The Poverty Fraud In Action, With UN Assist

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Back in December, I took note of a new Report out from the UN -- apparently it was just a draft -- supposedly addressing "extreme poverty" in the United States.  The Report was the work of a British guy named Philip Alston, designated the UN's "Special Rapporteur," who had just conducted a two-week "visit" to the U.S. during December 2017, and had supposedly in that brief time discovered to his horror the existence of pervasive "extreme poverty."  In my post, I stated that the Report was characterized by an extraordinary level of both "malice and ignorance," giving multiple examples of same.

Well, come June 1 the UN -- in particular, the so-called "Human Rights Commission," naturally -- decided to issue a somewhat modified version of this thing in final form, under the title "Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights on his mission to the United States of America."   Believe me, despite some revisions, the Report has gotten no better.  It is either completely uninformed and ignorant on the status of physical-deprivation poverty and redistribution programs in the U.S., or intentionally fraudulent as to same.  I would go with the latter, but you be the judge.  

More significantly, the Report was promptly seized upon by a group of some twenty Senators and Congresspersons of the Democratic Party -- led of course by none other than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren -- who sent a letter on June 12 to UN Ambassador Nikki Haley expressing "deep concern" about the "findings" in the Report.  The problem for Sanders, Warren, et al., is that, unlike Alston, they are not able to fall back on possibly being uninformed or ignorant on the U.S. poverty statistics or on the extent of redistribution and anti-poverty programs already in existence.  With one-hundred-percent certainty, they know that Alston's Report is so much hooey.  Therefore, their reliance on it is fraud, pure and simple.

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How's It Going In Mueller Land?

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Scouring through my print edition of Pravda today, I can't find one single word about Trump/Russia collusion or the Mueller investigation.  Whoa!  Something must be going on.  Shall we check in with other sources as to how it's going in Mueller Land?

As noted yesterday, it really seems to be the Justice IG Report, more than anything else, that has wiped Trump/Russia and Mueller out of the news.  Now, why might that be, given that Horowitz used the famous weasel words to describe how he couldn't really prove definitively that FBI partisan animus drove the investigatory decisions in the Hillary investigation.  (I.e., we "found no documentary or testimonial evidence directly connecting the political views these employees expressed in their text messages and instant messages to the specific Midyear investigative decisions.")  Doesn't that make it full speed ahead now for Mueller?

If you think that, you're not thinking it through.

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I Guess That IG Report Really Struck A Nerve

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I Guess That IG Report Really Struck A Nerve

For well over a year now, as far as I know, the "news" from the New York Times et al. has basically been about only one thing, namely Russia!Trump/Russia!Russia/Trump!Collusion!Russia/Tampering!Mueller!Indictments! etc, etc., etc.  How many articles have you seen over the past year on that subject?  Five thousand?  Over and over, the Times has seized on the teensiest new leak to justify yet another big front page spread on this issue.

Then the Justice Department Inspector General's Report on the Hillary Clinton investigation came out on Thursday June 14, filled with damning information on FBI corruption and bias.  On Friday morning, Mrs. MC -- who has a news feed overweighted (in my opinion) with progressive sources like CNN and the Washington Post -- says to me "I think it's wrong that the Trump administration is taking children away from their parents at the border."  My reaction was, why is that a big story all of a sudden?  Has anything about that actually changed in the last few days?  Wasn't the Obama administration doing essentially the same thing, although maybe on a lesser scale?

And then, as the weekend came along, suddenly the one and only thing that the news was about had completely changed.  Now it had become about Trump "snatching" children from their parents at the border.  On Monday and Tuesday, the Congress held hearings on the IG Report, with IG Michael Horowitz testifying.  IG Report?  What IG Report?

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Enjoying The "Green Energy" Follies

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Enjoying The "Green Energy" Follies

If you are a regular reader here, you know that the big problem with so-called "green" or "renewable" energy sources -- we're talking wind and solar -- is that they don't work.  Relying on energy sources that don't work is a big problem when you are trying to provide power for a big, sophisticated modern economy.  

What does it mean that "they don't work"?  It means first that you simply cannot run an electrical grid using just wind and solar energy sources, because they are incapable meeting the fundamental requirement of a grid, namely, matching production to user demand second by second.  And "they don't work" also means that wind and solar are not helpful or even meaningful additions to existing electrical grids, because they require the availability of alternative energy sources -- backup generation or storage -- at all times and at huge duplicative cost.  In short, they are useless.  Oh, and they also threaten grid stability, particularly as you add more of them to a grid.  So they are both useless and potentially destructive.

Unfortunately, basic engineering is not the strong suit of the religious environmental movement, nor of its acolytes in the media.  And so, as atonement for our sins of having an industrial society, we must flagellate ourselves with more and more farms of wind turbines and solar panels.  As these things come to cover the landscape, you can feel the excitement.  Let's have a little roundup:

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Germany -- April Fool No More?

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Germany -- April Fool No More?

It was only a short two and a half months ago -- April 1 to be precise -- that I nominated the country of Germany as "The Biggest April Fool."  The reason for the nomination was that Germany's so-called Energiewende ("energy transition") program, initiated in 2010, had saddled German consumers with electricity rates approximately triple the U.S. average, but had brought about exactly zero reduction in Germany's CO2 emissions.  Don't believe it could be that bad?  Here's the chart of Germany's greenhouse gas emissions by year from that post, data from the Umwelt Bundesamt (Germany's Federal Environmental Agency)

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At NYCHA, Spectacular Failure -- Or Is It Spectacular Success?

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Anyone who pays even a little attention to the bureaucratic/socialist business model quickly figures it out:  the fundamental problem is that the people who run the system view "success" not in achieving their stated mission, but rather in growing their own staffs and budgets.  And the way to grow your staff and budget is to reveal that the problem you are tasked with addressing is worse than anyone ever thought, and only more money can cure it.  In other words, the way to "success" is through failure, and the more spectacular the failure, the better.

Last July, I highlighted a particularly notable example of this phenomenon in the New York subway and commuter rail system, in a post titled "In Government, Failure Is The Way To Get Yourself More Money."   The system had just suffered a disastrous series of derailments and other major delays -- things that should have been completely avoided through normal, ordinary maintenance.  Facing a political firestorm, the Governor demanded immediate fixes; and the bureaucracy responded as you would expect they would:  We can do it for an immediate cash infusion of an extra $800+ million!  And, why wasn't the previous multi-billion dollar annual budget sufficient to do the job?

The genius of this is that, in the crisis of the moment, with derailments and delays constantly in the news, nobody stops to ask why the vast sums of money they were already getting were not sufficient to maintain the system.  Is the current budget being used effectively?  This question is just too crude to be asked in the middle of such a crisis.  Certainly, the politicians are unanimous in their view that this is not the time to start blaming the inefficiency of the unionized work force, but rather is an opportunity to hit up the taxpayers.

Today the functionaries at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are in the process of being shown up as rank amateurs at this game by their compadres at another New York bureaucracy, the New York City Housing Authority.

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