RedStateEclectic

A Ship with the Engine Off

Notes Steven Kates, author of the best introduction to economics there is:

If even Chris Matthews is done with Obama, who’s left? You can even watch the video here but this is the text:

‘What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press…. He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft,’ Matthews said.

‘So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere,’ Matthews continued. ‘But what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.’

On Tuesday’s program, Matthews similarly called Obama ‘a ship with the engine off.’

“A ship with the engine off.” He’s actually much worse than that and far more destructive but it will do for now.

The source.

Compare this with what Richard Epstein has to say (in the first 2 minutes of the below video) about his former colleague.

 

Against Political Biology

Lysenko, one of the masters of political biology.

Following up on my Scientists Not Interested in Science, find below a level-headed reminder of some facts of basic, depoliticised biology.

In his summary, Luboš Motl writes:

The basic theme of the [below] article is simple and most of us learned it as fifth-graders: CO₂ is primarily the plant food while its other implications for nature are negligible in comparison. Humanitarian organizations should work hard to help the mankind to increase the CO₂ concentration and it's surprising that virtually all of them are failing to do so.

Thus, ex-moonwalker Harrison Schmitt and physics professor Will Happer of Princeton argue:

Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That's simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The entire brief article.

Eco-Theocracy

Image credit.

Theocracy: a system of government by priests claiming a divine commission

It looks as if we are being increasingly ruled by an eco-(hypocracy)-theocracy:

They represent a rapidly expanding, increasingly powerful government class that is determined to control what we eat, say, do and buy.

In the environmental arena, these would-be czars and czarinas want to regulate what kinds of energy we can produce and use, cars we can drive, and jobs and living standards we can have. They are the vanguard of a dangerous alliance of eco-imperialism and vulture environmentalism.

[...]

Driven by utopian, Deep Ecology and global governance ideologies, elected and unelected ruling elites pass laws, promulgate regulations and issue edicts, based on faulty to fraudulent science and unsupported proclamations about dangerous manmade global warming, resource depletion and sustainable development. They seek to radically and fundamentally transform the energy, economic and social fabric of our nation and world – in the name of “social justice” and “saving the planet.”

They operate with little or no transparency or debate, often with vague or minimal legislative or constitutional authority, and with virtually no accountability for the false pretexts they use to justify their intrusive actions, or the harm they cause to people and wildlife. Their attitudes and actions often reflect a callous disregard for environmental values and people’s property, civil rights, jobs, health and even lives.

Our courts give them almost limitless discretion to impose laws and regulations, select pseudo-scientific “facts” to justify them, and ignore both the imaginary benefits and substantive harm they cause. They allow and encourage sweetheart “sue and settle” legal actions between regulatory agencies and activist groups, capricious agency inaction on mineral leases and permits, and arbitrary bureaucratic waivers of endangered species and other environmental laws for gigantic wind and solar projects.

Make sure to read the entire article.

Greenpeace Urging Obama To Ban Cats

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No, no, not quite.

However, following up on Who Is Going to Kill Those Cats, I ask our readers to note:

The review estimates that if Keystone is not built, oil sands production will be only 0.4 to 0.6 percent less that if the pipeline is built, or less than 0.83 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions annually. This difference equates to less than two hours of U.S. emissions, a negligible amount. Seventy-four million US housecats annually cause an estimated 196 times this emissions volume. Why isn’t Greenpeace urging President Obama to ban cats?

The full article.

See also The Cat in Me.

War - Spectator Sport for Western Consumers of Government Propaganda - Mali

Image credit.

The German caption translates into: Get ready for blind flying!! Yet again?

Killing people all over the world has become a sort of half thrilling, half boring pastime for the Western consumer of government propaganda (see also Panem et Circenses).

As a manoeuvre in self-importance, Western governments kill and create havoc in hapless foreign countries, carefully chosen for being the weakest and poorest in the world.

Who would risk, say, his job to safe a few lives in Mali? And if they kill one another, why should we not share in it, at least we bring the right values to the brawl.

The habit is so fashionable nowadays, i.e. politically correct, even the Germans put a toe in the pond.

It is the failure to understand that heavy handed intervention itself creates new problems has been the central failure of American policy makers ever since 9/11, witness the debacles in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. Blowback is the intelligence term used to describe the development of a new and larger problem due to a military or political action that is not carefully considered.

In order to avoid making a mistake, Washington inevitably and automatically magnifies every hiccup internationally into a threat, mobilizing massive resources that lead to the proverbial flea being smashed with a sledge hammer. That there is some kind of existential threat resulting from international terrorism is pretty much a myth. There are lethal insurgencies and terrorist groups to be sure but most have strictly local agendas and nearly all are being hunted and hounded successfully by every police and intelligence agency in the world. Terrorists ready, willing, and, most important, able to travel to Europe or the United States and successfully undertake a terrorist action are few, which means that the United States alone is spending some hundreds of billions of dollars to counter at most a handful of extremists.

Which brings us to the alleged terrorist threat in Africa in general and to Mali in particular, which might well be considered a case study of how non-traditional military engagement driven by interventionist policies can develop willy-nilly when some bad choices are made. What kind of terrorist threat does Mali actually represent and how did the current situation come about?

Read on at the source.

See also:

The Fuzzy Image War ..., Libya - Is It the Oil? as well as The Sport of Facile Killing - A Democratic Pastime (note, to read the article by P.T. Bauer scroll downward until the advertisement is out of sight.)

Gun Control is Racist

Today I learned that the largest gun control enforcers during the Reconstruction were the Ku Klux Klan, disarming black people with roving bands of "disarmament posses."

From the 2010 article by Adam Winkler entitled The Secret History of Guns:

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

Repeat after me: gun control is racist.

History has repeatedly shown that gun control has never been about controlling firearms, but rather to disarm marginalized people.

Simply put, gun control is people control.

James Padilioni at Students for Liberty gives more in-depth information regarding the history of gun control in the United States specifically, pointing out the obvious: it was easier to control and enslave people who are disarmed than those who are not.

Contrary to popular opinion, gun control laws are nothing new in the United States; in fact, laws restricting guns have historical precedent going as far back as the seventeenth century. A 1639 law in Virginia banned all Africans from gun ownership, while simultaneously making non-gun ownership punishable by a fine for all Whites. This law is remarkable because it is one of the earliest legal provisions created in British North America that paved the way for a full-fledged, racially-determined system of chattel slavery. Indeed, partus sequitur ventrem, or the legal doctrine of maternally-inherited slave status, did not enter the law books until 1662, some 23 years later (it should be noted that English common law was jettisoned in favor of Roman civil law in order to accomplish this – Hayek would not be very happy!). Evidently, the rationality in Virginia was one of control: African slaves with guns were a lot more ungovernable than slaves without them.

It is such a shame that Republicans and the National Rifle Association (NRA) are the faces of the opposition to gun control, instead of anti-racist civil rights leaders. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. attempted to get a gun license, but was denied by the racists in power. It is also fact that the NRA supported gun control against blacks. It must be noted that conservative Republican hero Ronald Reagan supported gun control when it came to controlling blacks, stating in 1967 that there was, "No reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons." This and the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 makes Republicans as credible on gun rights as the Democrats are currently.

Beyond the racist roots of gun control, let us also not forget to state the very obvious of any law that is usually passed in this country: the police will use gun control to incarcerate even more brown people.

Liberals never ask themselves: who will get the maximum sentence for gun control violations? Who will get convicted more? Who will the police stop for guns?

Kevin Carson puts it best regarding liberal rhetoric and the reality of what they are endorsing:

Regardless of the “liberal” or “progressive” rhetoric used to defend gun control, you can safely bet it will come down harder on the cottagers than on the gentry, harder on the workers than on the Pinkertons, and harder on the Black Panthers than on murdering cops.

That is right, brown people are the one who will suffer the most from gun control.

They never think about the fact that these new gun controls will lead to even more outrageous plea bargains, adding more counts to minor crimes. Current drug laws and gang control laws are already destroying minority communities, and these liberals want to give the police even more reason to put the poor and minorities behind bars?

Honestly, if you are a brown person with a gun and a white liberal say they support gun control, what they really mean is: "I want you to rot in jail."

This post originally appeared at Young Americans for Liberty.

Scientists Not Interested in Science

Richard Lindzen commenting on a speech given by president Obama at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

On the one hand, he was calling for sound science and critical analysis, on the other he was calling for the marginalisation of naysayers concerning global warming. It is, as an aside, an appalling feature of the present environment that this kind of abuse of scientific integrity is conducted to cheers at universities. Universities as such provide virtually no defense against this kind of behaviour by important officials.

(See time mark 22:00 of the below video)

The field is corrupt, without any question. I would say most scientists don’t believe this and didn’t believe it 20 years ago. But for young scientists they know they're in trouble if they say it, and so they don’t.

You created a community of scientists who are not interested in the science.

(See time mark 47:20)

On potential converts to the cause of veracity amongst scientists knowledgable enough to see through the politically correct travesty of climate science:

How do you describe these people 'for' or 'against'. It's meaningless. They're opportunistic.

(See time mark 49:20)

 

See also one of my earliest posts (from January 2008): The Sun Queen of Germany, and the very recent Tangents of Wisdom - Dürer and Popper.

Commanding Heights

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In a highly instructive, brilliantly written article containing lots of useful facts, Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz argue:

Over the past few decades, our economy has undergone some fundamental changes — with the result that the fight for control over the commanding heights of American economic life is still very much with us. And it is a fight that, at least for now, the free-market camp appears to be losing.

The commanding heights of our economy today are not heavy manufacturing, energy, and transportation. They are, rather, education and health care. These are our foremost growth sectors — the ones most central to employment and consumption; the ones that, increasingly, drive our economy. And it is in precisely these two sectors that the case for extensive government intervention and planning, if not outright control, is dominant — and becoming ever more so.

If there is to be any hope of reversing this trend, champions of market economics must come to see these two sectors as the front lines in the battle for capitalism. At stake is not only an ideological or theoretical point, but also American prosperity.

Read the entire article entitled The New Commanding Heights.

Tax Increase for Everyone But the Favoured Wealthy Few

It has been a constant theme, especially in my earlier writing here at RSE, that America is becoming more and more European, i.e. a social democratic country with an overblown welfare state that - largely unrelated to improving the common weal - is the outcome of the unprincipled compulsion (of our form of democracy) to buy votes and other means of maintaining power. In the meantime, I have come to believe that America has turned European a long time ago, at least in a number of rather crucial issues.

At the same time, I have always supported the Americanization of Europe, i.e. the absorption of America's great tradition of liberty by the peoples my side of the pond. Some of it is happening. Thus, I was made aware of the below article by a German liberty-friendly blog that draws heavily on American sources.

The Wall Street Journal has this to report on "a tax increase for everyone but the favoured wealthy few":

In praising Congress's huge new tax increase, President Obama said Tuesday that "millionaires and billionaires" will finally "pay their fair share." That is, unless you are a Nascar track owner, a wind-energy company or the owners of StarKist Tuna, among many others who managed to get their taxes reduced in Congress's New Year celebration.

There's plenty to lament about the capital and income tax hikes, but the bill's seedier underside is the $40 billion or so in tax payoffs to every crony capitalist and special pleader with a lobbyist worth his million-dollar salary. Congress and the White House want everyone to ignore this corporate-welfare blowout, so allow us to shine a light on the merriment.

The entire article.

Big 'SIS'

From the review at Amazon:

"Ending Big SIS (The Special Interest State) and Renewing the American Republic" is a stern look at the current crisis in politics and government. The surface problems are known to all: uncontrolled spending; exploding debt; legal and regulatory absurdity; imperious bureaucracy; misdirected investment; and crippled private businesses and institutions. But these are actually symptoms, not basic problems. They cannot be cured until we face up to a deep crack in the structure of our political institutions. We have allowed special interest groups of all kinds – the Founders of the republic called them “factions” – to capture segments of the government and then use its sovereign powers to tax, legislate, spend, and regulate to promote their own agendas rather than the interests of the nation as a whole. Indeed, we celebrate capture. We assume that this jockeying for governmental advantage is part of democracy, and that somehow it will all work out. But it will not work out, because too many interests have won too much over too long a period. Our institutions, which were designed to make government act slowly, make it impossible to reverse course, especially because the winning interests support politicians who will block reform. In fact, the problems will worsen, as ever-more groups demand a share of the pie. The Founders regarded capture by faction as a threat to the existence of the republic, using, in the words of one historian, “a dreadful image of a spreading rot” of a cancer eating at the vitals of the body politic. They were right, and American politics is approaching the day when the very legitimacy of the government will come into question. The book assesses the fears of the Founders, how their ideas governed our political arrangements for 150 years, and the rise of the special interest state in the 20th century. It analyzes the powerful forces that uphold Big SIS, and closes with some specific suggestions on how to reverse course. From the book: The Founders’ view: Like architects analyzing the lines of force necessary to prevent the collapse of a building, the Founders focused on making the forces of factional passion neutralize each other, thus keeping the republic standing. (p.2) Effect on other institutions: The leverage exerted by Big SIS affects decisions far beyond the money that it commandeers directly. It distorts the incentive structures throughout society, and sends investors and workers skittering off in unproductive directions. (p.91) The ratchet: Big SIS [is a ratchet that allows] motion in one direction only – toward greater government activism -- and then locks. (p.112) Rational ignorance: As more rules are created, and as complexity and opacity grow, it becomes more difficult to be “well-informed”. The rational response is not to increase one’s efforts but to cut them back, becoming even less diligent in seeking knowledge. 9p.119) Rapacity: The interest gets the benefits while the costs are borne by society at large, so there is “no constraint on the social cost such an organization will find it expedient to impose on society in the course of obtaining a larger share of the social output for itself.” (p.120)

 

The source: