Mark Twain on BREXIT and GLOBAL WARMING

'If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.'

BIG PICTURE

AND THE LITTLE PICTURE

THE BIG PICTURE

AND THE LITTLE PICTURE

h/t smalldeadanimals

I want to throw away my garbage, not redeem it.

Stuff you used to throw away is now embedded in religious ritual.  Children are taught the three Rs but it has nothing to do with Reading, 'Riting and 'Rithmetic.  Instead it is Reduce, Re-Use, and Re-Cycle.  Those 3R's make a certain amount of sense but expect to be shunned and shamed if you don't spend unpaid hours every month kowtowing to the blue box and the compost pail, the organics bin and the paper and cardboard bins and the plastic & glass recycle bins, and a separate place if there is a deposit for the container, and the special drop off for styrofoams and another one for paints.  Perhaps you drop off your empty plastic bags and tetrapaks at the grocery store, too.   Are you running containers through the dishwasher with hot water.  They're supposed to be clean! Drive a $20,000 car to the recycle depot with paint and old TVs.  Instead of being preoccupied with pee and poo, folks are fixated on the arsehole of society and everything that was cast out formerly must now be retained and played with.   Clearly cost is nothing and ritual all.  Cost is how the market gives us a clue about what is wise behaviour and what is foolish.  Did I mention that your time is free?  You don't get minimum wage, you don't get a dime a day for your trouble, just a sense of virtue and escape from those who carp at your failings.  The politicians and rent seekers price in the paid workers but your reward is just virtue, a religious good.  The recycling movement is a net cost to society and everyone is poorer.  Good judgement will always find things to reduce and others to re-use and still others to recycle but the priests of garbage want it all.

The entire waste of North America for the next hundred years could fit into a cubic mile of land fill in the desert.  If I had been born about fifty years later, a few years from now I'd be bidding for landfill sites to make my first billion dollars sorting them with high tech at a single site.  They are gold mines.  Money and officialdom gave us rules that make garbage nearly illegal.  The costs of cleaning it, sorting it, washing it and blessing it with new credentials has soared.  This should be redirected to challenge the market to find a way to make a buck transforming garbage into dirt and oil and copper and feed-stocks and fuel without relying on unpaid labour from you and me.

The recycle bins at our condo have a restrictive sticker saying what can go in them.  Now the sticker has a sticker over top of the first one with even more restrictive nonsensical rules.  No more lids.  Only clean containers.  Give me a gigantic break.   Bring back something big I can throw stuff into and charge me so much a month for the deal.  YOU fix it up.  I don't expect to compost my body waste before flushing the toilet and I don't expect to redeem my garbage before I hand it over to someone expert and efficient at handling it.

Commonwealth 2.0

Pay attention to the June 23 BREXIT vote in the UK.  Conrad Black seeys a win for the "Leavers"  might revive the Commonwealth with Canada playing a notable role.  A Britain that breaks with the EU may ally with top tier Commonwealth states (Canada, Australia and New Zealand with Singapore, too) and strengthen the nexus with the U.S.A.  This grouping, even without the USA, would have the economic clout of a China and be second in military might to the USA.

Flint reportage more toxic than the water

Being innumerate and credulous will equip you for Flint lead-in-the-water outrage.

The outrage begins with a change in water sourcing a year ago.   That last little blip in the chart is, almost unbelievably, the source of the killer narrative.

Exhibit one:  Wikipedia summary
Exhibit two:  Chart of lead levels in Flint chldren's blood (micrograms per decalitre).
Exhibit three:  Corruption sideline as mayor's PAC siphons off the remediation money.
Exhibit four:  The earth's temperature for the last several hundred thousand years.  The pattern is ignored to focus outrage on misreporting the last few ticks on the chart where politics and money get traction.

Exhibit One:

The Flint water crisis is a drinking water contamination issue in Flint, Michigan, United States that started in April 2014. After Flint changed its water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water (which was sourced from Lake Huron as well as the Detroit River) to the Flint River (to which officials had failed to apply corrosion inhibitors), its drinking water had a series of problems that culminated with lead contamination, creating a serious public health danger. The corrosive Flint River water caused lead from aging pipes to leach into the water supply, causing extremely elevated levels of the heavy metal. In Flint, between 6,000 and 12,000 children have been exposed to drinking water with high levels of lead and they may experience a range of serious health problems.[1] Due to the change in water source, the percentage of Flint children with elevated blood-lead levels may have risen from about 2.5% in 2013 to as much as 5% in 2015.

Exhibit Two:

Exhibit Three:

 

Exhibit Four:

 

Jadges and babies are nicer after a feed. We deceive ourselves to think we are objective.

Ben Gurion researchers found Israeli judges gave almost all their kindly decisions right after a meal and most of their cranky ones when they were getting hungry.  "Whether or not a prisoner got a favorable ruling depended in part on how long it had been since the judge had something to eat."  The right side of the chart is the percentage of favourable rulings like parole or a move to a more convenient jail.  The bottom line is how many cases they had listened to so far that day.

Application:  Politicians and dates should be wined and dined before you bring up favours that must get to YES.

Panama Papers blow the lid off secret money. Putin, FIFA, Iceland just for starters.

Snowden, Climategate and now the Panama Papers.   11 million files (not all illegal) cover decades of offshore paper facades designed to conceal what the powerful and rich are doing.  Stay tuned.  Several hundred reporters have been recruited to work with Suddeutsche Zeitung  The German newspaper received the 2.6 terabyte dump of secret files stolen from the Panama-based legal firm, Mossack Fonseca.

First contact and response at Suddeutsche Zeitung.
Guardian link.     $2 billion trail from Putin, FIFA, Iceland's PM. 
Sidney Morning Herald   mentions Xi Jinping too.
USA Today:  "Worldwide, Jaws Drop"  "Biggest data leak in history".

Stay tuned.
The death of privacy is the new normal.
The little guy loses it.  The big guy loses it.
Every dollar you spend, every GPS signal your phone emits, each page you view is tracked.
The same is happening to the market moguls and tyrants and the merely rich and influential.  Their secrets too are tempting targets.  They put up better walls than you and I but they attract bigger predators too.

Update: Illustrated lede at The Daily Mail.

Hope Wanted For Aging Optimist

I'm a glass-half-full guy.  My partner and my wife tell me I'm too trusting.   Life and love have never been better but I've an awfully hard time looking for the bright side of culture and politics.

Faced with a photo of Justin Trudeau, that handsome young fellow with the selfie camera, I turn my eyes away.  Seeing Barack Obama palling around with Raoul Castro, makes me cringe.  When ex-Rubio people post GQ shots of Trump's wife to help Cruz' campaign and Trump brags his wife is prettier that Cruz' wife, I'm brought to despair.  Reading in-your-face false reporting from both Republican and Democrat leaders to make Donald Trump look like a crazed idiot and force him out at the convention  gives me heartache.   University students get the vapours when they see a campaign sign, "Trump 2016" chalked by the sidewalk.   What it reveals about mainstream culture gives  me a heavier heart than any of The Donald's antics.  The twilight of the Chretien era was easier to stomach.

As noted by Milo Yiannopoulos:  "The weak, ineffectual conservative establishment, with their utter inability to defeat the left on cultural issues, has made Donald Trump a necessary, even vital force in American politics."

I'm cheering for Donald because he gives me hope that American and Canadian politics can be refreshed, like root-bound plants getting re-potted.  There will be an "after" after Trump.

The More Multiculturalism Prevails, The Less Community We Have. Breaking Racial Barriers Not Worth The Full Price.

Some is excellent.  A lot is ruin.

"Putnam found that diversity promotes alienation, disengagement, and social isolation. This all runs counter to a host of prevailing clichés and pieties.  ..  As a community becomes more ethnically and socially varied, social trust plummets. People tend to “hunker down,” ... banding together with a shrunken and shrinking group of friends or alone ... Trust in political leaders, the political process, and even voting decline precipitously. Volunteerism, from charitable giving to carpooling, deteriorates. Political activism increases as people look to government to solve problems that once might have been solved by a simple conversation across a coffee table or a shared fence between neighbors.

h/t Ed Driscoll from his tale of moving to Texas from California.

You And I Are Easy To Deceive: DIY Videos Of Public Figures Made To Say Fake Things With Faked emotion.

This is better than a horror show.  An actor's expressions and lip movements are overlaid on a target actor (in this case, George W Bush).  George seems to feel and say whatever the actor wants and all this in real time.  We aren't smart enough not to be deceived.  Prepare to be outraged like a puppet as activists pull your string.

The software: Face2Face.
See more with a search for facial reenactment.

Ochlocracy Bumps Oligarchy: Democracy 3.0 arrives with Sanders and Trump. We're next.

Democracy, like True Christianity, has never been tried.  You may not like it.  Everybody gets a say, including the unwashed and, the low information voters who heretofore saw no reason to take part in politics but now find social media and the internet and the comment pages give them a front seat.   I think democracy was promoted by those next to power but lacking the wealth, force and connections to prevail on their own terms.   Extending the vote brought crowd backing to this lot who wanted to drink at the governing teat.     Events have overtaken them.  Now Trump phones it in and tweets it in and gets a billion dollars free publicity.  Sanders appeals to some of the same people whose opinions lack that certain je ne sais quoi.   This isn't the end game, just the end of politics as we had come to know it.

Something similar happened in music.

You could make a living working for the king or the bishop. Then in Mozart's day, you could make a living working for various lords and even the occasional rich merchant.  In our lifetime, you could make it by contracting with a secular record label and getting air time lined up on the radio.  Now you can take your talent to the masses and get money selling downloads by the millions.  The middle men are disappearing.   Trump has few middlemen, almost no one he owes favour to except to the crowd. He is crowd-funding his run for the presidency.  Political operatives are being downsized.

My new favourite word: Ochlocracy: rule by the masses

Canada's Economy In One Cartoon From The Fraser Institute. NGO's Cost You Billions

Simple but useful., from the Fraser Institute.

Aboriginal manipulation of government and turning pipeline protests into government policy shrink our wealth just as effectively as taxes, undisciplined spending and debt. Interesting that NGO players control a big chunk of the GO budget.

"American men drop to their knees
begging Trudeau to run for president."

We've a likable guy on the tiller.  I don't hate Trudeau fils, but am embarrassed by him.

Putin joins Trump's campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Laugh with Trump in this first ad targeting Hillary.  Expect more ballsy clips though not all featuring Vladimir chuckling.  Hillary won't be wiping the floor with Trump. She won't even be making a peep about "Trump admires Putin" because it will draw more laughter upon herself.  She will never live down the barking episode at her rally.

Mass murder: Big government is a force multiplier for evil.

Governments with guns are the top killers. Rogue individuals slay dozens, sometimes hundreds, and with 9-11, the tollran into the low thousands.    But the millions and tens of millions are caused by governments with guns.  Governments are the force multiplier of evil.   These are not the deaths in defense of Motherland and Fatherland.  They are the internal butcheries and starvations of Pol Pot and Mao, of the Armenian genocide and the millions who perished in the Ukraine under Stalin.

The article by BOOKWORM is provocative.  "Because government is a force multiplier for evil, a vote for the small government candidate is a vote for good."  Everyone wants the government to do something about something and that includes conservatives who want values protected and activists who want pipelines stopped.  These "somethings" should be tested at the smallest local level possible and viewed as experiments.  A vote for small government is a vote for good government.

Two clicks for US 2016.

First click this graphic to follow all US delegate races at Nate Silver's Fivethirtyeight site.  The interactive graphic,  one for each presidential candidate, shows each one's progress, noting every caucus and primary date, how many votes are at stake and a calculated capture number per state per candidate needed to win the nomination.  Second, click to the Horse Race live blog at Breitbart which links every few minutes from about 8 a.m. EST to breaking US election stories from all over the map.  Except for opinion pieces and voting night tallies, you may not need anything else to stay on top of the news.

The Fivethirtyeight home page adds vote junky anlaysis to the stories you read on an election night.
The sample below is from the interactive graphic for Donald Trump, highlighting what's at stake for him on March 15th.

Electability Poll Hogswallop'

Head to Head polls make screaming headlines.  Trump loses to Clinton, Sanders, Cruz and even Rubio.   The winning margin in past US presidential elections is inside the margin of error of many past polls.  See the data.    "Loses by 2"   "Wins by 3" in head-to-head are close to meaningless remarks at this stage and verbiage promoting such freakily scandalous and stunning news qualifies for hogswallop.

The data in 2012 shows Romney within a percent of two of Obama right up to election night.  He wasn't a loser until that final Tuesday. The second chart shows the percent of the popular vote that went to the winner in recent presidential campaigns. Apart from a couple blowouts with Reagan, Johnson and Nixon, many races are close and indeterminate until voting day.  The first chart is from Real Clear Polling and the second from Wikipedia.

Proof That Dem Hijinks Are Blocked By Voter ID.

Eight of the first sixteen primaries and caucuses added voter ID since 2010.    Democrat turnout with voter ID was down 37% and without voter ID was down 15%.  With the same rules, Republican turnout was up massively everywhere.  Check it out.  Reported first at Huffington Post.  Low enthusiasm for the Donkey people accounts for less than half the decline.  Bad behaviour by political operatives, now being stymied, accounts for the rest.  Voter ID is a low cost small government fix.  Makes me glad to live in Canada.

Minimum Wage Graphic To Torment Believers

If you don't read Small Dead Animals, here is the graphic you need to show people who believe $15/hour ought to be the minimum wage. and every job should get it.   They believe in magic boats.

Not a Typo: 14,000 wind turbines idle in US

When the subsidy's gone, the turbines are toast and there's no green cleanup squad.  Not hundreds but thousands are idle.  Read more at "American Elephant".
Excerpt:

"When it is time to clean up after a failed idea, no green environmentalists are to be found. Wind was free, natural, harnessing Earth’s bounty for the benefit of all mankind, sounded like a good idea. Wind turbines, like solar panels, break down. They produce less energy before they break down than the energy it took to make them. The wind does not blow all the time, or even most of the time. When it is not blowing, they require full-time backup from conventional power plants. Without government subsidy, they are unaffordable. With governments facing financial troubles, the subsidies are unaffordable. "

Re-stated:

They are rusting hulks and no environmentalists are willing to pay to scrap them.

They didn't earn their keep.

They killed thousands of raptors.

When wind power makes sense you will need no subsidy.

Vote Trump and His Daughter to the White House: Hugh Hewitt

Hugh Hewitt gives six reasons to vote Trump.  Ivanka Trump is number six.

"And, finally, sixth: Donald’s daughter and Svengali Ivanka is a smart, smart, smart lady with an extraordinary intellect and influence on her father. We get the GOP’s own Valerie Jarrett, only this one with a sense of America’s role in the world and the same resolve to succeed as Jarrett possesses."

It's not that Hugh would eagerly pick Trump and you remember Trump insulted Hugh after a "gotcha" interview back in September, but Hewitt has six good reasons to vote Trump:
The first three are the three supreme court judges he will probably get to nominate.  "Diane Sykes and Bill Pryor are two fine judges that Trump has mentioned as possible nominees and he made the right commitment on religious liberty to me on stage Thursday night."  Fourth, Donald is a builder and will rebuild the navy. Fifth, the rulers of China and Russia will think twice before crossing him.

"An extraordinary intellect and influence on her father". Hewitt has had her on his show.
Something to think about.
FDOTUS and executive vice president of the Trump Organization.

Breitbart liveblogging the entire US election: "Horse Race Live Wire" is a new type of news.

Breitbart's "Horse Race Live Wire" page has over a 100 posts so far today, picking up within minutes all the political stories I've seen anywhere - the video clips - tweets - photographs - punditries - bon mots and scandals.  Reposted with links are all the stories that are making news in the primaries and caucuses including Bernie's and Hillary's doings.  Breitbart likes Trump.  Each day a new page is started with the "Horse Race Live Wire" theme.  Bookmark Breitbart and settle back.   During breaking news, the posts are minutes apart.   It's a new type of news.  I like it.

http://www.breitbart.com/