Congress Sends White House Auto Aid Proposal...

Ok - it's not the Triple-Digit-Billion tag they wanted the first time around...

"The measure would rush bridge loans to Detroit's struggling Big Three but would also demand that the auto industry restructure itself in order to survive and would put an overseer chosen by President George W. Bush in charge of monitoring that effort, according to a draft obtained by The Associated Press."

Yeah, huh?

Okay - I nominate John Bolton.
(yeah they tell the story with a sneer, but that actually makes it better)


- MuscleDaddy

Pournelle: Republican Principles or Democrats Light?

The incomparable Jerry Pournelle examines how the Republican Party has lost its way.
While the article begins with a discussion of the Anthropogenic Global Warming hoax, it does so mostly to explain why the McCain-style "me-too" approach is a loser. Turning to the general principle:

But do note that playing loyal opposition, Democrat Light, has been effective for many Country Club Republicans: they were allowed to keep their positions and influence. That was the situation when Newt Gingrich organized the Republican takeover of Congress. Unfortunately, without Newt's iron control -- you may ascribe his motive to dedication to principle or to simple desire to keep power -- without Newt's iron control the Republican congress went mad and truly acted as if it were Democrats: it spent money in ways that even the Democrats wouldn't have (then; not now), including the old Wilson/Roosevelt interventionism that generally led to war.

Dr. Pournelle offers this advice for the future:

The only way the Republicans can survive will be to become a party of principle: smaller government, devolution of power to the states, transparency and local control; the old principle Adams stated, "we believe that each man is the best judge of his own interest". Trust the Associations (as Tocqueville described) rather than government, and states more than federal. Give up "right to life" and adopt the constitutional position that abortion ought to be left to the states -- as should education and many other matters. We have plenty of failed experiments in federal control to show that it's not always a good idea and sometimes federalizing things is disastrous.

On this matter, I offer a weak semantic disagreement with the use of the word "federal" to mean "national". What he advocates (as do I) is a return to the original meaning of "federal": power devolved to the most local level practical, where the resources it commands can be used more efficiently, and tailored to the peculiar needs of the locality. Most of what the US Government does would be better done by state, county, or municipal governments, or by private-sector entities. If the GOP is ever to be trusted with power again, it will need to make that case, and make us believe they'll actually do it this time.
[Click on the title above, or date stamp below, to see the full article.]

Given the choice between faux Democrats and the real thing, the voters chose the latter. We need to give them a real choice.

Viscount Monckton: Open Letter on AGW

In honor of the recently-departed Michael Crichton, one of the stalwart opponents of the "consensus" of Anthropogenic Global Warming, we present this open letter to John McCain, published recently by Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. It is a withering and systematic fisking of Gorebal Warming, and the statist prescriptions to "remedy" it that are advocated by both Senator McCain and President-Elect Obama (the former being generally more moderate in his pursuit of their shared agenda). Here's but a taste of why it's a must-read:

The facts are that the free market can scarcely be blamed for having failed to address an imagined "problem" that has not long been widely talked of; that, now that the free market has been made aware of the imagined "problem", it will be able to deal with the "problem" (to the extent that the "problem" is real) far more quickly and effectively than the State; and that, given the late Milton Friedman's Nobel-prizewinning observation that the State consumes twice as much of the world's resources to achieve a given objective as the free market, it is the State, not the market, that has failed, and it is the State, not the market, that must be cut down to size, regulated, and controlled.

Man-Made Global Whining

Here's a lovely look by a professional meteorologist on how working in his profession is like working in climate science -- the dangers of trying to point out the truth: Global Whining vs. the Truth



And here's a must-read speech (really) on the whining, scheming and insanity of the Anthropogenic (i.e., Man-Made) Global Warming crowd by U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher on the House floor, made 3 weeks ago during the debate on the economy-stiffling Lieberman-Warner bill that has temporarily been stopped. Dynamite. “Do you really think the world is filled with morons?”

30,000 Scientists: AGW Is Wrong

Some 30,000 scientists have now signed to indicate their agreement with the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's Global Warming Review Paper, "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide". Read the report (here, as a web page) to get some highly interesting facts. This is the abstract:

A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th and early 21st centuries have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth's weather and climate. Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in hydrocarbon use and minor greenhouse gases like CO2 do not conform to current experimental knowledge. The environmental effects of rapid expansion of the nuclear and hydrocarbon energy industries are discussed.

Global Cooling, The New Pink

The world climate has just taken a sharp turn colder. For the first time in over four years, the area covered by sea ice over the globe has been greater than average -- and it's been that way since January. Currently the Earth has nearly a million square kilometers more sea ice than normal. The Earth also experienced a million square kilometers of sea ice above normal back in December -- more than any December since 1988..



Unlike fuzzy anecdotes and spotty human estimates about the coverage of sea ice, electronic satellite imagery is the gold standard for accuracy. These images have been taken daily since 1979. Sea ice coverage is measured against the standard daily average of the 1979-2000 period.



Don't know what happened to all that CO2 that was supposed to be causing Global Warming (tm). It's not like any of the major world economies has reduced its CO2 output over the last year. Maybe the CO2 theory has just gone bankrupt.

Vaclav Klaus vs. The Climate Alarmists

Vaclav Klaus spoke at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change last week. Here are some highlights.

What I see in Europe (and in the U.S. and other countries as well) is a powerful combination of irresponsibility, of wishful thinking, of implicit believing in some form of Malthusianism, of cynical approach of those who themselves are sufficiently well-off, together with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project.

As a politician who personally experienced communist central planning of all kinds of human activities, I feel obliged to bring back the already almost forgotten arguments used in the famous plan-versus-market debate in the 1930s in economic theory

the arguments we had been using for decades – till the moment of the fall of communism. Then they were quickly forgotten.

The innocence with which climate alarmists and their fellow-travelers in politics and media now present and justify their ambitions to mastermind human society belongs to the same “fatal conceit.”

The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong

We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society.

to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago.

It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.

Vaclav Klaus is an economist, and President of the Czech Republic.

Global Warming Strikes Even In Blogosphere

Last week GW climate change strongly affected the website CO2 Science. Apparently the Algorites were working overtime and managed to unleash a hurricane Denial of Service (DOS) attack on the site, shutting it down for several hours. It was damaged sufficiently that it will require several weeks to come fully back on line.



The Algorites are probably celebrating. The CO2 Science site provided blasphemous data and analysis on various aspects of the GW and AGW (man-made) C02 green-house gas (GHG) controversy.



CO2 Science is currently back on line, with only the latest data being available. They are working diligently to restore that which the Algorites, in their righteous wrath, hath wrought.

Global Warming Strikes Vermont

Apparently, Al Gore hasn't been able to make the rounds to Vermont frequently enough. Father Winter has decided to sneak in below Gore's radar.

Much of this week's winter carnival in Gilford has been canceled, due to too much winter.

Apparently a few feet of GW has hampered auto use.

[T]he cancellation of 2 events was due to poor road conditions and snow-filled parking lots.

Who knew that GW could be responsible for all this white stuff? I thought The Day After Tomorrow was just movie make-believe.