About 4 years ago, I bought stock in a company called XTO.  At the time they were seen as a great long term play in the alternate energy field.  They are one of the leading companies in extracting natural gas with non-traditional methods.  Recently, XTO announced that we were being purchased by Exxon Mobil.  Experts quickly concluded that this was a smart move by Exxon to diversify their business into future energy sources, like natural gas.  I bought XTO because I liked how the company was run, and I decided to sell this investment because that is my typical reaction when companies I own get bought out.  If I wanted to own Exxon Mobil, I would have bought their shares 4  years ago.

Don't Drink the Water

Since I was following this development, I came across this story.  The premise here is that because XTO was purchased by Exxon, that this will attract environmental consciousness to the practice of how they extract natural gas, because we all know that Exxon Mobil is the corporate embodiment of pure evil.  XTO injects chemical-laced water 1,000s of feet below the surface of the earth, this fractures the shale deposits, and the gas comes out.  Radical environmentalist, in their relentless quest to ensure that no resource is ever consumed, are worried that putting chemicals thousands of feet below the surface of the earth could contaminate the water tables that lie thousands of feet above the gas deposits.

Stories like this reaffirm my tendency to never take environmentalists seriously.  We are told by the climate doom-mongers that we need to stop emitting carbon into the atmosphere, but when a company comes up with a viable alternative these environmentalists’ comrades in arms find some other ecopalypse for us to worry about.

A while back, my friend asked me if I thought global warming was just a big liberal conspiracy.  I think our rigourous scientists at the prestigious climatology department of East Anglia University have settled this matter.  However, my response to this question would be to look at the liberal solutions to any environmental “problem.”  For the average soft green, liberal, leftist, democrat environmentalist there is one obscenely predictable solution for preventing environmental doom: Exerting government power through regulation and taxation.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times regularly claims that clean-tech is the next big thing, and divorcing our economy from oil is this generation’s moonshot.  Then, rather than propose moonshot ideas, he usually comes to the conclusion that we need to start taxing carbon.

I have recently been reading Superfreakonomics, and the authors suggest that we can cool the planet by pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere from hoses suspended by balloons.  This would cost a couple hundred million dollars as opposed to cap and trade which would cost trillions.  This is a moonshot idea.  Of course to really come up with and execute a moonshot idea like this, we would actually need some scientists.

What's getting in the way of your prosperous future?

For those who watched BYU beat OU on Saturday night, you would know that former Heisman winner, Sam Bradford, hurt his shoulder in the game.  This is unfortunate, because apparently (hard to tell from the game) he is supposed to be a pretty good quarterback.  He also chose to play college football for one more year instead of skipping school to play in the NFL and start making millions.  The ESPN announcers mentioned that he took out an insurance policy against an injury such as this.  I don’t know the details of the policy, but I would imagine that he forks out a ton of money, and if he gets hurt, then the insurance company would pay out what he lost in potential earnings as an NFL quarterback – or something like that.

As I now have the knowledge that this type of insurance exists, I have to admit that I am a little disappointed that Obama only wants to provide health insurance to every American.  He is really cutting the American people short.  We deserve nothing less then to be insured/ensured that we will have prosperity.  This is primarily why I am disappointed in the speech that Obama gave to the kids at school.  He told them that they are personally responsible for doing well in school.  He said that success would take hard work.  Nothing is more cute than a liberal pretending to believe in personal responsibility.

I want the actuaries who crafted Bradford’s insurance policy to create prosperity insurance for all Americans, and I demand that Congress write a 1,000 page Universal Prosperity Insurance Act that would free us from the economic consequences of bad decisions and missed opportunity while sheltering us from risk.  Obama says I might be a good writer, but I’ll never know until I try.  I say, “Why even try?”  It is entirely possible that I could be a good writer.  Or at the very least, I could be the next J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyer, which means there are potential billions in earnings on the table that I could make if I were to pursue this talent.  The federal government should create an insurance policy that is subsidized by other taxpayers to pay me if I never reach this potential.  How much would they pay me, you might ask.  I would have to say ” a lot.”

Barack Obama said the words “a lot” a lot in his speech, which, like a lot of his speeches, has a lot of abstract, if not meaningless, words and ideas.  For a man who shows no evidence of understanding the magnitude of the number “1,000,000,000,000,” what are we supposed to think when he says in the speech that he has given a lot of speeches, when he has only given a mere 112 speeches since becoming president.  It is hard to know what “a lot” means to this president, and I have to say that I expected a lot more from his speech to the kids than conservative platitudes about personal responsibility.  He’ll promote personal responsibility to the kids, but the policies he is creating for the adults suggest that he doesn’t believe all the crap he told the kids.  He’ll straight talk with the kids, after all most of them can’t vote, but with adult Americans he’ll promise a lot of things that we can’t afford.  

While universal prosperity insurance might cost a lot, “a lot” is the one quantity that Barack Obama seems to believe that we can afford.

Yes Master!

Conservative blogs are under attack.  In my previous post, A Good Mob is Hard to Find, Paul decided to make a comment.  Now I don’t know Paul, and I don’t want to deter people from commenting on my blog, but Paul has some explaining to do.  Here is his comment, so we are all on the same page.  Notice how his comment does nothing to engage with the point I was making in my post:

 

It’s funny we hear Republicans say that they do not want “faceless bureaucrats” making medical decisions but they have no problem with “private sector” “faceless bureaucrats” daily declining medical coverage and financially ruining good hard working people. And who says that the “private sector” is always right, do we forget failures like Long-Term Capital, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco, AIG and Lehman Brothers. Of course the federal government will destroy heathcare by getting involved, Oh but wait, Medicare and Medicaid and our military men and women and the Senate and Congress get the best heathcare in the world, and oh, that’s right, its run by our federal government. I can understand why some may think that the federal government will fail, if you look at the past eight years as a current history, with failures like the financial meltdown and Katrina but the facts is they can and if we support them they will succeed.

How does shouting down to stop the conversation of the healthcare debate at town hall meetings, endears them to anyone. Especially when the organizations that are telling them where to go and what to do and say are Republicans political operatives, not real grassroots. How does shouting someone down or chasing them out like a lynch mob advanced the debate, it does not. So I think the American people will see through all of this and know, like the teabagger, the birthers, these lynch mobs types are just the same, people who have to resort to these tactics because they have no leadership to articulate what they real want. It’s easy to pickup a bus load of people who hate, and that’s all I been seeing, they hate and can’t debate. Too bad.

 

As a former writing instructor, I know that Google can be an invaluable tool for exposing intellectual dishonesty.  In Paul’s case you can google search any random part of his comment, and you will find a screen that looks like this:

comment spam

You will see that I am not the only blog where Paul has copied and pasted his brainless ideas.  You might say comment spam is part of blogging, so why make a big deal out of this.  Well, this is more than a simple case of comment spam.  

For another example of this kind of comment spam, you can check out the post, Congress won’t take the medicine they prescribe, on Harrison Price’s blog.  Check out the comments on this post and you will find another comment spammer named Jacksmith.  I called jacksmith on his bluff in my own comments – I am Burro by the way.  Once again you might justifiably say, “So what.”  Ultimately, Paul’s comment is evidence that a claim I have been making since May of last year is correct.  Read Obama’s Biggest Weapon for some context and a great quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  My claim is that Obama’s biggest weapon is an army of witless supporters who will do whatever their master tells them.

Obama’s army of Storm Troopers is called Organizing for America, and he recently sent an email to this army of 13 million clones to engage in activities that support his healthcare proposal.  I imagine that Paul and jacksmith are members of this mindless herd.  Liberals are whining (redundant I know) that the massive protests by angry Americans are “astroturf” protests as opposed to authentic “grassroots” movements.  This is a stupid claim on their part that is backfiring dramatically.  On the other hand, I remember watching a documentary about the development of CGI technology in movies.  One of the defining moments of CGI was when they were able to develop programming that was sophisticated enough to create an image of a grass field where every blade of grass was moving independently.  Grass generated by CGI programming is a good metaphor for describing this new form of activism pioneered by Obama and Howard Dean where you can just send an email to your 13 million shills and they will go spam websites with manufactured comments.  We can call this form of protest “technoturf.”  Nancy Pelosi has said that the protesters of the healthcare bill are un-American, I would have to say that it is hard to argue that Obama’s army of mindless supporters are even human.  Just as a marionette without strings, or Obama without a teleprompter, Paul, wouldn’t be able to debate if he didn’t have a message from his master that he could copy and paste all over the internet.  While I am opposed to the shouting matches going on at town hall meetings, I am at a loss at how else you might get someone like Paul to acknowledge their humanity.

Paul was quick to disparage faceless bureaucrats in his comment, but I would take an army of faceless bureaucrats over an army of faceless apparatchiks any day.

Paul, if you want to debate, come to my blog and make a real comment.  I predict that he doesn’t.

A good mob is hard to find

Paul Krugman, in his most recent column in the New York Times, has become yet one more liberal participating in the project of denouncing those who are protesting the policies of Barack Obama.  To see liberals reach for their guns of derision so quickly to shoot down the form of protest that they invented is amusing, to say the least.  Krugman, labels these conservative activist groups as “townhall mobs,” and he makes the typcial liberal maneuver to say that these protests are discredited by the fact that they aren’t real “grassroots” movements.  I find it fascinating that liberals, who are quick to fasten themselves to theories of postmodernism, are so suddenly worried about authenticity.  

After all, many of liberalism’s claims to fame (multiculturalism, moral relativism, deconstruction) are all based on a premise that authenticity is an elusive ideal that if pursued too aggressively will lead to violence and fascism.  So now the cultural gatekeepers of authenticity are observing forms of social protest from conservatives and saying, “unlike our fabricated, contrived, and orchestrated social protest groups like ACORN, PETA, the Sierra Club, the ACLU, Code Pink, the AFL-CIO etc. these conservative protest groups are not legitimate, because they are fabricated, contrived and orchestrated.”  If you follow this logic through to its conclusion, a reasonable observer would have to conclude that if authenticity is what gives the stamp of legitimacy to a social movement, then the major liberal movements of social protest are an exercise in inherent fraudulence.

Krugman concedes that some of these protesters appear to genuinely angry, but he can’t figure out why.

Krugman says:

There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.

Now, people who don’t know that Medicare is a government program probably aren’t reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing.

He then concludes that these people are just being racists.  I must applaud Krugman for his authentic liberalism.  There is nothing more authentic than a liberal trying to read something like race into every issue.

In response to Krugman’s anecdote, where he implies that people on Medicare shouldn’t be opposed to it, I would have to suggest that this is the problem with entitlements in general.  Once an entitlement becomes entrenched in society, a politician can always pull this trick on his constituents.  Maybe Krugman and Gene Green should pay more cognizance to the fact that even people who are enrolled in Medicare are still opposed to it.  This seems like a good question, and unfortunately for Krugman, the answer probably isn’t because they are a racist mob.

Maybe Krugman, recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, could take a look at the current budget projections for Medicare, and ask the question of why Americans would be against an expanded government role for health care.  Given the fact that Medicare is an abject economic failure by all standards, one has to wonder why someone who claims an advanced knowledge of economics would be holding this program up as something that should be supported.

Ultimately this leads me to say that I am not an ardent supporter of these town hall protests.  Conservatives don’t need to go shout down their representatives like a bunch of mindless liberals.  I would like to hear politicians like Gene Green answer one simple question:

“Mr. Green, every year I get a statement from the Social Security Administration that tells me that Social Security and Medicare on a fast-track fiscal train-wreck.  Given the undeniable fact that the federal government has proven to be grossly incompetent in managing these massive failures, why should average American citizens support an expansion of the government’s role in health care?”

If the answer to the question is the same meaningless Obama drivel that we have had to listen to for almost two years now, then maybe I undervalue a good mob.

This is another Mark Steyn video.  It is an hour and a half long, but it’s worth every minute.  Liberty Belle, if you like the Cult of Ignorance, you will love this.  

Question: What is the only thing falling faster than global temperatures?

Answer: The approval ratings of President Obama and voter confidence in the Democrats.

Like a Rock

I am not usually one who cares much for polls.  It is too easy to find polls that confirm what you already believe.  However, when inevitable things like the failure of the Democrat’s policies start to materialize, we probably ought to get used to polls like these.

It must be nice for Republicans to get to occupy the position that Democrats were able to occupy for most of the Bush term: whine about everything, offer no solutions, and get elected the next time around not because you had better ideas but because the voters will take anything other than what they’ve already got.

Jake has been urging me to answer whether I believe there is something to the data saying that there are trends indicating the presence of climate change or if this is all just a big liberal conspiracy.  to clearly answer this question for him, I would have to say that I believe that the scientific study of climate, like any other form of scientific inquiry, is innocuous in and of itself.  Climatology is basically a bunch of curious people trying to answer questions using the scientific method.  Unfortunately for their field, it has become one of the most politicized fields of scientific inquiry.

The idea of anthropogenic global warming is more like a liberal’s wet dream than it is a liberal conspiracy.  To understand this claim, you have to understand the paradigm through which I view environmentalism.  Most Americans seem to view environmentalism this way:  Liberals are environmental crusaders that want to save the planet from the ravages of markets and industry vs. Conservatives who want to completely ignore the environmental impact of markets and industry as they greedily pursue profit.  This misrepresentation of the debate over environmentalism has atrophied the conservative side of the debate.

However, the modern environmentalist movement was started by a conservative, and despite the fact that conservative environmentalism seems to be an oxymoron to most, conservative environmentalism most likely has the best answers to today’s environmental problems than most liberal envirowackos.

Peter Huber’s book, Hard Green is probably the best book for laying out the conservative’s environmental sensibilities. For an example of how Huber thinks about environmental issues, you can read Bound to Burn. Here are some good quotes:
“Green jobs” means Americans paying other Americans to chase carbon while the rest of the world builds new power plants and factories.

Computer models demonstrated that [nuclear] meltdowns were highly unlikely and that the costs of a meltdown, should one occur, would be manageable—but greens scoffed: huge computer models couldn’t be trusted. So we ended up burning much more coal. The software shoe is on the other foot now; the machines that said nukes wouldn’t melt now say that the ice caps will.

We don’t control the global supply of carbon.

You can read the rest of the article to see the basic conclusion that I will also make.  Even if humans are contributing to an increase in carbon emissions, there is little that those who adhere to liberal ideologies can do to stop this.  Whether you call it a conspiracy or a wet dream, the reason why liberals cling to global warmingism and their regulatory guns is because liberalism wants to micromanage everything it possibly can.  From car companies, to banks, to molecules, modern liberalism is waxing quite confident that it can effectively manage just anything where markets have “failed.”  However, to the modern liberal, real results matter less than perceived ones, which makes global warming a perfect tool for psychological exploitation.  It is easy to see how labeling something that intends to control things as ephemeral as molecules and emotions as a conspiracy isn’t too far-fetched.  However, I’ll stick with my stance, that controlling the climate of the planet is just too juicy of an opportunity for the average liberal to pass up.

Meanwhile, the liberal’s solutions to prevent global warming does more to discredit the theory than any discussion of scientific evidence.

As I continue to address that Jake made on a previous post, today I will tackle multiculturalism.

Jake is in blue, I am in green:

I like your post on multiculturalism. However, I found myself wondering when I was done reading it, it is obvious that you don’t like multiculturalism, but you seem to assume it is bad as opposed to posting a substantive argument as to why this should be the case. Surely for conservative readers of your blog this is not a large assumption to make and will likely go unnoticed, but as an anthropologist (and one who claims to know a few things about culture), I still found myself scratching my head and thinking, why is this message to Iranian citizens such a bad thing, because it was phony and contrived.  How should the avowed disciple of multiculturalism engage the other who doesn’t share the same multicultural paradigm?  Where multiculturalism is a useful, historically located social construct for Western academics in the liberal arts to gain their fair share of grant money, since they can politicize an otherwise apolitical field of inquiry, unfortunately not all cultures have the same social constructs to encourage them to participate in this cult.  Despite its best intentions, multiculturalism is a very one-sided engagement with the other, and is therefore inherently and irreparably flawed. and more so why is multiculturalism such a bad thing? because of its strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest (notice the lack of pluralization on the word interest). And why is it such a bad thing particularly in a country as diverse as ours, where just about everyone who claims to have a culture disagrees fundamentally with at least someone else’s view from their “culture” why would we want to encourage a recipe for a melting pot of whiners?  Multiculturalism inflates the value of the cultural currency of minority groups and creates value where there is none., Mormons With what essentializing compass do you reductively circumscribe Mormonism as a monocultural phenomenon? certainly not being the most popular of these groups. Many southerners still talk about “the war of northern aggression,” for example.  I am assuming you have some field research to back this up, because it feels like a stereotype to me.  Honestly, if identifying a monocultural identity is so difficult how is drawing ever smaller circles around multiple cultures in any way a redemptive alternative?  At what point do you stop drawing smaller circles?  Ultimately, doesn’t the whole multicultural project become an exercise in arbitrary capriciousness? Is this not cultural difference?  Cogito ergo sum.  Are not two individuals islands of cultural difference? If you don’t think so, many of them certainly tend to think so, and also many of them don’t. When we look to such a rich history of immigration from diverse places of the world that populated this country not to mention the dynamics of time, history, syncretism, adaptation, it seems difficult for me to even begin to imagine whose monocultural stance we are going to adopt as “American.” I would have to begin to imagine that that there is a monocultural American identity that these diverse immigrants are adopting either through a process of assimilation or accommodation.  I would also have to begin to imagine that this monocultural American identity is largely the product of cultural discourses and narratives that are mostly rooted if not exemplified by the founding texts of America.  My short list of the founding texts of American culture are 1. The Constitution 2. The Bill of Rights 3. The Bible and 4. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.  I will grant that to their benefit these founding documents do create a space for multicultural exchange.  However, I would hesitate to essentialize America as a multicultural country.  In other words, I wouldn’t adopt the monocultural stance that we are a multicultural society.  This is a small part of American cultural identity usually made more important by liberals who exploit it for political purposes.  I am going to take a wild guess that, if this is ever going to happen I don’t think of cultural identity as an event, it is most likely not to be that of the average person in Utah valley however, your average person in Utah Valley probably has no problem adapting their multicultural proclivities to the hegemonic American culture that is rooted in America’s founding texts.  Also on another note, your average person in Utah Valley is probably more “multicultural” than your average American.  Most Americans haven’t immersed themselves in a foreign culture to the extent that the majority of average Utahns have.  So for you to essentialize America as multicultural and then use one of its most multicultural sub-cultures as an antithesis to your claim seems to be something of a paradox. So, again, I ask, why not multiculturalism? On further reflection, I am not opposed to multiculturalism, but I am opposed to the phony, half-assed multiculturalism that liberals use to advance questionable political agendas.   What is so bad about it? What parts of multiculturalism (as vague of a concept as it may be so framed) don’t you care for? And why is it so bad that our president should be considerate of the diversity of religious and cultural perspectives not only in our country but among the nations with whom we hope to engage diplomatically? I guess I don’t see engaging someone self-righteously through your own social constructs as considerate.  I also don’t overestimate the value of “being considerate” when it comes to international foreign policy.  Really, honestly, I can’t seem to figure out why you think multiculturalism is such a bad thing I can’t argue that it is a bad thing, but it certainly isn’t a good or viable or just solution to the world’s problems, except perhaps form a perspective of some type of massive group identity threat, which I don’t think to be the case.

Social Security is more bankrupt than we thought.  A few months ago I wrote a post, Weapon of Mass Wealth Destruction, where I explored how social security is a terrible investment.  The Social Security Trustees Report came out today, and we found that the condition of Social Security and Medicare is worse than expected.  Americans certainly didn’t need this reminder that government sponsored entitlement programs are disastrous failures at a time when Obama is trying to get things rolling with his plan for universal health care coverage.  In order to help Obama out, I am going to provide my best ideas for rescuing these toxic entitlements from failure.  I call this program to fix social security the Toxic Entitlement Relief Program, or TERP.

1. Enact punitive taxes on those who have abortions.  Since Roe v. Wade passed in 1973, there have been 49,551,703 abortions in the United States.  This massive reduction in the labor force is certainly partially responsible for the projected shortfalls of social security.  Where legal maneuvering might have enabled women to have the ability to escape the moral consequences of their sex drives, like smoking and alcohol, we should punish this negative behavior with excessive taxation.  I propose a tax code where the mothers and fathers of each aborted baby must pay the equivalent of one wage earner’s contributions to social security and medicare split between the two of them for the rest of their lives.
2. Lottery Retirement System.  Many states run lotteries as a way to tax stupidity.  Anyone who has ever been to a casino knows that they are flooded with old people squandering away their nest eggs.  Since old people like gambling so much, let’s make gambling part of retirement.  Every year you can buy a social security lottery ticket for a fixed sum.  Every year a certain number of winners will be chosen to retire at different ages.  For example, 100 lucky winners can win the right to start claiming full social security benefits at age 40.  1,000 lucky winners can retire at age 45.  5,000 lucky winners at age 50.  10,000 lucky winners can retire at age 65.  If you never win one of these lotteries, then you don’t get to start claiming benefits until you are 77.  However, if you win a the age 40 lottery at age 70, you will receive a lump sum payment of 30 years worth of retirement benefits.  This would be a great way to get the majority of Americans to accept a later retirement age, and it would bring in a much needed infusion of cash to the trust fund.
3. Base benefit payments on the number of offspring that you have and also the income levels of your offspring.  In order for social security to work, you have to have a steadily increasing population.  Therefore, the people who replenish the system with new laborers should be duly rewarded.  If you have 5 kids that all fall into an income bracket level over $80,000 dollars, your benefits should be higher than someone with one kid earning $25,000.  If you have 6 kids that are all on welfare or in jail, you don’t get any social security, Sorry!
4. Punitively tax Warren Buffet.  He deserves to have his wealth confiscated by the government for supporting Obama in the last election.
5. Repeal child labor laws.  The problem with entitlement programs is that they produce generations of entitled brats.  Just as social security is a backwater idea from a different time, so are child labor laws.  Now that chimney sweep is a dead career, and coal mining will soon be an extinct profession, there are lots of jobs that kids can safely do.  Kids also tend to be pretty naive when it comes to taxes, so you could probably tax them at a higher rate for several years, and they would never know the difference.  We need to expand the taxable labor pool as quickly as possible, and enabling children to work could happen with the stroke of a pen.
6. Start gambling with the trust fund.  If I can expect to lose $.22 on the dollar for every dollar that I put into social security, then putting this money in a slot machine would actually be an investment.  Payout odds for most slot machines are in the mid 90% range.
7. Tax energy consumption more.  I think any excuse we can find to tax energy more is a good idea that ought to be pursued.