Thank Heavens For The New Campaign Against Plastic Straws

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Thank Heavens For The New Campaign Against Plastic Straws

Without doubt, a good classic tale of sin and redemption makes a powerful appeal to human emotions.  Do you find yourself with an overwhelming sense of guilt, and a yearning for atonement and salvation?  A very large number of humans do.  Plenty of others will listen seriously when accused of sinning.  And in this era when traditional religion is fading fast among the trendy set, the favored sin and redemption narratives tend to revolve around the environment and the "planet."  For decades, the number one such narrative has been the global warming story:  By our use of fossil fuels to power a modern industrial society and to develop great wealth, we have sinned against the planet, leading to a future of irreversible catastrophic warming!  Redemption lies in the collective commitment to give up our use of energy and our modern ways and to cede control of our lives to our environmental priests and priestesses!

Unfortunately, after a good run of several decades, this narrative has recently run into a serious problem, namely the failure of global temperatures to increase in accordance with official predictions of catastrophe and doom.  Just a couple of weeks ago, in a post titled "Why 'Climate Change' Seems To Have Faded From The News," I noted that world temperatures had declined by more than half a degree C over the past couple of years, thus giving back about half of all of the twentieth century "global warming."  The frequency of press stories banging the global warming drum has inevitably declined dramatically, with the few remaining stories relegated to trying to keep up the alarm by cherry-picking a handful of record high temperatures from somewhere around the world, while omitting any mention of corresponding record lows or the decline in the overall average.  The main piece of reporting that I criticized in that post came from the Washington Post.

So what is the New York Times to do? . . .

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Some Fun With Paul Krugman Quotations

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Now that Trump-era U.S. GDP growth has reached the 4.1% level according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, shouldn't we go back and review a few choice quotes from Official Manhattan Contrarian Worst Economics Writer Paul Krugman?

It's been a long time since I've done any Krugman-bashing.  And why should we waste much of our valuable time on a guy who is so overcome with anger and invective that he has become a self-parody?  The answer is, occasionally you need to compare his prognostications to the real world to see just how wrong it is possible to be.  The operative word here is "occasionally."  I promise not to do it again for a while.

But anyway, if it's been a long time since you have read anything by Krugman (and I hope it has), it may be fading into the recesses of your memory that he devoted considerable energy during the Obama presidency to excusing sluggish economic performance as having nothing to do with Obama or his policies.  Slow economic growth had nothing to do with Obama's overall hostility to successful businesses; nothing to do with expensive increases in unproductive regulations; nothing to do with the war on fossil fuel energy and coal; nothing to do with corporate tax rates that were uncompetitive in the international arena; nothing to do with dozens of phony prosecutions and shakedowns of financial institutions; nothing to do with wasteful spending and debt accumulation; nothing to do, in short, with what I described all the way back in 2013 as Obama's "War Against The Economy."   No, instead, slow economic growth was just the "new normal," a natural state of late-stage capitalism that was completely inevitable and just had to be endured -- or perhaps ameliorated a little by the preferred prescription of a blow-out round of entirely wasteful government spending.

You don't believe me that his predictions could have been so bad?  Then I'll give you a few choice quotes. . . .

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Is Portugal Experiencing A Surge Of Growth Caused By "Casting Aside Austerity"?

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Is Portugal Experiencing A Surge Of Growth Caused By "Casting Aside Austerity"?

I'm getting to this one a little late, but last weekend the New York Times had one of those big economic stories that just cried out for checking into the real data.  Here are the headline and sub-headline:  "Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity.  It’s Having a Major Revival.  At a time of mounting uncertainty in Europe, the country has defied critics who insisted on austerity as the answer to the Continent’s economic and financial crisis."  Do real data actually back up this narrative?

Before getting too far, we should have a review of the defined term.  What is "austerity"?  From my post of August 18, 2013 ("The Horrors Of 'Austerity,' Singapore Edition"):  "[T]he term "austerity" is a befuddled Keynesian mixture of low government spending and taxes sufficient to cover all spending."  I've never understood why, in the progressive press, the alternatives for economic policy get divided between lower spending/higher taxes ("austerity") on the one hand, and higher spending/lower taxes ("stimulus") on the other.  What about lower spending/lower taxes?  You never hear about that one.  As my 2013 post noted, Singapore has long been the world champion of the combination of both low taxes and low spending, which have been accompanied by decades of world-beating economic growth, prosperity, and low unemployment.  (Singapore's GDP per capita is approximately equal to that of the U.S.)

So what does the Times have to say about Portugal?  

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The Remaining Obstacle To President Trump's Plan For U.S. Energy Dominance

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President Trump came into office last year promising a prompt rollback of destructive regulation of carbon dioxide and a new era of "energy dominance" for America.  Just two months into his presidency, in March 2017, Trump issued an Executive Order directing all executive agencies to  "review existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources and appropriately suspend, revise, or rescind those that unduly burden the development of domestic energy resources. . . ."   On June 1, 2017, Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate accord.  And in October 2017, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced, in a notice of proposed rule making, that the so-called Clean Power Plan -- an Obama-era regulatory initiative seeking to wipe out the generation of electricity by coal in the U.S. -- would be revised or scrapped.

Meanwhile, you can tell from the recent substantial lack of news on the climate front from the mainstream media that climate hysteria, both in the U.S. and internationally, is unraveling with remarkable rapidity.  Just since early 2016, world temperatures are down by about two-thirds of a degree C -- which is well more than half of the 20th century warming.  Canadian and Australian voters are resoundingly repudiating carbon taxes.  In the UK, after years of delay, the first horizontally-drilled wells using fracking technology are finally moving forward.  Germany has conceded that it will come nowhere near its previous carbon-reduction goals, and has stopped making any serious attempt to reach same.  The third world, led by China and India, proceeds with plans to build and deploy some 1600 new coal-fired power plants.  

Obviously, whatever pieties may continue to be uttered, no one with a brain cares about the bogeyman of "carbon emissions" any more.  The U.S., as the leader in fracking technology and with vast reserves of coal, oil and gas, seems poised for the energy dominance promised by the President.  Can anything stop us now?  Unfortunately, there is a significant remaining obstacle.  It is a landmine of the legal variety, planted by the Obama administration with the intent to have it blow up any efforts to revert from fantasy schemes of non-functional intermittent energy back to a system of inexpensive energy that actually works.  

I'm referring, of course, to the so-called Endangerment Finding (EF) of the EPA. . . .

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Immigrants Don't Need To Vote To Affect The Balance In Congress

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Much recent commentary on the conservative side addresses a perceived threat from potential illegal voting by non-citizen and/or undocumented immigrants.  As just a couple out of many examples, this article in the Washington Times back in February reported on a lawsuit by the Public Interest Legal Foundation that claimed that some 100,000 non-citizen immigrants were registered to vote just in the state of Pennsylvania; and this article at Fox News just today by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich reports on a plan in San Francisco to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, allegedly as a precursor to getting them to vote in state and federal elections as well:

[T]he long-range plans Democrats have for a ruling majority depend on continuous law-breaking to get enough non-Americans to vote. The Californians who don’t support the radical views of Democrats can simply be eclipsed by non-citizen voters supporting the Democrats.

Now, I don't claim to know how many non-citizen and undocumented immigrants have been voting illegally in U.S. elections.  Some on the right claim such voting is a major problem, while many on the left pooh-pooh that idea.  But here's what I do know:  At least as it concerns the balance of power in Congress, it really doesn't matter much whether non-citizen and undocumented immigrants vote or not.  Non-citizen immigrants affect the balance of power by their mere presence.  The only factor that counts in the equation is whether the immigrants concentrate themselves in Democrat-voting districts -- which they do.  Needless to say, the leaders of the Democratic party are completely aware of this dynamic.  Without doubt, this is a big part of the explanation for why Democratic party leaders are such fans of expanded immigration and/or open borders, even though large flows of low-skill newcomers would seem to disadvantage the traditional Democratic base by providing substantial wage competition to low-wage workers. 

Does this whole thing seem counter-intuitive?  Let me explain.

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Comments On The Carter Page FISA Warrant Application

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Saturday evening in the very middle of the summer, and suddenly the Justice Department finally releases a number of long-sought documents relating to the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation.  One of the documents is the government's application to the FISA Court for a warrant to spy on Carter Page, a some-time foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, in the heat of the campaign for President.  The document is heavily redacted; indeed, well more than half of it is nothing but big black marks.  You know from the long delay in releasing the document, from the timing of the release, and from the heavy redactions, that this is an extremely embarrassing document to the Justice Department and the FBI.  But, however bad you thought it might have been, it's actually far worse.

Here's the takeaway:  The entire basis for the application to spy on the political campaign of the disfavored party was the completely unverified opposition research, paid for by the Clinton campaign, known as the Steele Dossier.  The only other things they cite are some articles in the media.  But those articles give every indication of having been completely derivative of leaks from the FBI itself, in turn based on nothing more than the Steele Dossier. 

Many others have beaten me to the punch in commenting on this matter, and I don't mean just to repeat what others have already said.  But this disgusting document is too important to let pass.  So here are a few comments:

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