…in one area only, defense.

Via Powerline:

Most of this sounds terrible to me, but I can see how some of it could have some political appeal.

But what about this: “I will slow our development of future combat systems.”

Huh? Who thinks that’s a good idea? And this is a prepared statement!

I think pretty much every major new combat system we have developed in the last 30 years has had three primary goals: 1) Reduce the risk to our warfighters; 2) Reduce the risk to civilians in war zones; 3) Reduce the chance we will have to fight at all by maintaining an overwhelming technical superiority.

I wonder which of our more recently developed systems Obama wishes we didn’t have. Maybe precision munitions, so we’d have to carpet bomb foreign cities to hit small urban targets? Maybe he wishes we couldn’t make bomber pilots invisible to enemy radar. Or maybe he wishes we didn’t have up-armored Humvees or MRAPs.

Slowing the development of these systems makes sense only if you want to fight more wars with more American and foreign civilian casualties.

Watching the DNC debate now. Some comments:

Obama said he will “use the hammer of a possible opt-out” to force a renegotiation of NAFTA. In other words, he will tell Canada and Mexico that we will exercise our option to leave the treaty within 6 months unless he gets what he wants, which include a restoration of tarriffs to “protect American jobs.”

US exports to Canada and Mexico have grown 2.5x since NAFTA was ratified. They are our 1st and 2nd largest trade partners, together representing almost 40% of our total exports. Threatening a sudden and unilateral withdrawal from NAFTA is equivalent to promising to risk 40% of our exports in a trade war.

Hillary gave a 2 minute little speech about how its unfair she always has to answer questions first. It really sounded like she was accusing MSNBC of some sort of conspiracy against her. Later Russert asked Hillary what she would do if we withdrew from Iraq and then “Iraq went to hell,” and resumed its role as a major net exporter of terrorism. Responded, “Tim, you ask some highly speculative questions,” and basically refused to answer.

Obama claimed he has “spent 20 years helping working families achieve the American dream.” Huh? He graduated from college in 1983, worked for a consulting company for a year, spent three years in law school, and has two 2-year gaps in his resume where he apparently did nothing.

Best quote goes to Obama: “We need a sensible energy policy. Exxon Mobile had an $11B profit last quarter. The are not going to give up that money easily.”

I’d like to hear more about why Obama thinks a “sensible energy policy” will include getting XOM to “give up” their profits. Notably, XOM paid $8B in income taxes in the same quarter. They had $41B in net income in FYE 12/07 after paying $30B in taxes.

I give up. Time to sign some treaties. And just to be safe we’d better raise taxes, too. I bet Walmart is behind it. Microsoft, obviously. Probably Israel.

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950….

Arrgggh…its all so confusing. Thankfully we won’t have to think, since our Fearless Leader Barak will know what to do.

Another good one from Professor Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:
Yesterday I sent the following missive to the New York Times:

So America’s infrastructure has suffered what you describe as “decades of underfunding and inattention” (”Before Another Bridge Falls,” 23 February 2008).  This fact should shake the foundations of your faith in big government.  Adequately supplying public goods such as roads and bridges ranks among government’s least objectionable and most widely agreed upon duties.  And yet government fails even at this core task.

Perhaps one reason for this failure is that government has loaded itself with too many other tasks that drain its attention and resources away from attending well to its chief duties.  Or perhaps government, even at its finest, is incurably clumsy and untrustworthy.  Whatever the reason for government’s failure to supply sound infrastructure, don’t you see the danger in entrusting this same agency with the power to govern our diets, to “redistribute” our incomes, to regulate our industries, and, indeed, to intervene in nearly all of the ways that you famously demand?

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

From Professor Don Boudreaux’s Cafe Hayek:

Yesterday I sent this letter to the Baltimore Sun:

In “Words still have the power to inspire” (February 24) Leonard Pitts Jr. writes approvingly that the President’s authority comes chiefly “from his ability to rally the people, to inspire them in some great challenge or crusade.”

Reading these words clarified for me an elemental reason for my scorn of conservatives and modern “liberals.” Being libertarian, I find no romance in collective action. The yearning to be part of a great collective “challenge or crusade” - be it conservative or “liberal” - reflects humans’ tribal instincts. These instincts served a sound purpose during our hunter-gatherer past, but are today at odds with the individualism that makes us free and prosperous. Even worse, these atavistic instincts are exploited by silver-tongued and arrogant office-seekers such Barack Obama to gain measures of power that no man or woman should ever be trusted with.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

Obama coming out against NAFTA? From Salon:

In the fight for Ohio’s working class, Sen. Barack Obama has striven mightily to associate Sen. Hillary Clinton with NAFTA, the trade agreement her husband worked so hard to pass during his first term in office. In the welter of NAFTA-related accusations and counter-accusations, YouTube videos and campaign mailers, misinformation abounds, but no one is disputing the political reality of Obama’s sustained effort to portray Hillary Clinton as a one-time NAFTA sympathizer, and by extension, as partially responsible for Ohio’s economic woes…

He so rarely says anything of substance - makes it hard to pin down exactly where Obama sits ideologically. There’s no question he’s a socialist, but his Mexican-proletariat-baiting probably rules out his being an International Socialist. Maybe he’s a National Socialist, or as some Europeans would say Nationalsozialistische.

“He’s such a dynamic speaker…”

From The Telegraph:

Britain is experiencing the worst “brain drain” of any country as highly qualified professionals settle abroad, an authoritative international study showed yesterday.

Record numbers of Britons are leaving - many of them doctors, teachers and engineers - in the biggest exodus for almost 50 years…

…No other nation is losing so many qualified people, it points out. Britain has now lost more than one in 10 of its most skilled citizens, while overall only Mexico has had more people emigrate…

…The most popular destinations are English-speaking countries such as Australia, America, Canada and New Zealand…

We’ve written before about mass emmigration out of the EU, mostly to the US. In June we wrote:

…A tiny number of Americans give up their citizenship every year. According to the NYT, emmigration from the US reached “a high of about 2,000 during the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.”

Today most Americans who give up their citizenship do so for tax reasons. In 2006 the IRS counted 509 (year to date through 12/18/06) including non-citizen resident aliens returning home. In 2002 it was 403 departures. That’s 2-3x the number killed by lightning strikes every year. On a per-capita basis, emmigration from Germany is about 1100x more common than immigration from the US. Its 3300x for Sweden vs the US.

We closed the post with a quote from a Washing Times article:

Americans who think that the European welfare state is the model to follow would do well to ponder the question why, if Europe is so wonderful, Europeans are fleeing from it. European welfare systems are redistribution mechanisms, taking money from skilled and educated Europeans in order to give it to nonskilled newcomers from the Third World.

Dr. Vincent Grey has been an Expert Reviewer for every IPCC report since the first in 1990. Here’s an excerpt from a letter he recently wrote to a group calling for IPCC reform.

…I have been an “Expert Reviewer” for the IPCC right from the start and I have submitted a very large number of comments on their drafts. It has recently been revealed that I submitted 1,898 comments on the Final Draft of the current Report. Over the period I have made an intensive study of the data and procedures used by IPCC contributors throughout their whole study range. I have a large library of reprints, books and comments and have published many comments of my own in published papers, a book, and in my occasional newsletter, the current number being 157.
 
I began with a belief in scientific ethics, that scientists would answer queries honestly, that scientific argument would take place purely on the basis of facts, logic and established scientific and mathematical principles.
 
Right from the beginning I have had difficulty with this procedure. Penetrating questions often ended without any answer. Comments on the IPCC drafts were rejected without explanation, and attempts to pursue the matter were frustrated indefinitely.
 
Over the years, as I have learned more about the data and procedures of the IPCC I have found increasing opposition by them to providing explanations, until I have been forced to the conclusion that for significant parts of the work of the IPCC, the data collection and scientific methods employed are unsound. Resistance to all efforts to try and discuss or rectify these problems has convinced me that normal scientific procedures are not only rejected by the IPCC, but that this practice is endemic, and was part of the organisation from the very beginning. I therefore consider that the IPCC is fundamentally corrupt. The only “reform” I could envisage, would be its abolition…

…Sooner or later all of us will come to realise that this organisation, and the thinking behind it, is phony.  Unfortunately severe economic damage is likely to be done by its influence before that happens.

On a related note, I was browsing a list of authors of the Mitigation section of the 2007 IPCC report.

The section lists 138 Lead Authors, of which 21 were Americans. That’s the most of any single nationality, but its hard to argue that the United States isn’t dramatically underrepresented by any reasonable metric.

US spending on R&D is 35-40% of the global total. American scientists author 40% of all scientific articles in academic publications. In 2006 (the date on the IPCC list) there were a total of 6 Nobel Prizes awarded in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, and Economics - all of them went to Americans.

Yet just 15% of the authors of this section were Americans.

Contrast this to Sudan. Sudan ranks 146th for literacy (they have 7% as many literate people as the US). Their GDP per capita is $1200, about 1/7 the global mean. Google “sudanese chemist” - 3 hits; “sudanese mathematician” - also 3 hits (all the same guy). In various lists of scientific spending, publications, awards, Sudan is not mentioned.

So how many authors does Sudan contribute to the IPCC? Six, almost 1/3 as many as the US. That’s just one fewer than Germany or the UK, 50% more than France, and 3x Russia. Cuba was rather well represented, too. They had just 1 fewer than France, and 50% more than Australia.

This particular evidence might be circumstantial, but it contributes to my belief the IPCC is not a serious organization. Any international panel with Sudan and Cuba (and Zimbabwe and Iran) significantly overrepresented probably isn’t doing serious science - more likely they are representing their respective governments’ expertise in using central planning and coercion to destroy peoples lives.

Update 2/20/08:

Was taking a closer look at the list of Lead Authors with “USA” for nationality. I searched around and pieced together a job title and education for each of the 21. (.txt file here)

Maybe there are really just 18 Americans - 3 of the 21 don’t live in the United States (e.g. Rick Bradley is “Head of the Energy Efficiency and Environment Division at the International Energy Agency in Paris”). Based on education and job title only 10 of the 21 could be considered natural scientists (a few sociologists, Legal scholars, economists, MPPs). Just 7 have PhDs in a natural science.

Based on the publication and spending data above, I’d expect an international body of “scientific experts” in any field to include 30-40% Americans with PhDs in a natural science. For this group of IPCC lead authors its 5%.

I won’t say that any single person’s educational or professional credentials disqualifies them from being a serious person, but as a group it looks pretty weak. Mostly people with degrees of questionable relevance (e.g. Masters of Public Policy, MA Economics) working for some random US non-profit (e.g. Resources for the Future) or international NGO (United Nations Environment Programme).

Hard to believe its people like this (plus a few Cubans and Zimbabweans) that claiming to define Scientific Consensus.

(Via CK) These guys have to be pretty smart to do such an accurate parody:

George Reisman is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Pepperdine University. His NYU economics PhD thesis advisor was Ludwig von Mises, the same economist under whom Friedrich Hayek studied under in Vienna in the 1930s.

From Reisman’s blog:

Here’s the essential common core of hatred and destruction in the doctrines of Communism, Nazism, and Environmentalism. Only the concretes differ, not the fundamental principle of hatred for human life and happiness.

Communism: The pursuit of individual self-interest causes monopolies, depressions, and exploitation of workers by capitalists. It must be replaced by self-sacrifice for the benefit of the working class and the Socialist State. Capitalists and landowners must be exterminated for the benefit of the proletariat.a

Nazism: The pursuit of individual self-interest causes racial impurity, national decline, and exploitation of German workers by Jewish capitalists. It must be replaced by self-sacrifice for the good of the Aryan master race and the National Socialist State. Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs must be exterminated for the benefit of the German Nation.

Environmentalism: The pursuit of individual self-interest causes global warming, acid rain, and ozone depletion. It must be replaced by self-sacrifice for the good of other species—our “fellow biota”—and for the good of the planet, under the auspices of international treaties and a nascent Global Socialist State: the UN. Most of the human race must be exterminated for the benefit of exploited species and the planet. (This is what the environmentalist “extremists” already openly say. The “moderates” merely want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 90 percent and thereby reduce the American standard of living to that of a third world country, with a third world country’s infant mortality and life expectancy.)

On a related note, Market Correction carried this letter to the Boston Globe last summer:

To the Editor: 

Jeff Jacoby courageously denounces the hysterical groupthink so prominent in the crusade against global warming (”Hot tempers on global warming,” August 15).

I am a global-warming skeptic - not of the science of climate change (for I have no expertise to judge it), but a skeptic of combating climate change with increased government power. Al Gore, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and too many others dismiss the downside of curtailing capitalism in order to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. They write and speak as if the material prosperity that capitalism brings is either not threatened by increased government power, or is of only small importance when compared to the threat of global warming. Truly reasonable people are, and ought to be, skeptical of each of these dogmas.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University

We’ve written on the commie-greenie convergence before: here, here, here, here.