MORE ENERGY CORNUCOPIANISM? Drilling for oil and gas in the Beaufort Sea.
Archive for 2010
December 28, 2010
SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS for nonviolent felons? The real problem, of course, is that there are too many felonies, for crimes that shouldn’t be felonies at all — or, in some cases, even crimes.
FINANCIAL TIMES: Non-US banks gain from Fed crisis fund: Half of emergency credit facility cash went to foreign institutions. Healthy ones in many cases — because the Fed didn’t want weak ones to be stigmatized.
HERITAGE: Top 10 Charts Of 2010.
JERRY POURNELLE: “The most important event of 2010 was the election, when the country, having turned the Republicans out and confirmed that in the election of Obama, turned the Democrats out as well, and sent a number of newcomers to Washington in the hopes that they would not be captured by the system. Washington meanwhile made ready for them, planning to absorb them into the Iron Law mechanisms that have always been so successful. The most important event of 2011 will be the response of the new Congress to the manipulations of the Creeps and the Nuts, who remain with considerable influence, and the argument that ‘this is the way things are done’ in Washington.
UPDATE: Reader Tim Scott emails:
I see that you have a quote from Dr. Pournelle’s CHAOS MANOR website that was posted yesterday. In my opinion you should have quoted this instead:
Whether the Republicans will stand up to this is questionable. They have the power: they only need to insert “No monies appropriated under this Act shall be applied to the enforcement, regulation, application, implementation, or in any other way of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act popularly known as Obamacare”. The Obama Patient Protection etc. act gets its own appropriation, which can be done with considerable care. This will require patience and discipline among Republicans in the face of united scorn from the establishment Country Club Republicans, the mainstream media, and all of the Creeps and the Nuts.
We’ll know soon enough how this will go.
Spread the word on THAT one and see what happens.
Okay.
JACQUES ATTALI: The West And The Tyranny Of Public Debt.
The history of public debt is the very history of national power: how it has been won and how it has been lost. Dreams and impatience have always driven men in power to draw on the resources of others—be it slaves, the inhabitants of occupied lands, or their own children yet to be born—in order to carry out their schemes, to consolidate power, to grow their own fortunes. But never, outside periods of total war, has the debt of the world’s most powerful states grown so immense. Never has it so heavily threatened their political systems and standards of living. Public debt cannot keep growing without unleashing terrible catastrophes.
Anyone saying this today is accused of pessimism. The first signs of economic recovery, harbingers of a supposedly falling debt, are held up to contradict him. Yet we wouldn’t be the first to think ourselves uniquely able to escape the fate of other states felled by their debt, such as the Republic of Venice, Renaissance Genoa, or the Empire of Spain.
Politicians will, whenever allowed, play and gamble with and just plain piss away other people’s money because . . . that’s what they do.
NEW YORKERS OUTRAGED AT BLOOMBERG’S INEPT SNOW-MANAGEMENT:
“I’m furious at Mayor Bloomberg, he’s a rich man, so he doesn’t care about the little people,” said New Enrico’s Car Service livery driver Julio Carpio, speaking in Spanish. “I have to work, why aren’t people out there plowing? Why does the mayor always go on TV the night before to say, ‘We’re all set with a fleet of salt trucks,’? and then you never see a single truck. They always abandon Queens.”
Michael Bilandic was unavailable for comment.
UPDATE: Problems for Chris Christie, too?
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Pilot Who Angered TSA With YouTube Video Now Going Public. “‘I never even thought about being an activist,’ Liu told News 10 Monday night, ‘but it’s kind of turning into that direction.'” I think he’s got a pretty good civil rights lawsuit.
GREAT MOMENTS in legal correspondence.
CAN THIS SURVEY BE RIGHT? In The Worst Economy Ever, People Are Quitting Their Jobs With Nothing Else Lined Up. “While the unemployment number is growing, there is also a growing number of people who don’t see their joblessness as a bad thing.” It’s not unemployment, it’s funemployment!
UPDATE: Reader Grace McLoughlin writes:
Of course it’s right. Anyone with management experience would have bet money on this happening. These people are demoralized. It’s what Obama gets for punishing the most productive among us and rewarding the
crooked, the greedy, the uncaring, and the lazy. The average Joe is evening-up the playing field. It’s way beyond ‘going Galt’.
Ouch.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Dave Price emails:
I think it’s not just the more productive inceasingly going Galt, it’s also the less productive going looter. Food stamps, 99-week unemployment, and other government largesse have never been more generous, and it’s known that CPI probably overstates considerably the true inflation seen by the lower income quartiles (it ignores WalMart,
etc). You can actually live fairly well without working, and work is hard.
Some of both, I suspect. You can also work in the underground economy and do pretty well.
MICKEY KAUS: Obama And Income Inequality: No New Brazils! “The question is then what makes Brazil Brazil. Is it wild riches at the top, or extreme poverty at the bottom? It seems pretty obvious. . . . The solution is tight labor markets. Get employers bidding for scarce workers and you’ll see incomes rise across the board without the need for government aid programs or tax redistribution. A major enemy of tight labor markets at the bottom is also fairly clear: unchecked immigration by undocumented low-skilled workers. It’s hard for a day laborer to command $18 an hour in the market if there are illegals hanging out on the corner willing to work for $7. Even experts who claim illlegal immigration is good for Americans overall admit that it’s not good for Americans at the bottom. In other words, it’s not good for income equality. Odd, then that Obama, in his ‘war on inequality,’ hasn’t made a big effort to prevent illegal immigration–or at least to prevent illegal immigration from returning with renewed force should the economy recover.”
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK — WELL, WHO KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING? GAO Sees Problems in Government’s Financial Management. “The U.S. Government Accountability Office said it could not render an opinion on the 2010 consolidated financial statements of the federal government, because of widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations. . . . In addition, the GAO said last week it was unable to render an opinion on the 2010 Statement of Social Insurance because of significant uncertainties, primarily related to the achievement of projected reductions in Medicare cost growth. The consolidated financial statements discuss these uncertainties, which relate to reductions in physician payment rates and to productivity improvements, and provide an illustrative alternative projection to illustrate the uncertainties.”
HOPE AND CHANGE: Out of Lehman’s Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of What It Wants. They told me if I voted for John McCain, Wall Street would be calling the shots. And they were right!
JOHN TIERNEY: Economic Optimism? Yes, I’ll Take That Bet.
I called Mr. Simmons to discuss a bet. To his credit — and unlike some other Malthusians — he was eager to back his predictions with cash. He expected the price of oil, then about $65 a barrel, to more than triple in the next five years, even after adjusting for inflation. He offered to bet $5,000 that the average price of oil over the course of 2010 would be at least $200 a barrel in 2005 dollars.
I took him up on it, not because I knew much about Saudi oil production or the other “peak oil” arguments that global production was headed downward. I was just following a rule learned from a mentor and a friend, the economist Julian L. Simon.
As the leader of the Cornucopians, the optimists who believed there would always be abundant supplies of energy and other resources, Julian figured that betting was the best way to make his argument. Optimism, he found, didn’t make for cover stories and front-page headlines.
Read the whole thing. Including this:
It’s true that the real price of oil is slightly higher now than it was in 2005, and it’s always possible that oil prices will spike again in the future. But the overall energy situation today looks a lot like a Cornucopian feast, as my colleagues Matt Wald and Cliff Krauss have recently reported. Giant new oil fields have been discovered off the coasts of Africa and Brazil. The new oil sands projects in Canada now supply more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia does. Oil production in the United States increased last year, and the Department of Energy projects further increases over the next two decades.
We’re not anywhere near “peak bullshit,” however, so expect to hear more from the usual suspects.
LAYERS OF EDITORS AND FACT-CHECKERS: New York Times gets Jules Verne wrong:
Perhaps the most famous work in the genre is Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon,” which was published in Paris in 1865, and which accurately predicted not only that people from the United States would be the first to set foot on the Moon but also, among other details, that the craft carrying them would be launched from Florida, splash down in the Pacific and be rescued by the United States Navy. NASA’s Apollo program “helped make Verne popular again,” Mr. Brunner writes.
Actually, Verne’s explorers merely flew around the moon; they didn’t land.
MOE LANE: The True John Conyers Scandal.
The true scandal is that we’re only hearing about this now. Rep. Conyers – who is, by the way, still the JUDICIARY CHAIR – has a history of abusing official resources. His wife is in jail for bribery. There is thus zero excuse for the media not to jump on this with both feet… and if the man had an R after his name, they would have. Then again, if Rep. Conyers had had an R after his name the media would have destroyed him years ago.
Well, yeah.
RADLEY BALKO: More on Chris Beam’s New York Treatise on Libertarianism. “If this had been a straight Jacob Weisberg-style trashing of libertarianism, we could evaluate it on those terms. But this is more subtle and, I think, in some ways more pernicious.”
December 27, 2010
OH, GOODY: A Ton Of Bailed-Out Banks Are On The Brink Of Collapse. “98 American banks that received $4.2 billion in bailout money are teetering on the edge of collapse, according to the Wall Street Journal. In Q2 the number of unsound banks numbered 86; the increase to almost 100 institutions – most of which are smallish banks with about $439 million in assets – comes as a result of decreasing capital and more bad loans.”
WIKILEAKS FOUNDER: “Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism. . . I fell into a hornets’ nest of revolutionary feminism.”
As a tool himself, I’m not sure why Assange is so surprised to see other tools deployed against him.
THE HILL: White House Tries To Smother New “Death Panel” Talk. Get that pillow off of my face!
ROBERT SAMUELSON COMMITS RATIONALITY IN PUBLIC: “Yes, he said it. When you have a spending problem, fix it. When the spending problem comes from entitlements, fix entitlements. When the entitlements are driven by the baby-boom generation, admit it. As a matter of mental health, it’s probably good Congress and the president were not in town for this outburst of plainspoken logic as the basic rationality is so radical that it would likely leave them dazed and confused. And when they return, don’t expect immediate embrace of the facts.”