This past Friday, the 25th of June, Democrats, with 8 Republicans in the House have passed sweeping environmental regulation known as Cap and Trade.

Democrats narrowly passed historic climate and energy legislation Friday evening that would transform the country’s economy and industrial landscape.

But the all-hands-on-deck effort to protect politically vulnerable Democrats by corralling the minimum number of votes to pass the bill, 219-212, proves that there are limits to President Barack Obama’s ability to use his popularity to push through his legislative agenda. Forty-four Democrats voted against the bill, while just eight Republicans crossed the aisle to back it…

Despite the numerous problems with the bill and still open questions remaining as to what the full financial impact will be on average consumers, Nobel prize winning economist, Paul Krugman is full of praise (here):

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

Which is perfectly fine.  I honestly tend to expect more out of an economist, like asking questions about cost versus benefits and the like, but I’ve gotten use to Mr. Krugman using his very large bully pulpit for his politics, and not economic principles.

As is his trademark for completely disregarding anything that fails to comport with his world view, he moved from praise directly into false logic:

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

So from the very beginning, he places everyone into two basic camps – those who voted for the legislation and those who are anti-science, treasonous bastards, how don’t understand the fundamental science behind climate change.

Instead of acknowledging the well known fact that many opponents of this legislation are not global warming deniers, he presents a false dichotomy in which there are only two sides – his side and those that don’t believe in global warming.

From this basic setup, his article flows smoothly as he defends the science behind global warming all the while pretending the strawman he is busy burning exists in real life.

As usual, outside of his partisan world, the issue is not nearly as cut and dry.  Many of the best argued positions come from people opposed to this bill have absolutely nothing to do with the science of global warming at all.  The generally tread a few main points:

1. What are the true costs of the bill to individual consumers? This question is almost impossible to ask as 300 additional pages were added to the 1000 page bill just a couple of hours before a forced vote.  None of Congress had time to read the additions prior to voting.
2. If we can detail a good cost estimate, do we fully know what benefits to expect in order to balance costs with benefits?
3. & lastly, the politics of the bill are being setup for corruption.  Instead of opening an exchange where the initial carbon offsets can be purchased through a free market system, the government will be handing out those directly to business.  They will get these carbon credits free of charge and be able to resell them on the market once that happens.  Allowing congress the ability to decide who gets free money is a system setup for corruption.

Critiques :Reason, Cato.org, and just a lot of additional BS on politics of the entire thing

Of course Mr. Krugman should know and likely does know exactly what he’s doing.  He frames the debate as a false dichotomy, only allowing two choices, then pretends to make one choice look completely stupid by comparison through the ceremonial burning of the strawman he invented.

Not terribly surprising from a columnist who was arguing in 2004 that the economy needed a housing bubble to get us moving forward again, only to completely reverse course and pretend he never did any such thing after the collapse of that market (here).

Is it really any wonder why the self proclaimed 4th branch of the government is trusted less and less everyday?

In any debate or critical analysis of any issue, one must first begin by understanding terms as they are defined, understand the data being used and how that data has been obtained, and realize  that many people doing research have vested interests in any given outcome, and therefore will define everything in a way that will best suit their needs.

The number of currently uninsured falls into a category that should be better defined for anyone wishing to make an informed decision as to any potential policy recommendations.

To begin, we’ll start with the varying reports.  Currently, it seems that most politicians have settled firmly on a figure of around 50 million uninsured.  Depending upon the source and the definition they choose, this figure moves anywhere between 25 million, defined as those actually needing assistance, all the way up to 87 million, defined as anyone who hasn’t had health coverage over the past year.

To help make sense of the number, we can review the Health & Human Services report from 2004 (here).  The following figure help define the number more clearly, showing the number of insured versus their current level of poverty (defined as ~19K annually per family), by percentage of the total number uninsured (listed as 45.8 million in this report):

As we see here,  a full 27% of those uninsured currently make over 300% or more of poverty levels, with a full 46% of those uninsured making more than 200% of current poverty levels.

This means out of the current 2004 numbers, 45.8 million,  12.6 million currently have household incomes above 57 thousand annually, with a full 21 million having household incomes above 38 thousand annually.

To further define these numbers, at these figures, individuals making over 300% of poverty, would pay about 4% of their income to provide health care for themselves and family. Individuals making over 200% of poverty would be pushing about 9% of their income.

What does this mean for the debate?  That is of course an individual decision, as some will see these numbers and not care either way as they believe that health care is a right and those opposite who believe health care isn’t.

The main thing these two divergent groups should pull from this information, is that we should demand more truthful information out of our elected representatives instead of just the numbers that push their agendas.

Over at Statistical Modeling, Casual Interference, and Social Science blog, there’s a blog post discussing the VP’s marketing techniques sent via email to help pass the administration’s health care reform (here):

———- Forwarded message ———- Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:06:43 -0400 From: Vice President Joe Biden Subject: You’ve got to read these

A few weeks ago, President Obama asked you to share your personal story about how the health care crisis has affected you and the ones you love. Hundreds of thousands of stories poured in from every corner of the country. The President and I have read through many of them ourselves — and now I’m encouraging you to do so as well.

Read these powerful, personal stories from people in your area and around the country:

http://healthcare.barackobama.com/stories

And after you do, please forward this note on to as many people as you can.

For folks who don’t yet understand why health care reform is such an urgent priority, these stories make the case far better than any statistics ever could.

What’s interesting to note, is that this kind of thinking, pushing anecdotes instead of solid science, should rightfully seem irrational to most people.  However, the truth is the more people to follow Mr. Biden’s advice, the more adherents to his beliefs on health care reform he is likely to have.

He is basically exploiting a known human weakness in critical thinking.  A consistent issue all humans have to deal with is an inability to compare any one thing to all things possible.  That is, we have a poor ability to see things in a rational statistical manor.  For instance, we are scared of things that are statistically improbable, while at the same time we can have heightened sensitivities about things that are highly improbable.

We do this by making any comparisons against what we know or have seen, instead of comparing things against what’s possible.  This was demonstrated in the book Freakamonics, wherein the authors discuss the difference in the fear of parents possibly sending their children to other homes where guns might exist (1 in 1 million chance of death), juxtaposed against the indifference most parents have with sending their children to homes with pools (1 in 11,000).

When’s the last time you saw a news item on recent pool deaths?  When’s the last time you saw a news item about gun violence?

This is also demonstrated when polling people with questions about how many deaths they think are caused by various possibilities.  The consistently overestimate the number of deaths on causes which are very infrequent, but on TV more often (swine flu), and underestimate the number of deaths on causes which are much more frequent, yet never on TV (asthma).

This helps explain why polls currently show things such as; 45% of respondents are somewhat or very satisfied with the current health care system, yet 80% of respondents are somewhat or very satisfied with their personal health care.

This thinking also helps explain why all sort of new, completely unproven vitamins, homeopathic remedies, special healing diets, detoxes, and the rest continue to have solid adherents, but absolutely no proven track record or even any attempt to come up with a testable hypothesis.

The truly awful thing is that this thinking has not only invaded seriously complex debates such as health care, but also scientific thinking, such as grant funding from the National Institutes of Health:

I was on an NIH panel a couple of years ago with about 25 other scientists…

The highlight–or, I should say, lowlight–was when we were reviewing a proposal involving the study of the carcinogenic effects of hookah (water pipe) smoking. I asked if this was really such a big deal, and one of the panel members told me that smoking tobacco through a hookah is something like 10 times worse than smoking a cigarette. If so, the public health consequences could be pretty serious, even if not so many people did it. I said this sounded like a reasonable point to me. Then this guy across the table from me spoke up and said that he knew somebody who was 80 years old, had been smoking with a hookah all his life and was none the worse from it. At this point, I blew up. I couldn’t believe that the “my elderly aunt smokes and she didn’t get cancer” argument could be brought up at an NIH panel!

So in a real sense, if you could get people to read hundreds of anecdotes, you can effectively change someone’s comparative model if they aren’t deliberate in their thinking.

I think we need to be reminded or one of my favorite speeches by the esteemed physicist Richard Feynman, titled Cargo Cult Science In it, he addresses science majors that while ethics classes aren’t an express part of a normal science education, they should all learn that the cumulative effect of their science education should be the ability and responsibility to ignore pseudoscience.  They should see through their many classes that utilize the scientific principles of analysis, that science should always be a vehicle in which we strive to find the truth.

You combine the fact that humans use internal anecdotal evidence when making most of their comparisons, with pressure from cognitive dissonance helping people to fall for confirmation biases; it seems intuitive that serious and well meaning people can end up believing all sorts of things that simply aren’t provable in any real sense.

Of course understanding this is only the first step – admitting the problem.  We should next expect better out of our government and our elected representatives.  We should expect more from news organizations and TV personalities who wish to push an agenda.  We should expect more out of researchers and any organization that publishes things labeled as “science”.

In the end though, we should really expect more out of ourselves.  We should always be vigilant in seeking the truth through the obfuscation of effective propaganda which plays on our weaknesses.

I’m not sure exactly when the voting public will start going directly to Congress to ask them to please stop hurting the economy, but I’m hoping really, really soon.

As most people with a passing understanding of economics are aware, we have recently hit economic hard times due to a collapsing housing market.  This market collapsed because it needed to contract.  There is no such animal in this world that will continuously forever increase in price by double digits.

So the mere fact houses were doing that for years, showed us that inevitably, it will have to stop and contract back to reality.

There were a variety of causes, loose lending practices, GSE’s implicit backing of all loans, corrupt lenders, idiotic consumers, etc, etc, etc – IMHO though, the GSE’s are the main culprits as their implicit backing allows for all the other pieces to be put into place.

Even if you don’t agree with that statement, one should at least be able to acknowledge our politicians mistakes with respect to Fannie & Freddie and how it certainly helped the current economic landscape to develop.

& what does congress do about this?  Start  pushing other GSE’s, mainly FHA (Federal Housing Authority) to begin the same process over again.

That’s correct – our politicians are currently pushing FHA to make the same idiotic guarantees that Fannie & Freddie did, that helped cause the current mess we’re in.  It’s not like they can say they forgot what the real problems are – they know, and seemingly don’t care (here):

The demand for FHA mortgages has exploded during the past 14 months, increasing 314 percent nationally. In January and February alone, borrowers signed on for 670,000 FHA mortgages compared with 425,000 in all of 2007.

This has to be one of the most irresponsible moves in recent times.  It not only demonstrates a disregard for society as a whole, but also demonstrates most politicians’ apparent belief in the stupidity of the voting public.  Only with a belief that voters won’t out right reject the same corrupt politics, would anyone have the audacity to repeat the exact same mistakes in front of their bosses within side the same congressional session.

We’ll see if these politicians are correct in their belief in the phrase, “No one ever lost by underestimating the American public”… Or, maybe we’ll find out that in oppressive Iran, Iranians are more willing to protect their country from oppression and corruption than is the US public.

In what has to be an effort to discuss anything other than the sad shape of the French economy & social issues, today President Sarkozy has given a speech on the possibility of banning the burqa as (article here):

…“In our country we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” Mr Sarkozy said to applause in the parliament’s ceremonial Versailles home.

“The burka is not a religious sign. It is a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement,” he added. “It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.”…

As one can guess, this hasn’t gone unnoticed throughout the world.   In France, it seems moderate Muslims and the majority leftist population agree (here):

Leading Muslims and the media in France here have indicated general support of French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s striking comments Monday that the burqa cover for Muslim women is “not welcome on French soil,” though opinion is divided on whether the president’s cultural stricture should be extended to an outright ban of the burqa for women.

But this shouldn’t shock anyone, as it’s a simple continuation of policies from years ago (here):

A law banning Islamic headscarves and other religious symbols from French state schools came into effect on Thursday, the first day of term.

Of course the French and other Europeans don’t hold freedom of religion or speech to the high standards as the US does, and under their laws, this is well within their rights.

& I do agree that the burqa and complete covering of Muslim women are anathemas to individual freedom, however outlawing religious clothing, on behalf of secularism is not only xenophobic, but anti-freedom to all religions as well.

Basically with this policy, France will demonstrate their belief in a state religion called the state, while all the way, claiming this policy to be pro-freedom.

As with all doublespeak though, people who really want to see the truth, can do so easily.

For another obvious example of government malfeasance, the LA Times has an article discussing several projects that were given TARP money designated as “stimulus” that are doing everything except stimulating the economy:

…Millions of dollars are going toward bicycle lockers, bike paths, walking trails and a skate park, Coburn said. One town in North Carolina is using stimulus funds to hire an administrator whose job will be to procure more stimulus funds, according to the report….

One project mentioned is the $3.4-million construction of a 13-foot tunnel near Tallahassee, Fla., that will allow turtles and other wildlife to safely cross U.S. Highway 27….

I guess since they’ve proven themselves so trustworthy, we might as well hand over the entire financial and health care systems to the US government.

Read whole thing here.

In Florida, we apparently have a normal, well adjusted, dog-loving teenager with a distaste for all things cat.

As reported in the Miami Hearld:

The teenager accused of mutilating more than a dozen cats in South Miami-Dade was not the reserved yet rabid killer some expected. He was a dog-loving class clown, a swim class instructor, an 18-year-old who grew up before the eyes of the four-legged victims’ families.

He appeared to be appalled by the horrific killings, and joined the Facebook group “Catch the Cat Killer!”…

I wonder what PETA will have to say about this?

Amid the controversy of  Ahmadinejad receiving more than 65% of the total vote, amid the protests and global cries of election fraud, the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has asked for an investigation.  From the great analytical outlet Stratfor:

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered Iran’s Guardian Council, the country’s highest legislative body, to probe into fraud allegations over the June 12 presidential vote, Iran’s student state-controlled news agency ISNA reported June 15. Guardian Council spokesman Abbasali Kadkhodai said that the council would review formal appeals from reformist opposition candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi and would then issue its ruling within seven to ten days.

This likely doesn’t mean much as the ruling council will likely uphold the vote.  After all, there is precedence for this sort of thing in Iran:

There is precedence for such intervention by the Supreme Leader. In 2004, when the Guardian Council rejected the applications of 3,600 out of nearly 8,200 people seeking candidacy in Iran’s upcoming parliamentary elections in a blow to Khatami’s presidency, Khatami used the same language as Mousavi and his supporters are using today, calling the move a “silent coup d’etat” by the state. Khatami and then speaker of the Majlis Karroubi demanded a full review of the candidate screening, and the Supreme Leader responded by ordering the Council to look into the matter and reconsider some of its decisions. In the end, the Council acquiesced to having some of the candidates reinstated, but at the end of the day, the clerical body was still fully capable of fully containing Khatami and his reformist agenda.

It will be interesting to watch over the next couple of weeks as Iran attempts to hang on to their regional & domestic power, while trying to increase their international standing as well.

Read the whole thing here.