Some things can be done as well as others. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 03:15 PM | Comments (245)
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No really. They were doing a test to see what function high energy particles (like, from the sun) might have on cloud formation. I think the theory is that such particles help form clouds, but don't hold me to that.

CERN's scientists are gagged from talking about their interpretation of the results of the experiment. To be clear, they are allowed to talk about the actual results and data.

But they can't interpret it, not publicly, at least.

Why? Well, cloud formation is one of the areas that global warming cultists don't understand. Whatever they have discovered will have some impact on the global warming religion.

So, of course, scientists are warned not to take their scientific interpretations public.

Because, Heuer says, “That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”

Ahem.

Seems to me pretty likely that something in this undercuts a claim of the global warming cultists, and they are being extended the professional courtesy of getting a heads up and delay of the findings of this experiment, to give them time to prepare.

And that's what science is, isn't it? Delaying findings so that your colleagues, caught in error, have lots of time to start getting their press releases together.

Thanks to Circa.

The Theory... First of all, there's a six-part video on this, lasting an hour.

Several people explain, but Miss Marple is the most detailed:

I assume this supports Svenmark's hypothesis. You can see the whole thing on a documentary on YouTube called "The Cloud Mystery," about an hour in 5-6 parts.

Basic theory: clouds are formed when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere. The more cloouds, the more cooling. When the sun is very active, it's magnetism draws cosmic rays to it rather than earth, resulting in less clouds and less cooling. When sun is inactive, more cosmic rays hit the earth, resulting in more clouds, more cooling.

And when we go through one of the dense star areas of the Milky Way, it doesn't matter WHAT the sun is doing, because the stars make lots of cosmic rays and overcome the sun, so we end up being very, very cold. As in Ice Age.

All nicely correlated with astronomers, geologic data, etc. Very interesting and makes sense to me.

So... we don't know for sure, but it looks very likely that this experiment confirmed parts of this cloud-formation theory and thereby, by implication, discredits global warming.

Bumping Update: Linking Canada Free Press, the findings are called "bombshell."

It does seem like the CERN experiment verified much of the Svenmark hypothesis.

Get ready for the next big bombshell in the man-made warming debate. The world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory—CERN in Geneva—will soon announce that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in earth’s atmosphere. More cosmic rays mean a cooler planet. Thus, the solar source of the earth’s long, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle will finally be explained.

Posted by: Ace at 01:37 PM | Comments (397)
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Good Christie quote here at Verum Serum (video).

Asked about the debt limit, Christie first offers up the independent-flattering pox-on-all-houses "they should just fix it."

Fine.

But then he turns to Obama. And offers the opinion -- which the press corps cannot believe, so absurd it is -- that a president, the chief executive, is expected to lead with his own plan and his own ideas and his own specific proposal, and not just sit back "waiting for legislators to lead."

He notes that the did not just "wait for legislators to lead" himself.

Crazy!

Meanwhile, Christie lays out his reasons for not running in 2012, in a meeting with donors.

Basically, Christie spoke to donors via conference call, because one among them, a guy named Lagonne, begged him to run for President. Here's what he said:

ere’s a paraphrase of what Christie told his would-be backers: “I’m not running, but I came because Langone is so aggressive, he basically just physically shook me into doing it. I’ve weighed this carefully; I didn’t dismiss it out of hand. There were four considerations. 1) One question was: Where’s my wife? She’s not enthused. 2) The second is: I looked ahead at the potential for two years of running, and not seeing my kids. If I won, six years of not seeing them. If I won a second term, 10 years of not seeing them. Missing my kids growing up is a big deal to me, and it was a big reason. The wife was the biggest. The children were the second. 3) I’m staying in New Jersey. I am not just going to quit halfway through my term. The people trusted me, and I feel like I owe that trust and faith some fidelity. 4) And fourth: Could I win? Could I really do it? I think I would win — not saying I would win, but I could win. I brought my oldest son today because, first of all, I wanted him to wake up early. And, second of all, to have to put on his one suit and tie. But I wanted him to listen because if I did run, which I’m not going to — but if I did in the future — it’s going to affect him. There’s six people in the family — I’m just one. I recognize that not all of you would immediately commit, but it certainly makes me realize that if I were to run, and had this group were behind me, I certainly wouldn’t have any problem raising money.”

Anyway. He's not running.

Tammy Bruce reads this as some kind of a dig at Palin.

I will say what I said on Twitter. Palin is very, very important to some people. But those people have to understand their passion is not shared by all.

So when someone like Christie purports to be talking about his own wife and children, chances are, he's really talking about his own wife and children, and not, in fact, giving coded messages dissing Palin.

Most people do not think about Palin all that much. It is a simple error of projection to mistake one's own enthusiasm for her as universal.

Posted by: Ace at 12:52 PM | Comments (259)
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Joined in progress. I forgot about it.

Posted by: Ace at 11:18 AM | Comments (180)
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Just another silver bullet for 2012.

Expect the post-ObamaCare trendline to start heading south, too. This looks like it's getting worse, not better.

Oh, and independents want ObamaCare repealed by a two to one margin.

By a margin of 32 points (63 to 31 percent), independents favor the repeal of Obamacare, according to the latest Rasmussen survey of likely voters. Independents who feel “strongly” (one way or the other) support the repeal of Obamacare by a margin of 31 points (52 to 21 percent). Likely voters as a whole favor repeal by a margin of 15 points (54 to 39 percent), while those who feel “strongly” (either way) support repeal by a margin of 17 points (43 to 26 percent).

Why aren't we forcing Obama to talk about this? What little-d democratic argument can possibly support a law which was barely passed in the first place -- via a technicality to boot -- and was unpopular at the moment of its creation and so unpopular it caused a revolt against the party passing it?

Why are we not forcing Obama and the media to explain how this travesty continues?

I actually sort of know the reason: Because Obama and the Democrats will not, not, not permit repeal so long as they cling to power.

But that's not a good reason not to force them to explain themselves and justify their intransigence.

Posted by: Ace at 11:02 AM | Comments (132)
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Not that that's a new experience for her.

Contessa Brewer up first. Note Contessa is not asking questions; she's making assertions. She's arguing on behalf of Obama, of course.

And she decides to play the credentials game. Do you have a degree in economics? she demands to know. Not that she does, by the way, even though she's making substantive assertions about economics herself.

Her alleged "interviewee" -- actually her debate opponent -- leaves her sputtering. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:13 AM | Comments (182)
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Here's the current version:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.

How's that workin' out? It's not. It's base-bait. It gets the bait all excited. And it goes nowhere.

It's intended to go nowhere. It's intended to get the base excited, while going nowhere. This gives those who endorse it a two-fer:

1, The base gets excited.

2, Moderates who are uncomfortable with this do not vote against the people who supposedly endorse it, because they are reassured by that part about "it's going nowhere."

People are being played. The political class is pushing a document that serves all of their interests. Those in red areas can endorse it without political consequence. And those in blue areas can oppose it without political consequence.

And nothing happens. Everyone's base gets fired up and the donations flow in, but there's no actual movement on the issue.

And this is a feature, not a bug.

Let's drop the base-bait crap and push an amendment that can actually pass -- and if it doesn't pass, it will require Democrats (and socially "moderate" Republicans) to take an unpopular position.

Here's my proposed more modest amendment that can actually pass (or at least put Democrats on the defensive, big-time). It just omits the first sentence and changes the second a little:

1. The laws of marriage shall be enacted into law by the normal and usual legislative process only, or by explicit amendment to a state constitution expressly creating a new law of marriage.

2. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, nor the laws of any foreign jurisdiction, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.

3. The law of marriage in one state shall not be construed to create a right to marriage in another state.

Note that this pretty much just jettisons the attempt to resolve the issue for all of the country by amendment, at the federal level. It permits gay marriage -- so long as it's a genuine legislative law (or secured via explicit amendment -- none of this "penumbras and emanations" crap). But it stops all courts from imposing it.

And note well: It is mostly the courts who have forced this on the states, even when a state has acted "legislatively" to create a right to gay marriage. As was said in NY: Hey, at least the legislature did this before the courts forced them to.

This amendment would stop all that "Let's beat the courts to the punch" thing. And if the citizens of states genuinely want gay marriage, they can pass it, legislatively, or by express amendment to the state constitution... democratically.

This amendment respects federalism, and not just for gay marriage states, but for non-gay marriage states -- it enshrines DOMA's provision barring a gay-marriage couple from one state forcing the institution on another state by lawsuit (based on the Full Faith and Credit clause).

Further, it can pass.

Further, reluctant Republicans -- who are covertly in favor of gay marriage, but claim, publicly, to be opposed -- can no longer use the "federalism" dodge to excuse their inaction on the issue.

Further, Democrats will be hard-pressed to oppose this. Here's a little insight: People like getting to vote on things. They dislike having the power to vote taking away from them.

I was told this by a pollster. It is a common practice, for example, to seek to stop new buildings being built by creating a law stating that all new buildings must be voted on specifically by the public. This is a method that people who already own buildings -- and don't want their property value diluted by competition of new buildings -- use to keep new buildings from going up. And it's a tough law to fight, because people like the idea of getting a vote on everything.

It's a hard case to make that they shouldn't get a vote.

Anyway, I consider the current FMA to be some conservative fanservice which by design has no chance of passage and is an easy vote either way. It's an easy "yea" vote, as those who vote for it don't have to worry about moderates voting against them, because the moderates know it's just conservative fanservice not going anywhere.

It's an easy "nay" vote, because people can always say "federalism" and "state's rights" to justify their nay. Even Democrats do this -- this is their favorite dodge.

But what if a marriage amendment specifically did respect state's rights and federalism?

What would be the argument against it then, apart from the obvious -- that a lot of people actively desire the courts to impose the institution on reluctant citizens?

Let's stop the posturing and get something done. Let's push an Amendment that can actually pass.

Posted by: Ace at 09:36 AM | Comments (151)
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The videos are just up, right now. I haven't watched them yet, but O'Keefe promised hilarity to come and tipster Igor says they're hilarious.

Tease:

In the latest video, filmed in several Medicaid offices in New York City, an undercover reporter, who identifies himself as “Mario” seeks to apply for Medicaid for himself and his pregnant girlfriend, “Peach.”

When Mario is asked about his income, he intimates that he was a plumber, but does not earn a steady living and his source of income may not be legal, specifically the sale of “Mushrooms.” When the conversation turns to his income, the Medicaid worker says, “I don’t want to know nothing. I know you’re trying to survive, but you can’t tell me these things, okay?” Mario presses with, “If they come, I’m going to get arrested.” The Medicaid case worker also tells Mario to obtain a letter from a legitimate company saying that he is employed.

Funny: I didn't get it until I heard the Mario Brothers theme, but he claims he's named Mario, is an unemployed plumber, has a girlfriend named Peach, and deals in illegal mushrooms.

And of course he's looking for Magic Coins and Secret Passages.

Note: I took my gay marriage post down because I'd like it to have time to breathe but I have to put up breaking news in favor of it. I'll put the gay marriage post up later.

Posted by: Ace at 08:58 AM | Comments (87)
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"Medical."

And we all know that "medical" means "I'm feelin' stressy," most of the time.

But, so what? As I wrote I just no longer have any interest in using the coercive power of the state to impose my personal preferences on recreational drug use on anyone else.

I think this sort of law winds up undermining respect for the law. It breeds cynicism. And as the "law" remains mostly a paper law while cops and prosecutors increasingly ignore it, it tends to teach a bad lesson: The law is ill-considered and immodest and mostly in place for purposes of hassling people randomly.

Right now I'm on a general small government/trust citizens kick.

Posted by: Ace at 08:24 AM | Comments (316)
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If you don't know the background: O'Keefe's crew stung the Ohio Medicaid offices, catching a Medicaid staffer instructing a "Russian Drug Dealer" as to how he could defraud the state for Medicaid benefits his illegal and very high paying occupation should not qualify him for.

For example, she advised him to not mention his $800,000 McClaren F-1 super sportscar.

A couple of points. These workers were county level workers, not state level workers.

Why does this matter? Well, it matters to John Kasich, the Republican Governor of Ohio. He doesn't want to be tarred by this. And it's fair to say that certainly he wouldn't support the easy-peasy bureaucracy of free money regime that's in place. That's a Democratic creation.

Still, it's his job to fight that. He's ordered retraining.

Now that's nice and all, but I wrote to someone from the Ohio government, telling him that wasn't enough:

Thanks... shouldn't there be unannounced tests, too? Like O'Keefe's sting, but with people hired by the government?

This is not to attack Kasich. It is to note the nature of bureaucracy when it's handing out money. A bureaucrat only gets a complaint when he denies benefits, because the person he denied them to has a reason to complain. If that bureaucrat just fixes things so everyone gets money, there is no one to complain.

Thus the real rule -- forget training; people pick up on the real rule governing the situation -- is to just give money to virtually anyone.

Training will not cure this. What is needed is someone to complain on the other side of things -- as in the O'Keefe sting, where the complainer will be someone who actually got benefits but didn't actually qualify for them. As this situation will not arise naturally, it must be created via a state program of testing its bureaucrats.

No matter what the job is -- even in non-bureaucratic positions -- an employee's real directive is to avoid complaints by clients and hassles from superiors and above all else not get fired.

If a system is in place -- and I don't give a fig what's in the employee manuals; I mean the real governing system in place -- has all the incentives on one side of things (here, to just give out money willy-nilly; in the Army, to just promote Muslim officers even if they were giving "psychiatric research presentations" celebrating Islamic jihad -- then that is how the bureaucrats will act.

If bureaucrats began to get fired based on what we saw here in Ohio, there would at least be some incentive on the other side of things to deny money to plainly-ineligible fraudsters. As things stand, there is not.

It's clear that this woman has done this dozens (hundreds?) of times before. Nothing the "drug dealers" said fazed her in the least. She laughed it all off with "I'm not listening la-la-la" jokes. She had a ready defrauding scheme (call yourselves "babysitters").

She knows the real rule where she works is to make sure no one who comes into her office seeking "free government money" has any reason to file a complaint against her. And she behaves accordingly.

You can "retrain" this woman to tell her that she should also be considering the law and the taxpayer but until the law and the taxpayer actually threaten to take her cushy job away from by complaining about things from the other side, she's going to keep doing the same damn thing.

Look, you don't have to take my word for it. Enjoy the expert opinion of one Peter Gibbons.

By the Way: This woman needs to be fired.

I have avoided pouring criticism on her personally because it's my sense this is just Standard Operating Procedure and it's more The System that's to blame, with its perverse incentive scheme, than she herself.

But the only way to cure this situation is to lay down the law that there are real consequences to joining a conspiracy to defraud the government-- even if you work for the government. Especially if you work for the government.

The incentives must be laid down on the other side of things too: If you do this, and you get caught, you get fired. Period.

Otherwise you can "retrain" until the cows come home. The fact will remain that the real rule of the bureaucracy is that you can only get into a hassle by denying benefits, and that means you have incentivized all government workers to "fix" applications and offer advice about success at fraud.

A bureaucrat's motivation is not to serve the citizens or any of that bullshit. Her real motivation is just to do as little work as possible and receive as big a paycheck as possible for that low level of work.

In fact, that's most people's motivation at work. Most jobs, however, offer some kind of countervailing incentives to do a good job. Or, you know, you can just get fired for not doing a good job; something tells me that that possibility doesn't exist in a robust form when it comes to state bureaucrats.

When there is no counterbalance, when the taxpayer is never in the room, when the only threat to your easy-peasy paper-pushing job comes from a denial of benefits.... well, you won't have many, if any, denials of benefits. You'll have this-- rampant, routintized, SOP fraud, with the government a party to its own defrauding.

This is very much like the situation where a police force has become, through years of incentives, pretty corrupt. In a sense, you can hardly blame the cops who routinely take bribes. Because that's the real rule at work -- Take bribes. That's what the system has told them. Again, throw the rulebook out the window. Those are just words. What counts is action. And if most cops are taking penny-ante bribes, and none of them are being fired for that, then the real rule is "You are permitted to supplement your income through modest bribery."

And the only way to fix that is to start implementing stings and to start firing cops. In many cases, this will be unfair surprise to the cops getting fired over things that "everybody does."

But that's life. The only way to change the real rules of the situation is to begin imposing real consequences for behavior you wish to discourage.

And Further: Is it just me or is the "Employee Manual" treated as exactly what it is -- a corporate legal CYA document with little connection to the real world?

Who reads this? I have never been tested on it. That would be a manner to insure I read it and know it; but no company I've worked for tested me on it. They just handed it to me. It immediately went into the bottom desk drawer. I never saw it again until I cleared the desk out.

The fact that no one does this (AFAIK) is a major signal that it's CYA nonsense.

Another point: No party seems to take an interest in the lawful, proper functioning of the bureaucracy.

Democrats, the party of government, should take an interest, because it would help them sell more government if government actually functioned properly, but they don't, because their two biggest groups of supporters are government workers, who want to do nothing at work and get raises every year from their employers the taxpayers, and those on the government dole, who obviously have no desire to see welfare qualifications made more rigorous.

Republicans, the party of smaller government, should, in theory, take an interest in reforming bureaucracies, because these jackasses all vote against us anyway and we might as well squeeze some minimum level of job performance out of them, and we should also have an eye on protecting the taxpayer, but we tend not to, because we tend to view these bureaucracies as enemy camps, bastions of the Democrats, and we sort of just let them make the rules for their camps.

But we shouldn't. There's a line Democrats love to use: "Republicans campaign on the argument government doesn't work and then when they're in office they spend all their time proving it."

That's a hard knock. We should overcome that. We should recognize that whether we would have authorized these various welfare schemes in the first place, it is a fact on the ground that they exist, whether with our consent or without it, and we should be bears about making this crap work properly.

Now, some might say that that enables the welfare state by increasing its performance. Well, perhaps. But it also puts us in a position of credibility and authority to start making statements about what should be consolidated or closed down. If we became known as the Party of Smaller but High-Functioning Government we'd be in a better position to make it smaller still.

The Democrats don't like capitalism and have a vested interest (even subconsciously) in seeing it fail. We give in to the urge to wish the government to be as poorly-functioning as possible at our own expense.

I like John Kasich. I think it sucks he has such a low approval rating in Ohio. But he was elected to reform things. He should do so. And he should stop with this "retraining incorrigible bureaucrats" bullshit. He needs to change the system, not give "retraining" to these paper-pushers to instruct them that fraud is illegal.

They really know that already, don't they? Or rather, they know it's supposedly illegal.

In practice, they know it's not only legal but encouraged.

That must be changed. "Retraining" does not change that. Only consequences for poor performance does.

As expensive as it is to fire a unionized government employee: It's worth every dime.

As Admiral Nelson Voltaire advised: Sometimes you have to hang an admiral or two... to encourage the others. (Corrected; Voltaire was explaining the hanging of Admiral Byng in the Seven Years War, 50 years or so before Nelson would be in a position to order the hanging of admirals.)

Posted by: Ace at 06:56 AM | Comments (186)
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