Right to Opine

Thomas Sowell lays out the reality behind the recent media hype over “income disparity.”

It is easier and cheaper to collect statistics about income brackets than it is to follow actual flesh and blood people as they move massively from one income bracket to another over the years. […]
The Internal Revenue Service can follow individual people over the years because they can identify individuals from their Social Security numbers. During recent years, when “the top one percent” as an income category has been getting a growing share of the nation’s income, IRS data show that actual flesh and blood people who were in the top one percent in 1996 had their incomes go down — repeat, DOWN — by a whopping 26 percent by 2005.
How can both sets of statistics be true at the same time? Because most people who are in the top one percent in a given year do not stay in that bracket over the years.
If we are being serious — as distinguished from being political — then our concern should be with what is happening to actual flesh and blood human beings, not what is happening to abstract income brackets.

But if we did that, we’d have to have honest dialog about class mobility and the rewards of hard work, patience, and fiscal responsibility. Can’t have that, now can we?

Thomas Sowell, Townhall — Payday Loans

WSJ — Occupying vs. Tea Partying

George F. Will, Washington Post — Conformity for diversity’s sake

Mike Adams, Townhall — Death to Tenure

AP — US cuts UNESCO funding over Palestinian vote

Of potential greater concern to the administration is the possibility that the Palestinians, buoyed by the 107-14 vote in their favor at UNESCO, will apply for membership in other U.N. organizations…

Yes, that would certainly bother the White House—which loves the U.N.—but would be a blessing to U.S. taxpayers. If only more U.N. bodies would admit the Palestinians we could stop wasting our money on the execrable organization.

Fox News — Justice Department Sues South Carolina Over State’s Strict Immigration Law

See a pattern developing here? States are fed up with the feds’ failure. If the DOJ spent half as much time, effort, and money actually enforcing federal immigration law rather than trying to stop states from doing so, there’d be no need for state action.

Thomas Sowell, IBD — Loudmouth 1% Are Trashing Rights of 99%

If you weren’t asleep last week, you were inundated by the mainstream media’s coverage of Professor Richard Muller and the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) group. BEST has conducted an in-depth analysis of surface temperature data spanning the last two centuries, and is releasing four papers regarding temperature data for public and peer review. Muller, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, wrote,

…let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.

and concluded

Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.

The reaction from the left was swift. The debate is over. Anyone who still disputes anthropogenic global warming is a “denier”—morally likening skeptics to the cretins who deny the truth of the Holocaust. Yada, yada, yada. A rehash of the same tired ad hominem attacks that have been lobbed by the left for years. In one of the most blatant attacks, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson blasted,

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.

Not so fast, there, spanky. You see, one of BEST’s own members—Judith Curry, chair of the Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at no less than Georgia Tech—countered Muller directly in the U.K.’s Daily Mail:

“There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,” she said. “To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.”

Curry further discusses the issue in her own blog. She notes that the data set as analyzed by BEST is, well, the best set currently available and acknowledges that the way the data has been presented hides the truth about global temperatures. (She claims that was “teased” out of her, but does not contradict its accuracy.) To wit, even though CO2 emissions have risen drastically over the last decade, temperatures haven’t—a fact which contradicts the computer models being hyped to scare the general public.

Professor Curry again:

“This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,” Prof Curry said. “Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.”

[The graph to which she refers.]

Despite their best efforts to demonize skeptics, warming alarmists still have a lot of convincing to do. When two notable, respected scientists working on the same team with the same data can draw such disparate conclusions, the scientific debate is far from over.

Townhall — Clean Energy’s Dirty Secret: Cancer

Think “green” energy such as solar and wind are clean and safe? Not for the impoverished Chinese miners whose labor provides the rare-earth metals our government won’t let us mine here. Not only are their industrial methods unsafe, their mining technology is driven by…very dirty coal and oil. The small amount of CO2 we avoid by replacing cheap, reliable clean coal with expensive, spotty wind and solar is more than made up by the real pollutants spewed into the environment in Asia. Don’t hear the Goracle talk about that very often, now, do ya?

Real Clear Markets — Can the Youth Vote Be Bought For a Trillion Dollars?

You bet it can. You might even talk me into supporting it if you added a condition that only useful majors—math, physics and other sciences, pre-med, etc., rather than “womyn’s woes” and “minority grievance studies”—need apply. On a related note…

LA Times — Student loans add to angst at Occupy Wall Street

Many of the twentysomethings protesting in Manhattan have racked up sizable debts, and some are left to wonder whether their diplomas may be worth less than their cardboard signs.

Answer: yes, your diploma is worthless. You should have studied something that has real market value rather than “capitalist oppression of modern subversive poets” or “literary merits of gay S&M porn.”

NY Times — Distrust of Government Grows Amid Fears, Poll Finds

Wow, it took a poll to figure that out? But this is really rich:

The combustible climate helps explain the volatility of the presidential race and has provided an opening for protest movements like Occupy Wall Street…

Someone need to correct a cranio-rectal inversion. The OWS folks are asking for more government intervention—regulations, salary caps, student loan bailouts, etc. It is the dreaded Tea Party groups that have been clamoring for less.

CNN — Federal judge temporarily bars Florida’s welfare drug-test law

“Perhaps no greater public interest exists than protecting a citizen’s rights under the constitution,” the judge wrote…

Which article or amendment makes welfare a right? As an automobile driver I can be randomly stopped by a DUI task force but the same state can’t screen welfare applicants for drug use?

Townhall — Occupy the Consequences of a Philosophy That Encourages Rape and Theft

CNN — Clinton warns Iran against moving into Iraq

Or else…what? Iran has repeatedly demonstrated its determination to meddle in Iraq while we still have troops in country. Do you really think they’re going to stop once we leave?

BBC — Great Ormond Street criticised over Arvind Jain’s death

Yep. Healthcare is sooo much better when it’s controlled by bureaucrats.

Arthur Laffer, Wall St Journal — Cain’s Stimulating ‘9-9-9’ Tax Reform

let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Victor Davis Hanson, Townhall — Railing Against Reality

CNN — U.S. judge dismisses Arizona claims against feds on immigration law

“It is but the latest chapter in a story that Arizonans know all too well: The federal government ignores its constitutional and statutory duty to secure the border. Federal courts avert their eyes. American citizens pay the price,” the statement [from Arizona Governor Brewer] said.

The federal government refuses to protect it’s citizens and states aren’t allowed to. The administration feeds weapons to Mexican drug cartels yet blames American gun owners for the violence that is increasingly crossing the border. This will only get uglier.

Los Angeles Times — U.N. human rights office calls for probe into Kadafi’s death

“There seem to be four or five different versions of how he died,” said Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. “There are at least two cellphone videos, one showing him alive and one showing him dead. Taken together, these videos are very disturbing.”

Disturbing? Only if you’re a like-minded, blood-thirsty dictator. Any manner in which he could possibly have died would have been too good a fate. Now let’s see if Libyans are smart enough to replace him with something better. Not holding breath.

Fox News — Muslim Junior ROTC Student Wants to Wear Head Cover With Uniform

Cry me a river. I’m just waiting for the lawsuit from a 15-year-old tranny who wants to wear his dress in the color guard. It’ll happen.

IMAO — I can’t not vote

BBC — George Clooney: ‘I won’t run for office’

Thank you very much!

Fox News — Clerk Kills Would-Be Robber Who Grabbed Daughter

Much cheaper than a trial.

Hot Air — Cuba drills where Obama fears to tread

Make no mistake—someone will drill for the oil in the Gulf. Think Cuba is going to do a better job 60 miles off our shores than we would?

Townhall — America’s Orwellian Liberalism

Wall Street Journal — A New Spending Record

CNN — Obama orders U.S. troops to help chase down African ‘army’ leader

Special Forces as military advisers, eh? Sounds an awful lot like how we first got into liberals’ favorite war…Vietnam.

Los Angeles Times — Obama administration scraps program in health reform law

“For 19 months, experts inside and outside government have examined how [the Department of Health and Human Services] might implement a financially sustainable, voluntary and self-financed long-term care insurance program under the law,” [Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius wrote.

“But despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation.”

Really? You mean it’s not as affordable as you insisted it would be? Isn’t this the kind of thing that should have been researched and debated before you passed the bill Ms. “We need to pass it so you can find out what’s in it” Pelosi?

NY Times — House Panel Examines Details of Solyndra Deal

The Energy Department may have made a decision without precedent when it allowed Solyndra, the now bankrupt solar technology company, to restructure its loans so private investors — not the government — would have first call on its assets in case of liquidation, two Treasury Department officials acknowledged Friday before a House subcommittee.

By “not the government” they, of course, mean that when Solyndra went belly-up, we the taxpayers got screwed first.

Fox News — Love of Money May Mess Up Your Marriage

I really should stop being amazed at the amount of research time and money that’s wasted by academics. Newsflash—this is not news.

[1 Timothy 6:6-10, NIV] But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

Thomas Sowell, Townhall — Reverse Racism

NY Times — 8 Killed in Salon Shooting in Southern California

How could that happen in a gun-free zone?

BBC — EU billions fail to lift west Wales and valleys economy

Well, whadya know? Keynesian economics doesn’t work on their side of the pond, either.