Issa report on Lois Lerner and the IRS
Schadenfreude – a harsh word
Post by Brooks Imperial.
“Act worthy of yourselves.”
“local control” is communism, “without limitation” or the Constitution
https://www.facebook.com/localcontrolcolorado
A Colorado Grassroots Movement working to gain Local Control over Oil and Gas development and Fracking in our communities via a state ballot initiative.
http://therightclimatestuff.com/
William Perry Pendley at CPAC 2014 on energy
Trevor Loudon’s Republican Dream Team
Happy Birthday Karl Marx
The more we learn behavioral psychology, the more we understand that ideologies are as much a product of people’s nature as of observed experience. The perverted doctrines that actuated the Bolshevists may be immanent in a portion of humanity. Some people are determined to see every success as a swindling of someone else, every transaction as an exploitation, every exercise in freedom as a violation of some ideal plan, every tradition as a superstition. How delicious that, as we approach the bicentenary of his birth, Karl Marx should have turned into the thing he loathed above all: the prophet of an irrational faith.
Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom
clever propaganda
Consider this.
Mayor de Blasio in New York announced he is closing down several charter schools. These schools are performing better than nearby public schools. Thousands of supporters of the charter schools are rallying this morning to stop the closing of these schools. Fox News ran a segment with video of the thousands of upset, pleading parents, including snippets from some of the speakers.
Then Fox News cut to a panel of two experts for some analysis with the news anchor. Sometimes the experts in these panels sort out for and against the news subject, sometimes they’re both in favor or both against. In this case, they were both critical of de Blasio’s action, both in favor of the charter schools.
Here’s the rub – during the analysis segment when the screen showed head shots of the screen anchor and the two experts, the tag line on the screen underneath the panel read in part, “de Blasio rallies against charter schools.” For the rest of that news subject, the producers did not cut back to video from the rally.
Now, de Blasio wasn’t at the rally they’d just shown pictures from that contained thousands of people who were all in favor of charter schools. The propaganda effect from the tag line’s misrepresentation was to aggrandize de Blasio by falsely assigning the rally images just seen to him, and confuse the impact of the news analysis portion of the segment. Leftists would call this a win/win.
People who came late to the news report, who did not see the video from the rally or hear the sound clips from some of the rally speakers, saw a confused news presentation where the content the panel speakers delivered did not reconcile with the report of a de Blasio rally that never occurred.
Was this some news editor’s attempt to be clever that ended up taking down the impact of the entire segment? Or was this a deliberate misrepresentation intended to undermine the agreement and conclusions of the news panel that were in favor of charter schools and against de Blasio?
Understanding how the Left works, my money is on the latter explanation.
We’re surrounded by this sort of thing in the media. You cannot just absorb program content – audio, visual, or the interplay between the two – without putting it through a critical filter. And Fox News is, sadly, not exempt.
America under the boot
a chicken and egg problem
Thus, the COGCC was informing Elbert County that they could require more restrictive regulatory provisions as long as the operator agreed to them.
From “Stupid Is As Stupid Does” by Tony Corrado
Thanks for taking the point Tony, but it fundamentally misrepresents the nature of all government – which is inherently coercive. And why anyone should have to explain a basic concept like this to an elder liberal American with a lifetime of beneficial exposure to American limited government mystifies me. Americans living under a Constitution crafted to limit and frustrate the coercive power of the state really should know better.
A most wonderful example of cause and effect
Written by Tim Worstall | Monday 3 March 2014, of the Adam Smith Institute
I have to admit that I just love this story. For it speaks to that terrible problem that we face so often, trying to understand the difference between correlation and cause.
A number of studies have been done over the years trying to work out whether people are insider trading given the specialist knowledge that they have. For example, one such showed that Senators were getting a 12% annual return on their stock portfolios. The conclusion was that yes, they were indeed using their inside information about what laws were likely to be written and how. No prosecutions of course because this wasn’t actually illegal but it was pretty clear that the activity was going on.
Using very much the same techniques researchers have had a look at the stock investments of the policemen of that world, the folks at the SEC. And the results do seem to indicate the same sort of conclusion:
In the report titled “The Stock Picking Skills of SEC Employees,” researchers found that SEC employees’ stock purchases look like your average person’s. But when these employees sell their stocks, they appear to systematically beat the market by making sales within weeks of costly enforcement actions by the agency.
The smoking gun evidence is strong with this one. However, it’s not actually the correct answer:
The SEC says it has an explanation. “Each of the transactions was individually reviewed and approved in advance by the Ethics office,” said John Nester, spokesperson for the SEC. “Most of the sales were required by SEC policy. Staff had no choice. They were required to sell.” Nester explained that before staff can work on an issue that involves a company, they have to sell any holdings of stock in that firm. As a result, he said, there shouldn’t be any surprise that a sale would precede the announcement of an enforcement action.
I, for one, think this is a magnificent answer. The SEC decides in secret as to whether it will launch an investigation into a particular stock. An SEC investigation is never, ever, about awarding a company a gold star for being the good guys. So an announcement of an SEC investigation is always, but always, negative for the price of the stock in question. Which means that the staff are forced, no forced!, to sell out of those stocks that might be affected by an announcement of an investigation. Forced simply by being brought onto the team that decides whether there should be an investigation or not.
What other jobs insist as a condition of employment that you do things that would be illegal outside the context of that employment? The SEC forces people to insider trade, the Army forces people to kill people….any other candidates?
running out of other peoples money
The Coming Collapse of the Welfare State
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog
Everything that the left has done, from breaking up the family to driving out manufacturing industries to promoting Third World immigration has made its own spending completely unsustainable. On a social level alone, we don’t have the people we need to pay the bills. And at the rate we are going, we will only run up more bills that our demographics and our culture can no longer cash.
Greg Brophy, Scott Gessler, Steve House, Mike Kopp
Fumbling With A Quiver Empty Of Indignation
Post by Brooks Imperial.
Hydraulic Fracturing 101
Levin Addresses Tea Party Patriots
debunks the fracking aquifer risk myth
Studies: ‘Not Physically Plausible’ for HF to Pollute Water
2:02pm EST August 8, 2013
by Dana Bohandana@energyindepth.org, Washington, D.C.
Last year, Dr. Tom Myers released a report suggesting it was theoretically possible for hydraulic fracturing fluids to migrate vertically through thousands of feet of solid rock to contaminate water aquifers — within as little as three years’ time. As you might remember, the study, which was funded by the anti-fracking group Catskill Mountainkeeper, received a strong rebuke from the scientific community. As Energy In Depth has highlighted before, a report released in May from the Pennsylvania Geological Survey (PGS) and Pennsylvania Council of Professional Geologists (PCPG) found Dr. Myers’ assumptions were “unsupported by any empirical data,” among other problems. That same month, the research firm Gradient released a report analyzing potential exposure pathways for hydraulic fracturing fluids, including upward migration from the shale formation itself. According their report:
“[T]here is no scientific basis for significant upward migration of HF fluid or brine from tight target formations in sedimentary basins.”
Gradient recently published another paper, this one featured in the National Ground Water Association’s periodical Groundwater, which reiterates that Myers’ theory is basically impossible:
“Our review of the literature indicates that HF affects a very limited portion of the entire thickness of the overlying bedrock and therefore, is unable to create direct hydraulic communication between black shales and shallow aquifers via induced fractures. As a result, upward migration of HF fluid and brine is controlled by preexisting hydraulic gradients and bedrock permeability. We show that in cases where there is an upward gradient, permeability is low, upward flow rates are low, and mean travel times are long [often >1,000,000 years]. Consequently, the recently proposed rapid upward migration of brine and HF fluid, predicted to occur as a result of increased HF activity, does not appear to be physically plausible. Unrealistically high estimates of upward flow are the result of invalid assumptions about HF and the hydrogeology of sedimentary basins.” (p. 1)
“Our analysis and literature review indicate that where upward flow occurs, both permeability and flow rates are low, and therefore, timescales for transport are long. Overall, the rapid upward migration scenarios that have been recently suggested (Rozell and Reaven 2012; Myers 2012; Warner et al. 2012) are not physically plausible.” (p. 9)
As the authors point out, the geological characteristics of basins in which shale formations exist are not conducive to the upward migration of hydraulic fracturing fluids. For starters, the formations above these shales are typically of low permeability — including siltstones, mudstones, and shales. Secondly, hydraulic fracturing not only impacts a small portion of the rock, but the pressures associated with the process are “short lived and localized to the fracture network.”
A second peer-reviewed paper from Gradient, featured in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, echoed these findings. The study concluded:
“It is not physically plausible for induced fractures to create a hydraulic connection between deep black shale and other tight formations to overlying potable aquifers, based on the limited amount of height growth at depth and the rotation of the least principal stress to the vertical direction at shallow depths. Therefore, direct hydraulic communication between tight formations and shallow groundwater via induced fractures and faults (e.g., as suggested by Myers [2012], Rozell and Reaven [2012], and Warner et al. [2012]) is not a realistic expectation based on the limitations on fracture height growth and potential fault slip.” (p. 4)
These reports, completed with funding from Halliburton, are two more in a growing library of scientific literature that shows hydraulic fracturing does not pose a credible threat to groundwater resources. That fact has been reiterated by state and federal regulators, scientific experts, and industry engineers time and time again. So, while groups opposed to shale development hang on to the talking point that hydraulic fracturing is a threat to subsurface water supplies, the facts – and the studies — continue to prove them wrong.