Monthly Archives: February 2017

Setting Up The Excuse

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Watts Up With That is reporting a Mail on Sunday piece wherein a NOAA whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a leading scientist with NOAA at the time, has given MoA irrefutable evidence that the “Pausebuster” paper that NOAA rushed to print with lots of publicity just ahead of the 2009 Paris climate agreement was based on misleading, “unverified” data.  The purpose of the rush was to influence those present, including ex-President Barack Obama (D), and con them into believing that not only did the pause in global warming that’s still ongoing, not only never existed, the warming is continuing at a faster pace than thought.

It gets worse.

Not only had [NOAA] failed to follow any of the formal procedures required to approve and archive their data, they had used a “highly experimental early run” of a programme that tried to combine two previously separate sets of records.

About that program:

[T]he…software was afflicted by serious bugs. They caused it to become so “unstable” that every time the raw temperature readings were run through the computer, it gave different results.

And this:

…failure to archive and make available fully documented data not only violated NOAA rules, but also those set down by Science [which published the “Pausebuster” paper]. Before [Dr Bates] retired last year, he continued to raise the issue internally. Then came the final bombshell. Dr Bates said: “I learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure.”

The reason for the failure is unknown, but it means the Pausebuster paper can never be replicated or verified by other scientists.

Now, here it comes.

Dr Bates said: “How ironic it is that there is now this idea that Trump is going to trash climate data, when key decisions were earlier taken by someone whose responsibility it was to maintain its integrity—and failed.”

And NOAA’s coverup, perhaps to cover its embarrassment over its incompetence and dishonesty, perhaps to prepare the ground for its coming slur against the new administration:

After the paper was published, the US House of Representatives Science Committee launched an inquiry into its Pausebuster claims. NOAA refused to comply with subpoenas demanding internal emails from the committee chairman, the Texas Republican Lamar Smith, and falsely claimed that no one had raised concerns about the paper internally.

It’s beginning to look like NOAA needs to be abolished.  Surely, we have better uses for its $6 billion budget (requested for 2016) than to fund falsified “science.”

A Test

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The Moscow Times, one of several mouthpieces of Russian President Vladimir Putin and of his Kremlin government, sees the current flareup of shooting between government forces on the one hand and “rebels” and their Russian bosses and reinforcements in the Donbass region of Donetsk as a test.  Recall that Donbass is on the road to Black Sea coastal Mariupol, a key urbanized area on the coastal road to Russia-occupied Crimea.

The organ is right.

Moscow clearly wants Kiev to implement its vision of the Minsk agreement—a special status for the separatist controlled areas, retaining Russian-backed armies and de-facto control of the border with Russia, with only nominal oversight from Kiev.

The Kremlin wants to retain political control over separatist-held territory as a “structural veto” on Ukrainian security and foreign policy. Moscow hopes that the Trump administration alongside France and Germany will pressure Poroshenko to accept Russian demands under Minsk-2.

But the real test actually is two tests.  The first is whether President Donald Trump will, instead, recall and implement the Budapest Memorandum, which among other things requires signatory Russia to respect and honor Ukrainian territorial integrity, and begin enforcing the Memorandum by sending arms to Ukraine with which it actually can defend itself against those “rebels” and the Russian armor and artillery forces both in Donetsk and in Lukhansk.

The other test is whether Trump will do anything about Russia’s occupation of Georgia.

OK, a third test, too: whether Trump will follow through, promptly, on deploying an anti-missile shield into the eastern European nations bordering on Russia, as ex-President Barack Obama (D) had chit-chatted about doing late in his administration (and in southeastern Europe, too, against Iranian missiles).

Transparency or Government Snooping?

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Senator Ben Cardin (D, MD) had a letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s editor over the weekend.  He’s objecting to Congress’ removal of his (and Senator Richard Lugar’s (R, IN) Cardin-Lugar piece of Dodd-Frank that required public companies to disclose their payments to foreign governments.  Ostensibly, this was to track bribery actions, but like the rest of Dodd-Frank, it overstepped.

There’s nothing like a Democrat desperate to protect his legacy (Lugar was not silent on the matter; he voted for its repeal).

There is no unreasonable burden to businesses in asking them to track operating payments that should be part of the normal course of legitimate business.

Normal course of legitimate business. The Democrat Senator is oblivious to the irony of his claim. The normal course of legitimate business is no concern of Government; such things are strictly the concern of businesses, their owners, and their customers in a free market.

If Government is concerned, there is already a suitable and sufficient law: get a warrant.

The Business with Iran

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The Wall Street Journal opined on Iran’s missile launch last week and President Donald Trump’s imposition of sanctions against Iran in response.

[I]t does look as if President Trump may be willing to do what Mr Obama refused to do, which is to rigorously enforce the [nuclear weapons development] agreement….

Trump said during the campaign that he might not tear up the Executive Agreement, but instead enforce it to the letter.

Why would his doing so now be such a surprise? Oh, wait, the NLMSM spiked that part of his commitments while focusing, disparagingly, on his earlier musing about tearing up the EA.

What Should a Health Plan Cover?

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Anna Wilde Mathews wondered about that in her piece in The Wall Street Journal.  First, a couple of asides.  Notice the tacit acknowledgment that we have no health insurance plans available.  That industry was eliminated in toto by Obamacare, which replaced the industry with a Federally mandated, publicly/privately funded health coverage welfare program.  Next, notice the tacit assumption in the piece’s subhead: that the law should mandate business decisions.

To the piece itself:

The 2010 health law created a new set of federal requirements for plans sold to individuals and small businesses, including a list of 10 benefits, among them prescription drugs, mental-health services and laboratory tests. It also mandated that plans cover preventive services such as vaccinations at no cost to enrollees.

Along with women’s contraceptives (but not men’s…) at no cost to enrollees or the businesses providing the plans.

Trimming certain benefit categories from the required list could sharply raise the cost of those benefits for consumers who opt to have them.

That’s Mathews’ claim, anyway.  What she’s chosen to ignore is that a competitive, free market would sharply reduce the cost of most of those “benefits.”  What she’s also chosen to ignore is that eliminating the mandatory nature of the coverages would sharply lower the cost to millions of others who don’t need those “benefits,” but who must pay for them anyway—even if they’re included in a plan at “no cost to enrollees,” a fiction cynically foisted onto us by the Obama administration.  Enrollees certainly are paying for them; the added cost is simply hidden in a higher overall price.  And the rest of us are paying for them, too, in premiums similarly elevated to pay for that required coverage and/or in the taxes we must pay to pay for the subsidy.

It’s certainly true that other, rarer or more expensive to treat problems would have higher prices, but there’s never been a case made for why Government should pay for these ahead of family, friends, charity, church, local community—the usual suspects.

Plans with skinnier coverage can carry lower premiums, actuaries say. But as with everything in health care, that comes with a trade-off.

NSS.  But those trade-off decisions belong to the individual, not to Government.