"he doesn't get off the hook"

Can't remember how I came across Pundita, but I was intrigued by her criticism of a personal hero in the article," Milton Friedman doesn't get off the hook just because he's dead."
At Pundita's corner, the discussion is about Phillip Blond's Prospect article, "Rise of the red Tories." There is seen in Mr Blond's piece a potential for finding a new "middle" for political America. His is a provocative read, but I see only a little of value. I don't find harm in the ability of big business to deliver goods for less than smaller businesses can. Smaller businesses simply won't compete in those pursuits. It's apparent that it takes a great deal of capital to gather foods from around the world and deliver it for local sale. Small capital does road side fruit and vegetable stands, not Argentinian peaches and Australian beef. (Or whatever!) Besides, I think small business is already a natural political ally, and big business - especially because of big labor - has become the natural ally of the Democratic Party.

The other night CNBC aired a speech by the late economist Milton Friedman; during the Q&A he observed that whatever criticism one might have of globalization people had to remember that it had lifted hundreds of millions of people around the globe out of abject poverty.

I interject that when I mentioned his comments in my post of yesterday I wrote that CNBC aired a speech that Mr Friedman had given the other night. I have corrected the error (Milton Friedman died in 2006), but dead or alive he doesn't get off the hook.

His claim about the benefits of globalization was a sweeping statement but if we accept it at face value, what would Mr Friedman say when confronted with an American worker who must compete with the entire world by sitting in commuter traffic four hours a day and working two jobs -- just so he can afford enough in interest payments to make it to the next payday, and who has no hope of climbing out of crushing debt?

Capitalism, which supports globalized trade, is rooted in the profit motive. Would Mr Friedman ask the worker to abandon the linchpin of capitalism so that the rest of the world could climb out of poverty?

Actually, the American worker (and later - the American consumer) has been lifting the world out of poverty since WW2. Then, the US was the only game in town and the American Labor movement could have it's way with management. We've succeeded - finally - in the heavy liftng. If a nation is STILL poor it has been criminally mismanaged.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this all smacks of "I hate Wal-Mart." If what works for conservatives is the priority, then let's leave that logic to the leftists. The poor, for obvious reasons, love Wal-Mart as a place to work and as a place to shop. In my neighborhood, gasoline would cost 25 cents per gallon more if not for the rock bottom price that Wal-Mart (Murphy) charges.
Blond's statement that 73% of Britain's grocery dollars are spent in four chains is hardly frightening to me. They have figured out how to attract shoppers to their shelves, and their suppliers have figured out how to deliver more for less. That's capitalism. It works every time it's tried, and it employs and it disperses goods and services. Capitalism can be difficult as well as ruthless. "The only thing worse is everything else."
But if the point is to find a legislative balance that will provide more local competition to national brands, no sacrifice of principles in that. In Indiana, we've lost most of our local banks to the nationals due to federal changes, and however economical the "scale" seemed to be at the time, the nationals have shown themselves to be less sophisticated as survivalists than the local real estate agent.
Freedom is the point. I liked Blond's historical review liberality from monarchy to individualism, but I still see the Constitution of the US as the most radical document in history. If we legislate against big business, we legislate higher prices, and we impinge on capital formation.
The problems we are facing have a lot to do with incompetent and corrupt legislators of both parties. But if we try to make failure illegal, we will only end up making success much more difficult.

quote

shown

espresso beans to S H O W N

PowerLine article entitled:The Hockey Stick Hoax

I can't put this stuff into sentences when it really counts, but some otherwise very smart people have just swallowed this theory whole. They think it is because I don't understand the science. I'm sure there is lots of climate temperature transference physics that I could use a brush up with, but I understand human nature all too well, including the drive for dominance, and greed.

More recent scientific work has thoroughly debunked the Mann "hockey stick" analysis. It has been shown to rest on "collation errors, unjustified truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, incorrect principal component calculations, geographical mislocations and other serious defects," as well as "incorrect mathematics." There are indications, at least, that some of the errors on the part of Mann and his collaborators were deliberate--an instance of the corruption of science by politics and perverse financial incentives that underlies the entire global warming movement.

CO2 sceptics has a good set of articles, original perhaps.

espresso beans to PowerLine

What Caused the Global Slowdown?response to yahoo answers question...

I believe the US over-innovated its financial processes. Making it easier for less financially secure folks to engage in debt instruments they could not even be expected to understand. We were seeing things like "sub-prime mortgages" and "125% financing" that only made sense in specific circumstances, like a growing economy.
Making it much worse is the practice of "bundling" hundreds of thousands of these shaky debts into collateral or guarantees against other loans, and those expected debt profits are then used to guarantee still more debt. The companies that rate these securities bowed to financial sector pressure to give them higher ratings than they deserved.
When folks can buy more houses than they can actually afford, not only are there government "anti-poverty" programs lurking somewhere in the background, but there is a period of time when the market doesn't have enough inventory, and we saw the results in television programs such as "Flip This House." Prices rise so fast that people paid too much for a house knowing they could still sell it for more.
Democrats are always looking out for a way to look like they are on the side of "the poor" and Republicans - who tried to stop this - have no defense against the charge that they want grandma to eat dog food, so the process has no check.
When oil prices spiked because of (again - the expectation/speculation of) Chinese and Indian demand, the house of cards started falling apart.
Those banks that were heavily vested in sub-prime stuff collapsed almost immediately, scaring the bejeepers out of the rest who quickly tightened up lending requirements. That made it difficult for the marginally successful companies to find the survival financing they needed. Which leads us to government bailouts.
The US is the unquestioned global economic power. When we sneeze, the world catches pneumonia. Global demand for oil has plummeted to the point that speculators are yawning with OPEC threats of production cuts.
Anti-US saber rattling is purely based on oil. Venezuela has few oil customers beside the US. Russia's tough talk is all based on their oil wealth. I have absolutely no evidence, but the paranoid conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the slowdown might not have a geo-political strategic purpose as well.
News outlets are under tremendous pressure. Saying a newspaper makes money from telling us the news of the day is like saying a billboard makes money by giving us something to look at. News outlets are billboards, they make a living from advertising, not selling news. The more emotion (fear and anger) they can pour into a story the more attention they get and the more they can charge for the same 2" by 4" ad. Even under these scary economic times, news ad revenue is nose-diving for a number of reasons. They are panicking and are desperate for "bad " news to get your attention. They are going to encourage us to fear and anger to sell billboard space. This is going to be a difficult period for us. We were already too hostile with each other before this. My greatest fear is not that I'll lose my house (I might - you might) but that we'll degenerate into a bunch of mindless thugs out only for ourselves. God help us.

Time to say hello!

A Carbon Emissions Tax That Makes Sense

Economist Ross McKitrick has written a logical answer
to the dilemma of AGW in the Financial Post, part of Canada.com.
Title and sub-title are

Call their tax

Why not tie carbon taxes to actual levels of warming?
Both skeptics and alarmists should expect their wishes to be answered

He points out that the most recent computer models forecast a warming trend that will make itself known early in the area known as the tropical troposphere, and posits a tax based on the temperature increases, if there are any, that will occur there. Temps, according to the models, will rise in that part of the atmosphere only as a result of excessive carbon dioxide increases as opposed to fluctuations in solar activity.

The IPCC predicts a warming rate in the tropical troposphere of about double that at the surface, implying about 0.2C to 1.2C per decade in the tropical troposphere under greenhouse-forcing scenarios. That implies the tax will climb by $4 to $24 per tonne per decade, a much more aggressive
schedule of emission fee increases than most current proposals. At the upper end of warming forecasts, the tax could reach $200 per tonne of CO2 by 2100, forcing major carbon-emission reductions and a global shift to non-carbon energy sources.

Global-warming activists would like this. But so would skeptics, because they believe the models are exaggerating the warming forecasts. After all, the averaged UAH/ RSS tropical troposphere series went up only about 0.08C over the past decade, and has been going down since 2002. Some solar scientists even expect pronounced cooling to begin in a decade. If they are right, the T3 tax will fall below zero within two decades, turning into a subsidy for carbon emissions.

While I understand the reasoning behind the "science" of AGW, I more fully "get" the manipulative hysteria. The proposed tax is exquisitely formulated to make the side that is more accurate happy.

Under the T3 tax, the regulator gets to call everyone's bluff at once, without gambling in advance on who is right. If the tax goes up, it ought to have. If it doesn't go up, it shouldn't have. Either way we get a sensible outcome.

But the benefits don't stop there. The T3 tax will induce forward-looking behaviour. Alarmists worry that conventional policy operates with too long a lag to prevent damaging climate change. Under the T3 tax, investors planning major industrial projects will need to forecast the tax rate many years ahead, thereby taking into account the most likely path of global warming a decade or more in advance.

I was not aware of the "tropical troposphere" early warning, probably because it
tends to break the sense of urgency needed for emotional manipulations which the
press depends on to sell advertising. This tax clearly depends on all sides
agreeing that the climate change computer models be accurate on this point.
Not that this would ever happen.

espresso beans tonewsbusters

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) "Does anybody know how small that number is?"

I've been away for a while but I've been paying attention, particularly to AGW and Finance/Economics/Business articles - saving them when I thought they'd still be relevant when I returned to writing. The AGW stories have stayed current because the only variable is to how many skeptics will be allowed to contribute to the conversation, if one could call it that. So the headline "Global warming debunked" The Timaru (New Zealand) Herald article of May 19, 2007 by Andrew Swallow caught my eye. Highlights...

Climate change will be considered a joke in five years time, meteorologist Augie Auer told the annual meeting of Mid Canterbury Federated Farmers in Ashburton this week.

...

Water vapour was responsible for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, an effect which was vital to keep the world warm, he explained.
"If we didn't have the greenhouse effect the planet would be at minus 18 deg C but because we do have the greenhouse effect it is plus 15 deg C, all the time."
The other greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and various others including CFCs, contributed only five per cent of the effect, carbon dioxide being by far the greatest contributor at 3.6 per cent.
However, carbon dioxide as a result of man's activities was only 3.2 per cent of that, hence only 0.12 per cent of the greenhouse gases in total. Human-related methane, nitrogen dioxide and CFCs etc made similarly minuscule contributions to the effect: 0.066, 0.047 and 0.046 per cent respectively.
"That ought to be the end of the argument, there and then," he said.
"We couldn't do it (change the climate) even if we wanted to because water vapour dominates."

...

"The Greens are really going to go after you because you put out 49 per cent of the countries emissions. Does anybody ask 49 per cent of what? Does anybody know how small that number is?
"It's become a witch-hunt; a Salem witch-hunt," he said.

The biggest surprise here ie that even in NZ they use the cliche "Salem witch hunt."

This Week's Funnies

I've collected a few cultural stories that have a humorous side to them. For instance, I think it's nice to know that some in the U.S. military can still call a politically incorrect spade an "immoral" spade. His apology seems to be directed at the fact that he should have stayed on script, not that he said what he believes.No apology from Gen. Pace for gay stance

After a flurry of condemnation Tuesday, Pace issued a statement acknowledging that the Defense Department's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays is a sensitive subject and said: "I should have focused more on my support of the policy and less on my personal moral views."
The military lets gay men and lesbians serve if they keep their sexual orientation private. Commanders may not ask, and service members may not tell. More than 10,000 troops, including more than 50 specialists in Arabic, have been discharged since President Clinton signed it into law in 1994.

It's not a given, but probable that "specialists in Arabic" refers to Muslims. Homosexuality is supposed to be a forbidden act among them, and perhaps that's why they joined the coalition forces. Of course, if you're "lucky" enough to be of some importance or influence in a Muslim country, it's an entirely different scenario.
Left unsaid in this piece is any analysis of timeframe in the numbers it mentions. Or any possible other employment oppurtunities for said "specialists in Arabic." If I spoke Arabic and knew the culture, I might find plenty of incentive to want to leave the Army pay grade and work for Halliburton or Blackwater and perhaps make a killing. Or perhaps as a volunteer Army Arabic specialist in 2001-02, I didn't consider the possibility that I'd go to war against Iraq seriously enough. Perhaps others can think of reasons why someone would WANT to leave the military that also have nothing to do with being gay.
And then, there's every reason for a descendant of the mighty, historically important Persian empire to be embarrassed about the current administration in Iran. That a loosely historical comic book style portrayal of the Greco-Persian wars is thought to be an attack is simply paranoid. I would think that Frank Miller ought to be very proud for the mention, though. Iranian official lashes out at Hollywood movie "300" for insulting Persian civilization

Shamqadri was quoted as saying "following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hollywood and cultural authorities in the U.S. initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture," adding "certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies."

My bold, obviously, that's the funniest projection of fascist ideology I've ever seen. Living in an oppressed, tightly controlled society, this propaganda rings true to the Iranian reader. If they had any idea at all how unregulated "Hollywood and cultural authorities" are in America, they'd wonder how we've managed to survive.
The best is saved for last. No comment is necessary.Frostbite ends Bancroft-Arnesen trek

MINNEAPOLIS - A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

....

Then there was the cold — quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.

....

Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.
"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."

Global Warming In The News Again

First, a democratic congress that refuses to will a victory for the U.S. in Iraq, and now - it had to happen, man-made climate change hysteria. In the IndyStar, from AP in Paris...

However, the panel also said its best estimate was for temperature rises of 3.2-7.1 degrees Fahrenheit. In 2001, all the panel gave was a range of 2.5-10.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
On sea levels, the report projects rises of 7-23 inches

Some nerve, calling THAT kind of cushion "science!" Isn't that like saying tomorrow's temperature will be somewher between -20 and +70 degrees?

by the end of the century. An additional 3.9-7.8 inches are possible if recent, surprising melting of polar ice sheets continues.

Did you know that England, long ago, used to grow wine grapes just like France? That was way back when England was much warmer than it is now. Yup. The Vikings of Norway used to sail their long ships to Iceland and Greenland, and even to the Americas...back when it was warmer.

"It's very conservative. Scientists by their nature are skeptics."

Especially when threatened with de-certification for holding beliefs considered heretical to orthodox "science."

While critics call the panel "overly alarmist, it is by nature relatively cautious because it relies on hundreds of scientists, including skeptics.

Why do they keep saying that? So anyway, The Norse settlers in Iceland had to abandon the homes (or they stayed and starved to death) because their growing seasons got shorter and the winters became longer and colder. French wine making moved south to the Mediterranean while the British grew hops and other short season grains, and made ale and beer (which explains why we Americans drink more beer than wine). Don't let me interrupt the global panic!

Authors of the report called it conservative: It used only peer-reviewed published science and was edited by representatives of 113 governments who had to agree to every word.

I live in Indianapolis (GO COLTS!!) which at one time was under a mile or two of ice. It's probable that the planet has warmed some since. That and the fact that no one ever guaranteed us a right to a stable climate draws me to agree somewhat with the concept of global warming. Still, there's something troubling to me about the way man's interference is being "marketed" - as the cause - to us. You can tell when the voice at the other end of the phone line is informing you of, say, a prescription that is ready for pickup - and when they are trying to sell a new medicine to you that you've never needed before. Professor Gray saysgive it time.

"They've been brainwashing us for 20 years," Gray says. "Starting with the nuclear winter and now with the global warming. This scare will also run its course. In 15-20 years, we'll look back and see what a hoax this was."
Gray directs me to a 1975 Newsweek article that whipped up a different fear: a coming ice age.
"Climatologists," reads the piece, "are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change. ... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality."
Thank God they did nothing. Imagine how warm we'd be?

The History of Religion

I love the internet.
Floating about this a.m. I came across patterico's and found an enticing bit of historical musing of past wars in Iraq. I see these things occasionally and am often disappointed that upon learning that the point is "Bush Lied-People Died" or somesuch. I investigated only because I like patterico. (I like AcutePolitics, also, but was thrown off by the name "Teflon Don.") It is a wonderful sketch of realization of the immensity and grandeur of Iraqi history. This is patterico's entry that I found and this is the acute politics article that he linked to. This soldier gets it. And he helps me to get it with him. Great stuff.

This region is steeped in history. We walk on it; we breath it in. Eons of history surround us, infiltrate us, and turn to dust beneath our feet. The ashes of countless cultures, civilizations, and rulers dreams lie under the earth. With each breath, I inhale a few molecules of the dying gasp of Cyrus II, the Persian "Constantine of the East". In the howling wind I can almost hear the cries of a countless multitude dying on killing grounds that bridge across the ages. The same wind carries the red dust that might yet hold a few drops of blood from the battle at Carrhae- the first, crushing defeat for Rome's red blooded legions. Under my heel, a speck grinds into dust: the last grain of sand that remains of the Hanging Gardens at Babylon that are now known only in legend. Some of the world's oldest religions tell us that somewhere in this ancient Cradle of life, God himself breathed on this dust, and it became man, the father of us all. Whatever path we take here, we walk on history.

A commenter responded with this site of video historical maps. I found this one most interesting at the moment but there are many others that I'll be going back to see. Check out maps of war

Wahhabism In Trouble?

Stephen Schwartz (bio below) has an article in TCS, picked up by Powerline, that is most encouraging. It seems that maybe, finally, the Muslim world is telling the Saudi Wahhabi funders that, not only is the world's perspective of Islam being damaged by their murderous theology, but muslims from the former Yugoslavia have simply had enough of their garbage and will not tolerate any more.
This is very interesting to me because the Islamic Society of North America Headquarters, and the Mosque in Plainfield, IN, (15 min outside Indianapolis, is said to be of the Wahhabi tradition. The article begins with a few lines about the Iraq Study Group, but mostly it refers to clerics and attitudes in the Yugoslavic states.(emphasis and comments mine.)

Only a couple of lines in the report were worthy of comment. One appears on page 29 of the printed version: "Funding for the Sunni insurgency (sic) comes from private individuals within Saudi Arabia". This was the first time anybody connected to the U.S. government acknowledged something known throughout the Muslim world. That is, Sunni terrorism in Iraq is not an insurgency, but an invasion; the "foreign fighters" are mainly Saudi, as revealed when their deaths are covered in Saudi media, replete with photographs of the "martyrs."

...

Saudi sources indicate that King Abdullah (who apparently would like to live in a more or less "normal" country) is assembling his forces for a decisive confrontation with the reactionaries(the Wahhabi's). Part of the Wahhabi-line strategy is to depict a U.S. leadership in conflict with King Abdullah, to undermine the monarch's credibility. That is why different versions of a meeting between U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and King Abdullah, late last month, circulate in the MSM and the blogosphere.
According to credible reports, Cheney urged Abdullah to stiffen action against Saudi-Wahhabi involvement in the Iraqi bloodletting...

espresso beans to Powerline

Stephen Schwartz is the author of the bestselling Anchor paperback, The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role In Terrorism, and a consultant on domestic and international affairs in Washington, DC.
He was born in 1948, and has pursued a long literary and journalistic career, having published seven books on modern political history, with special attention to extremism. He was a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle for 10 years.
His articles have appeared in many of the world's leading newspapers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The Daily Telegraph of London and many more. He is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard as well as to Reforma in Mexico City, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and leading periodicals in the Balkans.

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