Cascajun

As the 2008 election cycle begins to swing into motion the politicians are making preparation for class warfare that depicts two Americas - a nation of economic inequality, a nation of haves and have nots.

Peter Cuthberson writes about a scientific survey of American millionaires in Two Americas, Indeed:

In surveys of thousands of millionaires, aimed at identifying the choices and behavior that lead to prodigious wealth, Dr. Stanley identified again and again the same characteristics, catalogued in numerous books. Unfortunately for class warriors, they are poor fodder for an agenda based on envy.

And what did those surveys say of those millionaires characteristics?

• the typical millionaire spent less than $400 on their most expensive suit, and only about 1% spent more than $2,800.
• Only one in ten millionaires had ever spent more than $300 on a pair of shoes.
• Most millionaires pay a few hundred dollars or less for their watch, and $30,000 or less for their main motor vehicle.
• They have been married to the same person most of their adult lives.
• Most inherited nothing and fewer than one fifth inherited even 10% of their wealth.

Read the whole article and Dr. Stanley’s book - The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy.

There’s nothing new about Stewart Brand. The NY Times has an interesting piece about him, An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’.

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.

[…]

“There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective,” he says. “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.”

Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he’s been shifting toward the minority.

“My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by,” he says. “I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.”

Read the whole article. He’s a facinating man whose influential career is woven with the ’60s counterculture, the birth of the environmental movement, and the internet revolution.

When U.S. civil libertarians argue that the Bush administration should follow the “European model” of treating terrorism as a law-enforcement issue instead of a military one, are they referring to Jacques Bauer?

Warrantless wiretaps? Not a problem under French law, as long as the Interior Ministry approves. Court-issued search warrants based on probable cause? Not needed to conduct a search. Hearsay evidence? Admissible in court. Habeas corpus? Suspects can be held and questioned by authorities for up to 96 hours without judicial supervision or the notification of third parties. Profiling? French officials commonly boast of having a “spy in every mosque.” A wall of separation between intelligence and law enforcement agencies? France’s domestic and foreign intelligence bureaus work hand-in-glove. Bail? Authorities can detain suspects in “investigative” detentions for up to a year.

Back in November I posted about the 2006 hurricane season and how far off the mark the forcasts had been. While there were 5 hurricanes, none made landfall in the United States. Following Hurricane Katrina, there were a plethera of stories in the press floating the notion that global warming is causing an increase in hurricanes.

I just recently watched Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. In the film Gore relies heavily on Hurricane Katrina disaster imagery and video footage. And he claims that tropical cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons are increasing in strength and frequency worldwide due to global warming.

Donald Sensing at Winds of Change writes about recent studies that contradict that notion.

Chris Landsea, science and operations director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said the notion that global warming is causing an increase in hurricanes gained widespread attention after the stormy seasons of 2004 and 2005.

But that perception is wrong and the statistics don’t bear it out, Landsea told about 200 students and professors in the auditorium at USC’s geography building.

Further study continues to show that hurricane activity occurs in cycles of 20 to 45 years, he said. Even though the seasons of 2004, when four hurricanes bashed Florida, and 2005, when Katrina devastated New Orleans and neighboring parts of the Gulf Coast, seemed shocking, they were no more intense than some storms in the early part of the 20th century and in the 1930s, Landsea said.

[…]

“An Inconvenient Truth,” the book by former Vice President Al Gore, also persuaded some people that global warming is contributing to hurricane frequency and strength, Landsea said.

But facts that also refute the theory are that tropical storms are weakening and becoming less frequent in all oceans except the Atlantic, he said.

Why was the 2006 season below normal? According to Weatherstreet.com, it was partly because tropical western Atlantic sea surface temperatures were lower than previous years.

Part of the reason for the slow season is that tropical western Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are running about normal, if not slightly below normal (see graphic below, which shows SST departures from normal).

In contrast, at the same time last year SSTs in the same region were running well above normal.

The cooler SSTs in the Atlantic are not an isolated anomaly. In a research paper being published next month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists will show that between 2003 and 2005, globally averaged temperatures in the upper ocean cooled rather dramatically, effectively erasing 20% of the warming that occurred over the previous 48 years.

Global Warming?
The slow hurricane season and the cooling sea surface temperatures might be somewhat surprising to the public. Media reports over the last year have suggested that, since global warming will only get worse, and last year’s hurricane activity was supposedly due to global warming, this season might well be as bad as last season. But it appears that Mother Nature might have other plans.

I presume that research was published in Geophysical Research Letters. NOAA has put this information out regarding the recent cooling of upper ocean temperatures - SHORT-TERM COOLING OF OCEANS SUGGEST ‘SPEED BUMP’ IN WARMING.

The article leads off with - “The average temperature of the water near the top of the Earth’s oceans has cooled significantly since 2003.” However they are quick to point out that this is “probably natural climate variability.” Yet NOAA presents no information supporting the headline conclusion that the cooling trend is short-term and the study only used data covering 1993 to 2005.

Larry Kudlow writes about Bernanke & Goldilocks:

In his brief tenure at the Fed, Bernanke has mopped up excess liquidity and reduced inflationary expectations; he has stuck to his free-market principles while targeting inflation and employment. Meanwhile, low tax rates have led to the availability of more goods and services, a growth cycle that makes the existing money supply less inflationary.

This is a supply-side model, and it’s very much in place right now: A combination of strong economic growth and newfound monetary control are working together for the betterment of investors, workers, and businesses — and even federal finances. According to Wall Street economist Michael Darda, surging tax receipts have reduced the federal deficit to only 1.4 percent of GDP, significantly below the 2.3 percent average of the last three decades.

The recessionists are wrong. The bears are wrong. The pessimists are wrong. The doom-and-gloom crowd is wrong. The Democrats who rule the roost on Capitol Hill are wrong.

We are witnessing the Bush-Bernanke boom, and it’s still the greatest story never told.

It does sound like the makings for a good story, though some are more cautious on the infation forecast.

Mark Steyn on the consensus from Iraq:

America is a big helpless baby who’s blundered into a war zone he can never hope to understand.

As Mark points out, the press and politicians will have you believe Iraq is just the Republicans’ war or just Bush’s war. However, to everyone else on the planet, it’s America’s war. And it will be America’s defeat.

Perhaps it doesn’t fit the plot….

There’s an interesting controversy on YouTube. It’s OK to post video’s argueing atheism over Christianity, but not atheism over Islam.

A DOUBLE STANDARD AT GOOGLE-OWNED YOUTUBE

Western institutions, corporations, and governments continue to ceede freedom to the squeaky wheels.