What You Should Be Reading

Dean breaks down the lying on the left regarding the government shutdown and what the Republicans are trying to accomplish. A small excerpt:

You are suggesting the House Continuing Resolution that passed late last Saturday night somehow defunded or struck down the ACA. This is false. The House funded all government operations and merely delayed the implementation of the individual mandate by one year. If “delayed by one year” sounds familiar, it should because that’s what the President has done for a select few.
. . .
What the House did through the legislative process, the President did illegally through executive fiat.

KTCat has been following the slow motion train wreck that is Japan.  He predicts that government spending and taxing and money printing won't save Japan.  He also advises us to follow the (smart) money.

Poll numbers show the San Diego mayor's race tightening as Faulconer and Alvarez increase their name recognition.  The UCFW Local 135 called the house asking my son to pledge support for Alvarez.

The Head of Iran's cyber warfare program was found dead in the woods with two bullets in his heart.  Is this assymetric retaliation or an Israeli op or both?  An earlier post discussed the Obama's administration complicity in giving Iran cover for its successful attacks on U.S. Navy networks.  We are at war with Iran whether we like it or not, but it is convenient for this administration to deny it from the public.  I look more and more to the foreign press to get accurate reporting on cyber issues, as I don't believe that the U.S. press is willing to give up their comfy spot on Obama's lap.

Shinzo Abe Cannot Save Japan

Source: The Economist.

I should probably just end this post with the picture, but a little explanation would be polite.  Shinzo Abe is on the cover of this week's Economist.  Ironically, it is also source of the graphic above.  The Economist is all but endorsing Shinzo Abe's approach to revitalizing Japan, but unless something radical changes with its demographics, it will have too many old people to support with too few workers.  They admit as much in one of the opening paragraphs:

Pulling Japan out of its slump is a huge task. After two lost decades, the country’s nominal GDP is the same as in 1991, while the Nikkei, even after the recent surge, is at barely a third of its peak. Japan’s shrinking workforce is burdened by the cost of a growing number of the elderly. Its society has turned inwards and its companies have lost their innovative edge.

What are the Prime Minister's bold proposals?  More government spending in an economy with an already debt to GDP ratio over 200% and printing money.  And vague "supply side" reforms to be created by five different commissions.  This won't help, but to be fair, nothing will help.  Mr. Abe also proposes to reinvigorate national pride.  Unless this results in more babies; nothing he does will do much good, because his economy lacks workers and the old folks want their benefits.

A stable or growing population is a source of economic growth.  We see this over and over throughout the world.  When native birth rates fall, then immigration is the only other source of population increase, which isn't happening in insular Japan.

Here in the United States, immigration reform is necessary for the same demographic reasons as exists in Japan.  However, pulling in an unskilled immigrant population that is as dependent on the government as the elderly will do us no good.  We need skilled and wealthy immigrants.  The current effort in the Senate does not emphasize this outcome.

What You Should Be Reading

Dean outlines simple and common sense health care reform implemented by one doctor.

Could we finally be getting rid of that miserable hack Holder?

Nuclear Situation in Japan

A few people have asked me to comment on the potential for public harm and the reactor situation in Japan, because of my background. I would like to make clear that my experience is with an entirely different type of reactor. Further, I don't think we are getting accurate reports from either the Japanese government nor the power company that runs the reactors, making transoceanic commentary problematic. However, I would urge my friends and readers not to panic. Taking potassium iodide prophylactically is unhealthy and an unnecessarily risky. In the highly unlikely event that a plume of radioactivity could transit over the 5500 miles of ocean between San Diego and Japan, then some precautions might be called for. However, rain and natural particulate fallout would likely drastically reduce the effect of such a plume.

I am neither an opponent nor a proponent of nuclear power. Its use should be a business decision that trades off cost and risk, like any other project. The disaster in Japan points up the added risk of centralization of power production, especially near the coast. Further, centralizing power production puts risk into a fewer number of baskets.

With regards to the safety of nuclear power, I can only say that this earthquake was of magnitude 9, not unprecedented but extremely rare, or so says Robert McCaffrey in Geology magazine.

Given multicentury return times of the greatest earthquakes, ignorance of those return times and our very limited observation span, I suggest that we cannot yet make such determinations. Present evidence cannot rule out that any sub- duction zone may produce a magnitude 9 or larger earthquake. Based on theoretical recur- rence times, I estimate that one to three M9 earthquakes should occur globally per century, and the past half century with five M9 events reflects temporal clustering and not the long-term average.