Here's What's "Cruel": Trapping The Poor In A Lifetime Of Dependency

Have you ever noticed that all Chinese menus are remarkably the same?  Moo shu pork.  General Tso's Chicken.  Beef with broccoli.  Sweet and sour pork.  In New York, everybody knows that it's because all the Chinese food is prepared in one massive central kitchen located beneath Times Square.  Of course it's all the same!

What hasn't been as widely recognized is that there is also one massive central newsroom, equally located just beneath Time Square (right next to the central Chinese kitchen), that prepares the progressive news talking points each day and distributes them to dozens of seemingly separate televisions networks, newspapers and websites.  How else to explain that you can go to literally any one of the so-called "mainstream" sites on any given day, and find not only the same stories, but generally also expressed in the exact same words?  Recently -- by which I mean, since January 20 -- the selected words always have been chosen to maximize the degree of evil attributed to the new President and Congress.

And thus, with the unveiling last week of the first proposal from the Republican Congress to start undoing Obamacare, we find the immediate emergence of the official progressive talking point clearly emanating from the central newsroom:  This is "cruel."  The CBO has estimated a likely increase in the number of people without healthcare "coverage."  Go literally anywhere, and you find this circumstance described with the same word -- "cruel" -- repeated, over and over. At the New Republic on March 14 it's "The Incredible Cruelty of Trumpcare" (subtitle "Republicans are willing to cause a humanitarian crisis just to give permanent tax cuts to millionaires").  At New York Magazine, it's "Trumpcare Is The Culmination of All the GOP's Healthcare Lies" ("they instead rushed out a plan that is shambolic and cruel").  At the Washington Post on March 8, it's "the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus . . . is terribly distressed by the fact that the Ryan bill is insufficiently cruel to poor people."  Paul Krugman of the New York Times put it in a tweet on March 14: "The first and most important legislative initiative [of the new Congress] is stupid as well as cruel . . . ."  There are dozens of other examples.

You get the idea.  The little people are incapable of facing any downside risk of life on their own.  Any failure of the federal government to accept and provide for any and all downside risks of life, right down to a couple of aspirin to help with a headache, is "cruel."  It's "heartless."  It's "a humanitarian crisis."  Government's job is to make sure that all people have free or affordable "healthcare," so that any healthcare issue that arises in their lives can be promptly treated, at public expense.   

Of course, it is a given that government-provided health care is a moral imperative.  Without it, people who are poor and of low income will go without needed medical treatment.  They will suffer, and then die.  Right?  I mean, everybody knows that people who go without healthcare "coverage" have a higher death rate than people who are "covered."  Everybody knows that because, back in 2002, the Institute of Medicine estimated 18,000 excess deaths per year among the "uninsured," based on an assumption that uninsured people had a mortality rate higher than that of the insured.  In 2009, in the run-up to enactment of Obamacare, a Harvard "study" upped the estimate of annual excess deaths among the uninsured to some 45,000, again based upon an assumption that the "uncovered" must have higher mortality.

And yet.  First came that controlled study in Oregon where thousands of people were randomly assigned to Medicaid and non-Medicaid groups.  The results were reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013:

This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes . . . .    

But here is what is even more significant.  Look at reports of health data among high-Medicaid recipient populations of poor people.  What you will find is that their health outcomes are universally inferior to national or city norms on any measure you can think of.  As discussed here several days ago, last year New York City published health data for 2015 broken down by neighborhood.  Look up the data for the poor and majority-black neighborhoods, where Medicaid is pervasive, and you can see how well Medicaid is working -- or not.  After 50+ years of massive and ever-growing spending, has Medicaid succeeded in bringing health outcomes among the poor up to national norms, or are the poor stuck in a rut of persistently inferior health outcomes?  It's not even close.  Here is the report for Central Harlem; here's the one for Mott Haven/Melrose in the Bronx; here's the one for Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn; and here's the one for Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn.

  A sample of some of the results:  

• U.S. life expectancy in 2016 was 78.8 years.  But in Harlem it was 75.1 years; in Mott Haven/Melrose 76.1 years; in Bed-Stuy 75.1 years.  And in the ultimate public housing, Medicaid, and food stamp dependency utopia of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, life expectancy was just 74.1 years, almost five full years less than the national norm.  
• Obesity and diabetes rates are far higher in these neighborhoods than elsewhere in New York City.  In the four cited neighborhoods, obesity rates range from 28% of the population in Central Harlem to 33% in Bed-Stuy, against a city norm of 24%.  Diabetes rates are 50% above the city-wide norm of 10% of the population in all of Mott Haven/Melrose, Bed-Stuy, and Brownsville, and 30% above in Harlem.
• These neighborhoods far exceed city norms for drug and alcohol-related hospitalizations.  Brownsville is again the "leader," with 2,285 alcohol-related hospitalizations per 100,000 population in 2015, and 2682 drug-related hospitalizations per 100,000, as against city-wide norms of 1019 and 907 per 100,000 respectively.  The best of the four is Bed-Stuy, with "only" 1713 alcohol-related hospitalizations per 100,000, and 1830 drug-related.
• Medicaid beneficiaries supposedly have infinite free pre-natal care and obstetrical services.  Yet somehow, infant mortality is far higher in all of these neighborhoods than city-wide norms.  The city-wide norm for infant mortality per 1000 births is 4.7.  But the rate is 8.1 in Central Harlem, 8.0 in Brownsville, and 6.6 in Mott Haven/Melrose.  Only Bed-Stuy, at 5.0 is near the city norm.
• In the category of "premature mortality," where the city-wide rate is 198.4 per 100,000, Brownsville leads the city with a rate of 367.1.  Bed-Stuy ranks third at 309.2, and Mott Haven/Melrose fourth at 305.7.  Central Harlem is closest to the city norm -- not very close -- at 293.1.

Do you maybe get the idea that something is not working here?  While no association of Medicaid "coverage" with better health outcomes can be demonstrated, it is glaringly obvious that what can be demonstrated is an association between widespread dependency on government programs for the poor (of which Medicaid is the largest and most widely available) and worse health outcomes.  Much worse health outcomes.

I don't know why high dependency on government programs in general, and Medicaid in particular, is so closely associated with much higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, higher death rates and shorter life spans.  But the best hypothesis is that no-questions-asked handouts take away human independence and act as a "subtle destroyer of the human spirit."  (The phrase comes from the 1935 Address to Congress of Franklin Roosevelt.)  If you can't improve your life by working hard, why not just take drugs? 

Anyway, if we are to take it as established that subjecting the poor to worse health outcomes is "cruel," then the path forward is obvious.  The thing to do is to lower rates of dependency.  Get as many people as possible off of Medicaid, and for that matter food stamps and subsidized housing.  Bring back some striving to the lives of the poor!  Anything else is "cruel"!

Somehow, I don't think that anyone has yet written this story in the central newsroom beneath Times Square.   

Good Riddance To Preet Bharara

Late last week, President Trump and Attorney General Sessions somewhat belatedly fired the 46 Obama-appointed U.S. Attorneys who had not already resigned.  Forty-five of the 46 promptly and appropriately submitted resignations.  One did not -- and, of course, it was Preet Bharara of the Southern District of New York.  Bharara ostentatiously refused.  He was then fired over the weekend, whereupon he compared his dismissal to the shutting of a New York State anti-corruption panel a few years ago.  Seems that Preet thought he was so important that the rules that allowed Presidents Clinton and Obama to fire all sitting U.S. Attorneys did not apply as to him and President Trump.

Needless to say, the New York press is filled with wailing and complaints about the firing of Bharara.  (As far as I can tell, none of them ever uttered a peep about the actions of Clinton and Obama.)  Even the New York Post, which should know better, expresses its regrets at Bharara's departure, in an editorial headlined "Thank You, Preet."  Excerpt:

President Trump’s dismissal of Preet Bharara as New York’s US attorney leaves a giant hole here. . . .  But this much is clear: New Yorkers will long be grateful for Bharara’s work — and its impact will be long felt.

Over at the New York Times, there is a long news article (not an editorial) headlined "A U.S. Attorney Who Shunned Politics Meets an End Tinged By Them."   You can guess the theme from the headline:  this was a guy who was the classic completely independent prosecutor, wholly above politics -- unlike those corrupt and mean and "highly politicized" Trumpians.  A few snippets: 

[A] theme that Mr. Bharara harped on throughout his tenure pursuing a host of public corruption, terrorism, civil rights and Wall Street cases [was that] [p]olitics and prosecution do not mix. . . .  “One hallmark of justice is absolute independence, and that was my touchstone every day that I served,” Mr. Bharara said in a statement on Saturday.

Sure, Preet.  So, as usual, it falls to the Manhattan Contrarian to present the dissenting voice.  Here's my view:  On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "politicized, overreaching, and consumed with personal ambition" and 10 is "completely honest and independent," Eliot Spitzer was a 1 and Bharara about a 3. 

Let's start with that nonsense about "absolute independence."  Probably, Preet actually believes that that mantra applies to himself.  And yes, he did prosecute politicians of both parties, including obtaining a conviction of long-time Democratic Speaker of the New York State Assembly, Sheldon Silver, to go with his seemingly comparable conviction of Republican Majority Leader of the New York State Senate, Dean Skelos.  But if you look a little closer, the two were not comparable at all.  Silver led an approximately two-to-one majority of Democrats over Republicans in the Assembly, so his conviction was irrelevant to political control of the chamber.  Skelos, on the other hand, led a precarious majority of at most one or two seats (depending on the election cycle), was the single guy most responsible for maintaining that precarious majority, and himself held a competitive seat whose flipping had the potential of turning over control of the chamber all by itself.  Getting rid of Skelos was the number one priority of all Democrats in New York.  

And then there is the issue of the seriousness of the "crimes" -- or even, the question of whether the underlying conduct was even criminal.  In an area where the statutes are notoriously vague, and prominent convictions are regularly reversed by the Second Circuit or Supreme Court on the grounds that the underlying conduct is not criminal (see coverage of Joe Bruno here and Bob McDonnell here), Silver's case was relatively clear cut.  In the most notable example, Silver directed $500,000 from a legislative slush fund personally controlled by him to a research doctor at Columbia University; and in return, that doctor referred multiple asbestos injury cases to a law firm with which Silver was affiliated, leading to several million dollars of referral fees for Silver.  In Skelos's case -- which is still on appeal -- it is not at all clear that the underlying conduct will stand up as criminal.  Here is my account of the principal allegations from the Skelos indictment, from a post shortly after the indictment in May 2015:

This is all about Skelos allegedly trying to help his son Adam get some paying work.  There is no allegation of any money improperly going to Skelos himself.  The total amount of money alleged to have improperly changed hands seems relatively trivial -- $218,000 if I am counting correctly, and over a period of four years.  Of the $218,000, almost all, $198,000, is from a consulting contract that Adam got with an unnamed and uncharged environmental technology company.  Supposedly the company gave Adam the consulting gig because the dad got the company a $12 million contract with Nassau County.  But wait a minute -- Skelos didn't have any position with Nassau County.  The contract was subject to approval by the County Legislature, and got that.  These legislators may well all be friends of Skelos (his State Senate seat is in Nassau County), but it can't possibly be that he controlled this decision in any real sense.      

Also covered in the same May 2015 post was the complete lack of interest expressed by Bharara and his office in the fact that Chelsea Clinton had somehow landed an equally fake gig at NBC News that paid approximately triple the amount of money as Adam Skelos's job, and over a much shorter period of time.  And also the complete lack of interest by Bharara and his office in the Clinton Foundation, which hauled in something like $2 billion, much of which while Hillary was Secretary of State.  OK, the FBI did ultimately take that one up.  But, if the question is, am I impressed by Bharara's "political independence," the answer is that I am not.

Then there was Bharara's improper use of criminal "insider trading" law to reach plenty of people who were not insiders at all, but whose conduct in making money in the trading game somehow offended Mr. Bharara's sense of propriety.  Bharara's jihad was ultimately stopped by the Second Circuit in the case of Messrs. Newman and Chiasson, both of whom had to go all the way through trial and suffer a conviction before having what I thought was an obviously correct legal position vindicated on appeal.  I covered that situation (among other places) in this post from August 2015.  Bharara (and his cohorts at Justice) insisted on taking that one all the way to cert denied at the Supreme Court before giving up.  In this post from December 2014 I called on Bharara to "do the right thing" after the Newman/Chiasson reversal by acknowledging that he had been wrong as to the law and agreeing to vacation of the convictions of many others who had pleaded guilty to the "non-insider insider trading."  He didn't do it, and held on to the bitter end.  Doing the right thing is not part of Preet Bharara's make-up.

And then we have Bharara's conduct of the phoniest of all phony prosecutions of all time, namely the criminal prosecution of J.P. Morgan for not uncovering the fraud of Bernie Madoff.  Here are a few remarks that I made about that prosecution in a post in October 2013:

The central irony of this one, of course, is that the government itself, in the person of the SEC, had both better information and better access to information about Madoff than JPM or anyone else.  The SEC had the right to inspect books and records.  The SEC had subpoena power.  The SEC actually sent people in to Madoff's offices no fewer than five times to conduct examinations or investigations.  The SEC had a well-informed guy named Harry Markopolos writing it one letter after another setting forth in layman's terms why Madoff's operation was and had to be a Ponzi scheme.  And compared to JPM or anyone else, it's actually the SEC's job, if they have any job, to figure out which operators are crooks and stop them.

How did that one end up?  Nobody at the SEC was fired or even publicly criticized by their superiors.  And J.P. Morgan?  They paid about $2 billion for the supposed "crime" of not alerting the government to Madoff's suspicious activities.  It was a settlement, of course.  The big banks will never risk a trial.  Bharara got a big press conference and his name in the papers for being the "sheriff of Wall Street," or something like that.

And how about the Reason Magazine subpoena?  Here is Reason's own account of the matter, from a June 2015 article headlined "How Government Stifled Reason's Free Speech."  This one arose out of a Reason article reporting on the sentencing of Ross Ulbricht after his conviction for allegedly running the Silk Road website.  Several commenters on the article at the Reason site made anonymous remarks that were highly critical or even threatening as to the sentencing judge.  Bharara's office served a subpoena on Reason to get the names of the commenters, and inserted into the subpoena language purportedly ordering Reason not to reveal or publicly discuss the existence of the subpoena or what it sought.  That part of the subpoena was clearly illegal and unconstitutional.  But hey, this was Bharara's office!

I could go on, but you get the picture.  Everyone should be really glad to be rid of this guy.  President Trump will be hard pressed to do worse in his replacement.

Andrew Cuomo And Progressives Treating The Voters Like Idiots

In yesterday's post I remarked on the degree to which climate propagandists treat their readers like idiots.  How does that compare with the way New York politicians treat their voters?  You be the judge!

Today's New York Post engages in a little tea leaf reading, and foretells a likely 2020 presidential run by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.  From the article headlined "$$ moves hinting at Cuo '20 run for prez": 

Gov. Cuomo has hired two Florida fundraisers, a sign he’s building a national network to launch a presidential bid, sources told The Post. . . .  “Hiring out-of-state fundraising staff, particularly in a battleground state, opens up money spigots beyond what would normally be available and is a key first step to laying the groundwork for a run,” said one source, a Democratic operative. . . .  Karen Hinton, a former Cuomo aide [said], “He is positioning himself to be seen as a liberal who can speak to a national audience.”

So when this guy goes out and speaks "as a liberal" to the "national audience," what is he going to say?  To get some clues on that, we might look to the most recent initiatives that he has launched.  For example, in the New York Times on Friday, we have "Cuomo's $1.4 Billion Plan Targets Brooklyn in Fight Against Poor Health and Poverty."  Yes, it seems that in that corner of the universe subject to the very most intense levels of anti-poverty, Medicaid, and public housing expenditures anywhere -- namely, Central Brooklyn -- and where poverty and health never seem to get any better despite all the spending, our genius governor has decided that an extra $1.4 billion of taxpayer funds is now finally going to turn the tide.  Excerpts:

Citing persistent problems of poverty, violence and poor health, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced a comprehensive plan on Thursday that would direct $1.4 billion of New York State’s resources to long-suffering areas of central Brooklyn.  Obesity, murder and unemployment rates are all higher in central Brooklyn than the city and state averages. The plan would allot the biggest chunk of money, $700 million, to health care. It would also create 3,000 affordable housing units, 7,600 new jobs and more than five acres of recreation space at state-funded housing developments.  Mr. Cuomo said the plan also includes anti-violence programs and job-training efforts — a “soup-to-nuts” approach that he said was designed to give central Brooklyn enough resources so its residents could be “in a position to help themselves.”  The initiative, which Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, held up as a national paradigm, comes at a time he is burnishing his credentials with a string of progressive moves that have stirred talk of a possible run for the presidency in 2020. It also comes as anti-poverty initiatives have all but dropped from the national political agenda.

Now, I'm going to suggest a revolutionary concept here.  How about this:  before we spend this next $1.4 billion on health and anti-poverty efforts in Central Brooklyn, can we take just a little peek at how things are going with the current spending on health and anti-poverty efforts in the same location?  Is the current level of spending above or below national norms, and what do the results look like?  If you read through that New York Times article, you will undoubtedly note that they do not undertake this task.  That's why you have the Manhattan Contrarian!

Start with health.  New York State and City have a famously over-the-top Medicaid program that has long provided every available healthcare option, at absolute top dollar. cost to the taxpayer.  They don't break down cost per enrollee by county, let alone neighborhood; but with a little looking we can learn that New York State had 6.39 million Medicaid enrollees as of December 2016, and total spending in the most recent year available (FY 2015, Oct. 1, 2014 to Sept. 30, 2015) was $59.8 billion.  That would be about $9,500 per Medicaid enrollee, and $38,000 for each family of four.  With another year-and-a-half under our belt, we're probably right around $10,000 per enrollee and $40,000 per family of four by now.  (And you thought that $20,000 per year for a family of four was a "cadillac" health plan!  We spend double that, and on every single poor family.)  By contrast, total U.S. Medicaid enrollment was 74.2 million as of December 2016, and total spending for FY 2015 was $532.2 billion, or about $7200 per enrollee (same links).  Not cheap, but a lot less than New York.  And fiscally prudent states spend way less.  For example, Texas had total Medicaid spending in FY 2015 of $35.8 billion, less than 60% of New York's Medicaid spending, even though its population is 30% larger than that of New York.

Surely then, New York achieves top end health outcomes for its poor citizens?  Not even close.  You actually can get some key health metrics for New York broken down by neighborhood.  The two big predominantly-black neighborhoods of Central Brooklyn are Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ocean Hill-Brownsville.  In 2015 New York City put out "community health profiles" broken down by neighborhood.  Here's the profile for Bed-Stuy, and here's the one for Ocean Hill-Brownsville.  You won't be surprised to learn that Bed-Stuy and Ocean Hill-Brownsville are at the bottom of the heap on every health metric that they report.  For example:

• Obesity rate: Bed-Stuy 33%, Brownsville 32%, New York City 24%
• Diabetes: Bed-Stuy 15%, Brownsville 15%, New York City 10%
• Alcohol-related hospitalizations:  Bed-Stuy 1713 per 100,000; Brownsville 2285; New York City 1019
• Drug-related hospitalizations: Bed-Stuy 1830 per 100,000; Brownsville 2682; New York City 907
• Stroke hospitalizations: Bed-Stuy 415 per 100,000; Brownsville 413; New York City 319
• Psychiatric hospitalizations: Bed-Stuy 1060 per 100,000; Brownsville 1727; New York City 684

Go ahead and keep this up as long as you want.  In the face of over-the-top blank check Medicaid spending, these poor black neighborhoods lag the City norms on literally every health metric you can think of.  And when this is all that $60 billion per year can accomplish, now the next $700 million of annual healthcare spending is supposedly going to turn it all around?  You'd have to be completely delusional to believe that.

The next big focus of the new Cuomo initiative is of course that regular progressive Holy Grail, "affordable housing."  Have they tried that yet in Central Brooklyn?  Yes, in spades.  It's highly likely that you have never been to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and certainly I would not recommend it as a tourist destination.  It's hideous.  Basically, it's NewYork City Housing Authority projects in every direction as far as the eye can see.  So how has that worked in lowering the rate of poverty?  Actually, the poverty rate in Ocean Hill-Brownsville is 37%, as against a Brooklyn-wide rate of 24% and a City-wide rate of 21% (and a national rate of about 14%).  Bed-Stuy has a much lower concentration of projects than Brownsville, but still a few.  Its poverty rate is reported as 35%.  

It is completely obvious to anyone who is awake that subsidized and "affordable" housing initiatives increase rather than decrease the rate of measured poverty.  That is because the amount of the subsidy is not counted as "income" in determining who is in poverty, while at the same time the subsidies induce people to accept the housing and to keep their income low in order to keep the housing and/or minimize their rents under income-related rent formulas.

In short, Cuomo's new initiatives are the usual progressive doubling down on abject failure.  He's treating the voters like they are idiots!  But then, New York voters clearly enjoy being treated like idiots.  That's how you get elected here.  On the national stage, I wouldn't think this would work quite as well.

Last Gasp Of The Global Warming Scam: Treating You Like An Idiot

On Thursday, new EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box," and made a statement that has gotten a lot of attention.  The statement was: "I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see."

I would have said that that statement was just a rather obvious truism.  I mean, we have an enormously complex climate system, affected by literally dozens of factors, many of them hugely larger than us puny little humans -- things like the sun, solar wind, oceans, clouds, volcanoes, aerosols, multiple atmospheric "greenhouse gases" of which water vapor is the dominant one, tilt of the earth's axis, position of the solar system in the galaxy, and plenty of other things that we don't even know about.  And in the era of reasonably good measurements, world average temperatures (a poorly defined concept to begin with) have varied within a range of around one to two degrees, with the accuracy of measurement not much less than the amplitude of the variation.  With all that going on, does somebody claim to have the method to know precisely how much of the variation in temperatures derives from human activities?  To what level of accuracy?  Tenths -- or hundredths -- of one degree?  Really?  Where's the proof?  The whole concept is inherently implausible.  I don't even understand how Pruitt's statement is remotely controversial.

Well, needless to say, Pruitt's statement has caused a total freakout in the progressive press and media.  Kyle Drennen at NewsBusters has a roundup under the headline "Nets Freak Out Over EPA Chief Questioning Climate Change Dogma."    The roundup includes what Drennen describes as "hyperventilating" from the likes of Gayle King and Chip Reid of CBS, Michael Brune of the Sierra Club (“[Pruitt] should not be serving as head of the EPA and he should resign immediately”), Hallie Jackson of NBC, George Stephanopolous (Pruitt is “drawing some real fire for taking on the scientific consensus about climate change”) and Jon Karl of ABC, and so on.

But as usual, I turn to my favorite, Coral Davenport of the New York Times.  Somehow, this young lady with an English literature degree from Smith College has been given the job by the premier news outlet of progressivism to instruct you as to what you are and are not allowed to believe in the field of science.  In yesterday's edition, she has a long front-page feature on Pruitt's statement and the reaction to it, under the headline "E.P.A. Chief Doubts Consensus View of Climate Change."    As usual, it's the litany of blustery unsubstantiated statements from the regular enforcers of the official orthodoxy.  Excerpt:

A January report by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded, “The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.” . . . “The scientific community has studied this issue for decades,” [said Benjamin D.] Santer, [a climate researcher at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]. “The consensus message from many national and international assessments of the science is pretty simple: Natural factors can’t explain the size or patterns of observed warming. A large human influence on global climate is the best explanation for the warming we’ve measured and monitored.”

We've studied this for decades!  It's the consensus!  Well, OK, where is the empirical study that quantitatively establishes that "natural factors can't explain" the observed warming, and that empirically validates the hypothesis that humans have caused x degrees of the warming (whatever x may be)?  Have you ever seen such a study, or even a reference to such a study?  I sure haven't.  And I've been looking.

What I have seen is the September 2016 Research Report by Wallace, et al. that demonstrates conclusively and empirically that just a few natural factors -- to wit, oceans, the sun, and volcanoes -- are completely sufficient to explain all warming that has been observed, leaving nothing to be explained by human emissions of "greenhouse gases."  The Research Report has been extensively peer reviewed and widely disseminated, including at this website.  No one has refuted it, or even made a serious attempt at refutation.    

In the face of the Research Report, it is just an insult to everyone's intelligence to keep on asserting that human greenhouse gases must be causing dangerous warming because there is a "consensus" and "natural factors can't explain it."  Either you can refute the Research Report, or you have nothing.  Needless to say, despite the wide dissemination of the Research Report, you will not find any mention of it in Ms. Davenport's article, nor at CBS, NBC, ABC, etc.  They just prefer to insult your intelligence.

Granted, the Research Report has some serious "heavy lifting" math, and is not for the [faint] of heart.  However, really, this is not that complicated.  For example, consider this chart of global lower troposphere temperatures from the 1979-to-date UAH satellite record:

Looking at this chart, here is something completely obvious and undeniable:  the recorded average temperature has seen several very substantial drops during this period, including a drop of almost a full degree C from early 1998 to early 1999, a drop of about 0.7 deg C from early 2010 to early 2011, and a drop of about 0.6 deg C from early 2016 to early 2017.  During this entire record, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has had a slow and steady increase.  So, does there exist some natural factor or factors that is capable of overwhelming the "greenhouse" effect of CO2 (if any) and causing temperatures to decline even in the face of increasing CO2?  Obviously, there is.  If so, how can we possibly know that human CO2 emissions are somehow the "dominant" cause of global warming?  

Now consider the following two graphs.  Both have been published by the people at NASA who are somehow the official guardians of our surface (land-based thermometer) temperature records.  The first is their 1999 graph of U.S. temperatures from about 1880 to 1999:

Here is the link to find this graph at the NASA website:  https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_ha03200f.pdf  The graph above is Figure 6 at the end of Hansen's paper found at the link.  Now here is NASA's current graph of U.S. temperatures, starting at the same date and going through 2017:

And here is the link to find this second graph on NASA's website:  https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/U.S._Temperature/graph.png  

Now look at those two graphs closely.  How is it that in the graph published in 1999, the years 1998 and 1999 were noticeably cooler than the 1930s, but by the time 2017 had come around, somehow 1998-99 had become noticeably warmer than the 1930s?  If you look closely, you will see that I am not making this up.  The 1930s to the late 1990s is 60 years of increasing CO2 emissions.  If temperatures went down, and for that long a time, how could it possibly be that CO2 emissions are the principal driving force in global climate?  It's completely obvious that there has to be some other natural factor or factors that overwhelm the effects of the CO2, if any.

So they "adjusted" the temperatures.  But the record of the temperatures prior to the adjustments still exists.  Hat tip to the great Tony Heller for doing the detective work to catch these people red-handed.

Thus you do not have to be a math whiz to understand that other natural factors, known or unknown, overwhelm the influence, whatever it may be, of CO2 on climate.  Just look at the charts above -- or dozens of others at Heller's website.  And when you read the output of the likes of Coral Davenport, know that she is treating you like an uninformed idiot.

Don't pay any attention to these people, Mr. Pruitt!  

Another Thing Not To Pussyfoot Around On: Cutting Public Housing Subsidies

Just a couple of weeks ago (February 20), I asked that critically important question that is on everyone's mind, "Which Will Collapse First: North Korea Or The New York City Housing Authority?"  The post noted that the new administration had not yet announced any plans for what to do about the debacle of HUD-backed low income housing, but that "if they focus on this a bit, it could all unravel very quickly."

The first indications that they may be focusing on this subject a bit have emerged in the past couple of days.  Yesterday's Greater New York section of the Wall Street Journal has as its lead headline, "Housing Agency Sees $35 Million Cut in U.S. Aid."   The "housing agency" referred to is the New York City Housing Authority -- NYCHA.  

My only question is, why is the cut only $35 million?  The annual HUD subsidy to NYCHA is running at around $2 billion.  It should be zeroed out entirely, and the sooner the better.  A cut of $35 million represents less than 2% of the current annual subsidy.  What is the possible reason for pussyfooting around on this?

To be fair, new HUD officials (unnamed in the article) do seem to have indicated that bigger cuts are coming, perhaps as soon as the upcoming fiscal year.  Bigger, but still ridiculously small -- less than 10% of the current subsidy level:

Citing conversations with federal housing officials, [NYCHA officials] said they were bracing for additional cuts that could be far greater, and total $150 million. Shola Olatoye, the agency’s chief executive officer, said a reduction of that size would be devastating.  “The direction we’re moving in is one where public housing is drastically different or doesn’t exist,” she said. “The progress we have made over the course of the last three years—it’s not that it’s at risk. It evaporates.”

I have no idea what Ms. Olatoye is referring to as "progress" at NYCHA.  There is no respect in which NYCHA is not an unmitigated disaster.  A fair description of it is a socialist-model scheme whereby local New York politicians use billions of dollars of federal handouts to trap hundreds of thousands of people into lifetimes of poverty and dependency.  Like all socialist-model economic schemes, it has been in a decreasing-productivity death spiral essentially ever since it started, and is kept alive only by subsidies from productive (capitalist) economic activities.  The subsidies must constantly increase in order to keep the death spiral from playing out to its crash.

Have ever wondered how the wealthiest county in the United States, New York County (Manhattan), can have a reported "poverty" rate well above the national average (21% versus 13.5%, although the most recent Manhattan rate is from 2013)?  NYCHA is the biggest piece of the explanation.  In essence the business of NYCHA is to subsidize people with an irresistible offer of gigantically subsidized rent in return for their commitment to stay poor and dependent.  The magnitude of the subsidies in Manhattan, if measured by the market values of apartments often next door or across the street, literally boggles the mind.  In the most extreme of many extreme examples, a nearly three mile long stretch of the waterfront of the Lower East Side of Manhattan is lined, with very few breaks, with close to 100 NYCHA buildings.  Directly across the island, on the Lower West Side, there is a highly comparable stretch of waterfront, but this stretch has a row of gleaming new condos.  The Lower West Side waterfront condos sell for at least $3000 per square foot, or something like $3 - 5 million for a standard two bedroom apartment.  To rent one of these waterfront apartments would cost you around $10,000 per month.  On the Lower East Side, rent in the NYCHA projects averages about $500 per month.  Thus the rent subsidy is in the range of $9000+ per month per family, well over $100,000 per year.  And yet after this enormous taxpayer giveaway, the NYCHA residents have no spendable income to show for it, and the majority of them are classified as "poor."  And the Lower East Side NYCHA projects are just one example among many now located in top-priced areas.  Other such enormously valuable projects can be found in the Chelsea neighborhood, in West Midtown (right next to the "Trump Place" development!), and immediately adjacent to the Upper East Side.

And I've just begun to describe the magnitude of the NYCHA disaster.  In a report that NYCHA put out in mid-2015, it declared that it had a backlog of some $17 billion of necessary capital maintenance projects, with no source of the funds anywhere on the horizon.  Apparently, when they built these things 30 - 60 years ago, nobody thought that they might ever need major upgrades.  NYCHA pays no property taxes on its projects, which house about 6% of New York City residents.  The crime rate in NYCHA projects is about four times higher than that for the city as a whole.  That's what dependency and hopelessness will do to the human spirit.

The federal government has the power to put NYCHA completely out of its misery by the simple expedient of zeroing out the subsidy.  To cut NYCHA's annual subsidy by 2%, or even 10%, will just prolong the misery.  NYCHA will continue to limp along in an increasingly-desperate situation, hands out to beg from the state and local taxpayers, buildings crumbling, and residents with nowhere to go.  The closest analogies in today's world are North Korea and Venezuela.

But if the subsidies are zeroed out, then the jig is up.  NYCHA will be forced into immediate drastic restructuring or exit from this unsustainable business.  The obvious strategy is to give away the projects to the residents.  Of course, this would be the best thing that could ever happen to the residents.  Thousands would become instant multi-millionaires, and tens of thousands instant millionaires.  They could sell the apartments, rent them out, or borrow against them.  The funds for renovation and upgrade would magically appear.  The need for taxpayer subsidies would go away.

Please, please don't pussyfoot around on this one!

President Trump: Don't Pussyfoot Around On Climate Policy!

One of President Trump's unequivocal campaign promises was to pull out of President Obama's Paris Climate Agreement.  Now there is talk that he is going squishy.  Trump going squishy?  And on this issue of all things?

Climate propagandist Coral Davenport has a report in the New York Times on March 2, headline "Trump Advisors Are Split on Paris Agreement on Climate Change."    The advisors advising Trump to stick with the Paris Agreement are said to include Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, First Daughter Ivanka Trump, and of course the Washington Blob of career diplomats.  Tillerson -- wasn't he the very embodiment of evil in his role as CEO of ExxonMobil until just a few weeks ago?  Here's how Davenport articulates the position allegedly now advocated by Tillerson et al.:

[Ivanka] Trump, Mr. Tillerson, and a slew of foreign policy advisers and career diplomats who argue that the fallout of withdrawing from the accord could be severe, undercutting the United States’ credibility on other foreign policy issues and damaging relations with key allies. . . . Foreign policy experts say withdrawing from Paris would have far greater diplomatic consequences than President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the world’s first global climate-change accord, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.  “I think it would be a major mistake, even a historic mistake, to disavow the Paris deal,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a retired career diplomat and under secretary of state under Mr. Bush.  "In international politics, trust, reliability and keeping your commitments — that’s a big part of how other countries view our country,” Mr. Burns said.

Really, is this the best they've got?  "Undermining the United States' credibility" and "damaging relations with key allies"?  Under the Paris Agreement, the United States will supposedly cut its "carbon emissions" by 26 to 28% by 2025.  That's only eight years away.  The only mechanism that might actually work that has ever been proposed for achieving such drastic reductions would be to multiply the cost of electricity and gasoline to such a high level that American citizens will become hugely poorer and will be stuck shivering in the dark at home.  China's side of the "agreement" is to continue increasing its carbon emissions by as much as it feels like through 2030, and then (when it thinks it will have fully electrified the countryside and everybody will have cars and its emissions will be about triple ours) maybe leveling off, unless it changes its mind.  (As usual for a Davenport article, she just brazenly lies about China's supposed commitments:  "[T]he Paris agreement includes commitments from every nation, rich and poor, to cut emissions, including China and India, the world’s largest and third-largest polluters."  Fake news, anyone?)  Among all people who are actually awake, this "agreement" makes the United States a laughingstock.  The representatives of the other countries were all giggling behind Obama's back when he signed off on this.  The guys from China and India must have split a gut.  OK, many of the representatives from Europe were likely exceptions.  They are also laughingstocks.

And what exactly is this supposedly "severe fallout"?  That other countries will suddenly realize that we are no longer so stupid that we will cripple our economy for no purpose?  In what way is our failing to decrease carbon emissions drastically over the next eight years even something that other countries care about?  Maybe because they were planning to move in on our export markets as we stupidly priced our exporters out of business?  Why do we owe them that?  I say let's go for the "severe fallout"!

James Delingpole, now working at Breitbart, has a somewhat different take:

Man-made global warming is evidently and demonstrably not a problem.  The people who pretend otherwise are crooks, liars, idiots or shills.  CO2 does far more good than harm.  Fossil fuels aren’t running out – especially not now we’ve discovered the game-changing technology of hydraulic fracturing – and are the ideal solution to our energy needs.  Renewables are a waste of everyone’s time – and always will be.

There is copious evidence to support all these statements and it’s really about time those of us on the winning side of the argument stopped pussyfooting around and apologising for being 100 per cent right. That should include everyone in the Trump administration.  No more cautious speeches equivocating as to whether carbon dioxide is a problem or not, and whether we ought to have more renewables in the mix.  This is a revolution; we’ve got truth and justice on our side. . . .  

I could quibble with a few things there.  For example, renewables are not just a "waste of everyone's time"; instead, they are a tool of impoverishment for the masses and enrichment for a handful of well-connected crony capitalists.  But overall, amen!