All Our Ideas

All Our Ideas is a website that enables crowd sourcing evaluation of different concepts - letting the wisdom and views of the many emerge in a valid way.  Historically organizational decisions have been taken by representatives or leaders who, 'surveying' their publics, drawing from their own experience, consulting 'experts' then apply their own judgment to the decision.  The problem with this is bias:  we tend to hear the views of people like us.  We tend to talk far more often to those who agree with us and think us to be wonderful fellows and avoid critics and those whose life experiences and perspectives are far different from ours.  This self referential 'loop' tends to reinforce our world view, rather than challenging it.

The result:  all groups tend toward group think and make poorer decisions than they would if they had a truly broad perspective.  Part of the answer is to use valid tools such as All Our Ideas to test the leadership's thinking far and wide.  Structured conjointly, the approach has been successfully used in consumer research for decades.  Internet enabled, it becomes extremely inexpensive (well free, actually) and easy to execute.

For anyone that truly wants to know what their public thinks, that is.

Here's an example that I ginned up for our Church:  "What type of music should we use during worship service?"

Palin receiving 'record number of death threats'

Ever since she was fraudulently tied to a schizophrenic's random act of violence by virtually every 'main stream' media outlet the former Governor has been deluged with vicious death threats.  It turns out that dishonest, eliminationist rhetoric does promote violent thoughts and actions....on the left.  How ironic.

Mark Levin wants to know when someone from the Obama administration or from the media, namely MSNBC, is going to step up and condemn the record number of death threatsthat Sarah Palin has been getting ever since the media assault against her began over the Arizona shooting. He calls out the hosts on MSNBC specifically and asks them what they are going to do about it.

Another example of fascist economics - The education cartel

This is funny-pathetic.  From NRO.

Finally, let me some up the idiocy with one last story. In order to obtain my “Professional License” in order to be allowed to keep teaching, I have to take a bunch of inane Graduate Ed School classes. In order to pay for those classes, I have to take on a part time job. The part time job I have to earn the money to take the classes I need to be allowed to continue teaching high school math? An adjunct math instructor at a local community college.

Obviously and egregiously fascist economics

The limitation of NYC taxi licenses is an obvious bad.  For consumers, for those who want to serve consumers and for the environment.  Yet it persists.  It's an example of what happens when a fascist state gives a rentier 'right' to an interest group in exchange for power, the 'right' is almost impossible to eradicate.  Some call this the liberal 'ratchet' effect:  things can go more left/state controlled but have a hard time going back the other way.  Rent control and ag subsidies are a couple other areas where this is true.


Just one more reason why we should be terribly 'small c' conservative about give the state more power and control over facets of our lives - we may end up making irrevocable decisions that are bad for everyone.

Except the rent seekers and the politicians, that is.

Hat tip Mark Perry.

Does BHO color his hair different on different days?

Ann Althouse thinks so and the pictures appear to back her up.  I can't believe that it's true, though.  Somebody help me figure this out.

And what's the first thing you notice — the difference between today and the speech he gave at the memorial? Right. Different color hair. Gray for the memorial, signifying the wise elder, the father figure. Back to dark hair to signify the vigorous young man, ready to forge ahead, solving problems, and restoring his party's electoral fortunes. 

Rethinking the President's speech

So where was BHO for four days after the murders when lots of his allies were doing everything but arraigning conservatives as accessories to murder?  Why did he wait until the blood libel had failed to speak out for 'civility'?  Byron York asks the hard question:

BYRON YORK: Rethinking Obama’s political performance in Tucson. 

“By the time he spoke in Tucson, Obama had let four days pass while some of the angriest voices in the media — his supporters — either blamed Republicans directly for the killings or blamed the GOP for creating the atmosphere in which the violence took place. During those four days, the president could have cooled the conversation by urging everyone to avoid jumping to conclusions, as he did the day after the November 2009 massacre at Ft. Hood, Texas. But he didn’t. Only after Loughner’s insanity had been indisputably established did Obama concede that politics was not to blame for the shooting. . . . Some Democratic strategists hope Obama can capitalize on Tucson the way Bill Clinton capitalized on Oklahoma City. Perhaps he’ll be able to, and perhaps he won’t. But he’s already trying.”

Victor Davis Hanson takes it as a sign of a little bit of 'growth' - getting through his rookie years.


VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Chrysalis Opens.

The new Barack Obama has learned not to offer instantaneous editorial commentary in the fashion of his past editorializing on hearing of the Skip Gates affair, the Mutallab bombing attempt, the Ground Zero mosque controversy or the Maj. Hasan mass murdering. 

Instead, the metamorphosizing president put his finger to the wind. He soon learned that his leftist base within 72 hours had turned off the public with its demagogic charges of conservative culpability for a deranged killer murdering the innocent. And so Obama summarily jettisoned his leftist scapegoating base. In dispassionate fashion, he figured that within hours the New York Times et al. would Trotskyize their earlier narratives, and most of the Left would cease the poll-killing (excuse the metaphor) “climate of hate” narrative. 

He was right. The progressive community snapped back into line, reminding the country that the desire for power and status always trumps ideology. . . . Will Obama 2.0 work? Perhaps, especially if conservatives ornate the Clinton ’96 analogy with their own Bob Dole in 2012. But all that said, the wages of hubris—nemesis—are not so easily forgotten. 

Only 9,098 of last 10,500 years warmer than 2010

I guess we need to find some way to make the world warmer.  Wait....oh, dear, my eyes have gone cross.

Hat tip NRO.

OBama Eases Cuba Restrictions

Bravo.  It is about time we treat Cuba like any other pathetic dictatorship.  Our opening up to them will be the Communists death.

NFL Season seems to be building towards some sort of climax - Onion

Experts concerned.  Hat tip NRO
NEW YORK—Though fewer and fewer games are being held each weekend, sources confirmed Thursday that anticipation and tension throughout the NFL seems to be gradually increasing, and the entire 2010-2011 season appears to be building toward some sort of momentous climax.

“Traditionally, there are 13 to 16 professional football games played on any given weekend, but last week there were only four,” AP football analyst Larry Lage said. “That’s right, four. And, perhaps more telling, the general consensus seems to be that those games were markedly more intense than usual, as if there were more at stake. Clearly, something big is looming on the NFL’s horizon, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what that is.”

“I think it all must be leading up to some sort of ultimate NFL extravaganza,” Lage added. “And I feel like it’s going to be on top of us before we know it.”

According to sources, a sort of “win or go home” mentality began consuming the league and its players just after New Year’s, with Jan. 2 marking the last time that all NFL teams played. The following week, the league shifted to the four-game format, and teams who seemed to have not performed as well throughout the year did not play, leaving many to wonder if their seasons were completely finished or if they would eventually be coming back for some sort of season-ending grand finale.

What is it about assassins and middle names.

John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, even Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme, for goodness sakes.  And now people are going around talking about Jared "Lee" Loughner.

How about giving them all the middle name 'du'?  As in 'nutjob du jour'.

What is the difference between Jared Loughner and the Weather Underground?

The Weathermen were more culpable....and incompetent.  Hat tip Instapundit.

ACTUALLY, JARED LEE LOUGHNER IS LESS CULPABLE THAN the Weather Underground. He’s just crazy. They were evil, and treasonous. It’s a disgrace — and, ironically, a testimony to the class privilege they embodied but claimed to oppose — that some of them occupy positions of importance today.

That's just crazy talk

Hat tip Instapundit

FELIX SALMON: The US won’t default, even if the debt ceiling stays.

In any given month, the government’s income dwarfs its debt-service obligations, which means that the government could simply pay all interest on Treasury bonds out of its cashflow. Greg hasn’t run the numbers on principal maturities, but I’m pretty sure that they too could be covered out of cash receipts—and when that happened, of course, the total debt outstanding would go down, and we wouldn’t be bumping up against the ceiling any more.

The point here is that the government has enormous expenditures every month, and debt service constitutes an important yet small part of them. If the debt ceiling weren’t raised, it stands to reason that just about any other form of government spending would get cut before Tim Geithner dreamed of defaulting on risk-free bonds.

So they could just . . . cut spending in response? No way, that’s crazy-talk!

There they go again

Barack Obama gives what amounts to the only rational speech on the Arizona tragedy given by any major Democrat (and then only after he realized that the politics had gone badly against them) and Professor Garry Wills gushes "Lincolnesque".  It is this sophomoric conflation of a mediocre Chauncy Gardener with Abraham Lincoln that got him into office and us into this mess in the first place.  The academic left has lost its mind.  Hat tip contentions.

During the 2008 campaign, the historian Garry Wills compared Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race with Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union address. Now he’s back at it, though he’s raising the bar a bit higher.

As both Alana and Rick have pointed out, according to Wills, President Obama’s Tucson speech “bears comparison with two Lincoln speeches even greater than the Copper Union address” — Gettysburg and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address.

Actually, it doesn’t.

I thought the president’s speech was a very good one. But the gushing Professor Wills really does need to get a grip on himself.

The New Republic: How the Media botched the Arizona Shooting

Ya think?  Here.

But sometimes the shortcuts produce a journalistic stampede at the worst possible time. That’s what happened last weekend, when 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner shot six people to death at an Arizona Safeway and gravely wounded many more, including Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The dominant storyline in the press—one that persisted in the face of all the facts—was that right-wing hysteria and lunacy had given rise to Loughner’s atrocity. Only on Wednesday night, when President Obama delivered a speech that effectively told everyone to cut it out, was the stampede halted (one hopes). But it’s still worth reviewing how the nation’s leading periodicals descended into such mindlessness.

Hat tip Instapundit.

Illinois: One party kleptocracy

A state that is in trouble has just compounded it by attacking the source of its wealth.  As it is south of Chicago the state is a wasteland.  I live in St. Louis and nothing, nothing happens east of the Mississippi river.  Way to go Obamaland.  James Pethokoukis explains here.  Hat tip Instapundit.

Now we have Illinois vs. Indiana. The Prairie State has the worst debt rating of any state in the union and heading into 2011 faced a funding shortfall equal to 40 percent of its total budget. Only Nevada, hit particularly hard by the housing depression, is as nearly bad off, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Yet directly east of Illinois is the Hoosier State with a AAA credit rating. Indiana faces a 2011 shortfall of just 9 percent and expects to balance its budget even though the economic downturn has struck just as hard as in Illinois. Under Governor Mitch Daniels, a noted budget hawk who may run for the Republican 2012 presidential nomination, Indiana has continually pared back spending. It now has the fewest public employees per capita of any state. And it spends half as much per citizen as Illinois.

But faced with a fiscal crisis, Illinois decided this week to raise taxes by $7 billion a year, jacking up the individual rate to 5 percent from 3 percent and the corporate rate to 7 percent from 4.8 percent. That the state didn’t instead cut spending dramatically is not really surprising. One-party kleptocracies — and that pretty much is what Illinois is — always want more taxpayer money, not less.

The Market Test for Climate Change

Joe Bastardi is a long term weather forecaster for Accuweather and also a climate skeptic.  More importantly, he's the guy that commodity traders hire to give them forecasts about future weather.  In other words, when money is on the line, they don't call the IPCC, or Harvard, they call this Bastardi - who is a skeptic.

Whereas a significant portion of today’s climate scientists are politically motivated, Bastardi has only one incentive in his job: accuracy. He won’t be denied tenure or publication if he ends up on the wrong side. He gets paid handsomely — he won’t tell me just how much — for long-term weather forecasts by traders who have an interest in commodities whose production is affected by the weather. And he still gets hired, despite his rising to fame and infamy as a global-warming skeptic. His credential, in other words, is that he’s passed the market test: “Because I know the physical drivers of the atmosphere . . . people see me on TV talking about things, but that’s the tip of the iceberg — I get calls from companies when money is on the line. They want the right answer, the best answer, the quickest answer. Do you realize how much money you save if you get the weather right?”

In this article he describes precisely why he's a skeptic and offers to run a 10 year wager on weather prediction:  will the world cool 0.1 to 0.2 degrees C as he predicts or heat up substantially as the 'elite' academic scientists predicts.  It will interesting to see the result.  One thing that I do know is that in previous bets like this environmentalists have consistently gone down in flames.

I think Bastardi is very likely to repeat the trend.  The Bastard.

Quninnipiac: Americans blame liberals more than conservatives for extreme political rhetoric

I don't think there's any real difference but it is hilarious to see this after the spectacular 'right hate speech meme' faceplant that the MSM just pulled.  It must be those effing Fox News bastards.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip www.instapundit.com

Us 67th in Public Sector Spending Efficiency

It isn't a surprise that we score far below Canada, Australia and New Zealand but Rwanda?  One of the curses of having the world's magic money machine is the grotesque waste that it enables.  Australia and Canada, not having a reserve currency must align ends with means.  It is this adult reality that accounts for their governments' superior performance.

According to the World Economic Forum’s GCR, the U.S. is ranked 68th in the world in terms of wastefulness of public spending. That is, 67 of the 139 countries in the index are doing a better job of channeling public dollars into productive activities, including Singapore, Rwanda, and Qatar at the top of the list and Australia, New Zealand, and Canada among our large English-speaking peers. Not surprisingly, to those of us who follow work on the quality and cost-effectiveness of public spending across countries, the northern European market democracies perform well, with Sweden at 12, Finland at 14, Denmark at 16, and Norway at 20. Switzerland is at 9, Holland is at 17, Germany is at 33. There are no real shockers on the list.

Incidentally, one argument that the statists make is that we are so inefficient because our Federal system causes waste and duplication.  I note that the top performers most culturally similar to us also have federal systems and indeed have systems that are in many respects more federal than ours has become.

Which is one more argument for breaking up our Federal behemoth and letting the states do far more.  For the states, not having magic money machines, must deal with the reality of limited means.  And facing competition from other states, must order their policies to be attractive to wealth creators.  Illinois is learning a bitter lesson about what happens when you abuse those that pay the bills.

And now we find ourselves engaged in a titanic struggle to see whether we can prevent the 'sons of Illinois' from taking their 'boffo' performance nationwide.  Which is strange, because it sure as hell isn't playing in Peoria.

Because Canada is too cold to flee to.  And Australia? well they talk funny there.

Conrad Black: The Political Class (both parties) has failed the nation

Connie makes the obvious point that for 20 years our 'leaders' have presided over failure after failure to deal with our problems and an increasingly vicious political system that is far crueler than anything else in any civilized nation.  The question isn't why there is political violence, it's why there isn't more (not that I'm advocating violence, I certainly am not).  But something must change and the fact that people are beginning to take charge in our elections is freaking large elements of our elites out - witness the scurrilous and factually challenged charges of 'excessive (right wing) rhetoric' by the NYT and others.  But change we must and that change must be at least a large as our problems which have been made immense by the Political Class' greed and fecklessness.

Bust it up, bust it all up.

London Guardian Moves Straight to Blood Libel

Noted without comment:

Elsewhere in the Guardian, the distance was bridged. Consider this heading (over a piece by Michael Tomasky): "In the U.S., where hate rules at the ballot box, this tragedy has been coming for a long time: The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords may lead to the temporary hibernation of right-wing rage, but it is encoded in conservative DNA."