Cowboy Confessional

To the victor go the spoils, until such time as spoiled children set fire to the booty.

Like dysfunction siblings, San Francisco cannot be fully understood without occasionally examining near-by Berkeley, or as we locals commonly refer to the joint, Bizerkley. A volcanic center of free speech and psychedelic dissension in the 1960s, Berkeley has never since been normal. Like San Francisco, its abnormality is part of its charm.

Berkeley is also home to a branch of the University of California. Ever left leaning (despite College Republicans being the largest campus organization aside from Fabulous Frank’s Friday Beer Bash), students there will protest everything from war to the color of split pea soup served at the cafeteria (they wanted purple). In recent years a small horde of them perched like featherless fowl in some trees which they preferred the University not topple.

Being of the socialists metal caste (or is the proper spelling in this instance cast?), when anyone dares insist that Berkeley students pay for their education, another protest is certain. This week has seen any number of 1960’s style takeovers of public property, triggered by having tuition and fees hiked. Semi-violent altercations occurred between students too busy protesting to study, and other undergrads trying to get to class. Cops handcuffed a few to end their adverse occupation of campus buildings. Health Services sophomores, too stoned from experimenting with pharmaceuticals, left on their own and haven’t been seen since.

Others firebombed the chancellor’s house.

Near midnight about 75 suspects students surrounded the chancellor’s chambers, which is quite appropriately referred to as a mansion. Recycling, being mandatory in Berkeley, caused these obstreperous offspring to regurgitate decades old slogans such as “No justice, no peace” as their broke windows, smashed planters and attempted to torch the joint. Evidentially nobody from the campus ROTC or engineering department participated, otherwise the building would have fallen. See kids, stay in class and learn the proper way to destroy structures.

Berkeley kiddies went kooky due to perceived inequities. Because California is enduring a financial meltdown (primarily from overly generous and routinely gamed public employee compensation), the University system budget was cut and the number of new enrollees was reduced. To compensate, the regents (a word whose root is the same as regency) decided not only to increase student tuition and fees, but also their salaries along with as those of upper echelon managers and faculty.

The lords grew fat and the peasants decided to eat them.

In California and Washington D.C., the same play is performed with nausea-inducing regularity and perpetually bad reviews. People in power explain-away why their salaries should inflate after bankrupting their respective governments and agencies. Doing so in times of prosperity goes largely unnoticed because voters are too busy conspicuously consuming. In tough times, when paychecks have vanished, unemployment insurance is depleted, and homes foreclose, such action incites mobs. Berkley students are a little misguided, angry at having to pay a fuller portion of the full cost of their education. But as they exit their experimental drug haze, they realize that the true problem is that the game is rigged – that those making the rules do so in their own interest. Indeed Berkeley students may be leading a trend in aggressive management of the managers of public (mis)trust.

Welcome to libertarianism kids. It is quite enjoyable once the throbbing in your head dissipates.

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One of the omniscient news services today paraded photographs of all Tiger Woods’ alleged paramours. Aside from Tiger’s apparently endless sexual appetite, we can see that he has great taste in women. All were stunning, which shows what a nice smile and a billion dollars in the bank can buy you (well, what is can rent you).

This is why Tiger should be elected the next President of the United States. We saw what a disaster the Clinton administration was, and that he had equally disastrous choices in human humidors. QED, Billy had generally bad judgment. Tiger at least shows better talent at picking his pud pumpers, so perhaps he’ll be a better chief executive.

And, he’ll likely be single again by 2012, so we will only have to worry about what he is doing, not who.

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economist, n. An expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.

When a politician tells you that targeted government spending will revive an economy, grab your wallet and your shotgun.

When Obama’s economic experts (if I may abuse the phrase) said last spring that His stimulus plan was targeted, I saw it for what it was – political payoff to election supporters, people who suckle on Uncle Sam’s sagging nipples (if that mental image did not horrify you to the point of setting your PC on fire, then you may be strong enough to stand the rest of this missive).

The recent jobs report is a study in clarity and calculation – the private sector lost jobs while government hired more people. Obama, who claimed during the campaign that his objective was to make “government cool again”, certainly has made having a government job cool. Government workers voted for Obama in droves because he intended to use federal tax dollars to inflate the state. It you run a store, style hair, program computers, generate electricity, manufacture anything or in some way add to our gross domestic product (GDP), Obama’s message is “Tough. The people at the Department of Motor Vehicles are more important than you.”

While the U.S. economy dumped 11,000 non-farm jobs, 7,000 of those people became wards of the state (i.e., your non-resident and non-tax deductable dependants). This does not bode well for the economy going forward. People in government – with only very rare exception – add nothing to economic activity. They do not convent raw materials into component parts. They do not assemble component parts into products. They do not drive trucks that get those products to your local store. They don’t even make boring infomercials to sell the products. In terms of real GDP and wealth, government workers individually produce bubkes, and collectively produce less.

Construction is still suffering (-27,000 jobs) because only public employees can afford houses, and government already has all the office buildings it needs. People who manufacture products (41,000 fewer than before) can only sell them to people with jobs, which includes fewer construction workers these days. This lack of potential market explains why wholesales (-11,700 jobs) and retailers (-14,500 jobs) aren’t eating as well as they once did. In fact, one of the only bright spots in the private sector is health services (+28,000 folks), because someone needs to treat all of us who are feeling ill from Obama’s incompetency.

Worrying is warranted. Economies are amazingly complex. Cost-to-coast and border-to-border economic revival requires more than a faux preacher in the White House chautauqua tent. Because we are all economically interconnected, everybody must get goosed. Every sector, every job classification, every income level and in every county needs a bump. Because every person saves, spends and invests differently, the only way to get all the cogs of the economic machine turning is to structurally reduce the burden people carry. Since taxes suck away more than 28% of America’s GDP (i.e., everything non-government workers produce), across the board tax cuts are necessary.

Which is amazingly difficult when you are trying to spend an extra trillion greenbacks.

The good news is that unemployed people understand that government workers got the gold mine (you know what you got). Some will conclude Obama is incompetent (he is) on matters of economics. Others will surmise he is corrupt (he is) by using tax money to bribe governments and their workers. Others will concluded he is clueless (not quite, but this may be splitting semantic hairs). The net effect is that people’s various perceptions accelerate Obama’s drive to be a one term president.

On January 20, 20012 the government sector unemployment rate will rise by one, and the rest of us can get back to work.

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faith, n. Tactical truth avoidance.

As a writer and political junkie, I stand amused, bemused, offended and (very) occasionally amazed at the way my language is manipulated, manhandled and forcefully deflowered. Politicians – the world’s original liars – have desensitized me to all the common linguistic spin cycles, and it is a cold, cold day when I encounter semantic sophism that makes me sputter.

It took scientists talking like congress critters to redecorate my computer monitor this morning.

I have not written about Climategate because it was too predictable. Anyone with on-duty dendra has been skeptical about anthropogenic global warming (AGW). I even cut a cute little video about the buncombe. Through the back and forth of the warring factions, scientific ethics had been questioned. Select scientists resigned the IPCC – the United Nations scientific cesspool – in protest for their minority report being downplayed. Certain data and modeling criteria was not shared, an almost unheard of refusal among real scientists. Repeated problems in process, proportionality and programming were uncovered. Yet promoters of AGW leaned heavily upon suspect scientists and maintained momentum due to their alleged inalienable integrity.

So leaked emails showing they are as craven as their criminal cohorts in Congress were only minor surprises. After all, when you are riding a publicity wave and making more money than every other scientist you know, it is human nature to keep the canard going.

What floored me this morning was the nearly Senatorial scheisse scientists spoke. George Orwell looked up from his fifth ring-side seat in Hell and said “Good play old man.”

The initial utterance appeared when requests for core data were denied. It seems that temperature data presented to the public had been adjusted. This is not necessisarily criminal – occasionally data from multiple points needs to be correlated. What was curious is that the original raw data had been disposed of, leaving only the doctored dope. While attempting to explain missing raw data, a spokesdroid said:

“We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

Can you spot the two twists in this tragic testimony? First is the assertion that under-detailed mathematical changes to the raw data added value. “Value” is highly subjective. DuPont chemical plants produce value for the corporation and the people who use the products it produces, but the value-add to deformed peasant children living downstream may not be well understood … to them.

More inane and insane is the self-contradictory statements about dumping data (which in computerized form takes no real room) and “quality control”. ‘Quality’ and ‘control’ insinuate that one controls quality, and in scientific research this means being able to reproduce experiments and calculation on demand (and, ahem, allowing other people to review and attempt to duplicate the same). Thus the scoundrel speaking this sputum asserted that the quality of manipulated data was controlled, but there was no control over the quality of their data storage in general.

Somebody, please call the Gobbles Political Communications Institute – I found their new fellowship candidate.

This does raise one question: Can the original data be reconstructed? The villains in this story have not claimed that the adjustment process is unknown. Could the current “value-added” data have the adjustments removed/reversed and thus the original data be reconstituted? Who is willing to beg the question publicly?

In a somewhat related story, another marcom cretin claimed that their organization refused to share information as required by law, saying:

When he submitted a request for the figures under freedom of information laws he was refused because it was “not in the public interest”.

Odd. I have been under a life long assumption that scientific data, knowledge and validation were the public’s interest? I can only speculate that the policy makers herein are afraid that public access would add value. Interestingly, freedom of information legislation was invented to force disclosure because transparency is in the public interest, and it was the public who enacted the law. Any employee of the people who does not perceive this principle needs to pack-up their personal belongings and exit the building immediately, because they are too dense to hold any job aside from elected office.

Expect more of the same in the days to come. With the Copenhagen summit approaching, and with AGW agitators getting defensive, industrial level adulteration of language is assured. It will be as grotesque as Copenhagen Chew residue.

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