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Thursday,
February 11, 2010 Rush Limbaugh today is concerned about
Obama's recent statement that he is 'agnostic' on the subject of raising
taxes on the middle class, which is to say those with family incomes of
lower than $250,000 a year. You may recall that during his campaign the
strongest promise he made was that if your family income was less than
$250,000 a year you would not see one dime of tax increases. Not one dime.
Now Obama's "I am agnostic" statement was made without a teleprompter,
and might just be a case of getting the wrong word. He may have meant
'adamant', one of Steve Jobs' favorite words. Adamant comes from Greek and
denoted a very hard substance, as in the adamant sickle used by the Titan
Chronos to castrate his father. If Obama really meant "agnostic" meaning
literally without knowledge (as in ignoramus, or we know nothing, one
possible finding of a grand jury) and usually taken to mean having no strong
opinion or program of action on an issue, such as being agnostic as opposed
to being atheist or religious, then it is a very major change in policy, and
a probably disastrous one for the Democratic Party. If it is such a change
in policy this is an odd way to announce it. It tells the ravenous wolves
that they are free to raise taxes on the middle class. I expect it was a
misstatement that is being allowed to stand as a trial balloon. If so, that
balloon ought to be shot down, promptly and vigorously, and the Democrats
should be put in a state of terror.
Note that the new Obama budget has a number of hidden budget increases
built into it: it moves a number of "temporary" budget items into the
permanent non-discretionary budget base, apparently enough to just about
offset his "freeze" on future spending. Perhaps that too is a mistake, or
some trick by staff officials, but the President ought to be asked about
this at his next press conference. One supposes there will be press
conferences? Alas, we have no equivalent of the British Parliament's
'Question time', so there's no requirement of press conferences other than
public demand.
Given that Washington is shut down by the latest indicators of global
warming, perhaps it will be a while before there can be a press conference?
On the other hand, maybe this is the right time. Surely the press can get to
the White House, the President is already there, if there is Internet
connection anywhere on Earth it ought to be from the White House, and the
President isn't going to be traveling for a few days. Ideal press conference
time.
==============
Karl Rove today advises the Republicans to accept the President's
invitation to the health care summit. "Republicans
and the Health-Care Pow-Wow". He thinks it's a good idea and will
provide some good Republican sound bites, a show case for proposals on tort
reform (probably the single most needed health care reform) and other
Republican "ideas".
I'm not so sure. It's a political spectacle, and Obama's people control
all the rules. One has no choice but to be respectful to the President -- he
is, as Clinton once observed, the only President we have -- and the
President has all the power to set the rules on what is covered, what is
recorded, what is televised. Newt Gingrich was usually able to hold his own
in some of those shows, but Clinton snookered him on more than one occasion
-- and they had mutual respect for each other as well as for their offices.
They also thoroughly understood each other. I don't think the current
Republicans have the skills -- and the whole thing is kabuki theater to
begin with. What purpose is served? The President wants any bill he can get.
The Democrats want some way to escape the general hatred of Congress -- bad
enough that the people hate the Congress, but it's clear that the Democrats
run it with their extraordinary majorities of 2008. "We put you guys in
charge, and you blew it," is a fair summary of the tea party movement. Why
help bail the Democrats out?
==================
I have mail from tea party hosts -- they don't like to be called leaders
-- reminding me that the tea parties are not nailed to the Republican Party.
I understand that. Neither am I. At the moment, though, the Republican
vector is toward less government, as historically it was until the Big
Government Conservatives after Gingrich changed that. Presumably they have
learned a lesson; it is one we should not let them forget. Reagan intended
to eliminate the Department of Education (a consummation devoutly to be
wished); he was thwarted by the ravenous wolves, and he had the Cold War to
end. No one is talking about eliminating whole government departments now,
but if anyone is going to do it, it will probably be Republicans, not
Democrats.
But let me repeat: if we don't have a viable two party system, a way to
turn out unsatisfactory political leaders without the election being taken
as an invitation to remake the fundamentals of the nation -- as the 2008
election was interpreted as a mandate to turn the nation into a European
model socialist state with socialized medicine and expanded welfare and a
huge increase in the portion of GDP disposed of by the government, with full
Industrial Policy and the rest -- we are in deep trouble. If each
election is an institutional revolution, and the stakes escalate with each
election until losing the election is ruin for a large number of people --
the subsequent history is pretty clear. Institutional civil war is not
stable.
Conservatism is enjoyment, not permanent revolution. It took a while to
get into this hole. It will take longer to get out. First we stop digging.
Then we begin to dismantle parts of the huge structure. But we must not do
it by turning out all the civil servants. Devolving many of their tasks to
lower levels, subsidiarity and transparency, those are vectors. The
Department of Education is, I think, an exception; but most government
programs began with good intentions, few of those who run them for us are
villains, and people made dependent on government cannot simple be turned
out to starve. Transitions take a long time: what's important is to get the
vector in the right direction, and it's very likely that the only way to do
that is to completely change the leadership in both parties. We have to make
elections a way to choose those who will lead, not simply choose between the
Creeps and the Nuts.
==============
If you want to hear about impasses and compromise, try this"
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/
music/thingaweek/ReYourBrains.mp3
=================
For some pictures of the snow, try:
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/2010/z20100208.php#Thursday
Of course it's global warming.
Now do understand: there's some sense in the notion that it
takes increased energy, coming from somewhere, to transport the gigatons of
water so that it can become glacial ice. There are also obvious feedback
loops. Ice is reflective. How do you get the water from the seas, and from
lower latitudes, up to the higher latitudes so that the glacial creep
begins? And what causes it to run away, so that in under 100 years Britain
went from deciduous trees to tens of meters, then kilometers, of ice? That
ice has to start with evaporation, and that takes heat and lots of it.
Needless to say, none of the great comprehensive climate models can explain
the sudden transition from temperate to Ice Age, nor do they show any
mechanism for recovery from an Ice Age once begun.
Clearly there has to be an energy source for an Ice Age
climate change. What we don't have are good and valid theories on what
causes the Ice Ages. Benjamin Franklin speculated volcanic clouds making the
world colder -- he came up with that theory when observing a volcanic
eruption in Iceland while on passage to (possibly from, I forget) a
diplomatic mission to Europe. Franklin speculated on global cooling; he
didn't think about the energy required to transport all that water to the
glacial area. Other since have thought about it, but few that I know of have
any testable hypotheses.
I note that current global warming theories are now
accepting the unprecedented snowfalls as evidence of the truth of AGW. There
seems to be no real consensus among them, though, and some are still showing
the lack of snow for the Winter Olympics also as evidence for AGW.
Apparently anything is evidence for AGW to some who call themselves
scientists, but this isn't science. Note the similarity to Freudianism which
was once a science by consensus even though there wasn't a falsifiable
hypothesis in the doctrine: whatever happened could be explained, including
results directly contradictory to previous predictions. Freudianism was
accepted as science for a long time, and even today few denounce it: it has
been "superseded" is about the worst any will say -- but it is as dead as
the dodo, having wreaked its corrosive effect on the culture -- and having
raked in an awful lot of money for its practitioners.
Meanwhile, Washington is still shut down. If, after this, we
have an early spring, you may be sure that this is a sure sign of global
warming -- or if we have a late spring, why that too will be support for the
AGW hypothesis. It might be a good time to nail down the AGW consensus
people: what might happen that will not be support for the AGW hypothesis.
If they say that AGW cannot produce flying purple people eaters before next
fall, that at least is falsifiable, and we should be on the lookout in
places where purple people eaters are usually seen.
=================
There's mail today including a discussion of tariff and
regulation, and some observations about the new DSM.
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