Month: February 2013

Let’s Talk About Drones

Wow. Drone policy has been in the news for like three days now. As in, the News news. On NPR. In the top of my Google News feed. In this conservative emailing list I accidentally got on. The “mainstream media” has spent more effort on drone policy this week than they did in all of the months leading up to last year’s elections.

It seems that eleven senators (both Democrat and Republican) threatened to delay the confirmations of Hagel and/or Brennan if the Obama administration didn’t release the memo(s) about their justification(s) for killing American citizens with targeted drone strikes. Then a 16-page memo “leaked” to NBC.

Page one of the memo (here from NBC, or here from Reason with selective highlighting) says that lethal operations against a U.S. citizen require, among other things, a “high-level official of the U.S. government” to determine that “the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.”

Later, on page seven, the memo says that “an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack” does not require the United States to have “clear evidence that a specific attack… will take place in the immediate future.” Yes, the government literally says that imminent does not mean immediate. This is pretty blatant doublespeak that basically gives the executive branch permission to target anyone they decide needs targeting.

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We Must. We Must. We Must.

Is it too late to comment on Obama’s second inauguration? Well, here goes. Much digital ink has been spilled about the way Obama’s speech revealed the modern progressive vision, etc, etc. I was most touched by the word cloud of the speech that I saw floating around various news websites:

Look at that giant “must.” Is there any more brilliant display of the coercive power of the state?

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So That’s Why the Socialist Scandinavians Are Doing So Well

The Economist brings some news from Scandinavia:

Sweden has reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP from 67% in 1993 to 49% today. It could soon have a smaller state than Britain. It has also cut the top marginal tax rate by 27 percentage points since 1983, to 57%, and scrapped a mare’s nest of taxes on property, gifts, wealth and inheritance. This year it is cutting the corporate-tax rate from 26.3% to 22%.

Sweden has also donned the golden straitjacket of fiscal orthodoxy with its pledge to produce a fiscal surplus over the economic cycle. Its public debt fell from 70% of GDP in 1993 to 37% in 2010, and its budget moved from an 11% deficit to a surplus of 0.3% over the same period. This allowed a country with a small, open economy to recover quickly from the financial storm of 2007-08. Sweden has also put its pension system on a sound foundation, replacing a defined-benefit system with a defined-contribution one and making automatic adjustments for longer life expectancy.

Most daringly, it has introduced a universal system of school vouchers and invited private schools to compete with public ones…

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Global Climate Snapshot: State of the Planet 2012

2012 has come and gone. It’s time to look at the official data and figure out how alarmed we should be about how warm the planet is getting. To help you with that, I have created the unofficial Global Alarm Bell Index (GAB Index), comprised of a highly scientific mix of seven complicated factors. Let’s begin.

Global Temperatures: 4 Alarm Bells

NOAA declared that 2012 was the tenth warmest year on record. That doesn’t sound too scary, though they are quick to explain that “this marks the 36th consecutive year” of “above average” temperatures, and that only one year before 2000 was warmer than 2012, and that 2012 was the warmest “La Niña” year ever. They also inform us that “record warmth” was observed in many specific areas, while “no record cold regions were observed.”

Most of that data suggests that the planet is warmer than it used to be a few decades ago. But it doesn’t tell us if the planet is getting exponentially warmer, or getting a little bit warmer, or just settling at this “above average” level.

2012-global-temp-anamolyRather than increasing, or even holding steadily, the global temp slope appears to have leveled off since the 90’s. I can slice the data to sound just as un-alarming as NOAA’s alarming slices. NOAA doesn’t tell us that the 10-year moving average of the temperature anomaly (a longer-term trend than any individual year) has now decreased for two consecutive years, the first time this has happened since at least the 70’s. The last ten years (2003-2012) were still warmer than the ten years before it (1993-2002), but by only 0.136 degrees, which is the smallest decade-by-decade increase since 1994.

Temperatures have gotten warmer in the last decade, but at a slower rate than the previous decade. If current trends hold (and of course they may not), the earth will not get any warmer in the next decade. For 2012, I’m giving the Global Temperature Record an arbitrary 4 alarm bells out of 10 for its contribution to the GAB Index.

Continue reading Global Climate Snapshot: State of the Planet 2012