In the 1970s, we were regularly being told to worry about a coming ice age. I can remember reading about it in Weekly Reader. Time magazine ran this story, right, in 1979. Here’s the introduction to a 1978 documentary warning us about it. And here’s a whole boatload of other predictions from the ’70s assuring us that we were facing serious cooling.
Then everything switched. The popular theory was suddenly that we faced global warming. We were told over and over again that the science was settled and decided. The Earth was warming up — and it was the burning of fossil fuels that was responsible. We must change our standard of living and quit using so much energy. …
The only problem is that reality hasn’t matched the predictions. Climate scientists — still wedded to their dear theory — are struggling now to explain why warming isn’t happening as their models predicted.
I don’t have a clue what the climate is going to do. I really don’t. But I do know that the people loudly telling us what’s going to happen have no credibility, as far as I’m concerned. When predictions change this much over a 40-year period, it’s impossible to have confidence in the people making the predictions. …
The world might warm up a bit. It might cool a bit instead. It’ll probably do some of both, if you want my brilliant scientific opinion. There’s not enough data. The current models can’t explain what’s actually happened recently. And despite improvements in our understanding of climate, we’re still theorizing about why certain things happen as they do. The idea that we have an understanding of how to predict what’s going to happen (and why) is looking pretty foolish right now.
What’s worse is that these people want us to reorder the entire world economy on the basis of their clearly flawed predictions. They keep saying, in essence, “Well we were wrong about that … or, well, sorta wrong … but we’ve got it right now.”
On the basis of that, they want us to use the force of government to require everyone on the planet to change how they live. That’s lunacy.
In a normal world, you could call that “lunacy.” In this world, you call it “politics.”
A group of first-term Democratic legislators is pushing for something guaranteed to not happen in this session of the Legislature — redistricting reform, reports WSAU.com:
Representative Mandy Wright from Wausau says the current law allowing the majority party in the Assembly and state Senate to redraw the political boundaries every ten years is flawed. “We would like to stop the finger pointing and stop the color game, and make sure that redistricting is handed over to a non-partisan agency that can objectively draw the district lines.”
Wright says the non-partisan Legislative Reference Bureau would be a good candidate to put the board together.
Iowa established more than three decades ago a non-partisan body to redraw the political lines. Wright says the Iowa model will help to reduce political bickering and save money. “To date, we have spent two million taxpayer dollars on redistricting, on the redistricting session that most recently happened. The bill that we’re proposing in Iowa cost the state approximately one thousand dollars.”
Wright says the likely outcome would be a voting district which more closely reflects the population. She says it’s likely to lead to less bickering between the parties.
Reform, however the proponents define it, is one of the oldest political themes. This country is the result of radical reform of how British colonies were governed. The Republican Party owes its existence to the desire to reform race relations by eliminating slavery. Wisconsin politics today was shaped, for better or worse, by the Progressive movement more than 100 years ago.
Today, and probably well before today, reform has been proposed first by those on the political outside. And in the dictatorship of the majority that is the state Assembly, no one is more outside than first-term representatives from the minority party. That’s not a judgment of the merits of their proposal; that is political reality. Given that the first and most important goal of a politician is to stay in office, when Democrats eventually regain control of the Assembly, this proposal to reform redistricting has at least a 50–50 chance to slip their minds.
To be potentially unfair to Wright and the other first-term Democrats, who theoretically had nothing to do with this, while their party controlled the Legislature, one year before the 2010 Census, redistricting reform was nowhere to be found on Democrats’ agenda, and for an obvious reason — Democrats wanted the ability to draw the maps themselves after the 2010 Census and 2010 election.
I support redistricting reform because of which party the redistricting process benefits — not the Republican Party or Democratic Party, whichever is in power in a Legislature in a year ending with the number one, but the incumbent party, which is always in power. Given the reelection rate of incumbents in an era when trust is in our elected officials is at an all-time low, the process obviously favors the incumbents.
In fact, I support many political reforms, although the reforms I support aren’t necessarily the same that Wright and her fellow freshman Democrats support. Dave Zweifel, editor emeritus of The Capital Times, may have supported returning to a part-time Legislature when Democrats controlled the Legislature, but I highly doubt it. Nevertheless, Zweifel is right, but in addition the state should be employing half or fewer the number of staffers of legislators the state currently employs.
Gov. Scott Walker claims, as did his predecessors, that the state budget is balanced. State law requires the budget be balanced, but only on a cash basis, not upon Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which (1) is more appropriate for an enterprise that spends $35 billion a year, and (2) is what the state requires of every other municipality.
Wisconsin has the fifth highest state and local taxes in the nation, and has been in the top 10 every year for the past three decades. One reason is that the state constitution includes no limits on taxing or spending for state government or any other unit of government other than the uniformity clause. Having limits on spending and/or taxes would force fiscal responsibility on Democrats and Republicans of any amount of legislative experience.
Redistricting reform, GAAP budget balancing, and restrictions on spending and taxation need to be part of the state Constitution. All of those initiatives can be classified as protections of citizens from government, whether that’s government taking too much of their money, or legislators creating for themselves or their parties lifetime roles as state legislators.
The U.S. Constitution, you see, is a document full of what the federal government cannot do to its citizens. The Wisconsin Constitution contains similar restrictions on government (in the case of gun ownership rights, the Wisconsin Constitution is superior to the U.S. Constitution). You’d never know that, though, from looking at not merely levels of taxation in this state, but from looking at what government does that government should not be doing.
I’d suggest the first-term Democrats in the Legislature — for that matter, every legislator, present and future — commit to memory article 1, section 22 of the state Constitution: “The blessings of a free government can only be maintained by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”
Envision this: You’re the editor of Motor Trend. And, naturally, you have lots of friends in automotive journalism. You see them at industry events, major auto shows, and press launches of important new vehicles, typically at exotic locations here in the U.S. and overseas. Now imagine inviting those friends to a bar after the first day of the New York auto show in April with these words: “Let’s design a dream car.” You’ll build a driveable version in less than six months, in time to be unveiled on a turntable in Los Angeles in November.
Sound improbable? Of course. But, believe it or not, this scenario transpired 45 years ago. Instead of New York, it was in London, England. The publication was The Daily Telegraph Magazine, and the editor was John Anstey. The car was a collaboration among auto journalists, Anstey, Jaguar, and the design house of Bertone, and was known as the 1967 Jaguar Bertone Pirana Coupe.
In March 1967, the increasingly powerful Anstey cooked up another wild scheme to promote his weekend magazine, gathering a group of motoring writers at that year’s Geneva motor show and asking them, in effect, “If you could build your dream car, what would it be?” The group of motoring scribes examined what was then the state-of-the-art in automotive design, culling elements from Aston Martin, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lamborghini, Lotus, and Maserati to come up with their ideal 2+2 Grand Touring coupe. But this was no mere pipe dream. After pushing the magazine’s senior management, Anstey actually obtained the budget to push the “dream coupe” vision forward. What’s more, he had the audacity to promise delivery of an actual car in just six months.
Sad to say, no such scenario presented itself when I was a business magazine editor. But the concept of this story was so captivating that I decided to create my own 2+2 as the one-man design team.
That, however, got waylaid by another idea — to create the ultimate sport utility vehicle. Not something like a Cadillac Escalade or Lincoln Navigator, but the original intention of the British Land Rover Range Rover — a vehicle that farmers could use for their daily work and take the family somewhere for the weekend. So it needs to be on- and off-road capable, but not Spartan.
Range Rover, you ask? According to Range Rover Classic, the original Range Rover was designed as a “Four-In-One car” …
“A luxury car”
“A performance car”
“An estate car”
“A cross country car”
… or, put another way in brochures …
“It is a seven-days-a-week luxury motor car for all business, social and domestic purposes.”
“It is a leisure vehicle that will range far and wide on the highways and noways of the world in pursuit of its owner’s activities and interests.”
“It is a high-performance car for long distance travel in the grand manner.”
“It is a working cross-country vehicle with a payload capacity of 1200 lb.”
… all by the definitions of 1970 Great Britain. (An “estate car” there is a station wagon here, but you knew that.) Today’s definition of “luxury motor car” generally does not include nonexistent air conditioning, rudimentary carpeting or a lack of automatic transmission choice, but none of those were available on the original Range Rover. Nor were four doors, until 1982.
I assume the Range Rover was developed because of a lack of British pickup truck tradition. In part for that reason, the Range Rover got some interesting uses:
The Range Rover became very popular as a police vehicle to patrol motorways (“freeways” over here).Fire truck. Notice the extra rear axle.
Think of this as the six-wheel Vista Cruiser edition.Before the Nissan Murano convertible SUV, there was …
The other inspiration is the Mercedes–Benz Geländewagen, developed by, of all people, the Shah of Iran. So obviously it had some military uses:
Canadian military, with the roof machine gun option.Norwegian military.Also with six wheels.
We’ll call our SUV the Cross Country, the former name of Rambler station wagons in the 1960s, because this SUV is intended to meet that purpose. What I have in mind bridges the gap between SUV and truck (with a specific retro design feature in mind), for those who might need either at some point.
(Unfortunately, since I can’t really draw, I have to describe, instead of show, what I have in mind.)
One goal here is to offer a few choices for the buyer. You can buy a Chevrolet Suburban, Ford Expedition or Jeep Grand Cherokee with any engine and transmission combination you like, as long as it’s a gas engine attached to an automatic transmission. GM and Ford no longer build pickups with manual transmissions, and the only Dodge — I mean Ram — you can buy with a proper transmission is the 3500 attached to a Cummins diesel.
The gas motor choice is GM’s LS3 E-Rod V-8, which is rated at 430 horsepower and 450 pound-feet of torque. Why 430 horsepower in an SUV? That’s 20 fewer horsepower than the answer-in-search-of-a-question Lamborghini LM002, the 12-cylinder four-door pickup.
The diesel choice is the Navistar Maxxforce 7, which has 300 horsepower and 660 pound-feet of torque. (The diesel was formerly used in Ford Super Duty pickups until Ford designed its own diesel. Having driven a Maxxforce-equipped moving truck, I am much more impressed with Navistar engines than with, say, Isuzu diesels.)
The manual transmission would be the ZF 6S700, which offers a low first gear and an overdrive sixth. The automatic would also be from ZF, the AS Tronic 700.
The Cross County would be a four-wheel-drive, not all-wheel-drive, vehicle most likely, for heavier-duty truck-like uses. I think independent front and rear suspension works better for handling, with (based on the Range Rover) lots of suspension travel built in, and, borrowing from the Corvette, magnetic shock absorbers with adjustable stiffness control inside the Cross Country.
Inside would have the usual SUV accouterments (air, stereo/navigation system, sunroof), with the extra proviso of a lot of gauges, which are always preferable to idiot lights. (The first Range Rovers had just a speedometer, fuel gauge and temperature gauge; the lack of tachometer is strange for a manual-transmission-only vehicle).
About that design feature: The first Range Rovers and G-wagons were two-doors. Four-doors are all they sell now. (G-wagons were available in two- and four-door versions and as convertibles.) You’d probably want at least an option for a third row of seats. But, you think to yourself, how do you get the utility of a pickup truck and the seating capacity of an SUV?
My first idea was to adapt the sliding roof design of the Studebaker Wagonaire and the GMC Envoy XUV. Those were huge failures in the marketplace, which is why despite seeming like a good idea, it apparently isn’t.
The roof of the first two generations (this is a 1977) of Chevrolet Blazers was removable.
The same was the case with the first Dodge Ramchargers. That, I think, solves the pickup-vs.-SUV issue. If you need the extra space, take off the top.
One reason I’m so bullish on Australia is that the nation has a privatized Social Security system called “Superannuation,” with workers setting aside 9 percent of their income in personal retirement accounts (rising to 12 percent by 2020).
Established almost 30 years ago, and made virtually universal about 20 years ago, this system is far superior to the actuarially bankrupt Social Security system in the United States.
Probably the most sobering comparison is to look at a chart of how much private wealth has been created in Superannuation accounts and then look at a chart of the debt that we face for Social Security.
To be blunt, the Aussies are kicking our butts. Their system gets stronger every day and our system generates more red ink every day.
And their system is earning praise from unexpected places. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, led by a former Clinton Administration official, is not a right-wing bastion. So it’s noteworthy when it publishes a study praising Superannuation.
Australia’s retirement income system is regarded by some as among the best in the world. It has achieved high individual saving rates and broad coverage at reasonably low cost to the government.
Since I wrote my dissertation on Australia’s system, I can say with confidence that the author is not exaggerating. It’s a very good role model, for reasons I’ve previously discussed.
This week, it’s Dick Brockman, the 31-year publisher of The Platteville Journal. Who, as a good newspaperman would, died in time to get in this week’s newspaper. (Media types appreciate that kind of irony and black humor.)
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 