Paul M. Jones

Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."

The First Sign Of Corruption

At the heart of the Left’s indulgence of political corruption lies the mistaken conviction that “public service” transforms politicians into exemplars of civic virtue, or that political office attracts a large percentage of such civic-minded individuals. In reality, the political class is even more greedy and selfish than wealthy businessmen… because they spend much of their time in the company of such wealthy men, and believe themselves entitled to riches and luxuries.

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The mythic ideal of Cincinnatus, the selfless citizen-legislator who reluctantly leaves his farm to serve the Republic, is incompatible with the combination of endless incumbency and gigantic amounts of government power. We are foolish to place our trust in a system that requires an impossible level of virtue from politicians to function as designed. A limited government can better protect the economic health of its citizens by policing corruption from the private sector, under the direction of term-limited representatives who will never become worth the risk of buying off. The larger government becomes, the more its arrogant ruling class believe themselves worthy of royal treatment… and the more justified they feel about lying to the public for their own good. That is why the climate change elite gathered in Copenhagen this week is outraged that anyone would dare question their right to save a foolish world from itself, by lying through its teeth in a bid to seize power.

via The Greenroom » Forum Archive » The First Sign Of Corruption.

Call Girls Out-Class Mistresses

A mistress is fundamentally riskier than a call girl because her idea of one-upmanship is getting the man in trouble with his wife or primary partner, to break up his main relationship. This wasn't as likely in the good old days, when mistresses and prostitutes had more in common--but Jamie and Jaimee are modern women. These are not your grandfather's mistresses. That's why, perhaps, they feel entitled to sell their stories to the tabloids.

A call girl's idea of one-upmanship--which is far more beneficial to the men she sees--is being more discreet than the next girl. If she does a better job of protecting her customer's marriage than anyone else, that's a point of professional pride.

via Call Girls Out-Class Mistresses - The Daily Beast.

Fast Facts About Climategate

* The consensus is not scientific as much as it is political.

What we find out from the emails is that Jones and a number of others were using underhanded manipulations to suppress scientific publications that disagreed with the CO2-caused AGW theory. There is no scientific consensus if all the science isn’t being considered.

* There’s a difference between “global warming,” “anthropogenic (caused by humans) global warming,” and “anthropogenic global warming caused by CO2.”

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* The Climategate files don’t call global warming into question, but they make some of the science of anthropogenic global warming more suspect, and they make it clear that “forcings” other than CO2 have not been fairly considered.

* There has clearly been significant warming in the last 400 years -- since the “Little Ice Age”. That’s how we know it was the Little Ice Age.

* There is good reason to believe that humans may be accounting for some warming -- and some cooling, for that matter. But we don’t know how much.

* The case for all or most of the warming being due to CO2 was not as unquestionable as it was presented to be, and from the Climategate files we know that even that case was being slanted significantly.

* There is more than one “smoking gun” email (see here, here, here, here, here, and more)

* … but the program codes are much more significant than the emails

* … and the program codes will be yielding new surprises for a while to come.

via Pajamas Media » Fast Facts About Climategate.

Protectionism == Stupid

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) is upset that Adidas will shift its manufacturing of National Basketball Association jerseys from New York to Thailand, and he menacingly calls upon the N.B.A. to terminate its contract with Adidas (”Sen. Schumer rips Adidas for outsourcing of NBA jerseys,” Dec. 2).

I wonder where Mr. Schumer’s business suits are made. All in the U.S.? What about his shoes? His neckties? His underwear? The watch on his wrist? How about the coffee he drinks? The flowers he buys for his wife in January? Are these all made in America?

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I don’t know Mr. Schumer personally, but I’ll bet my pension that his everyday consumption consists of countless products containing such large quantities of non-American inputs and labor that, were Mr. Schumer to rid his existence of these foreign contributions to his living standard, he would soon find himself dark-ages ignorant and appallingly impoverished.

via Personal Foul.

Where conservatives have it wrong

YOU’RE A sensible, principled conservative. You want America to be a land of boundless opportunity and freedom, where people are treated as individuals and judged on their merits. You reject the divisive identity politics of the left - what matters most about any of us, you would insist, is not race or class or ethnic origins: it is personal character and achievement. There are few things about contemporary politics you deplore more than the demonizing or scapegoating of entire groups (“white males," “the rich," “the Christian right," “gun owners"), as though every member of the group is interchangeable and indistinguishable, wholly defined by a single disparaging label.

But let someone mention “illegal immigrants," and your principles fly out the window.

via Where conservatives have it wrong - The Boston Globe.

I have noted in conversation elsewhere, and I will say it here: it is immigration law that is wrong, not the illegal immigrants.

What should we do instead of the Obama health reform bill?

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4. Make an all-out attempt to limit deaths by hospital infection and the simple failure of doctors to wash their hands and perform other medically obvious procedures.

5. Make an all-out attempt, working with state and local governments (recall, since the Feds are picking up the Medicaid tab they have temporary leverage here), to ease the spread of low-cost, walk-in health care clinics, run on a WalMart sort of basis. Stepping into the realm of the less feasible, weaken medical licensing and greatly expand the roles of nurses, paramedics, and pharmacists.

6. Make an all-out attempt, comparable to the moon landing effort if need be, to introduce price transparency for medical services. This can be done.

7. Preserve current HSAs. The Obama plan will tank them, yet HSAs, while sometimes overrated, do boost pending discipline. They also keep open some path of getting to the Singapore system in the future.

8. Invest more in pandemic preparation. By now it should be obvious how critical this is. It's fine to say "Obama is already working on this issue" but the fiscal constraint apparently binds and at the margin this should get more attention than jerry rigging all the subsidies and mandates and the like.

9. Establish the principle that future extensions of coverage, as done through government, will be for catastrophic care only.

10. Enforce current laws against fraudulent rescission. If these cases are so clear cut and so obviously in the wrong, let's act on it. We can strengthen the legal penalties if need be.

11. Realize that you cannot tack "universal coverage" (which by the way it isn't) onto the current sprawling mess of a system, so look for all other means of saving lives in other, more cost-effective ways. If you wish, as a kind of default position, opt for universal coverage if the elderly agree to give up Medicare, moving us to a version of the Swiss system and a truly unified method of coverage. But don't bet on that ever happening.

(As an aside, I *hate* the term "health care." It's not health care. It's *medical* care.) Via Marginal Revolution: What should we do instead of the Obama health reform bill?.

Trying Terrorists

When appellate courts decide questions of law, they set precedents for future cases. If they make allowances for the exigencies of the war on terror in order to uphold convictions of [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] and his associates, it could end up diminishing the rights of ordinary criminal defendants. That’s why the smart civil-libertarian position is to oppose trying terrorists as civilians.

Maybe reducing rights is part of the point. Via Instapundit » Blog Archive » JAMES TARANTO: “You have to wonder if the Obama administration and its supporters bothered to think….