Radioactive Communist Zombies

Four Police Officers Murdered in Washington State

News this morning that four police officers, three male, one female, were ambush murdered today in a coffee shop in Lakewood, WA (near Tacoma).  The officers seem to have been targeted because employees and other customers of the shop were not harmed.  The Seattle Times reports:

The officers were in uniform, including bulletproof vests, and were working on their laptop computers as they prepared to start their day shifts, [Pierce County Sheriff's spokesman Ed] Troyer said. It is unclear whether they drew their guns and fired their weapons, he said.

"This was a targeted, selective ambush," Troyer said.

Of course our hearts go out to the community and the families of the police officers.  The question is, what motivates someone to do such a thing.  Obviously an animosity toward police.  This murder follows on the heels of the ambush murder of a Seattle police office on Halloween.  That killer has been caught so there is, apparently, no connection.

Most reactions have been ones of shock and dismay.  One, from former Seattle Chief of Police Norm Stamper is embarrassingly ham fisted to explain the motivation of such an act:

I understand generalized animosity towards cops. It's triggered, often as not, by a specific grievance, an instance or pattern of real or perceived police misconduct -- fueled in some cases by recognition of historic institutional abuse.

Yes, there are some bad cops who do bad things.  But this is not "historical institutional abuse."  Stamper treads very close to the line of excusing this ambush.

Let's hope the police find the perpetrator of this act and soon before he acts again.  And let's hope people like Norm Stamper are less concerned with this person's rational for their acts than figuring out how best to get them off the street and punish them.  Washington State does have the death penalty.  I can't think of a more appropriate use for it.

UPDATE: The Seattle Times is now reporting that the police's suspect was granted clemency by then-governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee:

Maurice Clemmons, the 37-year-old Tacoma man being sought for questioning in the killing this morning of four Lakewood police officers, has a long criminal record punctuated by violence, erratic behavior and concerns about his mental health.

Nine years ago, then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee granted clemency to Clemmons, commuting his lengthy prison sentence over the protests of prosecutors.

If this Clemmons is the perpetrator, Huckabee's going to have some explaining to do.

Also, wait for the calls for stronger gun control laws, even though as a felon, Clemmons is already banned from touching a gun.

Preview of Obamacare

Want to see what life will be like once the Democrats succeed in socializing our health care?  Simple, just look to Britain and the National Health Service (NHS).  The socialized medicine horror story de jour is about the quality of care--or lack thereof--at British hospitals.  The UK Telegraph reports:

Bolton, Greater Manchester and Basildon NHS trusts have elite “foundation status”. However, The Sunday Telegraph has learned that statistics to be published this week will show a higher percentage of patients died while in their care in 2008-09 than in any other trusts in the country.

Well, somebody has to be worst, right?  But its the level of care in British hospitals that abhors:

Investigations by this paper have found:

- Eight foundation hospitals are failing so badly that they have breached the terms of their licence to operate and are being placed under close supervision by the NHS watchdog, Monitor.

- The leading children’s hospital Alder Hey has been issued with a “warning notice” for breaching basic infection standards and putting vulnerable young patients at risk of killer infections – just two weeks after the trust declared itself “the best in the country”.

- Three ambulance services have also been issued with the same notices after failing to properly decontaminate equipment, or provide clean services for the most high-risk patients.

- Bosses of foundation trusts with high death rates have awarded themselves bumper pay rises. Chief executives at the eight foundation trusts with the highest death rates in 2007-08 had average salary rises of 15 per cent when their institutions took on the coveted status.

Last week Basildon was condemned by inspectors who found “blood-spattered” walls and filthy conditions.

And the NHS was started shortly after World War II so it's had time to work out its problems.

I'm not quiet sure what makes the left think the U.S. can do socialized medicine better than the rest of the world.  Socialized medicine has never been tried on the scale of the United States (both population and geography) before, except maybe in Soviet Russia.

But we can look at the NHS for a preview of what's to come in the U.S.: poor care, bad hospitals, filthy conditions. 

Burn the Bills

Charles Krauthammer's column today is about the health care bills in Congress.  And he basically says "kill the bills":

The United States has the best health care in the world — but because of its inefficiencies, also the most expensive. The fundamental problem with the 2,074-page Senate health-care bill (as with its 2,014-page House counterpart) is that it wildly compounds the complexity by adding hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees, and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.

Krauthammer lists what's wrong with the bills:

You’ll find mandates with financial penalties — the amounts picked out of a hat.

You’ll find insurance companies (who live and die by their actuarial skills) told exactly what weight to give risk factors, such as age. Currently, insurance premiums for 20-somethings are about one-sixth the premiums for 60-somethings. The House bill dictates the young shall now pay at minimum one-half; the Senate bill, one-third — numbers picked out of a hat.
   
You’ll find sliding scales for health-insurance subsidies — percentages picked out of a hat — that will radically raise marginal income tax rates for middle-class recipients, among other crazy unintended consequences.

And yet the bills do nothing about tort reform.  In fact the house version even bans states from enacting any form of tort reform.  Why, because the Democrat party is owned by the trial lawyers.

So better to burn the bills than pass them:

Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method — a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.

The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one — tort reform, interstate purchasing. and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 — and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.

Unfortunately, that's probably not going to happen.

Garbage In: Garbage Out

(Hat Tip Instapundit)

Frank J. Tipler wraps up Climategate very neatly:

The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable.

In other words, the (simplified) computer models don't even have good data to start with, so how can what they predict be at all accurate.  Garbage in; garbage out. 

Tipler calls the actions of the "scientists" treasonous:

It is an act of treason against science. It is also an act of treason against humanity, since it has been used to justify an attempt to destroy the world economy.

Which is I think letting the so-called scientists off the hook.

President Obama, despite the revelations of Climategate is planning to go to Copenhagen and say the U.S. will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  The left and their enablers in the mainstream media are acting as if Climategate didn't happen.  But remember Climategate when you lose your job due to the devastation lowering Greenhouse Gases will wreak upon the economy.

Simplified Models

I've often questions do we really want to devastate our economy, throw who-knows-how-many people into poverty, all on the basis of models that, for example, did not predict the cooling we've since since the beginning of the century.

Now (Hat Tip Planet Gore) Der Spiegel has a piece about how those models work:

How do all these equations work together? The same way one would expect from physics class: Temperature goes up when warm air moves around or when rising pressure compresses air. Such changes in temperature in turn affect atmospheric pressure which then drives air masses. The Earth's rotation plays a role as well. This interplay between temperature, pressure and air circulation is reflected in the equations that drive climate prediction models.

But all these processes must be dramatically simplified for even supercomputers to produce results in a reasonable amount of time. "You have to limit yourself to the processes you think are most important," says Marco Giorgetta of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.

"Dramatically simplified"?  And in that simplification does any of the scientists' pre-conceived notions come into play (like "hide the decline").

So how can we know the model are accurate?  Wait 90 years to see if their predictions for 2100 pan out?  And in the meantime spend trillions of dollars mitigating what the model predict even though they missed the recent decline in temperatures?

I'm very skeptical of computer models as a basis for public policy.  Especially "dramatically simplified" ones.  

How to Grow the Economy: Cut Taxes and Spending

(Hat tip Washington Policy Blog)

With unemployment at 10.2%, the third quarter economy growth being revalued down, and multiple states looking to make up budget shortfalls due to decreased revenue, what is the best way to stimulate the economy and increase tax revenue?

Well, according to two Harvard economists (Harvard, that bastion of right-wing thought), the answer is: cut taxes and spending.  In their paper (pdf file) from October of this year, Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna argue:

Fiscal stimuli based upon tax cuts are more likely to increase growth than those based upon spending increases. As for fiscal adjustments those based upon spending cuts and no tax increases are more likely to reduce deficits and debt over GDP ratios than those based upon tax increases. In addition, adjustments on the spending side rather than on the tax side are less likely to create recessions.

In other words, cutting taxes and spending will cause the economy to grow and cutting spending and not increasing taxes is more likely to shrink deficits.  And cutting spending is less likely to cause recessions than increased taxes.

Which is sort of what a lot of right wingers (like me) have been sayingall along.  In fact, this was the basis of Reaganomics.  Compare and contrast to Obamanomics which spends until deficits are in the trillion dollar range and threatens tax increases.  Now even Harvard is saying Obama is wrong.

Unfortunately, we're stuck with him for three more years.

Ingrates

As Thanksgiving approaches, one thing I'm thankful for is men and women who put their lives and safety on the line to keep America safe.  But when I read something such as what Fox News reported, I wonder they they do:

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.

The three, all members of the Navy's elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called an admiral's mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial.

Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named "Objective Amber," told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.

Oh, the poor thing has a bloody lip.

So now three brave men are facing court martial.  How can expect people to put their lives and safety on the line if this is the way we treat them?  I'm afraid we may not be able to, much longer.

The military should be thankful they have such men.  But apparently they aren't.

Mission to an Asteroid

Apparently some, including some in NASA, are thinking about sending humans to an asteroid.  That would be the coolest idea.  MSNBC reports [links original]:

A plan to send a crew of astronauts to an asteroid is gaining momentum, both within NASA and industry circles.

Not only would the deep space sojourn shake out hardware, it would also build confidence in long-duration stints at the moon and Mars. At the same time, the trek would sharpen skills to deal with a future space rock found on a collision course with Earth.

The plan would be to go to a near-Earth object, not all the way to the Asteroid Belt (beyond Mars).  But this could be a dry-run for a longer mission to Mars.

There would be no landing on the asteroid. Rather, they would park in close proximity, then jet backpack onto the object. Once there, science gear would be deployed as samples of the space rock are gathered — on the order of a couple hundred pounds (100 kilograms).

"We assume staying at the asteroid for five days. They could stay a week or two. But staying for a month gets hard," Hopkins explained. While on duty, astronauts would engage in gathering data useful to understand the internal makeup of the asteroid. That, in turn, is solidly helpful, he added, in dealing with harmful space rocks on a worrisome trajectory dangerous to Earth.

Such as figuring out how to divert one on a collision course with Earth.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration hasn't made space a priority.  Humans haven't left low Earth Orbit since the end of the Apollo missions.  This mission could be a stepping stone to longer missions to Mars or the Moon.  And it would cost less than a couple hundred stimulus jobs, most likely.

UN Treaty to Ban Blasphemy?

If some Islamic nations get their way, the UN may put forth a treaty to ban blasphemy.  The AP reports:

Islamic nations are mounting a campaign for an international treaty to protect religious symbols and beliefs from mockery - essentially a ban on blasphemy that would put them on a collision course with free speech laws in the West.

I should say so.

If ratified in countries that enshrine freedom of expression as a fundamental right, such a treaty would require them to limit free speech if it risks seriously offending religious believers.

One wonders if Jewish or Christian religious beliefs would be as rigorously defended as Islamic beliefs.  Since Jews and Christians don't riot when offended, somehow I doubt it.

And what would be the punishment for violating the treaty? 

The U.S. is quietly fighting this proposed treaty, according to the AP.  I would hope so.

Climatologists are Baffled: Real World isn't Behaving Like the Models

(Hat tip Planet Gore)

Der Spiegel is reporting that climate scientists are in quandary about the last decade.  You see, depending on who's data you look at, either the past 10 years have seen a cooling trend or no temperature rise.  And the climate models did not predict that (especially since CO₂ concentration has risen during the decade):

"At present, however, the warming is taking a break," confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany's best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. "There can be no argument about that," he says. "We have to face that fact."

And the facts don't jib with the climate models:

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models . . .

And what does this say about climate science?

The controversy sends confusing and mixed messages to the lay public. Why is there such a vigorous debate over climate change, even though it isn't getting warmer at the moment? And how can it be that scientists cannot even arrive at a consensus on changes in temperatures, even though temperatures are constantly being measured?

Indeed, we should destroy our economy, throw thousands if not millions into poverty based on a science that can't even agree if temperatures are going up or down?  If the models didn't predict the cooling trend we've seen since 2000, how can they predict what's going to happen in 2100?  Or perhaps the models are all wrong because global warming is natural?