An EDF officer in the NYT:

You reduce, reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper. You avoid out-of-season grapes. You do all the right things. Good. Just know that it won’t save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global warming…

Leading scientific groups and most climate scientists say we need to decrease global annual greenhouse gas emissions by at least half of current levels by 2050 and much further by the end of the century. And that will still mean rising temperatures and sea levels for generations…individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action…

you’re willing to make real sacrifices. Sell your car. Forsake your air-conditioner in the summer, turn down the heat in the winter. Try to become no-impact man. You would, in fact, have no impact on the planet. Americans would continue to emit an average of 20 tons of carbon dioxide a year; Europeans, about 10 tons…

Every ton of carbon dioxide pollution causes around $20 of damage to economies, ecosystems and human health. That sum times 20 implies $400 worth of damage per American per year. That’s not damage you’re going to do in the distant future; that’s damage each of us is doing right now.

What an unpleasant life. Our advice: see below, for what’s it’s worth.

Next time try Lindzen, Spencer, or even Lomborg. Better still, put a team together as we suggested, and refer the specifics to them.

David Brooks in the NYT:

California was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize homes. So far, the program has created the equivalent of only 538 full-time jobs. A $59 million effort to train people for green jobs in California produced only 719 job placements. SolFocus designs solar panels in the United States, but the bulk of its employment is in China where the panels are actually made…Johnson Controls turned $300 million in green technology grants into 150 jobs — that’s $2 million per job…Evergreen Solar, the recipient of tens of millions of dollars in state support, moved its manufacturing facility to China before filing for bankruptcy protection. The U.S. Department of Energy poured $535 million in loans into Solyndra, a solar panel maker backed by George Kaiser, a major Democratic donor. The Government Accountability Office discovered that Solyndra had been permitted to bypass required steps in the government loan guarantee process…Solyndra announced that it was ceasing operations, laying off its 1,100 employees.

Don’t forget the 14 jobs in Seattle that cost a million and a half dollars apiece.

Paul Krugman in the NYT (HT: HA):

Let’s talk about the economics. Because the ozone decision is definitely a mistake on that front. As some of us keep trying to point out, the United States is in a liquidity trap: private spending is inadequate to achieve full employment, and with short-term interest rates close to zero, conventional monetary policy is exhausted.

This puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment. Indeed, in the absence of effective policy, that’s how recovery eventually happens: as Keynes put it, a slump goes on until “the shortage of capital through use, decay and obsolescence” gets firms spending again to replace their plant and equipment.

And now you can see why tighter ozone regulation would actually have created jobs: it would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point!

Good faith beliefs, bad policy. Raising costs in a business today can be a good thing if you produce a better product that people are willing to pay more for. It’s not good business if you produce the same product and it just costs more. That costs jobs, since being anything other than the low cost producer of a commodity product fritters away money that would have been better spent elsewhere.

Now you might argue that air with a little less ozone is a better product and that somebody, somewhere, someday might live a little longer on account of that. Who knows? You might be right. But the jobs are killed today, and the hypothetical person enjoying a hypothetically longer life is on a far horizon. The jobs are killed today, and no benefit is felt today.

We’ve argued repeatedly that fixing the economy is not that hard, and that is true. However, this NYT piece illustrates well that the vested interests in the academic-media-government-centric world are dead set against many of the kinds of things that are required to revive the economy, and it’s going to be a fight with them every step of the way. (The fight will not lack for amusing moments, however.)

Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi write:

CO2, a relatively minor greenhouse gas, has increased significantly since the beginning of the industrial age from about 280 ppmv to about 390 ppmv, presumably due mostly to man’s emissions. This is the focus of current concerns. However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1 degree C (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of well-mixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007).

This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5 degrees C to 5 degrees C and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so as to further inhibit infrared cooling.

Clouds also change so that their visible reflectivity decreases, causing increased solar absorption and warming of the earth. Cloud feedbacks are still considered to be highly uncertain (IPCC, 2007), but the fact that these feedbacks are strongly positive in most models is considered to be an indication that the result is basically correct. Methodologically, this is unsatisfactory…

Our study also suggests that, in current coupled atmosphere-ocean models, the atmosphere and ocean are too weakly coupled since thermal coupling is inversely proportional to sensitivity (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998). It has been noted by Newman et al. (2009) that coupling is crucial to the simulation of phenomena like El Niño. Thus, corrections of the sensitivity of current climate models might well improve the behavior of coupled models, and should be encouraged. It should be noted that there have been independent tests that also suggest sensitivities less than predicted by current models. These tests are based on the response to sequences of volcanic eruptions (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998), on the vertical structure of observed versus modeled temperature increase (Douglass, 2007; Lindzen, 2007), on ocean heating (Schwartz, 2007; Schwartz, 2008), and on satellite observations (Spencer and Braswell, 2010).

Most claims of greater sensitivity are based on the models that we have just shown can be highly misleading on this matter. There have also been attempts to infer sensitivity from paleoclimate data (Hansen et al., 1993), but these are not really tests since the forcing is essentially unknown given major uncertainties in clouds, dust loading and other factors. Finally, we have shown that the attempts to obtain feedbacks from simple regressions of satellite measured outgoing radiation on SST are inappropriate.

One final point needs to be made. Low sensitivity of global mean temperature anomaly to global scale forcing does not imply that major climate change cannot occur. The earth has, of course, experienced major cool periods such as those associated with ice ages and warm periods such as the Eocene (Crowley and North, 1991). As noted, however, in Lindzen (1993), these episodes were primarily associated with changes in the equator-to-pole temperature difference and spatially heterogeneous forcing. Changes in global mean temperature were simply the residue of such changes and not the cause.

Meanwhile from the UK:

CERN’s 8,000 scientists…have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised. The first results from the lab’s CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets”) experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth’s clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation. This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes…

Climate models will have to be revised, confirms CERN in supporting literature: “it is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours and water alone.” The work involves over 60 scientists in 17 countries.

Apparently some of these folks may be found in the 2% of nincompoops cited here. HT: RS

Paul Krugman in the NYT:

the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.

In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups…

multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations…

only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming…one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

So very sure of himself and his superiority to many of us. He’s fairly dripping with contempt for those who dare disagree with him. (And he shops for his statistics at the same store as Richard Cohen.) Final point: if this is what they say in public about those who disagree with them, what do you suppose they say in private?

A reporter watched Rainstorm Irene on CNN:

“We are in, right, now…the right eye wall, no doubt about that…there you see the surf,” he said breathlessly. “That tells a story right there.” Stumbling and apparently buffeted by ferocious gusts, he took shelter next to a building. “This is our protection from the wind,” he explained. “It’s been truly remarkable to watch the power of the ocean here.” The surf may have told a story but so too did the sight behind the reporter of people chatting and ambling along the sea front and just goofing around. There was a man in a t-shirt, a woman waving her arms and then walking backwards. Then someone on a bicycle glided past.

All the cable news coverage was deeply offensive. They were all overacting, all breathlessly saying the same stupid things, as if the viewers had never seen it rain before. Someone could have made a career for himself by saying into the camera, “It’s just raining. There’s really nothing to see here.” Now that would have been good TV.

The boxers or briefs moment was in 1994, and variations of it have continued ever since. CNN’s debate moderator continued with the fatuous and puerile questions in a recent GOP debate.

It looks like the time for this nonsense may finally have passed, and thank goodness for that. The leading GOP candidates are speaking very plainly these days about their opinions — the “monstrous lie” that is Social Security, the “radical environmentalists” who are preventing the exploitation of America’s enormous and untapped energy resources, and so forth. It is going to make the wise men in the media even more apoplectic than they already are, if that’s even possible.

We hope the moderator in the next debate tries the nonsense questions one more time, if only to hear the response he gets.

Daily Mail:

About half of both men and women in the U.S. will be obese by 2030…Obesity…will add an extra 7.8 billion cases of diabetes, 6.8 billion cases of heart disease and stroke, and 539 billion cases of cancer in the U.S. within the next two decades. Some 32 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women are now obese

Your government at work. BTW, we changed some numbers in the story above, but who notices these little details anymore?

Politico:

Eat less meat to fight warming…”Industrial agriculture is a part of the problem,” Gore said Friday during an interview with FearLess Revolution founder Alex Bogusky. “The shift toward a more meat-intensive diet”…and the reliance on synthetic nitrogen for fertilizer are also problems…Gore advocated organic farming and relying on “more productive, safer methods that put carbon back in the soil”…

The former vice president also criticized climate change skeptics, urging those who support curbs to greenhouse gases to “win the conversation” when it comes to global warming. He compared the struggle against climate skeptics to the fight against racism during the civil rights movement.

It’s remarkable that we’ve reached this point in our nation — those who consider themselves elite believe such silly things, and evince such contempt for those who disagree with them that real debate is impossible. What to do, what to do?

Roger Simon:

As of the last few days “Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America” has been making the rapid rounds on Kindle (#2 in “politics and current events”). This download is actually a longish chapter excerpted from a work-in-progress by Sasha Issenberg — “The Victory Lab” — about new, scientifically-based campaign techniques said to be transforming the American electoral process.

The chief architect of Perry’s strategies — and central figure in the chapter — is Dave Carney, a hulking three hundred pound, six foot four political pro from New Hampshire who once worked for George H. W. Bush. Said to be camera shy, if Perry wins, or even if he is nominated, Carney is likely to become as much of a household political name as Karl Rove or David Axelrod.

Indeed, if I were Axelrod, I would have been up last night poring over “Rick Perry and His Eggheads.” It’s filled with radical ideas about campaigning. Carney abjures such staples as lawn signs, targeted mailings, robocalls (Thank God!) and even, to a large extent, TV ads. He advocates instead personal appearances and flesh-pressing by the candidate, taking it to the people, as it were, something for which Perry clearly has a gift. This, in turn, generates a constant flow of media coverage on old and, perhaps more importantly, new media (Twitter, Facebook, even ye olde PJM).

Indeed, the MSM is almost purposefully disdained (up to a point, anyway). In his recent campaign for governor, Perry refused even to meet with the editorial boards of leading Texas newspapers, preferring to spend time with actual voters.

This strategy — which is counter to decades of conventional political wisdom — comes from research undertaken for Perry and detailed by Issenberg in the chapter. Several years ago Carney brought in a pair of liberal Yalie academics to test the efficacy of various traditional campaign techniques and came up with the surprising findings. This resulted in changes in tactics and the supposedly-dumb Texas governor won re-election big, twice.

One of the most interesting issues in current politics (for the right side of the aisle anyhow) is how to deal with a media establishment that votes 90% or more for your opponent, and often worships the ground he deigns to trod. How does a conservative candidate deal with that? Maybe by using the media’s disdain to generate street cred, at least of this stage of the campaign. It will be very interesting to see how this develops.

Richard Cohen, yes that Ricard Cohen, in the WaPo:

Perry waxed wrongly on global warming. He rejected the notion that it is at least partially a product of industrialization, asserting that “a substantial number of scientists have manipulated data” to make it appear that mankind — our cars, trains, automobiles, not to mention China’s belching steel mills — is the culprit. He said that an increasing number of scientists have challenged this notion and that, in conclusion, he stood with them — whoever they might be…

there are some scientists who are global warming skeptics, but these few — about 2 percent of climate researchers — could hold their annual meeting in a phone booth, if there are any left. (Perhaps 2 percent of scientists think there are.)

Perry’s quaint belief in the utter innocence of mankind when it comes to polluting our precious atmosphere might seem like a innocuous tick, a conviction without consequence. In this, it could be likened to the entirely wacky conservative belief of yore that the fluoridation of drinking water was a communist tactic…

just as important is the reason Perry clings to his belief. It’s not that he has studied the science, pored through the reports and all. It’s rather that global warming is global and reversing it would take global programs. This means that standards and limits have to be imposed by the much-reviled federal government — and it, in turn, has to cooperate with other nations.

This is how those on one side of the aisle think and, given the tone of moral superiority, it is a legitimate question whether any evidence could convince them otherwise; we’ve seen that before. As you know, the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere in recent centuries has been trivial, and AGW, whether it exists or not, is neither important nor urgent. But our betters think otherwise, and we’re going to be hearing a lot more of this in the days to come.

The other day we recommended some excellent and free educational resources. Now here’s one that’s been right under our nose but we were unaware of until just now: iTunes U. Interesting courses from places like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Berkeley. Don’t be surprised when the $550 billion in student loans created during the education bubble run into trouble.

This was advice from a senior government official about what to do: if you hear that the government plans “putting something in place that’s going to make it harder for you to farm, contact USDA. Talk to them directly. Find out what it is that you’re concerned about. My suspicion is a lot of times they’re going to be able to answer your questions and it will turn out that some of your fears are unfounded.” A reporter took the advice:

Wednesday, 2:40 p.m. ET: After calling the USDA’s main line, I am told to call the Illinois Department of Agriculture. Here, I am patched through to a man who is identified as being in charge of “support services.” I leave a message.

3:53 p.m.: The man calls me back and recommends in a voicemail message that I call the Illinois Farm Bureau — a non-governmental organization.

4:02 p.m.: A woman at the Illinois Farm Bureau connects me to someone in the organization’s government affairs department. That person tells me they “don’t quite know who to refer you to.”

4:06 p.m.: I call the Illinois Department of Agriculture again, letting the person I spoke with earlier know that calling the Illinois Farm Bureau had not been fruitful. He says “those are the kinds of groups that are kind of on top of this or kind of follow things like this. We deal with pesticide here in our bureau.”

“You only deal with pesticides?” I ask.

“We deal with other things … but we mainly deal with pesticides here,” he says, and gives me the phone number for the office of the department’s director, where he says there are “policy people” as well as the director’s staff.

4:10 p.m.: Someone at the director’s office transfers me to the agriculture products inspection department, where a woman says their branch deals with things like animal feed, seed and fertilizer.

“I’m going to transfer you to one of the guys at environmental programs.”

4:15 p.m.: I reach the answering machine at the environmental programs department, and leave a message.

4:57 p.m.: A man from the environmental programs department gets back to me: “I hate to be the regular state worker that’s always accused of passing the buck, but noise and dust regulation would be under our environmental protection agency, rather than the Agriculture Department,” he says, adding that he has forwarded my name and number to the agriculture adviser at IEPA.

On Thursday morning, POLITICO started the hunt for an answer again, this time calling the USDA’s local office in Henry County, Ill., where the town hall took place.

9:42 a.m.: Asked if someone at the office might be able to provide me with the information I requested, the woman on the phone responds, “Not right now. We may have to actually look that up — did you Google this or anything?”

When I say that I’m a reporter and would like to discuss my experience with someone who handles media relations there, I am referred to the USDA’s state office in Champaign. I leave a message there.

10:40 a.m.: A spokeswoman for the Illinois Natural Resources Conservation Service calls me, to whom I explain my multiple attempts on Wednesday and Thursday to retrieve the information I was looking for.

“What I can tell you is our particular agency does not deal with regulations,” she tells me. “We deal with volunteers who voluntarily want to do things. I think the reason you got that response from the Cambridge office is because in regard to noise and dust regulation, we don’t have anything to do with that.”

She adds that the EPA would be more capable of answering questions regarding regulations.

Finally, I call the USDA’s main media relations department, based here in Washington, where I explain to a spokesperson about my failed attempts to obtain an answer to the Illinois farmer’s question. This was their response, via email:

“Secretary Vilsack continues to work closely with members of the Cabinet to help them engage with the agricultural community to ensure that we are separating fact from fiction on regulations because the administration is committed to providing greater certainty for farmers and ranchers. Because the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction, it does not provide a fair representation of USDA’s robust efforts to get the right information to our producers throughout the country.”

Finally, this: “The response — eventually — from a USDA representative was that “the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction,” but rather the Environmental Protection Agency.” So the reporter followed up:

Thursday, 3:37 p.m.: I call the EPA’s main number, where the operator connects me to someone else. When I explain that I would like to find out information about regulations concerning noise, dust and water runoff regulations and their possible effects on Illinois farmers, I am told that Illinois falls under “Region 5” and given their number.

3:41 p.m.: At the regional office, I am transferred to somebody that deals with “clean air.”

“Have you gone through our website by any chance?” the person asks. “Our online information is very useful. Just in general practice, it’s good.”

I said I was hoping to get some information over the phone and am given contact numbers for two people: one that handles “compliance enforcement” and someone else that works with “water compliance.” I call both numbers and leave a message.

3:50 p.m.: Then I call back the regional office, explaining that both people were not at their desks.

“Normally Friday is not a good time — a lot of people don’t work on Friday,” the same person from earlier says. I mention that today is Thursday, to which they respond: “A lot of people take Friday off, but some people take Wednesday or Thursday off, too. And I know it’s the end of the summer, but people grab the opportunity to take a vacation before school.”

The person gives me two more people’s contact information: one who is an “environmental engineer” there, and another one who is at the “air and radiation division.” Both of them are also not at their desks, and I leave messages.

4:46 p.m.: I hear back from the “environmental engineer,” who tells me I should speak to the person at the air and radiation division, with whom I left a message earlier.

5:27 p.m.: The person from the air division calls back, who explains he wouldn’t be the best person to talk to about water and noise regulations, and because noise regulations are not federally enforceable, the Illinois EPA would be the place to call.

As for dust regulations, he says he would just need to know what kind of dust the farmer was talking about. “Without knowing what kind of source he’s talking about, it’d be pretty hard to generalize what requirements there are,” he says, adding that he would be happy to speak to the farmer from the town hall.

5:38 p.m.: At the end of the day, I ask EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan for a comment on our experience with calling the EPA to follow up on USDA’s response to Thursday’s story. This was his response via email:

“Below is an update on farm dust — while we do have statutory authority on noise pollution, I’m not aware of any pending rules or standards on that. “Farm dust: This is a myth the Administrator has debunked personally on several occasions. While EPA is mandated by the CAA to review air quality standards for pollutants like farm dust every five years, and that review is currently ongoing, we have no plans to put stricter standards in place. That review, at Administrator’s direction, has involved extensive outreach to farmers and ranchers”

Of course this might be a truthful response. But consider that it came after the first embarrassing story, and that it was a spokesman’s belated response to a reporter whom he knew was going to write another story embarrassing to the administration and to the government generally. Please remind us why it’s a good idea to give any more power or tax dollars to these buffoons.

Some guy said some things:

The economy’s changing, and the days when, just because you’re willing to work hard you can automatically find a job, those days are over. The truth of the matter is that everything requires an education. I don’t have to tell the farmers here, you guys, you’re looking at GPS and have all kinds of equipment and looking at all kinds of markets around the world. It is a complicated piece of business and you’re engaged in it. It’s not just a matter of goin’ out with a plow in a field.

And that’s happened to every industry. When I go to factories these days, what’s amazing is how clean and quiet they are, because, you know, what it used to take a thousand folks to do now only takes a hundred folks to do. And one of the challenges in terms of rebuilding our economy is that businesses have gotten so efficient, you know, when was the last time you went to a bank teller instead of using an ATM, or used a travel agent instead of just going online.

A lot of jobs that used to be out there requiring people now have become automated, and that means, us investing in our kids’ education, nothing is more important

Observations: (a) so the solution to joblessness has to wait until today’s kids become tomorrow’s workers a decade or two from now — how vapid and ridiculous is that? (b) this guy’s not responsible: he inherited the ATM problem from Nixon and Ford; and (c) the degree to which this guy knows nothing about American business and technology of the last hundred years is truly scary.

This ad appeared in August 1981. 140 million eh? Adding smartphones to other PC’s, the total is more like 3 billion today. As for “distribute this American technology to the world,” well………. The tone of the ad is annoying, given that Apple was such a pipsqueak at the time. But things seem to have worked out rather well for the company. Can’t imagine how things will look in another 30 years.

A former senior politician:

what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!…When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again…There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea!…It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word climate. It is not acceptable. They have polluted it

The lad is upset that no one seems to be paying attention to the planetary emergency. We have an idea about where this fellow might better use his righteous anger: make him ambassador to Syria.

Holman Jenkins in the WSJ:

All economic crises begin differently — this one began in housing — but eventually they morph into the same old crisis of forgetting what works. Think about the last big crisis of faith in American capitalism in the early 1980s. The panic was eventually crystallized in dueling Harvard Business Review articles by George Gilder and Charles Ferguson…

Mr. Gilder championed the then-emerging Silicon Valley paradigm. He quoted technologist Carver Mead: “We depend on the innovations of the citizens of a free economy to keep ahead of the bureaucrats and the people who make a living on control and planning. In the long term, it’s the element of surprise that gives us the edge over more controlled economies.”…

Mr. Ferguson, an MIT-based consultant, argued the U.S was dooming itself to vassalage unless Washington brushed aside small, poorly-funded entrepreneurs and concentrated regulatory favors and subsidies on giant firms like IBM, AT&T, Digital Equipment and Kodak.

Funny guy, Jenkins. The four companies he named have either disappeared or have been so thoroughly restructured or downsized that they bear little resemblance to their 1980′s incarnations.

The downgrade of Treasury debt by S&P crystallizes many of the strange happenings of the last two and a half years into a single event. Way back in 2009, over 70% of Americans already were “mad as hell” both about the wasteful spending in Washington and the media’s complicity in, and cover-up of, this scandal.

A majority of Americans knew that the $800 billion “stimulus” was a bad joke. They knew that giving insurance to 30 million additional people couldn’t possibly result in the promised lower costs. And they were disgusted with an establishment media machine that aggressively marketed the lies and defamed the majority that were on the other side of the debate.

Back in 2009 we explained that the deficits planned by this government were simply unfinanceable. There wouldn’t be enough foreign demand for Treasury debt at acceptable interest rates, and that taxing the rich at 100% wouldn’t do the trick. Moody’s had already warned the US about losing its AAA rating (and has kept doing so), and by the fall of 2009, The Economist was on board as well. Yet in 2010 the NYT was urging increased spending and opining that “the downgrade will never happen.”

In the fall of 2010 the electorate shouted Stop! at the top of their lungs, but even quite a few GOP senators refused to listen. Meanwhile, the media reacted predictably, accusing the majority of bad motivations on a wide variety of issues.

Suddenly it’s 2011. The government’s reckless spending has become a front page issue. The administration’s representatives in the media turn up the rhetoric even more on those who insist on tough debate and firm lines in the sand on spending. It’s a genuine and deep conflict of visions of the proper role of government; nothing could be more appropriate to have a fight about, but the name-calling only escalated.

And now there’s the downgrade. The “more spending” crowd has nowhere to go. Well, there are tax hikes of course, but that’s rhetoric more than reality. Spending is at least 80% or 90% of the problem even in a world with some tax hikes. But if that’s what the media has to work with, we’ll expect to see more about corporate jet owners and billionaires in the days to come.

Right now, we’re reflecting on the utter strangeness of the last two and a half years. The government should have been occupying itself with clearing the way for job growth and better finances, as we’ve outlined in detail many times in this space. Instead, the government piled on more and more regulations and added trillions of dollars of superfluous and counterproductive spending.

In a sense, time is the only commodity we possess on this planet, and we’ve just wasted a precious two and a half years of it on utter nonsense and worse. Disgraceful.

We encourage you to get acquainted with Khan Academy and Tech Guy Labs. They are a window into how university education will be likely changing due to technology. Salman Khan is a polymath who delivers hundreds, if not thousands, of fascinating mini-lectures on all sorts of subjects. We’d wager that more than 80% of college courses aren’t as chock-full of knowledge and as succinct and well-delivered as those of Mr. Khan.

If Khan’s formula is an excellent replacement for the college lecture, Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy Labs offers something of a replacement for the college seminar. Laporte broadcasts a technology radio program for six hours on the weekend, and offers all sorts of other tech programming live and on podcasts. One of the interesting features is his seminar — really, it’s a chatroom — with a thousand participants or more online during the broadcasts. In those instances when the highly knowledgeable Laporte doesn’t know the answer to a particularly arcane question, the hive often provides real-time answers to questions that come in live over the phone lines. We’ve never encountered a more well-informed group of seminar participants.

There’s one other improvement over current college practices that both Khan and Laporte offer — participation is free. College education in most cases does not deliver good value for the money. Expanding educational opportunities in this country by expanding scholarships is clearly a vastly inferior policy approach to lowering delivery costs. But politicians prattle on, do they not?