Life on Sleepy Creek in Words and Images

How the BLS calculate unemployment and why so many aren't counted

2009-12-08T20:25:00.000-08:00

http://dailybail.com/home/animated-cartoon-video-how-the-bls-calculates-unemployment-w.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyBail+%28The+Daily+Bail%29

FOR ALL THE BLOGGERS IN THE BLOGOSPHERE

2009-12-08T19:59:00.000-08:00

I heard an interesting statistic tonight.

For every hit you get,( and I hope you have a counter and a map), you reach on the average of 100 people.

I think that's fantastic, and that's why the house of cards in Copenhagen are fighting so hard to get this monster contained and signed. THEY think we don't know. WE KNOW!

And when you put a widget with a map and stats on your sidebar, and you watch THEM watching YOU, feel good about it.

Lord Monckton explains how the perps committed climate change fraud

2009-12-08T19:58:00.000-08:00

http://rightsoup.com/lord-monckton-exposes-how-the-perps-committed-climate-fraud/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RightSoup+%28Right+Soup%29

Baucus girlfriend eyed post for years

2009-12-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/us_baucus_girlfriend_nominated/2009/12/08/295674.html?s=al&promo_code=92E1-1

Max, Max, Max...you need to step down and leave in shame. It ain't gonna get no better.

A new blog just discovered: Ace of Spades HQ

2009-12-08T16:31:00.000-08:00

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/295584.php

I have a feeling I'm going to enjoy this one.

Requiem for the Dollar

2009-12-08T16:24:00.006-08:00

Requiem for the dollar

James Grant
Saturday, December 5, 2009
online.wsj.com

Ben S. Bernanke doesn't know how lucky he is. Tongue-lashings from Bernie Sanders, the populist senator from Vermont, are one thing. The hangman's noose is another. Section 19 of this country's founding monetary legislation, the Coinage Act of 1792, prescribed the death penalty for any official who fraudulently debased the people's money. Was the massive printing of dollar bills to lift Wall Street (and the rest of us, too) off the rocks last year a kind of fraud? If the U.S. Senate so determines, it may send Mr. Bernanke back home to Princeton. But not even Ron Paul, the Texas Republican sponsor of a bill to subject the Fed to periodic congressional audits, is calling for the Federal Reserve chairman's head.

I wonder, though, just how far we have really come in the past 200-odd years. To give modernity its due, the dollar has cut a swath in the world. There's no greater success story in the long history of money than the common greenback. Of no intrinsic value, collateralized by nothing, it passes from hand to trusting hand the world over. More than half of the $923 billion's worth of currency in circulation is in the possession of foreigners.

Associated Press

President Richard M. Nixon after his Aug. 15, 1971, speech which established that dollars could not be exchanged for gold.

But now the world is losing faith, as well it might. It's not that the dollar is overvalued—economists at Deutsche Bank estimate it's 20% too cheap against the euro. The problem lies with its management. The greenback is a glorious old brand that's looking more and more like General Motors.

You get the strong impression that Mr. Bernanke fails to appreciate the tenuousness of the situation—fails to understand that the pure paper dollar is a contrivance only 38 years old, brand new, really, and that the experiment may yet come to naught. Indeed, history and mathematics agree that it will certainly come to naught. Paper currencies are wasting assets. In time, they lose all their value. Persistent inflation at even seemingly trifling amounts adds up over the course of half a century. Before you know it, that bill in your wallet won't buy a pack of gum.

For most of this country's history, the dollar was exchangeable into gold or silver. "Sound" money was the kind that rang when you dropped it on a counter. For a long time, the rate of exchange was an ounce of gold for $20.67. Following the Roosevelt devaluation of 1933, the rate of exchange became an ounce of gold for $35. After 1933, only foreign governments and central banks were privileged to swap unwanted paper for gold, and most of these official institutions refrained from asking (after 1946, it seemed inadvisable to antagonize the very superpower that was standing between them and the Soviet Union). By the late 1960s, however, some of these overseas dollar holders, notably France, began to clamor for gold. They were well-advised to do so, dollars being in demonstrable surplus. President Richard Nixon solved that problem in August 1971 by suspending convertibility altogether. From that day to this, in the words of John Exter, Citibanker and monetary critic, a Federal Reserve "note" has been an "IOU nothing."

From the Solidus to the Euro

A guide to currencies through the ages.

Solidus

Art Resource, NY
A gold coin introduced around A.D. 310, early in the reign of Emperor Constantine I. In the Byzantine currency system, it was the prime coin against which other coins could be exchanged and was used in international trade and major payrolls. Its use continued into the 11th century, when Constantine IX began debasing it.

Pound sterling

Getty Images
The U.K. currency is the oldest currency still in use. Its paper form was introduced when the Bank of England was formed in 1694.

Dollar

American Numismatic Society
The Coinage Act of 1792 affirmed the dollar as the U.S. currency unit and specified that each was to equal the value of the Spanish milled dollar and was to contain 371 4/16 grains of pure, or 416 grains of standard, silver.

Euro

Deutsche Bundesbank/Getty Images
This common currency for 16 European Union countries launched on Jan. 1, 1999, replacing, among others, Italy's lira, Germany's Deutsche mark and France's franc. The euro erased most of Western Europe's monetary borders.

To understand the scrape we are in, it may help, a little, to understand the system we left behind. A proper gold standard was a well-oiled machine. The metal actually moved and, so moving, checked what are politely known today as "imbalances." Say a certain baseball-loving North American country were running a persistent trade deficit. Under the monetary system we don't have and which only a few are yet even talking about instituting, the deficit country would remit to its creditors not pieces of easily duplicable paper but scarce gold bars. Gold was money—is, in fact, still money—and the loss would set in train a series of painful but necessary adjustments in the country that had been watching baseball instead of making things to sell. Interest rates would rise in that deficit country. Its prices would fall, its credit would be curtailed, its exports would increase and its imports decrease. At length, the deficit country would be restored to something like competitive trim. The gold would come sailing back to where it started. As it is today, dollars are piled higher and higher in the vaults of America's Asian creditors. There's no adjustment mechanism, only recriminations and the first suggestion that, from the creditors' point of view, enough is enough.

So in 1971, the last remnants of the gold standard were erased. And a good thing, too, some economists maintain. The high starched collar of a gold standard prolonged the Great Depression, they charge; it would likely have deepened our Great Recession, too. Virtue's the thing for prosperity, they say; in times of trouble, give us the Ben S. Bernanke school of money conjuring. There are many troubles with this notion. For one thing, there is no single gold standard. The version in place in the 1920s, known as the gold-exchange standard, was almost as deeply flawed as the post-1971 paper-dollar system. As for the Great Recession, the Bernanke method itself was a leading cause of our troubles. Constrained by the discipline of a convertible currency, the U.S. would have had to undergo the salutary, unpleasant process described above to cure its trade deficit. But that process of correction would—I am going to speculate—have saved us from the near-death financial experience of 2008. Under a properly functioning gold standard, the U.S. would not have been able to borrow itself to the threshold of the poorhouse.

Anyway, starting in the early 1970s, American monetary policy came to resemble a game of tennis without the net. Relieved of the irksome inhibition of gold convertibility, the Fed could stop worrying about the French. To be sure, it still had Congress to answer to, and the financial markets, as well. But no more could foreigners come calling for the collateral behind the dollar, because there was none. The nets came down on Wall Street, too. As the idea took hold that the Fed could meet any serious crisis by carpeting the nation with dollar bills, bankers and brokers took more risks. New forms of business organization encouraged more borrowing. New inflationary vistas opened.

Not that the architects of the post-1971 game set out to lower the nets. They believed they'd put up new ones. In place of such gold discipline as remained under Bretton Woods—in truth, there wasn't much—markets would be the monetary judges and juries. The late Walter Wriston, onetime chairman of Citicorp, said that the world had traded up. In place of a gold standard, it now had an "information standard." Buyers and sellers of the Treasury's notes and bonds, on the one hand, or of dollars, yen, Deutschemarks, Swiss francs, on the other, would ride herd on the Fed. You'd know when the central bank went too far because bond yields would climb or the dollar exchange rate would fall. Gold would trade like any other commodity, but nobody would pay attention to it.

I check myself a little in arraigning the monetary arrangements that have failed us so miserably these past two years. The lifespan of no monetary system since 1880 has been more than 30 or 40 years, including that of my beloved classical gold standard, which perished in 1914. The pure paper dollar regime has been a long time dying. It was no good portent when the tellers' bars started coming down from neighborhood bank branches. The uncaged teller was a sign that Americans had began to conceive an elevated opinion of the human capacity to manage financial risk. There were other evil omens. In 1970, Wall Street partnerships began to convert to limited liability corporations—Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette was the first to make the leap, Goldman Sachs, among the last, in 1999. In a partnership, the owners are on the line for everything they have in case of the firm's bankruptcy. No such sword of Damocles hangs over the top executives of a corporation. The bankers and brokers incorporated because they felt they needed more capital, more scale, more technology—and, of course, more leverage.

In no phase of American monetary history was every banker so courageous and farsighted as Isaias W. Hellman, a progenitor of an institution called Farmers & Merchants Bank and of another called Wells Fargo. Operating in southern California in the late 1880s, Hellman arrived at the conclusion that the Los Angeles real-estate market was a bubble. So deciding—the prices of L.A. business lots had climbed to $5,000 from $500 in one short year—he stopped lending. The bubble burst, and his bank prospered. Safety and soundness was Hellman's motto. He and his depositors risked their money side-by-side. The taxpayers didn't subsidize that transaction, not being a party to it.

In this crisis, of course, with latter-day Hellmans all too scarce in the banking population, the taxpayers have born an unconscionable part of the risk. Wells Fargo itself passed the hat for $25 billion. Hellmans are scarce because the federal government has taken away their franchise. There's no business value in financial safety when the government bails out the unsafe. And by bailing out a scandalously large number of unsafe institutions, the government necessarily puts the dollar at risk. In money, too, the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone. Debased banks mean a debased currency (perhaps causation works in the other direction, too).

Many contended for the hubris prize in the years leading up to the sorrows of 2008, but the Fed beat all comers. Under Mr. Bernanke, as under his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, our central bank preached the doctrine of stability. The Fed would iron out the business cycle, promote full employment, pour oil on the waters of any and every major financial crisis and assure stable prices. In particular, under the intellectual leadership of Mr. Bernanke, the Fed would tolerate no sagging of the price level. It would insist on a decent minimum of inflation. It staked out this position in the face of the economic opening of China and India and the spread of digital technology. To the common-sense observation that these hundreds of millions of willing new hands, and gadgets, might bring down prices at Wal-Mart, the Fed turned a deaf ear. It would save us from "deflation" by generating a sweet taste of inflation (not too much, just enough). And it would perform these feats of macroeconomic management by pushing a single interest rate up or down.

It was implausible enough in the telling and has turned out no better in the doing. Nor is there any mystery why. The Fed's M.O. is price control. It fixes the basic money market interest rate, known as the federal funds rate. To arrive at the proper rate, the monetary mandarins conduct their research, prepare their forecast—and take a wild guess, just like the rest of us. Since December 2008, the Fed has imposed a funds rate of 0% to 0.25%. Since March of 2009, it has bought just over $1 trillion of mortgage-backed securities and $300 billion of Treasurys. It has acquired these assets in the customary central-bank manner, i.e., by conjuring into existence the money to pay for them. Yet—a measure of the nation's lingering problems—the broadly defined money supply isn't growing but dwindling.

The Fed's miniature interest rates find favor with debtors, disfavor with savers (that doughty band). All may agree, however, that the bond market has lost such credibility it once had as a monetary-policy voting machine. Whether or not the Fed is cranking too hard on the dollar printing press is, for professional dealers and investors, a moot point. With the cost of borrowing close to zero, they are happy as clams (that is, they can finance their inventories of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities at virtually no cost). The U.S. government securities market has been conscripted into the economic-stimulus program.

Neither are the currency markets the founts of objective monetary information they perhaps used to be. The euro trades freely, but the Chinese yuan is under the thumb of the People's Republic. It tells you nothing about the respective monetary policies of the People's Bank and the Fed to observe that it takes 6.831 yuan to make a dollar. It's the exchange rate that Beijing wants.

On the matter of comparative monetary policies, the most expressive market is the one that the Fed isn't overtly manipulating. Though Treasury yields might as well be frozen, the gold price is soaring (it lost altitude on Friday). Why has it taken flight? Not on account of an inflation problem. Gold is appreciating in terms of all paper currencies—or, alternatively, paper currencies are depreciating in terms of gold—because the world is losing faith in the tenets of modern central banking. Correctly, the dollar's vast non-American constituency understands that it counts for nothing in the councils of the Fed and the Treasury. If 0% interest rates suit the U.S. economy, 0% will be the rate imposed. Then, too, gold is hard to find and costly to produce. You can materialize dollars with the tap of a computer key.

Let me interrupt myself to say that I am not now making a bullish investment case for gold (I happen to be bullish, but it's only an opinion). The trouble with 0% interest rates is that they instigate speculation in almost every asset that moves (and when such an immense market as that in Treasury securities isn't allowed to move, the suppressed volatility finds different outlets). By practicing price, or interest-rate, control, the Bank of Bernanke fosters a kind of alternative financial reality. Let the buyer beware—of just about everything.

A proper gold standard promotes balance in the financial and commercial affairs of participating nations. The pure paper system promotes and perpetuates imbalances. Not since 1976 has this country consumed less than it produced (as measured by the international trade balance): a deficit of 32 years and counting. Why has the shortfall persisted for so long? Because the U.S., uniquely, is allowed to pay its bills in the currency that only it may lawfully print. We send it west, to the central banks of our Asian creditors. And they, obligingly, turn right around and invest the dollars in America's own securities. It's as if the money never left home. Stop to ask yourself, American reader: Is any other nation on earth so blessed as we?

There is, however, a rub. The Asian central banks do not acquire their dollars with nothing. Rather, they buy them with the currency that they themselves print. Some of this money they manage to sweep under the rug, or "sterilize," but a good bit of it enters the local payment stream, where it finances today's rowdy Asian bull markets.

A monetary economist from Mars could only scratch his pointy head at our 21st century monetary arrangements. What is a dollar? he might ask. No response. The Martian can't find out because the earthlings don't know. The value of a dollar is undefined. Its relationship to other currencies is similarly contingent. Some exchange rates float, others sink, still others are lashed to the dollar (whatever it is). Discouraged, the visitor zooms home.

Neither would the ghosts of earthly finance know what to make of things if they returned for a briefing from wherever they were spending eternity. Someone would have to tell Alexander Hamilton that his system of coins is defunct, as is, incidentally, the federal sinking fund he devised to retire the public debt (it went out of business in 1960). He might have to hear it more than once to understand, but Congress no longer "coins" money and regulates the value thereof. Rather, it delegates the work to Mr. Bernanke, who, a noted student of the Great Depression, believes that the cure for borrowing too much money is printing more money.

Walter Bagehot, the Victorian English financial journalist, would be in for a jolt, too. It would hardly please him to hear that the Fed had invoked the authority of his name to characterize its helter-skelter interventions of the past year. In a crisis, Bagehot wrote in his 1873 study "Lombard Street," a central bank should lend without stint to solvent institutions at a punitive rate of interest against sound collateral. At least, Bagehot's shade might console itself, the Fed was faithful to the text on one point. It did lend without stint.

If Bagehot's ghost would be chagrined, that of Bagehot's sparring partner, Thomson Hankey, would be exultant. Hankey, a onetime governor of the Bank of England, denounced Bagehot in life. No central bank should stand ready to bail out the imprudent, he maintained. "I cannot conceive of anything more likely to encourage rash and imprudent speculation..., " wrote Hankey in response to Bagehot. "I am no advocate for any legislative enactments to try and make the trading community more prudent."

Hankey believed in the price system. It might pain him to discover that his professional descendants have embraced command and control. "We should have required [banks to hold] more capital, more liquidity," Mr. Bernanke rued in a Senate hearing on Thursday. "We should have required more risk management controls." Roll over, Isaias Hellman.

So our Martian would be mystified and our honored dead distressed. And we, the living? We are none too pleased ourselves. At least, however, being alive, we can begin to set things right. The thing to do, I say, is to restore the nets to the tennis courts of money and finance. Collateralize the dollar—make it exchangeable into something of genuine value. Get the Fed out of the price-fixing business. Replace Ben Bernanke with a latter-day Thomson Hankey. Find—cultivate—battalions of latter-day Hellmans and set them to running free-market banks. There's one more thing: Return to the statute books Section 19 of the 1792 Coinage Act, but substitute life behind bars for the death penalty. It's the 21st century, you know.

James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, is the author, most recently, of "Mr. Market Miscalculates" (Axios Press).

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Ron Paul Reception

Posted: November 19, 2009

Friday evening, December 4, 2009 my wife and I will be honored to hold a reception for the world's most popular congressman, Ron Paul. The good doctor will be in the Phoenix area in support of Campaign for Liberty, an educational organization that sprang from Dr. Paul's exhilarating 2008 campaign for the presidency.

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Meltdown
by: Thomas E. Woods Jr.
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Read three pages of Meltdown-any three pages-and you will see why this book hit The New York Times Best-Seller list. If you think that Obama's bailout programs will solve all problems, Woods will dispel that erroneous thought. In fact, Woods will present a compelling case for bailouts making things worse. Now on sale at a discounted price.

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What's at stake in Copenhagen - Judge Scalia

2009-12-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.myheritage.org/

Danish text leak - summit in disarray

2009-12-08T15:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/copenhagen-climate-summit-in-disarray-after-document-leak-20091209-ki29.html

This is the very opposite of the Declaration of Independence. This is the founding of world tyranny.

Don't take this lightly.

This is the most serious event you will ever see in your lifetime. They want us starving, dying. We are parasites - a disease. This is what the elites believe.

This is right in your face. Watch "Fall of the Republic" available through Youtube or dvd at prisonplanet.com

I think it's somewhere on this blog.

REPEAT AFTER ME: AL GORE IS A FRAUD; CLIMATE CHANGE IS A HOAX

2009-12-08T14:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-gore/we-are-now-in-a-crucial-m_b_383058.htm

I WANT TO KEEP THE WORLD FREE AND MOST OF ALL, AMERICA!

FREE FROM THE AL GORE'S, THE OBAMA'S, THE ROYALS, THE GLOBAL BANKS, THOSE WHO WOULD ENSLAVE US.

ALL OF THEM MEETING IN DENMARK SHOULD BE THROWN IN JAIL FOR TREASON TO EACH OF THEIR COUNTRIES.!

DON'T YOU REALIZE, CO2 IS NECESSARY TO LIFE AND NEARLY EVERY LIVING THING, INCLUDING YOU, EXPELS IT. TREES AND GREEN VEGETATION TAKE IT IN AND EXCHANGE IT FOR TWO HARMLESS, ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY PRODUCTS - OXYGEN AND WATER VAPOR.

IF YOU ARE TAXED ON YOUR CARBON DIOXIDE, THEY ARE TAXING YOUR LIFE! YOUR VERY BREATH! IF YOU KEEP ANIMALS, THEY WILL TAX YOU BECAUSE THEY EXPEL CARBON DIOXIDE AND GOD FORBID, METHANE. WE ARE IN AN INTRICATE CYCLE OF LIFE HERE. IF YOU LEARNED IN SCHOOL ABOUT THE CLOSED WORLD OF AN AQUARIUM WITH PLANTS, FISH, SNAILS AND WATER, YOU KNOW IT IS SELF SUFFICIENT.

WHY ARE YOU BUYING THE LIES?

ONCE THIS STAR CHAMBER IS OVER, AND ONCE THIS TREATY IS SIGNED, WHICH OBAMA WILL DO THROUGH THE BACK DOOR - WE WILL HAVE TWO CLASSES - A GOVERNING CLASS AND A SLAVE CLASS. EVEN THE WILLING PROPONENTS OF THE GREEN MOVEMENT WILL BE THROWN INTO SLAVERY.

EVERY ELEMENT OF OUR CONSTITUTION WILL BE LOST FOREVER. THIS IS ALL ABOUT A COUP DE ETAT AGAINST CONGRESS. THERE WON'T BE ANY UNITED STATES AS WE KNOW IT.

PLEASE LISTEN. YOU MUST CALL YOUR SENATORS AND INSIST ON SPEAKING TO A SENIOR AIDE IN CHARGE OF CLIMATE/CAP AND TRADE.

DO NOT GIVE UP.

THIS HAS MONSTROUS REPERCUSSIONS ON A WORLDWIDE SCALE!

DON'T KNOW WHAT CLIMATEGATE/CLIMATE CHANGE FRAUD'S ABOUT? LOOK HERE!

2009-12-08T10:41:00.000-08:00

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/proved_no_climate_crisis.html

I am listening to Lord Monckton now. This is a horrendous fraud perpetrated on the people of the world.

You can listen to him now on the Alex Jones show - or prisonplanet.com - there will be a replay throughout the day. It's easy.

TOTAL GLOBAL GOVERNMENT ON AN UNIMAGINABLE SCALE. ABSOLUTE POWER AND FINANCIAL CONTROL WORLDWIDE OF EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE WORLD BY THE UNITED NATIONS. TRAVEL, TRACKING, FOOD, FINANCES - EVERYTHING DESIGNED TO LOOT THE POPULATION OF THE WORLD.

Cherry Tassies - Mom used to make Pecan Tassies, which were a favorite Christmas cookie in my house.

2009-12-08T09:57:00.000-08:00

Cherry Tassies

Prep: 40 minutes
Bake: 10 minutes
Cool: 10 minutes

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Ingredients

Nonstick cooking spray
1-1/4 cups butter, softened
2-1/4 cups powdered sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. peppermint extract
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 egg
2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup finely crushed striped round peppermint candies (about 18)
48 red maraschino cherries or liquor-flavored maraschino cherries with stems, drained
Coarse sugar

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly coat 1 3/4-inch muffin cups with nonstick spray; set aside. In large mixing bowl beat butter on medium to high for 30 seconds. Gradually beat in 1-1/2 cups of the powdered sugar, the baking powder and salt. Beat in peppermint extract, vanilla, and egg. Beat in as much of the flour as you can; stir in remaining flour and candies.

2. Place remaining 3/4 cup powdered sugar in a shallow dish. Shape dough in 1-inch balls; roll in powdered sugar. Press each ball into the bottom and sides of prepared muffin cups.

3. Place cherry, stem side up, in each cup (cherry will not fill the cup). Bake about 12 minutes or until pastry is browned. Sprinkle with coarse sugar. Cool 10 minutes in pan. Use a small sharp knife to loosen tassies from cups. Transfer to rack to cool completely.

4. To store: Place tassies in a single layer in a covered airtight container. Store at room temperature up to 24 hours or refrigerate up to 3 days. Return to room temperature before serving. Makes about 48 tassies.

5. Kitchen tip: Find whiskey-flavored cherries, labeled Tipsy Cherries, in gourmet sections of food stores or online.

Nutrition Facts

Calories 109,
Total Fat (g) 5,
Saturated Fat (g) 3,
Monounsaturated Fat (g) 1,
Polyunsaturated Fat (g) 0,
Cholesterol (mg) 17,
Sodium (mg) 69,
Carbohydrate (g) 15,
Total Sugar (g) 9,
Fiber (g) 0,
Protein (g) 1,
Vitamin C (DV%) 0,
Calcium (DV%) 1,
Iron (DV%) 2,
Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet

A great blog and a great post: The First Sign of Corruption

2009-12-08T09:40:00.000-08:00

http://reddotinaredstate.com/

The First Sign Of Corruption

posted at 4:39 pm on December 7, 2009 by Doctor Zero
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The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means. – Georges Bernanos

The Climagate scandal is a perfect illustration of this statement. Modern society provides plenty of other examples. The extensive corruption of our political system is one of the strongest arguments against the ongoing fusion of government and industry. People of all political persuasions are generally willing to conceded that too many politicians are corrupt. I have always wondered how intellectually serious liberals can reconcile this with their desire to increase the power of the State.

I suspect the answer lies in the belief that this new crop of statists will be honest, unlike all the generations before them. This is a dangerous delusion. Corruption festers in every large organization, but politics are more vulnerable than business… and when the two merge together, they become particularly toxic.

Political corruption is easily camouflaged, and often debatable. Since politicians live to debate, nailing them down on charges of corruption often feels like trying to pin down a drop of water with a staple gun. If a politician sponsors legislation that would truly benefit the public, but would also make him personally wealthy, is he corrupt? We would certainly view him as more corrupt if he tried to conceal his personal benefits… but if he was scrupulous about disclosing them in advance, it’s unlikely he would be able to pass the legislation, especially if he faced determined opposition.

Consider the current example of Senator Max Baucus, who took his girlfriend on taxpayer-funded junkets overseas, and has been trying to secure a U.S. Attorney position for her. She might be a splendid candidate for U.S. Attorney, as Baucus will doubtless continue to argue. That doesn’t make her nomination smell any better. It also won’t make an overtaxed electorate, shivering in the cold shadow of trillion-dollar deficits, feel any better about paying for her luxurious jet-setting romance with the Senator..

The Republicans proved themselves sadly capable of shoving their noses in the treasury during their last years in power, and were punished by the voters for it. The corruption of the Obama Democrats is truly breathtaking. Virtually nothing this Administration does is conducted in a honest, open manner. Everything from the “stimulus” bill, to Cash for Clunkers, to frantic attempts to buy House and Senate votes for the government’s health care takeover, is wrapped in pork and glazed with payoffs, cooked with a secret recipe that you can’t see without a subpoena. Some of this corruption is enabled by the Democrats’ largely accurate sense that the media will not hold them accountable for it, certainly not with the same vigor they would pursue Republicans. The raging rapids of taxpayer cash surging through Washington are a factor as well. Reckless deficit spending has made purchasing a representative or Senator the only investment guaranteed to increase in value.

At this scale of government, corruption is endemic. It doesn’t make that much of a difference which party sits on top of that much power. With the rare exception prosecuted by law enforcement, there is little immediate risk of penalty for dirty politicians. It takes years to get them voted out of office, and their local electorate might not be eager to displace a powerful, long-term incumbent with a new representative… especially if the incumbent has brought a lot of money home to the district, in addition to lining his own pockets. Big Government even corrupts the voters.

Bring all of these factors to an even higher level of centralized power and money, and it’s easy to see why the global warming movement – the birthing cry of world government – is so incredibly corrupt. The amount of money and power tied up in this movement is staggering. In fact, as they become increasingly desperate to fight off a public outraged by the Climagate revelations, the global warming cult might make the case they’re “too big to fail” – cutting off the billions of dollars poured into the global warming hoax would cost thousands of jobs, and destroy the corporate barnacles that grew around the shadow of climate change legislation, such as Al Gore’s carbon credit sales. The transnational elite planning to divide the wealth of nations through climate-change hysteria is even less accountable than Barack Obama’s corrupt Democrat Party. As Mark Steyn memorably put it, where would we go to vote these guys out of office?

At the heart of the Left’s indulgence of political corruption lies the mistaken conviction that “public service” transforms politicians into exemplars of civic virtue, or that political office attracts a large percentage of such civic-minded individuals. In reality, the political class is even more greedy and selfish than wealthy businessmen… because they spend much of their time in the company of such wealthy men, and believe themselves entitled to riches and luxuries. Max Baucus doubtless attends a lot of campaign events sponsored by rich supporters who can afford to fly their girlfriends to Europe for a romantic getaway, and he believes himself morally and intellectually superior to these men – the remorseless logic of statism demands it. It only makes sense to place politicians in control of industry if they’re better than the industrialists they control, after all.

The mythic ideal of Cincinnatus, the selfless citizen-legislator who reluctantly leaves his farm to serve the Republic, is incompatible with the combination of endless incumbency and gigantic amounts of government power. We are foolish to place our trust in a system that requires an impossible level of virtue from politicians to function as designed. A limited government can better protect the economic health of its citizens by policing corruption from the private sector, under the direction of term-limited representatives who will never become worth the risk of buying off. The larger government becomes, the more its arrogant ruling class believe themselves worthy of royal treatment… and the more justified they feel about lying to the public for their own good. That is why the climate change elite gathered in Copenhagen this week is outraged that anyone would dare question their right to save a foolish world from itself, by lying through its teeth in a bid to seize power.

Some Historical Perspective

By J. Storrs Hall, on December 5th, 2009

At Bryan Caplan’s blog this morning there was an odd comment that stirred up a 40-year old memory:

A single sentence in the Durants’ The Age of Napoleon makes me wonder whether I can trust a word they write on economic policy:

The memory is that it was reading another part of the Durant’s Story of Civilization (of which tAoN is volume 11) back in grade school, I stumbled on a passage which was the very first in any book of any kind in which I realized that the authors could let their political preconceptions alter their interpretation of their subject. What they wrote, as I recall it very inexactly 40 years later, was to the effect that western civilization had progressed in a grand upward sweep since the time of the ancient Greeks, pausing only in the years 1952-1960 — which of course the Eisenhower administration. (This was written before Nixon was elected.) I had previously believed that if something was written in a book, it was authoritatively true. This little gem was so blatantly silly that you couldn’t possibly take it seriously. Books weren’t Truth, after all. It was a defining moment in my intellectual life, something like learning the truth about Santa Claus.

I had some of the same feelings, roughly a decade ago, to learn that the scientific establishment would attack ideas, in this case the notion of diamondoid machinery and mechanosynthesis, using blather, appeal to authority, and various other fallacies, when they knew they didn’t have valid scientific arguments. It was all in aid of getting funding and retaining prestige, and not the search for truth.

There was never a “nanogate” so we will probably never know to what extent the nanotech “in-group” fudged, colluded, or simply used the old-boy network to marginalize their rivals. It would be just as clueless as the Durants to claim that there was a broad sweep of progress in nanotechnology except from 1996 to 2005. But it’s also a bit disingenuous to claim, as some commentators have, to be “shocked — shocked!” to find that kind of thing going on in climate science.

Unlike some people, we at Foresight haven’t been overly focussed on the sturm und drang of science politics. A major reason is that in the long run, it doesn’t matter. If diamondoid machines can be built, and it’s highly likely they can, there is little chance that they won’t be sometime in the coming century. So no matter what the specifics of any given debate, it’s a good idea to look at things like the Industrial Revolution to understand the coming century of technological innovation.

One thing that Climategate does is give us an opportunity to step back from the details of the AGW argument and say, maybe these are heat-of-the-moment stuff, and in the long run will look as silly as the Durants’ allergy to Eisenhower. And perhaps, if we can put climate arguments in perspective, it will allow us to put the much smaller nano arguments (pun intended) into perspective too.

So let’s look at some ice.

I’m looking at the temperature record as read from this central Greenland ice core. It gives us about as close as we can come to a direct, experimental measurement of temperature at that one spot for the past 50,000 years. As far as I know, the data are not adjusted according to any fancy computer climate model or anything else like that.

So what does it tell us about, say, the past 500 years? (the youngest datum is age=0.0951409 (thousand years before present) — perhaps younger snow doesn’t work so well?):

Well, whaddaya know — a hockey stick. In fact, the “blade” continues up in the 20th century at least another half a degree. But how long is the handle? How unprecedented is the current warming trend?

Yes, Virginia, there was a Medieval Warm Period, in central Greenland at any rate. But we knew that — that’s when the Vikings were naming it Greenland, after all. And the following Little Ice Age is what killed them off, and caused widespread crop failures (and the consequent burning of witches) across Europe. But was the MWP itself unusual?

Well, no — over the period of recorded history, the average temperature was about equal to the height of the MWP. Rises not only as high, but as rapid, as the current hockey stick blade have been the rule, not the exception.

In fact for the entire Holocene — the period over which, by some odd coincidence, humanity developed agriculture and civilization — the temperature has been higher than now, and the trend over the past 4000 years is a marked decline. From this perspective, it’s the LIA that was unusual, and the current warming trend simply represents a return to the mean. If it lasts.

From the perspective of the Holocene as a whole, our current hockeystick is beginning to look pretty dinky. By far the possibility I would worry about, if I were the worrying sort, would be the return to an ice age — since interglacials, over the past half million years or so, have tended to last only 10,000 years or so. And Ice ages are not conducive to agriculture.

… and ice ages have a better claim on being the natural state of Earth’s climate than interglacials. This next graph, for the longest period, we have to go to an Antarctic core (Vostok):

In other words, we’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history. But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still. It doesn’t even stand stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.

Does this mean that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas? No.

Does it mean that it isn’t warming? No.

Does it mean that we shouldn’t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels? Of course not. We should do all those things for many reasons — but there’s plenty of time to do them the right way, by developing nanotech. (There’s plenty of money, too, but it’s all going to climate science at the moment. ) And that will be a very good thing to have done if we do fall back into an ice age, believe me.

For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists’ insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock.

And that, if you will allow me to return full circle, means that the Fat Fingers argument is probably poppycock too.

Let me get this straight, we breathe in oxygen in order to live. We exhale co2 which is then consumed by green things such as trees and bushes so that they can live. In turn, these green living things turn co2 into oxygen so that we can live. Now the EPA wants to regulate this very sensitive balance of nature? Wow...

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/12/025111.php

As we have noted many times, the United States is the only country in the world that deliberately fails to develop its own energy resources. Other than instituting price controls, this is the single most destructive economic policy that a country can pursue, which is why no one does it except us.

Brazil has one of the world's most dynamic economies and is pursuing petroleum development on a grand scale. The Washington Post reports:

Everything about the shipyard here is colossal -- the 4,000-man workforce, the billions sunk into it in capital costs, the half-finished 10-story-high production platforms.

But then, so is the challenge facing Brazil's state-controlled energy company, Petrobras: developing a group of newly discovered deep-sea oil fields that energy analysts say will catapult this country into the ranks of the world's petro-powers. The oil pools are 200 miles out in the Atlantic and more than four miles down, under freezing seas, rock and a heavy cap of salt.

Petrobras, which until recently was little known outside oil circles, has launched a five-year, $174 billion project to provide platforms, rigs, support vessels and drilling systems to develop tens of billions of barrels of oil. Energy officials here project that Brazil -- still an oil importer five years ago -- will in the next decade have one of the world's biggest oil reserves.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if our government pursues policies intended to slow our economic growth, and Brazil pursues policies designed to accelerate its economic growth, before long Brazil will be richer than the U.S. What's really interesting here, however, is the identity of one of Petrobras's biggest shareholders:

With a market capitalization of more than $220 billion, Petrobras is one of the world's 10 biggest companies. Over the past two years, it has been the most frequently traded foreign company on the New York Stock Exchange, trade data show. Among investors bullish on Petrobras is George Soros, who last year made the oil company the largest single holding in his investment fund, according to Bloomberg.

That's right: the Godfather of the Democratic Party, who exerts his enormous political influence to prevent American oil companies from developing our own petroleum resources in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, has placed his biggest bet--not on the United States, but on Brazil. If Exxon Mobil can't compete in the Caribbean with Petrobras, the value of Soros's Petrobras investment will skyrocket. That's the sort of thievery that lies behind the Democratic Party's deliberate hobbling of the American economy. (powerline)

--
Kim Skelton - Stillwater County Republicans Freedom & Liberty Party

Here are the "Red Hots" from RedState today.

2009-12-08T07:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.redstate.com/redhot/#post-4335

OBAMA - THE ULTIMATE CZAR

2009-12-08T07:25:00.000-08:00

http://blog.heritage.org/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell

Now go bow your head and pay homage to Obama, 'cause you're going to have to get used to it.

Photographer's Christmas wish list

2009-12-08T07:07:00.000-08:00

http://photojojo.com/store/email-2009-12-08?utm_source=Photojojo+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2a4ab14b9e-Gift_Guide_2_12_8_2009&utm_medium=email

Psyops - from the excellent blog "Preparing for Tyranny"

2009-12-08T07:02:00.000-08:00

http://pft2009.blogspot.com/

NEW FEDERAL REGULATIONS THREATEN SMALL BUSINESS ACCESS TO CREDIT

2009-12-08T06:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=18765&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD

1775 document: Declaration of Arms

2009-12-08T06:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.nationalcenter.org/1775DeclarationofArms.html

To read, think about and compare 1775 with today. They were fighting for a country and for rights.

Today, we are not yet fighting, and our precious rights are being removed at an alarming rate.

Take inspiration for history. It repeats itself in all things.

Russia Today on the great climate change swindle

2009-12-08T06:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-great-climate-change-swindle-global-warming-is-not-manmade.html

Military strategy and leadership

2009-12-08T06:31:00.001-08:00

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.4963/pub_detail.asp

Roosevelt's address to the nation on the bombing of Pearl Harbor

2009-12-08T06:26:00.000-08:00

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.4957/pub_detail.asp

Can you imagine Obama giving a speech like that?

Reid: If you don't want Obamacare, then you are pro-slavery

2009-12-08T06:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/07/reid-compares-health-care-reform-foes-slavery-supporters/

The man is an idiot.

If you read one page of the bill, you know who's pro-slavery. Same with the climate change crap.

This administration is tap dancing as fast as they can to get all the ducks lined up to shoot us before the next election. My thinking is that there may not be another presidential election. Or any other by 2010.

Obama's science czar plans to sterilize population through water supply - but it's already here!

2009-12-08T06:05:00.001-08:00

http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-science-czars-plan-to-sterilize-population-through-water-supply-already-happening.html

Just for the record - go look up the dangers of fluoride. A group of us presented research years ago to our Bay County Florida County Commission when the contract for fluoridation was to be renewed, and they laughed at us.

COPENHAGEN - ITS BEAUTY SULLIED BY LIARS, THIEVES AND GLOBAL GOVERNMENT WHORES

2009-12-08T05:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.prisonplanet.com/caviar-scoffing-co2-belching-prostitute-molesting-climate-crooks-convene-for-the-mass-raping.html

http://www.prisonplanet.com/big-oil-behind-copenhagen-climate-scam.html

http://www.prisonplanet.com/climategate-the-rest-of-the-story.html

And no - I'm not apologizing.

Cap and Tax bad for rural American farmers

2009-12-08T05:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.redstate.com/leslieshedd/2009/12/07/cap-and-tax-bad-for-farmers-rural-america/