Monthly Archives: November 2017

Competition

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The German Marshall Fund of the United States had a worried piece about net neutrality up shortly before Thanksgiving.  Ignoring the author’s opening paragraph, wherein she laid out the Left’s nonsense about how getting government out of the business of regulating the Internet as though it were an early- mid-20th century telephone utility, the main point is concern that the US won’t look like Europe if net neutrality isn’t enforced.

While the decision will not significantly impact European policies or consumers directly, it will exacerbate the gap between Washington, DC, and Brussels on law, values, and interests when it comes to the role technology plays in our society.

Of course, it’s differences that create competition, and it’s competition that stimulates innovation—even among nations.  Were we to imitate Europe—or Europe us—there could be no invention, no creativity.  It’s not just economic or technology competition, after all, that stimulates invention.  Policy differences—like net neutrality there, non-centrally controlled Internet here—also stimulate invention.  Policy differences give empirical evidence of what works and what does not, and in what environments economic and technology thises or thats work better or less well.

It never ceases to amaze me how so many so desperately seek to avoid the cacophony of difference, try to anxiously to snuggle into the false comfort of group think.

Soros Puts His Money in a Tax Shelter

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And Stephen Moore’s knickers are in a twist.

Congress is still scrambling to find ways to pay for its tax cut, so perhaps it should pay closer attention to last month’s news that George Soros had transferred $18 billion of his fortune to a private charity that he controls. There it will be sheltered from the Internal Revenue Service forever. This may be the single biggest tax dodge in US history, yet no one on the right or left seems to have raised an eyebrow.

How is it a tax dodge, exactly, to take legal steps to protect one’s assets from the taxman?  Why would anyone “on the right” object to a man moving to hang on to more of his money?

I don’t question these billionaires’ right to do with their money as they wish. I’m simply arguing that Congress shouldn’t let the rich and politically powerful use private foundations to escape taxation.

This is disingenuous. Private foundations are a completely legal way in which to shelter funds and to escape taxation.  I applaud Soros’ effort to keep his money, even as I decry his politics.  Had I billions of dollars—or even thousands—I’d try to protect it from the Revenooers, too.  Government doesn’t need as much of my money as it tries to claim; as long as it’s legal, there’s nothing wrong with keeping out of the Feds’ paws.

What Congress should be doing is finding ways to allow those of us with less money than Soros, or even less than the 20% or 30% or 50%, shelter more of our money, too.  One way to do that would be via a single low, flat income tax rate applied to all income regardless of source by a tax code devoid of carve-outs, deductions, credits, froo-froo.  Failing that, the tax reform plan on offer from the House and possibly (subject to the whims of three or four Republican Senators’ egos) on offer from the Senate would be a good start.

Al Franken…Apologizes

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Senator Al Franken (D, MN) says he’s sorry, that his groping of women—he’s a warm person, and he hugs people, don’t you know—”crossed a line.”

I’ve learned from recent stories that in some of these encounters, I crossed a line for some women—and I know that any number is too many.

We’ve seen earlier the value of his apologies.

And we’ve seen already why he bothers to apologize.

And we know that he still wants to be a Senator.

More Mueller Leaks

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The New York Times has published another.

Lawyers for Michael T Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, notified the president’s legal team in recent days that they could no longer discuss the special counsel’s investigation, according to four people involved in the case….

Who might those “four people” be?  They can only be from Flynn’s team, from President Donald Trump’s team, or from Robert Mueller’s team.

Flynn’s team has no particular reason to leak, nothing to gain; although Flynn plainly has reason to cut the ties—he’s looking to trade favorables to Mueller in return for favorables back.

Trump’s team has reason to leak—to corroborate his drumbeat of complaints about Mueller’s “witch hunt.”  Except that Trump’s team hasn’t so far leaked anything specific to Mueller’s investigation—only those generalized complaints about his witch hunt.

An objective Special Counsel wouldn’t leak, with or with motive to do so.  However, with Mueller’s track record of leaks, it seems clear from whom this leak came.

Climate and Atmospheric CO2

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In a piece on Watts Up With That, Eric Worrall explored the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature.  (Yes, yes, I know the science is settled, but the fact is the only thing settled is the pseudo-science nesting in the fetid imaginations of climate “science” funding industry personages.  The rest of us keep asking rude questions.)

Using data consisting of meteorological records back to the 1850s and other data collected from sources like “isotope ratios in gas samples extracted from ice cores and seabed cores,” temperature records of Earth dating back hundreds of thousands of years (ice core data from Greenland and Antarctica reach back 400,000 years, for example), Worall was able to generate an interesting pair of graphs.  The upper graph of the two-parter below is one such easily constructed graph.  The red dotted line at the end of the measure period is the current “warming” put in context.

Figure 1. After Professor Bob Carter (lecture at the 10th International Conference on Climate Change at the Heartland Institute on June 12, 2015). Air Temperatures above the Greenland ice cap for the past 10,000 years reconstructed from ice cores using data from Alley, 2000 (The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19, 213-226) (top panel), with a time scale showing years before modern time. Lower panel shows the carbon-dioxide concentrations of the atmosphere over the same period from EPICA Dome C ice core.

The caption of the graph gives the data source for the lower graph: they’re from ice core data collected by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica from the Antarctic Plateau.

A number of things jump out at me about this graphed relationship between temperature and the atmosphere’s CO2 content.

One is the clear cyclical nature of global temperature.  There clearly is more going on with planetary temperature than any putative CO2 pumping.

Another is the absolute lack of relationship between temperature and CO2 in our atmosphere.  Atmospheric CO2 was at its nearby (as such things go on a geologic time scale) low when temperature cycles were achieving apparent highs over the 11,000 years presented.  While atmospheric CO2 has been rising since that low, it has been doing so more or less slowly and steadily, especially compared with the wild (relatively) swings of the temperature cycles.

Another goes back to the upper, temperature graph.  The average planetary temperature over the geologic time frame sure looks like it’s been decreasing, slightly, across the period.  While the atmospheric CO2 content has been rising.

And one more thing: that current rise in temperature represented by that dotted red line.  It’s indistinguishable from any of the other sharp rises into a warm cycle.

Settled, indeed.