MSL Mars Rover Curiosity Landing handling by NASA a Major Disappointment

I was one of the nerdy types that tried to stay up and watch the landing on NASA TV shortly after midnight Central time.  It started out okay with a couple of commentators explaining what was happening.  I gleened new information about the program I never knew.  That is why I tuned in.  There was also the occasional review clip that was make in recent months to explain the event.  That was an acceptable diversion too.  But then it got worse.

Through no fault of the space program, I dozed off.  When I awoke, it was 12:40, less than ten minutes after the landing.  Two images.  No dialog.  No data.  Big office party.  Who cares?  Unless you like peeking through a window at other people partying, there was nothing to see here.
What was missing you ask?  Speaking as a tekkie, how about information?  What about a recap of the landing?  Did it land near the target?  Did we gain information on the way down?  If we don't know, when will we?  When will those landing videos be available?  What else is MSL doing right now? 
After a well-orchestrated choreography of news in the weeks leading up to the landing, NASA totally blew it after the landing.  It's as if they really didn't know what to do in the unlikely event of success.
And what was with that control room anyway?  The transmitter was turned off, so there was no control taking place whatsoever.  I thought they were monitoring status, the signals coming back, but I was obviously wrong, since the party took over after the landing.  Nobody was working.  It was just a big show.
How about the eating of the peanuts?  Superstitious nonsense.  These people are showing just how easily they get dragged back to the dark ages and away from scientific enlightenment.  If billions of dollars in your own pockets doesn't stop your ancient habits, don't expect to influence the rest of society in any positive way.  The peanut tradition dates back before Apollo, when Ranger 7 became the first successful probe to take pictures of the moon on its meteoric way down to the surface.  Someone was eating peanuts that time, so it became a precaution from that day forward.  One would have expected NASA to fight such backward beliefs.  But then you have NASA's James Hansen and his questionable crusade on global warming, also known as Climategate.
The next morning, I looked for more information using multiple search engines and settings.  Nothing, except word of a press conference at 2:30 in the morning which had already passed hours ago and another at 9AM PT.  Nothing found about the 2:30 conference.  Nothing leaked before the 9AM conference.  Nothing on NASA's website. C'mon NASA, these are not legal proceedings.  After the 9AM conference, I searched again.  No transcripts. No summaries except about how big the party was, how momentous the landing was and how they ate peanuts.  I also read that the President and the space station sent congratulations.  Proclamations about history being made.  Yeah, yeah, I was wasting my time.
Space exploration costs a lot of money when other government agencies are being asked for belt-tightening.  Are we getting our money's worth?  A little more feedback to your eager audience, instead of self-absorbed partying at the peak moment of geek attention might have helped your case, at least with your most enthusiastic followers.

Wealth Tip: The Stock Market IS Manipulated to Your Disadvantage

Let's take a break from big government and talk about losing wealth in another way. Ever see a flock of birds all take flight within a split-second of one another? That's how the stock market works sometimes.

Take short selling. Without explaining it completely, this involves not buying, but borrowing shares of a stock for a short time as a kind of reverse bet: If the stock price goes down, the short seller profits. If it goes up, they see a loss.

A variation of the idea is to spread a nasty, untrue rumor about the company to help drive the short sell stock down and make a profit. That's illegal, but it happens.

Another more covert scheme could go like this: Let's say a few very, very large investors are close friends (they would be. After all, birds of a feather flock together). They observe that the market has entered a very volatile, jumpy phase. Together they agree to sell chunks of stock all at the same time. Much like a few birds on the sidewalk taking flight. Then the rest of the already nervous flock, the individual and institutional investors, would see a downward price trend and take the same action a split second later. Stocks would fall much more. At the right time, the circle of friends would then step in and buy stocks again, this time at much lower prices. The spike in buying would cause a rising price trend. Other investors would again jump in and drive prices up to about where they were in the first place. The difference is that the wealthy few made big money. On average, the little guy lost the initial spike at the beginning of the downtrend plus the spike at the beginning of the uptrend. Some lost more than others, depending on timing. There would be millions of losers. The wealthy could repeat as needed until the retail investor gives up in disgust.

I've done the same thing with my dog outdoors: Fade, lunge and chase her, getting her to act wildly. It's great for laughs and good excercise. She constantly adapts to my actions, so I have to keep adjusting my technique. The wealthy investors similarly play with the markets, laughing at the crazy ways it responds until they figure out how to make it work for them, and it wouldn't take long. They could time their moves to negative and positive investment news for greater effect. There's nothing illegal about it.

Small investors are especially susceptible to this type of manipulation, since they try to be on the leading edge of new trends. Many see the old buy and hold strategy as broken, forcing them to almost try to be day traders. They are looking for subtle signs to act upon before they become big trends. Then they bet big. Unfortunately, they are being played precisely for that reason.

Do I know this is going on? Only by logic: If some kind of manipulation can be done and is profitable, it will be done. Especially if it's legal. They say no one can time the bottom or the top of the market. Unless by such manipulation one is actually creating the peaks and valleys. And it's not just a few good ol boys making a guess, because they have teams of analysts that can measure where and when to have the greatest impact.

What does all this mean? Once the small investor knows this, they can look at events differently, with what I would call enlightenment. This would change the dynamics for the big fellas as they try to figure out a less predictable flock. Until that happens, I stand by helplessly as the little guys lose more money while I, on a wing and a prayer, am making money.

MAXTAX: How to Divide and Conquer Your Own People

Historically, why have countries conquered other countries? Often, it was to enrich themselves. What if a government was already presiding over the richest country in the world? Then the goal might be to enrich themselves off their own people. What is the world's largest source of money? The American taxpayer. The question becomes how to maximize the collection of taxes. Here's how:

Guilt Tax
Cigarettes, alcohol, gas guzzling sports cars and a variety of other sins are taxed at a high rate. After all, we feel bad about using these things and feel a heavy tax is just. But it doesn't stop there. The more things that can be tagged as "bad", the more money can be made. Climategate attempted to label all industry as bad carbon producers, thereby opening the way to far reaching taxes that would dwarf anything that came before.

Regulation tax
Many regulations seem to be beneficial, such as pollution checks on cars. But verifying their compliance incurs a cost which typically must be paid by everybody. Fines also help pay for the regulations. Just because a new regulation would be more good than bad, that doesn't mean it should be passed. The additional complexity for citizens and businesses is already overwhelming, reducing the time they can devote to keeping their head above water. The fees or taxes add another cost. These can drag an otherwise good regulation well below the good/bad dividing line, making the costs far outweigh the benefits. But it is a moneymaker for the government.

Rich tax
I love this one because rich people are certainly in the minority, so their voting power is near zero, while the majority of voters pay no federal taxes at all, they do not see that they have any skin in the game. But they do pay dearly. The rich have gotten richer through this recession, increasing the disparity between rich and poor. We really need a working class that works hard and is paid well. This is a problem that is not being addressed. Instead, legislators want to take advantage of the disparity. Imagine being able to levy heavy taxes on the nation without them having any say in the matter. All you have to do is shift the wealth to the rich and tax them. Did they do this purposely, or was it just fortunate happenstance? Either way, a tax is not the answer. A rich tax is more likely to institutionalize the disparity than break it. And it trickles up from the workers whose sacrifice is feeding it. They just don't see it on their pay stubs.

Specific Industries
Identify some reason to tax certain industries more than others and you again have an easy target with no voting power.

National Security
We seem to be fighting wars on dual fronts, offshore and here at home, where extremists try to topple our government. The solution seems to be make the size of government larger, more well defended, more unassailable. But that in itself makes it more unstable and unsustainable, as economic swings and other factors cause it to reel wildly. But who in government can resist the prospect of such growth?

Real Estate, Sales Tax
State and local taxes attack citizens from another direction, in ways that often do not overlap how the federal government taxes. We don't pay federal taxes on real estate, but taken all together, all the sources add up to quite a chunk of money. It is difficult for any individual to know how much tax they actually do pay.

And finally, Everybody Else
Once it is shown that legislators went after all the other interests and collected higher taxes, and yet they somehow still need money, it's more palatable to levy another tax across the board that affects most other people. This can be done on the basis of some costs going up, inflation, etc.

Deception About the Facts
The debt ceiling talks are a great example of public denial of the problem. The "baseline" estimate of revenues, which most reasonable people would expect to be a flat line is really defined as a climbing curve. Are they really making a sincere effort to communicate how much of our money they are taking? Of course not, which is part of the strategy.

Divide and Conquer
The tax strategy involves whittling down the opposition to a voting minority, then finding an excuse to tax them. Then move on to the next minority and the next until everybody is tapped.

Government Just Can't Manage People. Everything Else Works Great

When Illinois Governor Quinn or Chicago Mayor Emanuel try to get their workers to work more efficiently to cut costs once, which is what every private company constantly does, they meet a brick wall of resistance from unions - middlemen who resist improvements - or change of any kind. A great example is the article, how-many-city-workers-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb. The short answer is 3, which is three times as many as the private sector operating across the street from them.

It has been argued that the solution to this is to employ subcontractors from the private sectors. But here they run into problems too, pentagon-push-to-cut-contractors-takes-toll-on-businesses. They tried that and found it costs them less to do it themselves. One criticism in the article is that they even fail to properly evaluate the savings when making the switch. So it's not just poor management of workers. It's a lack of basic understanding about what they are doing, whether they are succeeding or failing.

Let's see, it costs them three times as much as private industry to do a job themselves. But it costs even more than than to hire subcontractors. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The common thread in these two cases is they are managing somebody. Maybe they are just not cut out for that. It is worrying that the even bigger job of managing the country is going to them. One does notice that myriad regulations promoted by special interests continue to find their way into the national agenda and impact every citizen, far too often in a net negative way. The Climategate scam comes to mind and one can quickly list half a dozen others, with more time, a thousand others. But let us not digress. Let's focus on the people they pay do get work done.

Whether a direct workforce or subcontractors, they do it very expensively to taxpayers. They can't eliminate waste. They can't control it much at all. It seems the only solution is to make government as small as possible so that when they do waste, that too is as small as possible.

Can we Start Drilling our own Oil?

When ultra tight U.S. environmental regulations virtually stopped oil drilling here, what was supposed to help the environment actually hurts it. That's because other countries with lax regulations drill the oil for us. They make a bigger mess than we would have. That doesn't make sense.

Then there's jobs. We import over a billion dollars of oil every day. That's a thousand millionaires created in one day -- offshore. Ouch. I want those people in my neighborhood. Or a million people that made a thousand dollars in one day... In other-other words, it's a boatload of money. Okay, three boatloads of the largest supertakers.

We have this unemployment problem. We can pay millions and millions of people's wages by drilling domestically. Every million is another 1% or so unemployment reduction. More when you consider the rippling effects of what those people spend. And we can reduce worldwide pollution.

It should make everyone happy. What's the holdup?

Democrats are the Give a Man a Fish Party; Republicans Need to be the Teach Him How to Fish Party

Last election, I thought the Democrats held the moral high ground. On the environment, for example. Then came Climategate. On taking care of the disadvantaged. That's when entitlements were shown to be growing out of control.

I don't know what Republicans are today, but if they position themselves correctly, they can get this country on track and beat the Democrats every time. They can't do it through handouts. The give a man a fish philosophy is no longer sustainable.

Why Did My Real Estate Assessed Value Go Down but My Taxes Went Up?

I visited the county records office and asked this question. They are very nice people, by the way. The person helping me said the tax rate went up for almost every program because they needed more money. The reduced assessed value was part of the reason.

So, now I get it: My taxes go up when my assessment goes up. And when my assessment goes down, my taxes go up. The nice thing is there is no vote, they have authority to raise taxes any time. Nice for them. Maybe we don't need quite as many of those very nice people.

Can anyone say taxation without representation?

How Much Spending Will Congress Really Cut? Around Zero?

The current debt ceiling debate centers on one honorable goal: For every dollar of debt ceiling raised, they must also cut one dollar of spending. The problems are three-fold:

1. The cuts are total dollars over ten years, while the spending increases are made this year. In other words, they are really cutting spending an average of 1/10 or 10 cents for every dollar spent.
2. The specific cuts aren't actually agreed to. When real programs go on the chopping block, the outcry by affected workers, unions and special interest groups will be like nothing we have seen before. It is difficult to imagine any cuts at all. Whatever does get cut is very likely to be much less than the original plan.
   
3. Much of the spending cuts are further out in time. In one plan, barely a billion dollars will be cut in the first year for 850 billion of spending increase in the same first year.

What that means is the current bitter debate is for 99.9 percent spending in the first year for every 0.1% cutting. In subsequent years, the deeper cuts that should take place could easily go the other way with no cuts or pushed out cuts, as rancor rules the day.

Congress is certainly acting seriously, as if government programs really are at stake, that cuts could actually happen. But this is a years long, unpopular process. Congressmen are much comfortable bringing more money to their constituents. The cuts could get derailed every step of the way. One does not get the feeling this is going to work. Congressmen, keep at it with every year another pitched battle, until it starts to happen.

Default Merely Faces the Inevitable Sooner Rather Than Later

If the nation defaults on its debt, interest rates go up and there will not be enough money to run the federal - and state - governments any longer. Basically, the programs that we all know will have to be cut just to break even. Or taxes have to be raised significantly.

But a tax increase does not look like it will fly in the current environment: High unemployment, rise of Tea Party conservatism plus all the other reasons people don't want to pay more taxes to get the same thing they had before. But it probably would have happened in a few years anyway: As spending increases, we get ever closer to that fine line between being just above water to being below.

If we cannot solve the problem responsibly, it is far better to see a default happen sooner rather than later when the impact will be more painful, when more government workers will be affected and more entitlement recipients will be dependent.

All of Us Do Not Want the Debt Crisis to Go Away So Quickly!

Except at the end of a war, how often do you remember government being downsized? Almost without exception, government can only grow. A democracy does not seem to know any other way to operate. As one commentator put it: In the past, Congress could always get everybody on board because there was enough money to address their local interests. It was a great "lubricant" in the negotiation process.

Two problems in today's debt ceiling debate; that lubricant doesn't exist when cutting programs and democracy doesn't know how to make painful cuts. That is why it is good to see the current debt ceiling debate be as painful and drawn out as possible. It is merely the baby step toward making real cuts on specific programs. If they can't make the baby step, they'll never get to the real cuts.

Obama's Debt Ceiling Speech Points at the Real Problem

On July 25, President Obama addressed the nation about the way he wants to raise the debt limit, which he described as a balanced approach consisting of tax increases and spending reductions. A transcript appears online, including CNN, the Washington Examiner and CBS.

In it, he said, "Understand – raising the debt ceiling does not allow Congress to spend more money. It simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress has already racked up."

This raises the most important points of the debt debate:

1. Congress has already spent the money.
2. Congress knew the money was not there to spend. Somebody would have to come up with it.
3. Congress never had to answer for overspending. This has emboldened them again and again. Obama pointed out, " In the past, raising the debt ceiling was routine."

And by extension, if we bail out congress and the government again, they will do it again.

Fewer Young Adults motivated to become educated, productive

Kids these days! The phrase was usable in any past time period to indicate that they don't think like we do. But I don't disparage them, I believe they act differently from their older counterparts for rational reasons.

Take living at home longer than their parents: The economy is unfriendly to new workers. The pay gap between the many and the few has grown. More young people cannot make a living on the pay that's out there. And what few dollars they get do not go as far for rental or purchased property. Real estate is in a severe downturn and there are some bargains now but this only turns back the clock a few years.

Take mapping out a career: When I grew up, jobs in science and engineering were encouraged. NASA was a source of pride, and excitement. Now they help the Climategate cap and trade government by supressing research that shows that the greehouse gas theory does not hold true on other planets.

Now the media, including Hollywood almost universally paints technology as evil. The same anti-technology message in Avatar was in Star Wars three decades earlier. Swear off these trappings, the message goes, and live a more pastoral life.

The dynamics of the world economy makes it harder to choose a career, but easier to choose a job. A couple of decades ago, I was hearing that the manufacturing economy was being replaced by a service economy that would pay less. I wondered, how would that look in a couple of decades? Look around. Kids don't mind working toward something but when they can't see a clear goal, they turn their attention elsewhere. Hobbies, games, loopholes in public aid. These are rational choices but they are damaging the economy.

The old guys rule the world. You work hard, you expect to build something, reap rewards. Eventually, you have it made so that all the money goes to you. It would be the job of government to maintain some balance, for example keeping wage disparities to a more manageable level, eliminating the wide chasm between low pay and high paying jobs. But government cannot keep their hands off the money. We ask them to represent the people and all they can to is split the difference: give people something and take something for themselves. Only over time, this formula has been applied again and again. The government is the big winner after all these years and the people and the economy are the big losers.

Start a Tax Revolt! Deduct more money from your 401K!

That's right, refuse to pay a larger portion of your taxes. And it's legal. With Gov Quin and the Illinois congress raising income taxes, now is a good time to say, "I'm not going to take it any more!" The same is true in other states. If the gov cannot do any belt tightening, maybe they should wear the belt a little higher: Let's choke off their air supply. By increasing your 401K deduction by several percentage points, you reduce your tax deduction to both state and federal governments, while putting away a nice bit of collateral all for you. It's now a larger nest egg, compared to income after taxes and it grows. Not a bad tradeoff. Keep more of your hard-earned wealth while increasing the pressure to make spending reforms.

Whether you're a democrat or republican, there are two realities: High unemployment is undesireable and negative cash flow in the government is unsustainable. Depending on who you ask, we are past, at or very, very near the limit of how much more can be spent on public projects, so it no longer makes a lot of sense to be either democratic or republican.

The government doesn't produce any products, so every headcount in public service has to be supported by many workers that do make and sell products in the private sector. Some retired former state employees make $100,000 per year pensions, how many productive private workers does it take to pay for each of them in the form of taxes while at the same time funding active programs? 10? 20? 50? 100 workers? It's a big burden and it's growing. We can't keep paying more and more for something we don't even need.

Can you picture the negotiations that led to this? The unions must have demanded $100K pensions. The legislators feebly protested. But it wasn't actually their money, and they didn't even have to raise taxes at that time, so they could shorten the unpleasant confrontation. And they get many guaranteed votes. Quite a pyramid scheme. They caved in no time. Stuck it to the taxpayers because that was easier than standing up for reasonableness.

Increase your 401K. It's good for everybody.

There you go again Governor Quinn. Went ahead and raised taxes instead of looking for cuts like the private sector

Illinois state income taxes just rose 40%. Quin raises my ire. He puts off the inevitable: Cutting the size of government. And he does this on the heels of a federal tax reduction on paychecks, as if to steal whatever stimulus was supposed to take place.

Take the money out of consumers and put it in the hands of big government to pay outrageous pensions that people like him approved in the first place. These pension plans are so far ahead of what people in the private sector get, it shows what amazing things you can do when you can tap into other people's money. On the Kudlow Report, Larry Kudlow proposed letting the states go bankrupt, then using this protection to renegotiate pension and other contracts. He says its going to happen anyway, why pour good money after bad while postponing it?

This is the 21st Century. Do we need Congress?

It is the holiday season of 2010 and the best-selling gifts are those that are "connected." The Internet has become woven into our personal fabric to a greater extent. We are able to communicate our preferences in more ways than before.

Meanwhile, elected officials are busy implementing our preferences in new legislation on a daily basis. The way they receive information about our preferences is like this: They tell us their preferences and we elect them or we elect somebody else. Handshaking and baby-kissing are not the main tools, but what we have is no less antiquated. Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate what we really have on our hands.

Anybody Remember Ronald Reagan?

Reagan took the voters aside on TV and explained things. Like the progressive tax. This is the idea where taxes are progressively higher, the more money you make. It's easy to tax the rich because it doesn't affect voters now. But add inflation and your income goes up, so does your marginal tax rate. This country is going to need runaway inflation just to break even and get the deficit under control and when that happens, a lot more people will be in the "tax the rich" tax bracket. Only they'll be in the middle class.

It's easy to vote for "tax the rich" when inflation is low. But low inflation cannot be sustained with these costs.

"Tax the rich" has three major problems:

1. One form of it is "Tax the corporations". This really taxes everybody, since in order to maintain adequate profit margins, these corporations immediately must raise prices to cover these costs. It equates to taxing everybody. By taking in more money, the rich corporations are momentarily richer (until they pay taxes) while the poor get poorer (paying more).
2. What does taxing rich individuals do? Does it kill the incentive to be industrious, encouraging more people to give up the American Dream and settle to the bottom of the food chain? Or does it encourage the wealthy to yank more wealth from the companies, taking it away from the little guy? I'd say it does both to different individuals. And thus helps create an ever growing disparity between rich and poor.
3. The long term effect is the progressive tax, where more people eventually get taxed at the higher rate.

The Tea Party Must Not Grow Too Quickly

The problem with Obama is he was untested. He had less work experience than I would hire into the company where I work. And believe me, the jobs here are not as important.

In software development, you build your project in steps. Write a small piece of code and test it. Continue adding to it. When it's small, it is easy to find bugs and alter the entire architecture, change the structure before it grows too large.

Starting a new job is much the same: You start with a filing system and how to track reminders and action items. Before long, you realize the types of problems are different than the way you organized things. For example, if you created five folders, four are nearly empty while all the work seems to end up in the fifth one. You need to restructure.

Without a track record, it was easy for Obama to chisel out the right position against lame McCain. But without a track record, we had very little idea of what he would do in office or how well he would work. One plus: He had a very effective campaign team. If this was anything like the presidental administration to follow, we could look foreward to a great Presidency. But it wasn't. We didn't elect the campaign team. The lesson is this: Look for a track record before you commit too much too an unknown candidate. The same is true of the entire Tea Party. It has to be tested in degrees, honed, improved and fine-tuned before we hand the reigns entirely over to them. But if the ideas are sound, this is a juggernaut that cannot be stopped. The current administration has no chance to do the same.

Republicans and Democrats want more Poor People

Republicans want to keep the minimum wage low. They want to court big business. What pattern is emerging? They don't seem to care about the little guy.

Democrats want to tax more and give more to poor people. They win if they can amass more voters that can receive more in terms of benefits, entitlements and other programs than they pay in taxes. These voters are poor. Geez, is it any surprise they are courting illegal immigrants? A ready flock of millions of voters with much to gain and who are very poor: These are voters they can keep.

It seems we have a fundamental problem. A sweetheart deal between both parties and against the little guy.

Congress Fighting to keep the Bush Tax Cuts. Gimme a Break!

We know what happens with tax increases: Spending increases. It pushes the spending problem down the road a bit more. Only if we stop the tax increases do we force ourselves to face the real problem of spiralling spending.

Let's say we allow more tax increases. What happens? We push the tax freeze down the road a bit. Yes, eventually, we reach the time when we can pay no more and we have to force ourselves to face the problem.

Back to the Bush tax cuts. A big show in Congress is taking place: Will we get it or won't we? Let's put it this way: This is something we already had. This is Congress at their very best. And they are working (maybe) to keep it the same. In effect, to do nothing. And they'll tout it as a big victory, a handout for the little guy. C'mon. This was ours, it's not yours, don't act like you're doing us any favors! Just do a job.

The Solution to the Nation's Growing Deficit: Destroy All Wealth

By now, everybody has seen we cannot cut government programs to cut spending. The leaders don't even give the idea lip service, perhaps because of an us and them mentality: Government workers protect their own. We can't raise taxes too much longer, we would soon reach a tipping point where it is better not to work than work. And we can't have inflation to shrink the size of these programs: The government workers get cost of living increases, so their costs rise in lockstep with inflation.

There is only one solution left. Spend more than we take in, build a huge deficit. Then introduce runaway inflation later after the income was earned and before cost of living increases kicked in. Inflation will devalue the deficit, making it be paid with cheaper dollars. Easy money. No difficult votes.

Here's an example. You have 100% inflation. Everybody's wages double but so to the prices of goods. Everybody's taxes double too (assuming a fair tax rate). This means the deficit is halved in constant dollars.

A policy of continual inflationary doublings will erase any size deficit. The problem is that it also erases personal wealth, savings and retirement plans. The idea that we can plan for our own retirement is put into question as any amount of personal wealth is eventually erased. And it again makes us dependent on government retirement support, such as social security, which has its own problems.

Higher taxes equals Destruction of the American Family

When people spend half their wages paying taxes, it takes two people to make what one person without takes would have taken home. Is it any wonder that more and more households have both parents working? How does that affect the family unit?

For one thing, it means day care and babysitting: Someone else is taking care of the kids. I guarantee no matter who they are and what morals they may have, the values these stand-ins are instilling in the children are not all what those parents would approve of if they were there. And so the kids are not being raised the way the parents would have if they were there.

Our children are curious creatures: We share values and understanding on many things. By extension, we assume that we share similar views on things not yet experienced. Such as when we send a child off to college, we think they will strike a balance between work and play while avoiding risky behavior. But many do not. At younger and younger ages, the problem is more pronouced: The chance of the child straying from parental values increases. It is now legal to leave a latchkey kid at home alone at age 8. Is this a good idea? No. Is it necessary in all too many cases? Yes, due to economic reasons.

And what happens to the tax money collected by the government? Much of it goes to welfare, with a special emphasis on single parents. It started out as a magnanimous gesture to help those in the greatest need. But it has grown and evolved to encourage mothers to stay single in order to maximize their benefits. In other words, they are paid better to have a broken family.

Just as a beaten child grows up to be a child beater, a broken family begets more broken families. All of this has a disorganizing effect: Individuals are less likely to be brought up in a nurturing environment, less likely to rise in terms of self-sufficiency and more likely to be poor, leading to even more of the same in the next generation.

The Gov spends $1.41 for every $1.00 it takes in. Do you know what that Means?

They used to say that we worked for the government every year from January 1 to the middle of May, around 135 days. During those days, every penny went to pay taxes of all kinds. The rest of the year was all ours.

Now the government spends 1.41 times more than it takes in. If we were to keep up with those expenses, we would have to work 1.41 x 135 days = 190 days, 55 more days working just to pay their growing expenses.

190 days is 6.3 months, almost the middle of July. What that means is a significant point has been crossed: We are now well past 50% point, where more than half our time is spent working for someone else, the other half working for ourselves.

Government Can't Innovate and Would You Like That Super-Sized?

Government can't innovate. There certainly must be exceptions but they don't come to mind. The US Post Office faciitated easy, cheap written communication between all Americans. Why weren't they a driver to move to the Internet? The phone company was essentially a government run institution. Where were they for the last three decades when cellular phone technology was becoming mainstream? Welfare benefits have n-tupled an unaccountable number of times since its inception in the sixties. How come we don't remember any example of them actually finding ways to reduce the welfare rolls for able-bodied individuals? With new healthcare legislation, where are the much touted economies of scale? Scale yes. Economy no.

On and on, the list grows for every branch, every corner of government. There's nothing wrong with the workers themselves, they are just as capable as those in the prive sector. Yet it seems the only thing they can do in this structured environment is grow, become less efficient, pass up opportunities to improve and just grow, and then grow more. With the exception of a few national parks and other isolated groups, government institutions can't break even. The government employees don't produce anything. They exist on tax dollars, skimming a little off the top of what you make. That is, each employee skims a little off what you make. The total is not so little.

Unemployment

There are a lot of theories about unemployment. Such as what the natural level is. Is it closer to 50 percent than 100%? And is the natural level what we really want? Most would agree we want somewhere near ninety-plus percent levels of employment and if the market won't provide it naturally (though market forces), then we want to get it through artificial means (the gov).

The trouble with innovation is, every time one hits the market, a shift in workforce takes place that causes upheval. New Jobs are created followed by old jobs becoming obsolete and lost. We're back to where we were, except now we have hovercars or an almost infinite library or something else we didn't have before. But we didn't create more jobs in the long run.

Meanwhile, the government, like some beast stuck in slow-motion time, can barely comprehend the changes going on, let alone take a leading role in determining what direction to take. So could the government raise the employment rolls? Yes, it seems they can, simply by growing. The more they do, the harder they must slave-drive those remaining in the private sector to pay for those additional workers through taxes. Notice that it doesn't particularly matter how hard the public sector employees work. The fact that they are being paid means the others have to pay them, and they can't very well stop working without disaster ensuing.

What we have here is unstable equilibrium. Everything just squeaks by, just breaks even. Everybody lives okay and then something unexpected happens. It could be a bad crop or a new disease or a natural resource becoming scarce. That carefully architected society then crumbles quickly.

And what a dull, drab world that would be. Government can't innovate, we already said that. And the private sector will find itself more and more hemmed in by higher taxes that further discourage innovation by raising the cost of risk taking and breaking even.

So if you can imagine a future with a high employment rate coupled with low innovation, you would get a stable society in which one century looks pretty much like another, only with everybody working harder than ever to keep it that way. You may have doomed the human race to a state of semi-suspended animation, punctuated once in a while by disasters, but you will have tackled the problem of 2010.

The Other Person Isn't as Smart

Sometimes you hear extreme views on the radio talk shows and ask yourself "How can they believe that?" You see when an international despot in the news seems to defy all reason. You experience it in personal life in any number of ways. The other person isn't getting it, they aren't being smart. How does this happen?

Debate club

Debate club in high school was a way to make a logical series of arguments that advocate a position. That's fine if you believe in the position you are advocating. What was new to us at that time was the idea that you can make an equally convincing case by arguing for the opposite side of what you believe simply by selecting (and omitting) the appropriate facts to tell and the conclusions we all must draw from them. And if you were very good, you might even convince people to agree with you on the resolution that even you don't believe yourself.

The modern equivalent of debate club can be seen everywhere. Every advertisement (for example, Coke saying Coke is the best tasting, has best type of bottle, etc.,, rather than presenting a balanced perspective of how well it actually compares in popularity, for example). Every political candidate (after all, who really expects a candidate to say their opponent has a better approach to some things and that the best of both should be adopted, although it must be true sometimes).

Al Gore is another example in the wake of climategate. He said he was concerned about global warming, he did not talk about regaining political power or becoming a climate billionaire. But if his stated motive was true, wouldn't the climategate scandal be at the very top of his list? One would think making sure the facts were checked, rechecked and checked again on the most important issue facing Humankind would be considerably more important than convincing the public that they are before the expert case is shown to be clean. It's even okay to take a skeptical view for a while and then conclude the theory is still good. It's not okay to sweep potential scandals under the rug.

His headstrong opinions can only be explained by other reasons than what he has stated publicly. Reasons like the self-serving ones given above. Convincing others of something you don't believe is like -- well, it's like high school debate club. Apparently, he has been very good at it because by his actions, apparently he doesn't believe it himself.

The way to win against an Al Gore is not to convince HIM he's wrong. Indications are he already knows that. The way to win is to marginalize his position. Convince the PUBLIC of the truth about it so no matter what he says, he cannot harm their lives or rob their wealth.

This is the only species on Earth that's really smart, brainy, intelligent. Head and shoulders above the rest. Although we see faint echoes of our thought processes in other species, no animal comes close to what we have. Which makes it all the more surprising that we uniquely have the capacity to believe that other people are significantly lacking in that.

Wiki entry for Government

This site talks about BIG government. Here's what we're talking about, Government, from Wikipedia, made as large as humanly possible.

-------------------------------------

{{Multiple issues
essay=February 2009
disputed=October 2009
rewrite=October 2009
POV=October 2009
original research=October 2009
citations=October 2009
citecheck=October 2009
article=September 2009
}}

A government is the organization, or agency through which a political unit exercises its authority, controls and administers public policy, and directs and controls the actions of its members or subjects.

Typically, the term "government" refers to the civil government of a sovereign state which can be either local, national, or international. However, commercial, academic, religious, or other formal organizations are also governed by internal bodies. Such bodies may be called boards of directors, managers, or governors or they may be known as the administration (as in schools) or councils of elders (as in forest). The size of governments can vary by region or purpose.

Growth of an organization advances the complexity of its government, therefore small towns or small-to-medium privately operated enterprises will have fewer officials than typically larger organizations such as multinational corporations which tend to have multiple interlocking, hierarchical layers of administration and governance. As complexity increases and the nature of governance becomes more complicated, so does the need for formal policies and procedures.

== Types of governments==

*Anarchism - a political philosophy which considers the state to be unnecessary, harmful, or otherwise undesirable, and favors instead a stateless society
*Authoritarian a�� Authoritarian governments are characterized by an emphasis on the authority of the state in a republic or union. It is a political system controlled by nonelected rulers who usually permit some degree of individual freedom.
*Communism - Communism is a sociopolitical structure that aims for a classless and stateless society with the communal ownership of property.
*Constitutional monarchy a�� A government that has a monarch, but one whose powers are limited by law or by a formal constitution. Example: United Kingdom
*Constitutional republic a�� A government whose powers are limited by law or a formal constitution, and which is chosen by a vote amongst at least some sections of the populace (Ancient Sparta was in its own terms a republic, though most inhabitants were disenfranchised; The early United States was a republic, but the large numbers of slaves did not have the vote). Republics which exclude sections of the populace from participation will typically claim to represent all citizens (by defining people without the vote as "non-citizens").
*Democracy a�� Rule by a government (usually a Constitutional Republic or Constitutional Monarchy) chosen by election where most of the populace are enfranchised. The key distinction between a democracy and other forms of constitutional government is usually taken to be that the right to vote is not limited by a person's wealth or race (the main qualification for enfranchisement is usually having reached a certain age). A Democratic government is therefore one supported (at least at the time of the election) by a majority of the populace (provided the election was held fairly). A "majority" may be defined in different ways. There are many "power-sharing" (usually in countries where people mainly identify themselves by race or religion) or "electoral-college" or "constituency" systems where the government is not chosen by a simple one-vote-per-person headcount.
*Dictatorship a�� Rule by an individual who has full power over the country. The term may refer to a system where the Dictator came to power, and holds it, purely by force - but it also includes systems where the Dictator first came to power legitimately but then was able to amend the constitution so as to, in effect, gather all power for themselves. See also Autocracy and Stratocracy.
*Monarchy a�� Rule by an individual who has inherited the role and expects to bequeath it to their heir.
*Oligarchy a�� Rule by a small group of people who share similar interests or family relations.
*Plutocracy a�� A government composed of the wealthy class. Any of the forms of government listed here can be plutocracy. For instance, if all of the voted representatives in a republic are wealthy, then it is a republic and a plutocracy.
*Theocracy a�� Rule by a religious elite.
*Totalitarian a�� Totalitarian governments regulate nearly every aspect of public and private life.
*Legalism - A legalistic government enforces the law with rewards to those who obey the laws and harsh punishments to people who go against the law.

==Origin==
For many thousands of centuries when people were hunter-gatherers and small scale farmers, humans lived in very small communities.

The development of agriculture resulted in ever increasing population densities. David Christian explains how this helped result in states with laws and governments:

The exact moment and place that the erectional phenomenon of human government developed is lost in time; however, history does record the formations of very early governments. About 5,000 years ago, the first small city-states appeared. By the third to second millenniums BC, some of these had developed into larger governed areas: Sumer, Ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilization, and the Yellow River Civilization.

States formed as the results of a positive feedback loop where population growth results in increased information exchange which results in innovation which results in increased resources which results in further population growth. The role of cities in the feedback loop is important. Cities became the primary conduits for the dramatic increases in information exchange that allowed for large and densely packed populations to form, and because cities concentrated knowledge, they also ended up concentrating power. "Increasing population density in farming regions provided the demographic and physical raw materials used to construct the first cities and states, and increasing congestion provided much of the motivation for creating states."

===Fundamental purpose===
According to supporters of government, the fundamental purpose of government is the maintenance of basic security and public order. According to Hobbes, people in a community create and submit to government for the purpose of establishing for themselves, safety and public order.

===Early examples===
These are examples of some of the earliest known states:

* Sumera��5200 BC
* Ancient Egypta��3000 BC
* Indus Valley Civilizationa��2600 BC
* Yellow River Civilization (China)a��2000 BC
* Jiroft Civilization-3rd millennium BC
* Norte Chico civilization-3000 BC

Governments are typically thought of as having a central base of power. However, during the Middle Ages in Europe, government by itineration was widespread, whereby the monarch would spend much of the year travelling around his realm in order to shore up allegiances and keep an eye on what was happening.

===Expanded roles===
====Military defense====

The fundamental purpose of government is to maintain social order and protect property. a��Security of person and property, and equal justice between individuals, are the first needs of society, and the primary ends of government: if these things can be left to any responsibility below the highest, there is nothing, except war and treaties, which requires a general government at all.a��

Military's are created to deal with the highly complex task of confronting large numbers of enemies.

Once governments came onto the scene, they began to form and use armies for conflicts with neighboring states, and for conquest of new lands. Governments seek to maintain monopolies on the use of force, and to that end, they usually suppress the development of private armies within their borders.

====Social security====

Social security is related to economic security. Throughout most of human history, parents prepared for their old age by producing enough children to ensure that some of them would survive long enough to take care of the parents in their old age.

This is not the case everywhere since there are still many countries where social security through having many children is the norm. Although social security is a relatively recent phenomenon, prevalent mostly in developed countries, it deserves mention because the existence of social security substantially changes reproductive behavior in a society, and it has an impact on reducing the cycle of poverty. By reducing the cycle of poverty, government creates a self-reinforcing cycle where people see the government as friend both because of the financial support they receive late in their lives, but also because of the overall reduction in national poverty due to the government's social security policiesa��which then adds to public support for social security.

==Aspects of government==
']]

Governments vary greatly, as do the relationships of citizens of a state to its government.

===Abuse of power===

The leaders of governments are human beings, and given human nature, what constitutes good governance has been a subject written about since the earliest known books. In the western tradition Plato wrote extensively on the question, most notably in The Republic. He (in the voice of Socrates) asked if the purpose of government was to help one's friends and hurt one's enemies, for example. Aristotle, Plato's student picked up the subject in his treatise on Politics. Many centuries later, John Locke addressed the question of abuse of power by writing on the importance of checks and balances to prevent or at least constrain abuse. It is believed that Thomas Jefferson was influenced by John Locke.

==Legitimacy==
The concept of legitimacy is central to the study of governments. Statists have attempted to formalize ways to legitimize government or state authority.

Social contract theorists, such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believe that governments reduce people's freedom/rights in exchange for protecting them, and maintaining order. Many people question, however, whether this is an actual exchange (where people voluntarily give up their freedoms), or whether they are taken by threat of force by the ruling party.

Other statist theorists, like David Hume, reject social contract theory on the grounds that, in reality, consent is not involved in state-individual relationships and instead offer different definitions of legitimacy based on practicality and usefulness.

Anarchists, on the other hand, claim that legitimacy for an authority must be consensual and reject the concept of states altogether; For them, authority must be earned, not self-legitimated. For example, a police officer does not earn his authority as a doctor does, because the authority is voluntarily transferred to the doctor while the police officer just takes it.

==Criticised aspects==
===War===
In the most basic sense, people of one nation will see the government of another nation as the enemy when the two nations are at war. For example, the people of Carthage saw the Roman government as the enemy during the Punic wars.

===Enslavement===
In early human history, the outcome of war for the defeated was often enslavement. The enslaved people would not find it easy to see the conquering government as a friend. However, this is not true in every case.

===Religious opposition===
People with religious views opposed to the official state religion will have a greater tendency to view that government as their enemy. An example would be the condition of Roman Catholicism in England before the Catholic Emancipation. Protestantsa��who were politically dominant in Englanda��used political, economic and social means to reduce the size and strength of Catholicism in England over the 16th to 18th centuries, and as a result, Catholics in England felt that their religion was being oppressed. For a contemporary example see Religion in North Korea.

===Class oppression===
Whereas capitalists in a capitalist country may tend to see that nation's government positively, a class-conscious group of industrial workers, a proletariat, may see things very differently. If the proletariat wishes to take control of the nation's productive resources, and they are blocked in their endeavors by continuing adjustments in the law made by capitalists in the government, then the proletariat will come to see the government as their enemya��especially if the conflicts become violent.

The same situation can occur among peasants. The peasants in a country, such as Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great, may revolt against their landlords, only to find that their revolution is put down by government.

==Anarchism / Libertarian socialism==

Anarchists and libertarian socialists are opposed to the state as a form of government, and to hierarchical social structures in general. Anarchists believe that explicit consent is necessary for legitimacy within a collective group or government. There are many forms of anarchist theories. Some anarchists, such as anarcho-syndicalists or anarcho-primitivists, advocate egalitarianism and non-hierarchical societies while others, such as anarcho-capitalists, advocate free markets and individual sovereignty.

==See also==
* Form of government
* Constitutional economics
* Legal reform
* Politics
* Public economics

Levels of civil government:
* World government
* Supranational union
* Sovereign state
* Province
* County
* Regional government
* Municipality
* Village or neighborhood
* School district
* Special-purpose district

==References==

* {{cite book
title=The Common Sense of Politics
last=Adler
first=Mortimer J.
year=1996
publisher=Fordham University Press, New York
isbn=0-8232-1666-7
}}
* {{cite book
title=American Heritage dictionary of the English language
edition=4th
publisher=Houghton Mifflin Company
location=222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116
isbn=0-395-82517-2
pages=572, 770
author=executive editor, Joseph P. Pickett
year=1992
id=american
}}
* {{cite book
title=Maps of Time
last=Christian
first=David
year=2004
publisher=University of California Press
isbn=0-520-24476-1
}}
* {{cite book
title=Thomas Hobbes & Political Theory
last=Dietz
first=Mary G.
year=1990
publisher=University Press of Kansas
isbn=0-7006-0420-0
}}
* {{cite web
url=http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?showtopic=565
title=Wang Mang: China History Forum
last=General Zhaoyun
publisher=China History Forum
date=2004-08-04
accessdate=2007-11-02
}}
* {{cite web
url=http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Government
title=LoveToKnow Classic Encyclopedia
publisher=LoveToKnow Corp.
accessdate=2007-12-04
year=1911
}}
* {{cite book
title=A History of World Societies
last=McKay
first=John P.
coauthors=Bennett D. Hill, John Buckler
year=1996
publisher=Houghton Mifflin Company
isbn=0-395-75379-1
}}
* {{cite web
url=http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=government
title=WordNet Search 3.0
accessdate=2007-11-10
work=WordNet a lexical database for the English language
publisher=Princeton University/Cognitive Science Laboratory /221 Nassau St./ Princeton, NJ 08542
first=George A.
last=Miller
coauthors=Christiane Fellbaum, and Randee Tengi, and Pamela Wakefield, and Rajesh Poddar, and Helen Langone, and Benjamin Haskell
year=2006
id=wordnet:earth science
}}
* {{cite book
title=Environmental Science (7th ed.)
last=Nebel
first=Bernard J.
coauthors=Richard T. Wright
publisher=Prentice Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
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isbn=0-13-083134-4
}}
* {{cite book
title=States, Nations and Nationalism
last=Schulze
first=Hagen
year=1994
publisher=Blackwell Publishers Inc, 350 Main Street, Malden, Massachusetts 02148, USA
}}
*
*Kenoyer, J. M. Ancient Cities of the Indus Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998
*Possehl, Gregory L. Harappan Civilization: A Recent Perspective. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993
*Indus Age: The Writing System. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996
*a��Revolution in the Urban Revolution: The Emergence of Indus Urbanisation,a�� Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 261a��282.
*

== External links ==

*

NASA GISS Oughta be 'shamed.

"GISS On Track For Hottest Year Yet" reported by www.icecap.us and stevengoddard.wordpress.com today.

Check out the blink comparator on the goddard site, showing two temperature sets. The icecap site's footnote to the article reminds the reader they continue to add bias to prior months (toward cooling) while recent months have more gaps (toward warming). Double shame.

--

Why this Blog Exists

Because stories like this still exist. Until government stops throwing around its weight without the scientific basis to back it up, there has to be an opposing viewpoint.

EPA denies global warming petitions
By: David SherfinskiExaminer Staff Writer

7/29/10 4:45 PM EDT

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday denied 10 petitions, one of which was filed by Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, challenging the agency’s 2009
determination that climate change is occurring due to the emission of greenhouse
gases and threatens human health.

One basis of Cuccinelli’s petition, filed
in February, was the so-called “Climategate” flap, in which internal e-mails from climatologists alleging to have manufactured data were revealed. An investigation into the matter largely cleared the scientists involved of wrongdoing.

“These petitions — based as they are on selectively edited, out-of-context data and a manufactured controversy — provide no evidence to undermine our determination,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/blogs/capital-land/epa-denies-global-warming-petitions-99575494.html#ixzz0vGbHkH1u

Why the Muir Russell Clamategate Inquiry Didn't Dig too Deeply

The Muir Russell inquiry, which Muir Russell himself kept a distance from with a clothspin on his nose, found "the rigour and honesty [of the scientists caught up in Climategate] are not in doubt." How is that possible when blogs like Watts Up With That counts up the omissions,

They decided against detailed analysis of all the emails in the public domain. They examined just three instances of possible abuse of peer review, and just two cases when CRU researchers may have abused their roles as authors of IPCC reports. There were others. They have not studied hundreds of thousands more unpublished emails from the CRU. Surely openness would require their release.

All this makes it harder to accept Russell’s conclusion that the “rigour and
honesty” of the scientists concerned “are not in doubt”.

New Scientist magazine criticizes their

“failure to investigate whether emails were deleted to prevent their release
under freedom of information laws.”

What does it all mean? When engineers write a reliability report, they'll test some number such as 500 or 1000 parts at high temperature, high humidity, high operating voltage and other accelerated factors to see how quickly they fail. But often the test ends with no failures, which looks pretty good on paper. Nonetheless, a failure rate is calculated as if a failure was just about to occur if the test had gone a little longer. Therefore a short test with no failures is not as good as a long test with no failures.

The trick of the Muir Russell report is to only go so far as to find no wrongdoing. If the scientists' behaviour had problems, you need to investigate less. If they misbehaved in many areas simultaneously, you have to prune several more areas of investigation. In that way, the investigation was severly hampered, but the end result was achieved, it looked pretty good on paper, as far as it went. The only problem is nobody's buying it. Including Muir Russell, who felt it was necessary to stay as far away as possible.

A cynic could read, "the rigour and honesty [of the scientists caught up in Climategate] are not in doubt" in a different way than intended. Whether they are guilty or innocent is not in doubt, the investigation just failed to say which it is.

If I wanted a Job as a Global Warming Skeptic, this would be the ideal Climate!

What an ideal environment for a writer! The other side never concedes a point, never gives in. You can keep reviving the same arguments in all different ways. It reminds me of high school debate club. The only end to all of this is if eventually the other side dries up and blows away to get jobs doing something else. That is if the public ceases to line up behind them, which it appears is already beginning. The only problem with this ideal job is I don't want it. I just want to button up the topic and move on to something else. But I need to keep weighing in as long as the other side is fairly strong.

To the Defense of Big Oil's BP! - Sort of

BP has recently caused a couple of stirs. 1 - They had the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and 2 - they lobbied for the release of the Lockerbie bomber to grease the way to more oil business with Libya. How should we feel about those things?

The gulf spill was a combination of government oversight, industry accepted practices, and possibly inadequate steps by BP to implement those practices. It has been widely reported that government oversight has been too cozy and lax with industry, while BP may have cut corners. If it turns out that both of these are true, then yes, government is corrupt and so is the company. In the end, the responsibility to do right was with BP and they should be held to blame.

In the case of the lockerbie bomber release, again it remains to be seen what BP's role was. If it turns out they exerted pressure on governments who in turn put pressure on doctors to find a reason to release him, and then did release him as we know they did, that would be a negative for BP. But the wrong done was not the lobbying pressure, it was the actual act of releasing him, which was done by the government.

In both cases, it looks (at first glance) like the government was inept or corrupt in their handling of the situations, but in one case they actually did something wrong, in the other case the big oil company did something wrong and must be made to answer to it (if accurate). Notice that this is an immediate moral question, not a moratorium on whether big oil should eventually be shut down because of a belief in global warming. Let's hold all to an ethical standard equally, not allowing a green agenda's end to justify the means, nor allowing corporations or governments that behave corruptly to go unanswered.

Statistics: The Achilles Heel of Climate Scientists

When it comes to scientific use of statistics, Odds Are It's Wrong. Science News wrote a great expose of the problem when statistics are used to link A with B, such as fertilizer with crop yields, dog barking with hunger and various genes with various diseases. This last one is interesting because like climate prediction, hundreds of variables could simultaneously influence the outcome (the climate of the future), so establishing a link by statistical methods must be done carefully and is very often done incorrectly.

The article gets into a bit of math, but some of the concepts offer very simple illustrations. For example, how could a drug test for baseball athletes which is correct 95% of the time catch cheaters only 50% of the time and incorrectly accuse non-cheaters the other 50%? Box 4 of the article makes it clear.

Suppose an anonymous player tests positive. What is the probability that he really is using steroids? Since the test really is accurate 95 percent of the time, the naïve answer would be that probability of guilt is 95 percent. But a Bayesian knows that such a conclusion cannot be drawn from the test alone. You would need to know some additional facts not included in this evidence. In this case, you need to know how many baseball players use steroids to begin with — that would be what a Bayesian would call the prior probability. Now suppose, based on previous testing, that experts have established that about 5 percent of professional baseball players use steroids. Now suppose you test 400 players.
How many would test positive?

• Out of the 400 players, 20 are users (5
percent) and 380 are not users.
• Of the 20 users, 19 (95 percent) would be
identified correctly as users.
• Of the 380 nonusers, 19 (5 percent) would
incorrectly be indicated as users.

Author Tom Sigfried writes,

... in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more
like a crapshoot. It’s science’s dirtiest secret.

Maybe that's why every other study of coffee drinking seems to be favorable with the others being unfavorable. It's about what you would expect from completely random results derived from poor use of statistics. The same disputes come up with every one of a hundred variables about global warming, including water currents, how land mass affects wind currents, various aerosols in the atmosphere, volcanoes and scores of others. Focusing on one, the claims vary from CO2 causes global warming, to CO2 rises as a result of global warming to the two rise and fall together but are not connected but one does not cause the other. Meanwhile, this writer notes that crystal clear nights are cooler than humid or cloudy nights. CO2 does not seem to cause as much warming as any number of other factors.

It is apt that Mark Twain quoted that going from bad to worse, you have "lies, damned lies and statistics." More than a hundred years later, we have a bigger problem, we rely on the damned statistics more than ever. Perhaps it will be another century before we really learn to use this potentially useful tool.

The Death of Science Based Policy -- Good Things Can Come of it

Climategate taught many of us that government-funded science is government funded corruption. It was true all along, check Michael Crichton's pre-climategate essay, but some of us were in blissful ignorance until now. Scientific research was once believed to be an unimpeachable source of truth. Now we know it's ripe for impeachment.

Government legislators need big leverage over the people to get their cooperation. God and Country lately doesn't have the authority over the masses it once had, science was the perfect replacement. And then it happened. By their influence over the scientists, they corrupted the science and thus showed themselves to be equally corrupt.

This looks like a bad day for science. If people no longer trust the science, what are we to base policy on, superstition and opinion? Ah, but isn't that what the corrupted science is based on already? The recognition of this is knowledge and knowledge is power. It takes the teeth out of the false-science tiger is to put it in its proper place. That's what we need to do.

I am an engineer and have worked with scientists. The relationship is this: The scientists study new technologies or natural phenomena or new components to take advantage of in future products. Think of any product, next cellphone frequency spectrum or a better paint coating on a car. It often starts with a scientist figuring out how to harness the new capability. Once they "simplify" the technology down to something manufacturable, they hand it off to engineering. That is called a reality check. What the engineers do at that handoff is combine the new technology with other parts, components to make a new working system. If the scientists got their part right, the product moves ahead smoothly. If they got it wrong, you may not have a product at all.

It isn't that way with government funded science, because there often is no practical application at the end of the process, no reality check. The longer you go without a reality check, the further from reality you eventually drift. A meteorologist forecasting hours to days ahead is constantly getting slapped by reality, every day in fact. They quickly learn how to reduce the errors and where the errors cannot easily be reduced, those are the uncertainties, the chaotic factors. By quickly, I mean several decades of daily lessons. A climatologist who forecasts decades to centuries ahead may not get slapped by reality in his lifetime. The closest thing is slapped on the errors in the work, if emails are leaked, or never, if they're not.

And everybody who has ever predicted an outcome, either by building models, or building a real world project, is slapped by the reality that things aren't just the way the calculations predicted. This is as true of building a bridge, a motor, a wind tunnel simulator, a light bulb as it is of a climate model.

The lack of verifiability through periodic reality checks in government funded science is the perfect breeding ground for both scientific and government corruption. We should not put so much faith in science based policies. Skepticism is good.

Footnote: Personal impact statement. This realization was a disappointment for me. I thought science could triumph over just about everything, objectively rising above partisan politics. I have recently learned two areas of weakness: Scientists do not make effective use of statistics and scientists do not work effectively in government funded unverifiable projects.

Two Great Essays: One on Whether Global Warming is Real, the Other on What to do About it if it is

Is global warming real? Michael Crichton of Hollywood fame (co-wrote Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Coma, Westworld, Twister, Congo, Sphere and directed some of these) wrote an illuminating essay about the scientific case for global warming, humorously entitled "Aliens Cause Global Warming".

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/09/aliens-cause-global-warming-a-caltech-lecture-by-michael-crichton/#more-21629

If Global Warming is real, what should be done about it? Atlantic writer Clive Crook looks at the history of moralizing about what's bad and what they did about it, "Climategate and the Big Green Lie".

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/07/climategate-and-the-big-green-lie/59709

Similarities and Differences between 1960's hippies and 2000's Global Warming Alarmists

Similarities: Both promote an alternate lifestyle, simplifying, shunning the trappings of modern society. Both are idealists with a vision of a better world.

Differences: Hippies changed their lifestyles, they didn't bother anyone except their parents. Alarmists didn't change themselves as much as they tried to change everybody else.

Hippies were never shown the errors of their ways, because fundamentally, their approach was sustainable (although not necessarily for everyone). Alarmists were shown the error of their ways, for many it was no fault of their own. and it remains to be seen how they respond in coming years. Ironic that their idealism was not sustainable.

The Gulf Oil Spill: Governing by emotion. Better watch your pocketbook

The danger of the gulf oil spill is not lack of supply at the local gas station. It does not appear to be an environmental disaster. What we should be most afraid of is decades of experience in energy mining being skewed by one event, taken out of perspective. If we raise the cost of getting oil dramatically while only attempting to fix one "outlier" scenario, we risk two things: Paying more AND continuing to have oil spills.

Carbon, the Ultimate Sin Tax: Where all Taxpayers are Sinners!!

A tax on immoral or unseemly purchases is a sin tax. This includes alcohol, tobacco and a few other things. The advantage of pushing through such a tax is that it is easy to pass because it does not affect the majority of taxpayers. The disadvantage from the government's point of view is the very same thing: It doesn't tax the majority of taxpayers.

If they could only find something that is very, very bad but everyone uses. At least everyone with enough income to pay more taxes. And that's when it hit them: Petroleum usage. Make it bad, very bad to use. And then tax people for using it. It's the perfect sin tax!

The Cap and Trade Tax and the many other "energy" and "jobs" disguises it comes under are proposals to do just that. The clue is that they are tearing something down more than they are building up something else. It could be the oil industry (I hate to break it to you, we still need it), your personal wealth (you could use it) or the very fabric of society (might come in handy too). Unfortunately, the climategate emails tore it wide open for many, for others it was already clear: There is no connection between energy usage and the end of the world. Except that if one ends, so does the other.

Question: Why can't we have balanced research, studying both sides of the argument on Global Warming?

Answer: Because large scale government funding only comes about if there is an urgent crisis to be dealt with. If they open the debate to skeptical climate researchers, they would quickly establish that there is no case for catastrophic global warming, they would poke holes in the works by alarmists and they would kill the movement entirely.

By the time they did that, the funding would be gone. Which means they couldn't do that. In short, the closer we get to disproving the alarmist case for global warming, the less funding there is to study either side.

Thus, we can only exist in two states, one where there is no alarm about global warming (and no funding), the other where there is alarm (and funding for alarmists). We will never see a scenario where there is no alarm about global warming but there is tons of research examining both sides of the question.

Sustainability Achieved out of the Dying Global Warming Movement!

This has got to be the slowest, most painful death possible for the Warmists. If the mainstream media had just reported on the global warming scandal Climategate and related malfeasances as they happened, it would be a knife through the heart of the movement. There would be a period of chaos among the supporters, followed by their attention moving on to something else.

Instead, the powers conspired to prevent this from happening, some with lofty hopes. Grassroot environmentalists hoped the scandal was all a big mistake and when the smoke cleared, it would all stand as solid as before, reinforcing their long-held belief of how the world really is. And others with not so lofty hopes. The green organizations worried that billions of dollars in donations would dry up if this scandal was not answered. Government leaders worried that their long held dream of energy taxes, redistribution of wealth and a much larger government that must administer these great programs would be set back by years. And the scientists worried that their climate research labs, all of which support the narrative, would lose funding and face downsizing and closure. The mainstream media worried that the large corporations that were so convenient to malign (because they cannot fight back the way individuals and government can), may not have been the bad guys after all. This shatters their very belief system, at a time when news organizations are being pummeled into dust by the Internet. MSNBC may have hoped that if they could only paper over the problem, parent company GE would still receive huge subsidies for wind generators, sweeping legislation would require green appliances in homes and many other financial benefits would be reamed, er raped, I mean reaped from the public. Literally, from an unsuspecting public until now.

Once the scandal broke, it seemed that nothing could save them. What the movement needed was time. Time to stop the lifeblood from spilling out of the environmental body. Time to figure out what would fix the problem. A virtual news blackout in the U.S. ensued. But they overlooked one thing (or hundreds of little things). By being predisposed to the global warming narrative, they were uncritical in the extreme to the strength of every piece of evidence in favor, at the same time feeling they had to come to it's defense and block any evidence against. As a natural result, the evidence for became weaker and the evidence against became stronger. It was a house of cards ready to fall.

The house of cards now falls in slow-motion. By delaying and understating the scandal in the mainstream media for as long as possible, they prolong the death throes of the movement for that much longer. In the long run, it is indefensible, it cannot stand. Today, a tiny minority in the USA is even aware of the scandal, you can see this for yourself by asking people outside of your circle of friends, especially young people. Yet we have a situation where cap and trade legislation is blocked, where support for the UN IPCC is evaporating, where states are fighting back against the EPA CO2 mandates, citizens are railing against shoddy work by government funded research such as at NASA and against perpetuating biased education in the schools. Public opinion polls about the belief in global warming show a declining trend.

All this without the true story of climate fraud reaching most of the people. When it does, slowly, and it surely will, because their supporters made sure the case for is based on only the thinnest verneer of scientific backing, and because this is arguably the greatest scandal in the history of science, the outrage will only grow and the verdict will be complete. In the meantime, the warmists are allowed to believe they still have a chance to recover something meaningful from their efforts as they continue unabated toward the precipice and oblivion and an eventual anonymous grave for the cause.

Warmists, your intentions were nothing but the best but your methods, and unknown to you, the improper methods by those you believed were supporting the narrative perverted all of that. The only outcome is the progressive demise and death of the movement as one percentage point at a time, the public excruciatingly slowly learns the truth. And that, ironically, is how the movement achieved some level of long-term sustainability.

The warmists methods did not kill the movement, it was the facts. Put another way, the movement would not have happened had the facts been given due regard. But since it did, we get some extremely valuable benefits:

1. The eventual death of the movement and the resultant correction of the errs of its ways. The environmental movement has had some important successes in the past but have defintely ventured too far into the ether (and perhaps inhaled it),
2. A deep abiding mistrust of the reliability of scientific claims that will be made in the future, ranging from health risks to asteroid impacts. While I really, really wanted to believe scientific research was objective and illuminating, it is far more valuable to believe that it sometimes will not be,
3. Fresh skepticism of our mainstream media who we thought were watching the science and now we know were - and are - actively hiding it,
4. Renewed wariness of our politicians, who, on some level exist to promote the growth of the political body, always at our expense.

And politics is where we will end. This is where the rubber meets the road, where government regulations and taxes incur real and major costs to taxpayers. Not just by soaking the energy producers, not just the rich but all of us as we pay more for everything they tax, regulate and restrict. And as the taxes, almost a living entity ever hungry for more, spread to more and more of the taxpayer's "environment", the burden on our pocketbooks only increases.

I'm a Green Guy with Solar Panels and Wind Generators

I'm kind of a green guy myself. I erected a couple of 1KW wind generators on my property with a few 50W solar panels on a rooftop. I did the major mounting and assembly myself.

What I learned was two things: In Northern Illinois, you get a very low percentage of the peak rating of either. You can go an entire week at a time with no wind whatsoever and the same week may be overcast, which greatly reduces the power to the panels. For what it does produce, you have to fight the elements the whole time, with storms that can bring down the wind towers and mold and humidity that can damage the panels. I lost all my panels but next time I would consider buying a more rugged brand.

I saved a lot of money by doing it myself but it took months of nights and weekends. For a $3,000 investment in these technologies, after a year, I have lost about a third of that to the elements. Since the power is often either being generated when you don't need it (such as high winds during a violent storm), or is not available when you do need it (about any other time!) along with downtime, I have after a year only extracted ten dollars or so of electricity from the equipment. As my wind towers are down at the moment, I am not generating power, but the generators survived along with most of the blades and they will rise again! Spring is approaching.

It would have been too expensive and unreliable to have motors point the solar panels directly at the sun, so they are mounted at fixed angles and through most of the day, they are off-angle and not collecting the optimum amount of sunlight. Furthermore, the sun's angle is lower in the winter than in the summer. Shortcomings in the simple charging circuit cannot use the power when the voltage drops too low. Then there's the dust. Factoring in many cloudy days in this region, a 50 Watt panel collects about 5 Watts average during daytime hours when the sun is not low. And then you have dusk and nighttime, bringing the average to about 2 Watts.

A 1KW wind generator generates 1KW for perhaps 1 hour per year while you worry about the whole thing tumbling down. Other times when it is turning, you get ten watts or so, if the dip in the voltage stays high enough to charge the batteries. But most of the time, the power is zero with a breeze that is more often than not too strong to fly a $25 toy radio control helicopter but too weak to reach the necessary 7 MPH speed to spin the generator.

When I write that I am skeptical about man-made global warming, that does not prevent me from dabbling in alternative technologies and making attempts at sustainability. It's an interesting and challenging area. A bit too challenging for me, I would say at this point.

And when I write that I do green things, that also does not prevent me from questioning the connection between wordwide thermometers compromised by nearby pavement, between the CO2 cycle and our own use of fuel on a planet whose capacity for absorption is still not established, between CO2 in the atmosphere which has a small warming effect on clear winter nights and water vapor which has a large effect, between climate models predictions and their vast uncertainty in that prediction. A bit too challenging for climate scientists, I would say at this point.

Climategate's Greatest Legacy may be a Healthy Skepticism of All Science-Based Policy

Scientistst should not pout that they lack the compelling charm of a television spokesperson when raising the alarm about global warming.

The climategate scandal has brought into the stark light of day the tenuous connection between global warming -- and the facts. Both the temperature record and the climate computer models are so badly damaged that the hollywood touch, complete with makeup and special effects, cannot repair their image.

This is unfamiliar territory for scientists, most of whom prefer a smidgen of notoriety with a heavy dose of privacy over the heated and politically charged debate. The sparks fly when science enters an area where the discoveries do not produce direct economic value but has heavy implications for how people behave. Global warming regulations and taxes fit that description. Another example is evolution, where many religions depend on a certain outcome of the evolution/creation question. While evolution has little economic value, the moral credibility of many religions and therefore how their members believe and live depend critically on the outcome of the debate.

When a scientific study is primarily of economic value; for example, that a new radio frequency becomes technically feasible for a next generation of cell phone, the controversy is a relatively quiet one behind corporate doors: Will the new radio work? And will the success of the new product justify the investment? If the science is wrong, it is quickly found out (the radio has limited range through walls). In this environment, the science is self-correcting (either fix the problem or move on to a different product), and it happens quickly (in a matter of months to a few years). The emotional attachment is there for a few advocates of the technology, but for the most part, the choices can be made dispassionately.

Undoubtedly, we will continue to face more emotionally charged science in politics. Next up, health care is a technological, moral and economic matter. We develop more and more exotic ways to save lives, but they are getting expensive. An MRI scan can identify tumors that might not otherwise be detected, but the cost is so high to routinely scan every American, that it is dismissed as impractical. Today, that is. But it is routinely used on the elderly in senior care, some of whom are so near the end of life, they could not undergo an operation or treatment if a problem is detected. The test is useless for such a patient. We are already spending money without thinking about how best to spend it and it can only get worse as these services default to entitlements.

It can get pretty confusing, especially when the science is faulty in the case of global warming, where huge government policy implications depend on a certain outcome. What the Climategate scandal teaches us is to be skeptical of the science and to "Follow the Money". Scrutinize who has something to gain from the policy that the science advocates. It is from this "analysis" that the most clear-headed policies can be achieved. And that healthy skepticism will help us keep vigilant in other fields. Thank you Climategate.

Has the CDC Grown Beyond Usefulness?

The Center for Disease Control was set up to understand and control the causes of sickness. One measure of whether a government agency has grown too large is if it starts acting weird, doing things that seem far outside the original charter. The EPA has gone too far with the CO2 endangerment finding the timing of which was suspiciously political. It came after Congress shot down cap and trade and the UN IPCC Climate Summit at Copenhagen was beginning. Obama needed more clout so he leaned on the EPA to produce this finding that is not only not scientifically founded (see Climategate) but is well outside the charter of the EPA. Again it happened at NASA, where the work of James Hansen, a self-avowed green activist, set out to advocate the theme (with the thinnest of shoddy data) that the globe is warming and much funding must be raised to work on the problem.

Two agencies, one theme: A far-future catastrophe awaits us in the form of global warming if we don't do something drastic (pay a lot of taxes, anyway).

Shift gears to a third government agency, the Center for Disease Control. What weird things have they done? Search global warming or climate warming on the CDC site and around 800 matches come up, speculations that are based on flawed temperature measurements located on paved parking lots and airport tarmacs. The temperatures contain major errors, so it is no doubt that the speculated rippling effects of those temperatures are even more far-flung and unreliable. How much time is wasted on these bogus scenarios at the CDC?

But I digress. It is the scare about the Swine Flu, also known as H1N1 that I want to talk about. While technically classified as a pandemic, it is no different than any other flu if not a bit milder in total impact. What the CDC is unable to do is predict the extent and severity of the pandemic. While the disease has not spread to everyone, the scare has, causing individuals and corporations to dig in, cancel travel and take other actions in the interest of safety.

It seems that the CDC has notched up their own importance by maintaining a fever pitch of excitement over the looming disaster. Looming disaster? This sounds like a page taken from the global warming playbook. And when a department has wandered so far from their original purpose to promote alarmism, it is time for a downsizing.

NASA's Alarmist James Hansen's Credibility on Global Warming is Hovering Right at Absolute Zero

I've been a big fan of NASA all my life, but I know an overblown bureaucracy when I smell one. My Taxes pay for this scientist and I don't like the job he's doing. He is on the string of Barack Obama to promote cap and trade legislation, part of Obama's unconstitutional control of government policies here. In his most recent letter here, he reinforces his claims about global warming that have increasingly been shown to be supported by weak and flimsy arguments. We still have his dismal temperature database that John Coleman and Joseph D'Aleo reported on in segment 4, and that surfacestations.org surveyed, but Hansen has not cleaned up his act. So how does he respond to such weaknesses?

"We are continually burdened by sweeping FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, which reduce our ability to do science and write it up"

In other words, the complete documentation, which he has refused to provide in the past and which offers the only way to redeem his credibility (if it did not show such shoddy work and flawed data) is the very thing that he objects to addressing most of all.

Hansen's methods are closely tied to the climategate scandal and his refusal to recognize and act on what is most important to resolving credibility has one positive benefit. It will forever hamper his ability to promote his alarmist agenda.

We should downsize NASA since it has shown itself to have grown to a size that now produces irrelevent, conflicting work and has slid from the cause of science to that of advocacy. I previously talked of downsizing the EPA for passing the point of diminishing returns, and now we have another government agency that has proven itself to have grown beyond usefulness. Second best if we cannot downsize NASA immediately, we can make sure the dysfunctional department continues with the widely discredited James Hansen as the head so that we never forget that this organization has fallen from the true faith of the pursuit of science.