Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) was proven as a non-issue in this year’s elections. Energy appears to be growing as an issue. See the transparent attempt to prop up Mary Landrieu’s run off election efforts by allowing a Senate vote on her proposed keystone pipe line bill.
That’s not to say AGW will not continue to be touted as an issue by hangers-on, even though it is a dying issue for the general populace/voter.
There will continue to be claims of the hottest (pick you period here),or the cause of the latest (pick your extreme weather event here), as the ocean cycles will continue into their cooling phases. Ocean cycles and their cause for long term weather changes (that’s climate) will continue to be explored, while ACO2 will continue to be mostly ignored. Ignored for the exception whose salaries are paid, mostly by governments, to continue to find anthropogenic causes.
Just though of this yesterday: Could a $15 minimum wage ACTUALLY only add 1.12 (one and one-eight percent) to Walmart prices? !!!
I have been quoting $10 an hour as the average Walmart non-supervisory wage. Making Change At Walmart quotes $8.81 for sale associates. I’ve been giving that a little room (easier to compute too). So I’ve been saying a $15 min wage means 50% higher labor costs. Since Walmart overall labor costs are only 7% — a 50% raise should only add 3.5% to prices. So I’ve been saying.
If true, a $15 minimum wage would amount at most to a 16% increase (not 50%) in labor costs. 1.16 X 7% labor costs = 8.12% labor costs = 1.2% higher labor costs — with price rises presumably in the same range.
Kinda hard to believe — be nice if the world knew if it held up — 3.5% price increase to pay for a $15 an hour minimum wage is pretty negligible in any case. Especially when Walmart’s low income customers will be getting the benefit of the same large raise. 🙂
The pentagon wants $1.6T to upgrade the nuclear war machine, while it proves weekly it cannot manage it. The pentagon is going to spend $1.5T (already dumped about $100B) on F-35 scrap and rework aero plane. While it is staffed with a general officer corps that makes George McClellan look like Bonaparte.
They have been making the same mistakes since Carter sent Beckworth into the Iranian desert in 1980, When all they accomplished was lose a couple of aircraft and get soldiers and airmen killed!
Why US lost. US went to war with the army it wasted trillions to build and maintain, a hugely expensive military designed to fight the Red Army, the root of which has not been linked to the objective, nor has the pentagon been able to submit to a financial audit because the roots are not solid.
That the enemy is not the Red Army was obvious to everyone but the studs in the pentagon. They wanted war, their futures advanced with war. Lots of money to be made especially with the huge shift to contractors on the battlefield because all volunteer soldiers are too expensive to be doing services support. They contributed not a single truth to the decision makers. In the Bush Cheney Rumsfeld Wolfowitz era truth tellers were cashiered! Obama era has been no better.
The studs went after the red army at hand, called Taliban and later Saddam’s army which looked somewhat like the Red Army. The studs forgot what they were supposed to have learned in 2nd year ROTC or one of the academies. To win the enemies “center of gravity” (forget von Clauswitz and Putin’s Red Army would clean their clocks) must be destroyed. None of the studs realized they were not attacking a center of gravity they were too busy pointlessly spending resources, and writing resumes.
Trillions of dollars and thousands of shattered lives later the pentagon failed at war the 20 year old second year cadets would have won. Stalin had a cure for these kind of generals in 1939.
This is related to the ideas of the “keeping on in Vietnam” revisionists, it is; “the dikes, the bombing limits, etc” are all a search for the CoG (nationalism not communism) no one was seeing in 1966, long after the loss is in the books!
Anyone reading anything from Spencer shows a total disdain for knowledge.
BTW,
I love the idea you take a shot at climate scientists “whose salaries are paid, mostly by governments, to continue to find anthropogenic causes” while linking to scientists whose salaries are paid, mostly by governments” .
Though in all fairness, we all know that the majority of Spencer’s income does not come from governments.
EM, more unsupported rant. 🙂 BTW, why would anyone take a path where the grant money is? Altruism? Nah, to show how much more is needed, especially for their line of study, to clarify further their preliminary findings? Always follow the money.
BTW, Dr Spencer works at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). And it is a public co-educational, state-supported research university within The University of Alabama System. In his own words: http://www.drroyspencer.com/about/
“…Dr. Spencer’s research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE. He has never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service. Not even Exxon-Mobil.”
So you have a problem with his credentials? If you can not argue th facts ad hom! 😉
What is funny is the need for many to deny the actual science, especially the more recent studies which try to explain the hiatus.
UPDATE for above — $11.83 average of full time and part time workers at Walmart stores:
15 divided by 11.83 = 1.27;
1.27 X 7% = 8.89%;
$15 an hour federal minimum wage likely fueling a 1.9% increase in prices at Walmart.
General Bolger’s last paragraph is informative:
“As a veteran, and a general who learned hard lessons in two lost campaigns, I’d like to suggest an alternative. Maybe an incomplete and imperfect effort to contain the Islamic State is as good as it gets. Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, “degrade” its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost. It’s not a solution that is likely to spawn a legend. But in the real world, it just may well give us something better than another defeat.”
I agree with that conclusion, although I don’t see the previous efforts in Iraq as a military defeat. Our elected government wanted the people of Iraq to adopt democracy, forget the past, and move on as a united country. This was a hopelessly idealistic dream!
First, General Shinseki told the congress that a war in Iraq would require 300,000 US military men. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld repeatedly demanded that General Franks come up with new plans until he got a plan with the force size that he wanted which was less than half what General Shinseki had told Congress. Using that smaller force Franks quickly took Iraq.
Second, then Paul Bremer was sent into Iraq to assume civilian control. He threw all Baathists out of the Iraqi military and the civilian government. This action targeted Sunnis for the most part. It was idealistic and seriously flawed, especially with the small number of US military personnel in Iraq. US Generals in Iraq recommended to Paul Bremer that he should not do this.
So here we have a country where a Sunni dictator had kept a lid on religious sectarian violence by using brute force against the Shiites and Kurds. We removed the Sunni dictator and gave almost all the power to the Shiites. Even a 5th grader should have been able to predict what was going to happen.
Sure enough, all hell broke loose as the Sunnis went to war. Then after we had restored some order, we asked the Iraqi legislature to agree to a Status of Forces Agreement, so we could leave US troops in the country. They refused, so we left and I fail to see anything wrong with either of those decisions.
That Iraqi government was dominated by the Shiites and they were hell bent on depriving the Sunnis of any real power. The Sunnis did not like that treatment so when an alternate power (ISIL) swept into their provinces and towns they joined them.
NOTHING WE CAN DO WILL STOP THE SHIITES FROM DOMINATING THE GOVERNMENT AND DENYING THE SUNNIS ANY REAL POWER IN THAT GOVERNMENT. THEREFORE THERE IS NO WAY FOR US TO BRING A LASTING PEACE TO THAT COUNTRY. Both the Sunnis and the Shiites have to want peace more than they want to get even!
President Obama refused to get involved in Iraq this year before the Sunnis and the Shiites had formed some coalition government. Now he is offering only limited military aid. His approach seems reasonable to me, I have too much life experience to be idealistic.
None of this was a failure of the US military. The US military is the servant of the elected US government. They did as they were ordered.
Our elected government has the power to use the US military in hopeless endeavors. (Usually hopeless because of the way elected officials define the problem or restrictions they place on the forces.) And when they do, that elected government should be blamed.
Thanks for proving my point about government spending funding the research of denialists.
OTOH,
My post was on Spencer’s income, not who spends the money for his research. You think he makes no money for being on the board of the Marshall Institute? You think Encounter books gives him money for writing insanely wrong books, as opposed to the koch brothers shoveling him money? You think he makes no money speaking for Heartland?
to give credit where credit is due, I have to admire the disinformation handbook for the internet of Heritage. It is amazingly adaptable considering the same formula “works” for climate science and healthcare.
Defeating the Iraqi army and deposing the Sunni dictator was easy. If that was the objective we could have packed up and left after Saddam Hussein was executed.
I repeat “Our elected government wanted the people of Iraq to adopt democracy, forget the past, and move on as a united country. This was a hopelessly idealistic dream!”
You seem to believe that our elected government’s objective was achievable. I do not.
I repeat “NOTHING WE CAN DO WILL STOP THE SHIITES FROM DOMINATING THE GOVERNMENT AND DENYING THE SUNNIS ANY REAL POWER IN THAT GOVERNMENT. THEREFORE THERE IS NO WAY FOR US TO BRING A LASTING PEACE TO THAT COUNTRY. Both the Sunnis and the Shiites have to want peace more than they want to get even!”
————-
There is no Center of Gravity in wars against insurgent or terrorist groups. Your adversary and their weapons are spread across the land and the population and their actions are spread across time. Protection of the population every hour of every day is impossible, and they don’t even want you there. You might kill them, but your adversary will absolutely kill them and so they just want you gone. And the cost of controlling every acre of land during every hour of every day is prohibitive. This type of warfare is like the game of Whac-a-Mole and if victory appears to be close, the adversary will escape into another country, which creates an entirely new set of problems.
————–
As General Bolger writes “Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, “degrade” its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost.”
I agree with this prescription for dealing with the Islamic State or other terrorist groups. Look at President Obama’s actions and you get the idea that perhaps he agrees with General Bolger too.
But that won’t solve Iraq’s religious sectarian problems, those were never solvable by outsiders. As long as those sectarian problems exist there will always be warfare in Iraq. The politics and the war can not be separated.
I repeat “Our elected government wanted the people of Iraq to adopt democracy, forget the past, and move on as a united country. This was a hopelessly idealistic dream!”
You seem to believe that our elected government’s objective was achievable. I do not.”
How do you figure that Ilsm saying “This was a hopelessly idealistic dream!” means he believes “our elected government’s objective was achievable”?
“A form of government that is not the result of a long sequence of shared experiences, efforts, and endeavors can never take root. Napoleon Bonaparte
Seems applicable to the greater Middle East. Look how Arab Spring in Egypt turned out, a military coup because US/Israel did not want the Islamists in charge of $3B a year in US military aid.
“Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence” -Napoleon Bonaparte
“A form of government that is not the result of a long sequence of shared experiences, efforts, and endeavors can never take root. Napoleon Bonaparte
I agree that it seems applicable to the middle east. But it seems to be only part of the answer.
In 2002, I read “What went wrong” by Bernard Lewis. He wrote that Muslims were tolerant of other religions. And he wrote that Muslims were also tolerant of other forms of their own religion. But judging by what I have seen or read during my lifetime, he was being very charitable. They are not tolerant of any criticism of their religion. What westerner would call christians tolerant if they advocated the death of one writer or another because they were perceived as having disparaged Jesus Christ?
A large part of the population in middle eastern counties is very poorly educated. In times of crisis their intolerance races to the front.
Can democracy take root if the population is unable to live together as equals with those who disagree with their religion or other strongly held beliefs?
And even if tolerance magically appeared tomorrow, there is no way to instantly undo the affects of decades of mistreatment within those countries or that region. Nelson Mandela worked wonders in South Africa but the middle east doesn’t seem to produce that kind of leader.
And this ““Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence” might be difficult to assume if you were on the wrong end of the incompetence. (Smiling here) But it is good advice anyway.
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) was proven as a non-issue in this year’s elections. Energy appears to be growing as an issue. See the transparent attempt to prop up Mary Landrieu’s run off election efforts by allowing a Senate vote on her proposed keystone pipe line bill.
That’s not to say AGW will not continue to be touted as an issue by hangers-on, even though it is a dying issue for the general populace/voter.
There will continue to be claims of the hottest (pick you period here),or the cause of the latest (pick your extreme weather event here), as the ocean cycles will continue into their cooling phases. Ocean cycles and their cause for long term weather changes (that’s climate) will continue to be explored, while ACO2 will continue to be mostly ignored. Ignored for the exception whose salaries are paid, mostly by governments, to continue to find anthropogenic causes.
We should have another decade or longer of slowed or even cooling temps while these ocean cycles continue in through their cooling phases. http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/11/a-busted-el-nino-and-the-new-weather-norm/ (a luke warmer) or http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169809513002834. There are many, many more papers re: the ocean cycles and climate.
Those who insist its all about ACO2 need to rethink their position(s), because its a lost issue.
Just though of this yesterday: Could a $15 minimum wage ACTUALLY only add 1.12 (one and one-eight percent) to Walmart prices? !!!
I have been quoting $10 an hour as the average Walmart non-supervisory wage. Making Change At Walmart quotes $8.81 for sale associates. I’ve been giving that a little room (easier to compute too). So I’ve been saying a $15 min wage means 50% higher labor costs. Since Walmart overall labor costs are only 7% — a 50% raise should only add 3.5% to prices. So I’ve been saying.
But, Walmart itself claims: “In the U.S., the average, full-time hourly wage is $12.92.”
http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/locations/u…
If true, a $15 minimum wage would amount at most to a 16% increase (not 50%) in labor costs. 1.16 X 7% labor costs = 8.12% labor costs = 1.2% higher labor costs — with price rises presumably in the same range.
Kinda hard to believe — be nice if the world knew if it held up — 3.5% price increase to pay for a $15 an hour minimum wage is pretty negligible in any case. Especially when Walmart’s low income customers will be getting the benefit of the same large raise. 🙂
Walmart itself claims: “In the U.S., the average, full-time hourly wage is $12.92.” – See more at: http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2014/11/open-thread-nov-14-2014.html#comment-2452884
http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/locations/united-states
The pentagon wants $1.6T to upgrade the nuclear war machine, while it proves weekly it cannot manage it. The pentagon is going to spend $1.5T (already dumped about $100B) on F-35 scrap and rework aero plane. While it is staffed with a general officer corps that makes George McClellan look like Bonaparte.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/opinion/the-truth-about-the-wars-in-iraq-and-afghanistan.html?_r=0
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/12/why_we_lost_retired_us_general
They have been making the same mistakes since Carter sent Beckworth into the Iranian desert in 1980, When all they accomplished was lose a couple of aircraft and get soldiers and airmen killed!
Why US lost. US went to war with the army it wasted trillions to build and maintain, a hugely expensive military designed to fight the Red Army, the root of which has not been linked to the objective, nor has the pentagon been able to submit to a financial audit because the roots are not solid.
That the enemy is not the Red Army was obvious to everyone but the studs in the pentagon. They wanted war, their futures advanced with war. Lots of money to be made especially with the huge shift to contractors on the battlefield because all volunteer soldiers are too expensive to be doing services support. They contributed not a single truth to the decision makers. In the Bush Cheney Rumsfeld Wolfowitz era truth tellers were cashiered! Obama era has been no better.
The studs went after the red army at hand, called Taliban and later Saddam’s army which looked somewhat like the Red Army. The studs forgot what they were supposed to have learned in 2nd year ROTC or one of the academies. To win the enemies “center of gravity” (forget von Clauswitz and Putin’s Red Army would clean their clocks) must be destroyed. None of the studs realized they were not attacking a center of gravity they were too busy pointlessly spending resources, and writing resumes.
Trillions of dollars and thousands of shattered lives later the pentagon failed at war the 20 year old second year cadets would have won. Stalin had a cure for these kind of generals in 1939.
This is related to the ideas of the “keeping on in Vietnam” revisionists, it is; “the dikes, the bombing limits, etc” are all a search for the CoG (nationalism not communism) no one was seeing in 1966, long after the loss is in the books!
Anyone reading anything from Spencer shows a total disdain for knowledge.
BTW,
I love the idea you take a shot at climate scientists “whose salaries are paid, mostly by governments, to continue to find anthropogenic causes” while linking to scientists whose salaries are paid, mostly by governments” .
Though in all fairness, we all know that the majority of Spencer’s income does not come from governments.
EM, more unsupported rant. 🙂 BTW, why would anyone take a path where the grant money is? Altruism? Nah, to show how much more is needed, especially for their line of study, to clarify further their preliminary findings? Always follow the money.
BTW, Dr Spencer works at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). And it is a public co-educational, state-supported research university within The University of Alabama System. In his own words: http://www.drroyspencer.com/about/
“…Dr. Spencer’s research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE. He has never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service. Not even Exxon-Mobil.”
So you have a problem with his credentials? If you can not argue th facts ad hom! 😉
What is funny is the need for many to deny the actual science, especially the more recent studies which try to explain the hiatus.
UPDATE for above — $11.83 average of full time and part time workers at Walmart stores:
15 divided by 11.83 = 1.27;
1.27 X 7% = 8.89%;
$15 an hour federal minimum wage likely fueling a 1.9% increase in prices at Walmart.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/10/16/walmart_eliminating_minimum_wage_pay_will_affect_about_6_000_workers.html
Ilsm,
You should be upset with the US elected government not the military.
You cite this article written by a retired US Army officer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/opinion/the-truth-about-the-wars-in-iraq-and-afghanistan.html?_r=0
General Bolger’s last paragraph is informative:
“As a veteran, and a general who learned hard lessons in two lost campaigns, I’d like to suggest an alternative. Maybe an incomplete and imperfect effort to contain the Islamic State is as good as it gets. Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, “degrade” its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost. It’s not a solution that is likely to spawn a legend. But in the real world, it just may well give us something better than another defeat.”
I agree with that conclusion, although I don’t see the previous efforts in Iraq as a military defeat. Our elected government wanted the people of Iraq to adopt democracy, forget the past, and move on as a united country. This was a hopelessly idealistic dream!
First, General Shinseki told the congress that a war in Iraq would require 300,000 US military men. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld repeatedly demanded that General Franks come up with new plans until he got a plan with the force size that he wanted which was less than half what General Shinseki had told Congress. Using that smaller force Franks quickly took Iraq.
Second, then Paul Bremer was sent into Iraq to assume civilian control. He threw all Baathists out of the Iraqi military and the civilian government. This action targeted Sunnis for the most part. It was idealistic and seriously flawed, especially with the small number of US military personnel in Iraq. US Generals in Iraq recommended to Paul Bremer that he should not do this.
So here we have a country where a Sunni dictator had kept a lid on religious sectarian violence by using brute force against the Shiites and Kurds. We removed the Sunni dictator and gave almost all the power to the Shiites. Even a 5th grader should have been able to predict what was going to happen.
Sure enough, all hell broke loose as the Sunnis went to war. Then after we had restored some order, we asked the Iraqi legislature to agree to a Status of Forces Agreement, so we could leave US troops in the country. They refused, so we left and I fail to see anything wrong with either of those decisions.
That Iraqi government was dominated by the Shiites and they were hell bent on depriving the Sunnis of any real power. The Sunnis did not like that treatment so when an alternate power (ISIL) swept into their provinces and towns they joined them.
NOTHING WE CAN DO WILL STOP THE SHIITES FROM DOMINATING THE GOVERNMENT AND DENYING THE SUNNIS ANY REAL POWER IN THAT GOVERNMENT. THEREFORE THERE IS NO WAY FOR US TO BRING A LASTING PEACE TO THAT COUNTRY. Both the Sunnis and the Shiites have to want peace more than they want to get even!
President Obama refused to get involved in Iraq this year before the Sunnis and the Shiites had formed some coalition government. Now he is offering only limited military aid. His approach seems reasonable to me, I have too much life experience to be idealistic.
None of this was a failure of the US military. The US military is the servant of the elected US government. They did as they were ordered.
Our elected government has the power to use the US military in hopeless endeavors. (Usually hopeless because of the way elected officials define the problem or restrictions they place on the forces.) And when they do, that elected government should be blamed.
JimH, US Gumint is owned by war profiteerrs. You miss the Center of Gravity idea, chipping away at the “periphery” is what Clauzwitz warned against.
US could get by cheap abd only spend $50B a year to prevent IS from killing eachother.
CoRev,
Thanks for proving my point about government spending funding the research of denialists.
OTOH,
My post was on Spencer’s income, not who spends the money for his research. You think he makes no money for being on the board of the Marshall Institute? You think Encounter books gives him money for writing insanely wrong books, as opposed to the koch brothers shoveling him money? You think he makes no money speaking for Heartland?
to give credit where credit is due, I have to admire the disinformation handbook for the internet of Heritage. It is amazingly adaptable considering the same formula “works” for climate science and healthcare.
Kudos to them.
Ilsm,
Defeating the Iraqi army and deposing the Sunni dictator was easy. If that was the objective we could have packed up and left after Saddam Hussein was executed.
I repeat “Our elected government wanted the people of Iraq to adopt democracy, forget the past, and move on as a united country. This was a hopelessly idealistic dream!”
You seem to believe that our elected government’s objective was achievable. I do not.
I repeat “NOTHING WE CAN DO WILL STOP THE SHIITES FROM DOMINATING THE GOVERNMENT AND DENYING THE SUNNIS ANY REAL POWER IN THAT GOVERNMENT. THEREFORE THERE IS NO WAY FOR US TO BRING A LASTING PEACE TO THAT COUNTRY. Both the Sunnis and the Shiites have to want peace more than they want to get even!”
————-
There is no Center of Gravity in wars against insurgent or terrorist groups. Your adversary and their weapons are spread across the land and the population and their actions are spread across time. Protection of the population every hour of every day is impossible, and they don’t even want you there. You might kill them, but your adversary will absolutely kill them and so they just want you gone. And the cost of controlling every acre of land during every hour of every day is prohibitive. This type of warfare is like the game of Whac-a-Mole and if victory appears to be close, the adversary will escape into another country, which creates an entirely new set of problems.
————–
As General Bolger writes “Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, “degrade” its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost.”
I agree with this prescription for dealing with the Islamic State or other terrorist groups. Look at President Obama’s actions and you get the idea that perhaps he agrees with General Bolger too.
But that won’t solve Iraq’s religious sectarian problems, those were never solvable by outsiders. As long as those sectarian problems exist there will always be warfare in Iraq. The politics and the war can not be separated.
I repeat “Our elected government wanted the people of Iraq to adopt democracy, forget the past, and move on as a united country. This was a hopelessly idealistic dream!”
You seem to believe that our elected government’s objective was achievable. I do not.”
How do you figure that Ilsm saying “This was a hopelessly idealistic dream!” means he believes “our elected government’s objective was achievable”?
A couple of Napoleon quotes:
“A form of government that is not the result of a long sequence of shared experiences, efforts, and endeavors can never take root. Napoleon Bonaparte
Seems applicable to the greater Middle East. Look how Arab Spring in Egypt turned out, a military coup because US/Israel did not want the Islamists in charge of $3B a year in US military aid.
“Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence” -Napoleon Bonaparte
Not sure this applies to US government!
JimH; I am not disagreeing.
Ilsm,
“A form of government that is not the result of a long sequence of shared experiences, efforts, and endeavors can never take root. Napoleon Bonaparte
I agree that it seems applicable to the middle east. But it seems to be only part of the answer.
In 2002, I read “What went wrong” by Bernard Lewis. He wrote that Muslims were tolerant of other religions. And he wrote that Muslims were also tolerant of other forms of their own religion. But judging by what I have seen or read during my lifetime, he was being very charitable. They are not tolerant of any criticism of their religion. What westerner would call christians tolerant if they advocated the death of one writer or another because they were perceived as having disparaged Jesus Christ?
A large part of the population in middle eastern counties is very poorly educated. In times of crisis their intolerance races to the front.
Can democracy take root if the population is unable to live together as equals with those who disagree with their religion or other strongly held beliefs?
And even if tolerance magically appeared tomorrow, there is no way to instantly undo the affects of decades of mistreatment within those countries or that region. Nelson Mandela worked wonders in South Africa but the middle east doesn’t seem to produce that kind of leader.
And this ““Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence” might be difficult to assume if you were on the wrong end of the incompetence. (Smiling here) But it is good advice anyway.