Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Abortion is unlike any other issue debated today. Millions of American women have aborted a child, and the pain, loss, and emotional need to justify what was done, both on the part of the mother and on the part of her loved ones, is strong and deep. This means that, in any debate, you may face an invisible thumb on the scale so that even the best logic will fail to persuade. The best you can do is arm yourself with the facts and deliver them in what you hope will be a winning way for your audience -- meaning you will need to make your case, in most instances, not in the language of faith or religion but in the language of the post-modern secularist. Arguing from Science The "classic" arguments from the other side collapse under the weight of science . Establishing the evidence of the beginnings of human life will ground your argumentation in science, giving you a much firmer foundation for additional arguments and preempting the charge that you are basing your position on fa...

I’ve been involved with the stock market since the early 80’s when I was a rookie broker with Merrill Lynch in Orlando. In fact probably the main reason I got out of stock trading and into programming was because I spent more time looking at the technical indicators than selling stocks and mutual funds! Back in the 1970’s legendary market guru Norman Fosback developed a “Daily Market Forecast” index that had an uncanny accuracy with predicting the direction of the next day’s market. Most of the items I have in this article were included in that index. There is a page on Yahoo Finance, http://finance.yahoo.com/advances   which provides most of these indicators daily. Another page on the WSJ, http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-tradingdiary2.html   provides the daily TICK and TRIN (Arms index) that are also components of Fosback’s indicator. I put together a console application that can be run daily via Task Scheduler to scrape these values daily and store them in...

When it comes to the alleged “fiscal cliff”, both supply-siders and Keynesians are in agreement that jumping off would bring tragic economic consequences. However, conventional wisdom is nearly always wrong, and I believe it’s wrong here. We won’t reach the fiscal cliff because the incentives that drive politicians ensure a deal. With the economy still limping, very few politicians will want to be on record as having voted to raise rates of taxation. Every member of the House of Representatives is up for re-election in 2014, a third of all senators are, and they’re not going to vote for large tax increases. Considering spending, though it nearly always occurs at the expense of growth, politicians exist to spend our money. We’ll never jump off the "fiscal cliff". For Keynesians like Obama and his advisers, they’re deluded by the false belief that government spending is an economic stimulant. So automatic reductions in spending by the feds would directly subtract...

“Fiscal cliff” is the popular term used to describe the conundrum that the U.S. government will face at the end of 2012, when the terms of the Budget Control Act of 2011 are scheduled to go into effect. Among the laws set to change at midnight on December 31, 2012, are the end of last year’s temporary payroll tax cuts (resulting in a 2% tax increase for workers), the end of certain tax breaks for businesses, shifts in the alternative minimum tax that will take a larger bite, the end of the Bush tax cuts from 2001-2003, and the beginning of dozens of new taxes related to Obamacare. These tax changes affect everyone -– not just “the rich”. At the same time, the spending cuts agreed upon as part of the debt ceiling deal of 2011 will begin to go into effect. According to Barron’s, over 1,000 government programs – including the defense budget and Medicare are in line for “deep, automatic cuts.” This bill was signed into law by Barack Obama on August 2, 2011 . Republicans should allow th...

When the President, his Vice President, his Secretary of State and others deliberately lie to American citizens about the tragic killing of an American ambassador and three of his staff, the nation has reached a point where decisions need to be made on Election Day. What disturbs me the most is the utter disdain for the truth that has marked the presidency of Barack Obama. It has been nearly four years of repeated lies about the steps that were taken to respond to the financial crisis; the so-called “stimulus” which wasted billions, and the literal explosion of entitlement programs. The administration literally seized control of General Motors and Chrysler, which were then in the normal process of bankruptcy, claiming to save the jobs of auto workers. What they really did was bypass the legitimate creditors and investors. They arbitrarily discontinued GM’s relationship with hundreds of auto dealerships, adding their employees to the unemployment lines. They then insisted that GM inve...

I grew up in a middle-class Jewish (but not religious) family where most everyone was - surprise - a Democrat, and voted Democratic. As I was growing up and into my teens and early 20's nobody really talked much about politics. It was basically, XYZ president or politician promised me this, and and I like him/her and I'm going to vote for him. Little if any critical independent thinking was devoted to "how" Mr. XYZ intended to PAY for whatever he promised. In my 20's I decided I needed to broaden my horizons, and traveled to Israel to live on a Kibbutz for about a year. I had a great time. I also worked hard (you HAVE to work on a kibbutz, period!). But I also learned that the kibbutz mentality is very socialistic, and not quite as capitalistic as many may think. I also learned a lot about the Jewish culture, morality, and history and how Christians and Jews are "joined at the hip". After all, Jesus Christ was born - and lived - a Jew. S...

Over the past several years, I’ve engaged in numerous debates with my liberal friends, and I think I’ve just about learned most of the tricks they pull at this late stage of the game. Here’s my short list of the “Favorite Nine”: 1) Attack The Messenger: Instead of addressing the argument that has been made, people using this method attack the person making it instead. This is particularly easy for many on the left who believe that almost everyone on the right is a racist, sexist, homophobic, Fascist, or some other horrible label.  2) The Bait & Switch: When a claim is made and your opponent refutes it, don’t try to respond, simply change the subject.  3) The Blitzkrieg: The goal here is blast your opponent with so many accusations that they can’t possibly respond.  4 ) Enter The Strawman: Tremendously exaggerating your opponent’s position and then claiming to fight against a position they don’t hold is always a great way to dodge the issues 5) History Will...

You’ll find plenty of blame to go around on this subject, but a little study shows that there were four or five major factors that caused the last big recession, and neither a single president or a single party can be blamed. First, the expanded mandate of Fannie and Freddie - The housing collapse can be traced back the Clinton administration’s pressuring of Fannie and Freddie to encourage more home buying. The Community Reinvestment Act — in which banks were encouraged to lend to people who normally would not be worthy of obtaining home loans — was especially pernicious. The Act had been around for a long time prior to Clinton, but the Clinton Administration turned a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities. This actually started way back in the Carter administration. Second, The FED kept interest rates too low for too long . Keeping interest rates artificially low led predictably to excessive credit a...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an intergovernmental body, set up at the request of member governments. It was first established in 1988 by two United Nations organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and later endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly through Resolution 43/53. Its mission: "to provide comprehensive scientific assessments of current scientific, technical and socio-economic information worldwide about the risk of climate change caused by human activity , its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences, and possible options for adapting to these consequences or mitigating the effects." Note carefully that the mission of the IPCC clearly states "climate change caused by human activity" as a foregone conclusion - before it even begins to do any scientific research! The chief characteristic which distinguishes a scientific method of i...

A graph titled 'Private Sector Job Creation' on the Obama-Biden campaign website… announces proudly that 4.4 million private sector jobs have been created over the past 28 months. But at the same point during the Reagan recovery, the economy had created 9.5 million new jobs.     Contrary to the Obama campaign's misleading claim of 4.4 million new jobs created, total jobs today are still half a million less than in January 2009 when Obama entered office.    The unemployment rate, which we were told would not exceed 8% if we enacted Mr. Obama's stimulus package…has never fallen below 8% during his presidency. The rate has averaged 9.2% since February 2009. After Bush's tax rate cuts were all fully implemented in 2003, the economy created 7.8 million new jobs over the next 4 years and the unemployment rate fell from over 6% to 4.4%. President Obama and his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Alan Krueger, brag that private sector ...