Tag Archives: Big Government

News

Temperature measurements plunge after Australia removes “adjustments”

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Satellite global temperature measurements 1979 - July 2017
Satellite global temperature measurements 1979 – July 2017

(Image source: Data from University of Alabama, Huntsville)

Of course the temperature measurements went down after the measuring process was adjusted to report the raw data.

The Australian reports.

Excerpt:

Recorded temperatures at the Bureau­ of Meteorology’s Thredbo Top automatic weather station have dropped below -10C in the past week, after action was taken to make the facility “fit for ­purpose”.

A record of the Thredbo Top station for 3am on Wednesday shows a temperature reading of -10.6C. This compares with the BoM’s monthly highlights for June and July, both showing a low of -9.6C.

The BoM said it had taken immed­iate action to replace the Thredbo station after concerns were raised that very low temperatures were not making it onto the official record. Controversy has dogged the bureau’s automatic weather station network since Goulburn man Lance Pigeon saw a -10.4C reading on the BoM’s website on July 2 automatically adjust to -10C, then disappear.

Later independent monitoring of the Thredbo Top station by scientist Jennifer Marohasy showed a recording of -10.6C ­vanish from the record.

BoM initially claimed the adjustments were part of its quality control procedures. But bureau chief executive Andrew Johnson later told Environment Minister Josh­ Frydenberg that investigations had found a number of cold-weather stations were not “fit for purpose” and would be replaced.

Several other temperature measurement stations are also receiving the fix to stop adjusting the raw data:

An in-house investigation that includes two independent experts has been called. The bureau said it rejected allegations aired in some media outlets that it had sought to tamper with temperature data.

It has been reported online that electronic smart cards were allegedly fitted to the BoM’s automatic weather stations, which put a limit on how low temperatures could be recorded in official weather data. The BoM declined to comment ahead of the internal review.

[…]On her website yesterday, Dr Marohasy said it was not the recording­ devices that were at fault. “To be clear, the problem is not with the equipment; all that needs to be done is for the smart-card readers to be removed,” Dr Marohasy said.

And this was not a situation where the government, which had been lying, corrected itself. Oh no! Challenges to the faked government data came from outside the government, as Bureau of Meteorology minister explained:

“The first we heard of the ­problem was in early July after (The Australian) approached the Bureau­ of Meteorology,” the ­minister said.

You might remember a recent scandal where it was discovered that scientists in the UK had been adjusting the temperatures to “hide the decline” of temperatures in their simulation code.

Here was the data before hiding the decline:

Raw temperature measurements before hiding the decline
Raw temperature measurements before hiding the decline

And here was the data after:

Raw temperature measurements after hiding the decline
Raw temperature measurements after hiding the decline

That second graph, with “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” was sent then to the IPCC to influence climate policy. I have no doubt that socialist governments were very grateful for this “evidence”. Just what they needed to get a mandate from the masses to control businesses and consumer spending were grateful for this hiding of the decline, and rewarded the scientists with many research grants. This is why we call global warming alarmists “watermelons”: green on the outside, and red on the inside.

If you’ve never heard of that Climategate story from 2009 before, you should definitely read about it.  Here is a good single post that explains what happened.

News

One million patients per week cannot get a doctor’s appointment in socialist UK

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The National Health Service is government-run socialist health care
The National Health Service is government-run socialist health care

What would happen if government took over health care, and created one of the largest bureaucracies in the world?

Absolute failure.

The UK Telegraph explains:

One million patients a week cannot get appointments with GPs, amid the longest waiting times on record, new figures show.

[…]The NHS figures show the number waiting at least a week to see their GP has risen by 56 per cent in five years, with one in five now waiting this long.

The pressures left 11.3 per cent of patients unable to get an appointment at all – a 27 per cent rise since 2012.  This amounts to around 47 million occasions on which patients attempted but failed to secure help from their GP, forcing them to give up, try again later or turn to Accident & Emergency departments.

Rising numbers of patients struggled to even get through on the phone, with 27.8 per cent of those polled citing difficulties, compared with 18.5 per cent in 2012.

[…]The survey of more than 800,000 patients – which is held annually – found worsening access to family doctors across a range of measures.

GPs said the NHS was “at breaking point” with patients increasingly giving up their search for help, even though their health was deteriorating.

But, I am often told by socialists that American health care is just terrible compared to government-run health care systems in other countries. After all, who gives you better service? Private companies in a free market, like Amazon.com? Or government-run monopolies, like the Bureau of Motor Vehicles?

Let’s take a look at this analysis by a medical doctor who is also a Stanford University professor:

Fact No. 1:  Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.[1]  Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom.  Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway.  The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

Fact No. 6:  Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K.  Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long – sometimes more than a year – to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer.[6]  All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada.[7]  In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.[8]

Fact No. 9:  Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K.  Maligned as a waste by economists and policymakers naïve to actual medical practice, an overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identified computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade.[11]  [See the table.]  The United States has 34 CT scanners per million Americans, compared to 12 in Canada and eight in Britain.  The United States has nearly 27 MRI machines per million compared to about 6 per million in Canada and Britain.[12]

UK taxpayers pay a lot more in taxes than Americans do. Is it worth it?

Honestly, who would you rather have running your health care? Doctors or unionized government workers who never passed high school arithmetic? The free market is best.

News

Welfare program usage drops 85% after work requirement reinstated

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This story is from National Review, and it really made me think about where all the money that I’ve paid in taxes over the years has gone.

Excerpt:

After Alabama reinstated food-stamp work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents, the rolls dropped by 85 percent.

[…]According to the Alabama Department of Human Resources, between January 1 and May 1, 13 counties in the Yellowhammer State saw their food-stamp rolls drop by a combined 85 percent. The reason? At the beginning of the year, those 13 counties joined the rest of the state in ending a years-long exemption from work requirements for ABAWDs — able-bodied adults without dependents — participating in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

On New Year’s Day, there were 5,538 ABAWD enrollees across the 13 formerly exempted counties; by the beginning of May, there were 831. That mirrors a sharp statewide decline, which began on January 1, 2016, when the same exemption ended in Alabama’s 54 other counties. At the beginning of last year, the state had 49,940 able-bodied adults without dependents on its SNAP rolls; by May 1 of this year, that number was 7,483 — a drop of 85 percent.

The article notes that work requirements on welfare programs were dismantled at the federal level by the Obama administration in 2009.

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed into law by President Obama that February, Congress “temporarily” suspended the conditions on ABAWD SNAP enrollees nationwide. The suspension was supposed to extend only through 2010, but no government initiative is temporary. Eight years later, ABAWD time-limit waivers are still in effect in at least part of 36 states; ten states remain entirely exempt.

The article also notes that Kansas (in 2013) rejected Obama’s federal waiver. The result? Welfare program usage fell 72%.

The article concludes:

The overall food-stamp population remains large: Forty-four million Americans — about one in seven — at a cost of $71 billion to the federal government last year. Compared to other categories of recipient, that of able-bodied adults without dependents is small. But more than savings is at stake in removing clingers-on from the dole. A free people does not depend on the government for its daily bread. Those who can work, should.

People who have jobs don’t need welfare, but these people were literally choosing not to work so that they could collect welfare. They could have worked if they wanted to, but they chose not to.

How do you think that people who are dependent on government vote? Do they vote for smaller government and lower taxes? All that Obama achieved by attacking welfare reform was to buy hundreds of thousands of votes from dependent people. But he didn’t use his own money to do this – he used mine. I could have used my money for my own life priorities, but Democrat politicians know better than me, apparently. My job is just to work to earn the money, but I’m too stupid to know how to spend it. Other smarter people who are better than me know best about how to spend it. And they spend it on buying the votes of lazy people so they can get re-elected.