Archive for February, 2014

The “Deep State.”

Thursday, February 27th, 2014

UPDATE: From Zerohedge: Is the deep state fracturing among the elites ?

History suggests that this low-intensity conflict within the ruling Elite is generally a healthy characteristic of leadership in good times. As times grow more troubled, however, the unity of the ruling Elite fractures into irreconcilable political disunity, which becomes a proximate cause of the dissolution of the Empire if it continues.

We live in interesting times.

This essay on the blog of Bill Moyers, a left winger and former LBJ press secretary who is almost 80 years old, is interesting. It has the usual leftist slant on the topic but also includes many good observations.

There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1]

Moyers had a significant role to play in the early stages of this administrative state.

Failure to recognize the distinction between the way in which the Department of the Army operates and the standing operating procedures of military organizations in the field has frustrated generations of field soldiers, who have taken for granted the necessity for tight management at the top, known to them as unity of command.This struggle for executive control within the Army has
taken place during a period of increasingly centralized authority over individual and corporate activities throughout American life.

Moyers has more of a role here than he admits. After some nonsense about Republican “obstructionism,” he says this:

Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement.

I think it is interesting to see that the left, certainly Moyers territory, sees this.

During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.

Yes, indeed.

Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it’s 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?” No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one’s surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.

The IRS bureaucrat begins to see that the Tea Party is a threat to his pension and continued nice life. That, of course, is not what Moyers is concerned about.

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

This is what some of us refer to as The Ruling Class.

There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings.

Remove some of the obligatory left wing rhetoric and I agree with this completely. Read the rest.

In 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus’ expertise in these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however, is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy. [4]

Exactly. Think about global warming and energy policy, matters Moyers neglects.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in corruption, financial, politics | Comments Closed

Ukraine

Saturday, February 22nd, 2014

UPDATE: Max Boot, who I also respect, adds some thoughts.

The Orange Revolution failed because of corruption and inertia in the economy. What now?

This is, after all, the second popular uprising against Yanukovych, the first being the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005. Although thwarted in his attempt to steal that election, Yanukovych returned to power in 2010, managing to win a fair election after his political adversaries failed to show results while in office.

This is a second chance for the pro-Western parties in Ukraine to deal with the deep-seated malaise of the economy, the pervasive corruption, and all the other ills that afflict this troubled land. They had better do better than last time–and all the while fending off what are sure to be determined attempts at sabotage emanating from Moscow.

What to do about Ukraine ? Michael Totten has some ideas.

Ukraine's Day Infamy

He has several suggestions about other sources. I pretty much rely on him as he has been all over and has a good eye.

I spent a week in Ukraine a few years back when I traveled by car from the Polish border through Lviv to Kiev and down to Odessa and Yalta. I wrote about it at length in my book, Where the West Ends. So I feel obligated to write about it now that the capital is on fire.

Kiev is a magnificent city, and it pains me to see it like this, but I should not be surprised. Almost every country I’ve ever written about is either in hell, has only recently recovered from hell, or is on its way to hell. I hoped when I visited Ukraine that it was on its way out, but I did not have a good feeling about it, as you’ll recall if you read my book.

From his recommended source,

First let’s consider the bad reasons for a breakup—Ukraine’s diversity in general and the regional, ethnic, confessional, and cultural divisions between its “West” and “East” in particular. A good place to start is a recent article by Orlando Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, “Is There One Ukraine?” Figes, who should know better coming from the UK, writes about Ukraine’s divisions as if they were unique and as if diversity alone justified or led to breakup. He’s wrong on both counts. Ukraine’s diversity is pretty much the norm for all stable states everywhere.

He has some excellent points. One is about The Party of Regions.

What is unusual about contemporary Ukraine is that it’s exploited by a criminal gangster regime—Yanukovych’s— in cahoots with another criminal gangster regime—Putin’s. Many countries have the misfortune of being misruled by homegrown camarillas. Many countries have the misfortune of being dominated by predator states. Ukraine has the double misfortune of being misruled at home and “mis-dominated” abroad.

The president, who has now fled Kiev, is described a a “criminal madman.”

Remove the southeast and Ukraine’s treasury experiences an immediate boon; its demographics, energy consumption, and health improve; and its politics automatically become more democratic and less corrupt.

Although lopping off the Donbas would benefit the rest of Ukraine, Yanukovych’s mafia regime desperately needs Ukraine to be whole. If Luhansk and Donetsk were to split away, their rust-belt economy would collapse without Kyiv’s financial support and the Regionnaires, trapped in their polluted bailiwick, would have nothing to steal. And what would Yanukovych’s multibillionaire pal, Rinat Akhmetov, do without easy access to Ukraine’s resources?

There appears to be no good solution to Ukraine, including partition although that may be what will happen.

The moral for the democrats is simple. If and when they return to power, the democrats should call the Regionnaires’ bluff. Next time the Regionnaires threaten to leave, the democrats should point to the door, and say, “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

The same might apply to Quebec.

The Wall Street Journal had a good piece yesterday comparing Ukraine with Georgia 5 years ago.

The West dragged its feet on financial sanctions against the Yanukovych circle, but on Thursday last week a move by the EU—after 77 protesters were shot dead in broad daylight—helped bring down the Ukrainian leader. Fearing for their assets and visas, his cronies quickly dropped him.

and: At every opportunity, Mr. Saakashvili says that Ukraine’s best defense against Russian pressure is a successful move to European-style rule. This is what the revolution was about. “Change must come fast,” he says. “I’m worried about Crimea, but I’m more worried about Kiev. If Kiev goes into protracted political crisis, then everything else will explode.”

If Ukraine starts to go after its oil and gas reserves with fracking, a lot may change.

Tags:, ,
Posted in corruption, economics, Europe, politics | Comments Closed

Global Cooling continues.

Sunday, February 16th, 2014

It is becoming more apparent that the earth is cooling in spite of continued leftist propaganda.

The first half of this year’s Northern Hemisphere (NH) winter season was especially brutal. December 2013 and January 2014 were the third-coldest Decembers and Januaries in the past 30 years averaged over the contiguous 48 United States, with temperatures plummeting to ?10°C in Atlanta and ?26°C in Chicago. Residents of North East India struggled with unusually severe snow and ?10°C temperatures without home heating. Snow and extreme cold also impacted the Kashmir Valley in India, where many elderly and very young people died of hypothermia. At the time of this writing, most of India is two to five degrees C colder than usual, a serious problem when 95% of all Indian homes lack central heating.

This has not deterred the alarmist camp which still believes the planet is warming due to human actions.

According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this shouldn’t be happening. The IPCC asserted in their Fourth Assessment Report (2007) that, as an impact of the carbon dioxide (CO2)-induced global warming that activists say is still going on:

There is likely to be a decline in the frequency of cold air outbreaks (i.e., periods of extreme cold lasting from several days to over a week) in NH winter in most areas.

The US administration is no better.

Yet, in his January 8 online video, Dr. John Holdren — President Obama’s Science and Technology advisor — explained that as a consequence of recent global warming that he maintains is occurring, the Arctic is warming roughly twice as fast as the mid-latitudes. This means that the temperature difference between the Arctic and the contiguous U.S is shrinking, thereby weakening the circumpolar vortex, a swirling mass of cold air that hovers over the Arctic. The result is that the boundaries of the vortex become wavier, allowing increased excursions of cold Arctic air into more southerly regions.

Of particularl concern are the warnings from solar scientists that over the next three decades, we are headed toward significant global cooling as the sun weakens into a grand minimum. The last time the sun was as weak as solar experts predict will occur starting after 2030, the Earth was in a particularly cold phase of the Little Ice Age that lasted from about 1350-1850, a period when there was great misery around the world.

Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov of Russia’s Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg warns:

After the maximum of solar Cycle 24, from approximately 2014, we can expect the start of the next bicentennial cycle of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055 plus or minus 11 years.

Dr Richard Lindzen, a well known climate scientist who doesn’t buy the warming hysteria Has teed off on the climate lobby.

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot on September 27, 2013:

I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence. They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.

Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans. However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability. Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified.

The “Ocean Deep” theory has recently been proposed as an explanation.

Finally, in attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there being nothing to be alarmed about. It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.

Global cooling, as occurred during the The Little Ice Age, a period from 1300 to 1870, is far more dangerous.

maunder_minimum

The data in that graph ends at 2000. Since that year, the number of sunspots has sharply declined and is now approaching the Maunder Minimum.

index

The second graphic illustrates this.

The climate change debate should move away from unsubstantiated warming fears and focus instead on determining if the extreme cold of recent years is a precursor to significant global cooling. If it is, then reliable and inexpensive energy sources such as coal-fired electricity generation will become crucially important for our survival. The last thing we should be doing is closing down these stations in the questionable belief that we are helping to prevent global warming, a phenomenon that has already stopped all on its own.

Tags:, ,
Posted in climate, energy, global warming, History, politics, science | 2 Comments »

Is Venezuela collapsing ?

Friday, February 14th, 2014

UPDATE: More on the role Cuba is playing in Venezuela now.

Belmont Club has a good post today on the collapse of Venezuela. The car manufacturers have announced they are closing their plants.

Toyota Motor Co. said it would shut down its assembly operations in Venezuela due to the government’s foreign exchange controls that have crippled imports and made it impossible to bring in parts needed to build its vehicles.

The country’s other car manufacturers, including General Motors and Ford, haven’t even started operations this year, while waiting for needed parts to arrive.

The oil field workers left years ago when the Chavez government cut oil workers’ pay.

Workers’ protests continue at Venezuela’s Puerto La Cruz refinery, in the northeastern state of Anzoátegui. The oil workers are requesting the payment of their contractual benefits. Workers gathered and had some meetings in the refinery and handed out fliers. These actions will continue until the authorities of state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (Pdvsa) meet each of their requests. Oil workers complained that the oil industry has violated 80% of the current collective bargaining agreement.

Army officers had no such limit on pay raises.

[They] got a 40 % raise last year. So let’s see, they get a 40 % raise in 2010, and a 50 % raise in 2011, and meanwhile oil field workers, the ones who create the wealth the government uses to give these obscene pay raises to the military, are protesting low pay and lack of legal payments they are supposed to get.

The oil workers who could, all left for Canada. That was about the time that the Alberta oil sands fields were coming on line. Those workers, and especially the engineers, are not going back to Venezuela any time soon.

Welcome to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, a country with the fifth largest oil reserves in the world and absolutely broke. It’s a remarkable achievement for Chavismo. A just-wow moment. Socialism is useless at everything except for smashing things in record time. There it excels. It’s hard to imagine that as late as the 1980s Venezuela had the highest standard of living in Latin America. But then in 1960 Detroit was the richest city in the world in per capita income. Now it’s well … Detroit.

Cuba is helping the post-Chavez government to cope.

The violence against unarmed citizens is reminiscent of the April 11, 2002, bloodletting, when 17 individuals who were part of a peaceful opposition march in the streets of Caracas were similarly gunned down by snipers. That was the day the head of the military told Hugo Chávez that he would not move against the crowd and that he was removing Chávez from office. Chávez prevailed, in part due to U.S. dogma against “a coup” and in part because the opposition bungled what ought to have been a transition to democracy.

Obama is a friend of Venezuela and will oppose any attempt to overturn the tyranny. He showed his true colors in El Salvador by rewarding the bad behavior of the current government.

What we see today in El Salvador is a government heading in the opposite direction from those core principles. In 2000, El Salvador was ranked as the 11th-freest economy in the world, according to the annual Index of Economic Freedom co-published by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. Today, it is 53rd and has registered declining scores in six of the 10 economic freedoms, including investment freedom, the management of public spending, labor freedom, and freedom from corruption. El Salvador’s performance in other world economic indices has also plummeted.

Obama’s friends seem to have dodgy records on civil liberties.

The deterioration in central and south America continues apace . There is an interesting pattern.

‘There are two Latin Americas right now. The first is a bloc of countries—including Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela—that faces the Atlantic Ocean, mistrusts globalization and gives the state a large role in the economy. The second—made up of countries that face the Pacific such as Mexico, Peru, Chile and Colombia—embraces free trade and free markets.’

The results are becoming clear.

Stifling bureaucracy, protectionist trade barriers, widespread corruption, lack of investment in infrastructure and the limited scope of economic reforms have been piling up like wood on a bonfire for a number of years. Inflation and weak government finances have provided the starter fluid and it maybe that lower demand for commodities will be the spark.

The divide has been developing for years. As Luhnow reports, ‘ A key moment in creating the two Latin Americas came in 2005, when Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela (then led by Mr. Chávez) lined up to kill the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas—a free-trade zone stretching from Alaska to Patagonia and promoted by President George W. Bush. Troubled by the FTAA’s demise, the Pacific Alliance set out to create its own free-trade area, eliminating tariffs on 90% of goods and setting a timetable to eliminate the rest.’

Obama seems more interested in the Atlantic states.

The genius of the Left — Chavez’s for example — is that it destroys things from the inside out. They pervert religion, collapse the mores, abolish the family, shred the constitution and gradually expropriate the property. The differences from one day to the next are apparently imperceptible, but it is harder and harder to go back until finally there is no reversal of ‘progressive gains’ possible at all. The public is finally faced with the stark choice between chaos or authoritarianism. And most people will chose the Boss over the Mob.

Does any of that sound familiar ?

Most people are spurred into resistance by a crisis. But they remain lulled into complacency while the crisis remains imperceptible. Progressive tyranny benefits from image management, and takes great pains to keep crisis from view. The most insidious thing about a secret police is its very secrecy, because the mayhem it wreaks is upon the intangibles, among things we call legitimacy. So it goes until only a facade is left. Until the day of death the victim is largely asymptomatic, except for a gradual weakening. When the onset comes he discovers that his immune system is completely gone and the end is sudden.

And Iran is allying itself with Venezuela.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in corruption, economics, politics | 2 Comments »

Medicine and Evolution.

Friday, February 7th, 2014

A Final Word: I went by that site today to see what additional comments might have been posted after I left. Here is what remained:

I was referring to your claiming that people were being dishonest in their claims not to be YECs. It’s not that you disagreed with the values expressed by their self-identification, it’s that you didn’t accept that they were who they claimed they were. This makes productive conversation much more challenging.

Does that make sense?

I didn’t claim that people were secret YEC members. I commented that I was astounded at the vehemence of people who described themselves as “non-creationist Christians,” at attacking a person who supports and thinks evolution will be important in medicine in the next 50 years. Read some of the comments in italics below to see if I am overstating this.

I am very concerned, after this, at the role of Fundamentalist Christians in the GOP. They are far less tolerant of other opinion and resemble the global warming alarmists in the unwillingness to allow dissent.

Update #4: I am saving some of the material from the thread to remember what Ricochet is like.

The pseudo sympathy: Mike, frankly, you never had them straight in the first place. The entire thread, you thought you were fending off attacks from a group of Young Earth Creationists, but there was only one YEC among them. The rest of them were believers in one form of evolution of another, and just upset with your attitude.

Attitude !

Do you bear any of the blame for making this thread so unpleasant? I’m perfectly willing to have a discussion with you, and I’m semi-sympathetic to your viewpoint. I’m definitely not a YEC. But I can’t understand why you are being so flippant.
Flippancy is the problem !

No, you’re not. You might try reading the thread. I’ve been listing all the insults over on my own blog as a study of how this happens.

“Mike, I am personally not a young-earth creationist, but I think you are confusing two concepts here. ”

I’m always the one confused. Explained by the Ivy League.

This: “Or would he create a universe that showed millions of millennia of age, even though it was only seconds old?”

Led to this: “It’s nice that you all believe this. Good luck. Let’s hope your doctor doesn’t.”

Now that was my mortal sin to the crowd here. From that the following resulted:

“You are very flippant in dismal of my case for faith. Once again I have no problem believing that someone who believes that God put together the world in 6 days .”can also understand the significance of mitochondria. ”

I doubt that. Instead: “I have a far greater trust of a doctor who believes in God and lives it in his own life rather than one who is merely technically competent and sees the universe, and my life, as a happenstance of evolutionary doctrine.”

Now, the folks who are denying this is about creationism and is about my “attitude” seem to ignore those parts.

“Well that’s a glowing example of inability to actually argue the point. When you encounter indications that people disagree with your conflating micro and macro evolution, imply that anybody who doesn’t believe in the warm puddle or whatever the popular origin of life theory is this week is incompetent. ”

Now there’s a thoughtful statement.

” If I’m just an expression of evolutionary pressures, he might want to trim it up. (Has the advantage of being supported by all the various eugenics of recent history, including the ongoing slaughter of those unborn suspected of having genetic illnesses.)”

So now abortion has been dragged into it.

“You slander many very good doctors with your dismissive remarks.”

And I’m the problem.

“But what followed was a long-winded series of examples that do not make a case that any student of what evolution teaches must believe any of the paleo-biology tall tales about the long long ago history of this and that.”

More friendly repartee.

“In my opinion, the whole argument is silly. Humans simply don’t have the intellectual capacity to comprehend the creation. It’s like a dog trying to understand how a television works;”

More brilliance. My tolerance for this is less than yours or you didn’t read it.

“Mike has argued that we should (or, at least, he would) place professional barriers before those who disagree with his creation myths ”

Another mis-statement of what I wrote. I only mentioned my own letter writing which was not a barrier the last time I checked admission requirements.

“You are the one who said that you would keep Creationists out of med school.”

More mis-statement.

“Believing that the paleo- fields have very badly miscalculated the age of the earth has nothing at all to do with the ability of a doctor to conduct medicine. ”

I guess you agree. I don’t.

I then gave up. This colony of creationists, even those who deny they are “YEC,” wore me out.

UPDATE #3: The attacks continue and it has been several days !

I am also a Christian who doesn’t hold to a YEC point of view. (I would also add, although I hate to flaunt credentials, that I am a more recently trained physician than you, Ivy-League-trained, and hold a faculty position at a medical center that’s a bit fancier than yours.)

So there ! I have decided that I am a Libertarian and not a conservative, if that is what this is about.

UPDATE #2 The pushback has finally succeeded in making me a villain.

(Yes, I know the things I cited don’t make him right about YEC, necessarily. My point is that he’s been successful despite Mike K insisting that people like him should be prevented from being doctors.) ·

This followed a long list of accomplishments by a supposed acquaintance who had had a successful career as, as best I can tell, a pediatrician. This all began with my comment that, aside from not being willing to recommend a student who did not believe in evolution for medical school, I was neutral. I think I am no longer neutral. The “Young Earth Creationist” community seems to have a determination to oppose any evolutionary thinking by anyone. They also seem to have an very convoluted way of explaining why obvious facts are not as they appear.

UPDATE: The pushback from creationists surprised me a bit. I guess it shouldn’t have. I expected “We will just have to agree to disagree” sort of thing. Instead I got an interesting series of attacks on me.

Is it impossible for the Creator to have built all the evidences of age into His new creation? The reality of natural selection isn’t necessarily required to have a long and indefinite period of activity to apply today.

and

Well that’s a glowing example of inability to actually argue the point. When you encounter indications that people disagree with your conflating micro and macro evolution, imply that anybody who doesn’t believe in the warm puddle or whatever the popular origin of life theory is this week is incompetent.

and

There are plenty of good Christian doctors and biologists who are well-versed in cell biology and in how mutations happen and in natural selection processes that affect microbes and higher organisms.

This all reminds me of the epicycles, which were used to explain why Ptolmeic astronomy could not explain certain phenomena like the movement of planets. It took Kepler’s discovery of the elliptical orbits to resolve the matter finally.

The creationists seem determined to ignore the implications of molecular biology about evolution and maintain “Young Earth Creation” in the face of the evidence of ancient biology.

But what followed was a long-winded series of examples that do not make a case that any student of what evolution teaches must believe any of the paleo-biology tall tales about the long long ago history of this and that.

Even Copernicus wanted to learn why the planets did not follow the rules of Ptolmeic astronomy. Today, that is considered rude. I may have to reevaluate my opinion of creationists. I have considered them harmless ill educated religious fundamentalists. They are far more aggressive than I had believed in attacking any disagreement.

I accidentally got into a debate about evolution at another site today. I didn’t want to get into this as I know there are many people, many of whom share my political affiliation, who are adamant about creationism, as the left often refers to it. Still, I have posted my opinions here in the past. I think molecular medicine is going to become even more important in the future and I do not understand how a physician can understand molecular medicine without molecular biology. There are many examples of evolution that must be understood to appreciate certain areas of medicine.

I think a physician can practice as a GP and not believe in evolution. I know a few. They are not likely to understand the future of medicine but they are my age and will not be practicing for long, if they are not yet retired.

(more…)

Tags:, , ,
Posted in education, medicine, science, social issues | Comments Closed

The Depression may be here.

Tuesday, February 4th, 2014

I have believed for some time that we were entering another Depression. I have previously posted about it.

The Great Depression did not really get going until the Roosevelt Administration got its anti-business agenda enacted after 1932. The 1929 crash was a single event, much like the 2008 panic. It took major errors in economic policy to make matters worse. Some were made by Hoover, who was a “progressive” but they continued under Roosevelt.

I posted that statement elsewhere and it got a rather furious rebuttal. I still believe it. What is more, I am not the only one. Or even only one of two.

The second article preceded the election of 2012 but is still valid.

When employment hit an air pocket in December, most analysts brushed off the dreadful jobs number as an anomaly, or a function of the weather. They chose to believe Ben Bernanke rather than their lying eyes. It’s hard to ignore a second signal that the U.S. economy is dead in the water, though: on Monday the Institute for Supply Management reported the steepest drop in manufacturing orders since December 1980:

fredgraph

In January, only 51% of manufacturers reported a rise in new orders, vs. 64% in December. Not only did the U.S. economy stop hiring in December, with just 74,000 workers added to payrolls; it stopped ordering new equipment. The drop in orders is something that only has occurred during recessions (denoted by the shaded blue portions of the chart). The Commerce Department earlier reported a sharp drop in December orders for durable goods. In current dollars, durable goods orders are unchanged from a year ago, which is to say they are lower after inflation.

So, the economy stopped hiring, even at the poor pace the past five years have seen, but business also stopped buying.

(more…)

Posted in economics, financial, health reform, History | Comments Closed