Solar Blemishes VIII

Or Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.

This morning the Sun presented yet another editorial advocating for a public option in health care reform (or is it health insurance reform? I can't keep up with all of the semantic games). They included some statistics to help make their case.

As Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., explained so well to her committee colleagues, the reason to approve a public option is this: Over a 10-year period, she said, insurance company profits soared by 428 percent and premiums rose 120 percent while the average wage of an American worker nudged upward only 29 percent.

428%? When you've actually done some research, as I have, and know that the largest health insurers profit margins are in the low- to mid-single digits a number that large just seems too good (or bad) to be true. Turns out that it is.

The figure originates from this report from Health Care for America Now (HCAN). The claim that "insurance company profits soared by 428 percent" is very misleading. The information is contained on p. 8 of the report. HCAN merely took the 10 largest publicly-traded health insurance providers in 2007 and compared each company's net profit in 2007 to their net in 2000.

This is not an accurate representation of the growth of profits of the industry as a whole, or even how the profits of the 10 largest insurance companies in 2000 compared to the 10 largest in 2007. It is merely a reflection of how these individual companies grew during this time (many of them from relatively small firms). This "study" is rougly equivalent to saying that, since the New England Patriots won 5 games in 2000 and 16 games in 2007, that wins in the NFL increased by 220% during that time. It is an absolutely meaningless statistic.

When you look into who HCAN is or, rather, who comprises HCAN, it's easy to see why they would present such a misleading study. HCAN is a coalition of left-wing organizations, including ACORN, AFSCME, MoveOn.org, National Council of La Raza, SEIU, Center for American Progress Action Fund and many more. This is a conglomeration of leftist activist groups that was created for the very purpose of pushing the left's version of health care reform. The left dismisses their opponents as shills for Big Insurance and Big Pharma but an organization whose very reason for being, its raison d'être, is to advocate for a particular policy is considered beyond reproach.

Once again, the Sun editorial board simply parrots the assertions of liberal/leftist politicians, media and activist groups without even a cursory check of the facts. It's one thing for a politician to do this but quite another for journalists.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

The federal government has loaned a company backed by Al Gore over a half-billion dollars to make status symbols for rich Europeans.

A tiny car company backed by former Vice President Al Gore has just gotten a $529 million U.S. government loan to help build a hybrid sports car in Finland that will sell for about $89,000.

The award this week to California startup Fisker Automotive Inc. follows a $465 million government loan to Tesla Motors Inc., purveyors of a $109,000 British-built electric Roadster. Tesla is a California startup focusing on all-electric vehicles, with a number of celebrity endorsements that is backed by investors that have contributed to Democratic campaigns.

The awards to Fisker and Tesla have prompted concern from companies that have had their bids for loans rejected, and criticism from groups that question why vehicles aimed at the wealthiest customers are getting loans subsidized by taxpayers.

"This is not for average Americans," said Leslie Paige, a spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste, an anti-tax group in Washington. "This is for people to put something in their driveway that is a conversation piece. It's status symbol thing."

The Ugly American

There is a disturbing consistency to the Obama administration's foreign policy.

There are people around the world who will always hate or distrust us, like the mullahs of Iran or Kim Jong Il or Castro. Obama seems determined to befriend these mortal enemies. Then there are peoples, nations, and leaders which share natural interests with America, like Israel, Poland, India, Columbia, and Britain. Toward these nations and their leaders, Obama seems bent on being the very ugliest Ugly American.

To some on the left, especially among the academic set, there is an inherent virtue in those who oppose the US and an inherent flaw in those who choose to ally themselves with us. The actions and statements of Obama betray this very sentiment.

The Real War On Science

Anthropogenic global warming poses one of the greatest threats to humanity of any problem we may have ever faced. Actually AGW itself (or is it climate change?) doesn't but the political "solutions" proposed by its proponents certainly do.

I'm old enough to remember when the problem was the coming ice age. Whatever the problem the solution is to reduce our use of energy and slow or reverse economic growth. This despite the fact that prosperity has allowed us to adapt to and cope with the most extreme weather our planet has to offer. Whatever the problem environmentalists recognize the solution is always the same. It is as if their goal is to implement the solution and mold the problem to fit it.

At American Thinker, John McLaughlin dissects some of the so-called "science" that has led us to where we are today.

It seems reasonable to ask, therefore, how can a seriously flawed -- if not actually fraudulent --mathematical model linking production of the relatively minuscule amount of an atmospheric trace gas be used to blame mankind for major planetary climate change? The answer lies in the intense public relations campaign launched by environmentalists worldwide following publication of the 1997 IPCC report. The entire debate has been framed by presenting only one side to the maximum extent possible while demeaning any skeptics. The worldwide distribution in 2006 of the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth added to the simplistic polarization and politicization of debate.

One cannot ignore how the IPCC report initiated within the United Nations played into an anti-Capitalism agenda. The report became justification to launch a major campaign throughout much of the late 1990s beginning with the 1997 Kyoto protocol and incorporating numerous U.N. special sessions and other international conferences during the following decade. All focused on accusing the world's richest countries of being long-standing polluters who must bear the burden for cutting greenhouse gases. A special 2007 UN conference, dominated by third world countries, demanded that rich industrial nations curtail their economic growth by reducing CO2 emissions and use their wealth to finance cuts in emissions in other countries. As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown put it, the effort involved "making the issue of climate change one of justice as much as economic development."

Given these multinational political forces seeking worldwide redistribution of wealth, it also becomes clear why throughout much of the 1990s only that scientific work promoting the concept of manmade global warming received serious financial support from government sources. This led to the perception of a scientific "consensus." Numerous scientists and mathematicians complained that serious debate on climate change was being suppressed by the lack of funding for skeptical research and the systematic criticism of such skeptics as just "tools" of energy companies or paid servants of Corporate America.

However, as the work of McIntyre, McKitrick, Wegman, Carter and others has spread, scientific "consensus" in recent years has begun collapsing. A detailed review of 539 technical papers about climate change published between 2004 and 2007 found no evidence -- none --supporting specific "catastrophic" climate change due to man. In March 2009, a petition signed by over 31,000 scientists stated in part: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

There are many in positions of power who view the economic development and human prosperity that capitalism has brought as the real problems. AGW, or climate change, is the latest vehicle they have chosen to advance their agenda.

Dog-Feces Ice Cream

Mark Steyn is less than impressed with what the President served up at the UN.

For better or worse, we are defined by our differences — and, if Barack Obama doesn’t understand that when he’s at the podium addressing a room filled with representatives of Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Venezuela, and other unlovely polities, the TV audience certainly did when Colonel Qaddafi took to the podium immediately afterwards. They’re both heads of state of sovereign nations. But, if you’re on an Indian Ocean island when the next tsunami hits, try calling Libya instead of the United States and sees where it gets you.

This isn’t a quirk of fate. The global reach that enables America and a handful of others to get to a devastated backwater on the other side of the planet and save lives and restore the water supply isn’t a happy accident but something that derives explicitly from our political systems, economic liberty, traditions of scientific and cultural innovation, and a general understanding that societies advance when their people are able to fulfill their potential in freedom. In other words, America and Libya are defined by their differences.

What happens when you pretend those differences don’t exist? Well, you end up with the distinctively flavored ice cream I mentioned at the beginning. By declining to distinguish between the foreign minister of Slovenia and the foreign minister of, say, Sudan, you normalize not merely the goofier ad libs of a Qaddafi but far darker pathologies. The day after the president of the United States addressed the U.N. General Assembly, the prime minister of Israel took to the podium, and held up a copy of the minutes of the Wansee Conference at which German officials planned the “Final Solution” to their Jewish problem. This is the pathetic state to which the U.N. has been reduced after six decades: The Jew-hatred of Ahmadinejad and others is so routine that a sane man has to stand up in the global parliament and attempt to demonstrate to lunatics that the Holocaust actually happened.

One sympathizes with Benjamin Netanyahu. But he’s missing the point. Ahmadinejad & co aren’t Holocaust deniers because of the dearth of historical documentation. They do so because they can, and because it suits their own interests to do so, and because in the regimes they represent the state lies to its people as a matter of course and to such a degree that there is no longer an objective reality only a self-constructed one. In Libya and Syria and far too many “nations,” truth is simply what the thug in the presidential palace declares it to be. But don’t worry, Obama assures them, we’re not “defined by our differences.” Hey, that’s great, isn’t it? Yet, if you can no longer distinguish between the truth and a lie, why be surprised that the lie metastasizes and becomes, if not yet quite respectable, at least semi-respectable and acceptable in polite society?

I can't remember who I first heard describe the UN as a corrupt dictators club. My only problem with that description is that it is being far too generous to the UN. I do agree in part with Obama's claim that he was not naïve. It was not naïve, it was far worse than that.

As he was speaking to a group of people - the majority of whom practice real torture (the pulling-out-fingernails, electrodes-to-the-genitals types of torture) against people who've done nothing more than expressed a thought contrary to their own, on a daily basis, as a matter of the general course of business of the state - Obama mentioned the word "torture" only when speaking about his own country. The type of moral equivalence that Obama expresses is certainly popular in the leftist academic circles he travels in but is dangerous in the real world. It is precisely this type of thinking that has allowed the UN to be hijacked by the world's despots, thugs and tyrants.

The UN was conceived as an organization that would uphold peace and advance the cause of freedom and human rights throughout the world. But the countries that incorporate those values into their own governance are given no more of a voice than those who willingly and forceably smother them.

Thus, we end up with an organization in which Israel, the sole democracy in the midst of a variety of thugocracies in the Middle East, has been the subject of more scrutiny by the UN than any other nation. Its enemies in the neighborhood see the UN and its agencies as simply another tool in their ongoing war against Israel. Other dictators around the world are more than willing to assist in focusing attention on Israel, lest it be turned upon them.

The idea that President Obama, by sheer force of his personality, can change the culture of the UN and force it to adhere more closely to its values is absurd. The only way this will be accomplished is by the world's democracies forcefully defending and advancing their principles. This is exactly the opposite of the direction Obama is moving.