Plants Make Natural Pesticides

07/29/09 - Via M.D.O.D by 911Doc

Organic foods are not more nutritious than conventional foods, but what about the pesticide residues?

Study Finds Organic Food Is Not Healthier
07/29/09 - Reuters by Ben Hirschler

[edited] A review of 162 scientific papers published in the last 50 years finds no significant difference in nutritional or health benefits between organic and ordinary food.

Alan Dangour: "A small number of differences in nutrient content were found between organic and conventional food, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance. There is no evidence to prefer organic over conventional foods based on nutrition."

----------
Plants Produce Natural Pesticides
5/24/1989 - FortFreedom - Paper by Bruce N. Ames, Chairman of Biochemistry at U.California Berkeley

[edited] The bad news is that our plant foods contain carcinogens, natural pesticides that cause cancer in rats. Examples are basil, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, celery, fennel, grapefruit, mushroom, mustard, orange, parsley, parsnips, pepper, pineapple, and raspberry.

These chemicals are present at levels ranging from 70 ppb (parts per billion) to 4 parts per thousand. These levels are enormously higher than the amounts of man-made pesticide residues in plant foods.

The good news is that the risk of cancer is negligible at levels far below the maximum tolerated dose given to rats. I am not even very concerned about the risk from allyl isothiocyanate, a natural carcinogen present in cabbage at 40,000 ppb and in brown mustard at 900,000 ppb. Most leading scientists and I are very skeptical about making worst-case, low-dose extrapolations from high-dose animal tests.

Here is an example of a low-dose extrapolation. We might observe that 95% of adults will be legally drunk after drinking 6 beers in an hour, 12 ounces each. We might extrapolate that 1.3% (1/72nd) of those people will be drunk after drinking one ounce of beer.

----------
Organic Pesticides Fail EU Safety Review
03/30/09 - OpenMarket by Greg Conko

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has rejected 13 of 27 commonly used "organic" pesticides. That organic carrot doesn't look as good any more.

Some of the organic pesticides might be dangerous, so it is reasonable to test them. But as above, the risks from pesticides are probably highly exaggerated.

----------
Synthetic vs Natural Pesticides
06/06/2007 - NYTimes By John Tierney

[edited] About 99.9% of the chemicals humans eat are natural. The amount of synthetic pesticide residues are insignificant compared to the natural pesticides produced by the plants. 99.99% of dietary pesticides are natural. Plants produce these chemicals to defend themselves against fungi, insects, and other animal predators.

Average Americans eat 5,000 to 10,000 natural pesticides and their breakdown products. Each eats 1,500 mg (1/3 teaspoon) of natural pesticides each day, about 10,000 times more than the 0.09 mg of synthetic pesticide residues.

Natural pesticides make up 99.99% of the pesticides in our diet, and synthetic pesticides are the remaining .01%. These pesticides are equally likely to be cancer-causing, but it does not follow that they are causing human cancer.

Dr. Bruce Ames and Dr. Lois Swirsky Gold believe most of these natural or synthetic pesticides don’t present problems because the exposures are very low compared to the high doses given to rodents in lab tests.

Dr. Ames: "Everything you eat in the supermarket is chock full of carcinogens, but most cancers are not due to parts per billion of pesticides. They’re due to causes like smoking, bad diets, and obesity."

----------
Dietary Pesticides are 99.99% All Natural
07/19/1990 - At JStor - by by Bruce N. Ames, Margie Profet and Lois Swirsky Gold

[edited] We examined the toxicological significance of exposure to synthetic chemicals compared to naturally occurring chemicals. 99.99% by weight of the pesticides in the American diet are produced within plants to defend themselves. Only 52 natural pesticides have been tested in high-dose animal cancer tests; about half (27) are rodent carcinogens present in many common foods.

We conclude that natural and synthetic chemicals are equally likely to be carcinogenic in animal tests. We also conclude that the comparative hazards of synthetic pesticide residues are insignificant at the low doses of typical human exposures.

Not Just Words

Obama famously said that his speeches were "not just words", that words were powerful and determined a nation’s path.

Unfortunately, Obama thinks that taxes, finance, productivity, unemployment, and income are just numbers.

A Few Words About Policy

President Obama recently held a prime-time press conference to present his desire to reform healthcare in the U.S. He suggested passing the bill in Congress, and asked for questions. He talked for about an hour and answered about 12 questions.

There has been a flurry of activity discussing what he said, whether there was any new detail, and criticizing some of his examples and facts. This told us very little about what is proposed in this sweeping grant of power to the government.

The press and the country are entirely wrong about what press conferences are good for.

Policy On Paper

Obama should have already released a detailed "white paper" describing his summary and justification for his health care proposals. (And such a paper for his other policy recommendations.) We need proposed results, methods, justifications, comparative studies, past successes, funding sources, the works.

Laws are not written as a random collection of thoughts, although they often look that way. They start with policies and reasons on paper. Legislator's staffs follow those policies when creating the details in these 1000 page bills. The white papers must exist, but they are not being presented to the public.

We should examine, verify, and criticize the policy documents, and then compare these to the details in the bills. Starting with the bills is like trying to approve a new building by looking only at the blueprints, without the purpose, graphics, and site requirements.

This is the United States Government, of, for, and by the People. The public cannot participate in a government that runs on policies that are hidden. The press and public should be able to review these undelivered documents. The government should be proud to display its carefully researched and supported policies. We deserve this as a free people.

The absence of these policy papers is appalling. Instead of open and proud policy, we have closed, imperial government. Sadly, we are controlled by a tyranny if our government sees no reason to explain and justify its actions. Are they ashamed or afraid of what they propose?

Be Informed

A press conference is supposed to question the President on his knowledge of the policy already presented in detailed, written form. The press conference is for the President to announce and defend the policy. It is to reassure the public that he knows about what he is proposing.

Instead, we have a few questions and vague speeches about what we would all like in a perfect world, and about the power and money that Obama wants ahead of time to work on it.

It is a magician's trick, to treat press conferences as if they could communicate the needed information, for either support or criticism.

We must ask our government for the important things. Among them is always a clear explanation of what the law will be, and why. If we ask and are not answered, then the responsible politicians must be voted out.

Minimum Wage Prosperity

Suddenly, McJobs are Good
07/24/09 - Blogs.DailyMail by DonSurber

[edited] Labor union officials and their handmaidens in Congress, including former congresswoman Solis, derided any increase in employment under a Republican president, calling them "McJobs". They derided them, even if they were above minimum wage, because new jobs do not pay as much as old jobs.

Now that Obanomics has turned a mild recession of 7.6% unemployment into 9.5% unemployment, in just 4 months, we have Solis praising a 70 cents an hour increase in the minimum wage as an economic stimulus.

Solis says that raising the minimum wage to $7.25/hour is going to help the economy and increase employment. I hope she doesn't mean it will help the economy while decreasing employment. Or, hurt the economy while increasing employment.

Where are the studies and information about the ideal minimum wage? Maybe the sky is the limit. Why not set the minimum wage at $50/hour? That would send funds to poor people while lifting the economy, right? (sarcasm)

The minimum wage is just another way of saying: "Fire that person unless you can pay them $7.25 per hour. We would rather that they be out of work, than work for less than we think is polite."

The government cannot help people by restricting their choices.

----------
A Minimum Wage Equals Minimum Jobs
07/30/09 - Reason.com by John Stossel

[edited] Politicians declare that workers should get a raise, and people assume they will actually get it. But, government can increase wages by decree only if employers set wages arbitrarily. You have to believe that employers are arbitrarily stingy.

Say an employee produces $4 of value each hour after all business expenses, and the employer offers just $2. Another employer will hire him away for $3 or more. Competition drives wages up to the the worker's level of productivity.

Several years ago, Santa Monica, CA made the town a workers' paradise by requiring everyone to be paid at least $12.25 an hour. Restaurant owner Jeff King complained to me, that the law would "dry up the entry-level jobs for just the people they're trying to help."

He was right. It's why gas stations no longer hire teenagers to wash your windshield. Wage minimums tell employers: "Don't give a beginner a chance." The people of Santa Monica later woke up and overturned the "living wage."

If minimum-wage advocates really believe wages are set arbitrarily, why do they favor only a $7.50 or $14 minimum? Why not $100? At those levels, even a diehard interventionist knows that workers would be hurt. But, the principle is the same at lower levels. Wages follow productivity, not whim. If the minimum wage is set above productivity, those workers will be harmed.

Low Skilled Workers Are Not Helped
07/26/09 - Cafe Hayek by economist Don Boudreaux

[edited] Uncle Sam has hiked the minimum wage, raising the hourly cost of employing low-skilled workers by 10.7%. This is always unwise, and more so when unemployment is rising.

Say that Uncle Sam passed a minimum-salary statute for economists, requiring that every employed economist be paid at least $300,000 annually. I would, of course, love to earn this much by teaching economics. My more accomplished colleagues would benefit, such as Tyler Cowen and Walter Williams. But, I would lose my job.

Using the Minimum Wage to Hamper Your Rivals
07/24/09 - Econlog.Econlib by David Henderson

[edited] Forty years ago, politicians who pushed for the increased minimum wage did not hide their motives or their knowledge of who the victims would be.

In a 1957 Senate hearing, Senator (and future President) John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts said:

Having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, the wages of the white worker who has to compete.

When an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage, it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn't it? There are, as you pointed out, hundreds of thousands of colored workers looking for decent work.

Exploiting the Minimum Wage
07/24/09 - Open Market by Ryan Young

[edited] Young people with little or no work experience may not be able to offer $7.25 per hour worth of productivity. No wonder so many of them are having trouble finding summer jobs. The law says that they have to be paid more than they are worth [if they are hired]. Wage floors reduce the number of jobs.

Raising Rival's Costs
7/24/09 - Marginal Revolution by Alex Tabarrok

[edited] Some employers benefit from an increase in the minimum wage because it raises the cost of labor for their rivals. This is why unions have typically been in favor of the minimum wage even when their own workers make much more than the minimum.

Borrowing Costs Per Legislator

Consider borrowing $1 billion. This costs $40 million/year at 4%.

There are 535 congressmen and senators. That is $75,000 each per year, without paying back any of the principal loan.

This year, the US is borrowing about $2 trillion. The cost of this is $150 million per federal legislator, per year.

Let's just pay the legislators a few million more per year in salary, if they will stop borrowing money.

Regulations are Too Complex and Dangerous

"A Crisis Of Politics, Not Economics:
Complexity, Ignorance, And Policy Failure"
07/16/09 - Critical Review by Jeffrey Friedman (PDF)
(Via Cafe Hayek)

The abstract summary seems right to me. Edited.

• The financial crisis was caused by the complex, constantly growing web of regulations designed to constrain and redirect modern capitalism.
• This complexity made investors, bankers, and perhaps regulators themselves ignorant of regulations previously promulgated across decades and in different “fields” of regulation.
• These regulations interacted with each other to foster the issuance and securitization of subprime mortgages; their rating as AA or AAA; and their concentration on and off the balance sheets of many commercial and investment banks.
• As a practical matter, it was impossible to predict the disastrous outcome of these interacting regulations.
• Government has attempted for 100 years to create a hybrid capitalism in which regulations are supposed to remedy economic problems as they arise. This may be impossible to do in practice due to complexity.

Motto of government: Let's have 50 more regulations and see what happens.

I see the government as falsly advertising that they have produced trustworthy systems. This leads people to trust the governmnet, drop their guards, and be hurt more badly than if they had been prudent and skeptical.

The government creates the idea that regulation makes a business trustworthy even if parts of the business are hidden from investors. In fact, only open disclosure and public audit can give confidence in a business.

The Bernie Madoff theft shows this. People trusted in the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate Madoff and find any fraud. The SEC did investigate him twice, and found nothing. They excused themselves by saying that they really didn't have the resources to find fraud.

While not helping much, regulations cost $trillions.

----------
The Madoff Scandal Exposes Government Failure
07/17/09 - Future of Freedom Foundation by Sheldon Richman

[edited] No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem is blamed on small zones of freedom. The government can’t possibly monitor and regulate everything in a country, but it claims that it must. Anything that displeases the government can be an excuse for stamping out whatever freedom still exists.

A false sense of security is worse than none at all. People are more vulnerable to scams when they believe government is protecting them, because they relax their efforts to protect themselves. The government broadcasts one unmistakable message: Have no fear because Big Brother is watching over you.

Free-market advocates do not claim that we need no protection from the unscrupulous. Rather, protection is maximized by undiluted market discipline, profit, loss, and buyer-beware skepticism.

A Hidden Cost of National Health Care

The Hidden Cost Of National Health Care
07/11/09 - Washington Examiner Op-Ed by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Treatment will be rationed by slowing the development of new treatments, along with longer waiting times and plain denial.

[edited exerpts] The normal and valid critique of socialized medicine is that people have to wait a long time for treatment in places like Britain.

There is another, hidden cost. A bureaucratized healthcare system will squash medical innovation.

Todays treatments did not come out out of the blue. They were developed by drug companies and device makers who thought they had a good market for things that would make people feel better.

But, under nationalized healthcare, the "market" is whatever the bureaucrats are willing to buy. Treatment for politically stylish diseases will get some money, but the main concern will be cost-control. More treatments mean more costs to bureaucrats.

Bureaucrats have their own view of cost. Medicines like Prilosec have made ulcer surgery a thing of the past. But, to bureaucrats, those pills are a cost, while ulcer-surgery expenses can be reduced by rationing. Let 'em eat Maalox while they wait.

The potential marvels of the next twenty years will never be developed unless some developer sees a market. This is despite the great promise of new medical technology for cancer treatment, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and more.

The existence of a market will be much less certain with bureaucrats in charge of selecting treatments to pay for. Federally funded medical research will still go on, but turning that research into actual treatments is a different story.

----------
Begging for Medical Care File that emergency request in writing during office hours.
---
Will your socialized hospital have enough money to care for you?

The actress Natasha Richardson died after hitting her head in a ski fall. She was very unlucky. Montreal does not have fast transportation to a full-service hospital, even near a ski area. Why not? Patients are a cost to the system.

The bureaucracy sees you as a cost, especially if you have already paid. All people and organizations seek income and avoid costs. Socialized healthcare is paid up-front and delivers services after the fact.

How hard will a system work to earn the money that they have already been paid? This is something that everyone can understand in their gut. A customer is lost without competition for his dollar.

The Actual Role of Government

Michael Moore Gets It Wrong
07/11/09 - John Stossel

Everyone is greedy, it is how you organize things that matters.

Socialists
The government is a caring institution that has been taken hostage by big business. We can free it by making it big enough to resist these businesses. Then the government can give the citizens a fair and prosperous world.

Libertarians
The government is a regulatory oppressor with a big sign in neon "Buy your favors and loopholes here". The back room has a high cover charge, a gambling casino, and rooms for sleeping with legislators. The front room is musty, with slow service and dirty glasses. The cardboard sign reads "We will improve service after we raise our prices".

Capitalists
The simple ones just want to make and sell things. The sly ones see the government as an opportunity which they can't resist. They all have to find a way around the regulations, mostly by paying to stay in business.

Reformers
Everyone is a reformer. The front room is obviously bad, and there are many speeches about fixing it up. Winners go to the back room, where they go along to get along, and work on the problem of not being poor at the end of their elective careers.

----------
How do you see the government? Caring mother held hostage, or corrupt ruler selling favors?

Who's the Materialist?

Who's the Materialist?
07/11/09 - Cafe Hayek by Donald J. Boudreaux

[edited] Capitalism emphatically does improve material living standards. But more, all the great champions of economic freedom ultimately justify capitalism because only it affords true dignity to individuals. That dignity is denied by systems which arbitrarily diminish each person's freedom to choose.

It is fine for "Progressives" such as Mr. Dionne not to share the value of freedom. But it is rather cheeky with one breath to accuse proponents of capitalism as unduly focused on material goods, and with the next breath to insist that a major problem with capitalism is that some people get fewer material goods than do other people.

Government Healthcare by Experts

The Mayo Clinic weighs in
07/11/09 - Don Surber

Dr. Wood is the chairman of the Mayo Clinic, division of Health Care Policy & Research:

[edited] The clinic supports “value indexing” to determine how providers get paid. This would measure patient outcomes and cost over a period of time. The current bills in Congress contain very little that reflects payment for value.

Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar:

[edited]If we just simply change who is paying for something and do nothing to make the system more efficient, we are really not going to get where we want to go.

Don Surber:

[edited] This is exactly what is wrong with government-run health programs. Their goal is to save money, not lives. More than anything, I oppose having Sen. Klobuchar decide how “to make the system more efficient.”

Jim B comments:

[edited] When Sen. Klobuchar can show me a record of the government ever making anything more efficient, ever, then maybe we can talk about health care. But she needs to put up or shut up. Government bureaucrats claim to be able to do things they’ve never once demonstrated an ability to do. There’s absolutely no substance to back it up.

So come on, supporters of ObamaCare, show me where you can back up your claims. Even one of them.

Links

Healthcare Reform Myths

One of the myths: If you like your current plan you can keep it.

You can keep your current plan if it is still offered and the company is still around. This is not a silly consideration. Proponents have learned from the Hillary Care proposal in the 1990's that radical transformation does not sell. The current plan provides a framework to take away freedoms one at a time, to minimize resistance, and obscure the ultimate goal.

A century of monopoly by the Post Office shows us how much Congress likes competition to one of its high-cost, inefficient activities. Private insurance likely will disappear or be made to conform to government rules, standards, limitations, and costs.

----------
Massachusetts Health Care Cuts

Henry Stern at InsureBlog examines the Massachusetts Health program that is the darling of Washington. Here is a part:

Massachusetts can't pay for the plan by itself. It needs Washington to distribute funds from the national money tree to pay for this program.

$32 million of the $115 million in claimed savings comes from slowing payments to the managed-care health insurance companies that won bids to offer insurance through the Commonwealth Care program. Regulators said that by slowing enrollment growth, the companies would receive less money than they had banked on when they submitted their bids earlier this year.

Overselling Science

Overselling Science
07/10/09 - ChicagoBoyz by Shannon Love

Why polls of scientists don't mean much, even if they are real scientists making their living from research. Read it all.

[edited] The problem with polling “scientists” is that there is a wide range in the predictive power of the studies that we lump together as “science”.

Physics has tremendous predictive power, but sociology has almost none. Worse, scientists in highly predictive fields tend to have too much trust in less predictive fields, and scientists in low- or non-predictive fields try to gain public trust by referring to the success of highly predictive fields.

Non-predictive sciences invite social and political fads. There was wide agreement a hundred years ago on the validity of eugenics, Improving a human population by discouraging people with undesirable traits from having children, or of mating people who have desireable traits. more agreement than we have today on global warming. Darwin strongly opposed implementing eugenics, but nevertheless believed in its validity.

Likewise, most scientists of that era thought it was obvious that races differed in behavior because they had different biology. Much bad policy, even in politically liberal countries, was based on this flawed and oversold “scientific” idea.

The theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) has the same social and political dynamics as did eugenics. Climatology has not predicted climate either in the short or long term. The computer models [and their predictions for tens or hundreds of years into the future] cannot be tested by any observation in the here and now. Yet, the public gives climatology the same respect as meteorology, physics, and chemistry.

To global warming, we could add each past “scientific” consensus on the population bomb, resource depletion, energy crisis, and inevitable nuclear war. In all of these cases, scientists and the public thought untested models with no predictive power were similar to the highly predictive models [of the experimental, physical sciences].

----------
Global warming caused by humans is a scam
The proponents of Global Warming don't mind lying for the good of us all. Saving the world justifies much cutting of corners.

Be Skeptical About Scientists and Polls

Scientists Versus The Great Unwashed
07/10/09 - Just One Minute by Tom Maguire

Survey Shows Gap Between Scientists and the Public
07/09/09 - New York Times by Cornelia Dean

Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public and Media
07/09/09 - Pew Research Center for the People & the Press

-----
I don't trust Pew research polls, after seeing this poll and information about it. I am skeptical of all polls, and the word "scientist".

Mr. Maguire reviews an article in the NY Times which reports a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, working with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Opinions differed between scientists and the general public.

Pew said "scientists". I credit Ms. Dean for the following, which is not emphasized in the Pew report:

NYT Ms. Dean: [edited] The survey involved about 2,000 of the public and 2,500 scientists drawn from the rolls of the AAAS, which includes teachers, administrators and others involved in science, as well as researchers.

The Pew report section About the survey is at the end of the report, the last segment of 10, and says:

Pew Report [edited] Results for the scientist survey are based on 2,533 online interviews. A sample of 9,998 members was drawn from the AAAS membership list excluding those who were not based in the United States or whose membership type identified them as primary or secondary-level educators.

The term "scientist" is used everywhere, but the survey contacted the AAAS membership, which includes people with a career related to science, and can include anyone. The survey excluded grade-school and high-school teachers, but included administrators. It seems that this classification is whatever each member listed when joining.

Rhetoric and Bias

It bothers me that Ms. Dean reports on a survey and inserts her own beliefs. For evolution and global warming, the supposed scientists agree with her, and the public is dumb. For nuclear power, she does not report on the supposed scientists who come to a conclusion different from liberal opinion.

This is a common misuse of surveys and group opinions. We often hear that we should believe something because "almost all scientists agree".

• How can we know that thay all agree?
• What does "all" mean?
• Who are the "scientists"?
• If "scientists" are all trustworthy, how can they disagree? If they are not all trustworthy, why are we polling them?
• Who employs them and how will they benefit from acceptance of their results?
• What are their areas of expertise?
• Have they opened their research, data, methods, and computer models to public examination?
• Has their research survived critical attention? Did they respond to criticism with thoughtful detail, or dismiss their critics as evil idiots?

Macguire selected these parts of the NY Times article.

[edited] There is a large gap between the views of scientists and ordinary Americans about climate change, evolution, and the state of the nation’s research enterprise.

Almost all of the scientists accept that human beings evolved by natural processes and that human activity, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels, is causing global warming. The general public is far less sure.

Almost a third of ordinary Americans say human beings have always existed in their current form. Only 2% of the scientists agree. Only half of the public agrees that people cause climate change, and 11% does not believe there is any warming at all.

About a third of Americans think there is lively scientific debate on both topics. In fact, there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution and there is little doubt that humans are altering the atmosphere in ways that threaten global climate.

Dean associates evolution and global warming as two settled theories. Evolution has been studied for 150 years with confirmation from many directions and sources that has survived public evaluation and criticism. Global Warming investigations are recent, biased by government support and political pressure, and results are unsettled and exaggerated The proponents of Global Warming don't mind lying for the good of us all.

Dean says "almost all of the scientists accept", implying that the issue is settled, except for the dumb public that has not yet accepted the uncomfortable implications.

Macguire points out something Dean does not report. The supposed scientists want more power plants, an action that is not supported by liberals.

[edited] Interesting, the Times forgot to report this factoid from a Pew chart. 70% of scientists (but only 51% of the public) favor "building more nuclear power plants". On global warming, 49% of the public and 84% of scientists believe that "the earth is getting warmer because of human activity".

----------
Global warming caused by humans is a scam
The proponents of Global Warming don't mind lying for the good of us all. Saving the world justifies much cutting of corners.

Obama Can Win The Chicago Way

Quote of the Day . . 07/08/09 - ChicagoBoyz by Jonathan
Minus Five . . 07/08/09 - Belmont Club by Richard Fernandez

Life Of The Mind commented on Obama's declining polls and his re-election prospects if this trend continues. Despite any development, Obama plans to win.

[edited] Soros, Axelrod, and Obama know what they are doing. They won't cancel elections or do anything spectacular that will rally resistance. I don't expect them to worry much about sagging poll numbers.

They intend to win the next election, despite 15-20% unemployment and inflation in 18 months. They intend to do it the Chicago way, to buy it with your money.

• The Democrats will have $500 billion of slush funds ready to pump out for the 2010 election.
• Acorn and an army of hacks will push to hold onto Congress in 2010.
• The census will be cooked to deliver the Congress in 2012.
• The declining economy will drain resources from the opposition.
• The carping left will discover a new discipline that Republicans could never threaten them with. Recalcitrant academics and think tanks will be defunded, and media jobs will be increasingly under the control of Obama aligned conglomerates.
• Immigration reform will complete the picture for Obama’s reelection.

Much of this will be technically illegal and corrupt. But, they will not resort to violence or attempt to repeal the 2nd Amendment before 2012.

People should stop assuming that Obama will make a mistake and do something overtly revolutionary. This hope puts people in a passive, reactive mode. Some expect that his birth certificate or college transcript will magically appear and then somehow force someone to invalidate the election.

Anyone thinking that way needs to have Cher slap him in the face and yell "Snap out of it". Can we win this battle? Yes, but it will take hard sustained work.

Newspaper Influence Peddling

A Question That Needs to be Asked
07/06/09 - ChicagoBoyz by James R. Rummel

Newspapers influence public opinion, and that influence is quite valuable. It seems that some newspapers are selling that influence. Do you still trust your newspaper?

[edited] The Washington Post salon scandal reveals that publisher Katharine Weymouth invited people to pay up to $25,000 USD in order to have dinner at her house.

For that money, the movers and shakers at the newspaper would personally introduce you to the movers and shakers at the White House, as well as the reporters who covered them. Pay them cash, and the good folks at the WaPo would create an instant handshake relationship with the people who are shaping the future of the country, and the reporters who shape public perception. This was irresistible to special interest groups, corporations, and lobbyists.

This is done all the time by newspapers with their foot in the door of the White House press room. But, this time it was jsut too blatant to pass the smell test.

David Bradley is chairman of the board at Atlantic Media. He emphasized that there can be no influence/access peddling going on, because everything that happens at the get-togethers is strictly off the record!

Idiots rarely work their way up to become ultra-rich, and dumb inheritors rarely hang on to wealth for long. They were not idiots. They expected good value for their bucks, and they must have received that value because they kept coming back for more.

Obama Explains Millionaire Grants (smile)

Future News:

It is just weeks after Barack Obama won the 2012 election to his second term as President. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs provided some details today about President Obama's campaign promise to "make 95% of all citizens a millionaire".

Participants must earn less than $50,000, with a net worth less than $50,000. They must be a legal resident for 3 years at the time of the grant. Illegal status will incur a $10,000 penalty in exchange for immediate citizenship. Gibbs said: "It just seems fair not to spoil such a happy event because of a technicality".

The White House will establish the Department of Citizen Grants to administer the program. Applicants can sign up at WhiteHouse.gov or write to an address to be announced. DCG will be fully established "by next year, or a bit later". Until then, one grant per month will be "completed by hand". Grant ceremonies may be televised.

The DCG will issue at least 1,000 grants each month, "or even more" when fully operational.

Gibbs deflected criticism that this plan was too expensive and was proposed merely to buy votes. "We are all tired of hearing 'NO' from Republicans. They should propose their own plan if they object to ours."

Republicans complain that this program will cost at least $12 billion per year and will take approximately 11,000 years to award grants to just the 130 million people who are taxpayers.

Gibbs: "We disagree with our opponents figures. Our economic advisors fully approve of this plan. These negative projections do not take into account future advances in money creation and grant making, which will result in net savings to the government overall and a revenue neutral program. The economy will receive $18 billion per year from this money injection, a 1.5 multiplier. The 60% tax on incomes over $100,000 will raise more than $6.5 billion per year for government programs to help the poor."

A reporter from Fox News asked Gibbs to "just look at the numbers". Gibbs: "I am not an economist, and I am not authorized to scribble things on a blackboard, even if we had a blackboard. We live in the richest country in the world, and $12 billion per year is quite affordable within the $20 trillion 2013 federal budget."

----------
Let's Counterfeit Our Way to Wealth
When an idea leads directly to a crazy result, what should we think about that idea? Maybe laugh at it until Obama explains in detail how it works.

If you believe Obama, Keynes, and their proclaimed wealth multiplier of 1.5 on government spending, then it would be valuable to counterfeit as much money as possible, of course under government regulation. You don't have to borrow counterfeit money, or pay it back. It is ideal for Keynesian government projects.

Gaining Power Through Public Policy

Social Science and Public Policy
07/03/09 - EconLog by economist Arnold Kling

[edited] Political Economy is the science of obtaining and retaining power. The pollster, the fundraiser, and the media expert supply expertise to the operation. The public policy expert is for decoration. If you want to be an economic policy adviser, my advice is to learn how to put a good spin on the methods used by leading politicians to obtain power.

Is Health care reform about health, the stimulus about recovery, cap and trade about global warming, or TARP about the financial system? No, they are about seizing and retaining power.

The social scientist's role is to say, "X is a problem. Government must solve X. Here are some solutions." The solutions that rationalize seizing and retaining power will bubble to the top.

Suppose you believe that regulators cannot possibly have the wisdom to direct human activity, and that politicians spending other people's money tend to choose unwisely. Keep those beliefs to yourself, if you want to get anywhere as a public policy adviser.