxymoron).  But who's going to do the yucky jobs.  Is there someone out there who likes shoveling manure at an organic farm?  How are you going to incentives them if you can't pay them (there's no money) and they can live as richly as the person who sits on their butt all day (everything is free).  And since everything is free, a lot of people will choose to do nothing.

And another problem.  What incentive will someone have to invent wonderful things like computers, laptops, iPhones, etc.  "I know, I'll put in 100 hour work weeks, use my genius and sweat to invent the next great widget, and recieve no greater reward than the guy who sits on his butt all day".

And another problem: allocation of resources.  If everything is free, who gets the Ferraris and who gets the Toyota Yarises?  Everything is in short supply (economists call this scarcity).  So how do you allocate scarce resources?  Everyone gets a Yaris and no one gets a Ferrari?  So, again, what is my incentive to work?  What is Toyota's incentive to build Yarises (Yarisi?)?

Sorry, but your economics won't work because of scarcity and lazy human beings.  We need money to allocate resourse and we have to pay for things because price gives us information about scarcity.

But nice try.  Not quite sure why you think your pet ideas are better than 50,000 years of hard-earned human experience.

The Hockey Stick is Gone

Remember the hockey stick?  This was a graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that showed a sharp upswing in temperatures in the 20th Century purporting to show that temperatures had never been higher in the past 1,000 years than they are today, even in the so-called Medieval Warm Period.

It appears that the Hockey Stick was the result of  . . . cherry-picked data.

What is cherry-picked data?  Let's say you want to show that most Americans think Obama is the best president ever.  So you survey 1,000 random people.  But then you decided that the results from the Republicans are invalid and throw those out, and then publish your results showing most Americans think Obama is the greatest president ever.  That's cherry-picking.  It's selecting data based on what the data says, like picking the best cherry out of a group of cherries on a tree.

So how was cherry-picking done in the case of the hockey stick?  The hockey stick is based on proxy temperature measurements using tree rings of trees in a remote area of Russia (a great way to limit your data points, by the way).  This is problematic because tree rings are not only affected by temperature.  As Andrew Montford and Harold Ambler write on NRO:

Russian tree growth, like that of trees around the world, also reflects changes in humidity, precipitation, soil nutrients, competition for resources from other trees and plants, animal behavior, erosion, cloudiness, and on and on.

But ignoring that, the so-called scientist who gathered the data, threw bunches of it out (emphasis added):

It was already known that the Yamal series contained a preposterously small amount of data. This by itself raised many questions: Why did [Keith] Briffa include only half the number of cores covering the balmy interval known as the Medieval Warm Period that another scientist, one with whom he was acquainted, had reported for Yamal? And why were there so few cores in Briffa’s 20th century? By 1988, there were only twelve cores used in a year, an amazingly small number from the period that should have provided the easiest data. By 1990, the count was only ten, and it dropped to just five in 1995. Without an explanation of how the strange sampling of the available data had been performed, the suspicion of cherry-picking became overwhelming, particularly since the sharp 20th-century uptick in the series was almost entirely due to a single tree.

He threw out data?  Yes, he did:

The intrigue deepened when one of the Climategate e-mails revealed that, as far back as 2006, Briffa had prepared a much more broadly based, and therefore more reliable, tree-ring record of the Yamal area. But strangely, he had decided to set this aside in favor of the much narrower record he eventually used.

And when the data Biffa threw out is included, the hocky stick disappears.

So if the science is settled and global warming climate change is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, why is a climate scientist cherry-picking data to prove his hypothesis in violation of the Scientific Method we all learned in grade school?  Could it be . . . the funding?  Naw.  And how do we know that anything climate scientists claim is reliable and not cherry-picked or even dry-labbed?

 

Democracy in Egypt

Egyptians are voting today in their first "free elections" ever.  The press is ga-ga over it.  A Reuters headline: "With Mubarak gone, Egyptians vote freely for leader."

Egyptians relished their first free leadership vote on Wednesday, with Islamists pitted against secular figures in a contest unthinkable before a popular revolt swept President Hosni Mubarak from power 15 months ago.

The problem is, what if the majority of Egyptians vote in the Muslim Brotherhood?  Should we respect that choice even if it means Egypt becomes a client state of Iran (or just Iran without the oil).  Women's rights violated.  Gays hung.  Girls flogged for kissing a boy (okay, that was Pakistan, but still).

That is why our brilliant founding fathers set up a constitutionally limited representative government.  Not a democracy.  The United States was never supposed to be a pure democracy.  I've touched on these themes before.

Now if Egyptians want to vote themselves back to the Stone Age, I guess that's their right (murdered Coptic Christians not withstanding).  But if they start exporting terrorism or funding terrorist groups (like Iran) then it becomes our problem.  As liberals live to point out, Hitler was democratically elected.  Probably didn't get much of the Jew vote but they were in the minority (really in the minority after the war and I'm pretty sure Jews in Poland didn't vote for Hitler, either).

That is why governments have to be limited in what they can do.  Because otherwise, they'll do anything.  It's a slippery slope with North Korea at the far end.

Let's hope the Egyptians don't elect the Muslim Brotherhood.  But let's make sure we're ready if they do.

The Ray LaHood "Car of the Future"

I sometimes wish I could draw.But I can't and we all have to live with our limitations.  If I could draw, I would draw the "Ray LaHood Car of the Future."

You see, Ray LaHood is the current Secretary of Transportation in the Obama Administration.  And he seems obsessed, nay fervid, about "distracted driving."  And, being part of the Obama Administration, he's also over-seeing raising Corporate Average Fuel Economy Levels to absolute ridiculous levels and saping all the enjoyment out of driving (assuming you can still afford to drive after paying the taxes to fund all of LaHood's multi-billion dollar "high-speed" public transport systems and Obama's Energy Secretary gets his wish of $8/gal gasoline).  What would the "Car of the Future" feature?

1) Driver isolation cell, slightly elevated to give the driver an 360 degree field of vision.  It will also be a Faraday cage to prevent any distracting signals from going in or out.  No cell phone, no radio, no GPS, nothing that could possibly distract the driver.  Including other passengers who will sit in their own sound-proof cell.  There will, however, be speakers amplifying outside sounds.  The only dial needed will be a fuel/battery gage (see #5 below) and a light that turns one saying "something is wrong" which will explain why the car is automatically stopping.

2) Passenger cell, seats three and ONLY three (there's a reason we want free birth control), with all sorts of restraints, airbags, and an uncomfortable seat.  The good news is, it has all the entertainment functions anyone could want.  However, if you have a small child in a safety seat you need to buy the "Car of the Future, small child edition" with built-in child seats.  There is also a "something is wrong" button to alert the driver something is wrong (the car's computer will also alert the driver if it detects a problem).

3) The driver's cell will be supplied with a Breathalyzer test device and a slot to insert an insurance-company-issued card which will allow the vehicle to operate after all seat belts are belted (pressure sensors detect who's in what seat).  Upon pressing start a 5-minute safety briefing by Ray LaHood is played for the driver and passengers detailing the safety features of the car, how to exit the car in the case of an emergency, and how to buckle the seat belts (which will all be already buckled or the car wouldn't start).  The driver is, in addition, reminded of their vast responsibility to drive safely and that "Big Brother is Watching" (Big Brother being the fleet of drones patrolling across America).

4) The vehicle will feature a three-cylinder engine capable of 85 horsepower backed up buy two electric motors from a blender that will accelerate the vehicle to 55 (the new national maximum speed limit . . . again) in 38.6 seconds.

5) The vehicle's computer will use GPS and a database to determine the speed limit and set the vehicle's maximum speed to 3 miles per hour under it.  If the windshield wipers or the lights are on (i.e., night), that is reduced to 10 miles per hour under the speed limit.  If the traction control system detects slippery conditions, that is reduced to one-half the speed limit.  If it's night, the windshield wipers are on, and it's slick, the car will flash the "something's wrong" light and automatically have a nervous breakdown.  The upkeep of this database will be the car owner's responsibility and should cost only $1,000 per year and be shipped out 5-6 weeks after receiving your certified letter and certified check.

6) The vehicle's range will only be 20 miles.  If you need to travel farther than that, you should consider one of the "LaHood High Speed" options such as the train, bus, or low-carbon footprint blimp.

And that will be the Car of the Future, Ray LaHood style.

(I'm almost scared to post this for fear LaHood will read it.)