The Daily Gouge Archive, Wednesday, February 15th, 2017

On February 16, 2017, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Wednesday, February 15th, 2017…but first, we take time to mark the passing of a truly great American:

During our time in the Navy, we had the distinct honor and pleasure to know a number of aviators (Jerry Unruh, Bob Willard, Burner Bob Hickey and Gray Hutchinson to name but a few) we’d willingly volunteer to follow into Hell and back. Hal Moore was such a man.

Harold G. Moore, Jr.: February 13, 1922 – February 10, 2017

All the technology and advanced weaponry in the world will not make up for a lack of such leaders.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

At the top of today’s order, the WSJ points out the hypocrisy of…

Yale’s Inconsistent Name-Dropping

Several campus names are more objectionable than John C. Calhoun—including Elihu Yale.

“Yale University announced Saturday that it would change the name of Calhoun College, one of its original 12 residential colleges that opened in the early 1930s. Henceforth, the college will be named in honor of Grace Hopper, an early computer scientist and naval officer.

No sentient observer of the American academic scene could have been surprised by the move to ditch John C. Calhoun, the 19th-century South Carolina statesman after whom the college was originally named. On the contrary, the unspoken response was “What took them so long?”

Since last August, when Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, announced that he was convening a Committee to Establish Principles for Renaming—yes, really—the handwriting had been on the wall for Calhoun, a distinguished Yale alumnus who served as a congressman, senator, secretary of war, secretary of state and vice president.

Like Belshazzar before him, Calhoun had been weighed and found wanting. He may have been a brilliant orator and a fierce opponent of encroaching federal power, but he was also a slave holder. And unlike many of his peers, Calhoun argued that slavery was not merely a necessary evil but a “positive good,” because it provided for slaves better than they could provide for themselves.

You might, like me, think that Calhoun was wrong about that. But if you are Peter Salovey, you have to disparage Calhoun as a “white supremacist” whose legacy—“racism and bigotry,” according to a university statement—was fundamentally “at odds” with the noble aspirations of Yale University (“improving the world today and for future generations . . . through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community”).

…When you study the four principles Mr. Salovey’s committee came up with to justify a renaming, you can see why it took so long. The task, it seems clear, was to find a way to wipe away Calhoun College while simultaneously immunizing other institutions at Yale from politicized rebaptism.

Did the principal legacy of the honored person “fundamentally conflict” with the university’s mission? Was that legacy “contested” within the person’s lifetime? Were the reasons that the university honored him at odds with Yale’s mission? Does the named building or program play a substantial role in “forming community at Yale”? Readers who savor tortuous verbal legerdemain will want to acquaint themselves with the “Letter of the Advisory Group on the Renaming of Calhoun College,” which is available online. It is a masterpiece of the genre.

Is it also convincing? I think the best way to answer that is to fill out the historical picture a bit. Nearly every Yale official who spoke at Saturday’s press briefing had to describe John Calhoun (1782-1850) as a “white supremacist.” Question: Who among whites at the time was not? Take your time.

Calhoun owned slaves. But so did Timothy Dwight, Calhoun’s mentor at Yale, who has a college named in his honor. So did Benjamin Silliman, who also gives his name to a residential college, and whose mother was the largest slave owner in Fairfield County, Conn. So did Ezra Stiles, John Davenport and even Jonathan Edwards, all of whom have colleges named in their honor at Yale.

Writing in these pages last summer, I suggested that Yale table the question of John Calhoun and tackle some figures even more obnoxious to contemporary sensitivities. One example was Elihu Yale, the American-born British merchant who, as an administrator in India, was an active participant in the slave trade.

President Salovey’s letter announcing that Calhoun College would be renamed argues that “unlike…Elihu Yale, who made a gift that supported the founding of our university…Calhoun has no similarly strong association with our campus.” What can that mean? Calhoun graduated valedictorian from Yale College in 1804. Is that not a “strong association”? (Grace Hopper held two advanced degrees from the university but had no association with the undergraduate Yale College.)

…As far as I have been able to determine, Elihu Yale never set foot in New Haven. His benefaction of some books and goods worth £800 helped found Yale College, not Yale University. And whereas the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica praises Calhoun for his “just and kind” treatment of slaves and the “stainless integrity” of his character, Elihu Yale had slaves flogged, hanged a stable boy for stealing a horse, and was eventually removed from his post in India for corruption. Is all that not “fundamentally at odds” with the mission of Peter Salovey’s Yale?

…In “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald comments that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” First-rate or not, the evolving politically correct circus at Yale does not offer a lot of support for that proposition.“

Nor does it offer much hope for a return to reality on the part of Progressives anywhere in the near future; frankly, all signs portend increased hysteria.

Next up, also courtesy of the WSJ, Jason Riley details the conversion of true believer confronted by irrefutable facts:

An Antipoverty Veteran Now Wages War on Dependency

How Peter Cove came to realize that jobs, not government aid, offered the route to prosperity.

“Peter Cove dropped out of a graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison more than 50 years ago to enlist in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. These days, he’s fighting a war on dependency.

“We have edged toward a moral cliff where the shame of being dependent on government aid has been replaced by a breezy bonhomie for entitlement,” he writes in a new book, “Poor No More.” “We have moved from a commitment to serve the deserving poor to an assumption that all are deserving. And much of this rests at the feet of politicians trolling for votes by larding on the largesse.”

Mr. Cove moved to New York in 1965 to work for the city’s new Anti-Poverty Operations Board, where he helped to write federal grant proposals and determine which local programs were worth funding. Domestic spending had exploded, but quality controls were an afterthought. “At the time, we didn’t know what was working and what wasn’t,” he writes. Activist groups were demanding money for their projects and then conducting sit-ins and trashing welfare offices if their proposals were rejected.

“Soon the War on Poverty became transactional: politicians awarded lucrative contracts to questionable programs in exchange for votes,” (The good things in Liberal life NEVER change!) writes Mr. Cove, who noticed something else. “The government’s unprecedented expenditures failed to bring about the decline in poverty that Johnson had promised. Instead, they made things worse.”

Between 1962 and 2012, the percentage of the U.S. population receiving government assistance in the form of cash transfers almost doubled to 21% from 11.7%. By 2012 nearly half (48.5%) of Americans lived in households that received some type of government benefit, up from less than a third (30%) in 1983.

Between 1965 and 2011, the official poverty rate was essentially flat, while government spending per person on poverty programs rose by more than 900% after inflation. A 2014 Heritage Foundation analysis marking the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty calculated that “today, government spends 16 times more, adjusting for inflation, on means-tested welfare or anti-poverty programs than it did when the War on Poverty started. But as welfare spending soared, the decline in poverty came to a grinding halt…”

Your tax dollars at work…buying votes for Dimocrats!

And since we’re on the subject of Progressives and their bureaucratic henchman pissing away taxpayers’ hard-earned income, submitted for your perusal, Exhibit “A”:

Oroville Dam: Feds and state officials ignored warnings 12 years ago

“More than a decade ago, federal and state officials and some of California’s largest water agencies rejected concerns that the massive earthen spillway at Oroville Dam — at risk of collapse Sunday night and prompting the evacuation of 185,000 people — could erode during heavy winter rains and cause a catastrophe. Three environmental groups — the Friends of the River, the Sierra Club and the South Yuba Citizens League — filed a motion with the federal government on Oct. 17, 2005, as part of Oroville Dam’s relicensing process, urging federal officials to require that the dam’s emergency spillway be armored with concrete, rather than remain as an earthen hillside.

The groups filed the motion with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They said that the dam, built and owned by the state of California, and finished in 1968, did not meet modern safety standards because in the event of extreme rain and flooding, fast-rising water would overwhelm the main concrete spillway, then flow down the emergency spillway, and that could cause heavy erosion that would create flooding for communities downstream, but also could cause a failure, known as “loss of crest control.” “A loss of crest control could not only cause additional damage to project lands and facilities but also cause damages and threaten lives in the protected floodplain downstream,” the groups wrote.

FERC rejected that request, however, after the state Department of Water Resources, and the water agencies that would likely have had to pay the bill for the upgrades, said they were unnecessary. Those agencies included the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides water to 19 million people in Los Angeles, San Diego and other areas, along with the State Water Contractors, an association of 27 agencies that buy water from the state of California through the State Water Project. The association includes the Metropolitan Water District, Kern County Water Agency, the Santa Clara Valley Water District and the Alameda County Water District.

Federal officials at the time said that the emergency spillway was designed to handle 350,000 cubic feet per second and the concerns were overblown.

“It is important to recognize that during a rare event with the emergency spillway flowing at its design capacity, spillway operations would not affect reservoir control or endanger the dam,” wrote John Onderdonk, a senior civil engineer with FERC, in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s San Francisco Office, in a July 27, 2006, memo to his managers. “The emergency spillway meets FERC’s engineering guidelines for an emergency spillway,” he added. “The guidelines specify that during a rare flood event, it is acceptable for the emergency spillway to sustain significant damage.”

This weekend, as Lake Oroville’s level rose to the top and water couldn’t be drained fast enough down the main concrete spillway because it had partially collapsed on Tuesday, millions of gallons of water began flowing over the dam’s emergency spillway for the first time in its 50-year history.

On Sunday, with flows of only 6,000 to 12,000 cubic feet per second — water only a foot or two deep and less than 5 percent of the rate that FERC said was safe — erosion at the emergency spillway became so severe that officials from the State Department of Water Resources ordered the evacuation of more than 185,000 people. The fear was that the erosion could undercut the 1,730-foot-long concrete lip along the top of the emergency spillway, allowing billions of gallons of water to pour down the hillside toward Oroville and other towns downstream…”

Seriously…no funds to ensure the safety of the tallest dam in the country (an earthen dam at that!), but plenty of cash to piss away on a high-speed rail line from Nowhere to East Bumf*ck! C’mon, these clowns had one job!

And like almost every other government SNAFU, don’t hold your breath waiting for anyone to lose their cushy position over this incredible boner.

In a related item of bureaucratic ineptitude, this time on the other side of the pond, the WSJ‘s Holman Jenkins recounts how, like every other government-imposed mandate, the EU’s…

Dieselgate Is a Political Disaster

Typical of Western leadership was a policy of huge cost and zero benefit.

“Compared with the stricter standards applied to petrol cars, the average diesel sold between 2009 and 2015 emitted 19 times more nitrogen oxides.” – The Guardian.

“Contrary to usual practice, we’ll begin with the punch-line: less than 4/1,000ths of a degree Celsius. That’s how much warming might be spared half a century from now thanks to Europe’s decision, starting after the Kyoto treaty in the late 1990s, to switch more than 50% of its passenger cars to diesel.

For this negligible result, Europe got significantly dirtier air. Paris, on some days, suffers worse smog than Beijing. Though his methodology may be questionable, a U.K. government scientist estimates that thousands of citizens die each year because of increased nitrogen oxide and soot emissions.

The word “microcosm” was invented for Europe’s diesel snafu—a microcosm of the governance failures that are breeding political revolt in much of the advanced industrial world. Europe has gone overnight from pushing and subsidizing citizens to adopt diesel vehicles, to punishing them with taxes and excluding them from downtown areas. Britain is contemplating a scheme to pay owners to scrap their diesel cars.

Europe’s entire auto industry was led down the primrose lane of adopting a technology that now appears to be a commercial and regulatory dead-end. More than 70% of BMW and Daimler cars made for the European market last year were diesel. When honestly tested, one study shows the latest “Euro 6 Standard” vehicles miss their pollution targets by a whopping 400%.

Virtually everyone agrees Europe’s “dash for diesel” was a monstrous policy error, not to mention the proximate cause of the emissions-cheating scandal that has engulfed Volkswagen and other auto makers. Yet the overarching imperative today is to vilify the car companies and insist they do better at achieving meaningless reductions in CO ₂emissions, now by forcing them to build electric cars that customers must be bribed and pressured into buying. Not to be questioned, though, is the green agenda or the competence of Europe’s political class.

When a government conceit goes pop in such a disastrous way, we usually get reform. That won’t be the case here…”

Then again, why should Europe be any different than America…where it wasn’t the case following the disastrous debacles which were Challenger, Columbia, the Big Dig, the Gold King Mine spill, the Aurora, CO VA hospital…or any other of the untold thousands…perhaps even millions…of government-created disasters and budget-busting fiascos which have plagued the country since the dawn of Progressivism.

Speaking of scams masquerading as Liberal policies, we follow-up on an earlier item recounting the apostasy of once-redoubtable Conservatives Jim Baker and George Schultz with today’s installment of the Environmental Moment, as Stephen Moore recounts…

The Carbon-Tax Scam

“I have nothing but respect for former Secretaries of State Jim Baker and George Shultz, but come on, gentlemen: You’ve been snookered.

These two esteemed gentlemen are endorsing a tax scam that would be one of the largest income-redistribution schemes in modern times. It would do considerable and lasting damage to the U.S. The justification for the tax is that it will save the planet by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, but it won’t even do that.

The Baker-Shultz plan would impose on America a carbon tax, which would be a tax on American energy consumption. Since energy is a central component of everything that America produces, it would make the cost and thus the price of everything — and I mean everything — produced in America more expensive. It is a tax that only China, India, Mexico and Russia could love.

The tax is highly regressive, so the remedy that the two call for is a quarterly check from the Social Security Administration for every American. They call this a dividend. Somehow they have come to the conclusion that two really bad ideas paired together make for a good idea.

So let’s get this straight: We are going to tax the producers of the economy and then give the money to people who don’t produce, and somehow this isn’t going to negatively affect the economy. If that makes sense, then why not adopt a 100 percent tax on production and then redistribute the money to everyone?

…The best way to reduce global greenhouse gases is for the U.S. to produce more of our domestic energy, not less. We have very cheap and abundant natural gas (thanks to fracking), and we should export it all over the world. The U.S. has reduced carbon emissions more than any other nation not because of regulations or green-energy subsidies but because of shale gas. Let’s sell it to every corner of the globe, get rich and save the planet.