Former Obama energy advisor warns EPA is being ‘hollowed out’

The agency is unnecessary as are so many. We mistakenly believe that it is only through regulation that positive change can occur. This is a false premise. We do not need more regulation; we need less, the politicians, the bureaucrats, the regulations only slow the process of the humanizing of the human race. 

The chart below shows this in detail. 

The Occupational Safety and Health Organization did not clean up the workplace, all it did was provide the politicians with a mechanism to accept credit for something they had no hand in whatsoever. And at the same time, it allowed the politicians to increase the federal bureaucracy and create a huge raft of graft and corruption via businesses funding politicians campaigns in exchange for favors vis-a-vis OSHA (and every other regulatory agency).

Markets are communities which humanize us - Politicians frequently slow or stop this process

From the cited article:

"We didn’t humanize capitalism, it humanized us. The wealth produced by capitalism allowed us to indulge our humanitarianism in ways not possible when so many were living on the edge of survival.

You can’t have 8-hour workdays, 40-hour work weeks, and no child labor, until the material conditions exist to make such changes feasible for a large number of people. Workers didn’t work long hours, and kids didn’t work at young ages, because employers held a gun to their head. And they didn’t do it because they loved to work hard, long, uncomfortable hours.

They, like us, would have preferred shorter hours, better wages, and better working conditions. However, when capital is scarce, wages will be low and feeding one’s family will require more hours and more hands on deck."

The fallacy is that the agricultural life which preceded this industrialization was a bucolic Utopia, as opposed to the truth that it was hardship, and privation, a hardscrabble life. This is the same analytical problem we see when progressives discuss the noble savage. This is nothing but a debased fantasy. 

"At the start of the nineteenth century, children were likely to be employed either working the family farm or in the early factories. In both cases, the household required the child’s contribution to its income generation in order to get by.

Historian of childhood Steven Mintz notes that wages of children between the ages of ten and 15 “often amounted to 20 percent of a family’s income and spelled the difference between economic well-being and destitution.” As Mintz also points out, “key decisions…were based on family needs rather than individual choice…[in] the cooperative family economy.”

Surely if parents of that era could have survived without their children working, they would have, as is demonstrated by the relative absence of child labor among the very wealthy of the time. But most parents simply could not afford to do so."

This wealth factor applies not just to child labor, or labor more generally but to nearly all aspects of society, and culture. As a nation becomes wealthy, the desires of the individuals change. These desires are powerful, and unrelenting. The result is that where republican governance, and individual liberty allow, the wealthier masses desire a cleaner, more secure home, then a cleaner, and more secure environment, among myriad other things. The result is better housing, then better air, water, and serious reduction in pollution of all stripe. This process is endless provided government does not sufficiently interfere with the process to derail it.

The quote below is one of the most important, I cannot say this more strongly.

"Evidence for the role of wealth rather than legislation comes from Clark Nardinelli, who shows declining child labor rates in the British cotton and flax factories for two decades before the first Factory Act in 1833, as well as ongoing declines in child labor in the silk factories up until 1890 even though most of the child labor laws did not apply to the silk industry."

No social change pursued by government is timely. The problem being addressed has been long solved, politicians are simply "piling on" in an attempt to scrape glory from the actual solution to the problem. The Factory Act of 1833 shows this since the problem was being handily reduced before the Act was introduced. The same happened with workplace injuries/fatalities in the US, which peaked in the early 1930s but only came to the mind of the politicians in 1970 when the OSHA law was passed. 

Notice how there is no immediate additional deflection in the trend line, and the later minor deflection immediately returns approximately to the prior trend. However, prior to the introduction of OSHA the trend was a long term dramatic lowering of the trend line, and the trend following was for the long term trend to continue. If one places a straight edge over the the period 1964 -1988 it shows no deflection. What were the results of OSHA? Few other than a birds nest of regulations. 

OSHA, and the Factory Act of 1833 helped politicians feel better about themselves, but did little to actually help the people they desired to help. There is nothing wrong with politicians wishing to help, there is plenty wrong when they do so by creating a thicket of regulations which slow the increase of GDP/wealth. By doing so they are simply slowing the actual process through which positive social/workplace change occurs, delaying progress, and delaying the humanization effect of the markets.

Or putting it another way, the politicians are a dehumanizing effect, a sea anchor in effect slowing the market's headlong rush to humanize us.

Questions Emerge About the Vietnam Veteran Status of Native-American Nathan Phillips

He attempted to intimidate and bait them into misbehavior, but they did not bite. Instead, they behaved with decorum, while Nathan did not. There is no need to subject these young men to further mistreatment by a man intent on inciting a confrontation. 

Suck it, Nathan.

Snowboarder falls after a jump and triggers an avalanche

By the end of the ride, I was fully buried with the exception of a small hole I could see and breath through. I've written about these avys before here at the blog.  The other one was much more dangerous and I was buried upside down about 8' under the snow with only a ski tip poking out of the snow. Brer 2 dug me out, thanks, bro!!!

Actually, he dug me out both times!

Trump could give RALLY speech instead of State of the Union address

Give the speech to the American people; they are the bosses, not the politicians. Trump should invite all of the pols to the speech. 

Soviet ‘destroyer of worlds’ uncovered deep in Polish forest

"The Soviet Union left a chilling legacy of the Cold War dotted across Poland – bunkers that once housed nuclear warheads hidden deep in the nation’s forests.

Experts are now uncovering new details of the once-secret sites. In the journal Antiquity, archaeologist Grzegorz Kiarszys argues that the crumbling former nuclear bases should be protected and studied because “they have the potential to increase our understanding of the general mechanisms related to such phenomena as conflict, totalitarianism and cultural identity.'"

Or we could read their documents and ask those still alive about these things! What a lunkhead. 

“Soon after completion of the bases, some documents were destroyed, and maps and blueprints were sent back to Moscow,” he writes, in Antiquity. “There are no known plans of the facilities in the Polish archives, no information about their spatial organization, field defenses, landscape context or any potential modification.”

Ask the former Soviets, many are still alive. Dude?!!!

Anyway, good luck with your "dig."

Increasingly Secular Nation Replaces Outdated Religious Ideas With End Times Prophecies, Moral Judgments

Progressivism is a dangerous secular cult. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: It's 'immoral' to have billionaires when some don't have healthcare

She seems to believe that the problem is the poor do not have money while the billionaires do, so we should redistribute the money and all of our problems will vanish. The woman is a simpleton who does not understand human nature at all.

Price's Law is a maxim it always operates in human endeavors, and it shows Occasional-Cortex's beliefs to be false. It is not about the money. 

Price's Law says in any human endeavor one half of the productive output will be produced by the square root of the total number of individuals engaged in the productive endeavor. So, for 10 people the square root is 3, for 100 it is 10, for 1,000 it is 32, for 10,000 it is 100, for 100,000 it is 316, and for 1,000,000 it is 1,000. What this means is that the number of competent, productive, hard-working people grows linearly, while the number of incompetent, unproductive, slackers grows exponentially. 

We know what happens when you eliminate or remove the incentives from the competent and productive and transfer the wealth to the unproductive. We watched this happen in the USSR, China, Cambodia, and now in Venezuela. The most shocking representations of this idiocy were the Holodomor in the Ukraine/USSR, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and the Cultural Revolution in China. All resulted in millions of democidal murders and untold horrors including survival cannibalism. 

This is what Occasional-Cortex is demanding, a redistribution which is highly likely to result in mass murder and myriad horrors. But she is too dimwitted to understand what she is demanding. She is a woman of no significant experience who received indoctrination, not an education. Regardless, an intelligent person would not gullibly swallow this bilge without careful examination. 

This clearly shows that Occasional-Cortex is not a careful person, but that she is an inexperienced, uneducated fool who is willing to throw your lives and your children's lives into an obvious hell. 

The fact that people voted for this fatuous twit says much about the people who elected her. 

President Trump Trolling Climate Change Activists Again

The crowds in middle America scream with delight!

DOOM! “…the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change” says Ocasio-Cortez

There is always a world-ending apocalpyse ten years away. Sometimes it is aliens following a comet or an asteroid. Sometimes it is acid rain, or a new ice age, or a demographic population bomb, or global warming/climate change/weirding/chaos, and sometimes it is God deciding to flood the world. Yet, here we are. Odd, no, we always survive these mythical apocalypses without so much as a scratch. 

A thinking man might presume the purveyors of these myths are little more than liars seeking attention or converts to their cult or both. I think "both" applies to the climate alarmism crowd. 

This woman has been wrong about everything up to now; I would not expect her to shift positions and start being right anytime soon. 

A short List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events.

Housing & Growth Management

The cure for housing unaffordability is to get rid of urban growth boundaries!