Republicans & Conservatives

Groundhog Day

Good news on jobs, two years too late. Usually a job loss bottoms out and then climbs out.You see this almost happened for Obama. But then his policies stalled the recovery.

Progressive Wisconsin

My Wisconsin relatives, all working class, are divided in their opinions about Governor Scott Walker, as is the state. We can disagree about the ideology, but there are some facts. The $3 billion deficit is now a $300 million surplus - without new taxes. Walker passed a statewide school voucher program, eased business regulation, and enacted tort reform. Last year only 10% of Wisconsin business thought the state was heading in the right direction; the number is now 94%. After losing 150,000 jobs they year before, Wisconsin added 10,000 jobs in 2011.

Trying to Understand the Great Depression and the Recent Recession

I spent a couple hours reading articles in the "Wilson Quarterly" looking back at the Great Depression and comparing it to our current condition. Economists still disagree about what caused the Depression and how it ended, but most of us have a kind of simple mental model, based mostly on ... nothing. The one I learned might be called a "hangover model". We lived too fast and too furiously in the 1920s and woke up with the headache like after a night of partying. This model is definitely not true. But read for yourselves some of the others.

We are alone in the vast universe

I was watching reruns of a "Cosmos" marathon. These were made by Karl Sagan around thirty years ago and described science of the time for the layman. They are a little dated today (even hard science changes) but that is not what I found remarkable. The remarkable thing is the implicit belief that there exists intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and that at some point we will be in contact with them. I used to believe that too, but it is not science. It is as much a assertion of religious belief as we find in any of the holy books. It is completely w/o scientific foundation.

Obama Rejects Keystone Pipeline, American Workers

President Obama did it. He rejected the Keystone Pipeline. Whether you thought that It was a good idea for the pipeline would create jobs and provide economic stimulus or you thought getting energy from Canadian oil sands was not worth the cost, you now know where Obama stands.

Illegal Logging

This is what I wrote for my forestry magazine. It has some political points that might be of interest here. - Illegal loggers steal from us in many ways. Sometimes they are literally stealing our trees, but it goes way beyond that. Illegal logging is rarely done according to good procedures that protect the environment and preserve the forest for future generations. The public views the scenes of destruction left by illegal loggers and jumps to conclusion that this is how logging is done. That means that illegal loggers also steal the reputations of honest loggers and landowners who are good stewards of their land and often have been for many generations.

Romney Ethical & Honest; Attackers Liars

The generally liberal Washington Post gave the accusations against Romney its "four Pinocchio" rating, which means that practically none of them are true. WP says, "The 29-minute video "King of Bain" is such an over-the-top assault on former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney that it is hard to know where to begin." But let's summarize.

Index of Economic Freedom 2012

We have almost dropped out of the top ten in economic freedom. We have been getting worse while others are getting better. Among others, we now fall behind Canada, Australia, New Zealand & Switzerland. These are places that we thought of as having more intrusive governments than ours. America used to be among the freest. Things change.

Romney Adding Value and Creating Success

Chrissy and I owned a house in New Hampshire a few years back. We bought it for around $230,000 and sold it less than a year later for $270,000. We were lucky, but also smart and hard working. We chose a good house that needed lots of work. We fixed the place up, replacing tile, fixing the furnace and generally making the place worth more. This is a way to add value and make money. This is almost exactly what Mitt Romney did at Bain Capital.

Making the Grade

One of the hallmarks of modern liberal/progressives is their bias in favor of equality of results. That is why they worry so much about "gaps" in performance and insist on using awkward modifiers like "underprivileged," "disadvantaged" or "underserved" when describing anybody not doing as well as others. This quest for equality is reflected in grades. To a statistically significant degree, Democratic professors give out fewer high and low marks. In other words, they equalize results.

Banned at the White House

It is about time. A famous athlete is banned from the White House because of his nasty behavior in the past. We shouldn't feel too sorry for Delonte West. He is somewhat cognitively challenged, so the sentence is ambiguous, but I am going to assume that when Delonte say, "It's going to be ashamed the President isn't going to get a chance to meet me. I'm the president of my house.'' that he thinks it is more President Obama's loss than his own.

How Violence has Declined & Why you Didn't Notice

Stephen Pinker is my favorite living philosopher of society. Some would correct me and say that he is a scientists and not a philosopher, but the two can overlap extensively. With all due respect to the ancient philosophers that I read and loved, many of the questions that perturbed them are now just "simple" matters of science. For example, philosophers argued back and forth for years as to whether humans were "blank slates" influenced only by their environments or whether they were determined by physical or genetic factors. Recent advances in science have made this argument mute.

The Democrats' Secret Weapon

by Phillip Whitten

Republicans have an historic opportunity in 2012 not only to wrest the presidency from the Democrats but also to capture the Senate while maintaining control of the House. Indeed, this may be necessary to undo the damage inflicted on our nation by the incompetent Obama administration.

Return to Reason with my Man Mitt

I am purposely jumping the gun and I may be eating dirt soon, but I am assuming that Romney will win in Iowa. This is something of a miracle. He has not spent much time campaigning there and all the liberal pundits have been telling us that Romney is too moderate to be nominated, that the "right" wouldn't accept his religion and that Republicans would never accept "impure" conservative brand (i.e. flip-flop on abortion, support for health care etc.)

Ghosts of New Year Past

I put the boys on the plane back to the U.S. I talked to Chrissy on Skype. Right now I am watching a nature show with Portuguese narration about New Zealand. New Year Eve party. However, if you turn the page you can see that I have all I really need.