James Carville’s own poll finds that 55% of Americans believe Barack Obama is accurately described as a socialist.

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Red China’s People’s Daily says that the Taliban are training monkeys (macaques and baboons imported from the jungle) in Waziristan to use AK-47s, Bren guns, and trench mortars against US forces whose uniforms the monkeys are being taught to recognize.

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Democrat Financial Reform Bill includes racial and gender quotas for US financial industry.
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With the Social Security system soon to go broke, even democrats are talking seriously about raising the retirement age to 70. (Talking Points Memo)
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From Brian Hughes:

After Nigeria was eliminated from the World Cup, the Nigerian goalkeeper personally offered to refund all the expenses of fans who had traveled to South Africa.

He said he just needs their bank details and PINs to complete the transaction.

To CNN:

“Washington and Russia agree to swap intelligence gatherers”

I can just see the historical headlines:

“British hang American intelligence gatherer Nathan Hale.”

“Intelligence gatherers Julius and Ethel Rosenberg electrocuted at Sing Sing.”

The most affluent Americans are “less susceptible to the shame and fear-mongering used by the government and the mortgage banking industry to keep underwater homeowners from acting in their financial best interest” and are with increasing frequency ceasing to make mortgage payments.

One in seven mortgages of over a million dollars is currently in default. NYT. The overall default rate is 9.2%.

Marine resting in Iraq

Veteran Marine officer Peter Somerville (who served in the Middle East) offers some perspective on the recent weather.

Yesterday’s High Temps:
Washington, DC: 102 degrees
29 Palms, CA: 106 degrees
Ramadi, Iraq: 117 degrees
Kandahar, Afghanistan: 107 degrees

Only one of those numbers represents a heat wave.

Daily Mail:

A man with a metal detector has made one of the largest finds of Roman coins in Britain.

The hoard of around 52,000 coins dating from the third century AD was found buried in a field near Frome in Somerset.

The coins were in a huge jar just over a foot below the surface, located by Dave Crisp from Devizes in Wiltshire.

Archaeologists believe the hoard, which sheds light on the economic crisis and coalition government in the 3rd century under Emperor Carausius, will rewrite the history books. ...

It is thought the £250,000 find – known as the Frome Haul – represents the biggest single haul ever unearthed in Britain.

The hoard is one of the largest ever found in Britain, and will reveal more about the nation’s history in the third century, said Roger Bland, of the British Museum.

One of the most important aspects of the hoard is that it contains a large group of coins of Carausius, who ruled Britain independently from AD 286 to AD 293 and was the first Roman emperor to strike coins in Britain.

The hoard contains over 760 of his coins, making it the largest group of his coins ever found.

It is estimated the coins were worth about four years’ pay for a legionary soldier.

Carausius was a Roman naval officer who seized power in 286 and ruled until he was assassinated in 293.

‘The late third century A.D. was a time when Britain suffered barbarian invasions, economic crises and civil wars,’ Bland said.

Matt Ridley points out that predictions of imminent doom have been with us for a long time, in the Huffington Post of all places.

When I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end. The adults told me so. They said the population explosion was unstoppable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a year, the ice age was retuning, oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off. There did not seem to be much point in planning for the future. I remember a fantasy I had – that I would make my way to the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, and live off the land so I could survive these holocausts at least till the cancer got me.

I am not making this up. By the time I was 21 years old I realized that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me – in a lecture, a television program or even a conversation in a bar – about the future of the planet and its people, at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain.

The next two decades were just as bad: acid rain was going to devastate forests, the loss of the ozone layer was going to fry us, gender-bending chemicals were going to decimate sperm counts, swine flu, bird flu and Ebola virus were going to wipe us all out. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro opened its agenda for the twenty-first century with the words `Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.’

By then I had begun to notice that this terrible future was not all that bad. In fact every single one of the dooms I had been threatened with had proved either false or exaggerated. ...

I now see at firsthand how I avoided hearing any good news when I was young. Where are the pressure groups that have an interest in telling the good news? They do not exist. By contrast, the behemoths of bad news, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year and doom is their best fund-raiser. Where is the news media’s interest in checking out how pessimists’ predictions panned out before? There is none. By my count, Lester Brown has now predicted a turning point in the rise of agricultural yields six times since 1974, and been wrong each time. Paul Ehrlich has been predicting mass starvation and mass cancer for 40 years. He still predicts that `the world is coming to a turning point’.

Ah, that phrase again. I call it turning-point-itis. It’s rarely far from the lips of the prophets of doom. They are convinced that they stand on the hinge of history, the inflexion point where the roller coaster starts to go downhill. But then I began looking back to see what pessimists said in the past and found the phrase, or an equivalent, being used by in every generation. The cause of their pessimism varied – it was often tinged with eugenics in the early twentieth century, for example – but the certainty that their own generation stood upon the fulcrum of the human story was the same.

I got back to 1830 and still the sentiment was being used. In fact, the poet and historian Thomas Macaulay was already sick of it then: `We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason.’ He continued: `On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us.’

The scholar who knows himself to be in possession of the facts does not lose sleep at night over the threat of the public being persuaded by the inferior reasoning and bad scholarship of rivals who have embraced error. On the contrary, the happy researcher who knows that he is right will smile with condescending pity at his adversaries’ folly, knowing perfectly well that the validity of his own position will inevitably ultimately be confirmed and his rivals’ errors toppled to lie discarded in the dust.

What he does not do is try to block the publication of opposing opinions or disseminate lists of adversaries or argue that he has more people with better credentials on his side.

But the “there are more of us, and we’re bigger cheeses” argument has actually been advanced in all seriousness by (Stanford graduate student) William R. L. Anderegg, (University of Toronto Senior Systems Programmer) James W. Prall, Jacob Harold (grant officer at William and Flora Hewlett Foundation), and (prominent warmist) Stephen H. Schneider in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, no less.

Frank J. Tipler expresses some satisfaction at finding himself in distinguished company on the Warmist Enemies List, and notes a certain correlation between the firmly established (by leaked East Anglian Climate Unit emails) Warmist policies of removing less-than-completely-loyal journal editors and blocking publication of opposing papers and Warmist pointing to quantity of published papers as evidence of an established scientific consensus.

The National Academy of Sciences, in its official journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has just published a list of scientists whom it claims should not be believed on the subject of global warming. I am number 38 on the list. The list of 496 is in descending order of scientific credentials.

Professor Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Royal Society, is number 3 on the list. Dyson is a friend of mine and is one of the creators of relativistic quantum field theory; most physicists think he should have shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Richard Feynman. MIT professor Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist who is also a member of the National Academy, is number 4. Princeton physics professor William Happer, once again a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is number 6.

I’m in good company.

The list is actually available only online. The published article, which links to the list, argues that the skeptical scientists — the article calls us “climate deniers,” trying to equate us with Holocaust deniers — have published less in climate “science” than believers in anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

True.

But if the entire field of climate “science” is suspect, if the leaders of the field of climate “science” are suspected of faking their results and are accused of arranging for their critics’ papers to be rejected by “peer-reviewed” journals, then lack of publication in climate “science” is an argument for taking us more seriously than the leaders of the climate “science.”

Demonstrated by Holly Valence in DOA:Dead or Alive (2006): 0:46 video.

Hat tip to Dr. Mercury.

4:49 video

CNS reports on just how inclusive the federal safety net has become.

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal government helped pay the home air conditioning bills for more than 11,000 dead people, 1,100 federal employees, and 725 convicts in fiscal year 2009.

The payments were made by a $5 billion program known as the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). LIHEAP is designed to provide federal assistance, administered by the states, to help people pay the energy bills to heat their homes in the winter and cool them in the summer. The funds are disbursed by the Department of Health and Human Services and are distributed based on a formula that takes into account a state’s weather and the size of its low-income population.

The GAO examined the LIHEAP programs in seven states: Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, New York, Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey. The agency found evidence of fraud in each state.

“Our analysis of LIHEAP data revealed that the program is at risk of fraud and providing improper benefits in all seven of our selected states,” reported the GAO. “About 260,000 applications—9 percent of households receiving benefits in the selected states—contained invalid identity information, such as Social Security numbers, names, or dates of birth.”

Most glaring among the problems the GAO found were the pervasive payment of LIHEAP benefits to dead people, some of whom, records show, had been dead for quite a long time.

Steve McCann, at American Thinker, hopes that the disastrous election of 2008 does prove that God really does take care of fools, drunks, and the United States of America.

On this 4th of July, 2010, when the future of the United States appears to be in serious jeopardy, it should be noted that sometimes in the history of a nation, what appears to be an event that could lead to long-term disaster may, in fact, be its long-term salvation. A case in point: the election of Barack Obama as president and the Democrats in full control of the Congress. To be sure, the far-left domination of government is not a situation to be wished for, but in a perverse way, it was necessary.

Over the past fifty years, regardless of who was in the White House or in charge of Congress, no one has been able to halt the incessant spread of Progressivism in our institutions and the concurrent uncontrolled spending and growth of government. When a president as accomplished as Ronald Reagan was unable to do so, no future Republican president or Congress, short of a major national catastrophe, could ever fully turn back this tide, as they could not overcome the apathy of the people and the hostility of the media, academia, the entertainment establishment, and federal bureaucracies.

A long as the American people remained largely disengaged (the result of unprecedented prosperity), the damage done to the society as a whole and to the long-term financial health of the country was unknown to the vast majority. This indifference has begun to undergo significant change as the reality of the nation’s future comes into focus, but that reality has started to come to the fore only as the result of the policies being pursued by a far-left government. ...

While the damage to date has been considerable, it is not irreversible. In essence, Barack Obama and the present Congress won their offices at the wrong point in the history of our nation to achieve all their objectives; but by attempting to do so and overreaching, this left-wing government has given the country an opportunity to awaken from its fifty-year slumber and repair the foundation. Only a radical presidency and Congress could have accomplished this before it was too late to turn back the tide.

Read the whole thing.

The United States, Israel, and their Western allies have, so far, failed to take military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapon development program, but Eli Lake explains that does not mean that covert operations intended to at least slow production have not been underway behind the scenes.

Efforts to steer defective products toward Iran have taken a number of forms. For instance, according to a former Mossad operations officer who goes by the alias Michael Ross, in 1998, the Mossad and the CIA developed a plan to sell a supposedly helpful chemical substance—which would, in fact, gum up centrifuges over time—to Iran on the black market.

Then, there was the odd case of the Tinners, a Swiss family of engineers long believed to be a cog in the network of nuclear proliferators organized by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. In 2008, Urs Tinner admitted that he had been a CIA asset. And it turns out that he may have played a crucial role in an effort to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. According to The New York Times and other sources, the Tinners sold high-quality vacuum pumps to the Iranians and Libyans. The pumps are crucial for uranium enrichment because centrifuges must operate inside a vacuum seal. David Albright—the president of the Institute for Science and International Security and the author of a new history of Iran’s illicit procurement of nuclear technology, Peddling Peril—explains that, while the pumps that ended up in Iran and Libya were produced in Germany, they were also worked on by the Oak Ridge and Los Alamos laboratories. These labs, he says, modified the pumps “to bug them or to make them break down under operational conditions. If you can break the vacuum in a centrifuge cascade, you can destroy hundreds of centrifuges or thousands if you are really lucky.” (A senior intelligence official confirmed Albright’s information to me. It should be noted that not everyone agrees that the Tinners were the ones who sold these pumps to the Iranians and Libyans; Albright, for one, isn’t sure.) ...

But do sabotage efforts work? In late 2008 and early 2009, the iaea began to see a drop in the amount of low-enriched uranium (LEU) being produced at Natanz, the facility that lies at the center of Iran’s known nuclear weapons program. In the fall of 2008, its centrifuges were producing 90 kilograms a month of LEU. By the end of the year, however, the same centrifuges were producing 70 kilograms of LEU. To be sure, that number was back up to 85 kilograms per month at the close of 2009, and it has been climbing since, to around 120 kilograms a month; but those increases came after the installation of more centrifuges—all of which suggests that at least some of the machines were less efficient than they should be.

Ivan Oelrich, a nuclear scientist and the vice president of the strategic security program at the Federation of American Scientists, estimated in a study this year that the centrifuges are operating at 20 percent efficiency. “We know the average efficiency of the centrifuges is dismal. We don’t know whether it is because of the quality of the individual centrifuges or how they are linked together,” he explains. “We can’t rule out sabotage as one factor leading to these inefficiencies.” Greg Jones, a nuclear analyst at the rand Corporation, says the Iranians “are operating just under four thousand machines, but they have installed about eight thousand five hundred. Those nonoperating machines have been installed for many months. Why they are not operating is not clear.”

Among people I spoke to, there seemed to be a broad consensus that sabotage was, at the very least, slowing Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon. A senior administration official told me that there was evidence the Iranians are experiencing delays due to “a combination of reasons—some inherent to the nature of the infeasibility of the design and the machines themselves, and some because of actions by the United States and its allies.” Explains David Kay, “History says that these things have done more to slow programs than any sanctions regime has or is likely to do.”

However, the biggest payoff from these efforts may not come from the sabotage itself, but from the psychological effect it could have on Iran’s government. At the most general level, there are probably benefits to keeping Iranian intelligence officials paranoid and off-balance, simply because it can cause them to waste valuable time and resources. This appears to be happening. In 2007, for example, Iran’s state-run news service reported that the national police had arrested a cell of spy squirrels. The next year, Iran reportedly arrested a group of spy pigeons.

But the specific benefit of sabotage is that it makes countries wary of purchasing crucial materials on the black market.

John Maudlin looks at the economic situation and sees nothing but bad news piled upon bad news.

Unemployment is high and is in reality going higher if you count those who would take a job if they could get one. Incomes are weak. Plans to purchase discretionary items are falling. Housing is likely in for a further drop in prices. The stock market is not exactly booming. Treasury yields are falling, not from a credit crisis or a flight to quality, but because of economic conditions (deflation). Money supply is flat or falling. Prices are under pressure. The list goes on, and all factors are indicative of deflation.

As noted last week, the data suggests we could see weak growth in the last half of the year. Over two-thirds of the past quarter’s 2.7% growth was from inventory rebuilding, which surveys seem to show is abating as inventories begin to stabilize.

I was on Larry Kudlow’s show (links below) last Tuesday, and he gave me some time to air my views. My main concern, as readers know, is that we may have a weak economy in the latter half of the year and then introduce a large tax increase, which my reading of the economic studies on tax increases suggests will throw us into recession. Recessions are by definition deflationary. (Not to mention what another one would do to unemployment and the stock market!) With inflation at less than 1%, could we see the central banker’s nightmare of outright deflation? We very well could. I think that is what the bond market is saying.

Beyond the threat of economic destruction via deflation, we have additionally the reality of dishonest and irresponsible regulation.

“Why don’t you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.” – Frédéric Bastiat

I’ll finish with this thought. This financial reform bill should be thrown out and they should start over. So much has been tagged onto this bill that has nothing to do with reform but is all about political agendas. It is also far too vague. Essentially, they create all these new committees or empower the bureaucracies that missed it last time to come up with the actual details of regulation. For all intents and purposes, a small number of unelected individuals will be given almost total control to write new rules overseeing a huge part of our economy. No matter how well-intentioned, this is not something that should be done in closed rooms.

We need major reform, of course. And when are we going to get to Freddie and Fannie, which are totally ignored but will cost the taxpayer the most? Local Congressman Jeb Hensarling has it right. He estimates there are about 3 unintended consequences on every page of that 1,200-page bill.

Our leaders in Washington in action and thought.

2:59 video

Hat tip to Ronald Nadel.