Author: Mark Noonan

Ebola and the Empty Government

Mark Noonan6 Comments

Now that 80-100 people are being monitored for ebola in Texas, doesn’t it seem to be time to restrict travel from west Africa? Not according to the Obama Administration. I cannot understand this attitude. I tried to think of it in terms of maybe Team Obama thinks it would be racist to restrict travel from west Africa – but I don’t think any rational person would really believe that. Is it just that the Obama Administration doesn’t care? After all, its almost certain that if anyone in America dies from ebola, it will be among the lower classes…no one who lives in Manhattan and is an Obama fund raiser is likely to get it.

It is just bizarre. It would cost Obama nothing to restrict travel and would pretty much guarantee that no Americans in the United States catch it. Short, simple, no cost – and they won’t do it. Maybe it just goes in with the Obama attitude that the United States isn’t worthy of defense? Oh, I know he makes his speeches saying that while he’s President, America’s enemies better tremble in their boots, but lets face a fact here: the only reason we’re bombing in Syria is because the video beheading of Americans played a role in Obama’s cratering approval rating. ISIS could have beheaded 1,000 Americans and if Obama’s poll numbers held steady, we wouldn’t be bombing. The ebola outbreak is illustrating something about Obama: if he and his cabal aren’t threatened, nothing serious will be done.

It is almost as if they don’t see themselves from an American perspective. Citizens of the world, indeed…and while Obama is out there striking poses, the actual business of government isn’t getting done. There’s no one home – the store is not being minded. Now I begin to understand how the Secret Service could get so out of hand – no one was watching it; only when it started to risk Obama’s political fortunes was any attention given to it. We’d just better hope that at crucial moments doing a rational thing polls well between now and 2016 – because if it doesn’t, it won’t get done. Our government is empty – a mere collection of disparate forces rolling along without a plan or pilot.

So, Will 2014 Be a GOP Wave, or Not?

Mark Noonan9 Comments

Here you’ve got analysis that the GOP only picks up a few seats and that works out to a win for Nancy Pelosi. Here you’ve got other analysis which indicates the GOP might get its largest majority since the 1928 election. So, which is it?

Beats all heck out of me. Real Clear Politics currently has the GOP with 47 Senate seats in the bag, the Democrats with 44 and 9 toss-ups, with the likely outcome as of today being 52 GOPers and 48 Democrats (that includes us losing Kansas, by the way – which I don’t think we will, in the end). But another way to read it is that the GOP could end up with as many as 56 Senate seats – an 11 seat gain. That would, indeed, be a wave.

While there is trouble for the GOP on the gubernatorial front (we’re definitely going to lose Pennsylvania and we’ll probably lose Kansas), there is also Democrat governor Hickenlooper’s likely defeat to counter that – and Hickenlooper was supposed to be the perfect person to transition a purple State to blue…now he’s probably going to lose, and maybe take down Democrat Senator Udall with him…all because he’s liberal.  Not fanatically liberal, but just liberal…and that is being rejected in Colorado, to all appearances (and this can’t make Team Hillary comfortable about 2016 – she’s a female Hickenlooper).

I really don’t know where this is heading. But there are some ingredients for a blow out – of course, we must remember the GOP’s penchant for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory (and talk of Jeb or Romney running in 2016 is the GOP Establishment’s way of saying “we’d rather have Hillary than Walker”).

Global Warming Hoax Update

Mark Noonan24 Comments

From Don Surber:

After 35 years of telling us carbon dioxide is melting ice in Antarctica, New Scientist is now saying carbon dioxide has caused the ice to grow for 35 years.

What they said before:

From January 2, 2001: “Ice in the heart of Antarctica is retreating and causing sea level rise, scientists have shown for the first time.”

From June 23, 2007: “Rising sea levels could divide and conquer Antarctic ice.”

From March 25, 2008: “Antarctic ice shelf ‘hanging by a thread’.”

From January 21, 2009: “Even Antarctica is now feeling the heat of climate change.”

From March 10, 2009: “Sea level rise could bust IPCC estimate: Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice fast and could end up taking sea levels to nearly twice predicted levels by 2100.”

From July 31, 2011: “Antarctica rising as ice caps melt.”

Got that?

Year-in and year-out, the editors at the New Scientist have warned us that the ice in Antarctica is melting fast…

So, what is New Scientist saying now? That the Antarctic ice cap is larger than ever, and that global warming is the cause.

Face it, we can’t actually win this debate – if glaciers start to cover half of North America, the global warming alarmists will be out there saying it is because of global warming. It doesn’t matter what the facts are because global warming is replacing religion in the lives of people on the left…they have to believe in something, and they’ve decided to believe that (a) humanity (mostly Republicans, it goes without saying) are destroying the planet and (b) only they – the liberals – can save it. You can’t beat someone’s religious beliefs; you can’t argue them out of it. All we can do is hope to win elsewhere enough political power to prevent these numbskulls from wrecking things in the name of saving the planet.

Life in Liberal-Fascist America

Mark Noonan4 Comments

Here’s the story – you’ll recall that Governor Walker was the target of a completely bogus, politically-motivated hatchet job by an out-of-control Democrat prosecutor. Recently, details of the political motivation for the case were revealed – and what did our MSM do? Ruthlessly track down the source of the revelation, and then smear him.

Do read the linked article – it tells you all you need to know about the real power structure of the United States. It is more nakedly exposed in Wisconsin than elsewhere because in Wisconsin it is more directly under threat…and the liberals believe (correctly) that if they can’t squash Walker, then what Walker has done will spread, thus undermining the whole basis of liberal power (which is, ultimately, that liberals are subsidized by government – and if you take away the government subsidy, then liberals will whither away and die as a political force).

Remember what happened in this particular case – the truth about an out-of-control prosecutor was revealed and the MSM went out not to investigate the prosecutor, but to smear the man who told the truth. If you think that the MSM has any sense of honor or decency, think again – if liberalism is threatened, the MSM becomes the merest arm of political liberalism. And this brings us to the most important lesson: the liberals are at war with us. They want us destroyed. They will not play fair. They will not obey the rules. They will not tell the truth. Unless and until we internalize the message that it is all or nothing, we can’t do what is necessary to win. There can’t be bipartisanship. There can’t be working across the aisle. There can only be unrelenting conflict all up and down the line.

Scotland: Secession is the Answer

Mark Noonan17 Comments

Tomorrow (or, maybe, today? Its kinda late as I write this on Wednesday in the USA), the Scots will vote on whether or not to leave the United Kingdom. Lots of worrying articles have been written about the horror of horrors which will happen if the Scots for “yes” on secession, but I can’t think of a more splendid thing for the Scots to do.  Keep in mind that those most opposed are part of the United Kingdom’s Ruling Class – it would reduce their power if Scotland and England weren’t together.

As readers here know, I’ve long advocated secession as the answer for many ills in the United States – not in the sense of States leaving the Union, but in the sense of States leaving the States.  Setting up 60-65 States in place of the 50 States we have today, many of which are just too large or two different in their constituent parts to make a rational whole. But, still, everyone stays in the good, old US of A: so, why am I ok with the Scots bailing on the United Kingdom?  Because it is probably the only way to eventually get to a Europe which is basically united.  The United States is, so far, essentially united – we have a general sense in our broad majority what it means to be American and what America is supposed to be about…we just have a problem in taming the Big Government beast we’ve allowed to grow up among us. Breaking up the States and other reforms will restore the situation.  Europe doesn’t have that – it has a lot of States which already dictate minutely the lives of the people and in the European Union you just get one more layer of micro-managing bureaucrats thrown into the mix to ensure that there are no local differences, at all.

A lot of places in Europe which are part of larger nations today really don’t have much business being part of their nations. Northern and southern Italy, for instance, are very different and were cobbled together in the 19th century by a set of ambitious adventurers who really didn’t ask so much as a “by your leave” of the Italian people if they wanted to be united in a nation called “Italy” (yeah, they cooked up some plebiscites which allegedly gave the will of the people – but when the army of the group wanting you “in” is already there, kind of a foregone conclusion how the vote will go…). The end result of this is two very different places being artificially fused together – and for south Italy to live a relatively impoverished and parasitic life attached to the wealthy and dynamic north. Same thing goes in Spain where the Catalans are starting to revive their age-old dream of independence – and if you can find me a reason that Bavaria is in the same Germany as Pomerania, then I’m all ears.  Other than ethnic affinity, there is no reason for Scotland to be in Britain, Naples and Milan to be in Italy, Bavaria to be in Germany or Catalonia to be in Spain. To be sure, all of these places are (or, at least were until recently) European (which means, further, Christian), but that is really where the unity ends. For the rest of it, these are different places with different people and different ideas of what is needed – they can be in one nation, but only if there is a limited central government and maximum power at the local level.

The Scots leaving the United Kingdom is, then, to me a healthy development. To be sure, the Scottish nationalist leadership seems to be largely made up of socialist pinheads who are apparently promising more welfare without anyone having to work harder. That illusion will quickly be dashed after independence, if won – but it was just as swiftly dashed in Slovakia when it broke off from the Czech Republic and now once-socialist Slovakia is one of the more dynamic nations of Europe; they no longer could live off the richer part of the nation; they no longer could blame others for their own troubles; they could only look to themselves.  And that is pretty much what they did – and that is what all of the peoples of Europe, once freed from the dead hand of the results of 19th century nationalism and 20th century multiculturalism, will do as well.

Don’t get me wrong, patriotism is a grand thing – but the welding together of things like “Germany” and “Italy” in the 19th century (and “Great Britain” in the 18th) weren’t acts of patriots – they were the acts of ambitious people, some of whom were scoundrels, who didn’t care about the people involved but only about the expansion of their own power (prime examples of this were Bismarck in Germany and Cavour in Italy). It’d be better, in the long run, if the genuine constituent parts of Europe separated and then found a mechanism of unity – some modern revival of the ideal behind the Holy Roman Empire. Some form of government which will keep the peace between the parts and defend the whole against outside enemies: but which will leave the parts pretty much alone to do as they wish (the European Union is the negation of this ideal – it is senseless and remote bureaucrats trying to micro-manage every aspect of European life and no locality having the power to opt out).

The Scots may take the first step – or they may decide that cutting lose from London and the money therein is too risky. We’ll see.  But I think that the concept is growing in the public mind both in Europe and the United States that remote, central governments simply cannot answer for the needs of the people and that while a central government is necessary for a few, limited functions, most power had better be in the hands of the people and their local governments.

What Media Bias? Part 198

Mark Noonan12 Comments

There is a Media Research Center study which shows that from January 1, 2006 to August 31, 2006 the MSM reported on Bush’s crumbling poll numbers 124 times.  Fast forward and between January 1, 2014 and August 31, 2014 the MSM has reported on Obama’s equally crumbling poll numbers a total of nine times.

This is what media bias is all about: its not so much the outright lies (though they are a problem – and an increasing problem), but the way that the same sort of story will be reported quite differently depending on whether it involves a Republican or a Democrat.  Take, for instance, when a politician is arrested – you can just about bet your life savings on it that if a Republican politician is arrested, his party affiliation will be front and center. Meanwhile, if a Democrat is cuffed, you’d have to read to the last paragraph where it is revealed that the offender may have had some slight connection to the Democrat party.

This is common across all elements of the MSM – doesn’t matter what organization, they all report things pretty much the same way. There is, however, no cure for this – the hard left people who make up the MSM simply will not change.  The only thing we can do, as conservatives, is to create a duplicate MSM to compete.  Fox News has shown the way, but we need a genuinely conservative news network; we need newspapers and magazines and all that MSM infrastructure which drives the narrative. And we need to start ignoring what the MSM is saying because it is all presented in a manner to help the Democrats and harm Republicans.

Obama’s Non-War

Mark Noonan7 Comments

The usual course of action is that when the guns go off, we citizens are to rally ’round the flag and back our forces in the pursuit of victory. But that is a bit impossible right now – Obama and his Administration are telling us, over and over, that this isn’t a war. That we’ll be bombing the heck out of things and that lots of people will die horrific, violent deaths at our hands doesn’t count: per Obama and Co, war is only in existence is U.S. troops are on the ground doing the fighting.

So, no war – and thus no rallying ’round the flag. And even if we decided – correctly – that Obama and Co are just full of “stuff” and that this is a war so we’d better rally anyways, what would we be rallying for? Not for victory, because there can be no victory in this non-war. Its not like the enemy commander can offer to surrender to a drone. We’ll bomb a lot and kill a lot of people and this will help those who are fighting the people we’re bombing – and that, in turn, might lead others to victory. A Kurdish victory would be ok, as the Kurds seem a lot of very decent people – but it could also lead to Assad’s victory in Syria and Iran’s victory in Iraq; not exactly ideal outcomes for us. It could also lead to victory for non-ISIS, non-Assad forces in Syria, this might not work out well, either. Let’s just say I have my doubts about Administration assurances that they can pick the non-Islamist-screwball forces in Syria for us to back.

We can also get the worst of all worlds – we blow a lot of stuff up and kill a lot of people with attendant video showing what a bunch of hideous war criminals we are but after all that, Assad still rules his part of Syria, ISIS still rules vast tracts of Syria and Iraq and Iran has secured itself the part of Iraq it cares about (ie, Baghdad plus the oil fields). That sort of outcome is made doubly bad because if ISIS survives in any form, it will become the Islamist hero as it stood up to us, endured a pounding and emerged from the welter of slaughter with victory. Of course, all of this won’t fully come out until after Obama leaves office, so he probably doesn’t care in the least about it, even if he’s aware of the possibility.

This whole thing is the terribly bad decision of a man – Obama – who knows nothing of history, nothing of the world and yet sits assured that he’s the smartest guy in the room. I hope it works out – and I hope our losses are small. But the rule of thumb for war is that you either go all in, or stay all out. Our choices for ISIS were two:

1.  Go all out to war against them until they are all killed or taken, regardless of cost.

2.  Surrender to them and allow them to do as the wish.

Either course of action can have rational arguments to back them up. We have failed to choose between them – we’re just going to bomb a bit and hope for the best. I believe we will be disappointed – and maybe in a vastly worse geo-strategic situation two or three years from now.

UPDATE: Reeling from criticism about us not being at war, the Administration has decided we are at war with ISIS, just as we are against al-Qaeda. Meaning? I guess that six years from now ISIS will be around and a threat, just as al-Qaeda is still around and a threat after six years of Obama…

If You Really Want to Fight ISIS…

Mark Noonan13 Comments

…then you’d better be willing to go to war. I mean real war. With two million American personnel over in the Middle East for a decade and a complete re-casting of Middle Eastern life under American rule for a long while.

As regular readers know, with Obama in the White House I have become a peacenik – all I am saying, is give peace a chance because I’m dead certain that any war Obama commands will be a lost war. But, maybe I’m wrong and Obama will turn into a regular Abraham Lincoln as war leader – and, so, let’s get to fighting, if that is what you want. After all, if ISIS isn’t worth fighting, then there’s never any cause to fight, ever.

But if we do this, then think about a few things. Don’t get upset about how long it takes: it will take a long time. Don’t get upset about harsh measures: harsh measures will be necessary. Don’t get upset about civilian deaths: civilians will die (especially as most of the people who would put up the stoutest fight are certain to use civilians as shields).  Think about what you want to accomplish: just to kill some ISIS guys, or to actually get to a general settlement of the Middle East?  Killing ISIS guys is fine; but just killing them won’t get rid of what created ISIS – which was not, by the way, Bush’s invasion of Iraq but a series of decisions of the past 1,000 years by the overall Muslim world as affected by various outside forces.

Resign yourself to a long, grinding, expensive fight among people who will alternately hate us or be resentful of us (with just maybe a few groups of people actually catching on that we’re helping them – these people will be invaluable to us). Or, just give it up and let things take their course.  Our choice. But let no one choose lightly. On either side is death and destruction – in a sense, there are no right answers to the problem.  There are a series of wrong answers, and we’d just be trying to find the least wrong thing to do, with a hope that we’ll eventually put things to right.

 

The Official Unemployment Rate is, Well, Bogus

Mark Noonan25 Comments

For lack of a better word:

The U.S. jobs report, a key measure of how well the economy is doing, has gotten increasingly less accurate in the past 20 years. The fix for that problem could be in a surprising place: Twitter.

Those are the conclusions of two separate reports out this month. The first report, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the unemployment number released by the government suffers from a problem faced by other pollsters: Lack of response. This problem dates back to a 1994 redesign of the survey when it went from paper-based to computer-based, although neither the researchers nor anyone else has been able to offer a reason for why the redesign has affected the numbers.

What the researchers found was that, for whatever reason, unemployed workers, who are surveyed multiple times are most likely to respond to the survey when they are first given it and ignore the survey later on…

This works out to an under count of the unemployed and/or an over count of people not in the labor force – the bottom line is that the official unemployment rate doesn’t really reflect the unemployment picture. This is something we’ve known for a while just by the labor force participation rate: if we are in a recovery, it should not be going down. The fact that it is down means that something is off – and calculations of unemployment based upon, say, a 2007 level of participation would still likely have the official rate in double digit territory. But now we see that aside from that, the basic survey is just flawed.

I’ve long had grave doubts about the whole methodology we use to judge the state of the economy.  We aren’t quite as bizarre as Spain, which is apparently set to use transactions in, shall we say, ladies who work in a very specialized form of entertainment, as part of their GDP, but we’re close. To me, there is something absurd in counting government spending as part of GDP, let alone counting what a lonely man blows a hundred bucks on. Real economic strength should be judged by what we make, mine and grow.

If the economy is improving, we’ll see it in statistics of corn production, gasoline refined, tons of iron ore mined, and things like that. These things can’t lie and they can’t be fudged. Did we, or did we not, produce more steel in July of 2014 than in June of 2014? July of 2013? July of 2004?  If the answer is “less” then that would be a bad indicator.  It still might be partially explained by other factors (maybe we’re more efficient in our use of steel, for instance), but the bottom line is that if the production is up, then things are better than if production is down…because people don’t produce for customers that don’t exist. I want to know the measure of production for real goods that people use – I want to know what it is last month, the month before that, the year before that and ten years before that…this way I can see how things are going in both the short and long term; and no need to seasonally adjust: each July will be pretty much like all other Julys. Just tell me what was made, mined and grown – I’ll then see for myself if things are worse, better or just the same…and that will also inform me of what the employment picture is like. If we’re producing less steel, it is a cinch that we’ve got less steel workers, and so on.

We don’t need to know how many people are working in the legal industry – it produces no wealth. Don’t need to know how many people are working in the tourist industry – it also produces no wealth, once you understand that wealth is not a casino mogul in Vegas raking it in hand over fist, but a farmer in the midwest growing corn. The reality is that the entirety of our economy – all of that government and law firms and casinos, etc – is dependent upon the ability of the United States to make, mine and grow things. If we don’t make, mine and grow enough things, then the economy is doomed, no matter how much money the Fed prints to keep things going for years after the economy collapsed. So, let’s start counting what matters and see what our economy is actually like – it’ll tell us what we need to do.

 

A Progressive (Sorta) Figures it Out

Mark Noonan19 Comments

But cut him some slack on being 7 years or so later than the non-Progressives – after all, he’s a highly respected and credentialed academic and so his knowledge of reality is on the low end of the scale. Anyways, Cornel West has some gripes about The One:

No, the thing is he posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency. The torturers go free. The Wall Street executives go free. The war crimes in the Middle East, especially now in Gaza, the war criminals go free. And yet, you know, he acted as if he was both a progressive and as if he was concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair…

Brother Cornel’s real problem is that he, himself, is shackled to Progressive thought as much as Obama is. It never occurred to Professor West that the reality is that Progressives are the Ruling Class.  And as such, they defend the status quo because any change to that means Progressives will be out of power and out of wealth. People like West think they are still out there getting ready to storm the barricades of the Ruling Class never realizing that they are the merest tools and foot-soldiers of the Ruling Class.  The Ruling Class likes people like West – they provide a patina of intellect to a class of people who are only in it for the money, power and fame. They also cook up arguments which allow the Ruling Class to pretend they are on the side of the people.  If West were to actually sit down and think about it all, now that he’s seen Obama for the fraud that he is, then he’d also start to realize that his Progressive ethic is the foundation of the fraud (seen more clearly in the way West – and the rest of the left – turn reality on ts head and find themselves on the side of bloodthirsty tyrants in Hamas vs the liberal democrats of Israel).

I actually have all sorts of sympathy for Mr. West.  He’s sincere. He really believes what he believes.  He really wants justice and mercy and equality to prevail – but he’s also been suckered his whole life by a left wing narrative and he’s so far proven himself incapable of breaking out of it, even when the stark, cruel truth is right in front of him. If he’d just realize that Obama hasn’t conned people any more than Reid or Pelosi or Sharpton or Jackson or Biden or Clinton (both of them), etc, etc, etc then he’d be on the route to being useful in the fight for liberty and justice for all. Solzhenitsyn noted this problem with Progressives in his Gulag Archipelago. Writing about the true-blue communists that Stalin, in his humor, raked in along with the “kulaks” and “wreckers”, Solzhenitsyn noted this inability to draw conclusions.  The communists remained convinced that the communist system was good; that Stalin was good – they couldn’t go from Step A to Step B and realize that if a gross injustice is carried out under the authority of those who claim to be for justice, then maybe they aren’t telling the truth. West is still stuck in the rut – certain that Obama is a fraud, he can’t go past that and realize that Obama is just one of many frauds…and maybe, just maybe, some on the right are better allies?

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got some blind people on the right, as well – but they are only a small minority compared to the blind on the left. In reality, you have to be a bit blind just to be of the left. You have to ignore some basic facts about humanity and history in order to really think, for instance, that a set of bureaucrats in DC could, say, craft a health care system for all Americans. But I still take it as encouraging that someone like West has at least partially awakened – and it makes me hopeful that maybe over 2014 and 2016 we can do some genuine good…that we can really get some hope for change.