Saturday, September 28, 2013
Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., Sept. 28 & 29, 2013
Let's start the weekend off with a song...
God bless you, Paul... 71 and you've still got it!
(Let's get a round of applause out of all you folks... right now...)
So... politics.
(*SIGH*)
Economics? Social Policy? Foreign Policy? Ethics... morals... values... principles...
(*NOD*)
Policies, folks. Pay attention to what they do... not just to what they say.
(That's what I try to do here at Usually Right with my newsbites...)
And speaking of newsbites... as always... you'll find 'em in the comments section!
Go to it, folks! I won't say "enjoy," but I will say "absorb."
(*THUMBS UP*)
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/28/UN-Climate-Change-Report-Ignores-15-Year-Pause-in-Warming
An exhaustive United Nations report that claimed with 95% certainty that humans are responsible for global warming left out data that found the planet has stopped warming over the last 15 years...
(*SNORT*)
The report, produced by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), could not explain "why the planet has largely stopped warming over the past 15 years." So it just ignored it.
* ONE MORE TIME...
So it just ignored it.
According to the climate data from the U.K.'s weather-watching Met Office, "global surface temperatures rose rapidly during the 70s," but they have "have been relatively flat over the past decade and a half, rising only 0.05 degrees Celsius (0.09 degrees Fahrenheit)."
* WHICH JUST "CAN'T BE" ACCORDING TO "THE ACCEPTED SCIENCE."
(*SNORT*) (*GUFFAW*)
In September, a draft of the U.N. report simply could not explain why the surface temperatures have not warmed.
“Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends,” the report now reads. "There may also be ... an overestimate of the response to increasing greenhouse gas and other anthropogenic forcing."
* NICE TRY! BUT THE BOTTOM LINE IS... TO REITERATE...
According to the climate data from the U.K.'s weather-watching Met Office, "global surface temperatures rose rapidly during the 70s," but they have "have been relatively flat over the past decade and a half, rising only 0.05 degrees Celsius (0.09 degrees Fahrenheit)."
* AGAIN... WHICH JUST "CAN'T BE" ACCORDING TO "THE ACCEPTED SCIENCE."
There have been many reports that have shown how climate models have vastly overestimated "warming." For instance, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change "compared 117 climate predictions made in the 1990's to the actual amount of warming" and 114 of those predictions overestimated the amount of warming.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Other studies have found that various climate models used by the United Nations have "forecasted two times more global warming than actually occurred."
* GEEZUS...
As Breitbart News reported, a group of 50 international scientists released a comprehensive new report, which cited thousands of peer-reviewed articles the United Nations-sponsored panel on climate change ignored, "concluded that evidence now leans against global warming resulting from human-related greenhouse gas emissions."
* MY GUESS? MOSTLY SOLAR RELATED. IN ANY CASE... WARMING... COOLING... MAN CAN'T DO MUCH TO PREVENT MOTHER NATURE FROM DOING WHAT SHE'S GONNA DO. MAINLY WHAT WE CAN DO IS ADAPT.
* FOUR-PARTER... (Part 1 of 4)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359778/worse-new-normal-mark-steyn
* BY MARK STEYN
A few years ago, after the publication of my book "America Alone," an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to be stupid.”
(That’s to say, Western democracies and their citizens are the wealthiest societies ever known, and no matter how much of our energies are wasted on pointless hyper-regulation for the business class and multigenerational welfare for the dependency class and Transgender and Colonialism Studies for our glittering youth, we can afford it, and the central fact of our wealth will ensure that our fortunes do not change.)
* HOW'S THAT ROMAN EMPIRE THING WORKING OUT FOR THE CAESARS...?
Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, we have been less rich, and our stupidity ought in theory to be less affordable.
Instead, it’s been super-sized.
* YEP... AS I'VE BEEN POINTING OUT AGAIN AND AGAIN OVER THE PAST NEAR FIVE YEARS OBAMA TENDS TO DOUBLE-DOWN ON THE STUPIDEST BUSH MISTAKES...
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* FOUR-PARTER... (Part 1 of 4)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359778/worse-new-normal-mark-steyn
* BY MARK STEYN
A few years ago, after the publication of my book "America Alone," an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to be stupid.”
(That’s to say, Western democracies and their citizens are the wealthiest societies ever known, and no matter how much of our energies are wasted on pointless hyper-regulation for the business class and multigenerational welfare for the dependency class and Transgender and Colonialism Studies for our glittering youth, we can afford it, and the central fact of our wealth will ensure that our fortunes do not change.)
* HOW'S THAT ROMAN EMPIRE THING WORKING OUT FOR THE CAESARS...?
Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, we have been less rich, and our stupidity ought in theory to be less affordable.
Instead, it’s been super-sized.
* YEP... AS I'VE BEEN POINTING OUT AGAIN AND AGAIN OVER THE PAST NEAR FIVE YEARS OBAMA TENDS TO DOUBLE-DOWN ON THE STUPIDEST BUSH MISTAKES...
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 4)
To take only the most obvious example, President Obama has added six-and-a-half trillion bucks to the national debt, and has nothing to show for it.
* AND REMEMBER FOLKS... THE LAST TWO YEARS OF BUSH'S SECOND TERM THE DEMS CONTROLLED BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS AND THUS THE NATION'S PURSE STRINGS!
My colleague Michelle Malkin revealed this week that her family has now joined the massed ranks of ObamaCare victims: Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield sent her a “Dear John” letter explaining why they’d be seeing less of each other. “To meet the requirements of the new laws, your current plan can no longer be continued beyond your 2014 renewal date.”
Beyond the president’s characteristically breezy lie that “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan” is the sheer nuttiness of what’s happening. For years, Europeans and “progressive” Americans have raged at the immorality of the U.S. medical system: All those millions with no health coverage! But Michelle Malkin had coverage and suddenly, under what Obama calls “universal health care,” she doesn’t.
The CBO’s most recent calculations estimate that in 2023, a decade after the implementation of ObamaCare, there will still be over 30 million people uninsured — or about the population of Canada. That doesn’t sound terribly “universal,” and I would bet it’s something of a low-ball figure: As many employers are discovering, one of the simplest ways “to meet the requirements of the new laws” and still stay just about solvent is to shift your workers from family plans to individual plans, and tell their spouses and children to go look elsewhere. Does it achieve its other goal of “containing costs,” already higher than anywhere else? No. Avik Roy reports in Forbes that ObamaCare will increase individual-market premiums by 62% for women, 99% for men. In America, “insuring” against disaster now costs more than you’d pay in most countries for disaster.
* AGAIN... I DON'T BUY THESE "62%" "99%" FIGURES. BUT I KNOW MY INSURANCE HAS GONE UP EACH YEAR.
No one has ever before attempted to devise a uniform health system for 300 million people — for the very good reason that it probably can’t be done. Britain’s National Health Service serves a population less than a fifth the size of America’s and is the third-largest employer on the planet after the Indian National Railways and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the last of which is now largely funded by American taxpayers through interest payment on federal debt.
(*SOUR EXPRESSION*)
A single-payer U.S. system would be bigger than Britain’s NHS, India’s railways, and China’s army combined, at least in its bureaucracy. So, as in banking and housing and college tuition and so many other areas of endeavor, Washington is engaging in a kind of under-the-counter nationalization, in which the husk of a nominally private industry is conscripted to enforce government rules — and ruthlessly so, as Michelle Malkin and many others have discovered.
Obama’s pointless, traceless super-spending is now (as they used to say after 9/11) “the new normal.”
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 3 of 4)
Nancy Pelosi assured the nation last weekend that everything that can be cut has been cut and there are no more cuts to be made. And the disturbing thing is that, as a matter of practical politics, she may well be right.
* AT LEAST UNTIL THE WHOLE HOUSE OF CARDS COLLAPSES...
Many people still take my correspondent’s view: If you have old money well managed, you can afford to be stupid — or afford the government’s stupidity on your behalf. If you’re a social-activist celebrity getting $20 million per movie, you can afford the government’s stupidity. If you’re a tenured professor or a unionized bureaucrat whose benefits were chiseled in stone two generations ago, you can afford it. If you’ve got a wind farm and you’re living large on government “green energy” investments, you can afford it. If you’ve got the contract for signing up Obamaphone recipients... you can afford it.
But out there beyond the islands of privilege most Americans don’t have the same comfortably padded margin for error, and they’re hunkering down.
ObamaCare is something new in American life: the creation of a massive bureaucracy charged with downsizing you to a world of fewer doctors, higher premiums, lousier care, more debt, fewer jobs, smaller houses, smaller cars, smaller, fewer, less; a world where worse is the new normal.
* I ABSOLUTELY BELIEVE THIS. I SEE IT!
Would Americans, hitherto the most buoyant and expansive of people, really consent to live such shrunken lives? If so, mid-20th-century America and its assumptions of generational progress will be as lost to us as the Great Ziggurat of Ur was to 19th-century Mesopotamian date farmers.
* BUT 2013 AMERIKA ISN'T AMERICA. JUST COMPARE 2013 AMERIKA TO 1962 AMERICA... OR EVEN 1982 AMERICA. WE'RE SIMPLY NOT THE SAME PEOPLE. OUR VALUES ARE DIFFERENT. OUR MORALS ARE DIFFERENT. AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM HAS GIVEN WAY TO DISASTEROUS DEMOGRAPHIC AND CULTURAL CHANGES. IT'S THAT SIMPLE.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 4 of 4)
George Orwell, after attending a meeting of impoverished but passive miners, remarked sadly that “there is no turbulence left in England.”
The Democrats, and much of the Republican establishment, have made a bet that there is no turbulence left in America, and the citizenry will stand mute before ObamaCare's wrecking ball.
* IT NOW COSTS $13 CASH TO CROSS THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE BY CAR INTO MANHATTAN. AND NO REVOLUTION...
(*SHRUG*)
Unless they’re willing to accept a worse life for their children and grandchildren, middle-class Americans need to prove them wrong.
* MIDDLE CLASS AMERICANS HAVE GIVEN WAY TO LOWER AND HIGHER CLASS AMERIKANS.
Despite being extremely large, China is resource-poor. But you can’t say it’s not thinking outside the box. The Daily Telegraph in London reported this week that the Chinese have just signed a deal to lease five percent of Ukraine (or an area about the size of Belgium) to grow crops and raise pigs on. And I’d doubt it will stop with post-Soviet republics on the Euro-fringe: It’s not impossible to imagine China buying, say, the Greek islands. Beijing thinks the half-millennium blip of Euro-American dominance is coming to an end and the world is returning to its natural state of Chinese preeminence. The West assumes it can endure as a kind of upscale boutique unaffected by the changes beyond.
China’s Ukraine deal may sound kinda wacky, but the People’s Republic consumes about 20% of the world’s food yet has (thanks to rapid industrialization) only 9% of its farmland. As Big Government solutions go, renting 5% of a sovereign nation to use as your vegetable garden and pig farm is a comparatively straightforward answer to the problem at hand. By contrast, try explaining American “health” “care” “reform” to the Chinese: You could rent the entire Ukraine for about 3% of the cost of ObamaCare, and what does it solve?
* I KNOW... A BIT RAMBLING... BUT YOU GET THE IDEA. WE'RE SINKING. CHINA...? THEY'VE GOT THEIR PROBLEMS... AS DOES EVERY NATION... BUT YEAR BY YEAR THEY SEEM TO BE OVERCOMING US.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359697/educations-gadget-syndrome-michelle-malkin
It’s elementary... public-education bureaucrats do the darnedest, stupidest things.
Clever kids are ready, willing, and able to capitalize on that costly stupidity in a heartbeat. Within days of rolling out a $30 million Common Core iPad program in Los Angeles, for example, students had already hacked the supposedly secure devices.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the disastrous initiative has been suspended after students from at least three different high schools breached the devices’ security protections. (It was a piece of "iCake." The young saboteurs gleefully advertised their method to their friends, fellow Twitter and Facebook users, and the media.)
“Roosevelt students matter-of-factly explained their ingenuity Tuesday outside school,” the L.A. Times told readers. “The trick, they said, was to delete their personal profile information. With the profile deleted, a student was free to surf. Soon they were sending tweets, socializing on Facebook and streaming music through Pandora, they said.”
In less than a week, though, teens were able to circumvent the locks for fun and playtime at home faster than you can type “LOL.”
Goodbye, Common Core apps. Hello, Minecraft!
The district spent untold millions of taxpayer dollars on iPad “training,” but many teachers still couldn’t figure out how to sync up the souped-up tablets for academic use in the classroom at the start of the school year. The Los Angeles Unified School District school board shoveled $30 million to Pearson for the leaky iPads, but nobody foresaw this glaring security weakness. Where’s the fiscal accountability? Where’s the adult responsibility?
* ONE MORE TIME...
...but nobody foresaw this glaring security weakness. Where’s the fiscal accountability? Where’s the adult responsibility?
* ONE... MORE... TIME...
Where’s the fiscal accountability? Where’s the adult responsibility?
(*PURSED LIPS*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Remember: These “reform” programs are not about stimulating brain cells. It’s all about stimulating the Benjamins. Pearson is the multibillion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate at the center of the federally driven, taxpayer-funded “standards” racket.
(*NOD*)
For Pearson, ed publishing and ed computing are a $6 billion global business.
(*RENEWED NODDING*)
For nearly a decade, the company has plotted a digital-learning takeover. According to industry estimates, Pearson’s digital-learning products are used by more than 25 million people in North America. Common Core has been a convenient new catalyst for getting the next generation of consumers hooked.
As I reported last week, Pearson sealed its whopping $30 million taxpayer-subsidized deal to supply the city’s schools with 45,000 iPads pre-loaded with Pearson Common Core curriculum apps earlier this summer. I repeat: That works out to $678 per glorified e-textbook, $200 more than the standard cost, with scant evidence that any of this software and hardware will do anything to improve the achievement bottom line.
The abysmal history of federal investments in ed technology is as crystal clear as an HD touch screen. Take President Obama’s $49 million technology initiative for the Detroit public schools, funded by federal stimulus money. The city is bankrupt. The urban school system is overrun by corruption, violence, and incompetence. The federal ed tech program showered some 40,000 new (foreign-made) ASUS netbook computers on Detroit, plus thousands of printers, scanners, and desktop computers to teachers and kids from early childhood through twelfth grade.
The district budget is $300 million in the hole. Meanwhile, the board slashed special-education buses and shut down 70 schools. Have the devices helped students “compete in a global marketplace,” as champions of the program promised?
* I'M GUESSING... NOPE...?
SAT scores in Detroit remain “stagnant.”
* SO "YES" ON THE ABOVE "NOPE."
According to the most recent data, just 3% of Detroit fourth-graders are proficient in math; 6% are proficient in reading. High-school graduation rates are rock bottom. In 2010, 11 people were charged in connection with a lucrative fencing scheme involving hundreds of DPS computers, which they stole and sold on eBay or peddled to friends and family.
Nothing has changed.
As I’ve reported previously, in both urban and rural school districts, large and small, these technology infusions have turned out to be gesture-driven boondoggles and political pay-offs that squander precious educational resources — with few, if any, measurable academic benefits. The Obama administration plans to dig even deeper into the FedEdTech hole through a furtive $5 billion “fee” on cell-phone users for “ConnectEd” — another progressive, FedEd boondoggle to subsidize high-speed Internet installation throughout the U.S.
Like districts across the country, Detroit and Los Angeles are infatuated with fancy electronic devices, glossy new textbooks and DVDs “aligned” to top-down Common Core “standards, and other whiz-bang gadgetry to stimulate “21st-century learning.”
Education’s Shiny Toy Syndrome is the result of a toxic alliance between big government and big business.
In the words of Robert Small, the Maryland dad who was arrested last week for daring to raise questions about Common Core: “Parents, you need to question these people. . . . Don’t stand for this!”
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359205/gunning-mcconnell-katrina-trinko
* THE... MADISON... PROJECT...
A group that played a crucial role in Ted Cruz’s primary win is taking on a new challenge this cycle, The Madison Project has made it a top priority to take down the current Republican leadership...
* GOD BLESS THE MADISON PROJECT...!!!
* I'M GOING TO DONATE TO THE MADISON PROJECT AND I HOPE ALL MY READERS WILL AS WELL!
...and one front in that war is Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin’s primary race against Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.
* GO BEVIN!
* GO HOME MCCONNELL!
* AT THE VERY LEAST... STEP DOWN FROM YOUR SENATE MINORITY LEADERSHIP AND SEE TO IT THAT A TRUE TEA PARTY REPUBLICAN TAKES YOUR PLACE.
“The problem in Washington, D.C., right now is the current GOP leadership and their unwillingness to fight the big-government policies that are coming down the pike,” says Drew Ryun, the group’s political director and a former deputy director at the Republican National Committee. “That is encapsulated in Mitch McConnell.”
* MCCONNELL AND BOEHNER... AND CANTOR... AND FAR TOO MANY OTHERS TO LIST HERE...
While other top conservative groups, such as the Club for Growth and FreedomWorks, have remained on the sidelines so far in the Kentucky primary...
* WHICH I FIND DISGRACEFUL. ALL THESE GROUPS SHOULD BE FIGHTING TO REMOVE RINOs FROM HOUSE AND SENATE LEADERSHIP!
...the Madison Project has enthusiastically jumped in, endorsing Bevin and making a $27,000 radio buy in August for an ad attacking McConnell.
It’s a repeat of the group’s strategy in Texas in 2012, when they were the first national conservative organization to endorse Ted Cruz. “The importance of their endorsement in the early days was significant,” says John Drogin, who served as Cruz’s campaign manager and is now the senator’s state director. “When Senator Cruz was still a long-shot, far behind in the polls, Madison Project stood with him because they knew he would stand for conservative principles.”
But while Cruz wasn’t the establishment candidate in the GOP primary, his establishment-backed rival — Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst — wasn’t an incumbent, much less the top Senate Republican.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
McConnell is known for his ruthless campaigning, and he has a long track record of victories in Kentucky. His campaign has already vehemently pushed back on attacks claiming that he’s not conservative enough by noting that he has a 100% rating from the American Conservative Union. And Rand Paul, a tea-party favorite and Kentucky’s other senator, has already endorsed McConnell.
* AND I'M VERY DISAPPOINTED IN PAUL FOR HAVING DONE SO.
For the Madison Project, Bevin’s candidacy is a perfect fit for their twofold mission of transforming Republican leadership and making sure the most conservative candidate possible represents comfortably Republican districts.
Republicans, says Daniel Horowitz, the group’s policy director, are “underutilizing” solidly red districts. “You look at the Democrat side, you won’t find any inner city where you have a blue-dog Democrat,” he comments. The group has launched the Madison Performance Index, which compares Republican House members’ voting records, as analyzed by Heritage Action and Club for Growth, with how Republican their district is.
(As a result, don’t expect to see the Madison Project playing in purple states or swing districts, although the group won’t definitively rule that out.)
* FIRST ONE LEARNS TO WALK... THEN TO RUN!
The group’s passion for defeating McConnell is grounded in a worry that even conservative stalwarts can’t flourish under the current Republican leadership.
(*NOD*)
Jim Ryun, chairman of the Madison Project and a former Kansas congressman, recalls vividly the pressure he faced when he opposed GOP House leadership. He voted against Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind, and today he remembers “some calls from the president where somehow we got disconnected when he didn’t agree with what I was going to do.”
The Madison Project isn’t as much of a fundraising powerhouse as some other conservative groups; it raised just under $2 million in the 2012 cycle. But the group is looking to expand their influence significantly in this cycle. “Will we be an 800-pound gorilla this election cycle? No,” Drew Ryun remarks. “But maybe a 400-pound gorilla.”
* LET'S HOPE SO!
* SEND THOSE CHECKS, FOLKS!
Drew Ryun is cautiously optimistic that the GOP could take back the Senate in 2014, but “a Republican majority that is led by Mitch McConnell, frankly, is not that appealing to me.”
* NOR TO ME!
Nonetheless, he thinks that 2014 could be a crucial year for conservatives. “2014 has the potential to be like 2010, except on steroids,” Ryun enthuses. And perhaps even more important, “what we do and the races that we win in 2014 will dictate how 2016 unfolds.”
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