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Deep in his past, Pickerhead was a UAW member. Not just a member, but assistant shop steward and member of the bargaining committee at a Hayes-Albion plant in Hillsdale, Michigan. We made warheads for 81 millimeter mortars and 2.75″ rockets. During Viet Nam, business was good. FOX News reports on the UAW’s golf course in Michigan. That’s the UAW Pickerhead remembers.
The United Auto Workers may be out of the hole now that President Bush has approved a $17 billion bailout of the U.S. auto industry, but the union isn’t out of the bunker just yet.
Even as the industry struggles with massive losses, the UAW brass continue to own and operate a $33 million lakeside retreat in Michigan, complete with a $6.4 million designer golf course. And it’s costing them millions each year.
The UAW, known more for its strikes than its slices, hosts seminars and junkets at the Walter and May Reuther Family Education Center in Onaway, Mich., which is nestled on “1,000 heavily forested acres” on Michigan’s Black Lake, according to its Web site.
But the Black Lake club and retreat, which are among the union’s biggest fixed assets, have lost $23 million in the past five years alone, a heavy albatross around the union’s neck as it tries to manage a multibillion-dollar pension plan crisis.
Critics call it a resort for union leaders that wastes money from union dues. …
Holman Jenkins has a idea the troglodytes in the UAW might understand.
In the continuing battle over Detroit, UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger doesn’t seem to get the picture. Let’s help him.
With shareholders virtually wiped out and debt holders taking a massive haircut, labor is the only stakeholder with anything left to lose. Even a friendly Obama administration will have to acknowledge this. But there is an alternative that would at least take some of the pressure off wages and benefits — and that’s freeing auto makers to build cars for a profit rather than to meet regulatory mandates.
Like all regulatory schemes, Congress’s hallowed Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules froze in place a conception of the auto industry as it appeared to the simple minds of Congress in the early 1970s, when three manufacturers dominated the U.S. market, making full lines of vehicles. Today, more than 25 companies sell vehicles here, and the corollary of such diversity, normally, is specialization.
The Big Three, left to their own devices, would surely specialize in those vehicles on which they make money — i.e., those with hefty price tags and markups relative to their man-hour content. Even at the peak of gas prices, half the vehicles sold in the U.S. were light trucks. In November, amid a collapsed home construction industry and with $4 gasoline fresh in mind, what were the two top sellers? Pickups by Ford and Chevy — and the Dodge Ram was No. 7. …
Christopher Booker of the Telegraph, UK says 2008 was the year global warming was disproved.
… Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise. …
Spengler says there are not enough young people anymore.
… In the mid-1980s, America was young, and was getting younger. Its ratio of younger (25-50) to older (50-65) workers peaked in the mid-1990s, when it had 1.5 citizens aged 25-50 for every one citizen aged 50-64. Those were heady times. The children of the baby boomers were happy to work for stock options, live on pizza, and spent 20 hours a day in a loft launching an Internet startup. Joining a startup was a rite of passage for bright young college graduates, and the exuberant young people of America momentarily persuaded the world that they had discovered a fountain of youth.
Ten years later, the number of aging workers and young workers is about even. The young programmer who worked for stock options during the 1990s still owns them, and all of them are worthless. He or she is pushing 40, with teenaged children who need money for college.
Youth needs leverage. The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, which launched the quarter-century expansion of 1983-2007, rested on three kinds of leverage: home mortgages, junk bonds and leveraged buyouts. Turning mortgages into mortgage-backed securities made it easy for young families to buy homes and easy for entrepreneurs to draw working capital from the value of their homes. Junk bonds allowed emerging companies without the balance-sheet strength of their big competitors to enter the market and take on entrenched interests. And leveraged buyouts allowed clever upstarts to evict stodgy managers and make capital more efficient. The financiers who created these markets were giants.
The mortgage-backed securities market allowed savers in the aging rustbelt states of America to lend money to young families in the sunbelt. Later, it allowed investors around the world to invest in American homes. Federal agencies that standardized and guaranteed US mortgages made securitization possible, by creating a generic form of mortgage that could be bundled into securities. …
David Warren looks around for a man of the year.
… As noted above, global warming alarmists are going out of fashion, owing to the collapse of their tenuous evidence, and the global cooling alarmists have yet to organize their fans. This eliminates all the leading climatologists except Reid Bryson.
The pioneer of modern climatology, Prof. Bryson has been blowing holes in man-made climate-change alarms for decades.
He is the man who replied to the “retreat of the Alpine glaciers” hysteria by asking, “And what did you find when the snow melted?” (A silver mine, with all the tools stacked up for the next spring: i.e. the glacier was recent.) He should have been man of the year around 1999.
Among other leading “scientists and thinkers,” it is the same story, endlessly repeated. The people who make the lists turn out, nearly invariably, to be wrong about nearly everything; the people who have been fairly consistently right never make the lists.
It was typical of the year in which the Large Hadron Collider debuted as the most expensive dysfunctional white elephant in history, that the Nobel physics prize went to three particle physicists. …
John Stossel says of course Caroline Kennedy is qualified.
… Senators bloviate on anything and everything, regardless of whether they know what they are talking about. This is an important part of the job. Senators must sound as though they know how to create jobs, what kind of energy the United States should use, how to make health care affordable, how to plan education for 75 million unique children, and so on. They don’t have to actually know how to do these things. They just have to sound as though they know. I know very little about Caroline Kennedy, but I’m sure she’s capable of making pronouncements about how progressive polices will save the world.
Another thing senators do is cast votes to spend other people’s money. Caroline Kennedy should be very good at that. She grew up in a wealthy family. Her stepfather was one of the richest men in the world. Now she’s married to a wealthy businessman. She’s had lots of practice spending other people’s money. She’d be good at it. …
For Christmas Anne Applebaum received a CD of presidential speeches.
… Who remembers now that a 1983 speech by Reagan, forever famous because he used it to call the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” also contained the following:
“Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal. The glory of this land has been its capacity for transcending the moral evils of our past. For example, the long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights, once a source of disunity and civil war, is now a point of pride for all Americans. We must never go back.”
In that one paragraph, there are echoes of John F. Kennedy (“Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect”) as well as of King, who so brilliantly appropriated the language of America’s founding documents and made them into an irrefutable argument for civil rights:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ ” …
Thomas Sowell says there’s much to like in Malcolm Gladwell’s new book.
“Outliers” are not politicians who lie even more than other politicians. It is a term used by statisticians to describe some data that are far away from the average— data on seven-foot women or freezing temperatures in Los Angeles, for example.
“Outliers” is also the title of a very insightful and very readable new book by best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell . The book’s subtitle is “The Story of Success.” It is a study of the factors behind people who have had spectacular achievements in fields ranging from hockey to computers.
One of the first groups of outliers studied are top-level Canadian hockey players, a wholly disproportionate number of whom were born in the first three months of the year. Moreover, the same pattern was found among top Czech hockey players.
The key factor turned out to be a fixed date— January 1st in both countries— for selecting young boys to be placed on special hockey teams that were the elite of their age groups.
Players born in January were the most over-represented among the top hockey players in both countries. As young boys, they would have just missed the selection cut-off for that year and would have had another year to grow before the next selection date. ..
Chris Hitchens has fun with Bill Maher and his morons.