This particular blogger has a few comments on the so called climate bill passed through the house this past week. I cannot get too worked up about it since I am sure this stack of self serving political hooey will never get past the Senate and is really no more than a ham fisted effort to score political points.
The goofs who pieced this together will likely attempt Das Kapital as an encore.
I am no longer sure what possesses these people. They are political animals, yet the polls regarding climate change are becoming progressively more negative. When that happens, you take the problem quietly off the table and send it back to committee to be chewed on until the next election. There is no win here. In fact there is ample opportunity to create multiple fiascos with democrat written all over it.
There is also no conceivable gain unless you are a crook feeding off government largesse.
All this is taking place while we all twiddle our thumbs and run an interesting economic experiment to discover if our Band-Aids will be sufficient to hold off a full blown depression. Right now we are getting the onslaught of a full blown recession
I suspect that the main reason this nonsense was passed was to educate the radical naïve left about the realities of creating good legislation. A hand on walk through the meat grinder for the rookies allows their experienced compatriots to hand off the task of education to the other side of the floor. It really does feel like a freshman effort.
Most disturbing is that the democrats seem locked away somewhere outside of history and that most are so ignorant that they are even determined to repeat the simplest blunders of the past, because they have the apparent power to do so.
It is as if they want to roll back the reforms of Reagan and reintroduce the economic skill and foreign policy genius of Carter. In the meantime they exhaust themselves with trifles such as this bill.
Has nothing been learned by these people? We had twenty years of economic success, upon which a Clinton presidency threw off the economic governors and a gob smacked Bush did not reassert control when it became clear that something was amiss. The 2000 dot-com bust was not a crisis in capitalism but a brisk change in direction to correct excess. The credit bust is a crisis in capitalism brought on by easy leveraging and secrecy.
Saturday, June 27, 2009.
When I returned home last night, I have been watching CSPAN-1 for many hours. The discussions about the Waxman-Markey "climate bill" were just a stunning experience.
H.R. 2454: the 1092-page version
H.R. 2454: the 932-page version
I can't find the 1201-page version anywhere.
First, a comparison. The proceedings in the Czech Parliament are often a farce. Deputies attack each other personally and they often (but not always) speak about off-topic issues. And yes, I often enjoy these exchanges, too - although they can be too much of a good thing. From this point of view, the members of the U.S. Congress (from both parties) are true professionals, relatively speaking. They're better rhetors who always try to focus on the topic.
However, do these superficial differences matter for the outcome of key votes such as the Waxman-Markey bill - and the results of their work are the only thing that a citizen really cares about (or should care about)? The result showed that they don't: the mad document has narrowly passed, 219:212. As the numbers show, the "victory" would be impossible without these 8 traitors (omitted)
The bill has 1201 pages, although this full version is nowhere to be found. About 300 pages were added yesterday at 3:09 am. Hillary may have received a call at 3 am, with a big threat to the U.S. Did she manage to save her country? No, she didn't.It became extremely clear from the proceedings that virtually no one has read the bill, especially not the brand new 300-page amendment. No one in the U.S. House actually owned a copy of this amendment during the proceedings. John Boehner, the GOP minority leader, is close to an exception and we will discuss some of his findings below.
The supporters have uniformly been delusional imbeciles, talking about a shiny future, added jobs, reduced deficits, and saving the world. They have clearly no idea what's written in the bill and even if you told them, they wouldn't understand what it would mean. They're not capable of an elementary mental activity.
They're apparently not even supposed to be thinking: they are just paid to raise their hand in favor of any stupidity that their bosses ask them to support. They're individually irresponsible appendices of a filthy octopus. I just felt terrible for the U.S. when I saw e.g. those congresswomen who were manifestly included in the House because they were black, female, and simple-minded enough to blindly approve anything recommended by their white male "leaders".
BillLet me tell start somewhere. The very size of the bill, 1201 pages, means that most people - and even most "local experts" - have absolutely no chance to understand all of its glitches. (I offer USD 5 to the first person who shows some evidence that he or she has read the full text.) So this bill is, first of all, a stunning document transferring an immense amount of power to a few selected people who will know how to master the bill and benefit from its details.
For a comparison, a pretty good bill called the U.S. Constitution originally had four pages and it allowed a great country to work well for 230+ years. Those four pages are somewhat less than 1201 pages whose only purpose is to allow one particular green tumor to thrive for a few years, before it dies of hunger.
John Boehner has read most of it. He showed a graph of a hundred of institutions that are expected to "conspire" to make this newly planned huge sector of the grey economy thrive. Many of these institutions are new and their name is composed out of approximately 10 words each.
The bill allows the new octopus to infiltrate the life of all the individuals, force them to look for expert opinions about all kinds of things before very basic transactions, order even villages (which often can't afford to hire anyone) to employ useless green staff that is a part of this new mafia, force them to have power outlets (or expensive devices to sequester CO2, a harmless gas that we call life) at all conceivable and inconceivable, mostly useless places, and so on. In other words, you won't be able and your community or company won't be able to live normally without paying attention to the new mechanism and you won't be able to rely on having resources because you can always be ordered to waste them for nonsensical expenses dictated by the bill.
This bill is trying to distort ways how energy is used. Now, what activities depend on energy? It's impossible not to think about the crazy physics textbook that once made Richard Feynman so angry. The answer to all questions was "Energy makes it go". Feynman explained that children didn't learn anything, it was just an indoctrination by a vacuous cliché, and energy makes everything go but also stop. In fact, it is conserved, just being converted from one form to another. Sadly enough, the sentence "Energy makes everything go" is no longer vacuous with this bill because the bill implies that "Everything must be regulated".
Meanwhile, the bill is doing nothing measurable to actually help America become energy-independent: it does nothing to help nuclear energy, the realistic domestic sources of energy are being suppressed, and the currently unrealistic domestic sources of energy will probably remain unrealistic. Moreover, the bill depends on hundreds of technicalities reflecting the current details about existing technologies such as fuel cells. If there's any significant technological progress, which is the only hope to realize some dreams proclaimed by the bill, all these things will be getting obsolete and hundreds of pages will have to be modified and added (to describe the bureaucratic treatment of the new technologies) almost every year.
There are many regulations that imply that new billions of dollars will be moved from one place to another. However, the algorithms how to exactly calculate these billions and how to determine where they're moved are never well-defined, as Boehner has found out: the bill was clearly written by a few random sloppy amateurs-become-professionals - or the vagueness may have been either unavoidable or deliberate.
So whatever the reason is behind the vagueness, the bill will give an immense power to those who will be able to take over this gigantic new machinery and move billions to their preferred locations (and order such transfers) - a situation that is likely to attract huge corruption and make Saddam Hussein a modest, wise, and fair manager in comparison.
The extra expenses needed for this gigantic new structure to operate are going to be paid by the "polluters". That's very interesting because the same bill argues that there won't be any polluters in a near future. So who will pay for all these new green jobs at that time? Of course, this question is rhetorical because the U.S. will never get there.Amazingly enough, this nearly unprecedented communist-bureaucratic revolution is being justified mostly by "climate change".
The whole industrial activity of the U.S. since 1776 may have (temporarily) added something between 0.05 and 0.2 °C to the global temperatures (would you prefer to sacrifice the U.S. to avoid this "serious" change?), and the business-as-usual in the U.S. would contribute an additional 0.1 - 0.5 °C per the 21th century - i.e. until the year 2100 which is so far that almost none of us will be here to see it. I am convinced that even the IPCC will agree about the figures. The greenhouse warming is small, the U.S. only influence a small part of it, and the growth will naturally decrease in a few decades or a century because of decreasing fossil fuel reserves, anyway.
The unmeasurably small cooling to be achieved by a century of this new system - which will surely be lost in local and global fluctuations and many other effects influencing the temperature - must be a really valuable thing because the U.S. House is not only ready to add trillions of new debt but also willing to transform their previously great country to a tyranny where energy-dependent jobs will be escaping to more friendly countries, where elementary business and human acts - and indeed, even manifestations of life - will need a bureaucratic stamp and approval (by bureaucrats whose number will have to be so large that they will de facto cover every piece of the country), a nation that is going to plan a rationally unmotivated global trade war with all countries in the world that are gonna realize that similar bills are a road to hell (the U.S. want to become a bigger version of North Korea, a rogue state that must bugger everyone else about its insane ideological viewpoints, in order to mask its own self-imposed internal problems).
You know, the Bolsheviks decided to transform the Russian society in a similar radical way back in 1917. At least, the champions of the existing regime together with the blue-dog Mensheviks of that time had the guts to try to stop the spreading Bolshevik cancer. At the end, they failed, and Russia was decimated by the Bolsheviks for more than 70 years, suffering from the economic decline, tens of millions of murdered people, and bringing the world to the verge of a nuclear holocaust. When the Bolsheviks got settled, they had all kinds of peaceful plans, and virtually all of them turned out to be nothing else than a wishful thinking: the real progress in the economy doesn't come from plans of a few mediocre officials who declared themselves as being important, without having passed any tests showing that they're talented.
The Waxman-Markey method to build new things in the economy is structurally analogous to the Lenin-Stalin method.
Is there someone in the U.S. today who will at least try to stop these blinded loons? At least the U.S. Senate? Well, I actually guess that the U.S. Senate will stop this looming storm. Meanwhile, we should better check that nothing like that will happen in Europe or at least not in the Czech Republic.
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