Dec 10 2008

Dividing the promised land part 1

Category: economy,environment,government,humor — harmonicminer @ 1:16 pm

This is about our adventures in dividing a 5 acre lot into two 2.5 acre lots, in San Bernardino County in southern California.  It will include human folly, financial folly, governmental folly, economic folly, and environmental folly.  Plenty of folly to go around.

My family and I live on the south half of the 5 acre lot.  The lot is defined as “sub-dividable” by the county.  We bought it 6 years ago, had a house built on it, assuming that we could subdivide it when we chose, and either sell the other half, or build on the other half, then sell it.

You know what they say about assumptions.

We moved into the house a little more than 4 years ago.  As you may recall, the go-go real estate market was in full swing.  When we began to check into it, we discovered that the cost to subdivide the property into two separate lots was estimated at $14,000 – $15,000.  Wow.  Who knew?  We asked why, and were told about all the things that “had to be done” before the lot could be divided.

“But,” we protested, “we just bought the lot, and built on it.  Environmental studies were already done.  Drainage has been determined.  Percolation tests have been done.”  (Those are necessary to determine that the ground will tolerate a septic tank, since it’s a pretty remote area.)  We continued, “And the survey was just done to determine the exact limits of the property before we were allowed to buy it.  All you have to do is draw a line down the middle of it.  Nothing has changed in the last six years.”

The county employee smiled condescendingly and explained that it all had to be done again.  I asked why, and was told, “It’s the state law for part of it, and county regulations for the rest of it.”  Did I mention that it was going to be $14,000 – $15,000 to get all this stuff done again?

Basically, we were staying in Judah, and wanted to sell Israel. Unfortunately, the Assyrians run the county, and the Babylonians run the state.  We could wait for Sharia Law to take over, and pay the jizya, or we could just bite the bullet and pay tribute now.

Continue reading “Dividing the promised land part 1”

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Nov 23 2008

Ten politically incorrect thoughts

Category: economy,education,energy,environment,politics,society — harmonicminer @ 7:39 pm

Victor Davis Hanson is in fine fettle indeed, in Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts. Herewith, two of them, but all are worth the reading.

5. California is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do. Rarely has a single generation inherited so much natural wealth and bounty from the investment and hard work of those more noble now resting in our cemeteries—and squandered that gift within a generation. Compare the vast gulf from old Governor Pat Brown to Gray Davis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. We did not invest in many dams, canals, rails, and airports (though we use them all to excess); we sued each other rather than planned; wrote impact statements rather than left behind infrastructure; we redistributed, indulged, blamed, and so managed all at once to create a state with about the highest income and sales taxes and the worst schools, roads, hospitals, and airports. A walk through downtown San Francisco, a stroll up the Fresno downtown mall, a drive along highway 101 (yes, in many places it is still a four-lane, pot-holed highway), an afternoon at LAX, a glance at the catalogue of Cal State Monterey, a visit to the park in Parlier—all that would make our forefathers weep. We can’t build a new nuclear plant; can’t drill a new offshore oil well; can’t build an all-weather road across the Sierra; can’t build a few tracts of new affordable houses in the Bay Area; can’t build a dam for a water-short state; and can’t create even a mediocre passenger rail system. Everything else—well, we do that well.

…

10. The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.

Nov 01 2008

Global warming would be better than this

Category: environment,global warming — harmonicminer @ 9:38 am

ICECAP

In 2007-2008, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) and computer modelers who believe that CO2 is the cause of global warming still predict the Earth is in store for catastrophic warming in this century. IPCC computer models have predicted global warming of 1F per decade and 5-6C (10-11F) by 2100, which would cause global catastrophe with ramifications for human life, natural habitat, energy and water resources, and food production. All of this is predicated on the assumption that global warming is caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 and that CO2 will continue to rise rapidly.

However, records of past climate changes suggest an altogether different scenario for the 21st century. Rather than drastic global warming at a rate of 0.5C (1F) per decade, historic records of past natural cycles suggest global cooling for the first several decades of the 21st century to about 2030, followed by global warming from about 2030 to about 2060, and renewed global cooling from 2060 to 2090 (Easterbrook, D.J., 2005, 2006a, b, 2007, 2008a, b); Easterbrook and Kovanen, 2000, 2001). Climatic fluctuations over the past several hundred years suggest ~30 year climatic cycles of global warming and cooling, on a general rising trend from the Little Ice Age.

It is not clear that global warming is a net bad thing. It is clear that global cooling IS. We’ll adjust to a little warmer planet, and may even thrive, but some will starve on a cooler one.

As usual, the eco-panic crowd is worried about the wrong thing.

Buy a Hummer. Save the planet with extra greenhouse gasses.

H/T:  Jerry Pournelle

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Oct 19 2008

Global warming reduction: at what cost?

Category: economy,environment,global warming,politics — harmonicminer @ 9:05 am

Bjorn Lomborg asks, why cut one 3,000th of a degree? That’s about how much difference Britain’s proposed policies will make, while costing ENORMOUS sums of money. Key graphs:

Continue reading “Global warming reduction: at what cost?”

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Oct 03 2008

Change Through Orchestrated Crisis

Category: Congress,economy,election 2008,environment,healthcare,left,liberty,media,Obama,politics,socialism,university — harmonicminer @ 8:54 am

In a remarkable article in the American Thinker, James Simpson connects the dots between the various parts of the Left that have contributed to our current financial “crisis”.

In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Continue reading “Change Through Orchestrated Crisis”

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Sep 23 2008

Brrr.. a look back at the winter

Category: environment,global warming — harmonicminer @ 9:00 am

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Smile. Buy a nice warm coat. You may need it.

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Sep 16 2008

Don’t get hot under the collar

Category: environment,global warming — harmonicminer @ 1:47 pm

Take that, eco-panic global warming fear mongers.

And if this isn’t enough for you, start here.

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Sep 07 2008

More political “science”

Category: Al Gore,environment,global warming,Group-think,science — harmonicminer @ 9:16 am

Powerline has a nice summary of the latest attempt of the political “scientists” to convince us that every single weather phenomenon is caused by “climate change”, the meaningless term whose usage has replaced “global warming” in many quarters, due to the inconvenient truth that the warmest year of the last 100 was 1934, and the second warmest was 1998.

Here’s more information on the very serious and eminent scientists who demur to the group think, politically inspired conclusions of the eco-panic Left.

As always, you have to read the fine print in the studies to learn the truth, and you have to ignore the summary and conclusions that make it into the press.  Powerline has a nice deconstruction of the latest.

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Aug 02 2008

Environmentalism unleashed = disaster

Category: Al Gore,environment,global warming,media — harmonicminer @ 9:26 am

Here is a new book that exposes the really, really inconvenient truth behind eco-panic myths about the environment, and what the real effect of many “environmental policies” has been.

Who is the inspiration behind the single biggest human caused environmental catastrophe, causing the most preventable death, of the 20th Century? Al Gore’s heroine, Rachel Carson, with her crusade against DDT, the use of which would have saved tens of millions of lives taken by malaria, but which was banned due to her efforts, and a sycophantic crowd of Gore’s predecessors in the eco-panic movement.

Yep: Al’s in fine company.

This book is a needed corrective for the total collapse of the media’s reporting in the area.

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Aug 01 2008

Democrats Squeeze the Water Balloon, expecting it not to change shape

Category: energy,environment,oil prices — harmonicminer @ 1:15 pm

When the USA outsources oil production to the rest of the world, the pumping tends to be done by nations that are far less careful about the environment than USA companies, in places more prone to damage caused by terrorists, natural disasters, and just plain sloppy work, with supervision done by corrupt regimes, and the profits going to the same place. Charles Krauthammer points out the environmental damage done BY the eco-panic Left:

Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic? Continue reading “Democrats Squeeze the Water Balloon, expecting it not to change shape”

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