Monthly Archives: December 2014

Merry Christmas

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First posted in 2011, I repeat it here.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.
-Ralph W. Sockman

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
-Benjamin Franklin

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
-Hamilton Wright Mabie

Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas. If we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world.
-Calvin Coolidge

Some celebrate Christmas as the birthday of a great and good philosopher and teacher. Others of us believe in the divinity of the child born in Bethlehem, that he was and is the promised Prince of Peace.
-Ronald Reagan

 

Update:

Why do bells ring at Christmas?

Because someone pulls the rope.

Perjury?

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This is the oath that witnesses before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform requires of its witnesses, when those witnesses are sworn (and if one witness is required to be sworn, they all must be) (scroll to Rule 9, para (g)). It’s not the same oath for all committees, but it’s typical.

Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony that you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

I mention this because it turns out

Then-Deputy Commissioner Steven Miller wrote in an email in June 2012, about a month before a House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing….

“I am beginning to wonder whether I should do [the hearing] and affirmatively use it to put a stake in politics and c4 [regarding IRS targeting of conservative organizations applying for 501(c)(4) status].”

Miller also was never directly asked about the targeting. That removes the legal aspect of perjury: Miller would seem not to have perjured himself.

But morally? Yew betcha.

Crony Capitalism

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Montreal-based CGI Group Inc, the company that received a $74 million contract to develop and maintain the Hawaii Health Connector web portal, will be awarded another year-long state maintenance contract despite the ongoing problems with the site.

The money comes from a $204 million federal contract the state received in 2012 to set up the Obamacare network in the islands.

This is the same crowd that had so much fun with the ObamaMart failure in 2013.

Hmm….

A(nother) Thought on Climate…Change

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Watts Up With That has a summary article and graph on this; the basic article is on the other side of a link in the summary. It’s typically academic in its language, but it’s well worth a layman’s time in slogging through. Here’s the graph (which is a construction of Watts’; it’s not in the linked-to article):TreeRingSummary

Northern Europe summer (June, July, August) temperature reconstruction. Data shown in °C with respect to the 1961-1990 mean. Adapted from Esper et al. (2014).

The black lines are individual data points, and the grey shading smoothes the data. The green line represents the center of the grey shading, and the red line approximates a regression line showing the long-term rate of cooling over these 2,000 years. All the representations show the same thing: it was warmer in northern Europe 2,000 years ago, during the time of the Roman Empire, than it is today.

The take away for me, though, is what’s represented by the black lines and the grey shading. Compare those to the alleged warming trend of the last 100 years—and its stagnation over the last 20 years (fully a fifth of those 100 years).

Now show that that recent “trend” is distinguishable from the noise level apparent in the data and their first smoothing, the grey shade.

Obama and Economics

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In the question and answer period following President Barack Obama’s end-of-year Friday press conference, Obama offered this regarding the Keystone XL pipeline, gas prices in the US, and global markets [emphasis added]:

So there’s no—I won’t say ‘no’—there is very little impact, nominal impact, on US gas prices—what the average American consumer cares about—by having this pipeline come through. And sometimes the way this gets sold is, let’s get this oil and it’s going to come here. And the implication is, is that’s going to lower gas prices here in the United States. It’s not. There’s a global oil market. It’s very good for Canadian oil companies, and it’s good for the Canadian oil industry, but it’s not going to be a huge benefit to US consumers. It’s not even going to be a nominal benefit to US consumers.

Pick one, Mr Obama. It’s either a global market or a Canadian one. If it’s global—which includes US consumers buying gas—the large increase in supply, especially if it’s more cheaply delivered to the global market via Keystone and Gulf Coast ports than via truck and train to British Columbia ports, most assuredly will have a salubrious effect on the prices US consumers pay for our gas.

And that ignores the fact that a lot of that Canadian oil going to the Gulf Coast via Keystone will be sent to US refineries there, and a lot of the refined product will be sold in the US—a prompt and nearby increase in supply.