Which American Governments are Bankrupt and Why

I was reading "Nine American Cities Going Broke," and noticed similarities between the cities in the most financial trouble. Many of them simply forgot their core functions and decided to go into projects like redevelopment and stadium building. These are "grand" projects that appeal to the egos of petty politicians, but for the most part, they do little good for, and much harm to, the taxpayers. Next, you have simple corruption and finally you have politicians buying the support of city workers by offering overly-generous pension schemes.

You may remember Vallejo, CA., actually filed bankruptcy as a result of the extreme pension costs for city workers, especially those given to unionized fire fighters. The city politicians, always wanting to be on the good side of the unions, caved in repeatedly. For years the taxpayers were able to cover the costs of buying political support from the unions, but long term it was unsustainable.

The nine cities listed are those "with the worst credit ratings assigned by Moody's." Here are the worst nine cities in from least bankrupt to most bankrupt.

#9 Camden, NJ. A very corrupt political system meant that three of the last five mayors ended up in prison for corruption. For some odd reason more than half the property in the city is tax exempt meaning taxes are imposed on the remainder. The city, not the school system, got over $1 billion in state aid in the last decade and is still going bankrupt. The state took over managing the finances and spending actually sky-rocketed while tax revenues plummeted. And in 2010 the state paid 80% of the costs of the city to stay afloat.

The city gave tax exemptions to a for-profit aquarium as well as to the a high-rent apartment complex. And greedy trade unions used their political clout to push through high pensions for police and fire fighters. Fringe benefits for those two departments doubled since 2001 after being adjusted for inflation. The city now pays out 28% of its budget in fringe benefits to these greedy city employees who use the clout of unions to their own selfish benefit.

Even while they are going bankrupt the unions increased their clout by getting more members hired. Full time city employees went from 1,131 in 2001 to 1,562. And the police department is 20% larger than the average for a city this size while there are 17% more firefighters than in other similar cities.

#8 Strafford County, NH. The main problem here is that the county went into the business of running a nursing home. And it is losing millions per year. About 40% of the entire country budget goes into this one nursing home. Most the patients are Medicaid patients and the country is finding that the reimbursements from Medicaid simply don't come close to paying the actual costs. This is a problem all health care providers face: government health care refuses to pay the actual costs of health care and this forces up prices for private patients. It is one way that government health care can pretend to cost less, while forcing up the cost of health care for everyone else, and then blaming the higher costs on private health care providers.

#7 Riverdale, IL. The main problem here just seems to be bad budgeting with the village consistently spending more than it takes in.

#6 Salem, NJ. The city decided to get into the office building field by guaranteeing bonds issued to construct the complex. Politicians said they could pay the bonds from revenue from leasing office space. But construction delays, a common thing in government run projects, meant they were paying out with no revenue coming in. Government officials tend to make bad investments like this all the time. They all dream of being the one credited with "revitalizing" the city, or having some grand project attributed to them. They are much more careful when they invest their own funds. But politicians are used to playing with other people's money.

#5 Detroit, MI. Trouble here is long term and tied to the heavily unionized auto industry which continued to push up costs for employers. General Motors and Chrysler both declared bankruptcy which substantially hurt the city. In addition the city was never well run to begin with. The net result is that debts are more than double the annual tax income for the city.

#4 Harrison, NJ. The city got involved heavily in redevelopment and spent $39 million to build a stadium. The income from the stadium, however, is well below what the politicians pretended it would be when they pushed it through. The stadium is one massive subsidy to the privately-owned New York Red Bulls, a soccer team. Bloomberg reports:

Town officials in December had to borrow $3.1 million -- 21 percent of its municipal tax collections -- to make the debt payment on the 2006 issue, and they anticipate doing so again this December, Moody’s said.

Meanwhile, the New York Red Bulls, whose owner is No. 208 on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s billionaires, are challenging their taxable status. The team refuses to pay a $1.4 million property levy, according to Moody’s.

To close its $6 million budget gap, Harrison plans to dismiss 17 percent of its police and 29 percent of its firefighters on July 1, according to an e-mail from Town Clerk Paul Zarbetski. Mayor Raymond McDonough is also considering selling seven parking lots.

The city claimed that payments from developers would go from $2.3 million in 2008 to $11.5 million by 2011. But, in 2009 they only received $980,000 and $1.1 million in 2010 and 2011, just 10% of what they projected. The soccer team's managing director says the team shouldn't pay taxes since just being there "is a huge economic impact." Of course, it was an even huger economic cost.

#3 Jefferson County, AL. The county is in deep shit, literally and figuratively. It's 2o09 debt was $1,337,233,000 while revenue was only $308,440,000. The county decided to spend $3.2 billion on sewer overhauls. But numerous officials ended up in jail due to corruption connected to the project.

#2 Pontiac, MI. Here is another city hurt by the bankruptcy of union-riddled General Motors. But there was another stadium project involved as well: Silverdome Stadium. Built in 1975 it cost the city $55.7 million. The purpose was to "lure" the Detroit Lions to the stadium by given the wealthy owners a huge subsidy. They moved and stayed until they got a better handout leaving Pontiac holding a white elephant. The Jehovahs Witnesses rented it once a year for their annual get-together and a drive-in theater was opened up in the parking lot. The city decided to get rid of the stadium and asked for bids. In 2008 an offer of $18 million was made. The buyers were planning to turn the stadium into an entertainment complex. The city refused the offer and put it out to auction. Instead of getting $18 million the stadium was then sold for $550,000 in 2009. Brilliant!

#1 Central Falls, RI. Central Falls declared bankruptcy in August of this year. The reason was mostly due to the pension plans for city workers. The city owes $80 million in retirement benefits, which is equal to five years worth of the entire city budget. Once again it was the greedy unions redistributing wealth to fire fighters and police officers. The $80 million in retirement promises is for just 215 cops and firemen. The city has around 20,000 residents. The New York Times reports that Central Falls "is small and poor, but over the years it has promised police officers and firefighters retirement benefits like those offered in big, rich states like California and New York." (I don't know about New York, but big, rich California is in financial trouble as well and once again greedy unions have pushed through massive pension promises for union members.)

State regulations are also to blame here. State law favors unions and forces cities into binding arbitration. The law says that benefits are to be based on comparable benefits across the entire state and has to ignore the city's ability to pay. The result is that each time a city is forced into paying higher benefits the "comparable average" for the state increases forcing each other city to increase their benefits during the next union hold-up (I mean negotiation). Of course, as those benefits go up then the other cities are now lagging behind and have to catch up again. And so it goes in perpetuity. The Times report this means Rhode Island has "the nation's highest per capita spending for fire services and sixth-highest for policing." The law does not apply to other government employees but the teacher's unions are now pushing for a similar law to inflate the pay of teachers.

So what?

The media seems to be in another feeding frenzy that Arnold Schwarzenegger father a child with a woman other than his wife and that the child is now a teen.

My take on it? So what? It's really none of our business.

It isn't that Arnold ran for office as a moralistic busy-body. He didn't do that. There was no violation of his promises to the voters, at least not because of this. If had been one of these Religious Right lunatics, anxious to use the state to ram "biblical morality" down our throats, then I'd say skewer away.

His now-separated wife, Maria, has a right to feel betrayed. To a smaller degree his kids do as well. But I have no interest in the matter and neither does the media.

Privately Arnold had the obligation to help care for his son. All the reports have indicated that he has done so.

My view is that this, at most, ought to have been a two-minute story and that the media has better things to do.

My advice is for the press to stay out of it. Arnold and Marie have issues to resolve, we don't. As for the Schwarzenegger's children my only advice is to remember that their half-brother is not responsible for any of this. He did nothing and is as much an innocent by-stander as you are. He is your half-brother, embracing him as such is not condoning anything that happened.

The real scum in this matter may prove, once again, to be the gutter tabloid papers that brainless housewives buy at the checkout line in the grocery store. There are claims that these papers are offering high bounties for anyone who gives them a photo of the child. These people have no decency. This kid has done nothing! Leave him alone. And anyone who feeds that depravity by purchasing those papers deserves the lowest rungs of hell.

If you want to go after Arnold go after him for his failure to reign in the California budget.

Bogus study panics public, parents and politicians—again.

This one story is an illustration of American politics writ large. And the Village Voice deserves credit for exposing it. The unfortunate thing is that they don’t seem to understand that the story is repeated over and over under the guise of dozens and dozens of other “urgent” issues.

The “crisis” begins with an advocacy group, the Women’s Funding Network, and similar local groups, such as the Atlanta’s Women’s Foundation. These groups were convinced, based on what remains unclear, that there was a crisis of child prostitutes. And they wanted government funding to address the crisis they discovered.

The Atlanta group had approached the state of Georgia with their begging bowl out. They only got 20% of the funds they wanted. Kaffie McCullough, from the group, admitted: “We had no research, no nothing.” Apparently with nothing to back up their assertions they still managed to get one-fifth of the funds they wanted. Now they approached an organization named the Schapiro Group to produce a study that would find the crisis they were looking to solve.

Deborah Richardson, from the WNF, announced the results: “An independent tracking study heard released today by the Women’s Funding Network shows that over the past six months, the number of underage girls trafficked online has rise exponentially in three diverse states.” They had dramatic numbers, as you knew they would. In Michigan they claimed it increased by 39.2%, up 20.7% in New York, and up 64.7% in Minnesota.

The media spread the story, and the result, according to USA Today was a “growing movement of women’s groups, celebrities, human rights activists ad state officials.” Of course the politicians, like vultures looking for rotten bodies, come swooping in to show they are concerned, to buy votes from identifiable political interest groups, and to scare taxpayers in funding some new project “to save the children.” Congresswoman Jackie Speier, D-CA, told Congress that these children “need specialized resources.” Richardson bragged, “We have more data and more momentum.”

And they had a new bogeyman—Craigslist and other on-line sites where individuals looking to “hook-up” with others would advertise. Loud-mouthed politicians like Richard Blumenthal, Attorney General for Connecticut, called these sites “online brothels” and began attacks to remove all adult ads.

As for the political interest groups, PIGs, promoting the “study,” they got oodles of cash taken from taxpayers, many of whom are having a hard time making ends meet. The Atlanta group was thrilled. They went to the legislature with the new "study" and came away with a bucket-load of greenbacks. McCullough said: “The research costs money, but we’ve been able to broker—I don’t know what it is now, I think it’s over $1.3, $1.6 million in funding that we never would have gotten.”

It wouldn’t be the first time, nor will it be the last, that a PIG has produced a bogus study in order to create a scare campaign in order to access millions of dollars in funding. Remember that the funds McCullough bragged about are only for her one group in Atlanta. It doesn’t reflect funding other groups got in other states using the same study.

The Schapiro Group came up with a unique method for determining the number of juvenile prostitutes, and it didn’t have anything to do with hard numbers, like arrests. Instead they looked at photos posted online of women who were seeking sexual partners. They then “guessed” the age of the women in the photos and noted that number, as if it were factual. This is the basis of the so-called study that set off a media sex frenzy, got Craigslist censored, had two-bit politicians fuming at the mouths and no doubt inspired many a sermon on the revival circuit.

To confirm their study, the Group did a back up “study.” Here is how Village Voice describes it:

Before conducting its full study, the Schapiro Group tested the accuracy of its method in a sample of 100 observers. At one point, the 100 observers are described as a "random sample." Elsewhere, they are described as "balanced by race and gender."

These 100 adults were shown pictures of teenagers and young adults whose ages were known, and were asked to guess whether they were younger than 18.

"The study showed that any given 'young' looking girl who is selling sex has a 38 percent likelihood of being under age 18," reads a crucial passage in the explanation of methodology. "Put another way, for every 100 'young' looking girls selling sex, 38 are under 18 years of age. We would compute this by assigning a value of .38 to each of the 100 'young' girls we encounter, then summing the values together to achieve a reliable count."

This is dense gibberish posing as statistical analysis.

When the team went on to conduct its full statewide study, it simply treated this 38 percent success rate as a constant. Six new observers were then turned loose to count "young-looking" sex ads on online classifieds sites like Craigslist and Backpage.

That total count was then multiplied by .38 to come up with a guesstimate of how many children were being trafficked.

None of the “investigators” that Schapiro Group used were experts in research. None had ever studied the issue of prostitution in general, or juvenile prostitution in particular. And no one bothered to verify if the guesses corresponded with reality, or if the photos they viewed were either current, or actually the woman running the ad. Of course no prostitute would try to use an old photo in order to attract customers. And you would never get one who would run a completely unrelated photograph in order to solicit business.

The methodology used actually indicates that there were no real children involved in these ads. That the hired guns for the Group had to "guess" if the person was above or below the magic line of 18 years of age indicates that very few, perhaps none. of the advertising women were clearly below the age of 18. You might have a 16-year-old who passes as 19, or vice versa, but it is much less likely that you would have an 11-year-old who looks 19. The methodology used indicates that all of the participants appeared to be over 18 years of ago, who proves that none of them appeared to be under the age of 18.

Then Schapiro Group would come back later and run the same bogus study a second time proving that the number of child prostitutes had escalated. Thus the crisis was proven, funding flowed and greedy PIGs increased their take to solve a crisis that no one can show actually exists. And no one connected to the study can verify how the photos were found, how they knew the ages of the test samples, or whether any of the photos of “prostitutes” actually represented the women advertising services.

McCullough defends the study saying “it is the same scientific methodology that science has been using for a long time to measure endangered species.” Calling something “science” twice, just two words apart, doesn’t actually make it science. And, if the same sort of bogus methodology is used by other PIGs for their causes, it doesn’t prove the methodology is scientific, or correct, just that it is politically expedient.

Actual arrest statistics do not exactly bolster the fear campaign that the PIGs need to rip off the taxpayer. According to the FBI about 75% of all jurisdictions report their arrests. The number of arrests per 100,000 juveniles—defined as between 10 and 17 years of age—was 5. The FBI says that arrests of juveniles for prostitution and “commercialized vice,” in 2007, amounted to 1,500 cases.

Not every juvenile prostitute is arrested, but then some are arrested multiple times. We don't have hard numbers but there is no indication that we are talking about some significant percentage of teens, let along actual children. Ask yourself if you are worried about teenage “forgery” rings or counterfeiters. Perhaps you should be since a teen is twice as likely to be arrested for that as for prostitution. They are four times more likely to be arsonists. No one thinks those crimes “are out of control” among teens yet they are far more likely for teens than prostitution but they don't get millions in funding to solve the crisis. But then it doesn't include something as racy as sex, to attract attention.

The other thing to keep in mind is that most of the arrests are not 12-year-olds in mesh stockings. Most are teens above the age of 16. And most these teens are legally allowed to consent to sex, just not for cash.

How does this compare to adult prostitution? In 2007 there were 76,100 adults arrested for the same offense. Teenaged prostitutes were 1,500. I believe that translates in less than 2% of all prostitutes arrested are under the age of 18 at the time of the arrest. And even then most of them are legally above the age of consent and not actually children.

PIGs use children constantly to stir up emotions. When the Left wanted to create a gun crisis they talked about the number of children killed by guns. They didn’t tell people that “children” included 17-year-old gang members killed in turf wars over drug sales. They wanted the public to think of wide-eyed tykes playing with their puppies who accidental stumble across a gun and kill themselves, along with the poor little puppy as well.

Some years ago I first came across this sort of bogus fear campaign about “child” prostitution when another PIG member claimed that millions of children were regularly being prostituted at truck stops and street corners around the country. I tried to find how this number was generated. The piece I wrote on the matter has been lost, but I will reconstruct what I can remember.

The woman who manufactured the factoid was a feminist ideologue convinced that girls were being terribly exploited. She found a rabid Los Angeles police officer who was equally convinced that it was boys being prostituted by homosexuals. He had a gut hunch that some 100,000 boys were involved in this massive trade that he was intent on exposing. The feminist in question then took the “hunch” of the police officer and concluded that if that were the case of boys being prostituted, then the number of girls in the same boat had to be at least twice as large. So she doubled the number and added it to the original hunch.

But she wasn’t finished. She then claimed that if this new number was the number of child prostitute “we know about” then there were at least ten times as many out that we didn’t know about. That lead to 3 million child prostitutes being used as the figure of the day.

At the time this claim was made there were around 29 million children 10-17 years old in the country. Apparently one out of ten of them was out there prostituting for a living. Absurd!

At about this time there was a national panic about “stranger danger” and child abductions. The papers spoke of 2.5 million missing children per year. They didn’t tell people that the term was so widely defined that any kid who was away from home for a few hours, without the parents knowing his or her location was “missing.” They left out that over 90% of actual “abductions” were custody disputes with one parent taking the child with them against the consent of the other parent. In the end the actual number of stranger abductions was miniscule.

There was also a bogus panic about satanic child-molesting day care centers. Thousands of people were arrested across the country and hundreds of people were prosecuted and convicted using very dubious “interviewing” methods created by PIGs to promote their agenda.

Out of these panics came entire government departments such as the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Hundreds of millions of dollars were redistributed to the PIGs for their use to discover new problems and lobby for new laws. Out of those panics we also got the various sex offender registries and the laws to protect teens, laws that are now putting tens of thousands of teens on the offender registries for normal adolescent sexuality. We passed laws, based almost entirely on manufactured panics, which today are classifying teens, who take naughty pictures of themselves, as child pornographers.

Politics today relies upon manufactured panics. Take a problem, no matter how small, blow it out of proportion. Try to drag “children” into it anyway you can and then scream about protecting the children. Bolster your case with a bogus study, using dubious methods, and the media will beat a path to your door breathlessly telling paranoid parents of the newest threat to their children. Politicians will promise to solve the crisis provided they get more power and taxes are increased. The PIGs line up with their hands out, millions are doled out. In the end the PIGs are at the through happy and full, for the time being. The politicians are more powerful than ever. The parents feel parent, even though their children are no safer than before. Taxpayers have less money in their pockets and everyone is just a little less free than before the panic was created.

The State of America in Ten Minutes

David Boaz is always a good speaker. But this 10 minute presentation is one of his best. In this short talk he outlines the political conflict in America today with Left and Right, united more than divided, waging war on liberty. This is 10 minutes well spent.

The perfect storm: Bernie Baran

Here is the trailer from the film Freeing Bernie Baran along with a short excerpt. I recommend seeing this film if you are able to do so.

Baran was just a teenager when he started working at a day care center in Massachusetts. When a set of very low-class parents, with dubious parental skills themselves, discovered Baran was gay they started making accusations against the boy. It was the era of the day care witchhunts where the media, government agencies, and feminist-oriented therapists, created a hysteria that swept the nation. People became convinced that organized rings of Satanic pedophiles had infilitrated hundreds of day care centers. Police and prosecuters had a field day.

Literally hundreds of innocent people were rounded up across America, thousands of children were psychologically tortured by the child abuse industry and taken from their parents. To this day many of the victims of the hysteria still sit in jail. It was 25 years before Baran finally had justice and was released.

For those with short memories, or who are too young to remember, it was this bogus hysteria that inspired short-sighted politicians—as if they are any other kind—to pass hundreds of new laws to "protect" young people from sex. The result of that hysteria is that today teens are routinely arrested and charged as child molesters for normal adolescent sexuality. A teen, exploring their sexuality, takes a photo of themself standing naked in front of a mirror, discovers they are a child pornographer. Two young people have sex when their parents aren't around only to find they are now guilty of mutual molestation. Personally I'm surprised that some moronic politician hasn't introduced legislation to define masturbation as self-molestation. Worse yet the politically-induce "sex offender" panic, the resulting legislation, means these kids will be legally tormented for the rest of their natural life.

Bernie Baran was the victim of the perfect hysteria. He was gay and accused of child molestation. Combine anti-gay bigotry with a sexual panic of this kind and you know something ugly will happen. It is the kind of campaign that only the most despicable amoral scum would knowingly initiate, but many of the instigators were just terrified parents believing the breathless stories fed them by the media.

When fear inspires "urgent" political action you can bet the farm that the action taken will almost always be the wrong action. Political campaigns that rely on fear, something that Democrats and Republicans are both guilty of, are attempts to stampede the public into supporting precisely the wrong sort of legislation. Be it child abuse, drugs, the war on terror, gay marriage, illegal immigration, global warming or whatever the panic d'jour may be, fear campaigns intentionally shut down the critical reasoning faculties of the human mind. The results are always wrong, always ugly and victims are created.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

HL Mencken.

The Coming Landslide and Mushy Libertarianism

Political analyst Larry Sabato has penned a piece on the upcoming Republican landslide. There is little in it that I disagree with. The Republicans are expected to make major gains in the Senate and the House. They are expected to take the House and possibly the Senate as well.

Sabato says the GOP may pick up 47 seats in the House and are likely to gain 8 Senate seats but possibly as high as 10 seats. When it comes to governorships Sabato says the GOP should gain 8 more seats and that somewhere between 8 and 12 state legislatures will be under Republican control.

This is precisely the sort of landslide I've been predicting ever since Obama used strong-arm tactics and government-funded bribes to ram his health insurance scheme through Congress. A lot of Democrats, who were not fond of the bill, were pushed into voting for it. And many of them will lose their seats as a result.

Sabato does note something that touches on points I've made numerous times: "2010 will generate a substantial pendulum swing from the Democrats to the Republicans. It is not that Republicans are popular—most polls show the party even less liked than the Democrats. Many observers find it amazing that the less-liked party is on the verge of triumphing over the better-liked party."

Sabato thinks this is simply because voters want to reduce the power of those in office. That is true. But the voters don't particularly care for either party. The middle of the road in American politics today is a sort of mushy libertarianism. Voters don't want high taxes, don't want lots of regulation, are tired of the wars and foreign interventionism, don't trust politicians of any party, and aren't particularly interested in imposing "Christian values" on our largely secular society.

This doesn't mean there is a consistent libertarian streak by any means—just witness the ugly anti-immigration hysteria disgustingly pandered to even by some Libertarian Party candidates. This is why I refer to the middle as a mushy libertarianism. It is not consistent and it is not principled but it is there. For the most part the American middle ground wants to leave people alone.

The two extremes in modern politics are busy-body Democrats and busy-body Republicans. The Democrats are dominated by the Nanny Statists and the Republicans dominated by nasty Theocrats. Given those choices I too would like the Democrats more. The Democrats think I'm stupid and need them to care for me. That is pretty disgusting. But what really scares me is that Republicans think I'm sinful and need to be punished. While trying to stamp out stupidity is, well, stupid, trying to force people to be virtuous is downright dangerous.

While I'm not a fan of C.S. Lewis he did describe the danger of Republican-type controls. He said that "tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." A perfect example of this is the hateful Maggie Gallagher and her Mormon-funded antigay campaign. She really does believe she is saving gay people from themselves so she is unrelentingly intrusive. If ever we need a face for the Nanny State, Maggie's fat mug ought to be used.

The voting public is not divided into two camps: Democrats and Republicans. It is divided into three: the latter two plus independents. Of those groups the independents are the largest. And the independents are the mushy libertarians personified. The Democrats tend to not have the moralistic agenda of the intrusive Republicans but the Republicans don't tend to have the central-planning mindset of the Democrats.

On any particular issue the majority of the population tends to lean libertarian. For instance, with taxes, most Republicans and Independents oppose high rates thus the majority leans for less taxation. When it comes to government enforced "Christian" values the Democrats and Independents tend to oppose such big government intrusions while the Republicans, in the clutches of the American Taliban, are hysterical proponents of such moral authoritarianism.

The problem is that the political elites in the parties tend not to give their voters what they want. Witness how the Republicans betrayed free markets and low taxes every time they have controlled the government. Witness also how Obama has not done anything of substance to bring the sort of equal rights in sexual orientation that he promised. Both betray the party base that keeps them in power.

What keeps the party base loyal to the two dominant parties is fear: fear of the other party. The Democratic base fears the Republicans will push their moralistic agenda on everyone—and rightly so. The Republcians were terrified that the Democrats would push for higher taxes, more regulation and more state control—and rightly so. So the voting public swings back and forth, first electing Democrats then getting disgusted with them and electing Republicans. But the Republicans prove to be equally disgusting and voters swing back to the Democrats.

The American public is being tag-teamed by the two major parties. Each jumps into the ring and beats up the public for a bit before being replaced by the other. The Democrats may use a few well-placed left hooks to blacken the eyes of the public and then the Republicans "save" them by using a few right-hooks to break their nose. American partisan politics is now in the position where neither party represents the dominant few on most issues.

Most Americans would bring the troops home, neither party is willing to do that. On civil liberties the anti-freedom Republicans tend to dominate and Democrats are afraid of standing up to them. On economic liberties the anti-freedom Democrats tend to dominate and Republicans, well, Republicans have just learned to love big government and use it to enrich themselves.

So the real story of American politics is that the two giants in the political arena are both in opposition to the vast middle ground of American politics. Neither the Democrats, nor the Republicans are willing to cater to that mushy libertarianism that dominates the views of the public. And sadly, these days the Libertarian Party isn't doing that very well either. But they are an irrelevancy and will remain such.

If either the GOP or the Democrats get the nerve to tell their base to fuck off there is hope for the country. The first party to jettison the extreme statists and embrace this mushy libertarianism is likely to be in power for some time. So far neither has the courage to do that.

Memory Lane and Boy Were They Wrong.

I was reading Wendy McElroy's website which mentioned the continuing controversy in Texas over textbooks. She linked to a history of the controversy and I went to take a look. The originators of this whole textbook movement were a couple of far Right fundamentalists by the name of Mel and Norma Gabler, both deceased now.

Now, if we go back further than I care to admit I went to observe a conference of extremely conservative folks—emphasis on the the extreme please. Among the participants were Mel and Norma. One of their allies was the Rev. Ezra Graley, a fundamentalist minister from West Virginia who led the protests about textbooks in Kanawha county. Graley I knew better than the Gablers. All three, I should say, were John Birch Society types, heavily into far Right politics and theories. Where the Gablers merely protested textbooks some of Graley's allies resorted to violence. My conversations with Graley left me with the impression that while he claimed to have no knowledge of who was behind the incidents that he approved of them.


One of Graley's ministerial allies, Rev. Charles Quigley led public prayers asked God to kill board members. Several schools were firebombed. Someone set 15 sticks of dynamite near a gas meter at the board of education offices, which exploded shortly after a board meeting adjourned. A friend of Graley's, another fundamentalist minister, Rev. Marvin Horan was sentenced to three years in prison on charges related to the bombings. All of this was kicked off by Alice Moore, the wife of yet another fundamentalist minister, who used the Gablers as her resource bank for the protests. As you can see it was incestuous and completely riddled with fundamentalists.

During that trip to Salt Lake City it was Graley who decided that a day trip through some of the canyons would be a good idea. There were four us in the car. Graley, myself and Mel and Norma Gabler. I wish I could remember more of the details of the conversations. It was time when they all let their hair down and weren't so guarded in their comments. And what I vaguely remember was discussion that was supportive of violence and tinged with racism. Yet, like so many fundamentalists I've known, they could be sweet a pie if they thought you could be won over. Like many very bitter individuals they had these saccharin voices that they could use to sooth you. But remember saccharin is fake and so was their pleasantness.

Among the material I was reading on the protest movement was an article from the New York Times about the Gablers. The article quotes a fund-raising letter from the Gablers which said: "Until textbooks are changed, there is no possibility that crime, violence, veneral disease and abortion rates will decrease." That was in 1981.

It is now almost 30 years later and the fundamentalists are no happier with the textbooks today than they were back then. All the same "errors" are being taught to the kids. Yet all the trends in these areas are down, something the Gablers said couldn't happen without getting rid of the sinful textbooks.

In 1981, the year this was said, there were 593.47 violent crimes for every 100,000 people. In 2008, the last year I was able to find stats for the number of violent crimes had dropped to 454.6 per 100,000 people. That is pretty significant. For murder the decline was even more dramatic; from 9.9 per 100,000 in 1981 to 5.3 per 100,000 in 2008. And the textbooks are still evil.

I looked at VD rates and found that they were already declining when the Gablers were claiming that couldn't happen. Here is a chart from the CDC showing gonorrhea rates from 1970 to 1993. The rate for that disease had peaked in 1974 and was in a slow decline which escalated not long after the Gablers were claiming that couldn't happen, unless the textbooks were changed. As for syphilis, the height of infections in the US were during the youth of the Gablers, in the 1940s, when rates had reached almost 600,000 cases. By 1981, with a much larger population, the rate was around 100,000 per year. Now if the textbooks in 1941 were acceptable to the Gablers this would indicates that syphilis rates dropped as the textbooks got more ungodly.

Now lets look at abortion rates in the United States. Obviously there was a sharp rise in the number abortions once women were allowed the choice and no longer regulated by the state to prevent it. Once again the Gablers, however, predicted that a decline in rates couldn't take place, even while the decline had already started. If you look at the following chart you will see abortion rates had already begun a slow deline when the Gablers made their statement.

What this reminds me of is the dire doomsday predictions of another hysterical extremists, Paul Ehrlich of "population bomb" fame. Erhlich has a history of making the same sort of dire predictions as the Gablers and being as spectacularly wrong as the Gablers as well. I remember reading a follow-up book he wrote where he damned Vietnam to famine just at the time that food production was rapidly expanding and Vietnam became a food exporter. Unlike the Gablers, who tended to make the same false claims over and over, Erhlich had a tendency to remove the statement from later books and simply make similarly wrong claims about new areas instead.

Here is the reality. There are scary things in the world and always have been. But, for the most part, things have gotten better not worse. Crime rates are down, not up. The amount of food per person in the world has expanded, not declined. Most trends are positive.

Political types, like the Gablers and Ehrlich, use fear to manipulate the public. Any campaign that relies on dire consequences is most likely exaggerated or entirely false.

The other day I was walking through the parking lot to a local store when I heard a hysterical mother screaming at a child who had gotten out of the car that was parked, before the mother had gotten out. She was shreiking that the child must never leave the car first and "wander" around as bad things could happen to the child. The entire tirade was clearly premised on the "stranger danger" scenario that has fueled parental hysteria for some time now.

At an airport, not that long ago, a mother was standing in the waiting area with a small girl. The girl walked a few feet to look out a window. The mother lost eye contact momentarily and then panicked screaming out the child's name. The girl was grabbed by the arm and yelled out loudly and hysterically that bad people could grab her and that she must never walk a few feet away from her mother.

But, once again, these numbers have been steadily improving—and they were NEVER that high to begin with. When I was a kid we wandered all around the neighborhood without any parental monitoring. We didn't have cell phones that parents could call to "check up" on us. Now parents panic if the kids play in the front yard. We hiked through the fields and woods surrounding the town, and this was a suburb of a major city. Kidnappings and abductions today are at the same levels they were when I was a kid, but the parental hysteria level is higher.

I don't want to say that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That is quite true. What we have to fear is the solutions politicians propose to solve our imaginary fears. Those really scare me because they almost always mean a loss of freedom, greater taxation, and unintended consequences that are more negative than the "problems" they are meant to solve.

How politics follows social change, and doesn't lead it.

Politicians frequently have the courage to ban a dying practice, but only when it is on its deathbed. Of course, for centuries later they will continue to claim that it was legislative fiat that killed the practice and proof that their interventions are thus proper and necessary.

Child Labor

Child labor was not created by the capitalists as a means to exploit the working classes, contrary to the deluded history of Marxists. Child labor was widespread and rampant in the millenniums prior to the first capitalist-owned factory. The work was different, but the expectation that children would work, was common. Even today in peasant farming communities children are put to work in the fields the moment they can do anything useful.

The reason for child labor was simple: the productivity of any single laborer was relatively low, making it difficult for families to survive without every member of the family laboring for the food they needed. In pre-industrial Europe standards of living were extremely low, poverty rampant and starvation not uncommon.

The introduction of new modes of production offered families a means of actually starting to make progress in their death race with poverty. The new machinery made each worker more productive and more valuable. The children who flocked to the factories, along with their mothers and fathers, didn’t leave behind some idyllic childhood, roaming green valleys and picking flowers. They left behind hunger and death.

These “free labor” child workers were watched after by their parents and for the most part their lives improved dramatically. A second class of child laborers also existed, those under the care of various government agencies, usually at the local, or parish, level. It was these parish children who were the worst off, and the worst conditions described in relatively accurate, though exaggerated, tracts of the day were descriptions of the parish children—that is those children whose labor was being exploited by the local government. With bureaucrats, not parents, watching out for them, these children did have brutish and nasty lives.

As capital was invested in new production techniques the value of individual workers rose substantially. During this period there were steady and strong improvements in the standard of living of all working people. As wages rose, the ability of parents to care for their families, through their own wages alone, became more prevalent and the number of children working alongside parents declined. Increased productivity pushed up wages and the higher wages made child labor unnecessary. By the time the politicians got around to banning child labor the practice was no longer widely practiced. Had it been, it is unlikely the political classes would have banned it.

One unfortunate result of the labor laws that were passed, and which still exist today, is that young people find it difficult to secure employment. Part-time work is possible under certain conditions, but teens, who leave school for one reason or another, find it difficult to find full-time employment. Young people who are forced to leave violent and abusive homes find themselves on the streets with few legal options open to them. One result is that many teens turn to less than legal methods to earn a living—sometimes drug dealing and sometimes prostitution, as two examples.

In the zeal to abolish a practice that had largely died out already, legislation created legal straightjackets for young workers. The restrictions are so onerous that many young people needing full-time employment are forced into illegal occupations where “working conditions” are far more dangerous than from what the legislation was meant to save them.

Apartheid

Consider the matter of apartheid in South Africa. By the time apartheid was officially repealed it had already been dead.

Apartheid was itself a web of regulations and laws restricting voluntary markets in order to force a result that the central planners didn’t deem possible without coercion. That result was not just segregation of whites from blacks, but the reservation of particular occupations to white workers, or more accurately to Afrikaner workers. Apartheid was seen by its architects as a temporary system of racial preferences necessary to end the problem of “poor whiteism.” Of course, with the normal nature of bureaucratic expansionism it evolved into a system that was much more than this, and much worse.

Throughout the history of apartheid, legislation was used to force results into the marketplace. Companies that hired black workers were punished. This didn’t end them from hiring black workers, but it made it much more difficult. The trade unions in South Africa, including those backed by the Communist Party, were explicitly racist. And during the ill-fated Rand Rebellion of 1922 these workers marched through the streets of Johannesburg carrying signs saying: “Workers of the World Unite and Keep South Africa White.” Note: If you look carefully in the lower left of the photo you can see this sign being carried by the revolutionary unionists during the rebellion.

Prior to the election of the first clearly “apartheid” Nationalist government in 1948, earlier attempts at government-mandated racism were being pushed by the Communist dominated trade unions. The Mines and Work Act created job reservations for whites in 1923. But these laws were soon replaced with other pieces of legislation doing the same thing. Following the Rand Rebellion, a coalition government of the communist-dominated Labour Party and the white, racialist Nationalist Party came to power.

The enemy of this system was a class of men despised by the unionists and the nationalists alike: entrepreneurs and businessmen. The business classes in South Africa were primarily made of two minorities: individuals of English descent and Jews. And the Nationalist Party despised both. Virtually all the architects of apartheid were open haters of capitalism and free markets and immediately set about to politicize markets. The purpose was simple: excluding rural blacks from moving to the cities kept wages higher in the cities, benefiting trade unionists, and it suppressed wages for farm workers, benefiting Afrikaner farmers who were the backbone of the National Party. Together these two groups politicized the marketplace in order to transfer wealth from two despised classes—businessmen and blacks—to their supporters, farmers and unionists.

By the time I first visited South Africa, well before the release of Mandela and the end of apartheid, economic reality has already eroded the laws to a large extent. The Group Areas Act, which restricted where the races could live, had collapsed and “grey” areas were thriving. Blacks were flocking to the city, begging employers to “exploit” them at double the wages they would received in the homelands—that is if they were lucky enough to find employment there. With many Afrikaners having escaped the government-created jobs and becoming businessmen themselves, the pressure was on to loosen the laws that restricted labor supplies.

When Nelson Mandela walked out of prison the laws creating apartheid were still on the books, but the actual practice of apartheid had died long before. When these laws were repealed officially they had already been repealed unofficially throughout the country, by the natural forces of marketplace transactions. (Merle Lipton’s book Capitalism and Apartheid: 1910-1986 is a must read for this history.)

Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Act

In light of the recent debate about the Civil Rights Act, and whether or not it was necessary to ban private discrimination, this sort of history has some relevance. Based on what I’ve said it could be assumed that the Civil Rights Act didn’t create the change, as the modern Left claims, but was a result of a change that already taken place. Is that true?

Ilya Somin, points out the evidence that Americans had already changed their views on race by the time the Civil Rights Act was passed. He writes:

The Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964 because “the thinking of the white portion of the country” had already changed over the previous 20–30 years. As Howard Schuman and his coauthors document in their comprehensive book Racial Attitudes in America, there was an enormous liberalization in white opinion on race from the 1940s to the 1960s. By 1963, one year before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, 85% of whites polled in a National Opinion Research Center survey endorsed the view that “Negroes should have as good a chance to get any kind of job” and rejected the position that “white people should have the first chance at any kind of job” (endorsed by only 15%). This contrasts with 55% who said that “white people should have the first chance” on the same question in 1942 and 51% who said so in 1944.

Similarly, 73% whites questioned in a 1963 NORC poll embraced the view that “Negroes should have the right to use the same parks, restaurants, and hotels, as white people.” The same 1963 study also showed that 79% of whites rejected the idea that transportation in streetcars and buses should be segregated, compared to 54% who had endorsed it in 1942 (both the 1942 and 1963 questions used the same wording). The 1963 figures probably overstate the actual degree of white support for integration and equal opportunity. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that white opinion had moved strongly in an integrationist direction relative to previous years, and that discrimination against blacks in employment and public accommodations was opposed by a majority of white voters by 1964.

Schuman and his coauthors show that white racial attitudes continued to move in a more liberal direction after 1964. But the enactment of the Civil Rights Act does not seem to have accelerated the pace of change.

None of this means that the Civil Rights Act was insignificant. Although national white opinion was generally favorable to integration by 1964, southern whites were still much more hostile. Moreover, southern businesses that wanted to employ black workers on an equal basis with whites and/or serve black customers in an integrated setting were often prevented from doing so by state law and government and private violence. On these fronts, the Act really did make a major positive difference. The South probably would not have desegregated anywhere near as fast without it.

Somin is correct that violence against businesses that integrated was a possibility but it should also be noted that such violence indicates a failure of the state to fulfill its primary function: the protection of the life, liberty and property of the citizens. Discrimination existed because government in the South actively intervened in the marketplace to secure results that the politicians felt would not be possible without that intervention: in this case segregation. And for integration to fail to evolve it was necessary for government to turn a blind eye when it came to protecting the rights of businesses to act in a non-discriminatory way. For instance, Southern Streetcar companies actively fought racial segregation of their customers. Like the businessmen in South Africa, these companies preferred to act in a manner far less discriminatory than the politicians wanted.

To secure segregation Southern politicians actively politicized the labor market, without that intervention they would have found their segregationist cause severely hampered.

On unfortunate result of this debate is that everyone is concentrating on the aspect of the Civil Rights Act that criminalized private discrimination, as if that was the main thrust of the law. In reality the Civil Rights Act, for the most part, was a massive roll-back in governmental power. Law professor Richard Epstein wrote:

The primary feature of the Civil Rights Act was the removal of the formal barriers to entry that had been erected by the Jim Crow legislation. At this point the historical evidence tells a libertarian story, not a government intervention story. …The successes of the civil rights movement derived from the shrinkage, not the expansion of total government power, both state and federal.

The Civil Rights Act abolished the web of laws which Southern racists had erected in order to force people to act as if they were racists, whether or not they were.

Marriage Equality

We can again turn to one active civil rights struggle in America today—that of marriage equality for gay couples. A handful of states have ended the discrimination that existed against gay couples. But throughout the country private businesses have granted equal benefits to gay employees and their spouses—whether or not the law requires such things. The roadblock to marriage equality is NOT the private sector but the governmental sector.

Not only do laws exist which explicitly forbid the recognition of same-sex marriages but the legal system often interferes with private decisions to recognize such relationships, at least on equal terms. No private policy can remove the differential tax rates at which gay couples are taxed, nor can such policies remove the discrimination inherent in the social security system, US immigration laws, or other similar areas.

These policies will change, but they will change after the public has changed. As we already saw public opinion has shifted dramatically on this issue, and I suspect that shift will continue as the opponents to equality tend to be old and the old die out. In addition opponents tend to be strong Christians and religion, Christianity in particular, is also on the decline in the United States. This means that many of the young aren’t joining sects that would encourage them to be prejudiced.

So, reform is possible. But history seems to show that political reform rarely tips the social scales. Politicians rarely lead, they look for the trends and then try to jump in front of them, only at the last minute, and then claim credit for shifts that had already taken place. In reality, they do very little to change society, and in each of these areas the political classes actively worked to prevent the change that had taken place without them.

Does Obamacare push Abstinence?

One of the problems of passing legislation that no one has read is that no one is sure what it contains until it is too late. Now it appears that the professional abstinence pushers, that special interest group that sucks up taxpayer money to lie to schoolkids about sex, believe that clauses in it will refund their efforts. The Washington Post reports that "the rescue plan for the nation's health-care system will also save their programs..." [Please note that referring to the bill as a "rescue" plan is not objective reporting but media bias. It is the same as if the Post had said "disastrous plan." Journalists are supposed to report the facts and whether this is a rescue or disaster depends on your politics—but then the political bias of the Post has never been questioned.]

The Obama bill "includes $50 million for programs that states could use to try to reduce pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease among adolescents by teaching them to delayy when they start having sex. " Amazing that the government is involved in teaching people not to have sex.

Valarie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Assocation says they are "otpimtistic" about the Obama bill providing them funds. By the way, that there is now such an association shows just how quickly government funding creates special interest groups of parasites who then lobby to keep the program forever. This is why "temporary" government programs become permanent.

Hilariously only James Wagnoner of Advocates for Youth said: "This is a last-ditch attempt by conservatives to resuscitate a program that has been proven to be ineffective." First, this bill was proposed by conservatives but by statist progressives. Conservatives didn't support the bill, not that there aren't plenty of awful bills they would support. If the funding is provided then blame Obama for that one, not conservatives.

And since when did effectiveness become important in analysing government policy? Our foreign policy is ineffective and continues. The war on drugs is not just ineffective but also counter-productive. Ethanol subsidies do more harm than good, so do agricultural subsidies. If you made a line by line list of every project that government funded, put them all on a wall, and then randomly threw a dart at it, you would hit an ineffective program most of the time.

In essence the best of government is ineffective and at it's worst it is lethal and destructive. Calling a government program ineffective is a compliment since accuracy would probably be much harsher. Neither the Left, nor the Right, give a damn about effectiveness. Playing politics is not about solving problems but capturing resources and both sides do that very well to the detriment of the people.

The high price of fear-based politics.

Francisco Lotero and Miriam Coletti were true believers in the various doomsday scenarios that some attach to the "threat" of global warming. The couple wrote their fears out in a letter, actually in a suicide pact. The couple shot themselves to death. Unfortanately these two fear-driving individuals were also parents. Their two-year-old son, Francisco, died after being shot in the back. Their daughter was shot as well, but the bullet missed any vital organs. Neighbors investigated the situation three days after the shooting and discovered the girl, still alive. She is in hospital and expected to recover. Police say the couple left a note explain their fear of global warming.

" Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis." Al Gore.

The climate blunders continue

The Times of London reports another major screw up by the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change. And they report that a former chair of the IPCC, Robert Watson, "has warned the United Nations' climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility."

The IPCC claimed that global warming was likely to reduce crop yields in north Africa in half by 2020. The IPCC loves apocalyptic claims like this. This was so popular that IPCC chair, Rajendra Pachauri (who has no credentials in climate science at all), and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, have publicly quoted this section of the IPCC report. In addition the IPCC thought the claim was so important that they included it in the IPCC's Synthesis Report, "the IPCC's most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers." Among the lead authors of this report os Pachauri himself.

Pachauri wrote: "By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%. Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised.” Pachauri has made this claim publicly in highly reported meetings. The problm is that there is NO verified, scientific evidence for the claim. Watson says that the report shows "no data supporting" the claim.

According to the Times this claim lists as its source a policy paper written by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The Institute is an environmentalist think tank, not a scientific body and the paper never underwent peer-review. The IPCC had repeatedly claimed that its apocalyptic vision of global warming is based on the science, and the science alone. Yet we have seen a growing body of evidence that the IPCC report is hobbled together using advocacy literature from left-wing, non-scientific sources.

In recent days the IPCC was asked by the ministers of the Dutch government to correct other errors from the report regarding the Netherlands. According to the IPCC report Holland is threatened by global warming because more than half the country is below sea level. While the Dutch are known for reclaiming land from the sea, they haven't been that industrious. The IPCC's report doubled the number.

Apparently an IPCC chart on energy production was also incorrect. In this case they reported on the potential of wave energy. The IPCC claimed the source was a company called Wavegen, note that the source is company, not peer-reviewed literature. But what the IPCC showed in their chart differs significantly from the chart that Wavegen published and Wavegen says they haven't changed the chart they published. But Wavegen also says they aren't the source for the chart as they merely reprinted it. Apparently the IPCC didn't verify the numbers, cited a secondary source for them, and wasn't interested into whether the claims were based on peer-reviewed information or not.

The Telegraph reports numerous other uses of non-peer reviewed literature in order to bolster the IPCC's political agenda including "ten dissertations" by students seeking their degrees. One such "unpublished dissertation was used to support the claim that sea-level rise could impact on living in the Nile delta and other African coastal areas, although the main focus of the thesis, by a student at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, appears to have been the impact of computer software on environmental development."

As for the false claims about the Himalayan glaciers the Yale Climate Media Forum has released a fairly in-depth article outlining precisely how the IPCC screwed up. This report appears to have pieced together all the evidence into a coherent whole. The YCMF says that the controversy was created by the IPCC alone and has "prompted intense, and warranted criticism of the IPCC review process." They do note that the "likely" source for the IPCC's "copied and pasted" claim was "an Indian environmental magazine." Think about that. The IPCC "copied and pasted" information from a magazine, no peer-review included, and reported the claims under the mantle of "peer-reviewed science."

And while Pachauri had been droning on about "one" mistake the reality is the paragraph on glaciers along contained three major errors. The YCMF lists them:

1. The first sentence predicts disappearance (a 100 percent loss) by 2035. The next sentence predicts an 80 percent loss. Nonetheless, the first prediction is made using more confident language. 2. The second sentence begins with “Its,” ungrammatical if it is referring to “glaciers” and unclear otherwise. It’s as if the two sentences were simply copied and pasted from different sources. 3. The approximate area of the Himalayan glaciers is 33,000 km2, so the 500,000 km2 starting figure in the second sentence is off by a factor of 15, and the decreased area predicted in 2035 - 100,000 km2 - is three times greater than the current Himalayan glacier area.

YCMF notes that one reviewer, David Saltz, caught and reported the first two errors but that the IPCC went ahead and published the paragraph unchanged. The third error couldn't have come from the World Wildlife Fund report that was cited originally because those numbers aren't found there. Instead they come from a paper by V.M Kotlyakov, as this blog reported two months ago. Kotlyakov wrote about all "extrapolar glaciers" not just the Himalayan glaciers and, as we reported, he listed the year 2350, not 2035. But when an environmental publication reported on these reports it made errors. And it appears the IPCC merely copied the claims as this publication reported them, errors and all. In other words, the IPCC didn't even bother to look at the science, they merely copied text from environmental publications and reported information as factual, without checking sources, or verifying data.

Climate Science Watch reported on how the IPCC "relied on an err0r-riddle online article when it it discussed the likely state of Himilayan glaiciers in 2035. It did so dispite questions raised by some reviewers." YCMF also shows that the IPCC had a chart on glacial melting which was "directly copied" from the environmental magazine in question. What is a dead give away is that the IPCC copied the chart which had its own internal errors—that is the data in the chart had a mathematical error.

The environmental magazine claimed that Pindari Glacier retreated 2,840 meters between 1845 and 1966. The magazine then said this meant the glacier was retreating by 135 meters per year! Do the math yourself, you will see that it is wrong. Had Pindari retreated 135 meters per year, from 1845 to 1966 (121 years) then it would have retreated 16,359 meters, not 2,840. The magazine had divided by 21 years not 121 years and thus got the wrong result. The IPCC, that paragon of science and peer-review, merely copied its material from this advocacy publication and that meant copying the bad math as well. So, in haste to report disaster, two major numerical errors were made. Someone transposed the year 2350 to 2035 and someone divided 2,840 by 21, instead of 121. And no one bothered to check original sources or verify the math.

Consider the main theory I hold regarding the IPCC and their reports. I do not contend that they intentionally distort or lie about information. I contend that they act precisely as we would expect someone to act who is absolutely convinced they have the right suspect apprehended. I see this similar to how police and prosecutors act when they arrest someone and are absolutely convinced of that person's guilt. If they find contradictory evidence they tend to ignore it. Anything that seems to point a finger at the suspect is emphasized. If they don't ignore exculpatory evidence they will go to great lengths to debunk it but make little effort to verify evidence that points a guilty finger.

Periodically they come across evidence that seems to prove the innocence of the suspect, but they are able to dismiss it, even if they can't debunk it. They convince themselves that "all the other evidence" proves their case. So this one piece that seems to contradict their claims can't be right. They may not know why it is wrong but they know it must be wrong. So they sweep it under the rug, not because they are trying to convict an "innocent" man, but because they are convinced they are convicting a "guilty" man. It is highly unethical either way, but these people are normally not attempting to incarcerate the innocent but tend to honestly believe they are seeking justice.

The scientific process is supposed to reduce the likelihood of this same sort of distortion. But the legal process has safeguards as well, to prevent this from happening, yet it happens all the time. The reason for that is that the process relies upon the investigators voluntarily following the rules. But often investigators see the rules as an obstacle to achieving the "right" goal. So they will selectively ignore, or bend the rules. This is why evidence, which proves a man's innocence, is often hidden from defense lawyers, even though the rules say that shouldn't happen.

We understand the courtroom is supposed to help prevent this by having open debate, with the defense and prosecutors appearing before a supposedly neutral judge and jury. The adversarial system supposedly helps justice come to the forefront. And it usually does, provided everyone plays by the rules. But with the IPCC there is no adversarial system. There are only prosecutors writing the final reports and the judges involved already know the guilty of the suspect before the evidence is heard.

There is an adversarial system in that papers may be published in any one of many journals. But the Climategate emails shows how the clique of warming scientists try to distort that process to guarantee only one side is heard. Even the papers that get published are easily ignored by the IPCC as the prosecutors then seek out papers (and apparently a large amount of non-scientific claims as well) that bolster their own theory. After selecting which evidence is submitted and which is ignored it is passed up a bureaucratic ladder where each new judge or prosecutor has the guilty verdict in their pocket and is just writing up the judgment, not checking the facts and making sure the rules have been followed.

This tendency to have the guilty verdict already written out is the reason that the errors that have been exposed all lean in one direction. All the major errors have predicted dire consequences if the IPCC's political agenda is ignored. So far none of the errors have underestimated catastrophe, only exaggerated it. That is because prosecutors err in their assumptions of guilt, not innocence. And the IPCC is a "scientific" body the same way the district attorney's office is a judicial one. They may be part of the process but they are advocacy bodies meant to achieve a specific goal. The district attorney is out to secure convictions, leaving the verdict up to the court. But the IPCC is acting both as prosecutor and court, and that makes it even more suspect.