The future will be conservative but not necessarily Conservative.

There are more older people everywhere and older people usually have some property and long term relationships they want to hang onto, a disinclination to riot in the streets, and have a less exalted view of themselves. The school of experience tempers their opinion. This adds up to conservative voting patterns. They may not end up in the Conservative party.  The NDP will be looking a little more conservative each year too.

Seniors are humming tunes from the rebel rock and roll of my youth.  They often have a smartphone, holiday in other countries, sport a google identity and wear joggers instead of oxfords. Which party will feel like home to these folks?

Rising tide.

As Michael Medved wrote after the US 2012 election:

"Forget 2012: Long-Term Demographic Trends Are Favorable to Republicans.   Democrats may have won this time, but they shouldn’t celebrate for too long—America is growing older fast, and older folks reliably vote Republican."

Some Winnipeg voters.

Seniors are the reliable voters who turn out in all weathers.     From the Elections Canada website:

Re-posted from 2013.

Fire has no morality. Mouse clicks into the unknown.

The spark of life is a flame that consumes fuel.  Fuel is anything in the world that can burn, whether food or experience.  It will be consumed when opportunity presents.  The possibilities in speed of light networking will vault man to the heavenlies, cast him aside for AI, or both and more.  We do try to stack the deck in our favour but a lot of new fuel has been discovered with the internet, the quantum leap and e=mc2 and it will burn, sometimes favouring us, sometimes not.

ISIS head choppers and PETA-linked firebombers are in the mix along with clerics, mom-and-pop-merchants, devout mothers  and earnest undergrads.  The firewalls of morality are like zoning bylaws that we put in place to protect the stuff we like.  They will be skipped over when opportunity presents and the wind is right.

I've watched a grassfire spreading with a steady burn line, ash behind and fuel before.  It has no morality.  It just computes the opportunity, turning it into smoke, ash and heat, a lovely sight, then passes from view.  We are as innocent as that fireline, clicking our mice, leading humankind into an unknown future as fuel appears that we are designed to burn.  The teleogenic argument is that something yet to be is drawing us forward.  Perhaps more than one possible future is presenting fuel in a dynamic competition that tempts our nature.  We may prevail.  We may be set aside.

Supply Meets Demand For Rape Tales.

A horrible thought, but the supply of rape stories in the news is going up as rapes in America have plunged by half.  My first reaction was disbelief that reported crimes of rape have plunged. It's true, a drop of 64% in less than fifteen years, as even The Huffington Post confirms. The gang-rape story from Lena Dunham in the Rolling Stone now looking shaky, is defended on grounds that no-one should doubt a woman.  Most men and women lie part of the time, that's life.  The feminist cadres are reporting that 20% of women are sexually abused, that there is a rape epidemic on campuses, and are turning regretted sexual activity into rape tales.   Hyperventilated mileage is extracted from a declining supply of crimes..  If they're right, we'd have notarized documents before making love and no parent in their right mind would send their daughters or sons to university.  I think the public is moving away from war-of-the-sexes feminism.   We haven't got to the point that the professionally outraged are Princesses who can't sleep because there's a pea under the mattress, but the nasty lumps under the mattress are smaller. University must be one of the tamest spots for sexual violence, They are in the news because that's where earnest people looking for tales to tell and tales to rally around are easiest found.  It's probably safer to walk around the UBC campus stark naked than to sit quietly in a rough part of East Hastings in Vancouver.

There's No Middle in the USA

Crowdpac traced political donations of all major US industries.  There's hard left  (Entertainment, Media, Universities, Silicon Valley).  There's  a bit more moderate right (Farming, Mining,  Fuels, Property). The rest are bi-polar, divided in two opposing camps, "in the middle" only because neither party prevails.  You'd expect to see a bell curve of opinion but you'd be wrong.  There's no middle.  To say they are "in the middle" is like the joke:  How many testicles does the average Canadian have?  One.

The introductory chart shows industry averages.  Note the left is further to the left than the right is to the right.

The remaining charts at Business Insider display how partisan all industries are.

Unipolar, to the left.

Unipolar, to the right

Bipolar, no middle ground.

h/t smalldeadanials, link to Business Insider sourced from Crowdpac.

Dollar years per birth: Pregnancy has awesome R.O.I.

A Canadian woman today has the most spectacular return on investment for her pregnancies since time began despite smallest ever family size.   The corollary: Canada can shrink and prosper.   Using Gapminder's interactive charts:  A woman in Canada about 1800 endured an average of 5.72 births  (stats talk) and her off-spring lived an average of 39 years earning annually $1340 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

A Canadian woman today has 1.66 children who can expect to live 81 years with average earnings of $40603.    Times it all out and you get a ROI of 299,000 dollar-years for the woman of the 1800's and 5,460,000 dollar years for today's woman.

The first corollary:  From a woman's point of view, it doesn't matter if Canada's population shrinks because her Return On Investment is spectacular and still growing as we live longer.

The second corollary:  A man and woman's best lifetime investment is to form a reproductive couple to rear one or two children.

Gapminder is sponsored by scientist, Hans Rosling.  If you haven't seen his illustrated talk, you probably are out of date thinking about population, family size and prosperity.

Lincoln on Male Female Differences

Men and women are different.  Males and females of all species priorize a little differently.  There are advantages for the pair to do so.  Saying men and women are the same doesn't change a thing.  Abraham Lincoln's joke applies:

Abraham Lincoln faced with some thorny issue that could be settled by a twist of language, or a slight abuse of power, asks his questioner how many legs would a dog have, if we called the dog’s tail, a leg. “Five,” the questioner responds confident in his mathematical ability to do simple addition. “No,” Lincoln says. “Calling a dog’s tail a leg, doesn’t make it a leg.”

The story has been sourced. In the original, a calf features instead of a dog.

US Army Kits Out Home Town Cops For Violence Against Their Citizens.

 In the last ten years, program 1033 has  been covertly transferring surplus tactical weapons and vehicles from the military to small town police forces, campus security, and park wardens. It's not your imagination.  The chart shows an explosive expansion of deadly force to the people who are hired to maintain the peace.  At the link you can see who got it in each town and county in the USofA. Until Ferguson triggered a release of the information, requests have been stonewalled.

Total Tactical Items Distributed by Department of Defense 1033 Program

Hair's width accuracy not yet good enough for Apple's robots. Next: Will we be good enough?

Apple has told Foxconn in China to fix their assembly robots.   A hair's width averages 1/10th of a millimetre and Apple wants accuracy of 1/50th.  The clunky robots get only 1/20th because they come from the less fussy world of car assembly.  All should be fine after tweaks.  Meanwhile they just get to tighten screws, stuff like that.

Why robots?  Foxconn was in the news three years ago for hiring 1,000,000 robots  because cheap Chinese labour doesn't have the edge it used to.

It's sobering to think about manufactured servants that can swiftly and repeatably put out quality merchandise assembled accurately to the nearest 1/50th of a millimetre.  No minimum wage here.  This is the week that Stephen Hawking. made the news predicting Artificial Intelligence is likely to assume a life of its own in the very new future, out-competing our DNA brand.  Intelligence is like an infection or a virus, successful acquiring resources and getting it's code reproduced.   AI may do much better in the marketplace for energy and code.   The Singularity may be near but will it include us? 

From Macrumors:

"Foxbots" have been tasked with menial jobs that include the assembly of larger components and tightening screws. Unfortunately, the bots are proving to have an accuracy to 0.05 mm, which is above the 0.02 mm tolerance required to assemble Apple's products.

From the BBC quoting Hawking:

"It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he said.
Prof Hawking says the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have already proved very useful, but he fears the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans.  Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

Yesterday's Woman: Hillary Clinton missed the wave.

CBS talks about Hillary's "Grandma Glow" and the Christian Science Monitor joins the chorus with
Will Grandma Hillary announce 2016 run?   The cruellest cut was Obama's "Voters are going to want that new car smell".  Who won't have heard and understood that by 2016?    She's been famous for being famous for some time and her one resume builder, "Secretary of State" is sinking as fast as the President's polls.

Grandma looks great.

   

The front bench for the Donkeys is looking thin. It's going to take a couple election cycles for the Democrat party to recover from the damage to their brand.  The talent  (which helped damage the brand during Obama's tenure) has been keeping off stage to make "victory" easy for Mrs. Clinton.  Now they regret it.   Seriously, their biggest accomplishments are the "Affordable" Care Act and Presidential overreach bypassing congress to dismantle the US border.  Both are justly unpopular with voters and provoking constitutional challenges from the states.

The Elephant bench looks like more fun, more like a party.  There's a lot of interest for the top spot.  Ask yourself which debate you'd rather watch, primaries for Republicans or for Democrats?  There's Tea Party and Texas,  Mormon turnaround expert and a libertarian,  Bush dynasty and Right to Work.  This is a party!   They went through having too many unfamiliar cooks competing to make the broth last time and went through letting the opposing team choose the moderators.  This time will be the charm with momentum, experience, and faces familiar to the public.

Behind scenes, compare Debbie Wasserman to Reince Preibus.  He is smart, pragmatic, and anchored.  She (I want to be President, too) is being squeezed to the margins.

Footnote: Despite the first paragraph, I'd be glad to have a wise leader over 75. As for cars, one broken in is better value than a shiny one fresh off the lot like Barry (Barack)'s.  I like a grandmotherly smile on Hillary's face.   The wave passed, however, and Hillary's votes are moving away.   

Sex stereotyping is useful

Male - female behaviour is different in most species.  We didn't just fall out of a tree like this. The differences are there because they have been job-tested for thousands of years and tend towards survival.  Some are baked into genes and some are transmitted by cultural software.   Sex differences optimize issues of foraging, competition, reproduction, health, food, shelter, defence and property.

To call male-female behaviour a cultural construct can be defended on this ground: The rules of survival for mankind have changed and with it the optimum culture.  

Source

Today, many of us can live in shelters without warriors, can survive without our kinfolk's help, can expect a baby will live eighty years, can see our children's children after investing just a few years in menstruation, and can forage successfully with a debit card after a few hours training.  Raising kids is as important as ever but you don't need to start eight or nine to raise a couple to adulthood.  It makes sense then that the roles of the sexes are changing and may be less important going forward.   They won't be going away.   There's no need to belittle them.  They have worked longer than you or I.

I will continue to open the door for my wife, offer to carry heavy things, feel happy when my arms are about her, and call her sweetheart.

Raising the Minimum Wage spurs Innovation

Pizza Hut developed a toppings screen that tells by where you point your eyes that you want shrimp, tandoori chicken and olives on your pizza.   
The London Yo Sushi restaurant uses drones to deliver to your table.

Forget about 18%, 15% or 10%.  When younger I couldn't afford to tip if I took my family to a buffet.  Now it's easy but I don't need a guilt trip to make a tip.   Let's save that for exceptional service.
If you want fast food, there's the hamburger machine that grinds the meat, mixes beef with pork, slices the tomato and pickle while perfectly grilling the bug and patty, and no tip expected either. Should taste pretty good.  Frees kids and college grads from dead end jobs.

Network news is broken. Defend the internet, it's your only hope.

Reading Sharyl Atkisson's book, Stonewalled, I am struck not by how the White House is illegally using the spy services to disable critics, but by how corrupt and broken network news is.  The government has mastered the art of snooping, flattering and intimidating.  The network news managers have mastered the art of copying each other so the same half dozen stories appear on every network.  Investigative reporting that puts the Obama White house or major sponsors in a bad light will die or be shunted to the website.

The branches of the US government seem united in suppressing whistleblowers and everything embarrassing.  Stonewalling is the norm.  False friendly calls from officials are to "pump and mine" which means to find out what documents you may have got hold of and get copies of them and the names of leakers.  They say they want to respond to the specifics but they are just checking to see how much of the truth you know.  Lying is standard operating procedure.  Canada seems better but bureaucracy will always trend towards covering its butt.

The reporters largely don't want to rock the boat.
The network managers are busy scanning the New York Times and Huffington Post and the Washington post to find out what has been defined as "news".  Then they send their reporters out to cover the same ground with a little distinctive spin.  New stories are not wanted and new stories that make the White House or Democrats or sponsors look bad are slow-walked and stopped.  (The one bright light:  Unwanted stories may make it into the web edition despite being studiously ignored in newscasts.)

It's disgusting.  I don't think it's going to be fixed.  The government under Obama and Holder and company have gotten too good at disabling inquiry.  The owners of the networks are too lost in sniffing each other's bums to find out what's for dinner.  The internet can be suppressed, as China has almost proven, but it is a wild wild west by comparison to network TV news.  Look to the internet for the missing viewpoints and fight to protect the freedoms it enjoys.

Sharyl Atkisson is pretty good at what she does.  When being pumped and mined, she pushes back with bold well-documented questions that I wouldn't have had the balls to pose.  ("Don't ask me what was said. You had your people at the meeting!" (No, we didn't). "Yes you did." (Names names))

Ancient mosaics look like they were laid yesterday. Colour portraits from 200 BC.

From the Greek city of Zeugma in modern Turkey comes this memorable photograph. 

(h/t extragoodshit.phlap.net)

Note also how deep into the ground this tile floor was buried. 2200 years ago is almost modern history. In many regions the earth's surface today is almost unrecognizable compared to 20,000 years ago when modern man was learning to talk and spearing mastodons.

Could DNA have seeded earth? DNA survived blastoff and re-entry on the skin of a rocket.

From Science Daily News: 

Scientists Dr. Cora Thiel and Professor Ullrich dabbed DNA on the outside of the rocket. The DNA survived and still worked.  We could have been seeded here.   Our rockets could accidentally seed another world.

"The genetic material DNA can survive a flight through space and re-entry into Earth's atmosphere -- and still pass on genetic information. A team of scientists from UZH obtained these astonishing results during an experiment on the TEXUS-49 research rocket mission.  Applied to the outer shell of the payload section of a rocket using pipettes, small, double-stranded DNA molecules flew into space from Earth and back again. After the launch, space flight, re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and landing, the so-called plasmid DNA molecules were still found on all the application points on the rocket from the TEXUS-49 mission. And this was not the only surprise: For the most part, the DNA salvaged was even still able to transfer genetic information to bacterial and connective tissue cells."

Source

America saved from socialism in 1623.

Switching to private property rights saved the Pilgrims from starvation. Planting corn the Indian way is a story, not an analysis.  Feel-good rules about enforced communal transfers could have been written this week in Washington.  They failed because they wasted people's talents and locked in perverse incentives against doing one's best for self and family.  Then they prospered by (apologetically) exploiting man's cupidity and preference for his own kin.  Read an extract from Ilya Somin's article then, intrigued, finish it in the original.

"People received the same rations whether or not they contributed to producing the food, and residents were forbidden from producing their own food. Governor William Bradford, in his 1647 history, Of Plymouth Plantation, wrote that this system was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. The problem was that “young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” Because of the poor incentives, little food was produced.

Giving people economic incentives changed their behavior. Once the new system of property rights was in place, the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability."

For Thanksgiving, watch Friedman on the virtues of greed:

Microaggression and the Mosquito test

The "microaggression farce"has been outed as a campus fad that will create a new generation of permanent victims.  To push back against getting the vapours over microaggression, ask yourself this question:   Does this bother me less than the sound of one mosquito near my pillow?  If you would take more action to dispatch the mosquito than to right the micro-wrong, forget about it and find some way to be useful to other people.

To me, this is an example of Parkinson's law:  Work expands to fill the time available to do it. The aggrieved students are in an expensive little hot house catering to their tantrums and should get a life.

The idea that we shouldn't be peeved, tested or mocked is an odd one that implies man or God is lord over nature and this sorry world should be remade so we can all make nice to one another.  In dramatic terms, life is viewed as a comedy which must always have a happy ending, never a tragedy.   The Christian doctrine that we are born into sin is more helpful and keeps us humble in present circumstances.

Caveman politics

Lefties, Greens, liberals,  Green Peacers, PC, PETA, Occupy types --- a long list of labels is fit for the trash pile.  Stacy McCain has summarized the belief package and calls it Caveman Politics

Women, good; men, bad.

Youth, good; adults, bad.

Atheists, good; Christians, bad.

Hedonism, good; responsibility, bad.

Abortion, good; motherhood, bad.

Sodomy, good; normal sex, bad.

Wilderness, good; carbon energy, bad.

Labor unions, good; entrepreneurs, bad.

Government, good; corporations, bad.

Foreigners, good; Americans, bad.

Democrats, good; Republicans, bad.

Link from Don Surber to McCain's article.

You can add:   Gaia good, mankind bad

                         Non-judgemental, good.  Judgemental and discriminating,bad.

Gay Pride, Toronto July 2014

Stairway to Heaven

An earthly stairway in snow beneath a white one that fell from heaven last night.

Plant kingdom recruits humans for seed dispersal, gives us Doggy Treats.

Primates are "indispensable for regeneration of tropical forests" through seed dispersion.  "In tropical rain forests, the seeds of 80 to 90 percent of trees and lianas are dispersed by animals. In addition to primates, birds and bats are the major animal groups that are responsible for seed dispersal."

A ten foot high bank of blackberries
near Sidney BC.  

We Sapiens are primates too and have been recruited to spread plants throughout the new and old worlds. First the Polynesians and then Caucasians brought the flora of South Asia and the Caribbean to the pacific islands where it would flourish.  Without us, bananas and bougainvillea and coconuts would never have reached this near ideal environment to grow and reproduce. If you spend time on Tahiti, you'll see that almost every significant plant and beautiful flower is introduced as the old timers got dislodged.   Self important people decry the invasive species and predict the end of a stable world ecology.   Plants don't care.  They got what they needed, access to prime habitat.  Our reward, some pretty colours, smells and fruity bites. That's like a doggy treat from the plant kingdom.

Here on Vancouver Island, the broom and gorse and blackberry thickets almost define the landscape at the margins. That's hardly a hundred and fifty years of plant history, a successful colonization. Some groups actually spend time trying to extirpate these colonists, feeling moral ripping out immigrants to re-establish Eden. It's like a zoning bylaw to keep Hispanics and Asians out of a nice Caucasian neighbourhood.  Ulex and Rubus are not pleased.

Hummingbird flight: The magic is filmed and animated.

A thousand frames a second from four cameras captured the motion and a computer has created an animation of hummingbird flight showing the structure of the air around the wing..  Like insects, they create lift on the upstroke too, 30% of the lift thus for 30% of the effort. They rotate wing pitch to optimize the lift of hundreds of vortices that agglomerate into larger ones to let it hover.  I love watching something this intricate and  normally invisible --- the turbulent air flow that lofts such a beautiful creature.  Reported at Science Daily News.

Robinson Crusoe for Geeks: The Martian -- best ever survival story

I spent two days struggling to survive on Mars, captivated by Andy Weir's obsessively accurate survival story about a man left behind for dead on Mars, a story set just a few years in the future. My wife likes it too.

Andy has been running Mars scenarios for years, even writing software to calculate rescue orbits.   He gamed possible answers to worse case life-ending scenarios and lured me into his world.  The astronaut's mates aborted the mission without him when signals showed his suit had depressurized and life signals stopped, but the wind had dropped him with the puncture facing into the sand, his blood sealed the hole, the suit re-pressurized.  I wanted to be there using a spare spacesuit to cache water that I had just manufactured from rocket fuel so I could grow enough potato calories per day so I could survive until the first possible rescue date.   Then there's the moment when a NASA tech scanned the abandoned site to see what could be re-used to fund an extra mission and saw an emergency tent had deployed.  All plausible, heart-stoppingly plausible.  These aren't spoilers because about a hundred
similar obstacles are met and overcome
with Yankee grit and engineering know how.

He published this free, a chapter at a time.  Later he put out a Kindle version for 99 cents.  Now it's over $11 and a movie is in the works.

Obama Scuppering Hillary.

President Obama made the news today with this zinger:  The American people are going to want the new car smell in 2016.   "They want to drive something off the lot that doesn't have as much mileage as me".  (ABC)  There's only one possible candidate with more mileage than him and that's Hillary Clinton.

This doesn't come out of nowhere.  Klein's book, Blood Feud, spells out the bad relations between Clintons and Obamas.

Subsequent to the 2012 election, Bill Clinton followed up with President Obama on the deal they had made in which Bill would help Obama get reelected, while theoretically Obama would for one thing place Clinton’s handpicked political allies in the DNC — including replacing Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as its chair. Obama did not follow through. And in a post-election phone call, the following occurred according to Klein:

“‘Obama cut right to the chase,’ Clinton’s associate continued. ‘He said he wasn’t prepared to turn over his campaign’s digital operations, data mining, and social media juggernaut to the Clintons. Instead, he said he was going to fold that operation into Organization for Action, his second-term political pressure group. Hillary would have to build her own data and analytics system. Bill listened, said, ‘Okay,’ and let it go at that.
‘Then Obama said it was too early to make a decision about 2016 and who he was going to support of the Democratic Party nomination. He wasn’t prepared to back Hillary now. He was keeping his options open. He was reneging on his promise.
‘Bill’s blood began to boil. He was speechless with rage.

DNA Is The Engine But Not The Sole Driver Of Inheritance

Genes are real but cells are complex.  Shit happens.  While genes set coding in motion, complex proteins by the thousands are folding intricately in a competitive environment.  The geometry of the folds determine the resulting chemistry.  We haven't been able to predict which way the folds will go by using DNA as the sole input.  It looks like the bustle in the cells and not just DNA can trigger the working protein shape.  The cell phenotype is the working model, not the code.  When cells divide, the new ones have the same state, the same working behaviour as the precursor.

Finnish scientists, Arto Annila and Keith Baverstock, a physicist and a chemist, describe this, beginning in paragraph six of Ricki Lewis' review.    A sample:

"The evidence clearly points to routine cellular function (apart from cell division) and regulation in somatic cells being a matter for proteins without the intervention of genes. If, for example, the dark/light rhythm changes (travel over a few time zones) then intervention involving new transcription to adjust the circadian rhythm does occur, but otherwise circadian rhythm is taken care of by protein chemistry."

ADDED:  Threespine sticklebacks, small fish found around the globe, undergo rapid evolutionary change when they move from the ocean to freshwater lakes, losing their armor and gaining more teeth in as little as 10 years. A biologist shows that this rapid change results not from mutations in functional genes, but changes in regulatory DNA.


A view of how beautiful and complex cell life really is:

Student Debt Will Elect Republicans.

Grads with debt load need good jobs.  Democrats lost half their advantage with young voters in the mid-terms.   Market-friendly politicians will look good to someone $33,000 in the hole, unable to afford a down payment on a bungalow or to kit-out a baby room.   That means Republicans and Libertarians more than it means Democrats.   Young and old, we want a place of our own and many would like to be Mom and Dad.  When the credibility of big government is in decline, voters look around.


The feel good degrees are worth a lot less than ones we actually need. The chart shows technical degrees offer double the starting salary of lib arts diplomas.  The soft diplomas have better pay increases over the next five years but that looks like catchup as they learn skills they should have had in college.
Those first years are hard on a debt-slave college grad.  She and he want to leave school and get a good job.   Jobs come from the market looking after what people need and want from each other.

The bottom scale is what you can expect your first year on the job  and the side scale is what sort of raise you can expect over the next five years.

Big Gov Heading for the Crapper: Gruber and UKIP

In Britain, UKIP's byelection wins shine light on the failure of big government to serve voters.  In the US, Gruber does the same, showing big government and Obamacare are built on the premise voters are stupid.  (Why Grubergate is so devastating to Democrats).  Exegeses from both continents follow:

First Stanley of the Telegraph (h/t barrel strength):

Somehow these posh, wide boys have managed to connect with an extraordinary coalition of angry middle-class and alienated working-class voters. How?  The answer must surely lie with collapsing faith in Westminster. The Credit Crunch, the expenses scandal, NHS horror stories, child abuse nightmares, even the dark hints of paedophile gangs at the heart of power – it all adds up to a sense that the establishment is irredeemably broken.                 People don’t necessarily agree with Farage or even possibly like him. But they know what he is; they understand a man like that. And so long as Ukip is respected for being unpretentious, it also won’t be punished in the same way as the other parties are."

And from The Fiscal Times:  "Why Grubergate is so devasting to Democrats":

(Gruber) has become an avatar of not only Obamacare, but of liberal paternalism, a caricature of the snotty know-it-all technocrat who will make decisions for people without consulting them.

The growing impression that politicians don’t play straight with their constituents is completely toxic, particularly to Democrats, who actually want to use government to improve people’s lives. 

Politicians will always be corrupted to some degree by power and will always lie selectively, but perhaps the cure is in the Telegraph article about Nigel Farage which praises the unpretentious:

Nigel

"People don’t necessarily agree with Farage or even possibly like him. But they know what he is; they understand a man like that."

In Toronto there was the wild cannon, Rob Ford.  Many hated him but he people "understood a man like that".

Do I really think Big Government is heading to the Crapper?  I think networks that rule the land will become increasingly complex but the few with their hands on the tiller will have to let more of us into the inner circle.
The loot acquired by nation states is opening to market bidding and rule will be more democratic as a result.  I blame the internet for this, making obscure and secret information harder to protect and cheaper to distribute quickly.

US Illegals sneaking into Canada

This is a spoof, right?   Illegal lefty immigrants crossing the Manitoba border, fleeing the Republican onslaught.

"I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn," said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn't have any, he left.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and renting all the good Susan Sarandon movies".

The lovely spoof dates from the re-election of George Bush but seems written for today.

Robot Yoga ?

This robot standing on one foot with hands gracefully extended appears to be doing Yoga, performing an asana midway between the Tree and Warrior poses.   This is one of the simpler forms and perhaps I shouldn't read too much into it.   Is there a Turing Test for Yogis and Yoginas?  If you can't tell the difference between a posing human and a posing robot, are robots entering into nirvana?

Source

Russian news from the Russian spigot. It all makes sense in a weird kind of way.

Katsenelson grew up hating America, but became an American.  He immersed himself in a week of Russian news to see the way Russians get it delivered.  Read all about it. You won't find Russians agreeing with your opinion any time soon unless the collapse in oil prices cuts back their living standard.  It's unsettling, a wall-to-wall mixture of emotion, lies and omissions with a small dose of truth.  Russians wouldn't consider relying on other news. Vitaliy's wife couldn't wait for him to finish the project and be cheerful again..

The link to Vitaliy Katsenelson's report at Institutional Investor:

"Ukraine was destabilized by the U.S., which spent $5 billion on this project.  As proof, TV news showed a video of Senator John McCain giving a speech to anti-government protesters in Kiev's Maidan Square.  It was followed by a video of Vice President Joe Biden visiting Ukraine during the tumult.  I wasn't sure what his role was, but it was implied that he had something to do with the unrest.  Speaking of Joe Biden, I learned that his son just joined the board of Ukraine's largest natural gas company, which will benefit significantly from a destabilized Ukraine".  

And so on and then on some more.

Predict my vote from my name.

Verdant Labs sorted hundreds of first names by voter registration lists to produce this chart.   Look way, way left to find "Abigail", "Naomi" and "Willie" and scroll far, far to the right to see "Dwayne", "Brent" and "Billy".   Many names are not predictive but it's a cluster of girls names that are predictive to the left and a cluster of mostly boys names clustered to the right.  How did our parents know?

ht Ace of Spades.

Click the link

Democracy doesn't depend on informed voters, it depends on voters.  If our parents pointed us towards being little Libs, Dippers, Tories and Greens, so be it.   Power in quantity always corrupts and any mechanism that creates regular turnover in the leadership is a good  mechanism.

Chopping heads off may save us from ourselves.

Revulsion to the ISIS Muslim butchery may cure us of believing that making nice will end war. Fretting about committing microagressions or saying "negro" or wearing shirts with bare naked ladies is looking a little fluffy.  It's one thing to crowd onto the Victim Train to gain money and attention in America and something quite else to be a victim, fleeing for your life from barbarians with knives, barbarians who cheer in the streets when you die.

As Samuel Johnson said, "When a man knows he is to be hanged.. it concentrates his mind wonderfully."   When we get bloody proof that all religions are not the same and only one, Islam, is producing a strain of beheaders who revel in their butchery, it concentrates the mind. It will change who gets elected.   Politicians will see advantage pandering to shock-concentrated citizens instead of to Occupy types.


Before leaving the topic, remember with sorrow that Americans live under a president who says after Muslim assassins murder praying Jews in Jerusalem:

"Islamic State’s “actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own”"  

Lucky break in the weather - Cold snap just when we need it.

It's getting easy to laugh at climate alarmists despite their money-raising skills.  This is because the weather has taken some cold spells in places near you.  If weather was a tad nicer or we were having a couple hot years instead of 18 years without warming, the big-NGO people would be insufferable. The politicians would shamelessly be stripping us of choice and wealth to fund climate programs with them in charge.  It's happening anyway but slowingly.   Hallelujah cold snap!

US including Hawaii, overnight forecast in Fahrenheit for Nov. 17th.

Remember when "32" meant frost?

Some of the other voices:
“Over the years, the IPCC has changed from a scientific institution that tries to be policy relevant to a political institution that pretends to be scientific. I regret that. There are already more than enough climate activists, while there are too few solid and neutral bodies that make down-to-earth and well-founded statements about climate change and climate policy.” Economist Richard Tol, in a prepared statement for the Dutch parliament.

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” John Theon wrote to the Minority Office at theEnvironment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results,” Theon is former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA

“We’re not scientifically there yet. Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem. Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.” — UN IPCC’s Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] since 2004.

And a Canadian viewpoint: “I am a skeptic on climate change. I know the climate is changing, and it always has been. I've studied this intensively over many years. I started what I call the Carbon Project here in British Columbia back in 1989 in order to bring everybody together to discuss this subject and figure out the facts behind it. Since then, I have watched as hysteria has grown, as if the whole world is going to come to an end and civilization is going to die because of humans causing this climate change. I don't buy that, and I certainly know we don't have any proof of it. I'm not denying that we might be playing some role, but the natural factors that have always caused climate change have not suddenly disappeared. I'm very skeptical of the alarmist nature of climate campaigning.” – Patrick Moore, co-founder of
Greenpeace.

And for perspective, the long view.  The rise to 400 ppm CO2 observed recently is a tiny blip at the bottom right corner of the graph.  Give me a gigantic break.  Don't tell me the world will drown with doubled C02. Notice the average world temperature seems to have natural upper and lower limits (25C and 10C), some kind of internal governor, and it DOES NOT vary in step with CO2.

Blue Narrative Falling Apart But It's Not Going Away.

The Mid-Terms are over but the train wreck continues.   Gruber is driving the Democrat brand down as this architect of Obamacare says misdirection and the stupidity of voters was key to getting the law passed.    Post-election Obama, instead of presiding, has threatened both houses of Congress he'll make up his own laws on immigration, laws opposed by 70% of the electorate.   The Blue cities in America are the ones in the biggest trouble for debt and crime.   And W.R. Mead, the Philosopher of Blue, shows the Blue social model is breaking down, the idea that an ever increasing social dividend can be diverted from an increasingly prosperous electorate through the hands of big government to the underdog.  Look at the Democrat back bench for talent and the light shines on an aging Hillary, while there's a striking number of younger voices and some women and blacks vying in Republican land.  Until that back bench looks fresher, the Republican brand is going up.  Governorships, the presidency, the House of Representatives and perhaps even the Senate are going to turn redder in 2016.

Blue is not going away.  The idea that someone should do something about something, the inclination to help the less fortunate from our plenty, envy of the rich, the tendency to suppress risk and change with rules about rules are all natural expressions of human nature.  To boot, the richest like politicians who buy the votes of the poor with food stamps.    Neither the Republican nor the future Libertarian party will be forever.

 (If you haven't seen it or the five following videos, cynicism and manipulation is policy.)

Gruber:

"Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage, and basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass," Jonathan Gruber said at the Annual Health Economics Conference.

World Leader Harper to Putin: Get out of Ukraine. (Americans envious).

Quoted from Bloomberg and CBC 

At the G20 meeting, Putin reached out to shake the prime minister’s hand.   Harper acknowledged his Russian counterpart, saying: “I guess I’ll shake your hand, but I only have one thing to say to you: you need to get out of Ukraine. “Putin did not respond positively,” MacDonald told Canadian reporters. “Indeed Harper told Putin that Russia should leave Ukraine,” Peskov said by phone today in Brisbane. “Putin told him that this is impossible because they are not there.”  Asked about the tone of the meeting between the two leaders, Peskov said “it was within the bounds of decency.”   

Picked up in the US by Instapundit:  "Smart diplomacy, the Real Thing".

A sampling of the comments there:

"I remember when the US president was the leader of the Free World. Good times."
"Anybody know off the top of their head what one must do to legally emigrate to      Canada?"
"BIG ones. No mom-jeans to poop in. I'll bet he has a pin-up girl Hawaiian shirt, too."

The picture is from the last G20 summit in St Petersburg.

The little guy on the left is making a lot of noise lately, including sending
a column of tanks into Ukraine and sending his warships  just off Australia to
the G20 meeting after he was dumped from the G8.

President One Note: Amnesty or Bust

President Obama is in love with defeat, trumpeting in advance where he will attack.  Sun Tzu's advice is to do the exact opposite.  Make nice to the enemy (Republicans and rubes) while making plans in secret. Obama's secret plan to amnesty millions of illegal visitors is about as secret as Kim Kardashian's wardrobe.   He's going to be shot down or diminished and appears to have no Plan B.

If he and his camp followers are correct that borders should be no barrier, then disband the IRS and send your taxes to the UN.

Pretty much the first responsibility of a government is to protect the border. From the US constitution, defense is listed right after paying back public debt and before general public welfare in the first statement of duties of Congress:

"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States. (Section 8)"

President Scott Walker?: "Does he sit upon a throne made of the skulls of his enemies"?

From The Federalist:

Does Walker sizzle? Not exactly. Is he a particularly charismatic speaker? No, he isn’t. But does he sit upon a throne made of the skulls of his enemies? Yes, yes he does.

Rick Cromwell's article makes a good case for President Walker.  It's an alternate to my view that America wants a time-out with a decent competent guy like Matt Romney.

DOE funds temperature fakery

Temperatures from DOE-funded USHCN are 30% made up and 100% twisted to make them hotter.  The GIF from Stephen Goddard's blog is unforgettable. Analysis at the link.  (DOE funding mentioned here.)

This reminds me of the joke about accountants.  The truth is whatever they want it to be:

A businessman was interviewing applicants for the position of divisional manager. He devised a simple test to select the most suitable person for the job. He asked each applicant the question, "What is two and two?" The first interviewee was a journalist. His answer was "Twenty-two." The second was a social worker. She said, "I don't know the answer but I'm glad we had time to discuss this important question." The third applicant was an engineer. He pulled out a slide rule and showed the answer to be between 3.999 and 4.001. The next person was a lawyer. He stated that in the case of Jenkins v. Commr of Stamp Duties (Qld), two and two was proven to be four. The last applicant was an accountant. The business man asked him, "How much is two and two?" The accountant got up from his chair, went over to the door and closed it, then came back and sat down. He leaned across the desk and said in a low voice, "How much do you want it to be?" He got the job.

h/t smalldeadanimals

Climate craziness best predictor of your vote.

From WUWT this exit poll of republicans and democrats who were asked:  "Do you think climate change, also known as 'global warming' , is a serious problem?"

John Hinkeraker comments: "Why is global warming such a partisan issue? I think because there is hardly any evidence to support the alarmists’ case, so the whole thing is a matter of faith and politics, not science."

The voter split is bigger than the political party split and that goes for Canada too.   Even conservatives with a microphone give a lot of lip service to doing something about climate.

I'll know I'm rich when...

1984 version:
I don't have to go to work right away but can enjoy a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, a fresh-baked croissant and read the Financial Post.

2014 version:
Semi-retired, and self-employed, I don't have to go to work right away.
(60% complete)
A glass of Not-From-Concentrate orange juice goes down well.  (70%)
I buy a gross of frozen Costco croissant starters, let a couple rise overnight and give them 15 minutes in the toaster oven before breakfast.   (90%)
And instead of the Financial Post, with PC or smartphone I skim the surface of the whole earth reading what is deemed news and wisdom.  (100%)

So, I'm rich.
The price of wealth came down.
Thanks to markets.