On vacation this week and enjoying time with my family. Not reading political news this week and taking a much needed break. I’ll be back in a week interacting with my blog buddies here but until then…..
Kevyn Orr Schools NPR
There was an interesting Q&A on NPR’s All Things Considered the other day between NPR reporter Robert Siegel and Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and it was quite obvious that these two gentlemen have two very different ways of characterizing and attacking problems.
First, here are some quotes from Mr. Siegel:
“And let’s start with that big chunk of Detroit’s debt that consists of unfunded pension liabilities. They are pensioners, as you say, they worked under contracts that guaranteed their benefits. Should they now assume that those guarantees are trumped by fiscal necessity?”
Regarding how much the pension benefits will have to be cut…“Is there any level that you would find outrageous? I mean, 50 percent cuts in pensions, is that out of the question, off the board?”
“You’ve said that there’ve been warning signs of Detroit’s demise for 60 years. Sixty years covers the working careers of most of the city’s pensioners. If they’d been told when they first went to work, you’ll have a pension, but maybe not, or maybe not as much as we say now, Detroit may not have had any employees all these years. Why can’t they say, look, I gave my labor, part of the deal was a pension and that’s the level we negotiated?”
“So you’re saying the residents of Detroit should be held accountable for the people they elected all those years, is what you’re saying?”
Now here are some quotes from Mr. Orr:
Regarding how much the pension benefits will have to be cut… “We don’t know yet. I mean, that’s part of the dialogue we have to have – are the calculations, and there are various ones that go into determining the value of a pension and what the liabilities are going to be in the future. But it appears it’s going to be the necessity for some level of adjustment. We just don’t know how deep.”
“I sort of have to divorce myself from any preconceived notion. I mean, it’s just a question of the math and dealing with the realities of where they are now. You know, over the past couple of years, you know, between the way the pensions were handled and some of the investment decisions that were made and frankly some underfunding by the city, we’re just left with a mess and that’s a whole bunch of people’s faults but that’s just a reality today.”
“So there were many times in that timeframe to adjust and to react, as you know, Robert, between – you know, economic cycles run seven to 10 years and you adjustments. And unfortunately, for a whole host of reasons, a number of people did not make appropriate adjustments and left us with the situation we have today.”
“No. I don’t want to be quite that harsh in my assumption. I’m just saying there were many indicators and warning signs that could’ve been corrected over a number of years. And I don’t want to blame the victim, in a sense, Robert. But I want to say it doesn’t really matter what happened in the past. I mean, a retrospect of looking behind us isn’t productive.”
“What matters is here’s where we are. In unfunded health care liability, we’re at 5.7 billion. In unfunded pension liability, we’re at about 3.5 billion. There’s not money. It doesn’t matter what I say. It doesn’t matter what we look back on. There’s just no money.”
To sum up Mr. Siegel’s position – People shouldn’t be held accountable for decades of voting for Democrats that borrowed from the future to give sweet heart deals to unions. It’s not fair to cut their pensions by so much. Before we go through the financial analysis we have to put a limit on the cuts right now that seem fair. We should spend more time assessing blame for the past 60 years than working to fix the problems.
To sum up Mr. Orr’s position – Elections have consequences and it’s up to the individuals to take responsibility for their actions in the voting booth. It was foolish for people to think the massive pensions could be funded in perpetuity and it’s not up to the Government to tell people they are acting foolish. Emotion has nothing to do with this problem, we have to use math to determine what has to be done. The truth isn’t mean, it’s the truth.
Bravo Mr. Orr!
And by the way, Mr. Orr is a Democrat!
Just goes to show you there are still some Democrats that still understand economics and math. I hope his approach spreads to higher levels in the Liberal DC elite.
Posted in economics, npr, politics
3 Comments
New PR Tactic For Obamacare
Last week Obama presented a new tactic for getting people to love Obamacare.
From the White House transcript from 18-JUL-2013 (emphasis mine):
“It’s hard. This is a big country, and the health care industry is massive and there are tons of providers. And so as we implement, there are going to be glitches and there are going to be certain states that for political reasons are resisting implementation. And we’re just steadily working through all that stuff.”
“The same was true when Medicare was started. The same was true when Social Security got started. There were folks who, for political reasons, resisted implementation. But once it got set up, people started saying, this is a pretty good deal; it gives me a little more security. It’s part of that basic bargain that if you work hard, if you’re doing the right thing, that you can get ahead in this country — and that you can provide some basic protections for your family.”
So the new PR tactic is this – Once Obamacare gets going it will be “a pretty good deal” for the American people, just like Social Security is.
I wrote an earlier post about the ticking time bomb of unsustainable entitlement spending that is the Social Security program and you can see from this graph what the predicted outlays are for this program if we don’t reform it now.
If Obama is saying that Obamacare will be as good a deal as Social Security and if by ”good deal” he means uncontrolled spending then I’ll have to agree with him!
Really, telling folks that Obamacare will be just like Social Security is pitiful. Social Security along with Welfare need immediate attention if we ever have hopes of reducing our debt and now Obama is telling us once Obamacare gets going we’ll then have 3 huge uncontrollable entitlement nightmares to deal with.
Great sales job buddy.
Posted in Entitlement Programs, politics
2 Comments
Poverty Rate and the Failure of Liberal Policy
You only need to look at two graphs to prove the failure of Liberal policies.
First, from Heritage, we see the amount of money our Federal and State Governments spends on Welfare programs to reduce poverty in the US.
Second, from here, we see the poverty rate in the US since 1960.
Spending has grown exponentially but the poverty rate has been flat lined at around 11%.
Why are we still throwing money at this problem?
Posted in Entitlement Programs, politics
5 Comments
Was That A Threat?
During Tuesday’s White House Press Conference Jay Carney gave the following statement regarding Edward Snowden (emphasis mine):
“The fact of the matter is, our message has been clear and consistent with every government in this regard. And Mr. Snowden has all of the rights that every American citizen charged with a crime in the United States has, and he should be returned here where he can stand trial and take advantage of those rights. So that’s the conversation we’re having with foreign governments; that’s the conversations we’re having with our Russian counterparts.”
Maybe I’m reading too much into this but Mr. Carney seems to be implying that Mr. Snowden will have certain rights on US soil but if he remains abroad those rights won’t be in effect.
Does that mean Mr. Snowden should expect a drone attack once he is in the open, away from civilian targets?
Posted in politics
9 Comments
Minister of Justice Needs Your Help!
Guys and Gals, Eric Holder needs your help.
There is this guy down in Florida who was just found Not-Guilty by a jury of his peers but we still think he’s a no good rotten scoundrel so we need to find something to charge him with. If you have any information about him that could lead to a civil suit being brought against him then we’d appreciate if you’d tell us. There might even be a sweet Obamacare exemption in it for you!
We have a hotline setup and everything. All you need to do is call or email with any information you can give. Nothing is too trivial. Oh yea, the email is Sanford.florida@usdoj.gov.
And if you could link him to an anti-Islamic YouTube video that would be a big plus!
Surely this crazy ass cracka has committed a hate crime at least once in his life. Proof is not required at this time, we’ll work out those details later.
Informing on your fellow citizens that we don’t like – It’s the American way!
H/T @Jammiewearing original post here.
Posted in politics
4 Comments
Diabetes Update – 4 Months Post Diagnosis
Today I had my 3 month checkup with my Endocrinologist, which was 4 months after I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes during my annual physical, and I’m happy to report that I’ve made great progress.
If you want to review where I started on this journey you can read my first Diabetes related post here. A lot has changed and I’ve learned more since I wrote that 1st post and I want to capture that knowledge here.
Medicine
Three months ago my Endocrinologist changed my medicine from 1,000 mg of Metformin to Janumet (which is a combination of 1,000 mg of Metformin and 50 mg of Sitagliptin) and I’ve continued to take two of those tablets each day. The most common side effect of Metformin is diarrhea and nausea but so far I’ve been immune to those side effects and only rarely experience minor bouts with diarrhea.
I still take two multivitamins, one Claritin and one Dexilant per day and a take a plain old 325 mg aspirin a few times a week. While these medicines aren’t related to Diabetes control, I share this only to be complete in case someone is reading this who may take the same meds.
Diet
As I stated in my first post, I was not someone who enjoyed sweets so refraining from desserts was something I continued to do but I have to admit this was not tough for me.
I also never enjoyed sugary sodas and only drink water and coffee with the occasional mild or orange juice for breakfast. I am a bourbon lover and I didn’t give that up but restricted my drinking to 1-2 drinks per day max.
Bread/Carbs on the other hand was my one weakness. I was raised with bread on the table for every meal and I grew accustomed to having bread with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Much to the embarrassment of my wife, I once walked out of a restaurant because they didn’t serve bread with their meals!
For that reason, totally eliminating bread “cold turkey” was not going to happen so I took the approach to cut my bread/carbs in half. If I normally had 2 rolls with dinner I’d just have one. If I could just have croutons on the salad then I’d forgo the bread. Instead of using 2 slices of bread for a breakfast sandwich I’d throw one slice away.
I eliminated starchy foods, i.e. potatoes, so instead of having French fries with a hamburger, I’d have cole slaw or better yet, grilled vegetables like green beans or asparagus. This was tough at first but I grew to enjoy the savory flavor of grilled veggies and now I prefer those over the greasy fries.
Snacks at work no longer consisted of chips or bagels but now involved apples, blackberries, blueberries and kiwi. I now look forward to my morning and afternoon fruit snack and these fruits provide me with more energy than the high carb snacks I used to enjoy. I have also fell in love with almonds as a snack when I want something a little different than the sweet fruit and I can eat a few handfuls of those and it gets me through my between meal times.
As you may have noticed with all the talk of snacks, I now eat more meals through the day but they consist of smaller portions. I’ll eat 3 modest meals a day and have at least 2 snacks and I’ve found this helped speed up my metabolism and aid in my weight loss.
And by the way, in the past 4 months I’ve gone from a BMI of 26.3 to 24.4 but I still have 5 more pounds to lose to get to my goal weight.
Exercise
I have been a runner since 2009 and a cyclist for the past few years but in the year leading to my Diabetes diagnosis, I really slacked off in this area. I now run 1-2 times per week (2-4 miles) and ride the bike 1-2 times a week (20-30 miles) and feel this more than anything has led to my weight loss and improvement in blood sugar levels.
Now the results….
As you can see from the graph below, my blood sugar is now in the range where my Endocrinologist wanted me to be – around 120 mg/dl.
When I was diagnosed with Diabetes my A1C reading was 11.5%!!!! This was off the charts and when I went in today the nurse told me she better see improvement over last time. As the nurse was in the hall performing the A1C analysis of my blood I heard a loud scream and the doctor walked in and asked me if I heard that. I asked him what was wrong and he said that my new A1C reading was 5.6% and the nurse was so surprised she screamed!
For those not familiar, a normal reading for someone who doesn’t have Diabetes is between 4.5% and 6% so my reading is now considered high normal!
So in 4 months my A1C reading dropped 5.9% points and while the medicine certainly had a hand in this, I think the diet and exercise had an equivalent effect.
From the clinical trial data for Janumet, there was a population (N-117) who started the trial with a mean A1C reading of 11.2% and at the end of 24 weeks their mean A1C readings was 8.3% or a drop of 2.9% points. The patients in this clinical trial also had diet and exercise added to the Janumet but I think my regime was more aggressive since I saw DOUBLE the average drop in A1C as the patients in the clinical trial.
Needless to say the doctor was well pleased and said that I can continue doing what I’m doing and see him once every 6 months just to make sure I stay on track.
While this is cause for celebration for me, I am not satisfied because my goal since my diagnosis has been to get off the medicine and control my diabetes with diet and exercise alone. It is a lofty goal considering my Type 2 diabetes came from genetics and not from being obese but still, the results of the past 4 months have been encouraging and I will continue to push on the diet/exercise pieces and experiment with dropping my dosage of Janumet.
Posted in Diabetes
12 Comments
A New Travelling Game
We just got back from a long weekend trip and I spent time killing the one-way 6 hour drive by playing a game I have recently discovered and let me share it with you.
Now that cars and its inhabitants are equipped with all manner of electronic gadgets, my passengers (wife included…) pass the time on the interstate with their devices, movies, iPads, iPods and Kindles so there isn’t much for me to do but count the miles as they tick off. To offer myself a minor distraction from my safe driving duties I developed a game that you can try if you find yourself on a long trip either by yourself or with other disengaged passengers.
The game is fairly simple and since I play by myself I really don’t keep score. I call it “The Interstate Profiling Game” and as the name suggests, it is not politically correct. I read the bumper stickers of the cars I am about to pass and then try to get a mental image of what the driver will look like. Again, that might seem mean but I assure you that I do this with all people and will probably offend just about every segment of the population including the one I occupy.
For example, if I see a ‘NOH8’ or a “Coexist” bumper sticker I would guess that the driver is a skinny white girl who has long, unwashed hair; she’ll be smoking a cigarette and have her nose pierced.
If I see a 26.2, 13.1, 70.4 or any other sticker denoting mileages for running or triathlon competitions I would expect to see a fit person drinking a Gatorade or eating a power bar.
When I see a bumper sticker suggesting activities like canoeing, hiking or kayaking then I would guess to find a granola, earthy type person who might be burning incense in their cup holder.
When I see a ‘Git-R-Done’ or Confederate Flag bumper sticker then I’ll guess that the person driving might be someone who would be mistaken for a regular on the Duck Dynasty reality TV show. He’ll have a long beard and probably chewing tobacco and drinking a 2-liter bottle of Coke.
If I see someone who has those stickers on the back window representing outlines of their family then I’ll see someone who looks like me. He’ll be boring looking, out-of-shape, wearing an old golf shirt and maybe yelling at the kids in the back seat.
Any car having Greek symbols on the back will have college kids with over gelled hair and they’ll be drinking Red Bull.
You get the idea, right? Just good natured fun, no racial or socioeconomic harm meant on my part. I just glance over at the driver, give a friendly nod as if to say ‘Hi’ and then pass them.
But there is one type of bumper sticker that is very hard to profile from a physical appearance point of view but I can definitely tell you how that person thinks (or rather doesn’t think). It’s this sticker:
Yes, there are still people who proudly display their Obama bumper stickers. I saw 5 of them during the 12 hours I spent on the interstate this weekend and I still shake my head every time I see them. And the people that still have the Obama 2008 bumper stickers? I saw two of them this weekend and I really have no words.
There is nothing that says “I’m gullible” more than an Obama 2008 bumper sticker still on a car in 2013. You either have to be oblivious of the news from the past 5 years or possess zero critically thinking skills to still have a desire to tell the world how proud you were to vote for this guy….TWICE.
If I were a criminal, I’d seek these cars out in a parking lot or camp ground because they would be the easiest targets. I doubt they’d have any fight in them and would be easy to overpower (I definitely would guess they wouldn’t have a gun) and they’d probably be willing to give you money for a sob story as well.
When I play this profiling game and I see someone with an Obama bumper sticker I do something different when I pass them – I point and laugh. Try it during your next trip, it’s fun!
A Lesson In Capitalism For The DC City Council
The Washington DC city council recently decided to teach evil Wal-Mart a lesson.
“D.C. lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to a bill requiring some large retailers to pay their employees a 50 percent premium over the city’s minimum wage, a day after Wal-Mart warned that the law would jeopardize its plans in the city.”
So now Wal-Mart, and other retailers, will most likely avoid or leave the DC area and cause more people to be unemployed. Why? Because Leftists think Wal-Mart shouldn’t be making obscene profits.
“Activists celebrated Wednesday’s vote, saying the company, which reported net income of $17 billion on sales of $470 billion in its most recent fiscal year, could afford to pay better wages.”
Sigh.
It’s the same old emotional arguments from the Left that are ungrounded in sound business sense. Let me teach the DC city council a lesson by looking at Wal-Mart’s 2012 annual report.
Wal-Mart had total revenues of $446.95 billion which sounds truly obscene so maybe the Leftists have a point here. But let’s move from the emotion to the factual and determine what Wal-Mart had to spend to get that revenue and how much they put in the bank at the end of the year.
After subtracting what it costs to buy, ship, store and sell their merchandise ($335.127 billion) and pay the people who work for Wal-Mart ($85.265 billion) they were left with $26.558 billion. But they had to pay taxes on this ($7.944 billion) as well as paying interest on loans which left them a final profit of $15.699 billion.
That’s still a lot of money even when we’re talking about Federal Government levels but dividing that final profit by their total sales gives a final profit margin of 3.5%.
I wonder if Leftists would be satisfied with that kind of profit margin if they ever got the courage to start their own businesses.
Leftists also conveniently forget about the roughly $420 billion that Wal-Mart paid to people and other companies throughout the course of 2012 to sell their merchandise. Now that is a real stimulus program!
Posted in economics, politics
4 Comments
Rules For Thee But Not For Me!
There was an interesting exchange on NPR’s Morning Edition today that highlighted the Leftist’s hypocrisy.
David Greene was talking to Cokie Roberts and here was the first part of the interview:
GREENE: Yeah, I wanted to ask you this morning, the president – while he was in Africa last week – a key part of the federal health care law, it was announced, was postponed until after the 24th election. What kind of impact this is having?
ROBERTS: Well, Democrats are happy because it means that the part of the law which mandates that employers have to cover their workers – if they have more than 50 workers, a tough part of the law to enforce – that that won’t go into effect until after they get through the next election cycle.
Important point #1 – Ms. Roberts admits that the President’s postponement of the employer mandate was a purely political one to help defend the Democrat’s seats in Congress during the mid term elections.
The next exchange centers on Mr. Greene’s confusion as to why the immigration reform legislation will be stalled in the House.
GREENE: Why no sense of urgency? I mean President Obama is set to go campaigning for immigration reform. Even a lot of Republican supporters, I mean, the business community, evangelical groups are pushing for it. Why no pressure? Why is the House leadership not feeling pressure?
ROBERTS: Well, because they think their biggest job is to hold on to the one government body they control in Washington – the House of Representatives. If they lose that, they lose all power in Washington. And they’re worried that the immigration bill could harm them there. They’re just not sure that passing that bill will make it possible for them to have an easy hold on the House of Representatives; and that is their primary concern.
Important point #2 – Ms. Roberts makes the claim that Republicans are stonewalling the immigration reform legislation to hold onto their seats in the House. According to Ms. Roberts, this is there ‘primary’ concern in preventing a vote on this bill.
Notice the difference? Not enforcing a law on the books is good for Democrats because it allows them to keep their seats in Congress but not passing a new law is bad because the mean ole Republicans are only interested in holding onto their seats in the House.
Really, the Leftists aren’t even trying to hide their double standards anymore.
Posted in politics
3 Comments
When bad astronomers play ‘claimatologists’
The Vostok Ice Core data and the revelation about the Hockey Stick being rigged should’ve been the death to the AGW cult lies. Unfortunately for us, the AGW cult depends on the ignorance of the average person to reach graphs and understand math/science. Let’s prove them wrong – Read this, share it and bookmark it!
Posted in Climate Change
2 Comments
Is There No Hope For Change?
The United States is coming apart and I don’t know how we save it.
We have reached a point where our overreaching Government has become so big that it is out of the control of even those who support it.
IRS, DoJ, NSA, looming Obamacare, Debt greater than our GDP, unsustainable entitlement programs….the list goes on and on.
Even today, the architect of Obamacare realized that he must scale back the employer mandate until after the mid-term elections. Of course he’s doing this because businesses have been expressing their displeasure to the Administration and the last thing Obama needs is another repeat of the 2010 mid-terms.
We are also seeing massive protests by the Pro-Abortion crowd because the Texas Legislature is trying to pass a bill to outlaw Abortions after 20 weeks. The vile tweets in the #StandWithWendy and #StandWithTXWomen are enough to make you sick to your stomach and it makes me wonder how we became a nation where many choose to defend the right to kill viable babies just for the sake of birth control. It’s not enough that we had to read about the evil inside Gosnell’s abortion clinic but there appears to be a large segment of the population that are totally cool with killing babies right up to birth.
https://twitter.com/GingerTimeLady/status/351735815006728192
It’s enough to make me throw up my hands and wonder how we take this country back. There is a great PowerPoint presentation showing how Conservatives can be a force multiplier and get involved in precinct activism and it is worth a read by everyone. While that is good work that we should definitely be involved with, I was left thinking that there was a bigger issue that we have to attack in order to rescue the US from the path we are on which is eerily similar to the Roman Empire.
Then I saw this video of #StandWithTXWomen people chanting “Hail Satan” and I realized what we need.
We aren’t just fighting a political war. If that were the case, the only thing that would save us would be a revolution. But a revolution is only successful when the vast majority of the citizens are in opposition to the ruling government and this isn’t the case now. There are too many people that are opposed to Conservative principles to solve this with a revolution. Do I have to remind you that Obama just won re-election by a decent margin? This is not a problem that can be solved by a revolution or a civil war.
We can’t combat the “Hail Satan” crowd, the #STandWithTXWomen crowd or the “Free Government Handout” crowd with blog posts and cute tweets. Let’s face it; we can’t do it by ourselves. I just can’t do it. I have failed. The chasm is too vast. America is more polarized now than ever before. We need help. I need help.
And when we reach the end of our rope and realize that we can’t do it on our own that is when we turn to a higher power. And then we find that Jesus has been waiting for us patiently all along.
We are fighting a Spiritual war in America and we just can’t win without help from the Holy Spirit. Only when we fall to our knees and admit we are powerless against the Prince of Darkness do we get help. The past few decades may have served the purpose to humble the Church and make us realize that we have neglected the One who could help us. It’s time to turn to Him. He’s the only hope we have.
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Eph 6:12
Posted in christianity, politics
12 Comments
Different Rules For Liberals
I recently broke my Facebook rule about engaging with my Liberal friends when they post BS and I am contemplating rescinding that rule altogether!
Here’s what started it:
Note – All names (including my own) will be redacted on the Facebook screenshots. It’s not fair to them to have their real names shared without their permission and I’m not anxious to give radical Leftists any hints to my real identity.
This Lib was obviously very upset with the recent revelation of Paula Deen’s past racism and while I certainly don’t condone the comments she and her family recently gave in a deposition, I couldn’t help notice that the Facebook post left off the recent homophobic tweeting of Alec Baldwin. I decided to poke the bear and have a little fun.
That inspired another rant where my Facebook friend admitted there are different rules for “pro-equality” Liberals.
This little rant does a great job of revealing how Liberals feel about Republicans and Conservatives. Liberals see themselves as intellectually superior and are interested in equality for all so their racist comments don’t have the same meaning as those coming from Neanderthal, fascist Republicans.
By her own admission, she’s not interested in facts. She’s more interested in perceptions that are based on her worldview and stereotypical view of Republicans. That’s par for the course with most Liberals I know.
Notice also that she didn’t know about the Alec Baldwin Twitter rant. My Leftist friend here is usually very current with news/politics so there are only two explanations why she hadn’t heard about this – 1) She only gets her news from Left leaning sites who would never cover the Alec Baldwin story or 2) The State Run Media did a great job of covering up the Alec Baldwin story which was in contrast to the wall-to-wall coverage on the Paula Deen story.
My parting shot came with this:
Her whole argument about how Liberals should get more forgiveness for their hate speech falls apart once it is revealed that Paula Deen is actually a Democrat and a huge supporter of Obama. She seemingly admits that she knew that but if that’s the case, then why didn’t Deen get a free pass too? Because the perception among many is that Paula Deen is a Republican since she’s an old, white, racist woman.
There was a time when I avoided political confrontation on Facebook but I can no longer do that. I have many Leftist friends that I will no longer give a free pass to when I see them post non-sense. It’ll lead to many of them de-friending me but so be it. They have to be called out in a public forum.
Posted in politics
3 Comments
CO2 Sucking Machine
In the vein of Dr. Doofenschmirtz – “I give you the great Carbon Dioxide Suckinator!”
It’s come to this. From NPR:
“Every year, people add 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the air, mostly by burning fossil fuels. That’s contributing to climate change. A few scientists have been dreaming about ways to pull some of that CO2 out of the air, but face stiff skepticism and major hurdles. This is the story of one scientist who’s pressing ahead.”
Notice the 2nd sentence where NPR connects the dots from rising CO2 to ‘climate change’ (which used to be global warming). As I’ve shown before, making this claim that CO2 is contributing to global temperatures requires a great deal of imagination. CO2 is a greenhouse gas but it is by far not the magical molecule that the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) cult claims.
But those inconvenient facts won’t get in the way of a great NPR story. Here are more of the details of the magical atmospheric CO2 scrubber.
“Peter Eisenberger is a distinguished professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. “
“He started looking for a way to pull carbon dioxide right out of the air. “And it turned out the best device already exists,” he says. “It’s called a monolith. That is the same type of instrument that’s in the catalytic converter in your car. It cleans up your exhaust.”
“Eisenberger’s monoliths grab carbon dioxide from the air and release it again when you heat them up.”
Well that’s just great. If we can devise a machine to pull the CO2 molecules out of the atmosphere (don’t worry about where we’ll store it, we’ll work that out later) then we can finally mute the AGW cult and their high priests (i.e Al Gore) and go back to living our normal lives guilt free.
What does the rest of the AGW cult have to say about this? Surely they are excited about this, right? Not so much! From the NPR story (emphasis mine):
“Robert Socolow at Princeton University started hearing a buzz about this technology a few years back.”
“It’s catchy,” Socolow admits. “It’s attractive conceptually that one could basically pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for the next several decades and pull it out later and everything would be fine.” But the appeal of the idea also worried him — people might use the mere prospect of this technology as an excuse not to act.”
“Socolow’s panel concluded that the technology would be hopelessly expensive, costing $600 for every ton of carbon dioxide it drew out of the air. And the scale would also be huge. In order to capture the emissions would waft into the air from a single coal-fired power plant, you’d need to build a structure 20 miles long and 30 feet high. “It’s like the Great Wall of China,” Socolow says.”
“The committee concluded that it would make a lot more sense to cut down on emissions first — make our cars, homes and factories more efficient. Panel members also said it makes much more sense to capture carbon dioxide directly from smokestacks, where it’s concentrated, instead of from the air.”
Did you catch Mr. Socolow’s bias? He went into his study “worried” that the idea of a magic CO2 eraser would allow civilization to continue driving cars, operating power plants and going about their lives business as usual. The AGW cult can’t have that! There must be punishment for the economic advances of the United States. The solutions must be painful!
Coincidentally, the other AGW cult members concluded that it is way too expensive to create these CO2 eaters so back to punishing the masses. Of course, imposing draconian restrictions on power plants, increasing operating costs for businesses and raising home energy costs isn’t very expensive. Or is it?
You really can’t make up what the AGW cult is doing right now. They are getting desperate since global temperatures have been flat for 15 years and the North Pole is experiencing record cold temperatures for the summer season. They have to do something and since they have the POTUS as a cheerleader they think the momentum is behind them.
Exit thought – I’m just glad the AGW cult didn’t blame Earth’s climate on Oxygen. Can you imagine the news story of a machine designed to suck Oxygen out of the atmosphere? In reality, water vapor is a stronger green house gas than CO2 but thankfully they haven’t suggested pumping the water vapor out of the atmosphere. Yet!
Posted in Climate Change
3 Comments
Obama Pivots To Climate Change
Now that Obama fixed our economic crisis and everyone who wants a job has a job……He’s going to tackle Climate Change next.
While Obama is bloviating about a topic that he knows nothing about, keep the following 5 graphs on your screen. Then ask yourself why we have a President who lacks the skills to prioritize and think critically.
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been steadily increasing since we’ve been measuring it.
Using two different data sets, Global temperature anomalies have been flat for 15 years.
There has been zero correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global temperature anomalies during the past 15 years.
Note – Links to the above data sets can be found at a previous post here.
Posted in Climate Change
17 Comments
Using BLS Data To Test The Income Inequality Theory
One of the favorite memes of the Left is Income Inequality. They tell us that over the recent years the wealthy, the top 10%, have seen their salaries increase by a greater margin than the poor, the bottom 10%. But is that true?
I heard an NPR story the other day that went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data to answer that question and here is what they found.
“So, for example, this morning I searched BLS, OES, bricklayers. And I learned that there are 50,000 some-odd bricklayers and blocklayers, which I didn’t even know is a profession, and that high-paid bricklayers and blocklayers make four times as much as the low-paid ones do. It’s about 80,000 to 20,000 or so.”
“And when I go back in time using the BLS website, I see that 10 years ago the ratio was closer to 3-to-1. So the ratio between the highest paid and the lowest paid has been growing steadily. I saw the same thing with actuaries, with embalmers, people who embalm bodies at funeral homes. I saw it with dental surgeons, with low-paid dental surgeons making far less than high-paid ones. I saw it particularly strikingly with journalists. And throughout, I saw the same trend. The top 10 percent make roughly four times as much as the bottom 10 percent.”
I decided to verify the work by NPR and used the following two websites to get income data from 2012 and compare it to 2001. The 2012 site is here and the 2002 site is here (check my work and do this yourself, it’s fun!).
The BLS data publishes average wages for 5 different percentiles (10, 25, 50, 75 and 90) and I calculated the percent change for each of these percentile groups (2012 vs. 2002) and if there is a true income inequality then the percent change in the higher incomes will be more than the percent change in the lower incomes. Simple math, right?
Here is a table and chart showing the comparison of wages for Brick and Block Masons (2012 vs. 2002) that was referenced in the NPR story.
This NPR report was totally wrong! The ratio of wages for the 90%tile compared to the wages for the 10%tile was 2.65 in 2002 and 2.69 in 2012 – hardly any change! While it’s true that the wage increase for those in the middle didn’t keep pace with those in the upper and lower ends, you can’t claim that the wealthy had more of an increase than the poor when looking at this Brick and Block Mason data.
That got me to wondering about other professions so here is the data from others that I chose at random. I’ll just report the findings graphically to save space on here but you can look at the detailed tables as well as the BLS job code listed in this spreadsheet so you can verify my findings on the BLS website.
Let’s first look at a profession that is near and dear to my heart – Electrical Engineering.
Sure enough, this data show that there was an income inequality between the higher paid EE’s and lower paid EE’s during this 10 year period. See the black line that shows the percent change in wages for each of the percentile groups and the slope upwards indicates that those at the upper wage range saw bigger increases than those in the lower ranges during the time period 2002 to 2012.
There were other professions that followed this same pattern:
Then there were others that showed equal wage growth between all percentile groups or at least between the bottom 10%tile and the top 90%tile.
I found the data for Elementary and Secondary School Teachers very interesting. Their data would totally blow the income inequality meme out of the water because the lower wage earners saw larger increases than the higher paid teachers.
And this one really floored me. It appears the profession to be in during the past 10 years was HR Management. Like the teachers, lower wage HR managers saw a much bigger increase than their colleagues at the top. Also, while the other professions I spot checked saw, on average, wage increases of around 35%, HR managers experienced twice that increase over the past 10 years.
So what did I learn?
Granted this is not a comprehensive look at all professions in the massive BLS data but I’ve seen enough to 1) discredit the NPR story and 2) cast serious doubt that we truly have a comprehensive income inequality problem in the US.
Posted in economics, Income Inequality, politics
5 Comments
AGW Lies On Antarctic Ice
The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) radical Bill McKibben recently tweeted out to his followers that the Antarctic sea ice is melting at a surprising pace!
The link he tweeted was from a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor which seems to support his claim:
But wait, I thought Global Warming expanded Antarctic sea ice extent:
That article in Nature was published in March 2013 but in just 3 months the story has changed!
Actually the real data show a very different story.
The penguins are very safe and we should continue our standard procedure of ignoring the Chicken Little tweets from the AGW cult. They are getting very desperate as global temperatures continue to ignore the apocalyptic rise in CO2 in the atmosphere.
Thankfully for us, Mother Nature doesn’t alter her behavior based on political memes.
Posted in Climate Change
3 Comments
How to Treat Leftists on Twitter
Most of the time, when an obvious Leftist interacts with me on Twitter, I ignore them because they are most likely trying to entice me into a Reply Trap so they can get my account suspended via the Twitter Spam/Block algorithm. But today I was feeling lucky so I decided to have some fun.
I started out reminding the proggie hive mind in #UniteBlue that Obamacare is causing people in Ohio to pay 88% more for their health insurance.
That tweet caused a Leftist named @HankBooth1 to reply with:
So according to Hank, health insurance costs in California are going down! Well, about 10 seconds on Google proved that little theory wrong so I sent out a reply.
That brutal rebuff of a meme generally angers Leftists and sure enough Hank gave up and accused me of acting like a child.
A quick scan of Hank’s Twitter timeline showed how he acts as an adult – by equating the Tea Party with a racist hate group.
Nothing says that you are opened to an intelligent debate of the issues by claiming your opponent is equivalent to the Ku Klux Klan.
This is how you have to treat Leftists who are incapable of reasoned thought and drawing conclusions from well known facts. Use 1 or 2 tweets to show them facts and then move to mocking them in public. For me, the window has closed for being considerate to people who only want to destroy the country.
Posted in politics
5 Comments
O-Bots Practicing Their Bow
File this under – You can’t make this up.
The latest Leftist brain washing camp was held this past weekend and a whole new crop of O-bots showed up. The updates from this Obama Youth rally were categorized under the hashtag #OFAFellows and go check out some of the hilarity.
My favorite is shown below:
Yep, they are supposed to be ‘stretching’ but it sure looks like they are practicing what to do when they meet a Middle Eastern ruler.
Good little O-Bots!
cosmoscon 
