George Rebane
As a continuous lament on these pages, the country’s lack of technical talent is now reaching new lows. We hear that “On college campuses these days, the top nerds are getting a taste of what it's like to be star jocks. Companies big and small are going on school campuses to hire undergraduate tech majors, offering outstanding compensation packages and stock (more here). Meanwhile tens of thousands of PhDs holding degrees in latino studies and women’s public policy are on the dole, with more arriving daily. All of this is lost on the country’s liberal contingent.
Sex selective abortions are giving those feminists who understand things a bit of a problem. There’s a bill in the House that would prohibit such abortions done for the sole purpose of getting a kid with specified outside plumbing. It turns out that minority women are in the overwhelming majority who request such government sponsored genocide services. Since such killings are the most basic form of gender bias, what’s a dyed-in-wool leftwing feminist to do? Opposing the bill would be blatant hypocrisy, yet supporting it would deny the federal dole to clinics that do this kind of thing. And it didn’t help that someone made a video of a woman having a very understanding interview with a worker in one of those abortion clinics.
The descendants of Lenin’s “useful idiots” are still parroting the denial of government worker pensions as the main cause of fiscal failures of local jurisdictions in America. Now we hear that Mayor Rahm Emanuel has finally seen the brick wall after having gone splat against it in Chicago. As the WSJ reports, in Illinois “Many teachers don't pay a penny toward pensions but can retire at age 60 with an annuity equal to 65% of their final salary plus a 3% annual compounded cost-of-living increase. The state's pension bill, which has quadrupled in five years, consumes all $7 billion of additional revenue from last year's income and corporate tax hikes. Even so, the pension funds are projected to go bust in a decade.” So now that he has executive responsibility, the former Obama chief of staff is singing a different song titled “Illinois pensions are breaking my city.”
Meanwhile, panning more to the left we see that the Sierra Club has picked a new target with which to hamstring the country – banning natural gas for power generation. Now natural gas is beyond plentiful on the North American continent, and many times cleaner than coal. But converting coal fired power generators to gas and building new ones will not help to bring the country to its knees fast enough to suit these Agenda21 types.
Their new “battle plan is called "Beyond Natural Gas," and Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune announced the goal in an interview with the National Journal this month: "We're going to be preventing new gas plants from being built wherever we can." The big green lobbying machine has rolled out a new website that says "The natural gas industry is dirty, dangerous and running amok" and that "The closer we look at natural gas, the dirtier it appears; and the less of it we burn, the better off we will be." So the goal is to shut the industry down, not merely to impose higher safety standards.”
This is a serious threat because the deep-pocketed Sierra Club is funded by legions of good hearted, light thinkers. Through their lobbyists and lawyers they can do to natural gas what they have done to nuclear power. It is a terrible thing to mix government and religion.
Finally, those readers who discounted RR predictions of Geece’s default on sovereign debt, may next ignore what the markets are saying about Spain. The markets – both equity and bonds – are roiling about the potential effects of the on-again-off-again eurozone domino effect. Spain’s 10-year bonds hit north of 6.41%, while the relatively risk-free German equivalents are paying 1.36%. (That’s less than the 10-year US Treasuries paying 1.74%; what does that tell you?) Putting the Spanish and German numbers into our little probability of default formula, we calculate that the markets believe that a Spanish default within the year is 99.4% probable. Stand by for ram.
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