Why not?

Press Release, News Story: What’s the Difference?

On February 23, ABC TV Channel 7, WTRF News (Wheeling, West Virginia/ Steubenville, Ohio), posted on its website what was originally credited as a story “written by” reporter Bob Westfall. Unfortunately, though, this posting was nothing but a word-for-word re-posting of Democrat Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown’s latest press release. There was little to no difference between Brown’s press release and the “story” as posted on the ABC 7 news site.

I can't get much exercised about this. The major media work hand-in-glove with the Democrats, and everybody with a functioning brain cell knows it.

So why bother to re-word a press release and put some reporter's name on it? Just publish the damned thing, and be done with it. What's left of your dwindling audience will never notice the difference, because there isn't any difference.

Anyway, it's not as if these outfits any longer have some reputation for unbiased journalism to protect. They forfeited whatever remained of that during the last presidential election, and it ain't coming back.

Byron

Paradise Lost

CALIFORNIA UPDATE:

“Amid a crippling fiscal crisis, managers throughout California’s government have routinely allowed their employees to amass unused vacation time, enabling hundreds of workers to end their public service careers with payouts topping $100,000, a California Watch investigation has found. One worker combined vacation and compensatory time to walk away with more than $800,000, records show.”

Yes, let's bail out union-bankrupted California with Federal dollars collected from taxpayers in, for example, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. The gray days of a long Winter make the perfect time to talk about taking money from people living in places like Akron and Flint and Peoria, and sending it to Santa Barbara, Palo Alto, and Santa Cruz. To a state with enormous energy consumption that won't even build power plants because they might mar somebody's gorgeous, palm-studded landscape.

The financial collapse of California is entirely of their own making. What California needs, (obviously, see below) is a long, strong dose of reality, not more doses of the hallucinogenic drug they've been on: Formally declare bankruptcy, nullify all existing contracts including and especially those with the public employee unions, and re-negotiate every single state obligation, from per diem allowances on up. People who find that too painful and unjust can be given the consolation prize of a free one-way train ticket for their choice of Akron or Flint or Peoria. And thanks for playing.

But back here in the real political world, let's see how Barack "The Mistake" Obama deals with this solidly liberal Democratic state, with its huge number of electoral votes. On second thought, I think I'd rather not look.

Byron

Nonsense vs. Common Sense

Bang! Bang! You're... Safe?

The deep thinkers at Colorado State Univ. up in Ft. Collins want to institute a gun ban that would prohibit people with concealed carry permits from bringing their guns on campus. No guns on campus! Make CSU a Gun Free Zone!

The only reason for this I can imagine is that they're out to replicate the senseless Virginia Tech tragedy at CSU. I don't know why they'd want to do that, but no other explanation makes any sense whatsoever.

OK, grasshoppers, here's your Zen koan for today:

You are dozing contentedly in your English Lit class as Prof. Lackluster drones on about yonic imagery in the works of Jane Austin. Suddenly! A Virginia Tech-style nutcase runs to the front of the room, pulls out a 9mm Glock and starts shooting people! Everybody dives under their seats. In your terror, and amidst the screams of wounded and dying classmates, you look over to see who's down there next to you. Who would you rather see:

(A) Concealed carry permit holder Joe Bob Tucker, who is racking the slide on his .45 ACP Sig Sauer loaded with 13 rounds of 230-grain jacketed hollow points;

or

(B) Sarah Brady, who is wetting her pants.


Whoa! Tough one!

Byron

Physicists drop the hammer...

...on the fraud of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) research, in a lengthy memo to Parliament.

The memo, from the highly respected Institute of Physics, reports the IoP's response to a parliamentary "call for evidence" for its inquiry into the conduct of AGW research.

"The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of over 36,000 and is a leading communicator of physics-related science to all audiences, from specialists through to government and the general public. Its publishing company, IOP Publishing, is a world leader in scientific publishing and the electronic dissemination of physics.

"The Institute is pleased to submit its views to inform the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's inquiry, 'The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia'.
"The submission details our response to the questions listed in the call for evidence, which was prepared with input from the Institute's Science Board, and its Energy Sub-group."

Ed Morrissey at Hotair.com describes the memo as

"a devastating critique from an objective scientific community. It exposes as risible the notion that, as EPA Director Lisa Jackson attempted to insist, the UEA CRU e-mails only revealed a lack of interpersonal skills among AGW advocates.

"As the IoP makes clear, the UEA CRU and its many partners in the AGW movement committed intellectual and scientific fraud — and their conclusions should be viewed as worthless."

The biggest boondoggle in the history of science.

Nothing else comes close. The Lysenko hoax in the USSR is merely the runner-up, even though it ruined Soviet biology and crippled agriculture there for a generation. But Lysenkoism (1) was forced on science by Stalin; (2) its influence and effects were restricted to the USSR; and (3) Lysenko, after the death and de-sanctification of Stalin, was disgraced and exiled to Siberia.

By contrast, AGW (1) has been generated, promulgated, and defended by corrupted science itself, not forced from outside by political authority; (2) has been a world-wide fiasco, thanks to the propagandistic efforts of the UN's lamentable IPCC; and (3) instead of leading to ignominy and exile, AGW continues to make fortunes for Nobel-Hollywood laureate Al Gore and other of its private-sector cheerleaders, to maintain a professional gravy train for its scientific enablers, and to provide psychic income and encouragement to the destructive fantasists of the anti-capitalist International Left.

We have a winner.

Byron

Killer whale

A killer whale kills its trainer. Gee, I wonder how they came to be called Killer Whales? People who romanticize powerful animals, and project a human mentality onto them, are making a fundamental mistake. What philosophers call a category error.

The worst cases have occurred with large primates, chimpanzees in particular. They resemble us in many ways (humans and chimps have about 99% of their genetic material in common), but nevertheless they are what they are. Those cute baby chimps in diapers on TV are nothing like an adult male chimpanzee, a truly formidable creature that can rip a human being to pieces. Their muscle fiber is not like ours, giving them the upper body strength four times that of a human male.

This case is horrific, and it's not the only one of its type in the past few years. By pure chance I happened to see this woman, what's left of her, on Oprah, and it's something I wish I had not seen.

Another, different attack, this one involving a chimp raised from infancy like human child.

Byron

Idiocy of Carteresque proportions

CNN: The Obama disco-jobs bill

Ready for leisure suits, gold chains, Angel’s Flight skin-tight polyester pants, and the Village People? If you liked the economic policies of the Carter presidency, you’ll love Barack Obama’s new jobs bill, CNN reported yesterday:

The ghost of Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is hovering over President Obama as the Democrats try to pass a jobs bill in time for this year’s elections. So why is the centerpiece of the measure — a tax break for companies that make new hires — a play straight from Carter’s economic policy circa 1977? …

Critics of Carter’s plan — and Congress’ now — say that the problem with any jobs credit is the potential for waste. It’s estimated that of the companies that claimed the tax credit under Carter’s plan, two-thirds would have hired those employees regardless of the tax break.

This persistent Democrat idea that you can stimulate employment by, in effect, offering businesses a bounty to take on a new employee is so brain dead it shouldn't even be up for discussion.

Why would any company add an employee if there isn't already the increased demand going forward to justify the new hire? Just what is so difficult about the concept of first stimulating consumer demand that prevents it from penetrating the thick skulls of Democrats?

Do Democrats think that a new worker somehow comes with a future revenue stream magically attached? As pointed out below, the companies that actually do claim the bounty by adding new workers will be ones that are doing well enough that they would have added those workers anyway. The Government subsidy is just more taxpayer money flushed down the toilet.

It's been demonstrated repeatedly that you increase demand by cutting taxes, leaving more money in people's pockets to spend -- and that drives job creation. For post-JFK Democrats, that is an utterly incomprehensible idea, because for them it's got to be all Government, all the time. Markets baffle them, so Democrats remain fixated on a kindergarten version of command economics, providing a paradigm example of Stuck on Stupid.

Apparently, Democrats think the private sector operates like Government, where you can add new positions willy-nilly, and then just appropriate tax money to pay for them. And their fuzzy image of "market economics" seems to be based on defense contractors competing (sic) for long-term, guaranteed, risk-free, cost-plus Government contracts. You have to be suffering from a form of mental retardation to think that private businesses in general operate on anything remotely like those degenerate models.
It is positively frightening that these fools should be holding the reins of our economy.

Byron

Game, set, match

UK Times:

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Now they're admitting that the temperature records can't be relied on to accurately represent past changes in temperature. Hockey stick, Shmockey stick. This is the killer, the nail in the AGW coffin.

It's the killer because the whole enterprise was established to explain past temperature changes, and from that to stampede governments with all those frightening predictions of imminent disaster. But since, as it turns out, there are no reliable data on past global temperature changes, then there was never anything to explain in the first place!

It's like launching a huge, expensive effort to explain why unicorns have only one horn. The difference being, of course, that nobody would stand to make billions of dollars from the Horn Question. Nor could the Horn Question energize the International Left's assault on capitalist economics. And we wouldn't have an entire generation of school kids propagandized into spending their time trying to Save the Unicorns. All things considered, a mass Unicorn delusion would have been by far preferable to this climate change fiasco.

A boondoggle for the ages, one for the textbooks. Will Al Gore show up on Oscar night to give his back? Probably a little too inconvenient. What about the Nobel Peace Prize he shared? To make the Peace Prize episode even funnier, the UN's disgraced IPCC was the joint recipient!

Can't make it up.

Byron

Tragic incompetence

Obama’s “jobs bill” has a slight defect

What was needed were tax cuts to fuel consumer demand. But Obama went on a spending spree instead, wasting vast, unprecedented sums on expanding Government and paying off the unions with a giant grab bag of pork projects. The result is a tidal wave of red ink, without making a dent in unemployment.
Obama's proposed "jobs bill" shows that he has not an inkling of a clue about what it costs a business to add employees, and how those costs have to be paid over future years. Obama thinks it's just like Government hiring, which is not at all the same. But, since he knows nothing about economics and has no experience in the private sector, how would he know?

Obysmal-Pelosi-Reid have created the perfect economic storm, one that is drowning the next two generations in debt, while squandering the accumulated savings of previous generations. The destruction wrought by these people in barely one year is almost beyond belief.

Byron

Science!

Lack of snow, heavy snow -- Everything proves global warming!
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/02/10/video-ms-nbcs-brewer-claims-heavy-snowfall-proves-global-warming/
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/02/10/breitbart-tv-looks-back-on-byrd-boxer-klobuchar-blaming-lack-of-snow-on-agw/

What an embarrassing farce. The climate models are so poorly specified, and the errors of measurement are so large, that you might as well make predictions from a Magic 8-Ball.

Actually, a Magic 8-Ball is better, because it always says something in particular, and everybody who looks at it can agree about what it says. Neither thing is true of today's climate models.

About 20 years ago, something like eight rings were discovered around Uranus. I asked a very accomplished colleague in the math department about the mathematics involved in describing the formation and behavior of those rings. He said that the math was fine for one ring, and it was OK for two rings. But once you got to three rings (maybe it was four, I don't quite remember), you could just throw up your hands and forget about it.

The point is that the ring system of Uranus is simplicity itself compared with what climate science, some of it, has claimed to have accomplished. The idea that there could now exist a Consensus about climate change based on Completed Science is laughable on its face. The only people who could possibly buy into that idea are those who are driven by some agenda of personal gain or by an ideologically-driven craving to see social-economic change of a particular kind.

Byron

Off the rails

Paul Krugman (NY Times):
Clueless

I’m with Simon Johnson here: how is it possible, at this late date, for Obama to be this clueless?

The Dow diving along with his party's election prospects, Obama panics, improvises wildly, and loses control of the message. His left base is livid.

Obysmal is a complete economic illiterate, and he's far out of his depth. (He said the other day that Government support for small business was important so they could borrow to meet payrolls. Good grief.) So he continues his obsession with the need to revive the corpse of his failed and hugely unpopular health care effort, as if that's the Grand Fix. It's bizarre to the point of being troubling. Is he up in the middle of the night, wandering around the White House talking to the portraits?

Meanwhile, the Chinese, who for some reason don't seem the least impressed by Obie's glorious speeches, are threatening to dump US bonds as a Taiwan lever.

Weak-kneed foreign policy meets economic illiteracy in the person of Barack "The Mistake" Obama.

Bette Davis: "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

Byron

Good presentation

Why this tea party business came about, what's fueling it, and why a third party is a terrible idea. Registration is free.

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=video&video-id=3076

End Game

Economist Robert Samuelson:

First, from 2011 to 2020, the administration projects total federal spending of $45.8 trillion against taxes and receipts of $37.3 trillion. The $8.5 trillion deficit is almost a fifth of spending...There is no way to close the massive deficits without big cuts in existing government programs or stupendous tax increases.

That's the guts of it...Unless you're confronting these issues -- and Obama isn't -- you're evading the central budget problems.

If investors lose confidence in Treasury bonds, they would demand much higher interest rates. The ensuing crisis would almost certainly compel abrupt spending cuts and tax increases that would make today's choices look gentle.

I really think that a bridge was crossed when we began to pretend to talk seriously in trillions of dollars. Pretend, because the numbers are so utterly beyond human comprehension that they are effectively meaningless.

Once the terms of discourse become meaningless, all arguments have about equal weight, and the entire discussion can only proceed as an absurd charade.

To make it worse, if such a thing is possible, the discussion leader in this case is a self-deluded narcissist with no insight whatever about his own limitations. Obama remains determined to pile on a massively expensive new entitlement program. What universe of the mind does he inhabit?

If anybody thinks this is going to end well, I'd very much like to see the scenario that they think will bring that about.

Byron

Beyond comprehension

House faces tough vote on $1.9 trillion more debt

The expenditure and debt numbers are now far beyond human comprehension. If my arithmetic is right, our $14.3 trillion debt would saddle every one of Earth's 6.7 billion people with a personal debt of $2,134. That'd be really bad news to the inhabitants of the world's 45 nations where income per capita is less than $500 per year.

And of course Congress's "debt limits" don't limit anything. They're not a straitjacket on the Federal Government, they're pants with an infinitely expandable waist -- so in Washington it's "All You Can Eat, All the Time."

Let's see what interest rates we have to pay to finance this catastrophic debt, because that's a budget expenditure, as well as raising costs for private sector borrowing. The only reason the inflation rate hasn't taken off, is that the economy continues to wallow in recession, with huge outlays for unemployment supplementals extending as far as the eye can see, and on over the horizon.

What, exactly, is Obama going to do, economic genius that he so obviously is? Seriously large, stimulative tax cuts? Not likely. But could there be some tiny devil perched on Obama's shoulder right this minute, whispering into his ample ear, "O powerful one, Why borrow money if you can just print it?"

If I were the Chinese, I think I'd demand repayment in gold bullion.

Byron

It just gets worse

Well, no, actually -- things are finally getting better, with even the leftist UK Guardian newspaper calling for heads to roll (Climate change email scandal shames the university and requires resignations).

I said long ago that the AGW push had red flags all over it, flapping high in the breeze for all to see: Naive, self-serving faith in laughably weak and incomplete computer models, big money at stake for economic players, big ideological leverage for anti-capitalist, redistributionist political factions, the rush to enforce a politico-scientific orthodoxy, the absurd claims of consensus, and the demands for premature closure on the central questions based on the ridiculous notion of "finished science." This thing had boondoggle written all over it from virtually the word Go.

Byron

Socialized health care failure

Canadian province premier passionately defends Canada's socialized medical care system -- then flies to US for his own heart surgery.

Canadian province premier bails on single-payer system for surgery

Says it all, doesn't it? Socialized medicine is for the little people.

Byron