Canadian Cincinnatus

CNN and Climate Scientists Under Siege at International Space Development Conference

An atom bomb of political incorrectness blew up Friday night at the gala dinner of the NASA sponsored International Space Development Conference in Washington, DC.  Burt Rutan, the visionary aircraft designer who built the first passenger civilian rocket to reach space, was accepting an achievement award from the hands of CNN's environment correspondent, Miles O'Brien.

Burt stunned an audience composed of scientists from NASA and civilian space enthusiasts when he stated that it was unconscionable for "a large corporation to make millions of dollars making people feel guilt about how they live, "and I'm talking about you and CNN, Miles O'Brien."

Remember, there are NASA climate scientists in the audience who have been forecasting the global warming apocalypse for their whole careers, which look like they're almost over judging by all the grey hair.

Burt went on to say that you could stick a pin anywhere in the ice core record of earth's climate and say that the planet was in a state of climate change crisis.  He also said that data had been "manipulated" and that we needed to "go back to the numbers." 

A shocked room listened as he went on to say, "and who are we to say that this is the right temperature for the planet?  It's been warmer before, maybe it should be warmer.  Who's to say that maybe humans won't be better off with a warmer climate?"

Mr. Rutan is not alone.  I went to as many talks and panels as I could on Friday, and several times my ears pricked up when some speaker said something like, "whether global warming is happening or not, space based solar power has great applications for the military in remote locations."  What did I just hear?  Whether global warming is happening or not?

One conference attendee said to me, "You won't hear about this moment on CNN."  I realized he was right.  CNN won't broadcast a competing view to Miles O'Brien.  And that's truly sad.

If there is unofficial debate at a NASA sponsored conference, I submit that Al Gore was very wrong when he said that there is no further need to debate global warming.  We should debate.  Publicly.  That's how we strip down to the truth.

Mike Downtown

Why trade deficits matter less than people think

Trade deficits are the perennial scapegoat of politicians for many of our economic problems. They are portrayed as a great evil that must be stamped out. This happens more frequently in the United States where they actually do have a trade deficit. It is touted as a job-grabbing monster that eats at the vitality of any nation state. "Think of all the jobs going to _____ (Japan, Mexico, South Korea - fill in the blank yourself, the villain country doesn't matter much in this discussion) where they pay people nothing. How can highly paid Americans compete with them!" pundits exclaim. In contrast, I submit that trade deficits are just another economic pseudo-problem created partly out of ignorance and partly by a government trying to justify its own existence.
Trade deficits are not actually bad. An obvious demonstration of this fact is that the United States has had persistent trade deficits since the early eighties, and yet it is precisely through the eighties and nineties that the American economy soared.
If trade deficits are so bad then why does the United States have half the unemployment rate of Canada - a country that has recorded trade surpluses year-in and year-out for the same time period?
"Some experts will point to Japan" Since the early nineties its economy has been in the doldrums, being outperformed in growth by the US for almost the entire decade to date. During this time period, Japan has enjoyed continuous trade surpluses with the States. True, their unemployment rate is lower, but their unemployment rate was rising at a time when America's was going down. While this situation doesn't disprove the trade deficit fallacy outright, it does suggest that, at the very least, there are other important factors at play.
What threatens to the very core the theory that trade deficits-are-the-root-of-all-evil theory is the fact that Great Britain, from 1815 to 1914, from the battle of Waterloo until the beginning of the Great War, i.e. when she was at the top of the world, suffered almost continuously from a trade deficit. Conventional wisdom suggests that Britain's economic prosperity was the result of the colonial markets that she could trade with at will on advantageous terms. If this were true, shouldn't it show up as a trade surplus for Britain? The fact is that the Liberals, who ruled England for a large part of this time period, supported free trade. It was only when Lloyd George abandoned the policy of free trade in the First World War that England's slide from economic efficiency began.

Why don't trade deficits (and surpluses) matter? They do, but not in the apocalyptic way usually thought. If you have a trade deficit because the goods you produce are so shoddy that nobody wants to buy them then you will have a trade imbalance and this is bad. But we should not be deceived into thinking that the underlying problem is the deficit. It is only the symptom of a more deep-seated economic malaise - economic inefficiency - usually created by an intrusive government.
Economic backwardness was not a problem in England in the 19th century, nor, I would venture to say in North America in the eighties and nineties. We may have far too much government regulation but compared with most other countries we are a mecca of free enterprise. The situation in North America today (and the situation in 19th century Britain) is that the countries are so rich that they can afford a trade deficit. North America produces so much excess wealth that we can afford to spend money on cheap imports, the very cheapness of the imports raising the standard of living further because we now have even more money left over to buy goods we previously couldn't afford, raising our already high standard of living even higher. This isn't a problem because the mechanism of wealth generation in any given country is not a zero sum game. The United States can easily afford a $200 billion trade deficit because it produces $6 trillion per year in goods and services. What opponents of free trade never point out is the amount the GDP goes down if consumers are denied access to the cheapest goods on the market thus contracting their purchasing power.
Additionally, the trade deficit is exacerbated by the fact that North America is a good place to invest. In other words, every dollar of capital flowing into North America (or 19th century Britain) increases the size of the trade deficit by one dollar because this is how economists calculate capital inflow in the trade balance equation. Furthermore, profits entering the country from foreign subsidiary companies increase the trade deficit the same way. By any measure, the flow of capital and profits into a country can only be good for a country's economic heath, but the anti-trade deficit crowd would implicitly have you believe that it is a bad thing. By their logic, ancient Rome, in the heyday of her empire, was going down the tubes financially!
Another argument put forward by trade deficit punditssuggests that trade deficits are bad because they are the result of unfair competition by third-world countries with dirt-cheap labour. While it is indisputably true that their labour costs are a fraction of ours, their productivity is much lower because we have had two centuries to accumulate productive capital. In other words, we can do much more with much less labour than they can. In some enterprises, cheap labour is the overriding factor; in others, expensive machines, educated workers and a reliable political structure are the dominant factor. If each country specializes in what each does best, the total global output of goods and services increases, benefiting all countries. The doom and gloom crowd would counter that our comparative advantage is only temporary; it is only a matter of time before the third world builds itself up to our standards. Good! As they do so they will bid up the cost of labour in their own country to equal ours, which they will be able to afford because of their productivity increases, productivity increases caused by an influx of capital goods sold to them by us! They benefit by getting rich. We benefit by gaining another equal trading partner so that everybody can specialize further, resulting in increased production and even greater riches.
It never ceases to amaze me that the group most afraid of cheap labour from the third world are the same people who like to condemn exploitation and imperialism of the third world by the first. Either they are hypocrites or just plain ignorant of economics. If they want to see who the true exploiters are they need look no further than their bathroom mirrors.
One remaining question is: why do growing economies like South Korea and Mexico have persistent trade surpluses with the United States and Canada? Why shouldn't our trading relationship be more equal? The answer is that we are in different phases of our economic development. North America is economically mature. The Asian tigers are only beginning to develop. Economies in different stages of development behave differently. When North America was in the development stage in the nineteenth century, it behaved more like the Asian tigers than late twentieth century North America. Just because there is a difference between us, doesn't mean that we should be enemies. Starting trade wars over trade deficits is stupid policy. Like real wars, it weakens both countries. But unlike real wars, there are no winners - only losers.

Cincinnatus, 1998

Moscow vs Washington: A tourist's perspective

I landed in Moscow in the lull between the two Chechen wars (1998), so radical Islamic terrorists were active in Russia, and security of government institutions took precedence over tourism.

I landed in Washington this week, with the Iraq war on and 9/11 still in mind, security of government institutions is also paramount.

In both cities I encountered hundreds of police and security guards.

But here's the difference: in Russia, a security guard didn't hesitate to shout at me to stay on a crowded sidewalk in the Kremlin (even though the road was 100 feet wide, closed to traffic, and empty).  The police did not make eye contact and only glared if you greeted them.  You had to be careful where you took out your camera.

In Washington, the police and security guards, whether federal or private, whether protecting the White House or a hotel parking, seem to want to be your friends.  If you nod and say hello, they'll reply and add that it's a nice day.

Why the difference?  All over Washington are reminders of the constitution.  The first amendment is engraved on the wall of the News museum.  The justice department has engraved (I'm paraphrasing) "No government can avoid tyranny if it can be above the law."

My theory is that the constitution is so deep in the American psyche that these security guards are practically embarrassed to be putting you under surveillance.

I could be wrong of course: maybe they've been instructed to greet tourists casually.  It would certainly be a benign form of interrogation.  What better way to find out if I'm a suicide bomber with ten pounds of C4 in my backpack than to say hello to me?  If I stutter in Arab accented English that I want to be left alone, he'll know to draw his Glock.

Whatever the reasons, while both cities feel under a terrorist siege, Washington is still very open for business, trying hard to allow tourists to wander everywhere they could want (without going into government parking lots or office buildings, thank you kindly, which is not what we're here to see anyway).  It's a city where you feel welcome.

Oh, and the museums are free.  The Kremlin charged $70 American for a 45 minute tour.  Usury.

Another difference: an anti-nuke protester was camped out right in front of the White House.  Chinese tourists snapped as many photos of her and her paraphernalia as they did of the White House. I didn't see anti-government protesters in Moscow, and that was in Yeltsin's day.  I doubt things have improved throughout Putin's tenure.

To sum up: I take Washington over Moscow as a tourist.  I take Washington over Moscow as a government.

Mike Downtown

The scourge of political consultants

Why does every principled right-wing politician end up wimping outand resort to mindless sloganeering? The examples are too numerous to mention but here’s a few:

• George H. W. Bush and his “thousand point of light”.
• The Canadian Reform Party’s MTV inspired “Catch the Wave” logo.
• Preston Manning’s obsession with laser eye surgery and hair styles.

In my opinion, for whatever its worth, the root cause of the problem is political consultants. Consider George Bush’s “thousand points of light”. I first heard about it on Saturday Night Live where I thought it was simply a product of satire. My surprise came later when I found that they didn’t have to make it up. It was real. It was a part of George Bush’s campaign.

Why would a former carrier-based combat pilot, Navy Cross winner, successful oil tycoon and former CIA head need a fuzzy slogan like this - whatever it means? The answer, I found, is because of focus groups. In other words, a cross-section of average citizens was hired to sit and watch a speech of his with one hand on a rheostat. The more they liked a particular part, the more they turned the dial clockwise. The cumulative reading was recorded, and in one instance, when the phrase, “thousand points of light” was uttered, it spiked. So in other words, without regard to context, consistency or defensibility, “a thousand points of light” became a center-piece of George Bush’s election campaign, and a joke for everybody else. My next question is, how much were the consultants who set up this focus grouping paid? How much was the graphic artist who drew the Reform Party’s “Catch the Wave” logo paid?

My bet is plenty. If you have any doubt, look at corporate motivation gurus. Big corporations pay big bucks to motivational speakers, psychologists, mountain-climbers and snake-oil salesmen to light a fire under their middle-managers. In a setting like politics where motivation isn’t one thing, but rather everything, will motivational gurus be paid any less?

This leads me to ask yet another question: If their results are so pathetic, why are political consultants paid so much? Who cares what the big corporations pay? After all, their salary is small change for Exxon, and beside the point, as far as the bottom line – their real motivator – is concerned. The answer is simply that everybody does it. The lemming principle is at it again, gripping people in fear - fear that non-conformity will lead to disaster. The Democrats do it, so the Republicans must do it. The Liberals do it, so too must the Canadian Alliance.

Of course, the advice of pollsters will fail, particularly if taken by politicians who have aligned themselves on a controversial part of the political spectrum – like the right. It doesn’t fool journalists one bit, to whom this stuff is their stock-in-trade. If the journalists are on your side, it is not a problem. But if they are hostile, then you have just become a laughingstock. “A thousand points of light” is the punch line.
To the public, no matter who does it, it makes politicians look untrustworthy. When people start sloganeering, they cease answering important questions honestly. They put out empty babble instead of hard answers. They avoid controversies and, instead, make a bee-line for ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Worst of all, they try to build consensus instead of convincing voters with argument. All of these signs are obvious to the voters on a sub-conscious level and lead them – rightly - to conclude that politicians are phonies.
This is really the crux of the matter - and the reason that the reputation of politicians as a profession is at an all-time low. The consensus politics formulated in the seventies produces nothing but used-car salesmen. People want leaders, not snake-oil peddlers. Definition: a leader is someone who will stand in front of a crowd and persuade them to do the right thing, even if they originally didn’t want to do it.

Definition: a consensus politician is a weather-vane. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “Consensus is the negation of leadership”. There really is a conflict here. You cannot be both. What people really want is a leader. This drive comes not so much from society or education but from instinct. For cave-men, picking a good leader was an essential survival skill. As a result the requisite instincts have been ingrained. They may not be able to describe what a good leader is, but they know one when they see him. This fact is not measured by the scientific and statistical method the pollsters use. But it shows up indirectly in the popularity of bygone leaders such as Churchill, Lincoln and Roosevelt - all of whom were significantly less popular in their day.

But for the current crop of aspiring leaders, polling data can only lead them astray. For besides the telltale signs of phoniness they will acquire, it also causes them to argue themselves into a corner. This is because the pollsters are wrong when they say politics can be separated from the issues. No matter how much we try to sell politicians like soap, politicians aren’t soap, and politics cannot be separated from political argument.

The truth of this matter is demonstrated every time a politician chooses his issues on the basis of polling data. He cannot argue for them convincingly because he does not believe in them. In fact he cannot argue for them at all because they are not consistent with each other. This is not a problem with the slicksters who inhabit the mushy middle (like Bill Clinton). BS is his stock-in-trade. But for a politician who inhabits a controversial place in the political spectrum, this strategy is fatal. Since they cannot articulate why they have controversial positions, the public naturally assumes the worst. They will come across weak and evil - the perfect target for bullies like Bill Clinton and Brian Tobin. Clinton could bash the Republican Congress to his hearts content and look compassionate doing it! The Republican Congress under Clinton was the perfect example of what happens to right-wing politicians who give up leading.

None of this is to say that leadership is easier than following polling data. It is not. The foremost reason is that leadership requires the adoption and articulation of controversial positions that are needed. No matter how convincingly one argues a point and how right the cause is, there will usually be a constituency irreconcilably opposed to it – likely on grounds of self-interest. But leaders have the advantage of cultivating a core of enthusiastic supporters around them who will go to battle for those beliefs. Ronald Reagan had them. Bob Dole didn’t. His supporters were either paid campaign workers or old Republican war-horses just going through the motions. Successful leaders use their core values as a base of operations, from which they venture forth to convince enough people to do what they subconsciously already know needs to be done. This is why real leaders rarely have commanding majorities, except in cases of extreme emergency where the normal rules don’t apply.

Unfortunately, when normal rules do apply, they usually work to frustrate the right-wing appeaser.

Cincinnatus, 1998

The values of suburbia

What is so rotten underneath the orderly facade of Suburbia?

Driving down the street in the suburbs of Toronto, I see wealth, safety, order and cleanliness. Even the smallest house has ample room (no tar-paper shacks here), plenty of amenities (colour TV, phones and cars are de rigeur), the lawns are neat and the streets are well maintained and properly planned. Who could reasonably want more?

If one didn’t know better, one would assume that places where this is not the case (like American inner-cities) would emulate the people who live in the suburbs. But they don’t, they scorn them. Furthermore, the adolescents of the people who own these tidy houses both scorn where they live and emulate the styles of their peers in the housing projects. Why?

To small-l liberals, the answer is spiritual. There is something wrong with the value system of the inhabitants of suburbia. It has a rotten core. And you know what? They are right. But not the way they think. In fact, if the truth be told, these people would shocked to their foundations. Because the small-l liberals are to blame for this predicament.

But not the way most conservatives think either. The problem is not a lack of family values. Looking at the way suburbanites indulge, pamper and protect their children, lack of parental love is not the chief problem. While divorce rates are higher now that at any time since the aristocracy of ancient Rome fell, parental care for their children is also higher. Look at the middle ages – parents were a lot younger then and treated their children the way older brothers and sisters treat their siblings today. They were more inclined to beat them than make them wear a tricycle helmet.

To home in on which values are missing one must examine which group are most alienated from suburbia and what it represents. This group is primarily young men in their teens and early twenties, with some support from women the same age. The values they miss, and try to supplant by listening to lots of rap music, are the hard values. Many young men have a strong desire to be pushed hard. They want to be driven remorselessly and judged by a strong code of behaviour. In other words, they miss a code of honour.

To illustrate the point consider my mother’s friend and her son, Sven. When Sven was an adolescent he was trouble – always creating it and always getting away with it. In fact, the more he escaped punishment for a transgression, the more trouble he caused. Everybody (except his mother) assumed the worst for his future. When he was 17, he ran away from home and joined the US Marines. Everybody was dumbfounded. Just recently he took early retirement after 25 years. He had achieved the rank of Gunnery Sergeant. What happened?

I believe that Sven craved to be pushed hard, to be measured up against a high standard and punished hard if he did not exceed. That is why he caused trouble. He wanted to see that code of honour. The trouble isit didn’t exist for him in the suburbs. The traditional source of this kind of thing, his father, did not exist. His parents were divorced. His father lived in a different state. From his mother and his maternal grandparents all he got was love, understanding and tolerance. In fact, he got so much of it, that he was sick to death of it. So he made a beeline to the toughest outfit in the US Military. That he found what he was looking for can be seen from the fact that he stayed – he didn’t desert like we all thought he would.
This is anecdotal evidence. But if this is just an isolated story with no larger significance, explain to me why military recruitment goes up when these kind of values are emphasized in army recruitment campaigns (“Be that all you can be”). When the military stresses college programs, generous pension plans and other careerist considerations, it doesn’t work. The Sven’s of suburbia want a code of honour. Why else would military recruitment fall in the midst of Clinton’s politically correct cleanup of the Pentagon, except for the Marines who are resisting it tooth and nail?

And why do the non-camouflaged Sven’s of suburbia listen to rap music anyway? It was formed by people and for people with absolutely nothing in common with them. But it clearly speaks to them just the same. Oddly enough, it is the hard values that rap music pushes that makes it popular with the Svens. Rap music is derided for promoting valueless killing, rape, lawlessness and mayhem. While it does indeed preach all of these things, it does have values. It pushes the hard values of the inner city street gang. These thugs, in spite of their arrest records, have values. Courage is one of them – physical cowardice is one of the worst things you could accuse a gang-banger (or a Marine) of. Loyalty is another. The ability to lead under pressure is another, if that is your place in the gang. These values influence gang-bangers far more than federal drug laws and billion-dollar prisons. By listening to their music and wearing their baseball caps backwards, the kids of suburbia hope to capture some of the glamour associated with the lyrics of rap.

Of course, most Svens outgrow this phase of their lives and become insurance executives. But it is the pressure of life that forces them to do so. Gangbangers would do the same if they could.
But subuurban kids mature reluctantly, and also with some relief because, in the discipline of the workplace, they at last find some of the hard values they crave for in their own society.

So what is to be done? Label the rap-music-listening era of their lives a “phase that they are going through” and leave it at that. That is the easy solution and therefore the one most parents end up adopting. Wave a white flag and give in to the rap culture wholesale. That would be infinitely worse. All of the age-old values that remain from the purification campaigns started in the sixties would be swept away. The result would be that the dark ages, following the collapse of Rome, would return with a vengeance.

I believe that the solution is to start remembering the values of a time when the alienation of youth simply did not exist. For those values were just as hard as today’s rap values – only with a veneer of civilization. But this veneer of civilization is not a pretentious affectation nor is it a hypocritical lie that our academics assume it is. It is civilization. The hard values are the vitality and the driving force that once tamed continents, and the civilizing veneer is the gentle cloth that covers the jagged edges of a force that would otherwise tear society to pieces.

In other words, I am calling for a return to the values that makes men gentlemen, as well as a return to chivalry – that patchwork conglomeration of Christian and military virtue. These are the values that make men open doors for ladies and choose to drown on the Titanic. It is the values, if you live up to them, that make you comfortably proud of yourself when you are in the lounge smoking a stogie and tasting brandy, and makes you get up out of the trench on the whistle to be cut to pieces by machineguns. Not so long ago, no longer than just before World War I, to be civilized was not an easy thing. One couldn’t be civilized by merely wearing a bicycle helmet.

But it seems until this point, I am just talking about men. And I am, so in this sense what I advocate is in no way equal and gender-neutral. But rest assured, back when women were expected to be ladies, they had their own hard code of honour too. So in a sense, there was a kind of rough equality.

My critics, champions of today’s enlightenment, would dismiss what I offer as hopeless nostalgia at best, and the ravings of a bomb-throwing reactionary at worst. Very well, but I hope they realize that rebuilding the world upon rational principles from the ground up is not an option. It will not survive because it is not a product of social evolution and therefore cannot meet all of the challenges that the university professors have not thought of. As a result, it is not me who is the social engineer’s greatest danger. I will not tear their world down – I do not have to. There are plenty of trenchcoat mafiosa biding their time in shopping malls, waiting for the chance to do just that.

Therefore, the choice is not between the Rev. Gerry Falwell and Oprah Winfrey. It is between Robert E. Lee and Tupac Shakur. And in which world will the attendees of the Lilleth Fair be safer?

Cincinnatus, 1998

Environmentalists Try to Re-write Their Predictions

Now that it's becoming obvious that there has been no global warming since 1998, and indeed there has been global cooling, environmentalist and the UN are claiming here that they always knew there would be cooling until 2015 and then (after they'd all retired) global warming would take off.

But Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth is proving to be an Inconvenient Record of the real history of their predictions, which claimed that global temperatures were already in a sharp rise that would continue unchecked unless we all returned to the dark ages.

Of course, if they (global warming fanatics) got it wrong about where the global climate was headed in the first ten years, could they be wrong about where it's going in the next one hundred years? 

Are Scientists Going to Miss the Next Ice Age?

If scientists fail to predict the next little ice age like the one that gripped the planet between 1645 and 1715, it will be because of a determination to ignore any evidence that runs contrary to the theory of Carbon/Human caused global warming. 

Astronomers Livingston and Penn were shut down by the journal Science two years ago when they suggested that sunspots might be winding down and could disappear altogether by 2015.  Interestingly enough, solar cycle 24 is very late coming and so far is very weak.  Could Livingston and Penn be right after all?  The last solar cycle with no sun spots began in 1645, thus the theory that no sunspots heralded the little ice age.

Right now even the fluffiest evidence in favor of C/H global warming is treated as fact, where as any evidence to the contrary is referred to as insufficient or dismissed as a statistical anomaly.

Whether the planet is in a long term warming phase or on the brink of a little ice age is anybody's guess, but that's why debate is essential. Al Gore's claim that the debate is over is now strangling scientific study.  This will inevitably lead to mistakes, and the reputation of science as a whole will suffer.

Mike Downtown

Blogging intermittent until June 17

I will be away on vacation until June 17th. As a result blogging will be intermittent. I have daily posts cued up until May 18 and, after that, I have six old political eesays cued up for your amusement (polished up by Mike Downtown). These should pop up every 5 days or so. Looking back over them, I am gratified how well they aged. If anything the quality of my blog will go up while I am away!

Mike Downtown also promised to contribute an article or two while I am away.

However, once I am back, daily blogging will resume.

Ciincinnatus

Obama believes the Teamsters need less oversight

According to the Powerline Blog.

I guess this is what he means by hope'n change.

Change the Teamsters can believe in, part 2.

Steve Sailer has a good article about higher education

Over at vdare.com.

Of course the reason the higher education racket gets away with its excesses and its fads is because a university education is what separates the aristocracy from the peasants in a meritocratic society. Everybody would rather be an aristocrat than a plumber, even if a plumber makes $80k a year and is waited on at the restaurant by the artsie with a degree in comparative literature. And nobody has the guts to exclude all the people applying to university who have no business being there and who would be much better off learning a trade.