Right Wing Nut House

My latest article is up at FrontPage.com and it is about the curious disconnect both parties exhibited between reality and politics.

Neither side made much mention at all of our entitlement crisis.

And a crisis it is.

Cosmetic gambits like “spending freezes” and “doc fixes” can’t even begin to address the danger. This is political gamesmanship and it should anger us that the politicians know it but do it anyway. It’s not that the crisis is hidden, or has come upon us suddenly. We’ve known for decades where we were headed, but Washington chose the easy way: the politicians ignored the problem, kicking the can down the road, assuming they would be well into retirement — living off their extravagant congressional pensions — before history forced our hand.

The can has now been kicked into a cul de sac and there’s no way we can start kicking it back down the road. It may not be our fault, but we’re the ones who are going to have to pay for all of these promises so recklessly made by previous generations. One way or another, a solution will be found — or imposed — on us. Those are the only alternatives. Either the politicians will find the political courage (that they won’t get credit for) to start cutting and slashing at the monster or the monster will solve our problem for us by devouring us.

A few bare bones numbers are needed to prove that this is not hyperbole or political exaggeration. If we were to fulfill the promises made to every American from those born as I write this to the oldest citizen regarding Social Security and Medicare, it will cost us at least $130 trillion. Long before then, the entitlement crunch will have destroyed our economy. By 2016, 71% of the federal budget will be dedicated to paying entitlements of one form or another, the vast percentage of that being Social Security and Medicare.

There are 78 million baby boomers set to retire over the next 30 years, all expecting that monthly Social Security check for the rest of their lives. The significance of this is a matter of demographics. The number of workers paying into Social Security was 5.1 per retiree in 1960; this declined to 3.3 in 2007 and is projected to decline to 2.1 by 2035. We are currently in hock to the Social Security Trust Fund to the tune of $2.5 trillion. This number is expected to rise to $3.8 trillion by 2019. But by 2015, payments to Social Security beneficiaries will begin to exceed tax receipts. And by 2037, payments to recipients would start declining automatically – whether we wanted them to or not. The Trust Fund would be exhausted and Congress would be unable to tap any other revenue streams from the government to pay for it.

I erred in the year that Social Security’s payments to beneficiaries would exceed tax receipts. It’s not 2015. It’s this year.

Ain’t that lovely?

There are only two ways this is going to end and neither is without massive pain. The first is, we find the courage to confront the crisis and make the painful adjustments necessary to salvage our future. Or, we do nothing and get rid of the problem when the economy collapses.

Matt Welch writes that we “don’t do big things” anymore.

Here’s a reality check: We will not have high-speed rail within Segwaying distance of 80 percent of the country, ever. We will not get 80 percent of our electricity from “clean energy sources” by 2035, unless someone far outside the halls of government invents a snail that eats trash and poops hydrogen. Obama won’t veto every bill that arrives on his desk with earmarks–re-watch that part of the speech last night; no one believed him.

Why won’t these things happen? Because, as Rep. Paul Ryan rightly emphasized last night, the only real policy issue in America right now is that we are on the verge of fiscal catastrophe because cannot afford the government we’re paying for today, let alone the one we’re promising for tomorrow. And the president, though he is much more serious on this issue than a huge swath of his political party, is nonetheless not remotely serious about this issue. Vowing to cut $400 billion over 10 years (a plan that, judging by the two people clapping when he proposed it, will likely be cut to ribbons if it survives through Congress), at a moment when the deficit for this year is more than three times that, indicates that Democrats (and a helluva lot of Republicans as well) are hunkering down in our awful status quo–half-heartedly tinkering around the edges of spending, making incremental changes this way and that, then launching new moonshots and redoubling old impotent efforts. Politicians have put us on the precipice of financial ruin, and they show no indication of doing a damned thing about it.

[...]

There are more than a quarter million people working at the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce. Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security combined nearly pass the half-million mark. And at a moment of grave fiscal peril, we continue to spend half the planet’s money on defense, with Obama et al expecting thunderous applause for snipping out “tens of billions” from future defense spending growth. We continue to arrest 800,000-plus people a year for smoking or trading a plant that makes you want to eat Pop Tarts.

No, these people are not serious about the task at hand. The state of our union, as measured by the competence of people in power, is a f***ing disgrace.

It would be the biggest thing America has done since Apollo if we could attack the entitlement problem successfully. It will require the same amount of effort, despite the obvious fact that it isn’t very sexy, nor will it excite the American people.

In fact, it will have the opposite effect. In order to tackle Medicare and Social Security unfunded liabilities, no less than a drastic alteration in the way Americans think about government will have to take place. Old people will be scared and angry. Younger people might feel betrayed. The only ones who will be grateful are those yet unborn or in their infancy who will have vestiges of these programs to help them when they get older.

One big adjustment Americans are going to have to make is they are going to be paying more for their own health care. Hopefully, this will make everyone realize that there is no free lunch and that a kind of self-rationing protocol where people will only use the health care system when they truly need it will gradually take hold. The “fee for service” model will have to go and other ways to reimburse doctors and hospitals for their work will have to be found.

As for Social Security, there will probably never be a political consensus to privatize it - no matter how bad it gets. The program is much easier to deal with, however, simply by raising taxes and/or increasing the retirement age. That might buy us a few decades. Eventually, even that bandaid won’t be enough and we’ll be back to where we are today. Why some kind of means test, where those who are tapping another pension, or whose income without Social Security is above a certain level could receive less is a mystery. We have means tests for all kinds of entitlements and Social Security should be similarly administered.

Every year we delay adds a few trillion to our unfunded liabilities - now standing at $130 trillion. Here’s Bruce Bartlett on what we have to look forward to:

To summarize, we see that taxpayers are on the hook for Social Security and Medicare by these amounts: Social Security, 1.3% of GDP; Medicare part A, 2.8% of GDP; Medicare part B, 2.8% of GDP; and Medicare part D, 1.2% of GDP. This adds up to 8.1% of GDP. Thus federal income taxes for every taxpayer would have to rise by roughly 81% to pay all of the benefits promised by these programs under current law over and above the payroll tax.

Times’s up, Congress, Mr. President.

My latest is up at PJ Media where I give an account of the passage of the massive tax increase that was rammed through the Illinois legislature last week.

A sample:

The fact is, we treat these politicians and the whole process as if it were a religion. This breeds humorlessness among the citizenry, which leads to a decidedly unfunny political climate where we are forced to take goofballs like Joe Biden and Sarah Palin seriously. What passes for humor from both sides is the kind of ill-tempered, mean-spirited, pulling-the-wings-off-flies jocosity you grow out of when you hit puberty.

That’s why before I go to bed at night, I hit my knees and thank God I live in Illinois.

You people who live in good government states like Minnesota and Vermont really don’t know what you’re missing. You might have the occasional stray dog who wanders off the straight and narrow, dipping their greedy paws into the public purse, or perhaps being a little too generous to their friends and political supporters. Politics, like any human endeavor, has more than its share of charlatans, grave robbers, and amoral amoebas who were born with a prison number tattooed across their forehead. No matter how squeaky clean you try and make your local governments, these types always seem to make an appearance now and again just to remind us all of the moral frailty of our species.

But really, how entertaining is that kind of government? Once you start taking politicians too seriously, they start taking themselves too seriously and then you’re in trouble. A politician who takes himself too seriously actually believes they can solve the problems of the world by spending just a little bit more money that isn’t theirs. They start to believe their own campaign rhetoric about how wonderful they are and before you know it, your state is up to its eyeballs in debt.

Illinois has the most fascinating, the most colorful, the most entertaining politicians in the land, which makes following the goings on in Springfield akin to watching a combination Demolition Derby and cockroach race. Of course, we still get politicians who spend the state into penury, but at least we’re disabused of the notion that any high ideals or uplifting principles are at work. It is a rotten-to-the-core, cynical, sybaritic exercise in politics for fun and profit and it was on full display last week. A lame duck session of the Illinois legislature passed a gargantuan tax increase on individuals and businesses, while borrowing another $4 billion to seed the gold-plated retirements of unionized state workers.

I am going to start calling Illinois Governor Pat Quinn “Four-County Quinn.” In the November election, Quinn managed to win just 4 out of 102 Illinois counties. Of course, he won Cook County, the most populous county in the state, by more than 500,000 votes. This proved too much a handicap for his Republican opponent Bill Brady to overcome.

It should be obvious by now that Illinois politics will never be reformed, which is why it is so much better to see the goings on in Springfield as comedy rather than bemoan the lack of good government. Life’s too short to grant these crooks and charlatans the benefit of taking them seriously. If you do, you’ll only end up miserable like all Illinois political reformers who continue to be disappointed that their efforts don’t yield more positive results. Trying to stop a tidal wave of corruption with a spoon is not logical - but it makes the reformers fair game for humor too. King Canute had better luck stopping the tide from coming in than reformers have in trying to stem the corruption in Illinois politics.

What happens next with Illinois’ fiscal crisis? Sit back, pop some popcorn and prepare to be amazed and entertained.

Michael Daly writing in the New York Daily News:

Palin would no doubt say that she was only speaking in metaphor, that she only meant her followers should work to unseat Giffords and 19 other Democrats who had roused her ire by voting for health care.

But anyone with any sense at all knows that violent language can incite actual violence, that metaphor can incite murder. At the very least, Palin added to a climate of violence.

Palin should have taken it as a warning of what might happen when a Tea Party hothead dropped a gun while heckling Giffords at an earlier Congress On Your Corner event, more than a year ago.

No doubt Palin is not even bothering to defend her use of metaphors because “figures of speech” are just that; a way to colorfully enhance language to make it more interesting and memorable. If I were to say, “Hang Michael Daly from the highest yardarm!” no one with a rational brain cell in their head would actually believe that I was advocating violence against Mr. Daly - despite the fact that a swift whop to the nose with a rolled up newspaper is in order for his clueless rant about metaphors inciting violence.

Similarly, as Jack Shafer points out, the use of military metaphors in politics is so pervasive as to make any criticism of it both bizarre and hypocritical:

For as long as I’ve been alive, crosshairs and bull’s-eyes have been an accepted part of the graphical lexicon when it comes to political debates. Such “inflammatory” words as targeting, attacking, destroying, blasting, crushing, burying, knee-capping, and others have similarly guided political thought and action. Not once have the use of these images or words tempted me or anybody else I know to kill. I’ve listened to, read—and even written!—vicious attacks on government without reaching for my gun. I’ve even gotten angry, for goodness’ sake, without coming close to assassinating a politician or a judge.

From what I can tell, I’m not an outlier. Only the tiniest handful of people—most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds—can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding crass, the only reason this brouhaha erupted was because a nutcase coincidentally got a gun and shot a congresswoman. Otherwise, Sarah Palin’s “bullseye” map had long been forgotten and dropped off the radar of our political conversation.

This begs the question of when Mr. Loughner could have been exposed to the map and why it took him many months to become inspired enough by it to act out his fantasy. Is this a slow motion incitement by metaphor? Why the delayed reaction - even if you accept the preposterous notion that Loughner saw the bullseye map in the first place. Someone on the left might want to explain this to the rest of us before they continue with the “Palin has blood on her hands” meme. Where did Loughner see the bullseye map? When? How could a mind without logic or reason, logically process the bullseye map - as in the suggestion of cause and effect being posited by many liberals - and become inspired to kill?

If you’ve read Loughner’s YouTube blather and incoherent ranting, you wonder if any such logical assumption can be made:

If I teach a mentally capable 8 year old for 20 consecutive minutes to replace an alphabet letter with a new letterand pronunciation then the mentally capable 8 year old writes and pronounces the new letter and pronunciation that’s replacing an alphabet letter in 20 consecutive minutes.

I teach a mentally capable 8 year old for 20 consecutive minutes to replace an alphabet letter with a new letter and pronunciation.

Thus, the mentally capable 8 year old writes and pronounces the new letter and pronunciation that replaces an alphabet letter in 20 consecutive minutes.

Every human who’s mentally capable is always able to be treasurer of their new currency.

If you create one new currency then you’re able to create a second new currency.

If you’re able to create second new currency then you’re able to create third new currency.

You create one new currency.

Thus, you’re able to create a third currency.

You’re a treasurer for a new currency, listener?

You create and distribute your new currency, listener?

There’s more, but if you believe that this tragically broken mind can process information the same way that you or I do then you’re as illogical as Loughner.

Note also that much of the narrative about this incident being caused by conservatives using violent language, threats, and metaphors was formed within a couple of hours of the shooting. In other words, before anything was known about the killer - even his name - the meme had been set, the narrative formed, the smears unleashed despite the fact that motive, state of mind, or even the political affiliation of the killer was published.

This appears to be another case of liberals not letting a crisis go to waste. Already, there has been a move to introduce gun control legislation in Congress. If someone can show me how this tragedy could have been prevented unless guns were banned entirely, I would love to see that fantasy.

And as a sign of the times, Democrats are already using the tragedy to raise money. On the linked page, right next to the letter asking Democrats to send well wishes to Rep. Giffords, is a great, big blue button encouraging people to donate. That link appears in an mass emailing sent by “21st Century Democrats” with this partisan appeal:

We also know that Sarah Palin and Rep. Giffords’ opponent used violent imagery last year urging her opponents to “target” her. Last spring, after she voted to expand health insurance coverage to working families and cut drug costs for senior citizens her office was violently attacked.

Members of 21st Century Democrats helped elect Rep. Giffords in 2006 and re-elect her 2010 because she wasn’t afraid to fight for working people — or listen to them at the neighborhood supermarket. She voted for health care; Wall Street reform, job creation, and much more.

She stood with us — and we need to stand with her in her toughest hours.

Makes you want to pull out your hanky, doesn’t it? Oh, and while you have your hand in your pocket, could you also take out your checkbook and give generously?

You really can’t blame them. They are only following the dictum about not letting a crisis go to waste - perfected by Rahm Emanuel and his boss, the President of the United States, who himself, once used a very colorful metaphor in giving advice to his supporters about how to “debate” the opposition:

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said in Philadelphia last night. “Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.

Politics is not tiddlywinks. It is a full contact sport that oftentimes makes the MMA look like a tea party (metaphor deliberate). Efforts to curb “violent metaphors” - a matter of opinion with which reasonable, rational people recognize as accepted speech - is really about curbing speech by the opposition. Liberals don’t expect anyone to take their violent metaphors seriously when they use them. Only the tragic coincidence of a shooting spree by an individual whose reason has abandoned him has given the left a blatantly political opening of which they have shamelessly and to their great discredit, cynically taken advantage.

The tragedy in Arizona, where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot and seriously wounded by an incoherent maniac has caused many leftist heads to explode in absolute, unadulterated idiocy.

First of all, congrats on once again trying to politicize a tragedy. It warms my heart to know that suffering and dying by humans brings out the worst in many on the left and that common decency doesn’t matter half as much as trying to score partisan political points using the most incredibly stupid line of attack available.

While we’re at it, I would say to my friends on the right that it is equally nauseating to try and turn the tables and place responsibility for this crime on the left. The reasons both sides are so monumentally wrong is simple; the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, wasn’t just nuttier than a fruitcake; he was so sick that he was oblivious to the world around him. He was caught up in an alternate universe to the point that trying to say that something from our reality set him off is laughable.

For instance, one of the usual suspects of leftist who make hay out of suffering and tragedy, Jane Hamsher, tries to pin the blame on the congresswoman’s opponent:

Per Puppethead in the comments, Giffords’ 2010 Congressional opponent Jesse Kelly held a June 12 gun event that was billed as follows on the Pima County Republican website:

Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shot a fully automatic M15 with Jesse Kelly

The old Sarah Palin bullseye map of targeted Democrats is pulled out also. Curious the the exact same concept - a bullseye map of GOP targets highlighted by the DNC - seems to have been misplaced by Hamsher. No matter. The silliness - one might say the loony tunes attempt to connect a campaign event that involved taking some shots at a plain old target with the GOP candidate many months ago with today’s tragedy bespeaks a mind devoid of reason and logic. Sorry, not this time.

Mr. Lougner’s incoherent rambling in a YouTube posting entitled “My Final Thoughts” should close the case as to whether anything anyone has ever said anywhere at any time had anything to do with motivating him to go postal. Doug Ross has screen shots of the video if you’re interested in reading the missive of a stone cold maniac with absolute zero connection to reality.

Here’s the bottom line. It is the height of idiocy to posit that the motivations of humans who commit such heinous acts are as simple as many on the left make them out to be. The mind is a terribly complex organ and to try and make the gobsmackingly stupid direct connection between something anyone says or does, and the act of violence itself is giggle-worthy. This is especially true in broken and smashed minds like Mr. Loughner.

Trying to draw a line from something Hannity or Palin, or any other conservative says and a light going off in Loughner’s head demonstrates a cluelessness that proves partisan intent rather than any profound psychological truth. It also shows a laughable ignorance of how the mind works - even among those with a healthy psyche. The armchair psychologists on the left who continue to ascribe logical connections to an illogical mind can’t really be serious, can they? They have to know that it is more than likely that a voice in Loughner’s head told him to kill the congresswoman for reasons having nothing to do with politics.

We go through this exercise every time there’s violence like this. One side or the other tries to make political hay out of tragedy with no more knowledge of what drove the perpetrator to violence than my pet cat Aramas.

And at least Ari has the good sense to keep his mouth shut even if he does have a half assed theory about what caused a murderer to snap and let slip his inner demons to wreak havoc on our reality.

Rep. Danny Davis has dropped out of the Chicago mayor’s contest and thrown his support behind the only other major African American candidate in the race, former US senator Carol Mosely-Braun.

“I’m proud that I will be here when Carol Moseley Braun becomes the next mayor,” Davis said. “I come here tonight…to help prove unity is more than just a concept.”

Braun said she is emboldened by the endorsements from both Davis and state Sen. James Meeks, the other major African-American candidate who dropped out of the contest last week. Braun called it a “great way to start the new year.”

“I’m so please to have their support,” she said. “Their endorsements…bring us closer to winning this election.”

Davis at first said he wasn’t so much dropping out of the contest as “dropping into victory” by endorsing Braun. He later clarified that he is ending his campaign.

“I am totally dropping out of the race. I am supporting Carol Moseley Braun with every ounce of fervor that I have,” Davis said. “I am even going to give her some money. I am going to try to get every person who thought that they might support Danny Davis to switch their support to Carol Moseley Braun. In fact, I will start tonight.”

The announcement at Davis’ West Loop headquarters came after African-American leaders met privately for days with the candidates in an attempt to unify behind a single contender who could improve the odds of an African-American winning the Feb. 22 election.

Davis and Braun both had insisted Thursday that they would keep running for Chicago mayor. Then they met again today, leading to Davis’ departure from the contest.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson brokered a roughly four-hour meeting Wednesday night with Davis and Braun at his Rainbow PUSH headquarters that was also attended by several ministers, business leaders and politicians. Among them was U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, who is backing Braun, and state Sen. Rickey Hendon, who is backing Davis.

Where does this leave Rahm Emanuel?

With a unified black political community behind Mosely Braun, her chances of winning just shot up substantially. It is significant that the Rev. Jackson brokered this agreement given the factionalization of the black vote in the past between west side and south side African Americans. For the first time since 1983 when the city’s only black mayor - Harold Washington - was elected, the African American community will head into primary day backing a single major candidate.

For Emanuel, this negates any opportunity he had to use Mayor Daley’s very successful game plan in winning the primary. With the black vote usually split, Daley successfully courted the growing Hispanic vote while siphoning off just enough black machine votes to add to his astounding margins of victory in working class white neighborhoods. For Rahmbo, the Hispanic vote is expected to split between two major candidates and it is doubtful that he will be able to run up the 85-90% margins in Bridgeport and other white communities in the city that Daley was famous for.

Might Rahm’s former boss take a hand? Bill Clinton offered to come to Chicago to campaign for Emanuel and had his face slapped by black leaders for even thinking about it. And the African American community, while supporting Obama to the hilt as president, no doubt recalls some of the betrayals the former state senator effected when Obama was part of the regular Democrats prior to his run for the presidency. His tacky deal with Daley to support his mayoral re-election (over a qualified African American candidate) in return for Daley’s support in his bid for the White House did not sit well with many in the “reform” community, or among rank and file blacks. Obama’s “help” may be no more welcome than Clinton’s.

Meanwhile, Daley is quietly doing what he can for Emanuel without showing his hand too much. A lot of Daley’s support, however, was personal, based on patronage and loyalty to his family. It is difficult to see how he can transfer many important Democrat’s loyalty from their chieftan to someone who many Democrat’s see as an interloper.

Now Mosely Braun has the opportunity to employ Harold Washington’s successful strategy of uniting the black community while exciting the liberals in Hyde Park and along the lakeshore to back her candidacy. Her name recognition will also help immensely. She will have decent funding, an army of dedicated volunteers, and the opportunity to portray Rahm as a carpetbagger.

Emanuel is down, but not out. Obama no doubt still has some pull although how much personal capital he will be willing to expend probably keeps Emanuel up at night. Rahmbo wins or loses now based on how big a hand his friend and former boss Barack Obama takes in seeing his former chief of staff succeed Daley.

Here’s my latest at Pajamas Media. It’s a frolic about some headlines that we may see in 2011.

As I point out, it’s easy to predict this kind of stuff because the chances are excellent that many news headlines from 2011 will look a lot like news headlines from 2010.

A sample:

I have absolutely no doubt that over the next year, there will probably be several headlines involving a Democrat saying something bat guano crazy about economics. It’s not that Democrats know next to nothing about how the economy works. It’s that they are absolutely, stone cold clueless about the subject. Comparative lit majors didn’t need to take Econ 101 to graduate, so the subject is even less familiar than Mandarin Chinese to most liberals. You get the impression that liberals believe that unless government controls it, nothing exists, and that this control extends to every thin dime you earn by the sweat of your brow. It’s not your money, it’s government’s — and government has the power to tell you how much of it you can keep, rather than you telling government how much they can take.

Anyone who seriously believes that unemployment benefits are “the biggest boost we can give the economy” will no doubt make similar horrifically inept gaffes in the coming year about the nature of a free market and how things really work. Try these on for size, the generic “Democrat” substituting for the name. Just fill in the blanks later:

“Democrat accuses GOP of trying to shorten recession on the backs of the unemployed”

“Democrat says 90% employment ‘acceptable’”

“Democrat says eliminating 200,000 jobs in coal industry will grow the economy”

Not to be outdone, I am also certain that some prominent Republican somewhere will literally get caught with his pants down in some kind of sex scandal. There’s a 50-50 chance that it will be a gay liaison and that the tawdry details will spill out on blogs first, to be reluctantly followed by the Washington Post and New York Times, who hate it when blogs scoop them on these kind of scandals but agonize over contributing to the sleaze.

What is it about Republican lawmakers and sex? I can understand the attraction. After all, I’m sort of a Republican and I like sex a lot. Straying from my Zsu-Zsu has never seriously crossed my mind, however. Certainly, as H.L. Mencken said, “Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.” But many Republicans seem to heed Mae West’s advice: “I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.”

Fox News has an all-star grouping of environmental forecasts that turned out to be so off base that the only question remains is why are the people who made them still taken seriously?

A couple of examples:

1. Within a few years “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event.” Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, interviewed by the UK Independent, March 20, 2000.

Um…no. Kids in England today know very well what snow is. They’ve had to shovel so much of it off the walk this winter they probably want to find Dr. Viner and throttle him.

2. “[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots…[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.” Michael Oppenheimer, published in “Dead Heat,” St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Read what this mealy mouthed little snit has to say to defend himself:

Oppenheimer told FoxNews.com that he was trying to illustrate one possible outcome of failing to curb emissions, not making a specific prediction. He added that the gist of his story had in fact come true, even if the events had not occurred in the U.S.

Um, no again. Where are the food riots? The “black blizzards” that will shut down computers? Or strip paint from houses? Or stop traffic on highways?

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

Here’s one from our old friend Paul Ehrlich, who famously predicted in the 1970’s that both China and India would suffer famines by 1985 where hundreds of millions of people would die. Both China and India are now self sufficient in food production.

Here, Ehrlich points his mini-brain in the direction of England:

7. “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

How about that one, Paul?

“When you predict the future, you get things wrong,” Ehrlich admitted, but “how wrong is another question. I would have lost if I had had taken the bet. However, if you look closely at England, what can I tell you? They’re having all kinds of problems, just like everybody else.”

Incredible. How wrong are you? Fantastically, stupendously,egregiously, idiotically wrong, that’s how much. “All kinds of problems” is light years distant from “England will not exist in the year 2000.” It’s not close, even by cosmic standards. You can look as closely as you’d like at England and glean absolutely nothing that would make your prediction anything more than the drooling ranting of a clown.

To be clear, scientists always get stuff wrong. It’s part of the scientific process, and is valuable because other scientists can critique their work and find a new direction with which to discover the facts.

But each of these examples shows that having an agenda - personal, political, or professional - makes this kind of science useless and is thus, bad science. So much science is politically driven today as to make a lot of it suspect, and virtually useless to the goal of uncovering the mysteries of the universe. You can’t build upon work that has been thrust into the public debate so that the individual scientist can personally aggrandize their standing in their discipline, or slavishly devote themselves to a political agenda. That’s not science, its  marketing.

Until those scientists who promote climate change as a catastrophic problem that needs to be addressed can assure the public that they are, if not pure of heart, at least basing their conclusions on solid scientific research and principles, there will continue to be a huge distrust of their motives and conclusions.

It is a tragedy for science that the practitioners don’t recognize this.

Check out the piece for more jaw droppers.

This post originally appears on the American Thinker

Politicians are not very bright. If they were, they wouldn’t keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Take Mayor Bloomberg of New York city. Here’s a man who they were talking about as a potential president just a couple of weeks ago. Now, if he ran for dog catcher, he might eke out a victory.

The reason? Let’s call it “The Bilandic Effect,” named after Mayor Michael Bilandic of Chicago who botched snow removal after a devastating series of snow storms in the winter of 1979. The result was that little known Jane Byrne, former head of the consumer affairs office, swept to victory in the Democratic primary, delivering a humiliating defeat to Bilandic.

Apparently, those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it:

A testy Mayor Bloomberg fended off criticism of the city’s failure to clear hundreds of snow-choked streets Tuesday as an avalanche of critics attacked his reputation as a supermanager.

“This mayor prides himself on saying the buck stops with him, and it should. We hold him responsible for what we’re calling theBloomberg Blizzard,” said CityCouncilman David Greenfield (D-Brooklyn).

“The whole world is laughing that the greatest city in the world cannot manage to clear the streets. New York today looks like a Third World country.”

Greenfield, normally a backer of the mayor, said every side street - and some larger avenues - in Borough Park were waiting for a plow 30 hours after the storm’s end.

Similar and worse complaints were heard from much of the snow-buried city outside Manhattan.

A Queens woman’s death Monday was blamed on the backlog of911 calls and on snow-clogged streets that delayed first responders from reaching her Corona home, said state Sen. Jose Peralta (D-Queens).

“Like many New Yorkers, I woke up two days straight to an unplowed street outside my frontdoor,” said city Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. “This is not business as usual, and frustration is mounting.”

Bilandic’s - and Bloomberg’s - problem is simple; both cities purchased snow removal equipment for the average or slightly above average snowfall one would get in their respective cities. Unfortunately, when that once in a century blizzard hits, man and machine are inadequate to handle the situation.

Byrne solved that problem - much to the gratitude of every mayor in Chicago since - by purchasing enough snow removal equipment to dig the city out of more snow than could choke the Abominable Snowman. There’s hardly been a peep of criticism directed toward the Chicago mayor since - at least not enough to cost him his job.

And Bloomberg? Aside from the fact that he needed to be brought down a peg or two, he will probably weather this storm. But I doubt whether we will hear much talk from now on about his candidacy for the presidency.

This post originally appears on The American Thinker

The St. Paul, MN school system is about to adopt a most draconian rule; they are to be “sweet-free zones:”

Debra LaBounty, president of the Minnesota School Nutrition Association, said she believes St. Paul is the only district in the state to institute such a dramatic measure. National nutrition leaders say fewer than a handful of school districts in the country have tried such a thing.

With a nod to their role in reducing the nation’s high obesity rate, Minnesota’s second-largest school district plans to fully enforce the ban on sweets.

Reminders have been sent to teachers, students and parents that “sweet, sticky, fat-laden [and] salty treats” aren’t allowed during the school day, said Jean Ronnei, the district’s director of nutrition services.

The move was made this year, four years after the idea was conceived in a new St. Paul schools wellness policy, passed at the recommendation of a panel of parents, teachers, school nurses and administrators.

Using kids as lab rats is right up the alley of these people. Besides:

Opponents say there is little proof such policies work and say it’s a school’s role to teach — not force — students to eat healthy.

Now there’s a novel idea; teaching in school. Rather than brainwash and impose adult behavior on 10 year olds, why not have a good old fashioned “Health Class” where stuff like nutrition and healthy eating are taught, not rammed down the throats of children by denying them the simple pleasures of a childhood treat.

A nutritionist at Tufts University nails it:

“Nobody has the money or the will to do the real work it’s going to take to get American kids to lose weight,” said Jim Tillotson, a professor of nutrition policy at Tufts University.

She underestimates the “will” of these food nazis. Eventually, they will have to criminalize behavior like this in order to achieve their goals. Frog marching 10 year olds off to the slammer sounds impossible but so did “sweet-free zones” a few years ago.

Jacob Sullum at Reason’s Hit and Run raises a few other issues:

According to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Star-Tribune, the new policy covers food served in cafeterias, food sold in vending machines or at fundraisers, food kept in employees’ drawers as rewards for themselves or students, and even food that parents send to school for their children’s lunches, which evidently will be subject to searches for contraband snacks and desserts. Food control officials will have to decide thorny issues such as whether an orange counts as a sweet and sticky treat, how much sodium chloride renders a snack “salty,” and whether cheese should be banned because of its high fat content or welcomed for its protein and calcium.

[...]

Evidently the message is that children’s bodies are a collective resource that needs to be managed by agents of the state for their own good and the good of society, regardless of what they or their parents think.

It’s not like schools have anything better to do.

This post originally appears on American Thinker.

Lawyers for Julian Assange are livid that police files detailing his sexual dalliances with two women who accuse him of rape were published by the Guardian.

The Guardian was one of the news outlets to which Assange made the Wikileaks cables available.

Julian Assange doesn’t understand “irony:”

Lawyers for Julian Assange have expressed anger about an alleged smear campaign against the Australian WikiLeaks founder.

Incriminating police files were published in the British newspaper that has used him as its source for hundreds of leaked US embassy cables.

In a move that surprised many of Mr Assange’s closest supporters on Saturday, The Guardian newspaper published previously unseen police documents that accused Mr Assange in graphic detail of sexually assaulting two Swedish women. One witness is said to have stated: “Not only had it been the world’s worst screw, it had also been violent.”

Bjorn Hurtig, Mr Assange’s Swedish lawyer, said he would lodge a formal complaint to the authorities and ask them to investigate how such sensitive police material leaked into the public domain. “It is with great concern that I hear about this because it puts Julian and his defence in a bad position,” he told a colleague.

First of all, it’s not a smear if it’s the truth. Left out of all media reports on the encounters Assange had with these women is that while he did have consensual sex on a couple of occasions with both females, he also sexually assaulted them at other times in that they repeatedly told him to stop his advances - and he refused. There is also the issue that the women requested he wear a condom and he refused. Apparently, that constitutes rape in Sweden.

Secondly, Assange was and is a hacker. Hackers are born without an empathy gene. They don’t care if they hack private information, violating your privacy in the most intimate way imaginable. It never enters their brain that what they are doing harms someone. They are anti-social in this respect in that they don’t see you as a human being with emotions and an ability to feel pain at being violated.

Of course, this gives the lie to Assange’s oft stated reason for releasing the cables; he’s for “transparency.” He wants to expose “the conspiracy” that exists but that really doesn’t conspire. What’s that you say? Here’s Assange’s “manifesto” where gobbledygook and adolescent thinking rule the day:

Can we find a value that describes the power of a conspiracy?

We could count the number of conspirators, but that would not capture the difference between a conspiracy and the individuals which comprise it. How do they differ? Individuals in a conspiracy conspire. Isolated individuals do not. We can capture that difference by adding up all the important communication (weights) between the conspirators, we will call this the total conspiratorial power.

Sophistry on a stick. Note the juvenile understanding of human behavior. People don’t act the way he says they do, no matter how many terms he makes up (”total conspiratorial power?”). His decidedly deterministic worldview has been proven wrong many times over as reality has trumped the notion that individuals are motivated to protect their “class” or group and act in concert to face threats to their status. That is nonsense, as any student of recent history can attest.

This justification is a beard for his real motive in leaking cables; Julian Assange wants to watch the world burn.

Like a 10 year old child focusing the light from the sun through a magnifying glass on to a grasshopper, Assange is fixated on seeing how much damage he can wreak on the world by his actions. There is nothing noble in this. It is, in fact, quite ordinary; your run of the mill arsonist or terrorist holds a similar desire. What sets Assange and his hacker friends apart is that now they have the ability to do incalculable damage to the peace of the planet - so much so that their actions may cost lives and perhaps one day, may start a war - a possibility raised by the very real problem that these leaked cables could provoke a misunderstanding of motives and intent that only leads to a rise in tensions. Lighting a match in a gasoline dump appeals to the anarchist in Assange which is why he doesn’t appear to care.

By his own acknowledgment, Assange seeks to destablize a world he fantasizes is run by this conspiracy that isn’t a conspiracy. A civilization that is unstable will make life miserable for tens of millions of people. But like Mao, Pol Pot, Lenin, Hitler, and others who sought to change the world, the lives of individual humans means nothing to Assange who now must face the fact that two female admirers who share his far left political views have the potential to send him to jail for a very long time.

He can watch the world burn from inside his cell if he is so inclined.

This post originally appears on American Thinker