Nullius in Verba

I firmly believe that both the mainstream media (MSM) especially CBC, as well as most socialists would rather see Iraq (and Afghanistan) a destroyed smoking heap than for the Americans to have any success there. That’s how selfish they are.

(The twisted irony is that Socialists more than any other group of people seem to have all the traits of the Seven Deadly Sins)

Whether the invasion was right or wrong, at this moment in life it is what it is.

The real question is now what? Leave when people are most vulnerable and your job is half done?

More news from yet another independent journalist Michael Totten, that you will never hear from the biased MSM. Ramadi in Anbar province was one of the worst places in Iraq and possibly on the planet. Literally the people of the entire city were terrorised and blown to bits by Al Quaeda simply for the benefit of the cameras of the Mainstream Media. Now that the surge is working and the city has been intelligently turned and the people are on the side of sanity things have cleaned up. No attacks in 81 days. The city is boring and the MSM is nowhere to be found.

Violence has declined so sharply in Ramadi that few journalists bother to visit these days. It’s “boring,” most say, and it’s hard to get a story out there – especially for daily news reporters who need fresh scoops every day. Unlike most journalists, I am not a slave to the daily news grind and took the time to embed with the Army and Marines in late summer.

…

“We have one Iraqi lieutenant here who speaks pretty good English,” Marine Lieutenant Jonathan Welch told me. “You should talk to him. He has a sarcastic sense of humor and a really interesting point of view.”

“That would be terrific,” I said. “Can you introduce me to him?”

He went to find the lieutenant, but came back with bad news.

“He won’t talk to you,” he said. “Apparently some reporters recently spent a few days with him and his men. They wrote an agenda-driven story with a few quotes yanked out of context. He said the story was a total lie and that he refuses to have anything to do with the media.”

I heard complaints of that sort about the media every day from American Soldiers and Marines, but this was the first time I had heard it, albeit indirectly, from an Arab Iraqi.

Totten’s report is worth reading. Unbiased reporting is hard to find and thanks to the internet, the power of blogs, and the power of individual private donation we have real reporting.

I was greeted by friendly Iraqis in the streets of Baghdad every day, but the atmosphere in Ramadi was different. I am not exaggerating in the least when I describe their attitude toward Americans as euphoric.

Grown Iraqi men hugged American Soldiers and Marines.

…

Ramadi has changed so drastically from the terrorist-infested pit that it was as recently as April 2007 that I could hardly believe what I saw was real. The sheer joy on the faces of these Iraqis was unmistakable. They weren’t sullen in the least, and it was pretty obvious that they were not just pretending to be friendly or going through the hospitality motions.

…

The Iraqis of Anbar Province turned against Al Qaeda and sided with the Americans in large part because Al Qaeda proved to be far more vicious than advertised. But it’s also because sustained contact with the American military – even in an explosively violent combat zone –convinced these Iraqis that Americans are very different people from what they had been led to believe. They finally figured out that the Americans truly want to help and are not there to oppress them or steal from them. And the Americans slowly learned how Iraqi culture works and how to blend in rather than barge in.

Finally this exerpt I found especially profound:

“We’re learning to use local conflict resolution strategies,” said Colonel John Charlton. “Living with Iraqis every day helps us understand local culture. We’ve actually become attached to these people on a personal level. We feel responsible for their safety. We’re concerned about what will happen to our Iraqi friends if we don’t succeed in this country.”

I heard quite a number of Soldiers and Marines express the same sentiment. Whether it’s true or it isn’t, and whether it’s supposed to be this way or not, sometimes I sensed they feel like they’re fighting for Iraqis more than they feel they are fighting for Americans.  

When one considers exactly how little most of the socialists on campus at either of my universities actually contributed to the lives of others, it is a tiny list indeed. In fact out of all the folks on this planet I meet, socialist are the most selfish people of all. I’ll say it out loud but many people feel the same way.

(This is how socialists truly feel. Greed Jealousy…)

Turns out more problems at the United States Historical Climate Network (USHCN) data are raising serious questions regarding the validity of climate change analysis and projections. The USHCN is the largest temperature database and collection system in the world. Much of the research involved in global climate change is based on the US data.

(Climate Stations)

These questions are being raised by a researcher called Anthony Watts who started looking at the changes in types of paint used on the stations. Watts can often be found on Stephen McIntyre’s site ClimateAudit. McIntyre is a mathematician well known for debunking the famous Hocky Stick graph published in Nature by Mann et al. and for pointing out the Y2K errors in the computer program analysis of the data consequently changing the hottest year in history from 1998 to 1934. The infamous Hockey Stick was analysed by a team of statisticians at the National Academy of Sciences (Wegman Report) and found to have serious problems yet it is often still referenced by people like Al Gore as evidence for climate change.

(False - more widespread high-resolution data are needed before more confident conclusions can be reached and that the uncertainties were the point of the article - Mann hockey stick author)

As Watts started to audit them for his research, he noticed serious problems with the stations themselves, serious problems regarding the actual quality of the stations.

He started a website and encouraged other people to go out and take pictures of the stations as well as perform a series of measurements on them based upon criteria on site quality designed by The Climate Reference Network (CRN) and used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) themselves. Some of the inappropriateness of the sites can only be described as disgusting.

(Top - a quality station vs Bottom - a poor quality station, note the difference in yearly temperature between sites)

Watts has now done some analysis on the 33% of the some thousand stations they have audited and the results are seriously alarming regarding the quality of the raw data. Based on his analysis presented at the CIRES meeting:

(Potential temperature errors based on site quality, 55% +2 degrees Celcius)

As a scientist this is the kind of thing that distresses us the most: poor primary data. If your initial data collection is poor than all the work later whether it is computer analysis or branching projects will be useless. There is nothing worse than this because it can mean years of work gone.

Another serious point is being raised here. If we are going to drastically alter the economies of the world, and cause more poverty in third world countries we’d better be correct about whether anthropogenic global warming is real. Economics is by and far the most important thing to a living human being, plain and simple. It can even affect his or her health.

Recently James Hansen released his computer code for the analysis of climate data after what I see as a serious breach of scientific ethics. For a long time he refused to release the code or answer questions regarding it. After any research is published in an academic journal it is fundamental that the data and methodology be available to other researchers for their interpretation. This is intinsic to the scientific method as all work requires the crucible of critism and is either weakened or made stronger by it. We’ll see what kind of criticism his code gets and whether it stands up to scrutiny.

(We eat from the tree of knowledge at our peril)

Ontario is about to embark upon the same referendum that BC participated in a short while ago. Bascially the referendum involves deciding on what kind of voting system we want to use. More information can be obtained here.

There are currently two options:

A) First Past the Post (FPTP)

B) Mixed Member Proportional (MMP)

In the FPTP system everyone in a riding votes for one person and the guy with the most votes wins. This can be a problem when only 30% of people actually vote for the winner, a usual occurance in Canada, as the other 70% get a guy they may or may not like.

In the MMP system everyone still votes for a guy in their riding as the FPTP system but you also have a second vote where you vote for a party. The party votes get divided up proportionally and then the party picks a bunch of people to sit in proportion to the number of votes they get.

(Laws are handed down to us from the meddlers in Toronto with the same profound righteousness as if they were from God himself) 

So why am I against this system? In my honest opinion this is the worst system we could have ever come up with second only to the parliamentary one we currently use. What we will have on the political party list is a bunch of party hacks who basically have never faced the crucible of public trial. Moreover these hacks can be from anywhere which means most of the Liberal ones will come from Toronto.

We’ll end up with a bunch of people who no-one really voted for deciding what to do across the province, people with no direct links to the general population and no direct responsibility to answer to the people. At the end of the day we’ll have a bunch of Toronto people deciding to raise the taxes of the rest of us since they think they know best. Great.

Secondly in Canada party leaders have a vice like grip around the votes of the members of the parliament already. With a bunch of party hacks being elected what’s the point of having members? Last thing we need is more corruption like I described in my previous post.

I propose we change to a republic system with the executive and legislative branches separated. Secondly at the ballot box voters should be able to rank the candidates from 1 to last. The top candidate will be chosen based upon the ranked choices of the voters. For example Fred, Tom and Belinda are candidates. 40 people choose Fred as their number 1 choice, 20 choose Tom and 42 choose Belinda. No candidate has the majority of the votes. The bottom candidate is excluded (Tom) and the voters for Tom give his votes to their second choice. In this case 15 for second rank votes for Fred and 5 for Belinda. Fred wins with 55 votes to Belinda’s 47. This is known as the Instant-runoff voting system.

Can anyone change my mind?

(As Promised, Monthly Blog Update) 

When it comes to the market place the Government is like a fat kid on a teeter-totter. One knows which end is coming down, and its sure to be as balanced as an elephant on ice. But how do governments in a democracy become corrupted? Surely with the voting public and the vociferous media hounding them there is no way for the fat evil merchants of capitalism to stroll in and take things from the collective?

If you have a moment, I’ll tell you how it happens.

It comes from our own best intentions gone wrong.

The latest squawking to come from the Liberals is the revival of the Income Trusts issue. For those of you unaware of what the big deal about income trusts is, I’ll explain briefly. Income trusts are a method corporations use to avoid income taxes. Plain and simple, and while some people will deny this, mature corporations wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t advantageous to them. As any accountant knows deep down inside, the more convoluted a tax system is, the more loopholes there are. It’s called Langmann’s Law which states: l=n/5, where l is number of loopholes, and n is the number of tax legislative sections or something.

And seriously though, as economist James R. Hines points out, the more government attempts to fix tax loopholes, the more they actually encourage the implementation of new loopholes. This is one of the main reasons the old Reform Party of Canada proposed a flat personal and corporate income tax with your only deduction being your children and the basic personal exemption.

Anyhow, in case anyone didn’t notice, the Conservative government did the unthinkable late last year by taxing Income Trusts and thus slamming the lid down on this particular avoidance strategy. They did this against the promise of not doing this, which is a clear violation and a shameful act. I personally am not completely against governments changing their promises based upon new evidence as long as they were sincere in their previous promise, that the new evidence is decisive,  that keeping a promise will result in a catastrophe, and that their decision isn’t for simple political gain. We must also bear in mind that a government which makes mistaken promises should be taken to the crucible for ineffectively analysing the data. This all being said there is nothing worse than the old Liberal strategy of promising action, not doing anything, and still promising action, ie: Kyoto.

Angry in the Great White North writes about slim shady Garth Turner (a man I mistakenly used to believe was a straight shooter even while he was burning the Conservatives from within) and his grand Canada tour railing against the Conservative actions on income trusts and how the great Liberal party will do all in its power if it gets elected to make everything better for the holders of income trusts and the corporations who created them. Angry points out several interesting flaws in Garth’s argument that the taxing of income trusts hurt seniors and instead points out that income trusts were in some cases preying on ignorant seniors.

However lets look deeper into what is going on. Garth is a member of the Canadian Parliament and within the Liberal Party of Canada’s caucus. Garth is going on a trans-Canada tour who’s theme is how the Conservatives ripped off the poor senior citizens and that we should instead vote Liberal so they can fix this tragety. The sponsor of Garth’s little anti-government tour is an organization called CAITI which is in fact made up on a number of organizations that sell income trusts. Basically what we have here is the direct efforts of a series of corporations to have a government elected that will give them a market advantage simply by setting up legislation. Your vote cast for the Liberals because you feel bad for the poor ripped off seniors is how they get you to vote for their personal advantage.

That is, folks, how corruption happens.

(The Boston Tea Party - A government granted monopoly to the British East India Company culminated to this famous riot, provided evidence for the new liberal philosophy of the proper role of government and created the U.S.A. under a constitution which was supposed to protect people from the government itself)

Milton Friedman used to use the Interstate Commerce Commission as an example of how the government tries to act in the best interests and protect citizens by setting up regulatory bodies but those same bodies end up becoming a direct method corporations use to lobby governments into giving them specific entitlements to markets.

In economics this is known as regulatory capture. In Canada we have several such groups, the Canadian Wheat Board is one currently in the news as the Conservatives try and end that bloated travesty.

How does one prevent regulatory capture of a market? Simple. Define property rights and then stay out of a market no matter how tempting it is. In the case of taxes, a simple flat tax is the best way to prevent loopholes and provide equality.

Update:

I few times I have hinted at ways to responsibly help out other people while not relying on either government ineptitude and/or corporate foundations that steal most of your donated money to pay for employees, computers, or glossy pamphlets. I’d like to point your attention to a non-profit organization I think appears to be doing the kind of giving a libertarian can only dream of.

Kiva.org is a website at which you can set up private loans to other people in third world countries who are trying to better their lives by working and being entrepreneurs. All of your donated money goes directly to the borrower. You can also make a small donation to Kiva to keep them running but its not compulsory. The money gets transferred to a private bank in the borrower’s country. They then pay you back over a period of set time.

So far this looks to be on the up and up. Recently they have been covered by bloggers and media. I have tried it out and I’ll see how it goes. Let’s hope this works out.

Why is Kiva responsible giving? Because you are helping someone become self sufficient and they are paying you back. You’re also watching the borrower’s report to make sure that your investment is being used for what it was meant for. The worst kind of subsidy is one that never gets paid back.