How Much Can We Borrow?

If your left hand borrows $1 billion from your right hand, would you, as a whole, be bankrupt?

Of course not.

You might wonder where your right hand got the money to loan your left hand. Assume that your left hand is able to create money, more or less like our central bank, the Federal Reserve. Your left hand, over time, gave the money to your right hand, which then lent it back to your left hand.

In this closed-system scenario, no matter how much your left hand borrows, no matter what the interest rate, you, as a whole, will never be bankrupt. Your left hand could choose to default on its debt, but it would never have to default.

Large debt and continued borrowing can potentially cause accelerating inflation. However, there is no inherent hard limit at which that occurs because the demand for consumption and investment in the private sector are equally important factors. Those factors will be the subject of another post.

The Politics of the Current Health Care Reform Debate

This post is a followup to Bret's earlier post.

Opposition to proposed changes to medical care/insurance programs has been growing and getting more and more vocal. Even though most people are at least somewhat satisfied with their circumstances they are willing to consider changes that make sense and don't seem fishy:

Yes, the current health care program does have problems. To fix them requires a series of repairs -- tort reform, portability, elimination of prior conditions as an impediment to insurance, and a safety net for people who don't have insurance or lose their jobs.

Health reform does not require a complete remaking of the system. If all that Obama wanted were to insure those who fall between the cracks, he could put them into the same wonderful program that Congress created for itself by subsidizing their premiums. This would neither require a thousand pages of legislation nor a new series of bureaucracies.

But building a new power base resulting from the mobilization of the political and economic periphery requires redefining the nation's health problems as the nation's health catastrophe.

Health reform is Chicago politics on a national level. Welcome to the city.

Also, when the president talks about competition he seems to mean something different than my notion of competition:

"Choice, competition, reducing costs — those are the things that I want to see accomplished in this health reform bill," President Obama told talk-show host Michael Smerconish last week.

Choice and competition would be good. They would indeed reduce costs. If only the president meant it. Or understood it.

In a free market, a business that is complacent about costs learns that its prices are too high when it sees lower-cost competitors winning over its customers. The market — actually, the consumer — holds businesses accountable and keeps them honest. No "public option" is needed.

So the hope for reducing medical costs indeed lies in competition and choice. Today competition is squelched by government regulation and privilege.

But Obama's so-called reforms would not create real competition and choice. They would prohibit it.

Competition is not a bunch of companies offering the same products and services in the same way. That sterile notion of competition assumes we already know all that there is to know.

Well-meaning politicians have created untold misery by assuming they and their experts know enough already.

The health care bills are perfect examples. If competition is a discovery process, the congressional bills would impose the opposite of competition. They would forbid real choice.

People who would be willing to make changes see all of this and the behavior of the political class and they are getting angry and losing trust:

Americans didn't vote for big government last November. They voted for a guy who looked like he could keep his cool in the heat of battle. If Obama wants to regain that cool, he needs to rein in the power-grabbers in Washington.

Actually they did vote for bigger government without intending to, but that's another subject. Here is how I would describe the growing opposition to any change at this time: they are calling a time-out on the political class until they start behaving in a trustworthy manner.

Irrational Debate

Many Democrats are upset with the current tone of the Health Care debate. In their opinion, those who oppose Health Care Reform are being noisy, disruptive, and irrational. For example, someone I know wrote the following on another forum I frequent:

"I don't have a problem with rational arguments and debate on these issues. One of my previous posts suggested that Reps [Republicans] choice [sic] to use lies and fear probably guaranteed a poorer final result than the decision for them to present rational arguments and advance the solution in a positive way."

The Health Care debate starts with assumptions about how the world works (for example, what motivates different people) and even more importantly, personal subjective preferences. Rationality and reason have little to do with either of those, especially the latter. Since there is little common ground between liberals and conservatives on these premises, it's no surprise that the conclusions are totally opposite as well.

Just to be clear, both liberals and conservatives want peace on earth, good will to men, prosperity and happiness for all, etc., etc., yadda, yadda. So it might seem like there is substantial common ground, at least regarding the desirability of various Ends.

However, where there is precious little common ground is whether or not it's possible to achieve any of these desirable Ends or anything close. Note that a belief that such Ends are unachievable precludes rational discussion about the path to get there. There often simply isn't one, in my opinion.

My observations of politics coupled with trading futures (which led to a large number of hours studying economics and public choice theory) have completely convinced me that, on average, new and expanded government programs, taxes, and/or regulations hurt me and my family (and others) in the short term and the vast majority of people in the longer term.

As a result, from my point of view, there really isn't any point to "rational" discussion. That's because the rational discussion is inherently limited to those details that can be reasonably foreseen. What can't be rationally discussed is all of the unforeseen problems that will ultimately occur because nobody knows what they'll end up being. The foreseen effects of a 1,000+ page policy are just the tip of the iceberg. It's the huge mass of problems lurking below the surface about which we're currently clueless that will be the real problem and there can't be meaningful debate about that which is unknown by all.

In fact, stooping to rationally debate what's known is counterproductive. It requires a certain level of buy-in to the program that isn't warranted.

I reject the Health Care Reforms being proposed, but I have no rational reason for doing so.

Government Versus Growth

This chart says it all:





(HT: Carpe Diem)









If want a better future for your children and grandchildren, keep total government expenditures under 25%.

Priests of Warmenism

In a comment on a totally unrelated topic, Peter Burnet wrote:

Hardly anybody is qualified to build or interpret climate models. We are all beholden to what the experts say. Even if a layman sets out to study the competing claims of climate scientists carefully, he still is pretty much restricted to comparing theories/conclusions and has a hard time critiquing their underlying methodologies systematically by measuring them against experience.

The "experts" want you to be beholden to what they say and Peter has closed his eyes and walked blindly into their trap.

Virtually all of climate science is based on typical everyday experience and a few minor and easily understood bits of physics. We've all noticed that sunlight (also called visible radiation) makes objects warmer when it strikes them and that when those heated objects are moved out of the sun they begin to cool but we can't visibly see the warmth emanating from them. We've all noticed that hot air rises (in a hot-air balloon, thermal, etc.) and that when the hot air is also moist (humid) that clouds form when it cools sufficiently as it rises. Etc., etc.

The climate is difficult to predict not because the physics is difficult, but because it is so chaotic. All the bits of earth, ocean, and atmosphere heating and mixing at different rates and interacting with each other produces really, really complex responses that are impossible to characterize analytically. So scientists make statistical climate models to try and mimic the past and predict the future. They are really little more than software hackers and statisticians and know little more science (physics) of relevance to their task than the average layman.

So no, we aren't beholden to the priests of warmenism unless we want to be.

The Road to Serfdom by VDH

From an article by Victor David Hanson:

Otherwise we know the ultimate end of the present road: a vast bureaucracy of non-taxpaying incompetents, damning the estranged few for not producing ever more to be taxed, convinced that they are geniuses—and only due to some sort of unfairness have been surpassed by others.

Sounds like he's channeling Hayek's Road to Serfdom. But that does seem to be where it always ends up in the long run. Personally, I'm thinking of joining the vast bureaucracy of non-taxpaying incompetents. It looks like that's where the money will be in the future.

The jobs fairy

When thinking about practical understandings of economic matters the matter of jobs is pretty meaningful to most people. Shannon Love provides illumination over at Chicago Boyz:

We talk about jobs as if they are physical objects. We find jobs. We lose them. We trade them. We save them. We export them by shipping them overseas. Occasionally, we believe they are stolen. Metaphors are common in language and usually harmless, but sometimes we seem to forget that they are metaphors. This in turn causes us to misunderstand the phenomenon under discussion.

In the case of jobs, the metaphor stops us from asking what physical event actually occurs when jobs “go away” and “don’t come back.” Examining this metaphor tells us something that is very important and ignored in most political discussions.

First, what is a job? A job is a task you perform for someone else’s benefit in return for compensation of some kind. If you mow your own yard it’s not a job. If you mow your neighbor’s for $10 it is. If you grow food for your own consumption, that’s not a job. If you grow food and sell it for money, then it is. A job requires that an economic exchange for the results of labor occur between two or more people.

Here we see the limits of metaphor. In the metaphor jobs are treated as objects, but in reality a job is an event or an action. It is the act of exchanging labor for money. The word job should be a verb instead of a noun.

When we talk about jobs leaving, moving, shifting etc., or being exported, we’re really talking about a particular subset of people leaving, moving, shifting etc. Who are these people? They are the job makers.

For example, a job in a factory does not exist before someone invents the technological item to be manufactured, designs the assembly line, buys the land, builds the factory and does all of the other thousands of tasks necessary to make, distribute and sell a product in the modern world. Until a job maker does all of that creative work, no job exists.

The ugly truth is that although we work hard, most us don’t create jobs for ourselves or others. Instead we rely on a small minority of job makers to create tasks that we can perform in exchange for a living. Only about 20% of us make any jobs at all. Of those 20%, about half, 10% of the total, are self-employed and make a job only for themselves. The remaining 10% make all the jobs for the rest of us. We rely on this small minority to identify solutions to problems and to create organizations that can implement those solutions. They then hire us to carry out the tasks associated with that solution. Without them, the rest of us would still be subsistence farmers.

When jobs “go away” it’s really the job makers, as living and breathing humans, who go away.

It’s easy to see why leftists would eagerly adopt the metaphor of jobs as objects. It lets them ignore the fact that a small minority of economically creative people create jobs for the rest of us. In turn, this lets them advocate policies that drive away job makers, without being held responsible for the loss of the jobs the job makers create.

The leftmost 25% of the American political spectrum do not for the most part consider themselves Marxist but they clearly work from a model strongly influenced by Marxist thought. Marx asserted that the economy and technology were the results of impersonal natural forces. No human created a job or any other economic good. Instead, the jobs and goods just happened, and a minority of evil people unjustly claimed the lion’s share of the benefit of these natural resources for themselves by shear brute force. The entire intellectual and moral argument for Marxism stands upon the idea that business people don’t actually create anything. This is why contemporary leftists honestly don’t understand why taxing and over-regulating the economically creative destroys the jobs of the economically uncreative. They think jobs just happen like the rain, and that the only real decision to be made is how we distribute the benefits of those jobs.

When the job makers leave, and the non-economically creative no longer have work, leftists do not wonder what they did to drive the job makers away. Instead, they treat the loss of jobs-as-objects like some act of God or natural disaster.

The rest of us should have that conversation. We should stop talking about impersonal and abstract “businesses” as creating jobs, and instead make explicit that a small and valuable minority of individual human beings creates the jobs and and wealth that the rest of us depend on. We should make it clear that the proper role of government economic policy is to support the creativity of such individuals, and it should do so mostly by getting out of their way.

The world has become “flat” in the sense that the geographical advantages no longer exist that once made one region inevitably wealthy and another inevitably poor. Today, one can build a factory or almost any job-creating system almost anywhere in the world. Today, prosperity simply requires that you have a sufficient mass of economically-creative job-makers. The great tragedy of Michigan, the other rust belt states and California is that nothing physical or material whatsoever prevents them from becoming economic powerhouses again. All they need do is change their political culture and laws such that instead of vilifying, hounding and looting job makers, they encourage them to create. If the states do that, then nothing can stop their rise to prosperity.

If they do not, then nothing can save them.

In my discussions over the years, most people seem unaware of the importance of the economically creative people who provide them with opportunities. The jobs fairy is my fun little rhetorical device for labeling the vital few but it also captures the common mistaken notion that jobs mysteriously appear out of thin air.

Additional info.: America Runs on Small Business

Did he realize what he said?

This is a bit old by now in terms of the news cycle. Nonetheless, it's still a teachable moment. (see here also video)

The Administration is "trying to tamp down talk that it didn't get it quite right -- talk created by Vice President Biden," who told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that the Administration "misread the economy." Obama "tried to modulate the impact of the vice president's words." Obama said, "No, no, no, no, no. Rather than say 'misread,' we had incomplete information."

Which is almost always the case on anything of consequence regarding the economy. Fortunately, Hayek is available to help:

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

However, only someone with an open mind can grasp this idea if it is in conflict with their existing beliefs!

Self-Healing Bicycle Tires

I find it funny that often inventions that have a really positive impact on my life come from completely unexpected places. The latest example of this is self-healing tubeless bicycle tires. I'm not what you would call an avid bicyclist, but I probably ride around 1,000 miles in a given year, nearly all of that on a mountain bike.

The Southwestern United States is infested with the goathead thorn (Tribulus terrestris). These thorns are intensely sharp and hard and can penetrate just about anything that you could make a bicycle tire out of including kevlar and steel belts. As a result, for most bicyclists out here, even (or especially) mountain bicyclists with their heavy duty tires, frequent flats are an inescapable part of life.

Or so I thought until a guy at the bicycle shop recommended (and then installed) a kit that turns regular tires and rims into self-healing tubeless tires. Basically, a special rim strip is installed, the tube is removed and discarded (or saved for an emergency), and a liquid sealant is added to the tire. The liquid sealant is distributed all through the outside of the tire while the bicycle is being ridden because of the force due to the rotation of the wheel. When something penetrates the tire, the sealant is forced into the hole by the tire's air pressure, and immediately heals the tire.

The most impressive recovery was when I somehow managed to get more than 10 goathead thorns in both my front and rear tires at the same time (it looked very much like the picture above). I only ever carry one spare tube, I didn't have ten patches left, and I was riding alone, so it would've been a long, long walk home if I had still been using tubes. But I just pulled all of the thorns out of the tires, the holes bubbled for 10 seconds or so then stopped, I got back on the bike, and rode off with no loss of pressure and no problems.

Amazing!

I have to admit that I particularly like the philosophy of the approach¹. The alternative of trying to design impregnable super tires seems rigid and Statist to me. In that case you have to foresee everything that can make a flat and design solutions to protect against them. You end up with somewhat better protection against flats than standard tires, but at higher cost and lower performance (such tires tend to be heavier and more rigid so they don't grip as well). And such tires still are susceptible to flats from goatheads.

On the other hand, Self-Healing Bicycle Tires are a Resilient Approach. Instead of trying to prevent a situation, allow the damage to happen and then recover quickly. It doesn't matter if the damage is from a 3 inch diamond spike or a piece of glass or a tiny sliver or whatever.

Recover and just keep truckin'.
__________________________________

¹Note that this particular approach is apparently not for everybody as shown by a few of the reviewers.

Supreme Court nomination hearings past

Activity surrounding current nomination hearings make me think back to a past hearing. Michael Barone recalls:

He is a man who says he does not read newspapers and seldom if ever watches newscasts. If true, it’s probably a good thing, because he has been the center of political controversy since his confirmation hearings in 1991 and the object of patronizing and dismissive commentary by many legal scholars. But though he was confirmed by the Senate by a slim 52-47 margin, he holds a lifetime appointment and has said that he intends to serve for 40 years — longer than any previous justice.

Thomas’s confirmation and role on the court are of special interest as the Senate Judiciary Committee begins its hearings tomorrow on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to succeed the retired Justice David Souter. The vetting of Sotomayor promises to be a tame affair compared with the tumultuous and controversial grilling of Thomas in 1991, which he characterized as a “high-tech lynching.”

Sotomayor seems to share the views of Hispanic politicians and advocacy organizations and will face a committee controlled by the party of the president who nominated her. Thomas, by contrast, appeared before a hostile committee majority as a nominee who had disagreed with the views of most black politicians and civil rights organizations.

Thomas told the story of his life up to the time he took his seat on the court in his best-selling memoir “My Grandfather’s Son.” It’s a dramatic story, of growing up in the segregated Deep South, raised by a stern and hard-working grandfather (“the greatest man I have ever known”), of rebelling against him and rejecting his church (“I was an angry young black man”), of academic achievement and personal failings. At Yale Law School he took tax and corporation classes and did better than his detractors have suggested; tax law professor Boris Bittker every year set aside several anonymous exam bluebooks as examples of good work, and one year one of those bluebooks was Clarence Thomas’.

Having recently read Justice Thomas's memoir, I'm reminded of the appalling indecency with which the man was treated in his hearing. Fortunately he had the courage and the will to defend himself appropriately.

Text Message: Your Time's Up

This is kinda cool: the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) is deploying new technology to warn people about incoming rocket attacks:

Code Red (early warning radar system) to your cellular device? This will become a reality two years from now, according to the plans of the Home Front Command. For the past year, the IDF Home Front Command has been working on warning civilians of rocket attacks via cellular devices. [...]

The Cellular Broadcasting Technology works according to the device's location. When a warning about a missile attack is received in a certain area, a warning message will be sent to whoever is in the zone.

Whereas this will clearly be very useful in Israel as soon as it's ready, I think it will be readily adopted in the United States as well given the proliferation of nuclear missiles to regimes such as North Korea. I expect the text message will look something like:

A nuclear missile will land in your vicinity in the next 90 seconds. Please go indoors, sit on a chair away from any windows, place your head firmly between your legs -- and kiss your ass goodbye!

At least we'll have some warning.

(HT: Israel Matzav)

Hurricanes Versus Bill Gates

Question: What's the difference between Bill Gates and God?
Answer: God doesn't think he's Bill Gates.

Gates' latest area of playing God involves the simple matter of stopping hurricanes:

Recent patent filings have shown Bill Gates and his friends exploring subjects as diverse as electromagnetic engines and beer kegs. Now they're thinking even bigger -- trying to stop hurricanes.

Microsoft's chairman is among the inventors listed on a new batch of patent applications that propose using large fleets of vessels to suppress hurricanes through various methods of mixing warm water from the surface of the ocean with colder water at greater depths. The idea is to decrease the surface temperature, reducing or eliminating the heat-driven condensation that fuels the giant storms.

The filings were made by Searete LLC, an entity tied to Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue-based patent and invention house run by Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft chief technology officer. Myhrvold and several others are listed along with Gates as inventors.

The idea is actually pretty simple. Large tubes from the surface of the ocean to some depth are attached to floating platforms. Waves slosh over the edge of the platform and the warm surface water from the waves run down the tube to the depths, requiring no external energy source. Build a gazillion of them, stick them in the possible path of a serious hurricane, and presto!, the hurricane is downgraded a couple of notches relative to what it would've been since it no longer has access to that very warm surface water that would fuel it.

Since these could be completely passive devices, it wouldn't cost all that much to build them. The only question is could you actually build and deploy enough of them to make a significant difference.

Oh! And in the long term, there'd be even more heat and energy in the ocean which would mean even more intense and destructive hurricanes. But hey, that's for another generation to worry about.

Where's the Buzz?

On June 2nd, Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, made a presentation at a conference showing empirically that the climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is 0.5 degrees Celsius. Since the climate models show a sensitivity that is 3 to 10 times larger, if Lindzen's findings are accurate, this would simultaneously invalidate the results of the climate models and eliminate the possibility of catastrophic man-made global warming. Indeed, at the end of his presentation, Lindzen states:

However, for the low sensitivity obtained from the actual climate system, we see that sensitivity is narrowly constrained to about 0.5C, and strongly implies that there is little to be concerned about.

In a normal field, these results would pretty much wrap things up, but global warming/climate change has developed so much momentum that it has a life of its own – quite removed from science. One can reasonably expect that opportunism of the weak will lead to efforts to alter the data (though the results presented here have survived several alterations of the data already).

It seems to me like this should be fairly big news. Lindzen is well known, with a long track record, from a relatively prestigious institution, with astounding results.

But there is remarkably little buzz. There's no mention that he's going to submit these results in a paper for peer review. The global warming skeptics don't seem to have much noticed these appealing results. The global warming believers haven't bothered to refute it.

The quiet seems strange to me. The debate has never lacked volume before.

Boy Am I Jetlagged

We're back safe and sound from London and France with no significant glitches in the entire trip.

The jetlag due to the 9 hour time difference is really bad though. It was bad going the other way too. I'm gettin' too old for that kind of travel.

I'm so jetlagged that I accidently clicked the 'Publish' button instead of the 'Save Draft' button on some notes I was making for a future post. So if your feed aggregator shows you a post titled 'I Shrugged', ignore it, it wasn't meant to be seen and I've since deleted it.

Oops.

Key points in the health care debate

Much of the public discussion does not even grapple with determining the most important criteria in determining policy changes. That can be the subject of another post. George Newman goes bowling, lining up several nonsensical shibboleths and knocking them down:(here)

The health-care debate continues. We have now heard from nearly all the politicians, experts and interested parties: doctors, drug makers, hospitals, insurance companies, even constitutional lawyers (though not, significantly, from trial lawyers, who know full well "change" is not coming to their practices). Here is how one humble economist sees some of the main arguments, which I have paraphrased below:

- "The American people overwhelmingly favor reform."

If you ask whether people would be happier if somebody else paid their medical bills, they generally say yes. But surveys on consumers' satisfaction with their quality of care show overwhelming support for the continuation of the present arrangement. The best proof of this is the belated recognition by the proponents of health-care reform that they need to promise people that they can keep what they have now.

- "Forty-five million people in the U.S. are uninsured."

Even if this were true (many dispute it) should we risk destroying a system that works for the vast majority to help 15% of our population?

- "The cost of treating the 45 million uninsured is shifted to the rest of us."

So on Monday, Wednesday and Friday we are harangued about the 45 million people lacking medical care, and on Tuesday and Thursday we are told we already pay for that care. Left-wing reformers think that if they split the two arguments we are too stupid to notice the contradiction. Furthermore, if cost shifting is bad, wait for the Mother of all Cost Shifting when suppliers have to overcharge the private plans to compensate for the depressed prices forced on them by the public plan.

- "A universal plan will reduce the cost of health care."

Think a moment. Suppose you are in an apple market with 100 buyers and 100 sellers every day and apples sell for $1 a pound. Suddenly one day 120 buyers show up. Will the price of the apples go up or down?

- "We need a public plan to keep the private plans honest."

The 1,500 or so private plans don't produce enough competition? Making it 1,501 will do the trick? But then why stop there? Eating is even more important than health care, so shouldn't we have government-run supermarkets "to keep the private ones honest"? After all, supermarkets clearly put profits ahead of feeding people. And we can't run around naked, so we should have government-run clothing stores to keep the private ones honest. And shelter is just as important, so we should start public housing to keep private builders honest. Oops, we already have that. And that is exactly the point. Think of everything you know about public housing, the image the term conjures up in your mind. If you like public housing you will love public health care.

There are many more gems in the article!!

Lessons learned

The late Peter Bernstein had much to offer...

Jason Zweig had this to say (excerpts):

Investing has yielded a few stars so famous they are known by first name. Warren Buffett is one. Peter L. Bernstein -- the economist, investment consultant and prolific author who died on June 5 at 90 -- was another.

In his almost 70-year career, he taught economics at Williams College, worked as a portfolio manager at Amalgamated Bank and ran the investment-counseling firm of Bernstein-Macaulay, co-founded by his father and Frederick Macaulay, who invented the modern discipline of bond investing.

In 1974, as Wall Street was suffering its worst market decline since 1929, Mr. Bernstein co-founded the Journal of Portfolio Management to improve risk management with insights from academic research.

In 1970, he asked rhetorically, "What are the consequences if I am wrong?" and said "no investment decisions can be rationally arrived at unless they are [based upon] the answer to this question." He counseled investors to take big risks with small amounts of money rather than small risks with big amounts of money.

The same focus on the consequences of error was one of the main themes of "Against the Gods," which he published more than a quarter-century later.

Also in 1970, Mr. Bernstein wrote: "We simply do not know what the future holds." Over the ensuing decades, he returned again and again to that phrase in his speeches, articles and books, because he felt it captured the central truth about investing.

Asked in 2004 to name the most important lesson he had to unlearn, he said: "That I knew what the future held, that you can figure this thing out. I've become increasingly humble about it over time and comfortable with that. You have to understand that being wrong is part of the [investing] process."

I've read many books and articles over the years written by Mr. Bernstein and always felt fortunate that he shared his thoughts and insights. The willingness to accept uncertainty in the realm of investing (and life in general) is a valuable lesson.

( re: uncertainty see also here here here and here)

There were many who did not ask the question: what if I am wrong?

I can not predict, but I can observe. The trick is learning what observations are worth making and then using that information to construct workable contingencies.

I See London, I See France...

Off to London, Paris, and Southern France for three weeks to give the kids a chance to see a bit of the world.

No blogging for me during that period, but maybe my coblogger will step up to the plate.

What's News?

I'm sorry, but the entire punditocracy has missed the point.

It is NOT news that someone in show business makes an intensely rude, crude, lewd, insulting, disgusting and/or despicable comment regarding an entirely inappropriate subject. Indeed, if we demanded an apology every time that happened, we'd never get anything else done.

The point is that Letterman's comment is a shot across the bow. He is saying, "Governor Palin, if you so much as poke your nose outside the great State of Alaska, we will insult and smear and humiliate and hound you and your family and your community and anybody who thinks or even looks like you until you feel so degraded and miserable that you run back home with your tail between your legs and never, ever come back. We hate you, we fear you, we loathe you, and we will stop at nothing to destroy you."

That's the news.

Fire up the Skeptics

Everyone is a Skeptic when it comes to religion. There are so many religions that it is impossible to be a believer in all of them so we are Skeptical about at least some of them. For the most part, we keep our Skepticism to ourselves because there is limited downside to letting others believe in whatever they choose to believe in as long as their attempts to convert the rest of us to their beliefs are kept within reasonable bounds.

However, if a religion exceeds those bounds, Skeptics will come out of the woodwork to attack that religion. Nobody wants to belong to a church that they believe is False. The propensity to not belong to someone else's church is so strong that wars have been fought over this sort of thing.

The Church of Human Induced Catastrophic Global Warmenism has exceeded reasonable bounds in trying to convert us all. This Church wants to use the full force and authority of the governments worldwide to force us to join. They want to limit our economic and political freedoms to force us to at least behave as if we believe.

To a great number of people, this is simply not acceptable and, sure enough, there is surge of Skeptics appearing all over the world.

I am one of those Skeptics. The science and economics on which the Church rests is full of holes, and unless that religion is one you wish to subscribe to, it may be safely ignored. If you do wish to subscribe to Global Warmenism, by all means please do so and limit your own energy usage and material consumption as you see fit.

Just don't impose your religion on the rest of us. Thanks.

Radical Christianists

Though not personally religious, I've argued numerous times that Christianity post-reformation is a peaceful and constructive religion.

Murders like this one undermine my argument.