A Good Year for Climate "Deniers"

The whole point about being a conservative is to stand against liberal group-think. Who knows? Liberals may end up being right on everything. But why do they all have to act like the Japanese under their emperor Hirohito: A hundred million hearts beating as one?

The science is in. The earth is dangerously overheating. We must act now. All that liberal group-think on climate just sticks in a conservative’s craw.

And now it is beginning to look as though something is changing in the earth’s climate. Temperatures are down.

It looks like we are getting two La Ninas in a row. It looks like the oceans are flipping from a warm cycle to a cool cycle. And Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick, the graph that shows stable temperatures over the last millennium suddenly shooting into the stratosphere in the last century, is slowly disappearing into Stephen McIntyre’s wood chipper.

Here are a couple of end-of-year pieces from another denier website, Watts Up With That:

First, there’s All Quiet on the Solar Front, an analysis of the much-extended Solar Minimum. There’s a strong suggestion that when sunspots are absent from the sun then the earth’s climate gets cooler. With the current Solar Minimum betwen Cycle 23 and Cycle 24 going on and on, we are going to get a lot of solar data from all the satellites that have been launched in the last generation to record the doings on the Sun.

Then there’s the curious case of the Decline in the Solar Geomagnetic Ap Index. It suddenly dropped in 2005 and has continued to decline since then. What does that mean?

For us climate deniers, there are troubling questions about the science of global warming. Our modern climate scientists are not amateur scientists like Charles Darwin laboring away in his country estate. They are closely connected with politicians who are pushing a large-scale political project to “do something” about global warming. They have obligingly developed a lot of science to provide “corroborative detail designed to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” to quote the Lord High Executioner from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado.

But when statistical experts like Stephen McIntyre start to analyze the work of climate scientists, it all starts to look pretty rocky. The corroborative detail turns out to be not that good.

In the coming years, the deniers are predictive a triple threat of a possible extended sunspot minimum combined with cool phases in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. That’s denier-speak for Little Ice Age.

Are the deniers on to something? Or are we just as dumb and blinkered as the bribed apologists of Al Gore?

Voters Think Dems are "Center Right"

You gotta give President-elect Obama credit. He managed to get the voters to think that the Democrats are a center-right party. That’s some achievement. And voters think that the Republican Party is a hard-right party. That’s according to a poll by Target Point Consulting discussed Wednesday by Stephen Moore.

[S]ays [pollster Alex] Lundry. "Democrats are seen as a center-right party, while Republicans are seen as dominated by the right."

I know what you are thinking. If only. Heck, if the Democrats truly were center-right we could give up on the limping, wounded GOP and join the parade. Liberals could desert the Democrats and create a Huffington-Kos Party, and the rest of us could live happily ever after.

Still, the key base of the Republican Party shrank in 2008. White males were for Bush by 24 points in 2004 and that gap closed to 16 points in 2008. You can see why. White males are instinctively center-right, and when Obama came through as the candidate most likely to give Americans a tax cut, well...

What about white women? McCain won them 53 to 46 percent, according to David Paul Kuhn in Politico, probably because of Sarah Palin.

Here are the spreads, updated from a variety of polls, using Jay Cost’s data from 1996-2004.

Republican Margin of Victory/Defeat: Selected Demographic Groups 1996-2008
	1996	2000	2004	2008
White Men	+9	+24	+25	+16
White Women	-5	+1	+11	+7
African Americans	-72	-81	-77	-95
Hispanics	-51	-27	-9	-36
Overall	-8.5	-0.5	+2.4	-7

So what does it all mean? It means that, just as Karl Rove knew in 2000 and 2004, the future lies with the Hispanics.

And the future also lies with defining the Republican Party as center right, which is what it really is, and defining the Democratic Party as center left. Which is what it really is.

And one more thing. The Republican Party is the party of tax cuts. Really.

UPDATE: Pollster Alex Lundry emails to say he was misquoted. Voters think that
the Dems are a center-LEFT party, after all. What a pity! I thought there was
strategic opening here. So the only opportunity is to move the voters
towards thinking that the GOP is really a mushy center-right party instead of
the Democrats’ favorite image of a party dominated by racist, sexist rich-bitch homophobes.

The Conservative View from 2008

Because so much happened in 2008 on such an epic scale, it is hard to know what it means.

Take the election of Barack Obama to be President of the United States. Is this primarily the election of the first African American president? Or just the election of yet another Harvard Law School grad, the liberal elite taking care of business?

What about the epic collapse in the credit markets? Will this result in a ratchet upwards in political control of the economy? Or will it cause the politicians to lower the risks in the credit market by reducing the amount of subsidy for highly-leveraged borrowing?

What about the eruption of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber? Conservatives loved them and liberals hated them. What is that all about? Does it mean that the Republican Party has become a party of the yahoo white working class? Or does it mark the decisive turn of the party towards aspirational America?

What we all do in exciting times is project our hopes and fears upon the climactic events. Conservatives hope for a conservative renaissance; liberals hope for the birth of another FDR era of Democratic dominance. And both sides propose their standard solutions. Conservatives say we need tax cuts; liberals say we need stimulus spending. Nothing has changed since the Reagan revolution of 1981.

While we worry about our jobs and our 401ks, the real story will probably be told in India and China. Let’s assume that the US will struggle through the meltdown and emerge in a year into a decent economic rebound. But China and India may experience much more turmoil that we do in the US. If all goes well, they will emerge as economic, cultural, and political powerhouses. If things go wrong, and they might easily do so, then there will be untold misery for hundreds of millions, and doubtless wars of frightful ferocity.

But what about the threat of Islamic extremism? It’s a problem, but I regard it as a similar problem to the ruthless revolutionaries in the west in the tradition of Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Che. The Muslim extremists will be a problem, but they will fail just as the other ruthless revolutionaries failed. In the modern world, power is not enough. Power doesn’t issue from the barrel of a gun but from the wealth of the modern economy.

What about conservatives here in the United States? Shouldn’t we get to work and repair the damage of the Bush years? Exactly. The important thing to do is to reformulate conservatism into a sadder, wiser creed, and one that directs its appeal to the most important democraphic group in America: white women. Despite all we’ve heard over the past half-century, women care mainly about their marriages, their children, their health care, and their safety. Get right with women on that and you have got their support and deserve it.

That can’t be so hard, can it?

Christian Right Does Direct Democracy

Did you know that abortion is the biggest item in “protest” activity? Yep. Wins by a mile.

In a review of a book on the Christian Right The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right by Jon Wright, Richard John Neuhaus notes how it is the Christian Right that has taken up the challenge for direct democracy that the SDS made in their Port Huron Statement in the Sixties.

“[S]ome 45 percent of respondents in the Citizens Participation Survey who reported participating in a national protest did so because of abortion. What is more, nearly three quarters of all abortion-issue protesters are pro-life, an unsurprising fact given that the pro-life movement is challenging rather than defending the current policy regime. Meanwhile, all other social issues, including pornography, gay rights, school prayer, and sex education, account for only 3 percent of all national protest activity.”

And you thought that the hottest issue right now was gay marriage.

Want to have some other media stereotypes challenged? It turns out that the pro-life movement is not really a movement of stay-at-home mothers against professional women.

[A] striking percentage of pro-life women are university educated, and many have given up professional careers to do pro-life work full-time.... “The pro-life movement,” he writes, “is actually quite diverse, and abortion politics more generally does not [as some claim] pit working-class Catholic housewives against professional, career-oriented women.”

In my view the rise of pro-life activism parallels the rise of environmentalism. Two hundred years ago, most people were fighting to make a bare existence on the land and to get a couple of children out of the nest. They didn’t have time for exquisite ideas about the sanctity of life and saving the planet.

But as soon as people moved to the city they started to have romantic ideas about Nature and the countryside. And as soon as women got free of the danger of childbirth and the heartbreak of infant deaths they started to develop romantic ideas about the delights of motherhood.

So it looks like we will have a sensible balance in the future. Liberals will champion the romantic view of Nature and conservatives will champion the romantic view of childbearing.

Naomi Klein's Latest Lefty Screed

Naomi Klein is a lefty journalist and author, daughter of anti-war Sixties parents that went to Canada during the Vietnam War.

In her No Logo, she railed against the Nineties economy. As I wrote for Liberty:

She is shocked by the megabrands, the brand bombers, and the category killers of the modern consumer society. For in the blaring public space of the brands there is No Space for artists and creativity, in the ravenous appetite of the Wal-Marts and Starbucks there is No Choice for consumers, in the new world of temporary jobs and contract workers there are No Jobs for workers.

It was, simply, left-wing rubbish. Yes indeed, so few were the jobs that half of Mexico came north to work at jobs that didn’t exist.

But now Klein is back with another left-wing tract. This time it’s called The Shock Doctrine and it argues that since people recoil from capitalism the capitalists have to trick the voters and consumers into accepting capitalism by staging crises and “shocks.”

That was before Democratic staffer Rahm Emanuel said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Exhibit A for Klein is—wait for it—Milton Friedman! Yes, he’s the trickster that got August Pinochet to liberalize Chile with his “Chicago boys.” (Yes. We get all the favorite lefty moments, like Chile, Tienanmien Square and so forth marshaled to show that the capitalists up and tricked us when we were feeling vulnerable.)

Johann Norberg in Reason does a good job of exposing the thinness of Klein’s argument. For instance, Klein writes that Friedman acted as “advisor to the Chilean dictator.”

In fact, Friedman never worked as an adviser to, and never accepted a penny from, the Chilean regime. He even turned down two honorary degrees from Chilean universities that received government funding, because he did not want to be seen as endorsing a dictatorship he considered "terrible" and "despicable." He did spend six days in Chile in March 1975 to give public lectures, at the invitation of a private foundation. When he was there he met with Pinochet for about 45 minutes and wrote him a letter afterward, arguing for a plan to end hyperinflation and liberalize the economy. He gave the same kind of advice to communist dictatorships as well, including the Soviet Union, China, and Yugoslavia.

But I suppose it doesn’t matter. Klein has her audience, and they’ll like what she says.

When you look at the shoddy stuff that the left puts out, you wonder: how long can this go on? The answer, unfortunately, is: a lot longer than you think.

And get your facts straight, Naomi. Milton Friedman was about as upfront and honest a guy as ever lived. To suggest that he ever proposed anything underhanded or tricksy is just fantasy. Or hate speech.

The Universe of Hope

If you want real Hope and Change, don’t expect it from a politician. You are committing a category error. Everyone agrees that soldiers and politicians are the fighters, businessmen and workers are the workers, and teachers, clerics, and writers are the prayers. It’s the job of the teachers and clerics in the moral/cultural sector to be in charge of the hoping.

So if you want to ponder the question of hope, the Christmas (or Hannukah, or Divali) festival is a good one to anchor your thoughts.

All these mid-winter festivals are about light or about new-borns. Light is hope, for it lets you see, and birth is hope because every new-born is a reckless expression of hope.

In fact, life is hope. Every living thing, from an irritable amoeba to a little plant struggling in the desert; from a bird flying around on a snowy day looking for food to a young human adolescent yearning to be grown up and free, every living thing is an impersonation of hope. Where there is life, there is hope, and where there is hope there is life.

But hope is not a dream. You cannot just sit back in a reverie and hope. That isn’t life. That’s just deliquescing. Real hope is a dream put into action. It is the young love of a human couple translated into marriage and children. It is the dream of creativity translated into step-by-step actions towards a goal.

And, of course, real hope often involves sacrifice. Maybe it is the sacrifice of the parent for the welfare of the child. Maybe it is the sacrifice of the soldier who dies that others may live. Maybe it is the impossible sacrifice of Christianity: God sacrifices his Son so humans don’t have to sacrifice theirs in expiation of their sins.

What is Hope? All you can do is have faith in Hope. Probably it will all come clear when Pope Benedict XVI issues his third encyclical, which should be due a year from now. Remember? The first was issued on December 25, 2005 and called God is Love. The second was issued on November 30, 2007 and called Saved by Hope. The third one? Something about Faith, I shouldn’t wonder, although, as the Holy Father writes, Hope and Faith are pretty much one and the same thing. But then you could say that Hope and Love are pretty much one and the same.

Faith, Hope, Love. There’s something about all three. Just thinking about them fills you with Faith, Hope and Love. Try it for yourself.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Road to the Middle Class.

NYT: Bush to Blame for Mortgage Meltdown!

Let’s say it up front. President Bush was not early enough or firm enough in calling a halt to the housing boom/bubble. For some years, it is clear, Bush just kept on the policy of mortgage-at-any-cost (especially to minorities) which has been the policy of the US government for decades.

But you’d have to have your head in a liberal bell jar to write a news story about the housing crisis and not mention “Community Reinvestment Act.” You’d have to try really hard not to mention the word “Dodd.” You’d have to try really hard not to mention the bullying of the banks by federal housing officials.

But The New York Times reporters Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton managed it.

They introduce Franklin Raines as a helpless victim of Bush’s policies:

[Raines, once] Fannie’s chief executive, has fond memories of visiting Mr. Bush in the Oval Office and flying aboard Air Force One to a housing event. "They loved us," he said.

But the reporters don’t mention the congressional hearings in 2004 when Republicans were accused of being racists for criticizing the performance of Raines at Fannie Mae.

“It was not until 2003,” the Times complains, “when Freddie became embroiled in an accounting scandal, that the White House took on the companies in earnest.”

Well Geewillikins, reporters and reporterettes, if the White House had succeeded in reining in Fannie and Freddie back in 2003, we would all be home free.

But they didn’t. They couldn’t. And the reason is Democrats in Congress like Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA). And the reason is the law: the Community Reinvestment Act that more or less forced banks to loan money to poor credit risks.

There’s a good side and a bad side to this sand-box journalism and blatant bias. The good side is that these journalists probably really don’t know what they are talking about. That means that New York Times readers won’t either. As political partisans, we gotta love that.

But the bad side is that the educated elite of the nation—let alone the ordinary Americans who get their news from the educated elite—still don’t have a clue, and may never have a clue about what hit us.

If you can’t get off the Democratic talking points of greedy banks and lax “de-regulation” then you haven’t learned the lesson. And that means that ordinary Americans are going to be forced to go through the whole thing again.

But who cares, as long as the good guys get reelected?

Yes. We are conservatives, and we do care.