Maggie's Farm

The best and worst return policies of the holiday season.

But the best thing for the gals and the guys are the post-Christmas sales, like Brooks Brothers. Or, as She Who Must Be Obeyed prefers, the "Polo Ralph" shop, aka Ralph Lauren, down where the cuz's live who we are visiting today and where I am enjoying some ceegars and scotch whiskey in the wintry global cooling sleet and wind:

The ladies naturally want to look good. I call that Ralph Lauren stuff wannabe Yankee clothing, and refuse to go into the place. I am a simple J. Press, tweed jacket, bow-tie sort of guy and do not care for their things for myself. Too expensive, too.

Their About Us. These are my peeps.

And, by the way, Parliament of Whores is a darn good book about how the US government works.

The Dem long-term goal is complete government control of medical care, as in Canada. They make no bones about that.

Their House and Senate bills take a big step in that direction. They do it by mandating the purchase of medical insurance - and then regulating what your insurance must pay for. From what I can tell, they are not really mandating insurance at all - they are mandating that most or all of your medical bills get paid by the general population, depending on what government panels deem worthy of coverage for you (watch that process become immediately politicized).

Thus the need for the hefty tax increases and for an inevitable leap in insurance prices. That leap in prices, down the road, will, the Dems hope, lead to people crying for the government to jump in completely. That's always the plan: break something, then arrive on the scene to "fix it."

A wiser path - but one which would never lead to Canadian medicine - would have been to disconnect medical insurance from the workplace, to ensure portability, to create high-risk subsidized pools (as is done for high risk drivers in auto insurance) for those who cannot purchase insurance, to take down interstate barriers to insurance competition so that people have the choice to buy whatever sort they want, and to do some tort reform so that docs do not need to spend $40-200,000/yr on their insurance. Plus no mandate - it isn't American to force everybody to buy something if they do not want the product.

(As I have mentioned in the past, I like my family medical insurance. It is portable, cheap catastrophic insurance which cannot be canceled - and which would become illegal under the Dem plan. The Dem plan requires me to buy all sorts of junk I neither want nor need.)

Related: The healthcare backlash is coming. Or maybe it already has. People know that this thing is a dog...not to insult our canine friends.

Also, via Insty:

PETER WEHNER: The Health-Care Backlash. “This health-care bill may well be historic, but not in the way the president thinks. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything quite like it: passage of a mammoth piece of legislation, hugely expensive and unpopular, on a strict party-line vote taken in a rush of panic because Democrats know that the more people see of ObamaCare, the less they like it.”

From Warner in The Telegraph:

When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?

and

This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future.

From Hoven in Who Needs Data?, which begins:

The scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU), and the people who funded them, did not know how utterly useless CRU was.  All the research done at CRU made no difference whatsoever to the "science" of global warming.  Just ask other scientists and global warming alarmists.  Heck, ask CRU.

What do the EVIL WARMISTS want? Global domination! It's called the Belgrade Process. Ya can't make this stuff up.

Update: Is this for real? Give China and India a pass, and give away more of our $. Just to get a piece of paper signed. What a joke.

Photo is Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen, during the summer. Nice place to drink some beer.

From A Jacksonian, trained as a geologist, on how science works and doesn't work:

The very first warning signs on Antrhopogenic Global Warming (AGW) and just plain old GW came from the paleoclimatologists who tried to run the models made for AGW/GW against known climates and what those models would predict for those climates. The models came through with junk, not even getting close to the actual climates they were tested against. When the paleoclimatologists asked for the datasets from those pushing AGW (mainly EA CRU, but elsewhere) they were stalled and rebuffed. Coming just after the K-T event and its aftermath, paleoclimatologists were not slow in criticizing the models, how they did not form into anything resembling known past climates nor did the models explain how those climates changed.

AGW/GW advocates refused to come out an play in the full contact body sport that was geology.

They retreated to the hothouse of academia, environmentalism and seeking to 'extract' government grants for their perfect theory of how bad man was to planet Earth. Apparently they couldn't model how nasty Earth was to life forms during the Permo-Triassic that saw over 95% of all species perish... but then geologists don't put an anthropomorphic form of the Earth on a pedestal and worship her. If you DID anthropomorphize the planet it would come out looking far worse than Pol Pot and all other mass murderers, combined, with just a hint of Charles Manson thrown in for fun. But then those seeking to castigate man don't bother to look at Earth's history, either.

via Drudge, Blizzard Dumps Snow on Copenhagen as Leaders Battle Warming. Indeed, the entire circus is farcical.

Enter, the O-man on the heels of the snowman. 

And, with perfect timing, Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming

Christmas book? NRO reminds us of Florence King's collection of columns, STET, damnit. One quote:

The draft produced the kind of men that today's girls have never known, and relations between the sexes were better for it. What sticks in my mind about them is their self-sufficiency and competence in fixing things that broke and figuring out solutions to emergencies. Thanks to the draft I belong to the last generation of American women who could scream "Do something!" and get results. Most of my men were intellectuals, but they had been taught in basic traning to change a tire in 90 seconds, rig up electrical wiring, tie knots that stayed tied, and take a rifle apart and reassemble it while blindfolded. This last was never necessary in civilian life, but it made for a self-assured deftness that was awesome.

Pop culture and politics. Driscoll on Guido Beach Meets The Great Relearning. Culture from the bottom, up?

Send a thanks, if you agree with him, to my independent and independent-minded Senator Joe Lieberman (with whom I agree about 30-40% of the time), for his strong stand against government-controlled medical care.

Here's his email.

I just sent him one. "Thank you, Sen. Joe."

h/t, Insty. How do you discuss things with somebody like that?

Interview with Andrew Klavan: My Way Into and Out of the Left.

How many of us have similar stories?

"Carl Pham" replies in the comment thread of a post at McArdle:

Broke, you're one of the good examples of why there is a "consensus" among "scientists" that AGW is real, and it's just a question of how much. And you're also an excellent example of why that consensus should not exist, how scientists who took the vow of empiricism seriously should not be part of that herd. (And I don't mean to be too critical; I understand the temptation, as one who happens to be an expert in very similar fields.)

Here's the problem. As someone who knows the molecular physics well, you can see the components that go into the AGW hypothesis. CO2 has an infrared cross-section of foo, and the atmospheric concentration of the stuff atop Mauna Kea has increased from bar to baz since 1960, and you get CO2 from burning any hydrocarbon in O2, so...well, there you go. Plain as a pikestaff. Hitch these facts together with a little logic, and you have a hypothesis of AGW.

That's actually fine as far as it goes. But what you should bear in mind is the key distinction we always teach youngsters between a hypothesis and a decent theory: empirical verification. It's simply not enough to say oh, A follows logically from B. That's Aristotelian "science," the way the Greeks deduced that there were four Elements (fire, water, earth, air) from which everything was made. The same way 18th century chemists came up with the theory of phlogiston to explain combustion. The same reason Michelson expected to find an ether drift.

No, it only becomes plausible theory when you actually run the experiment, and show that B produces A, every time, and not B produces not A, every time. Unless and until you do that, you merely have a plausible speculation.

As you know, the big problem with climate "science" -- I'm inclined to call it "climate studies" myself -- is that it is impossible to do the relevant experiments. We can't take a planet and jack up its CO2, then see whether the climate changes relative to some identical planet where we hold the CO2 constant. In the absence of that kind of experimental test, you do not have an empirical science. Yes, the components of climate studies -- molecular physics, atmospheric chemistry, complex systems simulations -- are all legitimate sciences, because you can do the experiments that directly confirm or contradict the theories. But when you assemble all these pieces into predictions of climate -- of what happens to the whole damn planet, over centuries -- then, alas, it stops being a science, because the experiments can't be done. (It's like theories of history: in the same way, we can't run history over again, have Truman make a different decision, and see whether lives were on balance lost or saved by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. This is why history is not an empirical science.)

Good engineers recognize this problem. Even if every part of your machine has been proved to work as you expect, that doesn't mean the assembled whole is going to work as you think it will. The whole is always more than the sum of its parts, and can surprise you.

You're an expert on one component of climate studies. Excellent. The constructions seems plausible to you. Fair enough. But your experience as a scientist should convince you (unless you are so young you have not experienced any surprising failures of your ideas) that unless it can be subjected to the crucible of experimental proof, the most convincing argument in the world is merely that -- an argument -- and does not rise to the level of empirical science.

Guardian:

Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol.

Politico:

'Climategate' muddied the good green message that was supposed to come out of Copenhagen.

Via Human Events:

The March 16, 2009 report by Dr. Alan Carlin says -- among other things -- that
“As of the best information we currently have, the GHG/CO2 hypothesis as to the cause of global warming, which this Draft TSD supports, is currently an invalid hypothesis from a scientific viewpoint because it fails a number of critical comparisons with available observable data. Any one of these failings should be enough to invalidate the hypothesis; the breadth of these failings leaves no other possible conclusion based on current data.”

You can read the entire report here. The report was disclosed by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) at a Tuesday afternoon press conference in which he said that the report was not considered by EPA in reaching its Monday determination.  

Dare I repeat this again? It's all about a political agenda.

From the piece at Big Government:

“We must create a national consensus that the health care system is in crisis.” and “To win we must not just generate understanding, but emotion—fear, revulsion, anger, disgust.” – Page 545

In much the same way that advocates of “Global Warming” continue to repeat that “The debate is over” those pushing the President’s Health Care Scheme continue to parrot that “We can all agree that our current system is in crisis…”  Right?  How often do we hear that?  Meanwhile, polls show that 80% of Americans are HAPPY with their health insurance.  But politicians who cite these numbers are painted with a broad dismissal and vilified for wanting to do nothing while Americans are dying because they have no health care.

The plan, from the beginning was to manufacture a crisis in health care.  And, with the willing media on their side (“This will require an ongoing highly integrated earned-media messaging program that brings the growing crisis into relief over the next two years” – Page 545) that crisis becomes a stipulated FACT, not a political position, not an opinion, but a given.  This book was written in 2007 and the plan calls for implementation over “the next two years”…  do the math.

So, now the “Crisis” has been manufactured and a solution has been put forth.  Now, how do our progressive leaders plan to win the votes of politicians and the support of the American people?

“We must focus especially on the mobilization of the labor movement…” and “Over the next two years, we must design and organize a massive national field program”  – Page 546

VDH at NRO:

Once upon a time, scientists, unlike prophets, were inductive. They sought to interpret evidence in empirical fashion, rather than twist it to "prove" preexisting suppositions. The Enlightenment taught them to welcome transparency and free expression, not (as in the Medieval Age) to form cabals to hound out heretics. Public intellectuals and grassroots activists were devoted to promoting proven ideas, rather than making fortunes through the shrill advocacy of unproven ideas. In the age of cynicism, penances were sold to sinners to allow them without guilt to satisfy appetites that conflicted with their doctrine; by contrast, the lives of moralists reflected the simple creed they advocated for others. Governments acted on scientific consensus, not theories that were the most favored or trafficked in popular culture. Debates, not propaganda cinema or cheap invective, adjudicated honest disagreement; people of the lab and library, not Hollywood celebrities and rock stars and their wannabes on campus, informed the public about scientific dispute.

How strange: This was to be our new age of science; instead, we are getting alchemy, the inquisition, and the reign of the superstitious.

Here's the trick that is coming:

...the Obama administration is expected as early as Monday to formally declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.

An "endangerment" finding by the Environmental Protection Agency could pave the way for the government to require businesses that emit carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to make costly changes in machinery to reduce emissions -- even if Congress doesn't pass pending climate-change legislation. EPA action to regulate emissions could affect the U.S. economy more directly, and more quickly, than any global deal inked in the Danish capital, where no binding agreement is expected.

Christmas puddings cause global warming. But you already knew that.

Photo is a dangerous Plum Pudding.

House votes to make death tax permanent.

I recently posted on the subject of Death, taxes, and death taxes in view of upcoming legislative considerations of current death taxes, and I see a post by Patten at NRO which echoes my views. He explains:

Often referred to as the death tax, the estate tax was established under the guise of ensuring “fairness.” Progressive reformers of the early 20th century thought a tax on lifetime earnings and savings would prevent “gross inequalities of wealth.” Instead, the estate tax destroys capital, the fuel that keeps the economy growing. When capital is difficult to acquire, some people are unable to start businesses, and some of those who already have businesses can’t expand them — resulting in fewer jobs for others.

Read his whole brief and to-the-point post. Estate taxes are wealth and asset destroyers. I want more wealthy people and wealthy families, not fewer.

Krauthammer spoiled his excellent piece on medical insurance by claiming a moral imperative for medical insurance. Not for medical care - for medical insurance. I agree with the Powerline guys that this part of Krauthammer's piece makes no sense.

It is a moral imperative for parents to take care of their kids as best they can. And, in a nation founded on equality in the face of the law, you could make a case for universal free national legal care.

Socialized medicine is no more insurance than Social Security is. What it is is having the government - ie your neighbors - pay your bills. That's not insurance.