In the March 15, 2010 edition of Time Magazine”, in the Briefing section, they have a short article on ice calving in Antarctica. In part, the article states:
Owing in part to warming global temperatures, Antarctica is loosing ice all the time–about 24 cu. mi (100 cu km) worth each year–a development that is slowly but steadily raising global sea levels, and scientists worry that climate change could suddenly accelerate that vast melting. But the models indicate that ice loss should be happening on the western edge of the continent, where it is warmer, not in the much cooler east. No doubt there are complicated scientific reasons for this…
And they call this journalism? “Complicated scientific reasons”? Why not do a few minutes of research, or just use a little common sense, and you can see how many problems the brief quotation above has in it. They are correct when they point out that “Antarctica is loosing ice all the time”, but they should have added “and it always has been”. Think about it. It is cold in Antarctica. Very cold. Temperatures of 50 below zero (and at that temperature, who cares whether we are talking Fahrenheit or Celsius; it is about the same) are common. A few degrees, or even a few 10s of degrees of “global warming” is not going to make any difference. Water is still going to be frozen! But, as it snows over Antarctica, the ice sheet, which is thousands of feet thick in most places, gets thicker. As it gets thicker, the pressure from the sheer weight of the snow presses the snow outwards. Eventually, that ice sheet meets the ocean. As it get further pressed out from the pressure of the weight of the ice, it eventually is squeezed out over the water, and breaks off, or calves, to form an ice berg. The best analogy that I can think of is to think of a mass of pie dough. As you press on it from the top with your hands or a rolling pin, it expands out horizontally. If you did that at the edge of your counter, as the dough expands out over the edge of the counter, just like the ice sheet in Antarctica expands out beyond the actual land mass of the Antarctica, a section of the dough will “calve” and fall on the floor. That process is actually due to cold temperatures causing ice to continue to build up, not melting as we are lead to believe by the warmingistas. And, that is why the “models” fail.
Also, here is another glaring example of the problems with the holy models. Global warmingistas base their whole agenda on their “models”. But, time and again, the “models” fail to predict reality. That is because the “models” are wrong! The “models” predict that Antarctica will loose ice on the warmer western edge, but the “models” fail, because the most rapid ice loss is on the cooler eastern edge of the continent. The “models” have predicted a steady rise in global temperature due to CO2, but, as even Phil Jones, the disgraced former head of the CRU, admits, temperatures have not been rising for the last 15 years. The “models” also predict certain temperature profiles in the atmosphere at certain latitudes due to CO2, but multiple data sets clearly show that not to be the case. Rather than trying to correct their models, the “scientists” state that the measurements must be wrong!
And, of course, if the “models” were correct, they would not be called “models”. They would be referred to as “the model”.
I realize I may be giving democrats too much credit, when I say that even they should be able to understand this story and get the message. But, given the total collapse of the education system in the United States since the inception of the Department of Education in the early 1980’s, and the control of the education system by the democrats and their transformation of a system of education to a system of indoctrination, even this simple story may go over the heads of many Americans. But, for those masses that couldn’t be bothered to read Atlas Shrugged, here is a very simple story that explains how the US income tax system works.
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers, he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!’
‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’
‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics, University of Georgia
For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
I’ve been ranting for quite some time now that our government is insane, selling sophisticated weapons to Islamic states. You would think we would have learned our lessons over the years. We befriended Turkey, allowed them into NATO, and now they are renouncing secularism, and returning to Islam and Sharia law. They are even siding with Iran against the necessary attack on Iranian nuclear facilities by the United States or Israel! How stupid were we to sell them modern weapons, that now might be turned against us and/or Israel, as Muslims further their attempts to re-establish the Ottoman Empire?
Then, of course, we sold millions of dollars worth of weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan back in the 80’s. Of course, that was ok, because the Taliban, even though not very likable, were fighting the Russians. And, as they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Oops, I guess that was not the best decision, since they are now using those weapons, quite effectively, against us and the Russians are (at least sort of, sometimes) our friend.
Then, we announced a while back that we were going to sell the most advanced F-16 fighters to Pakistan. That would be the same Pakistan that has nuclear weapons which may soon fall into the hands of those same Taliban. Well, not just the Taliban. Given the close ties between the Pakistani military and the ISI with both the Taliban and al Qaeda, those weapons could well fall into the hands of bin Laden. In fact, if things keep going like they are in that part of the world, bin Laden might be elected President of Pakistan after the Taliban and/or al Qaeda take over the country. If an election was held, he would certainly win in a landslide over any of the current, or past, leadership of Pakistan. (Or Afghanistan, for that matter.)
Air Force spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jeffry Glenn said the United States delivered 1,000 MK-82 500-pound bombs to Pakistan last month, and was considering additional requests for those bombs and more laser-guided tail kits.
Glenn said an initial batch of 700 GBU-12 and 300 GBU-10 Paveway laser-guided bomb kits built by Lockheed and Raytheon Co (RTN.N) would be delivered to Pakistan this month, allowing the Pakistani air force to outfit the MK-82 bombs delivered last month with sophisticated technology that allows better targeting of the weapons.
Those are to go with the shiny new F-16’s that we have sold to them. What could possibly go wrong? After all, Pakistan is our friend, just like Saudi Arabia! (It’s only an unfortunate coincidence that the vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens.)
This is not only spitting in the face of one of our increasingly few and genuine friends in the world, India, but it should scare any sensible non-Muslim, including Americans, to death! Imagine if Iran had such weapons! And, lets face it, the only real difference between Iran and Pakistan is that Iran is Shite and Pakistan is Sunni. From a purely geopolitical/economic point of view, Iran would be a more likely ally, since they have oil, which we value, while Pakistan, quite frankly, has nothing of value to offer. They are both Islamic nations, and they both hate us because we are not Muslims. If our thinking was that Pakistan would use the weapons to eliminate Iran’s nuclear facilities, I might be a little less harsh on this insane decision. But, lets face it, if Pakistan does use these weapons, it will be against Infidels, not fellow Muslims.
Damn, where did I put that roll of duct tape. I feel like my head is about to explode.
In war, it is vital to know your enemy. But, we, or at least the United States government, clearly does not understand that. You won’t hear this from the government (of course) but we are at war with Islam. But, government employees are not even supposed to refer to “terrorists” or “acts of terror”. (They are to be referred to as “man-made disasters”.) The word “Islamist” is out. And, of course, in the most ludicrous case of cover-up, and not seeing the forests for the trees, not a single connection was made between the fact that Nidal Hasan was a Muslim and the fact that he murdered 13 people at Ft. Hood while wearing an Islamic dress and shouting “Allahu Akbar”. (He was not only a Muslim, but a very devout one. But the official finding made no connection between that fact and the attack.)
And, by the way, Islam is at war with us. They have been for almost 1400 years. At least they know it, and have very publicly stated that they are at war with us. It is even in the Koran:
“Terrorize and behead those who believe in scriptures other than the Qur’an.” Koran 8:12
“Muslims must muster all weapons to terrorize the infidels.” Koran 8:60
But, the politically correct politicians and main stream media do not tell us that. All we hear is that “Islam is a religion of peace”. (It may be a religion of pieces, as in body pieces after a homicide bomber attack, but it has never had anything to do with peace.) To make matters worse, some uninformed, ignorant-of-history products of our failed American educational system even go so far as to bring up the Crusades as some sort of defense of Islam, or mea culpa plea. Of course, we owe our very freedoms to the Crusades, because they are what saved us from the Muslim hordes that had conquered and over-run much of what we now call Europe. (Although it is now insidiously becoming Eurabia as Muslims infiltrate society, and breed like rabbits, so as to take over the nations of the world without having to resort to their usual sword tricks.) By the way, don’t think it was some kind of coincidence that Osama bin Laden attacked us on September 11. September 11, 1683, was the date on which the Battle of Vienna took place. On that date, the Ottoman Empire was finally turned back, and prevented from taking over Austria by Polish, Austrian, and German soldiers. It marked the end to the expansion of the Ottoman empire.
The 10,000 people in line to get classified information are managers, supervisors and “behavior detection officers” who roam airports looking for suspicious people. They represent about 20% of the TSA’s airport workforce and exclude screeners who scan passengers and bags.
The information will give workers details about terrorist “tactics, planning, operations and threats,” TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said. Those details “give context to things they see every day which may otherwise not appear unusual” and let workers “exercise discretion” in dealing with travelers, Payne added. She would not elaborate on specific intelligence the workers will get. All TSA airport workers now get daily intelligence briefings that include less sensitive information.
So far, 750 people have been cleared to get classified information, Payne said, adding that it will take two more years to get all 10,000 workers cleared.
What could possibly go wrong? After all, I’m sure none of those people who get the secret material could be Muslims, who could relay the sensitive information to their buddies in jihad, so that they will better know how to escape screening and attack us. Yea, right. I’m sure Osama is dancing for glee in his cave, wondering how the infidels can be so incredibly stupid.
NOTE: This article is by Michelle Rodenborn. She is a practicing attorney, specializing in the areas of customs and international trade law. Her blog is: http://libertyswatchdogs.blogspot.com. Her law practice website is: http://www.rodenborn.com. She has been kind enough to allow me to republish this article, in full, on my site. Please repay that favor by visiting her sites. To view the original posting, along with comments, go to http://libertyswatchdogs.blogspot.com/2010/02/obama-disses-world-leaders-no-bows-at.html
In previous posts I have pointed out that President Obama shows more respect and deference for left-wing dictator thugs, Arabian kings, Japanese emperors, and Iranian “supreme leaders” than he does for the American people. His unreciprocated, abject deference to those rulers has been as patent as it is embarrassing. The pictures (at the bottom of the article) of our President bowing deeply at the waist say it all.
So would it be too much to ask of the man whom this country honored with its highest office, that when he meets with the leaders of this greatest country on the planet, leaders who in turn represent We the People, that he show some respect? Apparently so, because most of what we got from the President at this past week’s Health Summit was dissive, derisive, and dismissive treatment of the People’s representatives.
He started off reminding everyone (on the one fact of which no one needs reminding) that “I am the President,” said in the context of justifying his taking all the time he wants to speak. Judging by his subsequent behavior, he must also think his status justifies:
* his attitude of putting everyone else in their place;
* his allotting himself the right to cut people off;
* his giving himself the latitude to state what is and is not a legitimate concern;
* his refusing to answer questions he promised “to get back to;” and
* his dividing up speaking time-slots: 20 parts Obama, 5 parts Dems & 1 part GOP.
In a piece I wrote last year, I dubbed Obama IMPOTUS, an acronym I coined for “I am the President of the United States,” because he so often likes to use the grand phrase to refer to himself. Since he’s back to using it again, I’ll pick up on his lead and use the acronym here, with one difference. I will no longer put the acronym in bold and caps, as above, but will write it as “impotus,” a manner more in keeping with the small stature he has shown.
At the Summit, Senator Lamar Alexander spoke first for the Republicans, and asked impotus to renounce the use of reconciliation in pursuing health care, a procedure involving just a simple majority vote of 51 rather than the 60 votes ordinarily required. Reconciliation is technically supposed to be used only on budget measures, and has never been used in the past for something as far-reaching as a massive entitlement bill that will affect one-sixth of the country’s economy, a bill that the vast majority of We the People oppose.
Though Majority Leader Harry Reid now says that Republicans should “stop crying about reconciliation,” in fact, democrats complained loudly about attempts to use it in the past, as when Bush tried to use reconciliation to get some judges confirmed.
Just last April, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), the Appropriation Committee chairman, sent a strongly worded letter to his colleagues stating his opposition to using reconciliation to pass health care or climate change bills, pointing out that reconciliation insulates bills from amendments and debate. Byrd stated, in part:
“I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform and climate change legislation…. As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you that the ironclad parliamentary procedures it authorizes were never intended for this purpose.”
But impotus brushed off Senator Alexander’s call to abandon reconciliation on health care, saying that the American people aren’t too interested in the Senate’s technical rules, a sly avoidance of the question. It was as if to say, “Papa Doc Barack knows what’s best for all Americans, so they needn’t trouble their puny little heads about it.”
As I watched other parts of the Summit, many adjectives came to mind to describe impotus’s behavior: rude, boorish, arrogant, bullying, domineering, patronizing, hostile, impatient, and irritable, to name a few. Teams of body language experts could find enough material for an entire conference in:
* his pained grimaces;
* his condescending ennui;
* his disapproving scowls;
* his kneading a furrowed, supercilious brow;
* his deliberate talking when the GOP’s Eric Cantor was making his comments, impotus turning around and chatting up some of his aides behind him while his microphone was not fully turned down, so that you could hear his voice coming through over Cantor’s.
Perhaps the worst display of bad manners though, was his treatment of John McCain. McCain tried to speak about his concerns, which are essentially the same ones that the 75% of the American people who want to stop Obamacare have. They include:
* The size of the bill;
* The cost of the bill-(Even New York Times columnist David Brooks now says it’s a “fiscal time bomb.” See Brooks Article 2-22-10.);
* The mandates in the bill;
* The too great role of government in the bill;
* The special carve outs (for unions, for big Pharma, for certain Medicare Advantage seniors in Florida over other states’ seniors, for some states over others (Nebraska and Louisiana) to buy votes;
* The fact that we HAVE NO MONEY TO PAY FOR THIS BILL AND ARE FOISTING OFF THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT TO FUTURE GENERATIONS.
And how did impotus respond to McCain’s points? He cut him off, and was once again dismissive, scolding McCain in what can only be described as a “na, na, na, na, na” kind of way, that the “campaign is over, John,” as if McCain had no serious points to make and was just trying to re-hash the election.
For all who remember how McCain was gracious, even to a fault, in accepting his defeat and Obama’s win, it was especially galling to hear impotus chide him unfairly, and call him by first name, not in a friendly way, but in a patronizing, “I won and you lost so just shut up, John” kind of way.
Fortunately for the country, McCain is a bigger man than impotus will ever be, and had the grace to deflect his rude behavior with an attempt at humor rather than responding in kind.
And I got all the above and more from watching just a fraction of the total 7 hours worth of presidential grandstanding.
Unfortunately, this tactic, of dismissing out of hand opposing views and the people who have them, is not new behavior from impotus and the far left. True to his Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” training, impotus demonizes the opposition, either directly or through others in his administration:
* branding the Republicans “the party of “no;”
* calling the Tea Party Movement a bunch of “tea baggers;”
* labeling Americans with conservative views as potential homeland “terrorists” or “racists” and “right-wing extremists.”
Why, impotus is even kinder and gentler when speaking of known terrorists who have committed attacks on our soil than he is to We the People.
But I guess it’s hard to love those whom you believe are too far beneath you: That’s impotus’s problem. Someone forgot to tell him that he’s not king, nor emperor, nor supreme leader. He’s just the head of 1 of 3 equal branches of government, and all those branches ultimately must answer to the American people.
We’ve heard all along how intelligent, even how brilliant impotus is, though so far he has not shown much competence in anything other than getting elected. However intelligent he may be, he’s apparently not smart enough to figure out that we’re not that stupid.
Nearly half of the American people who voted in the 2008 election voted for the other guy, and I dare say that if the election were held today, impotus would lose. And, recently democrats have lost big races in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts. It doesn’t seem he’s smart enough to listen to the people behind those votes.
The Summit’s lesson from our scolder-in-chief is that the majority party will ignore the wishes of the majority of the American public, dismiss their concerns, and push whatever form of Obamacare they can get away with through Congress.
Oh, there might be some token, tepid gesture toward a GOP “idea” thrown into the mix to disguise the partisan nature of the move, but it will be as close to their original government takeover as they can get it. Time will tell if sufficient numbers of democrats in Congress will want to play Thelma to impotus’s Louise and go over the political cliff together.
Should that happen, impotus need not fear. There will always be a place where he can showcase the talents he displayed last week. I can picture it now: Somewhere, in (hopefully) the not too distant future, say 2012, there will be a university classroom or two waiting to welcome him, full of tabula rasa intellects eager to bask in the reflected glory of “I am the President,” and soak up teachable moments from our lecturer-in-chief.
Since starting this blog, I have written many articles about AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming), and explained that it is a total scam; a hoax; a massive political power and money grab. It never was about the “science”; it was about the most massive transfer of wealth ever schemed in the history of the world. To myself, and many other scientists who have actually read the articles, and reviewed the facts (and “inconvenient truths”, better known as lies and distortions of science) involved in climate science, it was obvious that the science was far from settled. Even though most people in the world are not trained scientists, the mere fact that the UN (arguably one of the most corrupt organizations in the world), and Al Gore, a political animal with no scientific training, but a huge vested interest in the trading of carbon credits and other schemes that could make him hundreds of millions of dollars on the backs of Americans and other citizens of developed nations if the global warming swindle was allowed to go forward, should have given people pause for thought.
Even the fact that Al Gore and the IPCC got a Nobel Peace Prize should have made people skeptical. After all, look at others who have won that “award”. Yasser Arafat, arguably one of the worlds’ foremost terrorists, won the award in 1994. Henry Kissinger, who has been involved in, if not largely responsible for, much of our often wrong-headed foreign policy, including our military policies in Viet Nam and Cambodia which would not allow our soldiers to actually win the war, received the award in 1973. Mohammad ElBaradei, who, as head of the IAEA, has given us a nuclear armed North Korea, and a soon-to-be (if not already) nuclear armed Iran, received the award in 2006. And, of course, lets not forget the latest abomination (in every respect) Barack Obama, who is rapidly increasing our involvement in wars (that he has no intention of winning) in many places in the world. Personally, I consider the Nobel Peace Prize more like a mark of dishonor, not something to be proud of or to be admired. (This criticism only applies to the Peace Prize; it does not extend to other Nobel Prizes.)
Anyway, someone did the world a great favor in November, 2009, when they released hundreds of documents and e-mails from the CRU that showed how they had distorted and corrupted the scientific process with the aim of bringing about draconian taxes and regulation that would serve no actual useful purpose, other than a massive transfer of wealth. As a result of this scandal, Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, stepped down.
In a February 14, 2010 article in the Daily Mail Online, Jones made some revealing statements about the whole issue of climate change. For one thing, he admitted that for the past 15 years, there has been no “statistically significant” warming. This, of course, in spite of the fact that all of the global warmingistas’ models suggested strong warming during that time period due to increases in CO2. (The graph below is from an earlier article of mine.)
And, of course, lets not forget the term “models”. We keep hearing how the “science is settled”, and all of the “models” predict strong global warming due to rising CO2 levels. Um, it seems to me that if the “science is settled”, there should be one “model”, not “models”. Of course, as those of us who have followed the “debate” have known for years, there are many places, and some very critical, where the “models” don’t predict reality. In some of those cases, the reality (measured data) is discarded as being “incorrect”; nobody seems to realize, or at least admit, that there may be some problems with the “models” that clearly don’t predict reality. (And one fault of the “models” is that they do not take into account clouds! And, of course, clouds are related to the strongest greenhouse gas, which is water vapor!) (A good treatise about clouds, and what may actually control them, can be found here.) This presentation may lie at the true heart of climate change, as it presents in a very clear way the relationship between cosmic rays (which more and more are believed to control clouds) and global temperatures. Of course, you won’t hear about this from the global warmingistas, since they cannot tax cosmic rays. In fact, as is pointed out in this article, an excellent paper that explained this whole relationship was rejected in peer review. Gee, I wonder why? Of course, now that we know that the global warmingistas took over control of the peer review process, and effectively blocked any papers that they felt were damaging to their “cause”, the rejection of such a paper is easy to understand. And, as I showed in a followup to that article, the predictions made a few years ago have been holding true since the paper was rejected!
But then, in the Daily Mail article, Phil Jones makes a truly startling admission. For years, the global warmingistas have been telling us that current temperatures are “unprecedented”. They wrote off the “little ice age” and the “Medieval Warm Period” as myths, or, at best, as very localized events. But, in the article Phil Jones states:
‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’
Well, as I showed in an earlier article, the Medieval Warm Period was real, and was well documented to be a world wide event. The graphic below from that article shows some of the multiple scientific studies that establish the Medieval Warm Period as a period that was at least as warm, and probably warmer than, today. This graphic, which just shows a small assortment of the multitude of scientific studies that have verified the Medieval Warm Period is from Science Skeptical Blog.
Well, there you have it, straight from the former head of the CRU; man-made global warming is a lie. So, lets stop wasting time and money on an imaginary problem, and lets devote those resources to real, genuine problems. It’s not like we don’t have enough of them.
It is amazing how blind the West is to the truth about Islam. (See his excellent movie “Fitna” on the right side bar of this blog.) Time after time, we hear the tired and ludicrous “Islam is a religion of peace.” While it may be a religion of pieces, as in body parts after a homicide bombing, it never was, and never can be, a “religion of peace.” The Koran and the Hadiths, like Hitler’s “Mein Kamp”, constitute a diatribe of violence and supremacist ideology. And lets not hear any more of the garbage that the vast majority of Muslims are “moderate”. As no less a dangerous Islamist than Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan said, while describing his displeasure with the term “moderate Islam”:
Since Ataturk disbanded the caliphate in 1924, and up until the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, Islam had been more or less contained. Without an umma, they had no leader who could command an offensive Jihad to take over the rest of the world. During that time, for the most part, the Muslims of the world were weakened to the point where they essentially had to declare a “truce”. According to the Koran, it is acceptable for Muslims to enter into a truce when they are weak and it is to their benefit. But, as we learned from the treachery of Muhammad when, after 2 years he broke his 10 year truce with the Quraish known as the Treaty of Hudaibiya, truces are only valid until the Muslims are in a revived state of strength. Then, they are to break any treaty or truce and continue on their obligatory path of conquest and subjugation. As Muhammad himself said, “War is deceit”, Hadith 4:269, narrated Jabir bin ‘Abdullah. (Of course, like much of what Muhammad said, this was simply stolen from someone else. In this case, it was stolen from Sun Tzu, who said “All war is deception”, centuries before Muhammad was unfortunately conceived.) Yasser Arafat, one of the world’s most famous terrorists, even explained to his followers (in Arabic so that most of the Western press would not realize what he said) that his signing of the Oslo Accords was equivalent to Muhammad’s agreeing to the Treaty of Hudaibiya. The treaty was only to be observed until the Muslims were in a stronger position and could break the treaty! But, alas, the Western media, as well as the stupid, or willfully blind, politicians knew nothing about this, and still do not understand Islam.
We keep hearing about “Peace in the Middle East”. Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, and all of the other apparently clueless politicians, keep running around the world trying to bring about “Peace in the Middle East”. They keep spouting lunacies about a “2 state solution”. They keep saying that the problems in the Middle East will be gone once the Palestinians have a “country”. But, that is not the problem, and giving them a “country” will just give them a stronger fortress from which to attack Israel!
As long as there is an Islam where people blindly follow the sayings of a possibly insane and definitely barbarian pedophile who terrorized and subjugated the world in the 7th century, there will be no peace in the Middle East. In fact, as the Muslims get stronger, and especially once they regain their caliphate, the death, destruction, misery, misogyny, and subjugation and totalitarian ideology that is Islam will spread to even wider areas of the world. Already, much of Europe has been essentially Islamized, and become what Bat Ye’or so appropriately renamed Eurabia. London is rapidly becoming Londonistan. Even in the United States, Dearborn is rapidly becoming Dearbornistan, and Detroit Detroitistan.
THE PROBLEM IS ISLAM! As Erdogan said “Islam is Islam, and that’s it.”
Politicians and government bureaucrats are generally extreme cowards when it comes to speaking out about Islam. In fact, it is so bad, now, in the United States, that government lackies are not even allowed to utter words like Islamist, jihadist, or terrorist! In fact, the war on terror (which should be called a war on Islam, because that is what it is), is now an “overseas contingency operation”. Terrorist attacks are to be called “man-made disasters”. You cannot defeat an enemy that you not only don’t understand, but won’t even identify! There are a very few courageous politicians, like Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, but he is actually being tried in a criminal court in his nation for telling the truth about Islam! Virtually every year, the OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference) in the UN passes a resolution that makes criticism of a religion a criminal offense. Fortunately, the United States has veto power in the United Nations, but how long before some clueless politician allows such a resolution to pass, effectively nullifying the First Amendment to our Constitution?
Now, we have yet another apostate from Islam, warning us about Islam and it’s intentions. He is no less than the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a Hamas leader in the West Bank, Mosab Hassan Yousef. He converted to Christianity in the 1990’s, and worked with Shin Bet to help arrest many Palestinian terrorists, and to save the lives of many Israelis, Palestinians (including his father), and Americans. Having grown up a Muslim in Palestine, he was indoctrinated in the hatred and supremacist ideology that is Islam. But, he broke away and renounced that ideology. He is now living in California, but had the following insightful statements to make about his own beliefs and motivations, as well as the impossibility of “peace in the Middle East”.
…I am not a Zionist and I did not work for the Zionists. I am not pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian. I worked for my God, who is the father of all human beings wherever they are. I do not want to go back to that work. I chose to leave, because after 10 years of fighting terrorism, I understood that it is not the problem. Of course, it is important to fight terrorism, but if I think about the long term, the only way is not to do battle against suicide bombers but against their motivation: namely, their God.
“Many people think the terrorists’ motivation is the Israeli occupation, the corruption, but all that is just the backdrop. It is not the root of the problem. The occupation is like the rain that falls on the soil in which the seed has been planted, but it is not the seed itself. The root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not lie in security or politics: It is a war between two gods, two religions. Between the God of the Torah and the God of the Koran. The Koran teaches that this is Waqf land – a sacred endowment which must not be given up. The Torah taught the Jews that this is their land and must not be given up.
“It follows that there will be no peace in the Middle East. Israel’s problem is not with Hamas or with any other organization, nor with the interpretation Hamas reads into the Koran. It is with the god of the Koran. After all, even a moderate Muslim who reads the Koran must read that the Jews are the sons of apes and that the infidels must be killed. The Palestinians must stop blaming Israel, or the West, for all their problems. If they want true freedom, they must free themselves from their God.”
More people in the civilized world need to understand Islam for what it is. Contrary to popular misconception, Islam is NOT just a religion, like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism. Islam is a religion and a system of laws (Sharia) and a system of government. It is completely totalitarian, and it controls every aspect of a Muslim’s life, and virtually every second of his day. It even micromanages life to the extent of telling its adherents what foot to lead with when entering the bathroom, what foot to lead with when leaving the bathroom, and what to do when in the bathroom. In a similar manner, it controls and defines virtually every other aspect of a Muslim’s life, and how they should treat non-Muslims. Islam will never allow for “peace in the Middle East” for a very simple and insidious reason. Muslims believe that they own the Middle East. They believe that since Muslims once “conquered” that land, that it is forever to be “Muslim land”, and there can be no people living on “Muslim land” who are not either Muslims or dhimmis, paying jizya (basically protection money) to the Muslims (their only real source of income until oil became important). Dhimmis are non-Muslims who Muhammad allowed to live, without converting to Islam, as long as the paid the jizya and “felt themselves subdued”. The life of a dhimmi is so miserable that you find very few of them, today, in Muslim countries. And, as Muslim nations become stronger in their adherence to Islam, the persecution of non-Muslims is becoming more and more widespread. (Just today, nine Christians were arrested in Iran in a recent crackdown in that country against Christians.)
The West ignores the treachery and danger of Islam at it’s own peril. The sooner the West listens to people who actually know and understand Islam, like Mosab Hassan Yousef, Bat Ye’or, Ibn Warraq, Robert Spencer, Walid Phares, Daniel Pipes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Brigitte Gabriel, Geert Wilders, and even Osama bin Laden, and take action to stop it’s spread and control it’s influence, the better.
The following is an interesting article from Stratfor.com
THE UTILITY OF ASSASSINATION
By George Friedman
The apparent Israeli assassination of a Hamas operative in the United Arab Emirates turned into a bizarre event replete with numerous fraudulent passports, alleged Israeli operatives caught on videotape and international outrage (much of it feigned), more over the use of fraudulent passports than over the operative’s death. If we are to believe the media, it took nearly 20 people and an international incident to kill him.
STRATFOR has written on the details of the killing as we have learned of them, but we see this as an occasion to address a broader question: the role of assassination in international politics.
Defining Assassination
We should begin by defining what we mean by assassination. It is the killing of a particular individual for political purposes. It differs from the killing of a spouse’s lover because it is political. It differs from the killing of a soldier on the battlefield in that the soldier is anonymous and is not killed because of who he is but because of the army he is serving in.
The question of assassination, in the current jargon “targeted killing,” raises the issue of its purpose. Apart from malice and revenge, as in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the purpose of assassination is to achieve a particular political end by weakening an enemy in some way. Thus, the killing of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto by the Americans in World War II was a targeted killing, an assassination. His movements were known, and the Americans had the opportunity to kill him. Killing an incompetent commander would be counterproductive, but Yamamoto was a superb strategist, without peer in the Japanese navy. Killing him would weaken Japan’s war effort, or at least have a reasonable chance of doing so. With all the others dying around him in the midst of war, the moral choice did not seem complex then, nor does it seem complex now.
Such occasions rarely occur on the battlefield. There are few commanders who could not readily be replaced, and perhaps even replaced by someone more able. In any event, it is difficult to locate enemy commanders, meaning the opportunity to kill them rarely arises. And as commanders ask their troops to risk their lives, they have no moral claim to immunity from danger.
Now, take another case. Assume that the leader of a country were singular and irreplaceable, something very few are. But think of Fidel Castro, whose central role in the Cuban government was undeniable. Assume that he is the enemy of another country like the United States. It is an unofficial hostility — no war has been declared — but a very real one nonetheless. Is it illegitimate to try to kill such a leader in a bid to destroy his regime? Let’s move that question to Adolph Hitler, the gold standard of evil. Would it be inappropriate to have sought to kill him in 1938 based on the type of regime he had created and what he said that he would do with it?
If the position is that killing Hitler would have been immoral, then we have a serious question about the moral standards being used. The more complex case is Castro. He is certainly no Hitler, but neither is he the romantic democratic revolutionary some have painted him as being. But if it is legitimate to kill Castro, then where is the line drawn? Who is it not legitimate to kill?
As with Yamamoto, the number of instances in which killing a political leader would make a difference in policy or in the regime’s strength is extremely limited. In most cases, the argument against assassination is not moral but practical: It would make no difference if the target in question lives or dies. But where it would make a difference, the moral argument becomes difficult. If we establish that Hitler was a legitimate target, than we have established that there is not an absolute ban on political assassination. The question is what the threshold must be.
All of this is a preface to the killing in the United Arab Emirates, because that represents a third case. Since the rise of the modern intelligence apparatus, covert arms have frequently been attached to them. The nation-states of the 20th century all had intelligence organizations. These organizations carried out a range of clandestine operations beyond collecting intelligence, from supplying weapons to friendly political groups in foreign countries to overthrowing regimes to underwriting terrorist operations.
During the latter half of the century, nonstate-based covert organizations were developed. As European empires collapsed, political movements wishing to take control created covert warfare apparatuses to force the Europeans out or defeat political competitors. Israel’s state-based intelligence system emerged from one created before the Jewish state’s independence. The various Palestinian factions created their own. Beyond this, of course, groups like al Qaeda created their own covert capabilities, against which the United States has arrayed its own massive covert capability.
Assassinations Today
The contemporary reality is not a battlefield on which a Yamamoto might be singled out or a charismatic political leader whose death might destroy his regime. Rather, a great deal of contemporary international politics and warfare is built around these covert capabilities. In the case of Hamas, the mission of these covert operations is to secure the resources necessary for Hamas to engage Israeli forces on terms favorable to them, from terror to rocket attacks. For Israel, covert operations exist to shut off resources to Hamas (and other groups), leaving them unable to engage or resist Israel.
Expressed this way, covert warfare makes sense, particularly for the Israelis when they engage the clandestine efforts of Hamas. Hamas is moving covertly to secure resources. Its game is to evade the Israelis. The Israeli goal is to identify and eliminate the covert capability. Hamas is the hunted, Israel the hunter here. Apparently the hunter and hunted met in the United Arab Emirates, and the hunted was killed.
But there are complexities here. First, in warfare, the goal is to render the enemy incapable of resisting. Killing just any group of enemy soldiers is not the point. Indeed, diverting resources to engage the enemy on the margins, leaving the center of gravity of the enemy force untouched, harms far more than it helps. Covert warfare is different from conventional warfare, but the essential question stands: Is the target you are destroying essential to the enemy’s ability to fight? And even more important, as the end of all war is political, does defeating this enemy bring you closer to your political goals?
Covert organizations, like armies, are designed to survive attrition. It is expected that operatives will be detected and killed; the system is designed to survive that. The goal of covert warfare is either to penetrate the enemy so deeply, or destroy one or more people so essential to the operation of the group, that the covert organization stops functioning. All covert organizations are designed to stop this from happening.
They achieve this through redundancy and regeneration. After the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the Israelis mounted an intense covert operation to identify, penetrate and destroy the movement — called Black September — that mounted the attack. Black September was not simply a separate movement but a front for various Palestinian factions. Killing those involved with Munich would not paralyze Black September, and destroying Black September did not destroy the Palestinian movement. That movement had redundancy — the ability to shift new capable people into the roles of those killed — and therefore could regenerate, training and deploying fresh operatives.
The mission was successfully carried out, but the mission was poorly designed. Like a general using overwhelming force to destroy a marginal element of the enemy army, the Israelis focused their covert capability to destroy elements whose destruction would not give the Israelis what they wanted — the destruction of the various Palestinian covert capabilities. It might have been politically necessary for the Israeli public, it might have been emotionally satisfying, but the Israeli’s enemies weren’t broken. Consider that Entebbe occurred in 1976. If Israel’s goal in targeting Black September was the suppression of terrorism by Palestinian groups, the assault on one group did not end the threat from other groups.
Therefore, the political ends the Israelis sought were not achieved. The Palestinians did not become weaker. The year 1972 was not the high point of the Palestinian movement politically. It became stronger over time, gaining substantial international legitimacy. If the mission was to break the Palestinian covert apparatus to weaken the Palestinian capability and weaken its political power, the covert war of eliminating specific individuals identified as enemy operatives failed. The operatives very often were killed, but the operation did not yield the desired outcome.
And here lies the real dilemma of assassination. It is extraordinarily rare to identify a person whose death would materially weaken a substantial political movement in some definitive sense — i.e., where if the person died, then the movement would be finished. This is particularly true for nationalist movements that can draw on a very large pool of people and talent. It is equally hard to reduce a movement quickly enough to destroy the organization’s redundancy and regenerative capability. Doing so requires extraordinary intelligence penetration as well as a massive covert effort, so such an effort quickly reveals the penetration and identifies your own operatives.
A single swift, global blow is what is dreamt of. Covert war actually works as a battle of attrition, involving the slow accumulation of intelligence, the organization of the strike, the assassination. At that point, one man is dead, a man whose replacement is undoubtedly already trained. Others are killed, but the critical mass is never reached, and there is no one target who if killed would cause everything to change.
In war there is a terrible tension between the emotions of the public and the cold logic that must drive the general. In covert warfare, there is tremendous emotional satisfaction to the country when it is revealed that someone it regards as not only an enemy, but someone responsible for the deaths of their countryman, has been killed. But the generals or directors of intelligence can’t afford this satisfaction. They have limited resources, which must be devoted to achieving their country’s political goals and assuring its safety. Those resources have to be used effectively.
There are few Hitlers whose death is morally demanded and might have a practical effect. Most such killings are both morally and practically ambiguous. In covert warfare, even if you concede every moral point about the wickedness of your enemy, you must raise the question as to whether all of your efforts are having any real effect on the enemy in the long run. If they can simply replace the man you killed, while training ten more operatives in the meantime, you have achieved little. If the enemy keeps becoming politically more successful, then the strategy must be re-examined.
We are not writing this as pacifists; we do not believe the killing of enemies is to be avoided. And we certainly do not believe that the morally incoherent strictures of what is called international law should guide any country in protecting itself. What we are addressing here is the effectiveness of assassination in waging covert warfare. Too frequently, it does not, in our mind, represent a successful solution to the military and political threat posed by covert organizations. It might bring an enemy to justice, and it might well disrupt an organization for a while or even render a specific organization untenable. But in the covert wars of the 20th century, the occasions when covert operations — including assassinations — achieved the political ends being pursued were rare. That does not mean they never did. It does mean that the utility of assassination as a main part of covert warfare needs to be considered carefully. Assassination is not without cost, and in war, all actions must be evaluated rigorously in terms of cost versus benefit.
This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to www.stratfor.com.
In this long, but excellent and educational piece, Hugh Fitzgerald rips apart Adam B. Lowther’s idiotic article “Iran’s Two-Edged Bomb”. Lowther is, reportedly, a “defense analyst at the Air Force Research Initiative”. Being a defense analyst, you would think he would know better, but, looking at the history of the US Government’s foreign policy, and the government’s complete lack of understanding of Islam, I guess the lunacy of Lowther’s article is not surprising. At one point in the article, Lowther even bemoans how we got involved in “overseas counter-insurgency operations”. What a good little government puppet! Not daring to call the war on Islam the war on Islam that it is! He doesn’t even dare use the words “terrorists” or “jihadists” or “Islamists”!
“Last, the United States would be able to stem the flow of dollars to autocratic regimes in the region. It would accomplish this not only by driving down the price of oil and increasing arms exports, but by requiring the beneficiaries of American security to bear a real share of its cost. And in the long run, a victory in the war on terrorism would save taxpayers the tens of billions of dollars a year now spent on overseas counter-insurgency operations.”
The basic premise of Lowther’s article is that the United States should welcome an atomic Iran! After all, he then claims, we can offer a “nuclear shield” to the oil producing states in the Middle East. If we do that, they will sell us oil cheaply, he claims, and they will buy our weapons, which will help keep American’s in jobs! Of course, I have said before how incredibly stupid it is of us to sell any weapons, let along advanced weapons, to any Muslim nation, because it is just a matter of time before those weapons will be turned against us.
In his article, Fitzgerald points out, repeatedly, how the total and complete lack of understanding of Islam by the leaders of our military and government has lead to failure after failure in foreign policy, not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been wasted in “nation building” operations that morons like George Bush insisted would bring democracy to Islamic countries.
Now the Iraq and Afghanistan ventures of the Americans constitute a squandering of resources – men, money, materiel, morale. And those ventures represent a failure of American foreign policy, or rather a failure of those in power to adequately study the texts and tenets of Islam. For if those in power had studied those texts and tenets, instead of allowing themselves to be unduly impressed by the word “religion” affixed to Islam (as Bush was so impressed), or if they did not allow themselves to be impressed by plausible, smiling, carefully apologetic representatives of Islam in the form of some Muslim advisers, including the Bright Young Reformers who have stood in the way, for many in Washington, of a sober grasping of the ideology of Islam, then another strategy would have been followed. It is interesting that Barack Obama clearly wants out of Iraq and, I suspect, out of Afghanistan too. But he will not be able to do the latter, for obvious political reasons, unless he shows that the reason he wants out of Afghanistan is not because he is soft on Islam (though he has given various signs of that, and the worst was that unbelievable speech he delivered in Cairo, a speech in which almost every phrase about Islam could be held up for inspection, analysis, and ridicule) but because he wishes to undertake an entirely new strategy, one based on a recognition that the presence of Infidels merely helps to unite Muslims, or at least to make less likely that internal conflicts will develop. And it is in the interests of the world’s Infidels that the pre-existing fissures, sectarian, ethnic, and economic, within the Camp of Islam, be exploited to the fullest.
That is one part of a two-part strategy. The other part is a campaign of education and self-education, all over the Infidel world, so that many more people come to understand the relation of Islam to the political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failures of Muslim states, societies, and even families and individuals living in environments – even within the West – that are suffused with Islam. This can be done. And if it is done, it will be hard for the world’s Muslims not to have to begin thinking about the matter. And because the case, once you begin to think about it, is so obvious and so convincing, that will further demoralize the Camp of Islam. Among those who might have other reasons for jettisoning the faith, or at least de-emphasizing it (as Iranians, sick at heart from their experience under the Islamic Republic of Iran), such arguments will particularly resonate.
It is a brilliant and educational article. It is an article that non-Muslims need to read and understand. Even more importantly, it has many lessons and bits of information that are critical for our leaders to understand, because they obviously don’t, and apparently never did.
In this excellent video, Pat Condell discusses the disgusting display of dhimmitude taking place in an Amsterdam courtroom. For those who don’t know, Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders is on trial in the Netherlands for “defaming Islam”. (To see Geert Wilders’ short film about Islam, “Fitna”, watch it in my sidebar towards the bottom.) What a ridiculous situation in a country that used to have freedom of speech; to be on trial for asserting your right to free speech. And, to make matters worse, very, very few Americans are aware that the Muslims of the world our trying to take away the free speech rights of all citizens of the world, including Americans. The OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference) passes a resolution in the United Nations every year that makes defamation of a religion A CRIME. Fortunately, the United States has blocked it’s official implementation, since it can (fortunately) veto anything. But, how long before the United States decides to go along with this abomination, making free speech a thing of the past. As Pat points out, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have lost their right to free speech. Who is next?
For those who don’t know, “In the most determined statement of dhimmitude we’ve yet seen in Europe (and that’s saying something) the Dutch authorities are pushing ahead with the prosecution of an elected Parliamentarian for the crime of embarrassing them with the truth.”
Prosecutors went so far as to state that it doesn’t matter that what he said is true, it matters that it is illegal! As Pat points out, “When the truth is against the law, then there’s something seriously wrong with the law. Because when the truth is no defense, there is no defense, and the law has no anchor, so it will drift wherever the wind of political expediency blows.”
It is an excellent speech. Watch it all, and learn.
NOTE: This article is by Michelle Rodenborn. She is a practicing attorney, specializing in the areas of customs and international trade law. Her blog is: http://libertyswatchdogs.blogspot.com. Her law practice website is: http://www.rodenborn.com. She has been kind enough to allow me to republish this article, in full, on my site. Please repay that favor by visiting her sites. To view the original posting, along with comments, go to http://libertyswatchdogs.blogspot.com/2010/01/reagan-wins-big-in-massachusetts.html
Well, not the man, of course. But the spirit and the philosophy of conservatism, championed by Ronald Reagan, won big time yesterday in the very Blue Bay State of Massachusetts. And, because of that, (to paraphrase a statement made by the First Lady during the ‘08 campaign,) I can say that for the first time in my recent memory, I have been proud of Blue State America.
Conservatism? Reaganism? You may think my analysis as off-base as Martha Coakley’s comments on the Red Sox and the Yankees. But, contrary to much of the commentary floating about, especially the deranged sore-loserism on the far-left, Scott Brown’s win is a victory for conservative principles.
How so? Brown ran his campaign on substance, on principles, promising the people of his state:
* That he would be the 41st vote against Obamacare;
* That he was for cutting taxes and cutting spending to improve the economy and jobs;
* That he was for smaller, fiscally responsible government;
* That he was opposed to government takeover of the private sector;
* That he was opposed to the administration’s weakening of our military defenses, including the giving of constitutional rights to terrorists.
Those in a nutshell are the key principles of conservatism. And, though last night’s election may seem to be a wonder because of the history of democrat voting in Massachusetts, it’s not that surprising that Brown’s message caught on with voters there.
After all, Independents make up a large portion of the population of Massachusetts, as is the case across the country. Overall, Americans who describe themselves as liberals (not to be confused with all democrats) continue to make up only about 20-25% of the American public, while the remainder of Americans describe themselves as either moderates or conservatives.
But Obama and his supporters continue to say that yesterday’s election has nothing to do with Obamacare and the rest of the big spending, big taxing Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda. The excuses and fingerpointing and the throwing of Coakley under the bus, (which began even before the election results were in), can be summed up as follows:
* Coakley lost the personality contest: She’s a plain Jane and he’s hot. (True but irrelevant.)
* The Massachusetts voters were mad about bank bailouts. (Really? No one campaigned on that.)
* People are still reeling from the Bush years, and the Massachusetts voters were just expressing opposition to all incumbents. (When in doubt, blame Bush! Oh, by the way, Coakley was not an incumbent.)
* Coakley didn’t campaign hard enough. (She denies this, and with all the other odds in her favor, she still should have won.)
* Massachusetts doesn’t like to vote for female candidates. (Didn’t they go for Hillary in the primary?)
* And, (my favorite), Massachusetts voters were just responding to their inner racist, subliminally appealed to by Brown with coded messages sent through images of his pickup truck.
I’ll have to explain that last one as you are probably as clueless as I was when I first heard it.
Last night, just for fun, I tuned in to MSNBC, whose over-the-top ultra-liberal bias can always be counted on for some amusement. Usually I can’t stand to listen to the likes of Chris Matthews or Keith Doberman-Pinscher for very long, but I assumed, rightly so, that they would be in full-blown whining, blaming, retreat mode. I was not disappointed.
Take a look at Keith Olbermann in this clip from his show, Olbermann’s Rants, where he shared his deepest thoughts, chief among which is the conclusion that Scott Brown is a “homophobic racist” and that “Tea Baggers” are racists in disguise, just as decades ago, anti-civil rights southerners were racists who hid under the states’ rights banner.
Funny, but I didn’t know that there were hundreds of thousands of racists up there in Massachusetts ready to vote for one of their own kind. It’s especially odd when you think that those racists who voted for Brown must have been among those who voted for Ted Kennedy for many years, since Kennedy routinely got about 70% of the vote.
I guess those former Kennedy voters just didn’t realize they were racists until they picked up the “code” from seeing Scott Brown in his pickup truck. I’ll let Mr. Olbermann and his talking head guest, Howard Fineman of Newsweek, explain.
On Olbermann’s show last night, as Coakley was losing, Olbermann suggested to Fineman, who thought Keith posed a “good question,” that perhaps Brown voters were really racists who didn’t like the Obama agenda because Obama is black. (See the video at
Racists in Every Truck.)
It was a shame, but not unexpected since it was Fineman speaking, that someone from Newsweek would not slam this ridiculous comment at the outset. Instead, Fineman ran with the argument, rambling on about how “there are codes, there are images, there are pickup trucks…” and “you can say there’s a racial aspect to it.” (You can? Was that why Obama made fun of Brown’s truck six different times during his Sunday rally for Coakley?)
Olbermann then chimed in with remembering how many times Brown had been photographed in that truck of his, and Fineman capped it off, recalling Fred Thompson in his pickup truck in Tennessee (I guess that made Thompson a racist, too), before concluding that racism probably wasn’t the case in Massachusetts.
Somehow the fact that Obama carried Massachusetts by 26 points (at a time when he was still black) didn’t prevent Olbermann or Fineman from speculating that these same people who voted for Obama might be racists when they voted for Brown! And, folks, these people think they’re the smart ones.
Fortunately, there are some democrats who are starting to “get” the real message from Brown’s win. One is Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton and a lifelong democrat.
In a piece in the Wall Street Journal today, entitled “Blame the Left for Massachusetts,” Davis states that: “This was a defeat not of the messenger, but of the message-and the sooner progressive Democrats face up to that fact, the better. It’s the substance, stupid!”
Davis went on to state that the Democratic Party needs to “stop listening to the strident, purist base of our party” and adopt positions that are more centrist and bipartisan, to form:
“a party that is willing to meet half-way with conservatives and Republicans even if that means only step-by-step reforms on health care and other issues that do not necessarily involve big government solutions.” (Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2010, p. A15.)
It may be a vain hope for President Obama to start following that line of thinking, unfortunately, as the only time he seems to turn to the right is when he switches between teleprompter screens. Everything Obama has done since taking office has led away from the center and farther down the path to the far left, but he may find himself forced by the people to change his tack.
For this election was clearly a message of opposition to the Obama agenda of big government, private sector takeovers, higher taxes and higher spending, legislation obtained through closed door backroom deals and the buying of votes (Louisiana purchases and Nebraska buy-offs), all of which has been poised to be shoved down the collective throat of an unwilling public.
If this election is a defeat for Obama and the far left, it is yet not a victory for the Republican Party itself, except to the extent that it can return to conservative principles, the ones Scott Brown campaigned on, and the ones voted for by the people of Massachusetts.
To paraphrase Brown, this was “the people’s win.” But it was also a win for Reagan-style conservatism. In fact, you could say it was one for the Gipper!
It is very refreshing to see that at least some politicians in the world are waking up to the extreme and pervasive threat posed by Islam and Sharia law. Of course, I don’t expect our (at least at one time) Muslim President, Barack Obama, to adopt this policy. In fact, he is doing everything he can to appease the Muslims, which is just the wrong thing to do.
As far back as Thomas Jefferson, leaders of this country realized the threat from Islam. Of course, back then, Muslims would simply not have been tolerated in this country if they did not assimilate into the culture. And, of course, the founding fathers, like Jefferson and Franklin, especially, were atheists. (Of course, not many Americans, today, realize that. Technically, they were deists, and believed that there was a “supreme being or force” that set the universe in motion a long time ago, but it has had nothing to do with the earth, or humans, since then. They certainly did not believe in any sort of personal God. In fact, Franklin discusses this in his autobiography, and says it was hard for him to abandon religion because his father had been a preacher. Jefferson made his own version of the Bible, in which he removed all matter that pertained to the supernatural. Of course, there was not much left to his Bible after that.)
Anyway, a UPI article, published today, January 16, 2010, is titled “British party calls for ban on burkas”. Finally, politicians standing up against the expansion of Islam, and creeping Sharia law!In part, the article states:
“We are taking expert advice on how we could do it,” UKIP leader Malcolm Pearson
told the newspaper. “It makes sense to ban the burka — or anything which conceals a woman’s face — in public buildings. But we want to make it possible to ban them in private buildings. It isn’t right that you can’t see someone’s face in an airport.”
The Times said the UKIP is the first British party to call for an all-out ban on burkas although the far-right British National Party believes advocates banning them from schools.
“We are not Muslim bashing, but this is incompatible with Britain’s values of freedom and democracy,” Pearson said.
His UMP party is to put forward a bill this month banning the wearing of the Islamic veil in public, as a means of defending France against “extremists”.
Mr Sarkozy said the first step should be for parliament to adopt a resolution that would unequivocally condemn the burka – and then move on to considering a ban.
He said no decision should be made until parliament hears the results of a six-month commission on whether a law banning such garments from public places was needed.
This is not a new topic in France, either. France has been suffering for years under an ever-increasing Muslim population.
Home to Europe’s largest Muslim population, France in 2004 banned burkas and other “conspicuous” religious symbols in state schools and by public employees.
If the Western, civilized world does not wake up to the threat of Islam, and do something serious about it, we are going to be in very deep trouble. As their population expands (deliberately to spread Islam), we are going to find ourselves with more and more terrorist atrocities, even within our own country. The only way we can fight this growing danger is to simply not allow it to flourish, starting with restrictions on things like the burka, followed by the shutting down of madrases and the very close monitoring of mosques (most of which have been radicalized), as well as very strict controls on immigration from Muslim nations. In fact, this may have to be extended to a complete ban on immigration from Muslim countries, because of the danger posed by the Islamic ideology. And, this is not a matter of religious freedom, because Islam is not just a religion; it is an ideology, like Nazism or Communism. It defines virtually all of your activities on every day, and it is a system of law and government. And, it’s adherents are taught that they MUST take over the world, and wage war on the unbelievers until the whole world is Islamic. Unfortunately, most Americans simply do not realize this. They think that Islam is like Christianity or Judaism, where you mind your business and go to church or mosque a few times a month. But that is where they are wrong. Islam is out to rule the world, and unless we can eliminate it from the world, we must learn to control and contain it.
Banning the burka would be a good starting point. It is nothing more than a sign of the oppression of women in Islam.
It has been going on for too long; the “imaginary war” with Islam. It is time that we woke up, and smelled the coffee. We are at war with Islam. We are at war with Muslims. We have been for over 30 years, even since Jimmy Carter failed to respond to the takeover of our embassy in Tehran. That was the point when the Muslim cat was let out of the box. Up until then, we had the Muslims “more or less” contained. They were “in a box” so to speak. In other words, since the destruction of the caliphate by Ataturk, Muslims had been contained, and had to behave by “normal” standards of civility. After 1979, all of that went away. After 1979, Muslims felt empowered to reach out and destroy the civilized world.
Now, we have to pick up the pieces. All over the world, we have the OIC, the Organization of the Islamic Conference. These are, basically, the people who will plead innocence to any Islamic atrocity.
So, anyway, what are we to do? I would suggest that we tell the Muslims that IF they attack us, or Israel, or any of our allies in the world, that we will IMMEDIATELY DESTROY MECCA. Thus, the Haj is done, since there will be no place to visit. We must further instruct them that if attacks on the West continue, then other “holy” sites will be obliterated. We should have done this a long time ago, but we must do it NOW if these 7th century Cretans still intend to affect our lives.
We are not at their mercy, they are at ours, as long as we still have the balls to admit it.
The best gift from Obama to America in 2010: bin Laden is DEAD! Islam is DEAD!
Unfortunately, I am not holding my breath. I think he is rooting for the bad guys.
This is an interesting lecture that I found. Now, if you are a global warmingista, how do you explain this? Here we have climates changing, and temperatures changing, without the evil influence of mankind. The more I see, the more disgusted I get with the global warmingistas and their political corruption of science! This is all about Al Gore and the IPCC’s power grab. Remember him? He is the guy who uses 20 times more electricity than the typical American family. Do you think that a $2000/month electric bill is normal? Personally, I think that my average electric bill of $250 is too high, but obviously it is extremely reasonable, since it is much less than Al’s, and he is the poster child for global warming and saving the earth.
Anyway, this lecture is from CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Specifically, it is from the CERN Colloquium, which was held on June 4, 2009. It is presented by Jason Kirkby, of CERN. It may be a bit too technical for non-scientists, but it brings up some very interesting data, as well as ideas on what might really be the reason for climate change. After all, it has been a lot cooler in the past, and it has also been warmer. Also, CO2 levels have been higher in the past. As I showed in an earlier post, the relationship that Al Gore tried to show between CO2 and temperature with the Vostok ice cores is a complete lie, since that data clearly shows that CO2 increasesafter temperature increases. Thus, CO2 has never been the primary driver for temperature.
ZD YouTube FLV Player
To make things a little easier to follow, I have also included the lecture notes on this talk from CERN. It contains a lot of the information in the video, but with much more information. Also, it can be viewed and/or printed, for your convenience.
There are several especially interesting portions of this lecture. The first occurs at about the 7 minute mark. At this time, the graph on page 7 of the lecture notes is discussed. It turns out that very accurate records of the number of sun spots has been kept since the early 1600’s, shortly after the invention of the telescope. This graph shows the number of sun spots between 1600 and 2000. The graph also shows the time periods of the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age. Both of these time periods were recognized, by historical records, as very cold periods of time. Clearly, there is a correlation between sun spot activity and the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age. Furthermore, although not gone into during this talk, the sun is in a very low (unusually low) period of activity at the present time; early 2010. And, we are seeing worldwide cold weather and snow events, some of which have not been seen for decades.
Another interesting portion of the lecture is in the 10 to 14 minute time period. Here, the correlation between GCR (Galactic Cosmic Rays) and temperature is shown over various time periods ranging back as far as 2000 years. A clear correlation can be seen between GCR and temperature, especially in the Austrian speleotherm data. However, there is no clear correlation between temperature and CO2. The graph on page 9 of the lecture notes shows the relationships between solar and GCR values and temperature over a 700 year period from Siberia. This shows very good correlation between solar and GCR variability and temperature, until the last 125 or so years, where the temperature does increase more than the previous data would suggest. This might be due to other forces, such as CO2. But, clearly, there is still a correspondence between temperature and solar/GCR data, even during that period. If CO2 is causing the additional warming, that would be interesting to know, but it clearly shows that CO2 is not the dominant controller of global temperature.
At about the 24:40 point in the video, the data on page 15 of the lecture notes is discussed. This, again, shows excellent correlation between GCR and temperature, and this goes back over 500 million years. This graph very clearly shows a correlation between GCR and temperature. The graph also show CO2, and you can clearly see that there is no clear correlation between temperature and CO2. What is noteworthy in this graph is that we are currently in a cold period, called an “icehouse”, but we seem to be entering another warm period. Additionally, this graph indicates that global temperatures, on a geologic time scale, have tended to be much warmer than they are today. The cold periods are clearly short lived phenomenon. The peaks in GCR, and the delayed, but corresponding global “icehouse” periods, occur about every 140 to 150 million years. This time period corresponds to the time it takes the solar system to travel from one spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy to another arm of that galaxy. The solar system is not locked in position in the galaxy. Rather, it orbits the galaxy, moving from one arm to another arm about every 140 million years.
At about the 37 minute point, the data on page 22 of the lecture notes is discussed. Several things are significant in looking at the graph of surface temperature from 1978 to the present. The most obvious thing to notice is that the red data (corresponding to ground based thermometers) is consistently higher (and some times significantly higher) than the satellite determined data. Given the extreme difficulty of accurately measuring air temperature with a thermometer, and given the fact that we know that many measurement sites are corrupted by nearby sources of heat, and given that we know that some of the techniques used by the global warmingistas to “adjust” temperature data are poor at best, and completely fraudulent at worst, I think we have to learn to concentrate on the satellite data, since it is global in scope, and not affected by the measurement and siting errors so common with ground-based thermometer measurements. (If you think measuring temperature on the ground with a simple thermometer is simple, try an experiment I propose in another article.)
Another critical fact that the global warmingistas do not want you to know is the total failure of their models compared to actual data. This is shown in the graphs on the right hand side of the page. The top graph depicts what the temperature should be as a function of altitude and latitude given a particular concentration of CO2. The bottom graph shows the actual, measured data. Even a child could tell that these graphs are not even close. Thus, the models that the global warmingistas depend upon to predict future temperatures do not even work with today’s situation! And, of course, as mentioned earlier, the models all predict a dramatic rise in temperature over the last 10 years, but we have not seen that. This is what Phil Jones referred to as a “travesty” in one of the leaked CRU documents.
A very interesting point was brought up in the lecture at about the 41 minute mark. This was a reference to a 2005 paper by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Unfortunately, the paper did not pass peer review, so it was not published. Jasper Kirkby made a somewhat sarcastic comment about how he could not imagine why it would not pass peer review; “must have offended the sense of scientific orthodoxy..” Remember, this talk was put together in June of 2009. Although many of us knew that the global warmingista cabal was actively preventing the publication of excellent papers if they did not support the man-made global warming mantra. Of course, I suspect he knew the reason, and that was the reason for the comment. Now, thanks to Climategate, and the release of the CRU e-mails and files, the whole world knows the most likely reason this paper did not receive peer review and publication. It was almost certainly blocked, but it’s data and conclusions are extremely valuable, and may offer a realistic clue to a significant cause of climate change, which is not CO2. A very interesting follow-up to this article, by the original authors, but with data extended to 2009, is at this location. The critical graph from the follow-up article is shown below. It is the same graph as shown on page 24 of the lecture notes (labeled “Sunspot Magnetic Field (G)), but this graph extends the time scale out to 2009, and shows that the trend described in their 2005 paper is continuing. The main point of this paper is that the sun may be entering another very quiet period, with few or no sun spots, which would be similar to the Maunder Minimum. If this is true, and if GCR may, in fact, be one of the major modulators of global climate, we may be in for a very cold decade or two. This could be devastating to many people in the world. Cold periods have always been harder on humans than warm periods for reasons ranging from simply freezing to crop failures and shorter growing seasons.
In fact, in his recent book, “Chill”, author and scientist Peter Taylor predicts a coming “ice age”. Sun spot activities may be the clue. A better understanding of clouds and the effect of clouds on global climate is critical. Clouds are not accurately modeled in the Global Climate Models used by the IPCC and similar groups. The understanding of the function of cosmic rays in the formation of clouds is vital if we are to ever have a chance of actually understanding climate change, let alone predict it.
I am currently reading several very new technical papers relating to this concept that cosmic rays may be one of the most significant drivers of climate change, and I will write about those papers once I have had a chance to digest them and to try to produce information that can be understood by non-scientists
We have spent decades in a state of denial. It actually started in the 1970’s, with the Olympic massacre. Then, Jimmy Carter let the Muslims have their way in Iran. He did nothing! By then, the Muslims knew that the West had lost it’s way, and that they would never fight to bring right, again. We fought in World War 1, and we won a decisive war against evil. We reluctantly entered World War II, and won a war against fascism and evil. In fact, in World War II, we faced some of the same type of insane ideology that caused many Japanese citizens to become homicide bombers; we just called them “kamikazes”. But, in the first two world wars, we knew what we were fighting for, and we knew the enemy. I am not going to go into the first world war too much, here, since the history is older, and the lessons of the second world war are more immediate and pressing.
During the second world war, Hitler had decided that he was going to take over the world. He was going to exterminate the Jews. If we had not joined the war effort, there is no doubt that we would be speaking German, and there would no longer be any Jews in the world. But, we not only joined the fight, but we knew who our enemies were, and we identified them. Germany, Italy, and Japan. We took precautions to make sure that Germans and Italians in the United States did not subvert our government; we took steps to minimize the chances that German and Italian spies could learn our secrets. After the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, we went to war with Japan. And, we named Japan as an enemy, and we took steps to ensure that the Japanese citizens in the United States could not transmit information to the Japanese government. We put them in internment camps. For this, America has been denigrated. But, we knew it must be done. We did it, and we won the war. Could we have won the war if we did not do this? I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t care. It was a small price to pay for ensuring that our security was not violated. We are now not only not watching Muslims in America, but we are actually allowing them into our military, our security services, and our government itself. As we know, this has had disastrous results, culminating with the murder spree of Major Nidal Hasan in Ft. Hood, but also including the treachery of Muslim interpreters who not only deliberately slowed down and falsified translations, but who also openly celebrated the attacks on the United States by Osama bin Laden on 9/11. How stupid can we be. We must identify and marginalize the enemy if we ever intend to win this war on Islam.
Today, we are at war with Islam. But, who tells you that? Barack Obama (at least at one time a Muslim)? NO! George Bush, widely denigrated for torturing “prisoners” who were not really prisoners, because they did not fall under the Geneva Convention? NO! (He probably came the closest to saying the truth, that it is a war on Islam, but he never could quite bring himself to say it.) Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, Barney Frank, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, or even John McCane? No, nobody is telling you the truth. Not only do they not tell you the truth, but they don’t even allow truthful words to be spoken. A while ago, Obama stated that the “war on terror” is no longer to be called a “war on terror”; it is an overseas contingency operation! SAY WHAT? Are you kidding me? That is like in the old days when you could not call a “walk in closet” a “walk in closet” because you might “offend” somebody in a wheel chair! To make it even more absurd, “big sister” Janet Napolitano declared that terrorist incidents could no longer be called terrorist incidents. They had to be called “man-caused” disasters. How totally stupid is that?! Well, we found out on December 25, 2009, when a crazed Muslim homicide bomber tried to blow himself up on Northwest flight 253, en route from Amsterdam to Detroit, better known as Detroitistan. And, the blogger who leaked the TSA document that mentioned a “terrorist” attack was threatened by jack booted federal agents to identify the source of the leak. Apparently, Napolitano had her panties in a knot because someone had the balls to use the term “terrorist” instead of “man-made disaster” in an internal memo. Obviously, one of Obama’s first moves in the new year must be to fire Napolitano.
What upsets me more than most things about this atrocity is that Napolitano had the audacity to say the the “system worked”, but she also sicked the TSA and federal agents on some bloggers who reported on the fact that some poor, unfortunate employee at the TSA did not get the “message” and released a classified briefing bulletin that used the dreaded word “terrorist”, instead of “man-caused disaster makers”, as I reported. I kid you not!
Before we go any further, lets get some things straight. There is no war on terror. There is no war on “man-made” disasters. There is no “overseas contingency operation.” We are at war with Islam. We are at war with Muslims. This is a new Crusade. The enemies of Western civilization (Muslims) have declared war on us. They have basically said that we must convert to Islam, pay the jizya and live as dhimmis, or be killed. Period. It really is very simple. Have you heard any mainstream Muslim group deny this? Of course not. Have you heard CAIR deny this? Of course not. In fact, the co-founder of CAIR, Omar Ahmad, and the long-time chairman of CAIR, stated, in 1998:
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant,” and, “The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”
Clearly, this is one sick, deranged, person. But, he is one of the foremost spokesmen for Islam in the United States!The main stream media, as well as government agencies, refer to CAIR, and bow down to CAIR. FBI agents even have to remove their shoes when entering a mosque! How stupid is that? That is sending exactly the wrong message; the message that we respect their barbarian, 7th century ideology. We do not, or at least we certainly should not. We must get over this leftist relativism where all cultures and civilizations and ideas are equal. They are not. Some are superior, and some are simply representative of 7th century barbarism and misogyny.
The most important thing that the Western World must realize about Islam is that it IS NOT a religion. It is, like Nazism, an ideology. But, Islam is even worse than Nazism, in that it defines what you do every minute of your day. It even tells you what foot to use when entering the bathroom, and what foot to use when leaving, as well as what hands or fingers to use while you are in that bathroom. Unlike normal religions, Islam is a religion, a system of law, and a system of government. That is why it cannot be considered a “religion”, and is thus not protected by freedom of religion in the United States. Islam has been hiding behind this protection for too long, and it is time that people wake up and realize that Islam is much more than just a religion.
Bin Laden also declared war on America. What is it about a declaration of war that we refuse to understand? When are we finally going to realize that we are at war with Islam? Maybe when we are all sticking out asses in the air waiting to be fucked by Allah and banging our heads on the rug so that we can have that ugly “whatever” on our foreheads that you see on Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as many current and dead terrorists?
The situation is simple. We are at war with Islam. We have been for almost 4 decades. We’ve been at war with Islam for most of the last 1300 years. We just had them contained, in a box so to speak, for the last couple of hundred years. But, we let our guard down, and they got bold, again, wanting to recreate the old “glory days” when they had conquered and subjugated most of the civilized world. There are those that will say, “No, we are at war with “radical” Islam”. But, as the Prime Minister of Turkey, Erdogan, a former friend and ally of the United States so famously stated a few months ago:
“These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”
So, there you have it from the horses mouth, so to speak. Islam is Islam. In other words, you cannot be a Muslim and denounce Jihad, or Holy War, because that is at the very foundation of Islam. Islam was found by the sword, and Islam will die by the sword (or a few hundred nuclear weapons.)
Americans have been amazingly patient up until this time. The Muslim world is lucky that America did not demand the destruction of Islam in 2001. It is a shame it did not, because there are only three ways this can work out.
1) Islam is destroyed. That is, the Muslim population of the world is simply eliminated. This is what was done to the Aztec’s, with their barbaric human sacrifice. Today, we have no Aztecs and their barbaric human sacrifice.
2) Islam has a reformation. That is, it goes back and realizes that it is an ancient, barbaric religion based in the 7th century world. It will go and strike from it’s beliefs all violent phrases and teachings, and will grant equal rights to women, and will treat people of other faiths, or of non-faith, with total respect and dignity. (I am not betting on this one.)
3) Muslims are “re-educated”, and taught that their “prophet” was nothing more than a common barbarian pedophile. He was not the messenger of god, he was not the perfect man, and his sayings were nothing more than the rantings of a schizophrenic. This is basically what we did with the Japanese after World War II. (Of course, a bit of solution 1 had to be applied before the Japanese recognized the wisdom of solution 3.)
My guess, in the end, is that the Muslim solution will consist of a bunch of situation 1, followed by a bit of situation 3, pretty much like what had to be done with the Japanese. But, in the case of the Japanese, it eventually resulted in a great friendship, mutual respect, and a great trading situation.
In any case, I do not see any other solution. Our government does a huge disservice to all people involved when they refuse to name the enemy. Without naming the enemy, you cannot possibly hope to defeat them. We hear, repeatedly, how “prisoners” from Gitmo go back to become terrorists. Well of course they do. We do nothing in Gitmo to “decondition” them, as we would do with other people trapped in a cult. We should treat prisoners in Camp Gitmo as brain-washed victims of a cult, which they are. (The cult of Islam.) But, instead of trying to break their ties to Islam, we do just the opposite. We treat the Koran with respect; extreme respect. This is a mistake, since we do not respect the Koran, or their religion. Rather than only handling the Koran in white gloves, which gives the exact wrong impression, we should issue Koranic toilet paper. That is, each page of the toilet paper would contain a page of the Koran. Instead of offering them Imams that help them to further their jihad, we should offer them serious psychological reprogramming sessions, basically what you would offer to other victims of a cult.
If we are not willing to reprogram the “detainees” at Gitmo, to eliminate their Muslim tendencies, then we should just shoot them; take no prisoners. In the end, as I said, we have 3 choices. We must choose among them. If we don’t choose, then choice one is the default solution, because it then becomes kill or be killed, and we will not be killed.
What is the temperature outside? It certainly sounds like a simple enough question. But, have you ever actually tried to measure outside temperature? What a silly question. Of course you have. Virtually every home has an outside thermometer. Often, it is attached to the outside of the kitchen window, so you can easily see whether you need to bundle up, or put on shorts. And, that is fine. But, how many times have you looked at that thermometer, when there is snow on the ground and the local weather station is stating that it is 25 degrees Fahrenheit, and seen a reading of 35 degrees? Or, maybe even higher. Is your thermometer that bad? No. It is probably just “in the sun.” Very few people realize just how much energy the sun places on any given portion of the earth. On average, the sun deposits about 1000 watts per square meter at the surface of the earth on a clear day. That is a lot of power! (And, that is why solar panels offer so much hope for a sustainable energy future if their cost can be reduced, and/or their efficiency increased.) But, if that power is applied to a thermometer that is exposed to the sun, it will raise the temperature of the thermometer, and thus the temperature that it indicates, above the actual temperature of the air. Plus, the fact that the thermometer is mounted to your house will affect it’s reading (up or down, depending on the temperature of your house as compared to the ambient air.) In addition, since it is mounted on a window, you will have some air leaking out of the house, and that air will change the thermometer’s reading. Again, if it is winter, and the inside of your house is warmer than the outside air (hopefully your case), then that leakage air will tend to increase the temperature indicated by the thermometer.
So, we see that a thermometer mounted on your kitchen window is not a good way to measure outdoor air temperature, especially if you intend to measure temperature to an accuracy of less than 0.3 degrees F, or so. (Remember, in all of this global warming brouhaha, we are talking temperature changes of much less than 1 degree Celsius, which is about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit. So, if we are going to have data that is meaningful in any way, we must be able to measure temperature to an accuracy of at least 0.2 degrees Celsius, or about 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit.)
So, the thermometer attached to the kitchen window, in the sun, does not work. OK, lets place the thermometer in your patio, under a roof, so that it is not in the sun. That should be better. But, is your patio on a concrete slab? Did you mount the thermometer on a wooden post that supports the roof that is exposed to the sun? Is there sufficient air circulation under your patio roof to ensure that the heat absorbed by the roof is not raising the temperature under the roof, even though the area is not enclosed, slightly? Truly, there are a lot of variables.
So, what I would suggest is a simple experiment. Go out and buy 6 to 10 identical thermometers. Then, put them in a common location in your house where they will not be exposed to sunlight. Then, after they have had a few hours to settle, record the temperature of each. If your room is at 70 degrees F, you might get readings like 70.2, 68, 69, 71, 70.8, 69.2. Thus, they are all reading about 70 degrees, but there are some accuracy problems. (If you are using a simple liquid based thermometer, you may not be able to read them to anything like this degree of accuracy. This is a problem in itself, but you can make the most accurate readings that your eyes can determine.) This data, by itself, is not very meaningful. It only means that compared to thermometer A, thermometer B reads 2.2 degrees lower, etc. You need to record this information. If you really want to be scientific, you must measure your “standards” at a number of temperatures, but this will be difficult unless you want to vary the temperature inside you home by a wide range. (You could open the windows on a winter day, or night, to let the house cool down and make additional “calibration” measurements; just don’t let the pipes burst.)
Anyway, so now you have your thermometers, and you know how each “reads” relative to the other. Now, place them in different places on your property. Put at least one in a ludicrous location, such as one where it will be in full sunlight almost all day. Place the others in locations where you think you will get a “real” surface air temperature. Then, for a period of a few weeks, record the readings of your thermometers as accurately as you can. And, make sure you make those measurements at the same time for all thermometers. (Yes, it may take a few minutes to record all measurements, but don’t record thermometer A at 10 am and thermometer B at 10:15 am. Hopefully, you can record them all within a 5 or 6 minute period.) Also, make sure you make a few measurements after the sun has gone down.
I have no way to know what your results will be, but I suspect this exercise will give you some appreciation for the difficulty of accurately measuring outside, surface air temperatures. (Officially, outside air temperatures are to be measured at 2 meters height above the ground, but the exact height is not critical, as long as it is at least 1.5 meters above the ground, and less than 3 meters above the ground.) I suspect that you will find that measurements are much closer after the sun has set. This is important, since it demonstrates the inaccuracies that can be injected due to solar heating. Also, I suspect that you will find that one location seems to be the coolest during the day. This is probably the most accurate location for taking outside surface temperature data. You will probably notice that it is located in a position that is far from any possible heat sources, such as asphault or concrete or buildings or air conditioners. It is also in a shaded location that has good air flow.
While your results may vary, it is important to recognize that almost all of your measurement errors are going to be on the high side. That is, it is virtually impossible to get an outside air temperature reading that is consistently too low, but very easy to get one that is too high. This is one reason to question the data from the GISS and the Hadley center, since they are based on very error prone ground based thermometer measurements. In addition, as has been well documented, a huge percentage of the ground based temperature data is based on sites that are improperly located in relation to artificial heating, such as asphalt parking lots, roof tops, and air conditioner outlets.
Another prominent scientist, Dr. Neil Frank, has come out to criticize the CRU and their politically driven “science”. And, as a meteorologist, he is well qualified to speak on matters pertaining to the climate. In the article he points out very clearly that the climate models cannot even accurately predict weather 5 to 10 days out, let alone 100 years out. On top of that, he points out that the models used by the IPCC clearly predicted significant warming over the last 10 years, but that has not happened.
The article starts out:
Now that Copenhagen is past history, what is the next step in the man-made global warming controversy? Without question, there should be an immediate and thorough investigation of the scientific debauchery revealed by “Climategate.”
If you have not heard, hackers penetrated the computers of the Climate Research Unit, or CRU, of the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia, exposing thousands of e-mails and other documents. CRU is one of the top climate research centers in the world. Many of the exchanges were between top mainstream climate scientists in Britain and the U.S. who are closely associated with the authoritative (albeit controversial) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the more troubling revelations were data adjustments enhancing the perception that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other atmospheric greenhouse gases.
He goes on to point out how the core IPCC scientists marginalized the skeptics, and essentially took over the peer-review process, thus preventing the scientific work of skeptics from being published. He also points out that there have been many petitions by various groups of scientists stating that the science is not “settled” and that there is no solid proof for man-made global warming. He mentions that more than 700 scientists have endorsed a 231 page Senate minority report questioning anthropogenic global warming. Additionally, more than 200 scientists objected to the American Physical Society stand in support of man-made global warming. (I am one of those 200 scientists. That list also contains at least 1 Nobel Prize laureate.)
The article goes on:
What do the skeptics believe? First, they concur with the believers that the Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. The cause of this warming is the question. Believers think the warming is man-made, while the skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal and certainly not potentially catastrophic à la Al Gore.
Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. Numerous field experiments have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor. If you are going to change the temperature of the globe, it must involve water vapor.
Third, and most important, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly overpredicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world.
If we ever want to actually defeat the Taliban (and I don’t think we do, for what ever twisted reasons the powers to be hold), the simple solution is to destroy the Poppy fields in Afghanistan. Everyone knows that the only cash crop grown by Afghanistan is Poppies, to be used to produce heroin. Eliminate the Poppies, and you totally wipe out Afghanistan’s source of income. (For those morons who don’t understand this, that means, if you wipe out the poppies, you cut off the funding for the Taliban. No more Taliban, no more war in Afghanistan.)
The simplest and safest way to thwart an enemy’s ability to conduct war is to destroy their supply lines. This is an old and useful tactic from the time of King Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562) of Babylon. His armies would surround their hapless victims who had taken refuge in forts, cut off all supplies, including water and food, until famine weakened their army, and then attack. This is a brutal but effective military ploy. We have been in Afghanistan for eight years—and neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has effectively utilized this strategy.The solution to winning the war in Afghanistan is to destroy the Taliban’s ability to make war, causing the decimation of the Taliban war machine. The Taliban’s supply lines are the poppy fields. Eliminating those fields as a source of income would strike a fatal blow to the Taliban.
The Taliban are mafia drug-lords wrapped in Middle-Eastern freedom-fighter apparel. They generate $100 to $150 million annually by imposing “taxes” on opium farmers.Selling and exporting opium raises $700 to $800 million annually for the Taliban. This allows for the purchase of arms for insurgency, terrorism and black-market tyranny. Worldwide, Afghan heroin fuels 93 percent of a $65 billion trade, far surpassing all of Mexico, Southeast Asia and South America combined. The United Nations estimates between 15 to 21 million people use this highly addictive drug. Afghan heroin alone kills over 100,000 people each year, outweighing the U.S. combat losses of Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Grenada and Vietnam combined.
Until recently, people have argued that we cannot destroy the poppy fields, since that would destroy the economy of Afghanistan. Aside from the obvious fact that destroying the economy of Afghanistan should be a major goal of the free world, if that economy is built on heroin trade, the fact remains that Afghanistan farmers are simply business men. If an illegal drug brings them fortune, they will grow it; if other, legal crops, bring prosperity, they will grow them. We need to encourage them to grow legal crops.
One of the fiercest arguments against the destruction of Afghanistan poppy fields is that if opium production is eliminated it will destroy the Afghanistan economy. First, no one makes that argument for Mexican drug-dealers or marijuana cultivators in California. Second, if the crops were removed the Taliban would collapse, Afghanistan would become safe and foreign investment money would flow into that country. More to the point, Afghan farmer’s gross revenues from opium is about $1 billion dollars according to 2007 U.N. estimates, while our 2007 U.S. Military operations cost taxpayers $35 billion. Therefore, the plan should be: burn the fields, crush the Taliban, send the boys home, send one billion in aid and save $34 billion a year.
The U.S. dominates the air in Afghanistan. Poppy fields grow in full sunlight, and forests do not obscure the poppy fields. Eradication efforts will not be hampered by a lack of discovery. Modern herbicides are quite safe and effective, as well as the use of tractors to plow the fields under. When the Afghan farmer is faced with the choice of taking U.S. assistance to grow legal crops or face total eradication of his crops and imprisonment, he will be far more motivated than he currently is to switch his crops.
In the past, the United States did not have the ability to eradicate those fields. Now, we are the occupier of Afghanistan and have the capacity and the duty to destroy this trade. Every poppy that grows empowers the Taliban with more artillery that will be used to kill American soldiers and Marines. No one has more power than Mr. Obama to dispatch the largest source of heroin export in the world. If he really wants get out of Afghanistan and cares about our troops, he must destroy those fields.
Read the whole article. This brings some sanity to an insane part of the world.
In his recent book, Chill, scientist Peter Taylor predicts that the world may be heading for another deep chill, similar to the Maunder Minimum that started in the 17th century. Unlike the dire predictions of the global warmingistas, another major cooling cycle could be a disaster for mankind. While people and animals tend to thrive in warm climates, and warm climates result in longer growing seasons for plants, a major cooling would have disastrous results.
The graph below shows the global temperature over the last 11,000 years. It was compiled by David Archibald after Dansgaard, et al (1969) and Schönwiese (1995). The Maunder Minimum can clearly be seen, labeled as the “Little Ice Age”. During this time, the Thames River froze over frequently, as did the Hudson River. (Remember, during the Revolutionary war, Washington was able to get cannons across the Hudson River by simply pushing them across the frozen ice.)
Cycles are involved, not short-term trends, and many respected scientists, especially those in Russia and China, think that a cooling cycle is coming.
The AGW brigade have mistaken the current warm period for a trend caused by carbon emissions. But the detailed science says it could be natural and part of a cycle.
Behind the scenes at the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change there is no consensus – the dissenting views have been covered over in the summary documents for policy makers – and among UK and EU politicians it’s even worse, and criminally expensive for the British taxpayer.
At the end, the article ominously warns:
We’re being fatally led up the wrong garden path by green businesses, politicians, the IPCC and their computer geeks with their doctored spreadsheets and forecasts. They need to get out more and study the real world – not their virtual reality – because, like the asset bubbles of the financial crisis, the global warming bubble is about to burst…
Here we are, more than 8 years after 9/11, and we are witness to the gross incompetence displayed by intelligence agencies, the TSA, and the airlines in the case of the Underpants Bomber. Watch these two videos. In the first video, Napolitano states that “the system worked. Everybody played an important role here. The passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action. Within, literally, an hour to 90 minutes, of the incident occurring, all 128 flights in the air had been notified to take some special measures in light of what had occurred on the Northwest airlines flight.” Here, she not only shows her incompetence, but basically brags about it. Passengers should not have to be responsible for the safety of a flight. That is the job of the TSA. And, if you have a bomb on a plane, obviously the SYSTEM DID NOT WORK! Furthermore, they only notified flights that were inbound from Europe, not domestic flights, and not flights from other locations. Al Qaeda is known for multiple, simultaneous attacks. To not advise every flight is gross incompetence and dereliction of duty. Plus, how could it have taken 60 to 90 minutes to make those notifications? I’ll bet many of the passengers on those flights knew about the attack in less time than that! (And, just think of the problems that could create. I can see it now: “Oh, stewardess, did you know there was a bomb on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit?” “WHAT?? BOMB?? Oh my God, there’s a bomb on the plane…..”)Again, total incompetence. Then, after watching the first video, where Napolitano gives her political doublespeak to hide the systemic failures of the “system”, and to cover up the fact that virtually nothing has been learned since 9/11 except novel new ways to inconvenience and embarrass airline passengers, watch the second video, where the stunning extent of the failures in the system becomes clear. Obama’s first act of 2010 should be to fire Janet Napolitano.
Now, the video that documents the extent of the failures. (Note the s at the end of failure, as in multiple.)
NOTE: This article is by Michelle Rodenborn. She is a practicing attorney, specializing in the areas of customs and international trade law. Her blog is: http://libertyswatchdogs.blogspot.com. Her law practice website is: http://www.rodenborn.com. She has been kind enough to allow me to republish this article, in full, on my site. Please repay that favor by visiting her sites. To view the original posting, along with comments, go to http://libertyswatchdogs.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-square-pegs-and-round-holes-true.html
It’s 2010, an important election year, and you will soon be asked to choose which side you are on: Will you vote to keep in Congress those who supported the kind of big spending- government-can-do-it-all state being created by the Obama-Pelosi-Reid machine, or will you mark your ballot for those who support a smaller, fiscally responsible Washington with a more limited role in our daily lives?
This is a crucial decision, particularly for those of you who consider yourselves “independents,” or “moderates” of either political party. But this fall’s election is even more of a watershed event for those of you “dyed in the wool” democrats who pretty much always vote along straight party lines: For you, it is not too soon to warm yourself up to the possibility of voting for a (gasp!!) republican candidate for Congress. For in 2010, with 1000’s of democrats and independents swelling the ranks of the Tea Party movement, and others filled with “Obama remorse,” and with the power grab currently underway by the democrat administration and Congress, this is not your typical “politics as usual,” not your “well, they’re all the same anyway” kind of moment. And this is not your father’s or mother’s democrat party.
I speak from experience here. Like my parents before me, and like much of my generation which came of age in the ’60’s, I voted straight democrat tickets through the late ’90’s. I was not all that politically aware and tended to vote based on myopic views of one or two issues, and a disparaging view of all things republican. Disaffection with the post-Lewinsky Bill Clinton initiated the slide in my allegiance; 9/11 solidified it; and Obama-Pelosi-Reid’s march toward statism has turned it into fervent opposition.
“You don’t dance like a republican,” one new liberal acquaintance said to me at a recent dinner-dance event, reflecting the pervasive belief among the left that a person who votes republican must have the personality of a radish, the tolerance of a prig, and the natural rhythm of an Al Gore, (or a Tom De Lay.)
“How did this happen?” some liberal friends have asked me of my political defection, the question always delivered in the same hushed tones one might use to inquire delicately about the onset of some noxious disease or a death in the family. On those occasions I can practically see the mental wheels grinding, downgrading their earlier estimate of my IQ, certainly now in question for having the weakness of mind to vote republican. At such moments, I often recall the lines from Dylan’s song quoted above and rephrase them: They ask why I don’t abide with the dems, and I think, honey, how come you don’t move?
But the answer I give to the “how did this happen” question, is that I woke up one day, exhausted from the strain of furiously trying to pound ideological square pegs into the round holes of reality, and, like a nearly-blind woman with a first pair of glasses, I saw the world that is, and not the world that some would like it to be.
It started with the Lewinsky scandal and the knots into which democrat women lawmakers of the time turned themselves, in order to stand by their (pro-choice) man over “that woman,” the phrase delivered by Clinton as he lied to us (again) while finger-pointing angrily into the camera. I could not persuade myself then that a President of the United States, lying under oath, in a sexual harassment lawsuit in federal court was simply a lie about a private matter involving recreational sex in the oval office.
And once I gave myself permission to doubt one piece of liberal dogma, I found it impossible not to turn those same clearer eyes on a whole host of liberal doctrines. Freed from the shackles of having to fit everything into a strict (liberal) view of the world, from trying to jam square pegs into round holes, I could embrace different views. To borrow a phrase from the other Clinton, I could no longer employ the “willing suspension of disbelief” required to sustain the democrat mindset.
To see if, after the events of 2009, the first year of Barack Obama, you might find yourself in the same boat, (or clinging to its sides), I invite you to take the following True/False test to see if you still have (or ever had) the right stuff to vote for the left:
Janet Napolitano was right earlier this year when she said that the biggest terrorist threats that face America come from returning military veterans and tea partiers? (T/F?)
Obama’s sending additional troops to Afghanistan does not mean that we are “at war” with Islamic terrorists. (T/F?)
If we don’t call it a war, it is not a war. (T/F?)
Soldiers can be sent into battle, fight and die, yet they are not engaged in “war.” (T/F?)
If we act “nice” to our enemies, they will be nice to us. (T/F?)
We must give civil trials, and not military commission hearings, to battlefield detainees like KSM because they are not wartime prisoners or enemy combatants, but if they are released by a jury or by the President, our soldiers can go ahead and shoot them or bomb them when they retake the battlefields. (T/F?)
When a person espousing fundamentalist Islamic beliefs, who calls himself a Soldier of Allahu, and who has recent ties to a radical imam in Yemen, who in turn has ties with Al Qaeda, and that same person kills and maims US soldiers, yelling as he does so, “Allahu Ahkbar,” the jihadist war cry, this act is simply “an inexplicable act of violence,” as the President said, and is not tied to Islamic jihad. (T/F?)
Intelligence gathering is all important to our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it makes sense not to interrogate people like the underpants bomber, but instead “lawyer” them up, because the world will see that we are a nation of principles. (T/F?)
A youth with radicalized Islamic views and jihadist fantasies who has ties to Al Qaeda in Yemen, who tries to blow up an airliner full of Americans on Christmas day is simply, as the President put it, “an isolated extremist.” (T/F?)
You agree with Janet Napolitano, Head of DHS, that the “system worked,” referring to the security system that failed to prevent the underpants bomber attack, despite adequate advance information received by the CIA. (T/F?)
President Obama was right when he contradicted Janet Napolitano saying it was a “systemic failure.” (Note: this is a trick question.) (T/F?)
It is right to charge KSM (the mastermind of 9/11) and the underpants bomber (who tried to kill hundreds) in civil courts, even though our own Navy Seals will not get a civil trial on (denied) charges of a single punch to the stomach to one detainee. (T/F?)
We cannot tolerate any kind of profiling on the basis of ethnic looks and religion, even if the vast majority, (nearly 100%), of all terror attacks are committed by those sharing the same ethnic looks and religion. (T/F?)
If a would-be bomber uses a blanket and pillow, (or shoes, or box cutters) in his botched attempt, it makes sense to profile, even outlaw, the use of blankets and pillows and such, rather than profiling the characteristics of the would-be bomber himself. (T/F?)
In order to give the appearance of fairness to all, an 80 yr. old grandma from Iowa must be given the same type of airline screening that a disaffected radicalized youth whose own father turned him in to the CIA as being an Islamic extremist, should get. (T/F?)
A network of people with common ideological, extremist religious views, who openly express their commitment to killing infidels, particularly Americans, and who are armed by Islamic rogue nations, and who carry on battles with our forces, are not engaged in acts of war with us, but are mere common criminals. (T/F?)
Eric Holder was right when he said that waterboarding battlefield detainees was torture. (T/F?)
Eric Holder was right when he said that waterboarding our own troops to prepare them for interrogations (as we do), is not torture. (T/F?)
Eric Holder was right when he backtracked and said that if waterboarding our troops is not torture then waterboarding per se is not torture. (T/F?)
Eric Holder was right when he said that the purpose behind waterboarding makes it torture or not: if it’s to get information, then it’s torture; if it’s to prepare someone about giving up information, it’s not torture. (T/F?)
You do not find listening to Eric Holder to be torture. (T/F?)
President Obama, Al Gore, Bono, and other politicians and celebrities are within their rights to use up large amounts of carbon in their private jets to go to places like Copenhagen to chastise the rest of the world about not using carbon. (T/F?)
Climate science is settled even though serious scientists have serious doubts. (T/F?)
It is appropriate to quiet the voices of dissenting views in the scientific community through suppressing data and disallowing divergent opinions to be published, because the matter at stake, global warming (or cooling or climate change,) is a catastrophe waiting to happen. (T/F?)
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) was right when, in the context of publicly funded health care coverage, she said that there was no real difference between a woman’s right to abort a fetus and a man’s right to use Viagra, in that both involve reproductive freedom. (T/F?)
A fetus dies during an abortion, and also when a man uses Viagra. (T/F?)
The health care crisis is so serious and grave, and so many people are dying without medical coverage that we must jam a partisan bill through Congress without showing it to the American people, even though medical relief will not be provided for at least 4 years but new taxes will start immediately. (T/F?)
You can cover health care for 25 million more people, cut Medicare by $500 billion, spend $1 trillion overall, and have better health care than ever and still save money! (T/F?)
Some law, even though it may prove ruinous to our health care system, and even though it is achieved through bought votes, and even though it has unknown consequences at a forbidding price tag that may put us in the poor house, is better than no law, as long as the goal is worthy. (T/F?)
In the pictures below, President Obama is not bowing at the waist, but is merely inclining his head to foreign leaders. (T/F?)
During the entire 20 years during which Barack and Michelle Obama regularly sat in Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s pews, and during which the Reverend officiated over their marriage and their children’s baptisms, and during which Wright served as a spiritual mentor to Obama, Barack Obama never heard any radical, racist, anti-American or other extremist views expressed by Reverend Wright? (T/F?)
When in doubt or left without an answer, it is best to blame George Bush. (T/F?)
If you answered True to most of these questions, it is probably too late for you and you should immediately stop reading this blog and go to the Daily Kos or Huffington Post post-haste. If, on the other hand, you, find the above hard to swallow, you owe it to yourself to stop wearing yourself out pounding those square pegs into round holes.
Do you really want to vote for a party that requires you to check your reason and common sense at the door?
Think about it. We could use more dancers on our side.
(CNN) — A Somali man was shot as he allegedly tried to enter the home of Danish political cartoonist Kurt Westergaard — known for his controversial depictions of the Muslim prophet Mohammad — on Saturday, police said.
The 27-year-old man, who was not identified, wielded an ax and a knife and cracked a window at Westergaard’s home in Aarhus, said police spokesman Morten Jensen. A home alarm alerted police to the scene at 10 p.m., and they were attacked by the man, he said.
The officers shot the man in the right leg and left hand. He was hospitalized, but was not seriously injured, police said.
Westergaard’s caricature of Mohammed — which depicted the prophet wearing a bomb as a turban with a lit fuse — sparked an uproar among Muslims in early 2006 after newspapers reprinted the images months later as a matter of free speech. The cartoon was first published by the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jullands-Posten in September 2005.
Of course, most Americans have no idea what this is all about, because most of the main stream media totally obfuscated the story in 2005 and into 2006. The only main stream media publication, that I know of, in the United States, to publish the cartoons was the Philadelphia Enquirer. While I am not a fan of the Philly Enquirer (or any newspaper), I have to give them a lot of credit for having the journalistic integrity to at least publish the cartoons that caused so many deaths by followers of an insane, epileptic, barbarian, pedophile named Mohammad. How insane are these people, to go on rampages about harmless cartoons? Did Christians riot, loot, and kill when Jesus was depicted in dung? How many disparaging cartoons and outrages have been committed against Jesus, and other characters beloved by Christians? Many. But, you don’t see Christians rioting, looting, and killing over them. Christians had a reformation, and got over that stuff a few hundred years ago (thank God!)
In fact, the political correctness and fear of Muslims has gone so far that Yale University Press prevented the publication of the Mohammad cartoons in a book about the Mohammad cartoons. How totally absurd is that? If I was the author, I would have told my publisher to go fuck themselves. Unfortunately, the author of this book did not do that. I guess the author needed the money. I discuss this situation in my article “Disgraceful Dhimmitude: Yale University Press Afraid To Publish Muhammad Cartoons In Book About Muhammad Cartoons!” In this post, I include the cartoons in question, along with a few that are more “controversial”. (My favorite is “Mohammad Invents a New Religion”.) Anyway, the one with Mohammad with a bomb in his turban was the one that generated so much “angst” among the pious, “peaceful” Muslims. They claimed that it made Mohammad look like a terrorist. Well, DUH, he was a terrorist! He spent much of his life as a barbarian warrior, killing many (preferably by decapitation) while he, unfortunately, walked the earth. And, his barbarous legacy continues. Lets face it, 99 times out of 100, when you hear about some bombing or other atrocity committed in the world, there is a Muslim involved. I am not saying that every Muslim is a terrorist, but virtually every terrorist is a Muslim. A couple of decades ago, it was not so clear, since there were a lot of IRA terrorists committing atrocities. But today, terrorism is almost exclusively the domain of the Muslims. I was not politically aware in the age of the IRA, so I can’t comment on that situation, but it seems to have been resolved, or at least contained. In the case of the Muslims, as the attempted bombing of Northwest flight 253 on Christmas day proves, they are still 7th century barbarians.
It is a shame that Kurt Westergaard does not live in the United States. If he lived here, he would have a right to bear arms; that is, a right to protect himself. If the attack had happened here, Kurt could have dispatched the Somali attacker to his imaginary 72 virgins; in stead, the police arrived and only wounded the attacker, thus allowing him to attack, again. I am amazed that Kurt is still alive. It does speak volumes about the apparent ability of the police in Denmark. But, Denmark is small; what is the expected police response time? I don’t know. In most of America, police response time would be tens of minutes, at least, which would translate to death for the attacked, unless they were armed.
This situation is not only a further indictment of Muslims, but it is another reason why the 2nd amendment is so vitally important. I’m actually surprised that the police got to Westergaard’s house quickly enough to save his life. Lets face it, it only takes a few seconds for an assailant to enter you house. If you can’t defend yourself, your chances are not good. Theo van Gogh found that out on the streets of Holland, when he was brutally stabbed in the chest by a crazed Muslim after making the film “Submission” with Ayan Hirsi Ali, one of the most courageous people to leave Islam. I recommend all of her books. I also show “Fitna” on my site, by Geert Wilders, an incredibly courageous Danish parliamentarian. I do not show “Submission” only because it has some nudity, and thus might not be appropriate to viewers of all ages. It is a great movie, however, and you can find it if you want to.
It has recently occurred to me that the Muslims seem to be obsessed with killing their own. We all know that most homicide bombers kill, primarily, Muslims. But, how about other bombers and attackers? In the last few days, we heard that a follower of the insane, epileptic, barbarian, pedophile, commonly known as Mohammad, failed in his attempt to bring down Northwest Flight 253, an airliner that was flying between Amsterdam and Detroitistan. How dumb was that? I obviously have no way of knowing what percentage of the passengers on that jet were Muslims, but I suspect it was higher than the percentage of Muslims on most flights, because it was flying from a place with a high Muslim population, to an American city with one of the largest Muslim populations in the country.
Thus, it stands to reason that an unusually large percentage of the people on that plane were probably Muslim. Thus, his act, if it had succeeded, would have killed many Muslims. Collateral damage, I guess.
We are constantly reminded about all of the deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, as well as other places. Ignoring the deaths of militants, and those unfortunately caught in the crossfire, the majority of those deaths are Muslims being killed by Muslims. Sometimes it is al Qaeda just trying to stir the pot. More often, it is Shia against Sunni violence, or vice versa. Many of the deaths in Iraq are caused by operatives brought into the country to kill and terrorize by Iran. And, of course, we now see Iran’s “government” killing Iranian citizens by shooting them and running them over with vehicles. And, lets not forget the situation in Palestine. Every time the Israeli’s strike back in self defense, you hear the hollow scream from Hamas and Hezbollah about all of the “civilian” deaths. Well, DUH, if you put rocket launchers in populated areas, or run back to populated areas after performing attacks, civilian casualties are inevitable. Plus, there is no easy way to tell who is a member of Hamas or Hezbollah and who is a “civilian”, since these groups illegally do not wear a uniform. (Or, if they do, they quickly change back into civilian clothes and “blend in” after staging an attack, making their targeting impossible.)
Of course, the fact that they are not part of a nation state’s military, and don’t wear a uniform, makes them, like the Taliban and al Qaeda, ineligible for any Geneva Convention protection. The Geneva Convention only applies to recognized soldiers, wearing a uniform, of a national army.
So, if “innocent civilians” do not want to get killed in the occasional (but increasing), and necessary, Predator missile strikes, don’t hang out with the bad guys. You know who they are.
Just as I was finishing this article, a got a breaking news text message from CNN. It seems we have another case of Muslims behaving badly, this time in Pakistan. A car bomb reportedly loaded with 600 pounds of explosives blew up at a volleyball match, killing 60 and wounding 60. Just one more, typical, example of Muslims killing Muslims. And, that was clearly targeted to kill Muslims. It was not an attack on US or NATO forces that killed a few Muslims who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I just found out about this fantastic article, “500 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of ‘Man-Made’ Global Warming“. It lists, and links to, 500 peer reviewed, published articles that support a skeptical view towards “man-made” global warming, also known as AGW, or Anthropogenic Global Warming. Unfortunately, being peer reviewed scientific articles, many are not freely available unless you subscribe to the particular journal in question. But, virtually all of these articles can be purchased for a fairly nominal fee, and the abstracts for the articles are freely available. Also, many of the articles are freely available. It is not only a great resource for anyone interested in the topic (whether you believe in AGW or not), but it shows conclusively that there are responsible scientists that do not support “man-made” global warming, and their research clearly shows that the science is not settled. But, of course, you don’t hear much about these scientists and their work.
Another thing that I found very interesting about the articles when I glanced through the list and the brief descriptions of each article was the fact that a significant portion of the articles are quite recent. That is, many were published after 2005. This is very significant, since the last IPCC report was published in 2007, and the global warmingistas responsible for that report would not allow any article published after 2005 to be included. Thus, the report was based on old, and perhaps outdated, science. This article is a treasure-trove of information for anyone interested in the topic.
I am sure it’s hard for you to hear these words, but there is something you can do to help. Why not sit your dad down and have a good talk to him. Tell him you want him to stop helping the big companies that are spoiling the future for you and all the other kids at school. Tell him that the family would rather have less money if he had a different job, one you could be proud of.
So, I really did not think things could get too much worse. But, of course, I was wrong. Now, the Build A Bear company has come out with this atrocious attempt to brainwash children about global warming and other leftist trash. The videos talk about the North Polar ice cap melting in 2 days, and global warming causing the cancellation of Christmas. They even had the audacity to mention that the cute penguins (with Australia accents) were working at the “Global Village Research Center”. (Hillary would be so proud.) When mentioning the fact that the warming could cause the North Pole to disappear in 2 days, they dutifully reported 2 days as “The Day After Tomorrow.” When they showed their “research” book, I was actually surprised that they did not show the rediculously fraudulent cover of Al Gore’s newest book. (And, I am not even going to insert a shameless plug here, in the form of an Amazon link, because I don’t want anybody to buy his book, even if that purchase might net me a few cents.)
Of course, by now just about everyone has heard about Climategate, that huge (over 150 megabytes) release of files, e-mails, and computer code from the CRU (East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit). But, in spite of the significance of the “hack” (or whistle blower release of information), it has not been very well covered by the main stream media. Of course, since the release severely damages the “science” of man made global warming, (no matter how hard the main stream media tries to claim that it does not) it is not too surprising to learn that the main stream media was quite. After all, they are mostly owned by large corporations who plan to line their pockets through carbon tax trading at the expense of ordinary citizens. And, many media types are extremely liberal, and would welcome global government and “climate justice”.
In the article, he points out that the released materials were clearly not random. They were picked from over 13 years worth of files and e-mails to describe what can not be considered anything more than the pure politicization of science, and “scientists” in search of validation of a theory to prove that man is causing unprecedented global warming, rather than a scientific search for the truth. And, the e-mails showed that some of the scientists had their own personal doubts about some of the findings and research.
The 2001 Synthesis Report looked authoritative in its carbon and temperature outlooks. But one of the “lead authors” was Kevin Ternberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Eight years later, Mr. Ternberth shows up in the emails. On Oct. 14, 2009, he wrote to Tom Wigley: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.” In other words, one of the lead authors of the 100-year climate forecasting exercise says there’s something wrong with the models — or the data.
After a while, the IPCC team at the CRU decided to bring Dr. Michael Mann on board. In an e-mail where he agreed to work with them, to Dr. Phil Jones, the leader of the CRU, Dr. Mann wrote the following.
Dear Phil,
Of course I’ll be happy to be on board. I think the opportunity for some direct collaboration between us (me, and you/tim/keith) is ripe, and the plan to compare and contrast different approaches and data and synthesize the different results is a good one. Though sidetracked by other projects recently, I remain committed to doing this with you guys, and to explore applications to synthetic datasets with manufactured biases/etc remains high priority. It sounds like it would all fit into the proposal you mention. There may be some overlap w/proposals we will eventually submit to NSF (renewal of our present funding), etc. by I don’t see a problem with that in the least.
Once the collaboration is officially in place, I think that sharing of codes, data, etc. should not be a problem. I would be happy to make mine available, though can’t promise its the most user friendly thing in the world.
In short, I like the idea. Include me in, and let me know what you eed from me (cv, etc.).
cheers,
mike
Terence Cororan’s comment to this e-mail was:
Exactly what those words mean is hard to know. It must be science talk
Personally, to me, it sounds ominously prescient of the “science” that is going to be done by the CRU and it’s associated “scientists”.
It seemed that there was a lot of tension between the scientists as to what should be published and what should not be published.
Finally, in an important concluding remark, Mr. Mann tells Mr. Briffa to “correct” his definitions regarding “global temperature and non-temperature proxies.” Mr. Mann prefers using the words “global climate proxies,” thus giving the impression that proxies from tree rings and other sources and actual temperatures are one and the same for IPCC purposes. What Mr. Mann appears to be talking about here is the use of what CRU head Phil Jones would later refer to as Mr. Mann’s “trick” and how he was able to “hide the decline” that Mr. Briffa’s tree-ring research showed 20th century temperatures to be cooler rather than warmer.
A series of email exchanges, some heated and involving a range of scientists, follows. It appears, moreover, that Mr. Mann had interfered with the peer-review process of Mr. Briffa’s article at Science magazine. One of Mr. Mann’s associates, Raymond Bradley at the University of Massachusetts, on April 19, wrote to Science editor Julia Uppenbrink, saying, “I would like to disassociate myself from Mike Mann’s view” regarding the climate warming article. Mr. Bradley sends a blind copy of this email to Mr. Briffa.
The conflict eventually makes it up to Phil Jones, the head of CRU, who writes a stinging letter to Mr. Mann on May 6. “You seem quite pissed off with us all in CRU,” said Mr. Jones. “I am somewhat at a loss to understand why.” Mr. Jones, in strong words, then rips into Mr. Mann. He accused Mr. Mann of “slanging us all off to Science.” We all have disagreements, wrote Mr. Jones, but “We have never resorted to slanging one another off to a journal … or in reviewing papers or proposals.”
After a month of back and forth, Mr. Mann seems to offer an apology. In a mildly grovelling but self-serving and ultimately not-too-apologetic letter, he commends Mr. Briffa and others for doing such terrific work. “I appreciate having had the opportunity to respond to the original draft …. We have some honest disagreements among us …. Thanks for all the hard work and a job well done,” wrote Mr. Mann on May 14. Mr. Bradley, Mr. Mann’s associate in Massachusetts and co-creator of the hockey stick graph, sends a private response to Mr. Briffa: “Excuse me while I puke … Ray.”
More clashes occur later that year over the tree-ring record. Mr. Briffa, in September 1999, is still battling Mr. Mann. “I know Mike thinks his series is ‘the best’, and he might be right — but he may also be too dismissive of other data and overconfident of his own.” He adds: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data,’ but in reality the situation is not quite so clear … I believe the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”
After all, it would not fit their agenda to have people knowing that it actually has been warmer in the past. How many times have we heard Al Gore, and others, state that “it has never been warmer”, or something like that. After all, if it was warmer 1000 years ago, that warming was clearly not caused by CO2, and thus their argument for human activities destroying the planet and bringing on major, life threatening catastrophes does not look so impressive or urgent. But, the sinister side of this is the very clear attempt to kill the publication of anything, no matter how well accepted and presented, that does not fit their agenda. This is not how science is supposed to work. As the article points out:
The Mann technique of aggressive intervention in the peer-review process over Mr. Briffa’s work sets the tone for what would become a major strategy as all the scientists within the IPCC loop waged war on any science and papers that contravened or questioned the official view.
One of the most famous incidents involving the IPCC, the CRU, and Dr. Mann and others is the infamous “hockey stick chart”. This was proudly displayed in the first IPCC finding, and trumpeted by Al Gore as proof that we are destroying the planet. Unfortunately for Al Gore and the IPCC, it was based on very bad science, and was later proven to be false by Steve McIntyre (of ClimateDepot fame), and Ross McKitrick. But, not without intensive efforts by Mann and others of the global warmingistas to block the publication of McIntyre’s and McKitrick’s work.
The anti-skeptic campaign switched into overdrive with the arrival on the climate science scene of two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. In mid-2003, after many efforts, Mr. McIntyre and Mr. McKitrick finally published a paper titled “Corrections to the Mann et al Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series.”
The public battles between Mr. Mann and the two Canadians are already on the record. The emails reinforce the worst of suspicions that the official scientific community did all they could to smear Mr. McIntyre and Mr. McKitrick, prevent publication of the work of skeptics, manipulate the peer-review process and isolate all skeptics as cranks. On May 31, 2004, Phil Jones, head of the IPCC-designated Climatic Research Unit, wrote to Mr. Mann: “Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised…”
Mr. Mann meddled in other ways. In January 2005, he called the editor of Geophysical Research Letters, the official science publication of the American Geophysical Union, to try to head off a paper by Mr. McIntyre. The editor, Steve Mackwell, defends the decision to publish and tells Mr. Mann that the McIntyre paper has been thoroughly peer reviewed by four scientists. “You would not in general be asked to look it over,” Mr. Mackwell told Mr. Mann. Later in 2005, Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Jones on their troubles with the GRL journal after Mr. Mackwell’s term as editor was up: “The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership.”
As the battles between the CRU and McIntyre and McKitrick intensified, McIntyre filed freedom of information act (FOIA) requests in the United States and Great Britain to request copies of the raw data that was used by the CRU. It was at about this time that the leaked documents show Dr. Jones telling people to delete any e-mails related to the data for which there is a FOIA request. And, as I reported earlier, it is at about this time that the CRU announced that it “lost the data” and thus could not fulfill the FOIA request!
It is a great set of articles. Go read them in full.
A new article has been published in the American Meteorological Society publication “Journal of Climate” on pages 4029 to 4049. Yes, it is a very long (20 pages) article. The lead author is Jason E. Box of the Byrd Polar Research Center and Department of Geography, Atmospheric Sciences Program at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. The article title is “Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Air Temperature Variability: 1840-2007″. While the data only goes back to 1840, and thus misses the colder portion of the “little ice age”, and it certainly does not cover the “Medieval Warm Period“, it is a very interesting article. Of course, since there were extensive crops and livestock herds in Greenland in the Medieval Warm Period, it was obviously much warmer then than it is now. But, the article clearly shows that there is nothing remarkable about recent temperatures in Greenland.
The highlight of the article is a graph showing temperatures in Greenland during that period of time. It clearly shows that temperatures were higher in the 1930’s, and it also shows that temperatures rose at a more rapid rate a long time ago, compared to the recent warming. Furthermore, it clearly shows a drop in temperature during the time period from 1930 to 1990. This is significant, because CO2 was rapidly rising during this time. Again, the data shows that temperature is not primarily a function of CO2. And, of course, if CO2 is the driver, there is absolutely no way to explain the rapid rise in temperature between 1885 and 1930.
This article is just more evidence that we have seen higher temperatures in the past; even the very recent past. It also clearly shows that temperature changes are not just the result of CO2. In fact, there is very strong evidence that temperature changes are mostly due to something that we don’t understand, as Dr. Phil Jones’ leaked e-mail revealed when he said that it is a “travesty” that we cannot explain the lack of global temperature increase over the last 11 years, in spite of a clear increase in CO2 levels.
This is just more evidence that we DO NOT understand climate change, and to cripple the world’s economies with carbon taxes before we really understand the science is not only ridiculous, it would be criminal.
Many people simply don’t understand global warming skeptics. Or, more specifically, they don’t understand AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) skeptics. And, I have to admit that there are many varieties of us, and we have a wide range of skeptical beliefs. Some are just skeptical that man is the primary cause of global warming. Some don’t even believe it is warming. Some believe that it was warming for a couple of hundred years after the “little ice age”, which bottomed out about 400 years ago, but that warming trend ended in the early 1900’s. So, we have a wide range of beliefs. In his excellent article, “Global Warming Skepticism 101“, self-professed AGW skeptic Dr. Roy Spencer offers a basic rundown of AGW skepticism.
I get so many questions from readers about a variety of global warming issues that I thought I would whip up some Q&A for those who want to understand the views of skeptics a little better. I will try to update these with links and additional answers as time permits.
Climate science is complex and the study of it is highly specialized. Nevertheless, there is a common theme that runs through the claims of the global warming establishment, from Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Weather and climate events that happen naturally are being increasingly blamed on the activities of humans. So, causation is at the root of most beliefs about global warming and climate change.
As one digs further into the science, the direction of causation also emerges as a key theme, and it is one that can totally change the degree to which it appears humans affect the climate system. In my own area of research I have found that mixing up cause and effect when examining how cloud cover varies with temperature has greatly misled the scientific establishment regarding how sensitive the climate system is to our addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Not all skeptics believe the same things, though, so some skeptics will object to some of what I have listed below. These represent my opinions, not all of which are necessarily ascribed to by other skeptics. Additional details on many of these issues can be found throughout this website, including a Q&A list I published on April 19, 2009.
The following list, in no particular order, are my responses to common claims and accusations about global warming skeptics. If other scientists or laypersons want me to add to the list, or want to argue for changes, email me and I will update it as appropriate. Please be sure to check back for the latest update (posted above).
He then continues to address many of the conceptions, and misconceptions, that people have about AGW skeptics.
Along with most scientists who do not believe that CO2 is the main cause of global warming, I have believed that the globe was warming. Generally, the crux of the argument by scientists like me is, so what if the globe is warming? It has been warmer in the past, such as the Medieval Warming Period, the Holocene Climate Optimum, as well as other times. And, more importantly, the world has been much cooler. It is global cooling that will hurt us, not global warming. We went through the little ice age in the late 1700’s and the early 1800’s, and then we warmed up. Is the current warming just a continuation of that warming? I don’t know. Nobody knows. The earth warms and the earth cools. We don’t really understand why.And, the global warmingistas admit this too, when they state that they can’t explain the current lack of warming since 1998, even though CO2 continues to increase.
Is CO2 a greenhouse gas? Yes. But, it is a very minor greenhouse gas. The primary greenhouse gas is water vapor. Also, as a trace greenhouse gas, the effect of CO2 on temperature is not linear. It is logarithmic. That is, if a doubling of CO2 causes some temperature increase (lets say 0.5 degrees Celsius for the sake of this discussion), then, to get another 0.5 degree rise in global temperature would require the CO2 concentration to double again, thus ending up at 4 times the original concentration. And, to get another 0.5 degree increase would require yet another doubling, or 8 times the original CO2 concentration. So, to get a 1.5 degree Celsius temperature rise would require CO2 to increase by a factor of 8 times. Not likely in the next few centuries. And, this is assuming that temperature increases 0.5 degrees for a doubling of CO2, and I suspect the actual number is much lower.
As I have demonstrated, CO2 does not drive global temperature, anyway. We know that from the ice core samples, which clearly show that CO2 levels follow, rather than lead, temperature changes. Thus, CO2 cannot be a primary driver of global temperature.
But today I came across a very interesting article stating that even the assumption that temperatures have risen in the last 60 years may not be true. I have seen other, similar, articles that show that the very temperature measurements that we have been fed by the global warmingistas are very suspect, and have a lot of errors in them. We have seen in the Climategate e-mails and software comments that the global warmingistas were having a very hard time adjusting their data to get the results they wanted. Of course, by now we all know about the infamous “hide the decline” in the fraudulent “hockey stick” graph that was published in the original IPCC finding and Al Gore’s infamous book. (But, how many people actually know that the graph was proven to be totally fraudulent and invalid, and had to be removed from future editions of the IPCC findings? I suspect that not many people in the general public know that fact.)
But the article I found, today, does a very good job of showing just what kind of bogus science was performed by the warmingistas, who are supposedly Ph.D. educated scientists. In this article, along with another excellent article, The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero, anyone can see just how temperatures may have been manipulated to produce a warming, where, it is possible that none really happened, because of the various errors involved in the measurements, and the way those errors were unscientifically ignored. And, to make matters worse, it looks like some of the most egregious “adjustment” errors may have been performed on the latest data! This data (after 1950) is the very data that should be the most accurate, but NOAA data itself shows that this is the very data that was adjusted the most. And, it was adjusted UP by about 0.6 degrees C.
Things like this, as well as the fact that articles referenced above show how data has been incorrectly “adjusted” to create warming, tend to make me wonder if we have seen any real warming in the last 50 or 60 years. And, Russia has just announced that much of the data from their country was not used, even though it was available. Not only that, but the data that was used tended to be from locations likely to be warm, like cities, and data from rural locations, which are likely to have not warmed, were ignored.
The whole global warming scam just gets worse and worse.
This is a great debate on climate change. In it, Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction.com debates Michael MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs with the Climate Institute, and Bjorn Lomborg, a social scientist at the Copenhagen Business School. Lomborg is also the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
Corbyn points out that this is not about science; it is a political operation to hold back third world development. It is, in his words, a “thieves kitchen”, and he points out that the IPCC “scientists” have refused to prove that CO2 drives the climate. He also points out that the data is fraudulent and that other planets are warming. Obviously, warming on other planets must be caused by the sun, not man-made CO2. Corbyn clearly states that CO2 does not drive global temperatures. He states that global temperatures are controlled by the sun.
Lomborg correctly points out that developing countries basically look at Copenhagen as a “honey pot”.
NOTE: This article is by Michelle Rodenborn. She is a practicing attorney, specializing in the areas of customs and international trade law. Her blog is: http://libertyswatchdogs.blogspot.com. Her law practice website is: http://www.rodenborn.com. She has been kind enough to allow me to republish this article, in full, on my site. Please repay that favor by visiting her sites. To view the original posting, along with comments, go to http://libertyswatchdogs.blogspot.com/2009/12/so-much-outrage-so-little-time.html
A problem I have in writing this blog is that by the time I have settled on an idea, done my research, and begun setting thoughts into type, invariably, equally offensive outrages from the political left surface so as to eclipse the current project and steal my fury for the new offense.
Such is the case today. I had been researching the climate debate, Copenhagen, Al Gore and his hockey stick charts, Lord Moncton, polar bears, developing nations developing demands for money, Ed Begley, Jr., Chicken Littles in the Green movement, did I mention Al Gore and his predictions on the polar ice caps?, Darryl Hannah in her finest acting role as a CNN climate expert, carbon footprints, sycophantic frauds in the “climate media,” CO2 and temperature, and medieval weather patterns (much warmer than today.)
More about all that later, but this moment requires that another topic take precedence, and I will try to type quickly enough, so that this latest violence need not take a back seat to some further atrocity before my final click and save.
This hour’s outrage, (there are simply too many of them to have merely an outrage of the week, or even an outrage of the day) is Tuesday’s arm-twisting of senate democrats at the White House, the political violation of Hadassah Lieberman, wife of Senator Joe Lieberman, (former running mate of Al Gore in 2000 and current Independent from CT), and threats to Senator Ben Nelson, D- Nebraska, and the Offutt Air Force base located in his state.
We start with today’s Rasmussen poll which shows 56% of Americans, and 63% of seniors, do not want Obamacare. Reasons not to like the bill abound, including:
Even without a so-called “public option” the bill still sets up a government-run system;
It will slice $500 BILLION from Medicare;
It will increase taxes on everyone to at least $400 BILLION;
It will increase insurance premiums for everyone;
It will mean the government will intrude itself into your relationship with your doctor;
It will mean the government will be making your health care decisions;
It will mean rationing;
It provides no mechanism for lowering health care costs;
It will penalize you if you don’t want to buy insurance;
It will dump the people that it adds to coverage into the current sub-par Medicaid system;
Medicare and Medicaid are already bankrupt, so there’s no money to fund the extra coverage without going even more into debt;
It will restructure 1/6 of the US economy WITHOUT ALLOWING MORE THAN A FEW OF OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES TO KNOW WHAT EXACTLY IS IN THE BILL;
It will allow for publicly funded abortions;
It will not be a bipartisan bill, even if passed with a token GOP vote; and
It has thoroughly violated Obama’s promise of transparency, and, contrary to what he told us he would do, (place the bill on C-SPAN, let the American people know what’s going on, allow both parties to participate in the making of the bill), it has been drafted (and redrafted) only by Harry Reid and a few insiders.
The outrage that has taken my attention today is the Chicago-style; (Al Capone would be proud) strong arming and threatening of any democrat who dares to consider voting against this monstrosity, even on grounds of conscience.
Joe Lieberman has become the hated point man for the far left now, which doesn’t stop at merely criticizing him and his position. Now the gloves are off, and the desperate leftists are trying to get at Lieberman through his wife, Hadassah, who is now a target.
Mrs. Lieberman has been working for years as a global ambassador for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer foundation. A liberal website, Firedoglake, has started lobbying celebrities attached to the organization, (such as Ellen DeGeneres and Neil Patrick Harris), to use their star power to force out Mrs. Lieberman. This came after Firedoglake founder, Jane Hamsher, was rebuffed by the Komen organization in her first attempt to get them to fire Lieberman.
In her letter to Komen founder Nancy Brinker, Hamsher said, in part:
“As Hadassah travels the glove under the banner of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, decrying the inadequacies of our health care system, and the desperate need to reform it, her husband is at home to kill the reform efforts we so desperately need.” (”Blog Wants Celebs to Help Oust Lieberman’s Wife,” FoxNews.com, December 14, 2009, Emphasis added.)
If this health care bill is such a great thing, why do they have to threaten everyone to vote for it? While the tactic used against the Liebermans doesn’t come directly from the White House, we see no one from the administration or the democrat party take these bloggers to task for the threats. The silence on their part leaves the threats still on the table.
Another arm-twisting outrage does come right from the White House, and that is the case of Senator Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska, who has had the nerve to insist that all publicly funded abortions be taken out of the bill before it gets his vote.
“My vote is not for sale-period,” Nelson said Tuesday as rumors surfaced that he had been threatened at a one-on-one White House meeting with Obama to convince the democrat senator to vote for the bill. While both Nelson and the administration deny it, there are rumored to be threats by the White House to close Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska if Nelson doesn’t vote for the bill.
Whether or not any threats were made to Nelson in his closed door session with Obama, I cannot say. But the administration has certainly created the scenario for Nelson to be wary of crossing swords with Obama/Reid through earlier threats to close Offutt Air Force base.
As pointed out in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece:
“Offutt’s operations pump over $2 billion into Nebraska’s economy and account for more than 10,000 jobs, but earlier this year the base was denied two new commands in an Air Force reorganization program, despite scoring well on graded Air Force evaluations. In June, Mr. Nelson called the process by which Offutt lost out “a charade” and no doubt would welcome assurances that Offutt will not be on the chopping block when the federal base-closing commission likely reconvenes in 2013.” (”The Selling of Health Care Reform,” by John Fund, WSJ.com, December 15, 2009.)
It is easy to see the White House setup in this: securing the vote of a potentially wayward senator by taking steps earlier this year to put his home state’s livelihood and economic wellbeing in jeopardy.
And, all this is being done for the purely political aim of cramming this version of health reform down the throats of an unwilling public. If the administration were truly concerned about structuring a proper health care bill, they would approach it in the way that Candidate Obama said he would do while on the campaign trail.
The president says that there is too much at stake not to pass health reform by Christmas, but he’s not stating the thing that’s really at stake: his presidency, with new poll numbers out showing his job performance approval rate somewhere around 44%, with 54% disapproving.
I don’t often agree with Howard Dean, the former DNC head, and though his reasons for saying so surely differ from mine, I agree with his statement that we should just “scrap” this health bill and start over. As Dean told “Good Morning America’s” George Stephanopoulos today:
“We’ve gotten to this stage … in Washington where passing any bill is a victory, and that’s the problem,” Dean said. “Decisions are being about the long-term future of this country for short-term political reasons, and that’s never a good sign.”
(See the full story at ABC.com “Howard Dean: Health Care Bill Bigger Bailout for the Insurance Industry than AIG-Top Democrat Urges Lawmakers to Kill the Bill and Start Over,” by Huma Khan and Jonathan Karl, Washington, Dec. 16, 2009.)
Short-term political reasons are indeed driving the mad rush to get this bad law locked up by Christmas. Twisting arms, threats, squeezing out a barely there vote, restructuring 1/6 of the economy with only a small cadre of insiders: this is the way this administration works.
But is this the way Americans want their lawmakers to act? Is this the Hope and Change that Americans voted for? No. This is leftist ideology first, and the 56% opposed be damned.
In a stunning new revelation, the Russian IAE (Institute of Economic Analysis) reported that the CRU, and other agencies that are trying to convince the world that man-made global warming is real have very selectively used temperature data from Russia. Although lots of data was available, it seems that the CRU and other agencies tended to use data from stations in urban (and therefore warm) areas of Russia. They also, apparently, tended to select incomplete data sets which tended to show warming, while ignoring data from other locations that did not support their global warming agenda.
According to an article in the December 16, 2009 edition of Rianovosti, while the data the CRU inexplicably “cherry picked” to push its agenda that some of the largest warming had occurred in Russia, the truth is that no significant warming has occurred in Russia, if all of the available data is used.
Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.
Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.
Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.
While this is a fact that was known to many of us that have been studying the fraud of anthropogenic global warming for some time, it is certainly not something that was trumpeted by the main stream media, and it was certainly not something that was known by the general public.
The article later states that these revelations bring into question much of the other temperature data that has been disseminated by the CRU. (And, of course, by other similarly biased agencies, such as NASA.)
IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.
The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.
Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.
This is just further evidence that COP-15 and the whole subject of anthropogenic global warming has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics, money, transfer of wealth, and global governance and control over the lives of the people of the world.
If you want my personal prediction, I suspect we will see a complete and total release of all of the raw Russian temperature data. The CRU has been hiding the raw data for their “homogenized” data set for a long time under the guise of data privacy. That is, they have been saying that they do not own the original, unedited and unadjusted raw data, and thus they cannot release if for independent analysis. Recently, on only a select few raw data sets, sites like “Watts Up With That” have been demonstrating severe problems with the way that the CRU (and other agencies) have “adjusted” the raw data to get results that suit their political agenda; that is, results that show rising temperatures, where logical and sensible “adjustment of that data” shows no temperature increase, or much less temperature increase. Russia sells a lot of oil. Russia has a vested interest in showing that anthropogenic global warming is total bunk. Since some of the “biggest” temperature increases trumpeted by the CRU, NASA, and others has “apparently” happened over Russia, I suspect they will release the raw data for independent analysis, which may prove that AGW is nothing more than an Al Gore wet dream.
It has been clear to some of us for quite some time that the whole “thing” about global warming had nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics. The very fact that Al Gore is the poster child for anthropogenic global warming should be a clue to anyone, whose life and intelligence goes beyond watching American Idol and listening to anything said by Oprah Winfrey, that this is not about science. Al Gore knows very little about science and reality, based on some of his claims. If you will recall, he “invented the internet”. And, even more recently, he claimed that the temperature in the center of the earth was “millions of degrees.” PUULEEEASE! What a moron.
Of course, he showed us his famous graph of CO2 concentrations over the last 650,000 years, along with the temperature over those same 650,000 years. So far, so good. But, he showed them in a very deceptive way, so that the casual viewer could not see the true relationship between CO2 and temperature. He claimed that an increase in CO2 lead to an increase in temperature. In a recent post, I take that same data and present it in the way that a scientist would be likely to present it (if he was not trying to “hide the decline”). It show that just the opposite of what Al Gore claims is true. That data shows that temperature goes up, and then CO2 goes up. Thus, while there is a slight relationship between CO2 and temperature, CO2 levels ARE NOT the primary cause of temperature change. In fact, these graphs make it even more clear that CO2 does not drive temperatures, as the global warmingistas would have you believe, because even on a large time scale, it is clear that temperatures plummet into the various ice ages long before CO2 levels decline.
Recently, some hackers, or an inside “whistle-blower”, released over 150 megabytes of data, files, and e-mails from the CRU. These materials clearly show a pattern of deception, and a lack of scientific integrity, by the various people involved. And, these people are the scientists at the very heart of the whole global warming conspiracy. The CRU is the organization that decides what gets peer reviewed and what does not, what gets put in the IPCC reports and what does not. They are also one of the primary repositories of the raw climate temperature data, which they have done their utmost to keep private, and away from the eyes of scientists that might find problems with their analysis and methods. (Certain scientists who are not part of the global warming cabal have, on many occasions, embarrassed the global warmingistas, including NASA, into having to change some of their results and pronouncements.)
Now, the release of these files has been very embarrassing for the global warmingistas. A natural, inquisitive press would have questions about this, but the main stream media has been amazingly (but predictably) silent about the whole affair. When they do mention the affair, it is generally in the tone of: “Nothing to see here. Move along.” But, some journalists do have questions, and rightfully so. But, the global warmingistas will have none of that questioning in Copenhagen. They have even used armed guards to remove a journalist who bring up legitimate questions, as can be seen in the video below, where journalist Phelim McAleer tries to ask a question about the leaked CRU data of Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider. He is removed by armed guards for daring to ask the most simple and important questions about the “science” of global warming.
In a previous incident in the United States, Phelim McAleer had his microphone cut off while asking Gore what he thought about a British court ruling that there were nine significant factual errors in his film, “An Inconvenient Truth”. After hemming and hawing for a while, Al Gore stated that the result was that the court “ruled in favor” of allowing British school children to see his film. In true global warmingista style, he “hid the decline” by making it sound like the court did not find any fault with his movie. In fact, according to an article in Time Magazine:
While accepting the broad arguments of the film, the judge pointed out nine scientific errors and omissions that he believes Gore raised in the context of alarmism and exaggeration. For instance, Gore refers to a study indicating that polar bears have, in recent years, started drowning as they swim up to 60 miles (97km) in search of ice. According to Justice Burton, “The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm.” He also dismissed what he called the film’s “Armageddon scenario” in which the world’s melting ice caps could cause sea levels to rise by up to 20 feet (6m) in the near future. Such a rise could take place, he said, but “only after, and over, millennia.”
There was also not sufficient evidence to back the film’s claims that global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, the melting of snows on Mount Kilimanjaro or the evaporation of most of Lake Chad, he said.
Government attorneys amended their existing teacher guidance notes following a preliminary ruling last Tuesday, and specifics of those guidelines were debated with Dimmock’s attorneys before the court. Those notes detail, on a scene-by-scene basis, the areas where teaching staffs nationwide will be required to point out opposing arguments and scientific errors. According to the guidance, which is now available on the government’s Teachernet web site, it is designed to help teaching staff “encourage their pupils to assess the validity and credibility of different information sources and explore different points of view so as to form their own opinions.”
The following two videos discuss the global warming fraud, and the fact that this is about global governance and total control of your life, not man-made global warming. (I also agree with Alex Jones that whoever did release this material should be applauded. In fact, I think Al Gore’s Nobel prize should be taken from Gore and given to whoever released the CRU data.) In the second of these two videos, at the 3:50 mark, the President of the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy (a member of the Bilderberg Group) says: “2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet. Our mission, our presidency, is one of hope supported by acts and by deeds.”
This is the second part of the video by Alex Jones.
In the following clip, Al Gore brags about how the global warming issue will bring about “Global Governance”. This is at about the 1:05 point in the video. He then talks about energy efficiency; this from a person whose home uses 12 to 20 times as much electricity as the average American home. (And this is only after he did a lot to reduce the energy useage in that home!) And, of course, remember through all of this that Al Gore has made something like $100 million dollars off the global warming scam, and he stands to make many times that much in the coming years if this scam is not stopped.)
And, as if this is all not bad enough, and as if we have not heard from the horses’ mouths (or horses’ somethings) that the real agenda behind global warming due to man-kind’s emission of CO2 is global governance, we finally get to the admission of the head of the IPCC itself, Dr. Pachauri. In his blog, he states:
The Copenhagen Conference of the Parties to come up with an agreement on climate change is clearly not making much headway. This may be the result of frozen mindsets, strong vested interests and ignorance. The question is whether the additional time that the world would now have to arrive at an agreement at the next Conference of the Parties in Mexico will give us time and space to look at the larger problem of unsustainable development, of which climate change is at best a symptom. Human society cannot continue to ignore the vital dependence that exists between human welfare and the health of our natural resources.
In other words, climate change is not “really” the agenda. Rather, we need to slow down the development of the civilized, industrial world, and, by implication, transfer wealth to the third world nations. (And we all know what would happen if we did that. The wealth would just go into the pockets of the two bit dictators that rule many, if not most, of the third world nations. The people of those nations would be no better off, but their rulers would laugh all of the way to the bank. But, the globalists don’t see it that way. They simply refuse to let go of their Marxist, Utopian views.)
, here is a very simple story that explains how the US income tax system works.
