Alfred’s Commentary on the Human Condition

The Challenge

I imagine most people have heard about Warren Buffet and Bill Gates challenge to the very wealthy to donate half of their wealth to Charity. Sound great, but in the end not particularly effective. What if the challenge was to the governments of the world to dedicate half of their military budgets to development instead of destruction? I find it interesting that there is always money to go to war, build bombs, tanks, bombers, bullets, machine guns. What if the same effort was made to produce tractors, water pumps, rail road track and locomotives, bull dozers, cement truck and cement plants……..etc. The same people are at work, the same businessmen are getting rich (and hopefully they will donate half of that to charity as well) the same governments are busy doing whatever bureaucrats do, everybody wins. Imagine if we loaded a super cargo ship loaded with John Deere Tractors, Caterpillar dozers, cranes and earthmovers, Gould water pumps, GE wind and gas turbines, Ford and GMC trucks, etc. and delivered this cache with an “army” of engineers and teachers to Iraq, or Somalia or Haiti. You choose, we would spend half of the military cost and would be welcomed with open arms. Build up their infrastructure, make them self-sufficient, and teach them to fish, then leave. When I thought about the possibilities, it just seems too simple, but I challenge anyone to find a flaw.

Alfred Holzheu

Does it matter that there is not one piece of scientific evidence that links CO2 to warming. Lots of conjecture, lots of statistical linkage………..but no one that I have been able to find links CO2 to global warming in any sort causality. Even the basic science of the absorption and emissivity of CO2 do not support it as a APGW gas, and especially at the concentrations it exists in a column of air 31 miles high, beset with all manner of Coriolis driven wind currents, solar bombardment, massive quantities of water vapor (very heavy by atmospheric standards, etc, etc. Wikipedia: Atmosphere of Earth read this and ponder its implications, think about it in common sense terms. They “that big amorphous, anonymous THEY” continue to label it as a “Global warming” gas, but never support that with why something at about 4 hundredths of a percent by volume is more important than water at 5%. In fact there is more water put into the air from burning gasoline than CO2 and water is the only reason we do not freeze then the sun sets. CO2 is a great fertilizer and nothing more.

Alfred

Phys.org: photovoltaics vs. biofuels for sun-to-miles energy

Finally, some did the analysis to prove the obvious, growing corn for fuel, is fuelish. Some times I hate to be right.

"Six years into our global data collection effort, we may have already found the single most searing, clarifying, helpful, world-altering fact.

"What the whole world wants is a good job.

"This is one of the most important discoveries Gallup has ever made. At the very least, it needs to be considered in every policy, every law, every social initiative. All leaders – policy makers and lawmakers, presidents and prime ministers, parents, judges, priests, pastors, imams, teachers, managers and CEOs – need to consider it every day in everything they do.

"That is as simple and as straightforward an explanation of the data as I can give. Whether you and I were walking down the street in Khartoum, Cairo, Berlin, Lima, Los Angeles, Baghdad, or Istanbul, we would discover that the single most dominant thought on most people's minds is about having a job.

"Humans used to desire love, money, food, shelter, safety, peace and freedom more than anything else. The last 30 years have changed us. Now people want to have a good job. This changes everything for world leaders. Everything they do – from waging war to building societies – will need to be in the context of the need for a good job."

- From The Coming Jobs War, by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup

"Progressive taxation is not in the rational self-interests of the 1%, but it is in the best interests of society as a whole--a concept that Rand did not accept. One can make a good argument that taxation is in the interests of the 1%, as members of the greater society."

(me)The world is not static, the playing field will never be level, the makeup of the 1% is always in flux, just like a star sports figure. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, etc were not in the 1% just 20 years ago, in fact their professions hardly existed. They did not rip off their fellow humans to get to be part of the 1%, they worked hard, worked smart and got lucky. Why should they now be singled out as a "government resource to exploited", and this story is repeated thousands of times for every business in existence. It is in our rational interest to resist the allure of jealousy and require progressive taxation, that just kills the golden goose.

"In the Randian world view, however, there is no such thing as "the public," there were only individual people, with individual rights. That may be fine if you're a billionaire and don't give a hoot about other people. It's not so great if you're a little guy, which is why collectivism--ordinary people's collective prerogatives--is the antidote to the privileges of the 1%."

(me)No, "the public" is the individual, each one making decisions that, will with a "greedy" (and that word can mean many things, there is an altruistic aspect to greed, read the "Selfish Gene") motivation make life better for all of us. It is what drives us forward, hopefully soon enough to escape the wrath of a very impersonal universe.

"It's not in the rational self-interests of the 1% to support collectivism, but it is in the selfish interests of the rest of us. It's also far more in keeping with the view of the Founders, who included forward-thinking progressives like Thomas Paine. He advocated a guaranteed national income."

(me)Who is the "rest of us" of which you speak, are we some how divorced from rational society, some how bereft of the gifts that the 1% some how magically received? What static fantasy could you possible propose that would make collectivism work. As Margaret Thatcher so famously said, "I would much prefer to bring them down as soon as possible. I think they've made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalize everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalization, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people."

NPR Planet Money in the New York Times Magazine

This guy writing for NPR has nailed it, personal responsibility is everything, and no one can manufacture an economy or a job.

"I wrote this in reply to a reply (who did not see the problem) to a friend who was bemoaning the moving of a division of GE to China, but I feel that it is relevant here also. Also, the competitors to Solyndra who drove down the cost of panels to below manufactuerablitly in the US, were receiving massive direct and indirect subsidies (the artificially low value of the yuan and the use of essentially sweat shop labor) from the Chinese government, and if we used the Chinese system of "equalizing" tariffs to discourage our products from being competitive in China, we could take those same tariffs and "subsidize" our manufacturer's to make our investment worthwhile.

The problem is that by moving that division to China, although there is a temporary business increase for some US companies, we are sharing our tech with the "economic" enemy. They will copy everything, and then use slave and gulag labor to produce these parts they need to have and cheaper and sell to the rest of the world. Do you realize that there is no Paypal in China (they did not allow it or put horrendous conditions or duties to discourage it) and Cisco has to constantly fight to keep their proprietary code (and have lost every time to the lack of real enforcement of intellectual property rights in China). Look at Apple, Foxcom (Apple's primary manufacturer in China) is now introducing their own cell phone (with a proprietary OS) that they will sell in competition to Apple all over the world and they only way they know how to do that is that they were taught by us. Are we that stupid? Where are we going to employee people if we constantly put all our manufacturers out of business? They are not our friends.

Alfred

Why are we in Libya? We have no reason to be there, we do not buy their oil, they export virtually nothing to us, they are ruled by what appears to be a mad man, they are a third world developing nation that is powerless to defend against cruise missles. There is no upside, no end game, no possible reason to attack them. Even China and Russia did not concur on this at the seucrity coucil, we have been played again! How long will it take for our foreign affairs people to figure out that they do not like us, want nothing to do with us, etc. etc. etc. One of the only times I can agree with Farrakhan, "who do you think you are Mr. Obama?" (in reference to his comment to Gadaffi to step down). This is insanity!

Political 'Science'
"House Republicans rejected amendments offered Tuesday by Democrats that called on Congress to accept the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring, it is caused in large part by human activity and it is a threat to human health," the Hill reports:

Committee ranking Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) offered an amendment Tuesday that called on Congress to agree that climate change is occurring. The amendment failed on a party-line vote of 20-31. No Republicans voted for the amendment.

The amendment says that "Congress accepts the scientific finding of the Environmental Protection Agency that 'warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.' "

"This finding is so obviously correct that there should be no need to offer the amendment," Waxman said.

Two other Democrats offered similar amendments that differed slightly in wording, which were voted down by the same party-line vote.

The Dems' intent is to portray Republicans as "antiscience," but only someone with no understanding of science could reach that conclusion. Scientists attempt to explain the world by formulating hypotheses and conducting empirical observations to test them. "Global warming" is one such hypothesis. By treating it as an ideological doctrine and effectively making it part of their party platform, it is Democrats who are showing themselves to be hostile to science.

HowStuffWorks: solar energy conversion question

If you truly want to get real, you must separate the conversion efficiency of solar energy into food from the the conversion of solar energy into mechanical motion. Although plants are indispensable for the production of food (even us omnivores know that), they are very poor at making that transition from solar nuclear froth into making the wheels of the bus go round and round. Both are important, but both have their place. To digress a little, there are probably seas of methane on Titian, ergo hydrocarbons are probably a gift from the GOD, and we can use that gift to produce modern life. Consequently we can produce food, or produce solar cells (assuming that you don't buy into the CO2 is bad hypothesis) from that energetic bounty. Each has its proper place and efficiency coefficient, but to take the inefficient process of growing a plum and making fuel from it is just stupid, when the same expenditure of effort can produce 15 times the energy with solar cells. I am ignoring nuclear for the moment as we do not have a environmentally acceptable process to extract energy from the true source. If someone comes up with a solution to this conundrum, all bets are off. But until then, we need to drink reality tea, not fantasy koolaid.