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richard_daily said:
So, let me get this straight...

Education is the problem, and people should toil away and be thankful for the opportunity to be able to do that.

What about the people at the top? Should they also be forced to work, or only the lower classes?
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Try again...
 
Peregrinator said:
"A definition of the limits of state action" is just another way of saying "I approve of any and all interventions that can be found within this set."

Once again, we're back to your desired government intervention in uteruses. And I'll ask you again, how many ppm of toxic chemicals are too many? Who decides?

I see as internal enemies anyone who would poison the populace or destroy the physical country in order to earn a profit. I cannot imagine why cotton farmers carpet bombing their fields with DDT and thus creating a strain of resistant mosquitoes which could potentially spread malaria to the populace is not enemy action. I'm guessing you don't think DDT should be banned, though. I see strip mining and mountaintop removal as enemy action as well in most cases, as currently practiced. Large pools of tailings containing cyanide compounds that leach into ground water. Destruction of species in order to have cheap paper. A gigantic island of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean which will likely never be cleaned up.

The difference is that I see government intervention in these cases as a necessary evil, not a step toward centralized control of production and distribution. This is the reason I don't and never will vote for the Green Party.

You seem to rely on proven ineffective solutions for environmental issues. Spotted Owls in Wal-Mart signs. Lawsuits that drag on for decades and never actually accomplish the cleaning. Monetary compensation for people whose land is logged without permission. After the fact, reactionary intervention by the courts. That system has been shown time and time again that it doesn't work. You would do away with seatbelt laws at a cost of 60 000 lives per year; I'd rather have the laws and not have to pull all those people out of their windshields. You would do away with speed limits as well; a car going 130 mph is only a potential hazard after all. Drunk driving, same thing. We all have--or at least know someone who has--driven with more booze on board than we should have. Potential hazard. No law. Ownership of nuclear weapons. Potential hazard. No law.

I keep having to fix your Alinsky quote for you.
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You are redefining interferences and then demanding I defend the redefinition. I didn't have to, for example, redefine abortion to show that you, indeed too, believe in telling a woman what she can, or cannot do with her uterus.

Who decides these issues?

A court of law where both sides get to make a case, not the halls of Congress where the most votes control the hearings based on the advocates of the majority and the fears and whimseys of the mob.

Do I want a clean environment? Yes.
Do I want a bureaucracy deciding what clean is? No, again, because each accepted level of "clean" is but a step towards a "cleaner" world because, for political purport, clean quickly becomes dirty because politicians needs issues and battles to champion in order to win elections, no one wins on "everything's alright, yes everything's fine and we want you to sleep well tonight..."
And you are wrong, for it is a step towards a centralized bureaucracy, which is why Shell was told to pound sand by the EPA after a $4BILLION investment in offshore drilling while the Left hand of government blames SPECULATORS for the high price of gas, but we're not making the planet greener by not drilling, we're just letting third-world countries do the dirty work to their "standard" of regulation and safety, which I am sure is high, but not as high as the private companies trying to make a profit.
__________________
We don’t prevent pollution, we export it.
A_J, the Stupid
 
Except that's not true. The reality is that we are going to for hard to reach deep water oil and for the most part the middle east is going after easy to get often landlocked oil. So the EPA told shell that twhat they were trying is too risky. They won't be the first nor will they be the last.
 
Sean Renaud said:
Except that's not true. The reality is that we are going to for hard to reach deep water oil and for the most part the middle east is going after easy to get often landlocked oil. So the EPA told shell that twhat they were trying is too risky. They won't be the first nor will they be the last.
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Yeah, that's the thing; no matter what you do, once you're on the hit list, nothing you can do will prove to the bureaucracy that what you are doing is "safe." And the EPA is quite open to the fact, as we discovered in recent hearings, that they pay scant heed to the economic impact of their proclamations.

As for oil, thanks to fracking, even Israel has become an exporter of energy...

We're sitting on tons of potential energy but the possibility of one mistake and a lockstep mindset of so many groups from the anti-Capitalist Left to the Greenies of the far-right Fundies unites to, "Just say NO!" So we went from, we need just a little regulation A_J, to a de facto prohibition, and the economy be damned. I say a damned economy eventually becomes a dirty place to live in having traveled a bit in the third world; none of those places are very clean. It takes technology, but we always hold technology in place (or set it to zero) when we use our Calculus of Climate Calamity and Environmental Doom to predict impending disaster. It then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy as we stall technological advancement (via regulation and the confiscation of private equity) in its tracks in the name of "saving" the planet.
__________________
We don’t prevent pollution, we export it.
A_J, the Stupid

Remember: once you organize people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move.
Saul David Alinsky
Rules for Radicals

☮

✌
 
We just want a little regulation, what can you possibly have against some reasoned, rational interferences from government if they keep you safe...

Global warming, now called climate change, is a big industry with academic and commercial branches. One way or another the government provides the money to keep it in business. The academic side supports thousands of scientific workers churning out some good science larded with lots of junk science. The commercial side is busy turning out tank cars filled with corn ethanol and covering the landscape with windmills. Nobody would be doing any of this without government subsidies and mandates. A recent example of how the geniuses in Washington direct policy is the loaning of hundreds of millions to electric car companies like Tesla. Tesla is the stock that everyone is going to be trying to short when they aren't trying to short First Solar.

Some of this government support is direct, such as the 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour subsidy for windmill electricity. But much is mandated by regulations that result in increased consumer prices -- a hidden tax. For example utilities may be required to generate a certain percentage of their electricity from green sources such as windmills. Since the electricity from these sources is expensive, prices to the consumer must be raised.

Why the government even bothers trying to reduce CO2 emissions is a mystery. Rising CO2 emissions from China and the rest of Asia make any efforts to reduce CO2 emissions in the U.S. irrelevant. The numbers and trends are very obvious on this point. China currently generates 1/4 as much electricity per capita as the U.S. and China has 4 times the population. This suggests that China could eventually increase its electricity generation by a factor of 16 to match the per capita electricity usage enjoyed in the U.S. In the single year 2010 electricity production grew 15% in China, a pace that would double production in 5 years. Electricity in China comes mainly from coal, the indigenous fuel available in large quantities and the most CO2 emitting fuel. China is also consuming ever increasing quantities of oil to support its growing automobile population. Even at its current early stage of economic development China passed the U.S. in the generation of CO2 5 years ago. Some apologists for Chinese CO2 policy claim that China is leading in windmills and solar panels while neglecting to point out that these are export industries, selling hardware or emissions credits to Europeans who are even bigger believers in the climate change religion than we are. Those Chinese industries are currently suffering because the Europeans are running out of mad money.

How big is the climate change industry and how large could it become? Probably the research side is in the single digit billions. The mitigation, or CO2 reduction, side is where the big bucks are. To get an idea consider that the cost of electricity amounts to about $3 a day for each person in the U.S. or around $300 billion per year. Double the cost of electricity, something that is seen as good start by the preachers of climate change, and you have another $300 billion per year. That's half of the cost of Medicare in 2008. Some people in California are already paying 5 times as much as people in areas less affected by the green virus. The beauty of green electricity mandates is that it results in a gradual creep upwards in the cost of electricity and it's not easy to know who to blame. Of course the climate change industry reaps the benefits as surely as if the government wrote them a check. Perhaps writing a check should be considered, because it would be a big savings if the government just bribed these people to stop building windmills.

The U.S. climate change industry, if allowed to grow, could surpass the trillion dollar mark. The uneconomic schemes will become a drag on every sector of the economy. We already have corn ethanol increasing the price of food and gasoline. More biofuel schemes are in the wings. Electric cars will give us a new and more annoying way to run out of gas. The power grid must be rebuilt to support the intermittent electricity from windmills. We' re supposed to bury CO2 emissions underground. The list is endless. Perhaps our young people can emigrate to China and get jobs in factories building windmills for export.

One financially minor, but intellectually important, part of the industry is the writing of alarming reports detailing the global warming catastrophe that awaits us if we don't support the industry. This is the marketing or propaganda side of the climate change industry. A constant drumbeat of propaganda is needed to generate support for the high cost borne by the rest of society to finance the industry. There are many of these alarming studies. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) generates the most prominent alarmist tract. The World Bank has a report. The National Academies of Sciences has a report. The British government did the well-publicized Stern Report. Even the state of California gets into the act, albeit with more amateurish[ii] reports.

The reports lend a scientific gloss to what otherwise would be science fiction type speculation. There are plenty of distinguished scientists who have looked at the global warming thesis and pronounced it nonsense. Notably absent are those scientists whose work is financed by the global warming juggernaut. Since the juggernaut controls the research money and has plenty of propaganda money, the global warming activists have controlled the public conversation until recently. Numerous scientific mistakes and scandalous revelations from bloggers and journalists have changed the public conversation and now the juggernaut is in retreat.

...

Those who work for the global warming juggernaut realize that public opinion and elite opinion are turning against them. For this reason there is a new emphasis on propaganda, called communication inside the climate change bubble. The climate change workers seem to think that people outside of the bubble can be won over if the message is dumbed down enough. For example, instead of the traditional term "greenhouse gases" we now have "heat-trapping gases." In order to make the global warming predictions of doom more meaningful the USGCRP will issue personalized predictions of doom for various regions of the country. These regional predictions will be based on downscaling studies. Downscaling is a complicated scheme for supposedly extracting regional long term climate forecasts from global climate models. The global climate models disagree with each other concerning global climate trends and often their predictions are contradicted by reality. Extracting regional forecasts from the dubious global forecasts requires extensive adjustments to the data in order to get anything remotely plausible. Downscaling lacks a convincing scientific basis. But, downscaling studies are very popular because they can be sold for cash to credulous local governments.

...

The evidence for the fundamental theorem is runs of various clashing computer climate models. The scientists who have fertile imaginations when imagining all the bad things that global warming will do are unable to think of anything that could have caused the warming of the last 50 years except CO2 and the other greenhouse gases. But, early in the 20th century from 1910 to 1940 there was a very similar warming not caused by greenhouse gases. Back then greenhouse gas generation was in its infancy. Neither the scientists nor their computers know what caused the early century warming. If the scientists can't explain the early century warming why are they so quick to pin the late century warming on greenhouse gases? There are plenty of alternative explanations available such as cosmic rays or oceanic climate cycles. But, if global warming is not our fault and we are the helpless victims of nature, we wouldn't need the climate change industry. Restraining their imaginations is a precondition for continued employment.

The 2009 crystal ball assessment report recites the dubious claims of global warming disaster so loved by the popularizers of environmental doom. The cute polar bears will die. We'll all get tropical diseases if we don't die in heat waves. Agricultural productivity will suffer from weeds, droughts and floods. The sea will rise up and flood the coasts. This stuff has been refuted by angry experts many times, but no matter, some stories are too good to check. No doubt we are in for more of the same with the new report to be published in 2013.
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Norman Rogers is a Senior Policy Advisor at the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. His personal website is www.climateviews.com

Of course, he's been "discredited" repeatedly as a fringe "quack." ;) ;)
__________________
A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States...,
John P. Holdren
White House Office of Science and Technology Director

You loot the private sector, strip every dollar of 40¢ for overhead, and then give the other 60¢ to your political base in order to revitalize the looted.

What's not to like about that plan?
A_J, the Stupid

We don’t prevent pollution, we export it (along with our jobs).
A_J, the Stupid
 
House Republican Budget Plan Would Benefit the Poor (Excerpt)

Ryan's plan would reduce the deficit by $4.4 trillion over ten years by repealing ObamaCare, substituting private health plans, and making block grants to the states for Medicaid. It also imposes hard spending caps on domestic spending. It ends government bailouts to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have already cost the U.S. taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars (and, with house prices continuing to fall, will likely cost hundreds of billions more). It enhances business investment by reducing the top corporate and personal income tax rates from 35% to 25% while making up the revenue loss by closing tax loopholes. Furthermore, Ryan's plan would remove the barriers to safe, responsible energy exploration in the United States.

Not only that, but Ryan's plan would actually benefit the poor tremendously, simply by ending Obama's environmental crusade which has been banning the exploration and development of our plentiful oil and natural gas resources on public lands; offshore in the Atlantic, Pacific, Bering Sea, and Gulf of Mexico and through the EPA's many restrictions on coal, oil and natural gas producers. The rising price of transportation and energy hurts the working class more than any other group. Regressive? You bet.

It would also help the poor by reducing corporate welfare. President Obama's Recovery Act gave billions in corporate welfare to wind and solar plants. Not only did these plants get direct subsidies, but they were also guaranteed higher prices for the electricity they produce -- double or triple the cost of electricity produced by coal or nuclear energy. Even though Obama gave China a free pass to emit carbon dioxide when he negotiated the Copenhagen Accord, his EPA is raising electricity prices to all American households and businesses by requiring that they separate out carbon dioxide from their smoke stacks and sequester it underground. These regulations will be paid for by American households in the form of higher utility bills and lost manufacturing jobs. Regressive? You bet.

The Obama administration and its EPA are adherents of the 20th century theory that climate change is caused by greenhouse gases. The 21st century theory, currently being explored by some of the world's top physicists, is that solar activity shields the earth from cosmic rays, which cause clouds to form. And that low lying clouds tend to cool the earth by reflecting sunlight back into space. (Watch this Cern lecture by Jasper Kirkby for a review of the current research evidence.) Kirkby's research group has just achieved a breakthrough which may establish exactly how clouds are formed. If the new theory is true, then sequestering carbon dioxide harms plant growth, but has little effect upon climate. Obama's EPA administrators were informed of the changing state of climate change theory in an internal report by some of their own employees, which they decided to ignore.
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Raymond Richman and Howard Richman
The American Thinker
 
Just a "little" government intervention in the name of political Science:

Mr. Pope is the chief executive officer of Smithfield Foods Inc., the world's largest pork processor and hog producer by volume. He doesn't mince words when it comes to rapidly rising food prices. The 56-year-old accountant by training has been in the business for more than three decades, and he warns that the higher costs may be here to stay.

Courtesy of? "I'm not going to say, 'a political policy,'" he tells me. (His senior vice president, a lawyer by training, sits close by, ready to "kick his leg" if his garrulous boss speaks too plainly.) But politics indeed plays a large role, as Congress subsidizes favorite industries and the Federal Reserve pursues an expansive monetary policy.

Ours is a timely chat, given the burst of food inflation the world is living through. Mr. Pope is running a multibillion-dollar business in the midst of economic turmoil, and he has strong views about why prices are rising and what can be done about it.

The Southerner is an old hand when it comes to food. He graduated from William and Mary in 1975, spent a few years at an accountancy, then joined Smithfield and worked his way up the ranks. He's something of an evangelist about his trade: He boasts that Smithfield employs some 50,000 people, many of whom are high-school graduates and immigrants others would consider "hard to hire." It's a "good business" that "gives people a good start."

It's also a business under enormous strain. Some "60 to 70% of the cost of raising a hog is tied up in the grains," Mr. Pope explains. "The major ingredient is corn, and the secondary ingredient is soybean meal." Over the last several years, "the cost of corn has gone from a base of $2.40 a bushel to today at $7.40 a bushel, nearly triple what it was just a few years ago." Which means every product that uses corn has risen, too—including everything from "cereal to soft drinks" and more.

What triggered the upswing? In part: ethanol. President George W. Bush "came forward with—what do you call?—the edict that we were going to mandate 36 billion gallons of alternative fuels" by 2022, of which corn-based ethanol is "a substantial part." Companies that blend ethanol into fuel get a $5 billion annual tax credit, and there's a tariff to keep foreign producers out of the U.S. market. Now 40% of the corn crop is "directed to ethanol, which equals the amount that's going into livestock food," Mr. Pope calculates.

The rapidly depreciating dollar is also sparking inflation, although Mr. Pope says that's a "hard" topic for him to discuss, trying to be diplomatic. But he doesn't deny that money is cheap. Investment bankers are throwing cash at the firm—a turnaround from 2008, when money was scarce—even though Mr. Pope doesn't need it right now.

Rising prices are already squeezing food producers' "two to three percent" earnings margins. "Many of us had our costs hedged in the commodity markets and we all took on strident measures to control our cost structures," Mr. Pope says. "In the case of Smithfield, we closed six processing plants and one slaughter plant. We also closed 15% of all our live production business." But "once those measures are done, we have no choice but to pass those prices down" to consumers.

...

Food price inflation isn't a problem confined to America's shores. "This ethanol policy has impacted the world price of corn," Mr. Pope says. The Mexican, Canadian and European industries have "shrunk dramatically. . . . We have an unsustainable meat protein production industry," he says. "We're built on a platform of costs, on a policy that doesn't make any sense!"

Nor does the science. The ethanol industry would supply only 4% of the nation's annual energy needs even if it used 100% of the corn crop. The Environmental Protection Agency has found ethanol production has a neutral to negative impact on the environment. "The subsidy has been out there since the 1970s," Mr. Pope says. "If they can't make themselves into a viable economic model in 40 years, haven't we demonstrated that this is an industry that shouldn't exist?"

So what's the solution? First, Mr. Pope says, get rid of the ethanol subsidies and the tariff. "I am in competition with the government and the oil industry," he says. "It's not fair." Smithfield's economists estimate corn prices would fall by a dollar a bushel if ethanol blending wasn't subsidized. "Even the announcement that it is going away would see the price of corn go down, which would translate very quickly into reduced meat prices in the meat case," he says. Imagine what would happen if the mandate and tariff were eliminated, too.

He also advocates lifting regulatory and tax burdens on business. "I fundamentally don't understand the logic of corporate income taxes," he tells me. "If I have a 35% tax, all I do is take that 35% tax and I transfer it into the price of bacon and the price of pork chops."
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SEE! Even Corporations admit that ol' A_J is right, Corporations don't pay taxes, PEOPLE PAY TAXES!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704330404576291772245610028.html
 
May Dal 2011

The May Day march was epic...tens of thousands took to the streets, chanting, banging on drums & noisemakers, dancing jouyously.

There were quite a few normal folk at this year's demonstration, and the dredlocked anarchists, schizophrenics with sandwhich boards ("CIA Is Torturing Me Via Radio Waves"), wild eyed old radicals in need of a shave, and random schmoes with weird axes to grind (one guy was buttonholing all passersby and insisting that they sign onto his scheme to distribute free money) were distinctly outnumbered.

No big puppets were in evidence.

Speeches were made in a number of languages---English, Espanol, Tagalog, to mention three. Many children played underfoot: next generation of labor activism. Everyone seemed to be on a contact high from the Madison uprising.

All in all a fine May Day.
 
I hope, perg, for your sake, that the government "Science" doesn't do to the environment what government "Economics" does to the actual economy...


;) ;)

When people in Washington start creating fancy new phrases instead of using plain English, you know they are doing something they don’t want us to understand.

It was an act of war when we started bombing Libya. But the administration chose to call it “kinetic military action.” When the Federal Reserve System started creating hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air, they called it “quantitative easing” of the money supply.

When that didn’t work, they created more money and called it “quantitative easing 2” or “QE2,” instead of saying: “We are going to print more dollars — and hope it works this time.” But there is already plenty of money sitting around idle in banks and businesses.

The policies of this administration make it risky to lend money, with Washington politicians coming up with one reason after another why borrowers shouldn’t have to pay it back when it is due, or perhaps not pay it all back at all. That’s called “loan modification,” or various other fancy names for welching on debts. Is it surprising that lenders have become reluctant to lend?

Private businesses have amassed record amounts of cash, which they could use to hire more people — if this administration were not generating vast amounts of uncertainty about what the costs are going to be for Obamacare, among other unpredictable employer costs from a government that is heedless or hostile toward business.

As a result, it is often cheaper or less risky for employers to work the existing employees overtime or hire temporary workers, who are not eligible for employee benefits. But lack of money is not the problem.

True believers in the old-time Keynesian economic religion will always say that the only reason creating more money hasn’t worked is because there has not been enough money created. To them, if QE2 hasn’t worked, then we need QE3. And if that doesn’t work, then we will need QE4, etc.

Like most of the mistakes being made in Washington today, this persistent faith in government spending is something that has been tried before — and failed before.

Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the Treasury under Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, said confidentially to fellow Democrats in 1939: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.”

As for the Federal Reserve today, a headline in the Wall Street Journal of April 25th said, “Fed Searches for Next Step.”

That is a big part of the problem. It is not politically possible for either the Federal Reserve or the Obama administration to leave the economy alone and let it recover on its own.

Both are under pressure to “do something.” If one thing doesn’t work, then they have to try something else. And if that doesn’t work, they have to come up with yet another gimmick.

All this constant experimentation by the government makes it more risky for investors to invest or employers to employ, because neither of them knows when the government’s rules of the game are going to change again. Whatever the merits or demerits of particular government policies, the uncertainty that such ever-changing policies generate can paralyze an economy today, just as it did back in the days of FDR.

The idea that the federal government has to step in whenever there is a downturn in the economy is an economic dogma that ignores much of the history of the United States.

During the first 100-plus years of the United States, there was no Federal Reserve. During the first 150 years, the federal government did not engage in massive intervention when the economy turned down.

No economic downturn in all those years lasted as long as the Great Depression of the 1930s, when both the Federal Reserve and the administrations of Hoover and FDR intervened.

The myth that has come down to us says the government had to intervene when there was mass unemployment in the 1930s. But the hard data show that there was no mass unemployment until after the federal government intervened. And once the government did intervene, it was politically impossible to stop and let the economy recover on its own. That was the fundamental problem then — and now.
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Thomas Sowell
NRO

Like I said, intervening in the name of green will lead to a dirtier planet...

__________________
We don’t prevent pollution, we export it.
A_J, the Stupid
 
Like most popular uprisings, who starts it is far different from who has the organizational skills to eventually control it...
 
Frisco_Slug_Esq said:
Like most popular uprisings, who starts it is far different from who has the organizational skills to eventually control it...
Click to expand...

That's debatable, but don't you find it a bit sinister that it was private interests that first pushed for Federal intervention in conservation? Let's pretend that it's 1927. No New Deal, no hippies, no Als Gore & Sharpton conspiring against liberty. And yet there the government is, interfering in the market.
 
Have you been following the thread closely?





'Cause when you casually jump in, you might leap to the wrong conclusions...
 
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