Tao of Government

Greenwald writes ...

2011-11-25T05:32:00.001-05:00

GlennGreenwald
Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 6:31 pm

You are responding to a cheap shot. But you responded with a cheap shot yourself. I have been told often that we should not respond in kind here; and I think your response was a little thin-skinned. (as you have said of me on occasion)
No - one way to illustrate a cheap shot is to take someone's shoddy reasoning and apply it to them.
Dr. Paul has said that each state should let the people vote on the issue. Have you given up on democracy?
As you undoubtedly know, constitutional rights are not supposed to be subject to referendum. Leaving aside the debate about whether privacy rights protects abortion, the fact - the indisputable fact - is that returning this question to states would mean that for at least some women, abortion would become illegal again.
Again, I'm not arguing that this outweighs the questions of war and other civil liberties (and I'm not arguing it doesn't), but I absolutely understand people for whom that is a deal-breaker - just as I understand people for whom, say, due-process-free assassination is an Obama deal-breaker even if they agree with him than GOP candidates on domestic issues.
Dr. Paul has said we should continue to pay for those already on the welfare programs like SS. He has never said we toss old people into the street.
There are a lot of old people not yet on SS who will be eligible soon, and taking it away from them after they paid into it their whole lives and expected it will leave them with nothing in their retirement years. Again, I do not think it's unreasonable for progressives who believe in SS to consider that a serious issue when deciding for whom they will vote.

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Let us respond:

Point 1) Constitutional rights are those spelled out in the constitution; but there does not seem to be a right for a woman to kill her child in the womb. One can read it over and over and there just is not such a right. Much like the constitution once saw a black man as the equal to a mule; someday the public will realize this is question for the people to decide.

College Life Cycle Chart

As all college life cycle charts from the biology department will show that human life begins with a fertilized egg; you are saying that the female, under our constitution, is authorized to commit murder. I think not.

Let the people vote on the matter.

As a practical matter; it seems unlikely that abortion will be illegal in any state if the people get to decide, but even if that is so the woman can go to a state where it is legal to have the murder committed.

Point 2) As one of those "old people" getting close to Social Security age, I have listened to Ron Paul's message on how to unwind Social Security and there was never any mention of just letting those already on benefits keep those benefits. That is something that you know also and you surprise me to use such a debate tactic. Beneath you.

Ron Paul:

Q: Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme?
PAUL: Well, I agree that Social Security is broke. We spent all the money and it's on its last legs unless we do something. One bill that I had in Congress --never got passed--was to prevent theCongress from spending any of that money on the wars and all the nonsense that we do around the world. Now the other thing that I would like to see done is a transition. I think it's terrible that theSocial Security system has the problems it has, but if people wouldn't have spent the money we would be OK.Now, what I would like to do is to allow all the young people to get out of Social Security and go on their own. Now, the big question is, is how would the funding occur?

Source: 2011 GOP Tea Party debate in Tampa FL, Sep 12, 2011

Abolish Social Security, but not overnight

Q: Are you still in favor of abolishing Social Security?A: Yes, but not overnight. As a matter of fact, my program’s the only one that is going to be able to take care of the elderly. I’d like to get the young people out of it, just the youngergeneration, because there’s no money there, and they’re going to have to pay 50 years and they’re not going to get anything. I’d take care of all the elderly, all those who are dependent, but I would save the money from this wild spending overseas.

Source: 2008 GOP debate in Boca Raton Florida, Jan 24, 2008

Let people get out of Social Security; it’s a failure

Right now they’re getting behind because they’re having a 10% to 12% inflation rate and we give them a 2% increase, and they’re really hurting. I don’t want taxes on the Social Security benefits that they receive. I have a bill in that would secure thetrust fund, where none of that money could be spent in the general revenues. So in many ways, the goal would be to get us out of this program that is a failure. It doesn’t work, and is going to bankrupt this country. The only way you can do that is saveenough money, tide the people over, let the young people get out, because they’re going to be paying all these years and they’re not going to get anything. I probably have the only program that would really help the elderly because the money’s not goingto be there. There’s no way these cost-of-living increases are ever going to keep up with their benefits are never going to keep up with their cost of living. They’re decreasing. My program has a better chance of helping them than any other one.Source: 2008 GOP debate in Boca Raton Florida, Jan 24, 2008

Who owns you?

2011-10-21T05:51:00.001-04:00

Stephan Kinsella:

The primary social evil of our time is lack of respect for self-ownership rights. It is what underlies both private crime and institutionalized crime perpetrated by the state. State laws, regulations, and actions are objectionable just because the state is claiming the right to control how someone's body is to be used.

The central question of all time has to be "who owns you?" If you do not own your own self, then who does?

Does the State have the right to tell you what you may eat? Smoke? Ingest in any way? May the State tell you where you must live? The job you must work at?

What rights do you have? Or, what rights "should you have" may be more like it.

Fascism 101 (part 3; a closer look)

2011-10-16T07:51:00.001-04:00

In the writings of many experts on Fascism, Flynn in particular, we can see that the following 8 points are descriptive of any Fascist State.

1. The government is totalitarian because it acknowledges no restraint upon its powers.

2. Government sustains economic life through spending and borrowing.

3. Militarism is a mainstay of government spending.

4. Military spending has imperialist aims.

5. Government is a de facto dictatorship based on the leadership principle.

6. Government administers a capitalist system with an immense bureaucracy.

7. Producers are organized into cartels in the way of syndicalism.

8. Economic planning is based on the principle of autarky.

The question becomes; does our present political/economic system meet these points? In his book, "The Three Faces of Fascism", Ernst Nolte told us that fascism can take different forms even as the underlying reality of the system remains the same. Does the USA represent a fascist state? Let us look at each point in its turn.

Point one can be seen as very controversial in some quarters but many modern political writers from the far left unto the far right have been documenting the government's lack of restraint upon its actions for decades. I think one would have to be blind not to see that. Mussolini himself claimed that, "The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative."

Point two, that the government operates by "stimulating the economy" though massive dept and inflation is beyond debate. All sides acknowledge the fact even as they disagree as to its benefits or lack of benefits.

Point three goes along with point two. The government's main spending is on the military, intelligence apparatus, and other "security" forces. The USA outspends the rest of the world combined on military items. This is, indeed, the mainstay of government spending.

And point four goes along with both 2 and 3. The USA has been an imperialist power since 1900 at least. (longer if you include the "Indian Wars")

Point five brings us to, perhaps, the most controversial aspect of this list. In the USA we bow down to the Office of the President. Even though many are truly following a person like many follow Obama no matter what he does. But the reality is that the "White House" controls the government and does not really change very much as the president himself comes and goes. We don't have a Hitler or a Mussolini (at least not yet), our fascism is stronger because we can stand the loss of the man at the top so much easier than Germany or Italy could have.

Point six should be obvious to any citizen of at least normal intelligence. We have thousands of regulators and hundreds of thousands of regulations in which the central government attempts to run, top down style, a capitalist system in the "third way" manner first conceived of by Mussolini.

Point seven tells us that the government controls the economy via syndicalism which means economic control by the producers. Capitalism is different as it places all control in the hands of the consumers. We are fascists so we place control in the hands of the "producers" who might be the workers but can also be the largest corporations. In today's America the largest corporations are the wielders of the States control over the economy.

Point eight tells us that fascists use autarky. This is the concept of self sufficiency by taking large amounts of resources from others if needed. The idea is that the State mush continue to grow or it will die. This is the reason that even Republicans in modern America do not favor free and unrestrained trade with other countries. The Fascist-State will use its military to secure what it wants and needs via power. It will literally give the resources so secured at great cost to the most favored large corporations so as to fit in with the above points.

The question was simple; is the USA a Fascist-State in the political-economic meaning of that term? I submit that the answer is an unqualified "YES" even if we have a slightly different take on the system than the 30s Italy did under Mussolini.

Fascism 101 (part 2: a closer look)

2011-10-15T07:40:00.002-04:00

I read As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn many years ago along with several other book on the topic of fascism. Flynn was an expert writing at the time of the rise of the fascists. He also wrote with the style of the journalist that he was and the book is very readable.

Flynn was a progressive journalist who wrote a number of best-selling books in the 1920s. After the "New Deal" he changed into what might be best described as "old right". He fought FDR's domestic plans and his plans to take America to war. John Flynn was a leader of the America First movement of that time that opposed the foreign policy of Roosevelt. Flynn told us where fascism always leads; to militarism and war as the stimulus-spending economic agenda demands.

Flynn wrote:

"One of the most baffling phenomena of fascism is the almost incredible collaboration between men of the extreme Right and the extreme Left in its creation. The explanation lies at this point. Both Right and Left joined in this urge for regulation. The motives, the arguments, and the forms of expression were different but all drove in the same direction. And this was that the economic system must be controlled in its essential functions and this control must be exercised by the producing groups."

Flynn told us that "the right" and "the left" would never agree on who, exactly, the producer group is. No surprises there. The left says it is the laborers that are the producers while the right says it is the business owners. The political compromise was to cartelize both groups! This government control of both groups came with the willing acceptance of both groups. Workers and businesses, under fascism, are to cooperate under government supervision to build a mighty nation.

Under fascism, national greatness becomes a top priority. The government is to make "us" great as a collective, even as any individual becomes as expendable as a borg. But, this program has achieved far better political success than old-fashioned socialism since fascism doesn’t nationalize private property as socialism does. There is no push to equalize income levels and there is plenty of room left to give the illusion of personal freedom. (within limits, of course)

Next we look at the components of fascism.

Fascism 101 (part 1: the Origins)

2011-10-08T11:30:00.000-04:00

The origins of Fascism are well known. It began in post-World War I Italian politics. Benito Mussolini won a democratic election in 1922 and established fascism as his philosophy. Mussolini had been a member of the socialist party and editor of the main socialist magazine. His background as a socialist is indisputable. In addition, the most important players in the fascist movement were former socialists as well. Fascism was seen as the most appealing approach for the real-world application of the socialist ideals. For this reason the 20s saw socialists join the fascists movement in large numbers.

Mussolini was very popular in the USA press and stayed that way for at least 10 years after his rule of Italy began. Check out the New York Times newspaper from that era. In addition, scholars hailed Mussolini as the leader of the age and practically as the messiah bringing us the coming utopia.

The American left of the time had a strong anti-corporatist impulse up through the 20s. They opposed war, prohibition, violations of civil liberties. The leftists were not capitalists but were not corporatists/fascists of the 30s style either. In 1933 and 1934, the American left had to decide if they would they accept fascism as the route to their idea of socialism or if they would hold to their long held ideals. They caved. The "New Deal" offered a planned economy and welfare state that socialists in the US had not been able to accomplish. The same thing went on in Italy 10 years before. The same rational drew socialists into the scheme in large numbers.

As an expert pointed out, "The left realized that their anti-capitalistic agenda could best be achieved within the framework of the authoritarian, planning State." At the same time, the authoritarians were overjoyed to see all the new company. John Maynard Keynes said that national socialism was far more hospitable to his ideas than a market economy. Keynes is the author of the economic ideals behind the West today.

The government was not to "own" all property and means of production in the nation; rather it would be content to exercise total control. A far better arrangement since the "owners" could always be blamed for any shortcomings or error.

The West beat the Fascist States in WWII and Fascism won the war of ideas. Ironic, no?

Fascism 101 (an intro)

2011-10-08T10:26:00.000-04:00

No, this is not a how-to or an endorsement of fascism! Everyone knows that the term fascist is a pejorative and the word is used to slime your opponent no matter what his beliefs are. Don't like a guy? Call him a damn "fascist". But what in the world is this thing called "fascism"? There are many books written about the subject, and I have read several of them. Fascism is not all that hard to understand.

I submit that if we were honest and understood Fascism that we would all have to acknowledge that the USA is a fascist state and has been for generations. Here I use the term descriptively and not pejoratively.

Fascism is a system of government and does not really have any theoretical apparatus or underpinning. Fascism denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals and exalts the State above all. Fascism makes the executive branch the unquestioned master of all and exalts the police state as the source of all order in society. Fascism plans the economy via central planning and makes use of large cartels in the private sector. Fascism does not take ownership of the businesses but rather takes control. Producers are subsidized and hence don't complain about the rules and regulations: government and Big Business become one.

To understand a thing, it is often useful to look at its history and lineage. For that we need to look back to Italy between WWI and WWII.

Coming next: the origin of Fascism.

Econ 101 part 9 (the mystery of mysteries)

2011-09-18T06:34:00.016-04:00

The economic historian Gregory Clark (UC at Davis and author of A Farewell to Alms) points out:

. . . there is no sign of any improvement in material conditions for settled agrarian societies as we approach 1800. There was no gain between 1800 BC and AD 1800 – a period of 3,600 years. Indeed the wages for east and south Asia and southern Europe for 1800 stand out by their low level compared to those for ancient Babylonia, ancient Greece, or Roman Egypt.

Around 1800 this changed and economic growth began to rise every year. Inventions, trade, wealth creation, and all the rest we recognize as the modern world.

Why?

By 1889, these post-1800 inventions had arrived: gas lighting, electric lighting (arc light), the steam powered ship, the tin can, the macadamized road, photography, the railroad, portland cement, the reaper, anesthesia, the typewriter, the sewing machine, the Colt revolver, the telegraph, the wrench, the safety pin, mass-produced newspapers, pasteurization, vulcanized rubber, barbed wire, petroleum-based industry, dynamite, the telephone, Carnegie's steel mills, the skyscraper, the internal combustion engine, the automobile, and commercial electricity. (Gary North)

What had happened? After 3,600 years of no growth, the economy was growing at 2% per year. The "industrial revolution" happened. Every economic historian would recognize this; and would point out that it happened around 1800 and it happened in the northern part of north Europe. Why there? Why then? Some say it had to do with liberty and man's inventiveness. But still, why Great Britain and North America? If we want this process to continue then we need to honor whatever condition made it happen in the first place.

Ludwig von Mises told us that the greatest strength of the socialists was their belief in the inevitability of victory. This gave them strength to endure. But they were wrong in economic theory as von Mises had pointed out in 1920. It was not collectivism that built the modern world.

It turns out that as long as people keep their hands off each other's property and leave them alone, most will be as productive as they can possibly be. Perhaps the practical and the moral among us should realize that the ancient admonition "Thou shalt not steal" is good economic advice. "Thou shalt not covet" is also good advice.

The battle is not technological but rather it is ethical. The best method of helping all people is to realize freedom and liberty are the only answers.

Classical Liberalism gave us the great advances of the industrial revolution. If one cares to return to mass poverty with only a few at the top having plenty of the available necessities then they should recommend the opposite of freedom: government enforced interventions into the economic sphere. That is the prosperity killer.

Wikipedia:

... Classical liberalism places a particular emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual, with private property rights being seen as essential to individual liberty. This forms the philosophical basis for laissez-faire public policy. ... Classical liberalism holds that individual rights are natural, inherent, or inalienable, and exist independently of government. Thomas Jefferson called these inalienable rights: ...

This is the basis for the vast wealth and technology production of the last three centuries. As you allow freedom, so you allow prosperity. Covet not! Steal from individuals not!

the purpose of the war

2011-09-18T06:11:00.000-04:00

In his famous dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (*) George Orwell described a world enthralled to a permanent war economy which was an "economy existing by and for continuous warfare." It is said that the idea for the novel came in 1944 and the novel itself was written just after the war.

In the late '40s the leadership of the US in business, government, the military, and others believed that the US economy had been "saved" by the war. They further worried that the US economy might sink back into the Great Depression when peace finally came to the world. What to do? What to do?

One did not wish for a continual WWII style nightmare; but rather for a low grade, safe to both sides, conflict. Hey! A Cold War! The USSR would be the perfect enemy. With spies, the Russians knew before the war was over we were going to betray them. The CIA helped by always painting a dark and frightful picture of Russian supermen who would take over the world and give us Orwell's dystopian vision if the Sainted West did not stand and fight. The media and the schools did their part.

Unfortunately for the leaders, the USSR suffered from a fatal flaw that had been pointed out in the 20s by von Mises. (coming discussion on that in the econ 101 series) The USSR folded its tent after about 70 years and we looked around for another long term enemy. Today, we are waiting for China to become the new Great Enemy and in the meantime we have to make do with little, weak enemies like Afghanistan, Pakistan(**), or Iraq.

War is the health of the State and the bane of the people. Freedom leads to prosperity and the "mixed model economy" based on force, fraud, and drones leads only to ruin.

So; what to do? What to do? What to do?

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(*) Some say that Orwell was a time traveler and 1984 was a really a documentary with a few names changed. I don't know, maybe.

(**) Pakistan, much like Russia, is OK when we need them but they are really one of them!

Econ 101 part 8 (Progressives and the origin of the Federal Reserve --- central bank)

2011-09-10T06:23:00.004-04:00

Murray Rothbard wrote about the vastly wealthy fooling the progressives and then re-writing history as to what happened in a small article in 1999. One can read the entire article at http://mises.org/daily/3823. Here is a small portion:

The Federal Reserve Act of December 23, 1913, was part and parcel of the wave of Progressive legislation on local, state, and federal levels of government that began about 1900. Progressivism was a bipartisan movement that, in the course of the first two decades of the 20th century, transformed the American economy and society from one of roughly laissez-faire to one of centralized statism.

Until the 1960s, historians had established the myth that Progressivism was a virtual uprising of workers and farmers who, guided by a new generation of altruistic experts and intellectuals, surmounted fierce big business opposition in order to curb, regulate, and control what had been a system of accelerating monopoly in the late 19th century. A generation of research and scholarship, however, has now exploded that myth for all parts of the American polity, and it has become all too clear that the truth is the reverse of this well-worn fable.

In contrast, what actually happened was that business became increasingly competitive during the late 19th century, and that various big-business interests, led by the powerful financial house of J. P. Morgan and Company, tried desperately to establish successful cartels on the free market. The first wave of such cartels was in the first large-scale business — railroads. In every case, the attempt to increase profits — by cutting sales with a quota system — and thereby to raise prices or rates, collapsed quickly from internal competition within the cartel and from external competition by new competitors eager to undercut the cartel.

During the 1890s, in the new field of large-scale industrial corporations, big-business interests tried to establish high prices and reduced production via mergers, and again, in every case, the merger collapsed from the winds of new competition. In both sets of cartel attempts, J. P. Morgan and Company had taken the lead, and in both sets of cases, the market, hampered though it was by high protective, tariff walls, managed to nullify these attempts at voluntary cartelization.

It then became clear to these big-business interests that the only way to establish a cartelized economy, an economy that would ensure their continued economic dominance and high profits, would be to use the powers of government to establish and maintain cartels by coercion, in other words, to transform the economy from roughly laissez-faire to centralized, coordinated statism. But how could the American people, steeped in a long tradition of fierce opposition to government-imposed monopoly, go along with this program? How could the public's consent to the New Order be engineered?

Fortunately for the cartelists, a solution to this vexing problem lay at hand. Monopoly could be put over in the name of opposition to monopoly! In that way, using the rhetoric beloved by Americans, the form of the political economy could be maintained, while the content could be totally reversed.

Monopoly had always been defined, in the popular parlance and among economists, as "grants of exclusive privilege" by the government. It was now simply redefined as "big business" or business competitive practices, such as price-cutting, so that regulatory commissions, from the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to state insurance commissions, were lobbied for and staffed with big-business men from the regulated industry, all done in the name of curbing "big-business monopoly" on the free market.

In that way, the regulatory commissions could subsidize, restrict, and cartelize in the name of "opposing monopoly," as well as promoting the general welfare and national security. Once again, it was railroad monopoly that paved the way.

For this intellectual shell game, the cartelists needed the support of the nation's intellectuals, the class of professional opinion molders in society. The Morgans needed a smokescreen of ideology, setting forth the rationale and the apologetics for the New Order. Again, fortunately for them, the intellectuals were ready and eager for the new alliance.

The enormous growth of intellectuals, academics, social scientists, technocrats, engineers, social workers, physicians, and occupational "guilds" of all types in the late 19th century led most of these groups to organize for a far greater share of the pie than they could possibly achieve on the free market. These intellectuals needed the State to license, restrict, and cartelize their occupations, so as to raise the incomes for the fortunate people already in these fields.

In return for their serving as apologists for the new statism, the State was prepared to offer not only cartelized occupations, but also ever-increasing and cushier jobs in the bureaucracy to plan and propagandize for the newly statized society. And the intellectuals were ready for it, having learned in graduate schools in Germany the glories of statism and organicist socialism, of a harmonious "middle way" between dog-eat-dog laissez-faire on the one hand and proletarian Marxism on the other. Big government, staffed by intellectuals and technocrats, steered by big business, and aided by unions organizing a subservient labor force, would impose a cooperative commonwealth for the alleged benefit of all.

And that transformation of a "roughly laissez-faire economy and society" to one of "centralized statism" came just in time to begin over a century of war and empire expansion that continues until this day. Earlier articles explained how the government could use the central bank to inflate money and pay for things they could never get with just taxes or borrowing (as bad as these two are).

Due to limits of the Salon letters section, I will have to discus the meaning of the move from laissez-faire to the fascist model in the next post on econ 101 as far as the economy goes and leave this post with just the idea that the progressives brought you the wonders of central banking --- endless war and control by the rich.

Ironic evil is the evil good men do while they think they are doing good.

Econ 101 part 7 (Fractional Reserve Banking)

2011-09-05T06:48:00.017-04:00

Last time we ran out of space as we discussed the central bank of the USA which goes by the name of the FED. We did not discuss the idea of fractional reserve banking enough. So, today I'll try to string it together and still get in under Salon's word limit. Please note, most ideas today come from Dr. Rothbard and nothing here indicates any original thought on my part at all. Original thought hurts one's head!

Fractional Reserve Banking

Let's see how the fractional reserve process works without a central bank.

We set up a Bank, called Unclaimed Booty, and invest $10,000 of cash to get the darn thing going. You regulars would trust me with the loot, right? I now "lend out" $100,000 to some people, for whatever purpose they have in mind. But how can I "lend out" far more than I have? I promise that I understand that four zeros is less than 5 zeros. Honest! Now you see the magic.

It works like this; with my original 10,000 I then open up a checking accounts that add up to $100,000 which I lend out to customers. I can charge a lower rate of interest than savers would charge if they were handing out money that they had worked for. I don't have to save up the money myself, but simply can counterfeit it out of thin air. Before the 20th century, I would have issued bank notes, but the Federal Reserve now has a legal monopoly on the issuing of note issues. Since demand deposits at the Unclaimed Booty Bank function as equivalent to cash, the nation's money supply has just, by magic, increased by $100,000. The inflationary, counterfeiting process is under way.

But without government support there are some severe hitches in this counterfeiting process.

First: why should anyone trust me? Why should anyone accept the checking deposits of the Unclaimed Booty Bank? Why do they not just use RedState Bank instead? Or a bank backed by the Koch Brothers?

But even if I were trusted and able to con my way into the trust of the gullible, there is another severe problem. Since the banking system without a central bank is competitive the people I loaned money to would spend it (why else did they borrow it?) in various places and the bank notes would end up in a competitor's bank. Say RedState Bank had $50,000 of my bank's paper and decided to cash it since they don't want any bank notes from other banks. Now what? I don't have $50,000. I only have my original "reserves" of $10,000 so I am finished. Bankrupt. I am out of the money supply game and should go to jail.

As you can see under free competition without government support and enforcement there is very limited opportunity for fractional-reserve counterfeiting and this is why under "free banking" in the past the reserves were supposed to be 100% and were nearly that at all times in honest, respected banks.

Central Banking

The bankers themselves set out to get the government to cartelize their industry. This was by means of a central bank. Central Banking began with the Bank of England in the 1690s. Central banking came to the United States by the Federal Reserve System of 1913. The FED was greatly welcomed, in particular, by investment bankers such as the Morgans who by this time were moving into commercial banking as well. Banksters were in on this idea from the get-go.

Today the FED, our Central Bank, is granted the monopoly of the issue of bank notes. These bank notes are now identical to the government's paper money and so is money in this country. A bank puts a deposit in the FED and then can issue up to 10 times that amount because we have a fractional reserve system. The FED backs this scheme by law as we saw last time.

By the way, the originally written or printed "bank notes" were, in fact, warehouse receipts for gold or silver kept in a warehouse as opposed to the intangible receipts of bank deposits today. Neat how we bastardized that term is it not?

Who benefits

This system was set up to inflate the money; but who benefits? Why the largest debtor benefits by making a debt smaller in real terms all the time. So who is the largest debtor in our country? Why the US government is. Coincidence? The banksters also benefit by getting the money first before the inflationary effect; plus the effects of the FED scheme discussed last time. But the benefits also include the minions of the central government who are paid by the central government with the looted wealth.

Econ 101 part 6 (Money Velocity and Inflation)

2011-09-04T10:01:00.008-04:00

We have seen that the central bank is the main engine of inflation and that inflating the currency leads to higher prices and the boom-bust cycle. But we need to look a bit closer at how the inflationary cycle works. That means looking at a thing called "velocity", or fast money! :-)

Economists talk about "velocity" and they mean the speed at which money is changing hands. For example, imagine I sit 20 regulars around a table (assuming none kill another) and each has a dollar and a pencil. Each buys a pencil from the guy to his left (to the "left", get it?) with his dollar. Every dollar was used one time and so "velocity" was one. Now imaging the same situation but there is only one dollar. Mr. Jones has that dollar and buys a pencil from the guy on his right (a different example, eh?) and the guy on the right does the same all around the circle. Twenty pencils have been sold and one dollar was used 20 times. Hence, "velocity" is 20. So we see that a small amount of money can do the same job as a large amount of money given the right conditions.

Professionals define "velocity" as M/PQ but that hurts my head to think about!

The dollar responds to the law of supply and demand and when demand for the dollar falls then people are more willing to spend the dollar than hold it. They buy more goods and services and keep less dollars. On the other hand, if demand for the dollar rises then people then to buy less and keep more dollars. Get it? So, we see money demand is what causes changes in velocity. Economists look at "velocity" to figure indirectly the demand for dollars at a given time. Simple really.

Now we can look at the three stages of inflation. Let us imaging you want to buy a new aluminium mountain bike.

If the prices are stable (1) and the item has been the same for a long time, say $600, then there is no real hurry to get one and you hope that the price might fall a bit and you can pick up a bargain. But instead the price rise (2) to $650 and you decide to buy the darn thing before it can go up any more! Your good friend does the same and he was not even going to get one until Christmas! Then the price goes up steeply (3) to $1,000 and you buy another one as an investment because bikes look to be a better deal than holding dollars.

In the first stage the velocity was low and you held on to your dollars. In the second stage velocity has gone up and you spend dollars. Velocity is going up. In the third stage everyone is looking to get "stuff" and not hold dollars and velocity is way up. Velocity is always very high in the third stage of inflation. There are many examples of this one can look at; the USA in the 70s would be a good example.

The depression of the early 80s was the correction from the economic mismanagement of the 70s. Remember that inflation goes through three stages, caused by money demand, and one can look at velocity to see what stage a country is in.

Econ 101 part 5 (Money and the Central Bank)

2011-09-04T08:38:00.011-04:00

Money is a crucial part of our economy and our society. Untold numbers of voluntary exchanges imply a division of labor in society, this is known as the "free-market". Everyone benifits because the division of labor allows for all of us to be much better off than we would be if we had to be self-sufficient which would reduce us to a pitiful standard of living.

As Rothbard noted:

Money is different from all other commodities: other things being equal, more shoes, or more discoveries of oil or copper benefit society, since they help alleviate natural scarcity. But once a commodity is established as a money on the market, no more money at all is needed. Since the only use of money is for exchange and reckoning, more dollars or pounds or marks in circulation cannot confer a social benefit: they will simply dilute the exchange value of every existing dollar or pound or mark. So it is a great boon that gold or silver are scarce and are costly to increase in supply.

But if government manages to establish paper tickets or bank credit as money, as equivalent to gold grams or ounces, then the government, as dominant money-supplier, becomes free to create money costlessly and at will. As a result, this "inflation" of the money supply destroys the value of the dollar or pound, drives up prices, cripples economic calculation, and hobbles and seriously damages the workings of the market economy.

The natural tendency of government, once in charge of money, is to inflate and to destroy the value of the currency. ...

So how does the American system work?

In modern central banking in the USA, the central bank is called the "FED" The FED is granted by the force of law the monopoly of the issue of bank notes. These 'bank notes' are identical to the the government's paper money. If the my bank needs to get cash for its customers, it must go to its own checking account at the FED which is, in effect, the bank's own bank.

It turns out that my bank keeps deposits at the FED in its checking account and these are its "reserves". It may then leverage that amount by ten fold.

Here's how the counterfeiting process works in today's world. Let's say that the Federal Reserve, as usual, decides that it wants to expand (i.e., inflate) the money supply. The Federal Reserve decides to go into the market (called the "open market") and purchase an asset. It doesn't really matter what asset it buys; the important point is that it writes out a check. The Fed could, if it wanted to, buy any asset it wished, including corporate stocks, buildings, or foreign currency. In practice, it almost always buys US government securities.

Let's assume that the Fed buys $10,000,000 of US Treasury bills from some "approved" government bond dealer (a small group), say Shearson Lehman on Wall Street. The Fed writes out a check for $10,000,000, which it gives to Shearson Lehman in exchange for $10,000,000 in US securities. Where does the Fed get the $10,000,000 to pay Shearson Lehman? It creates the money out of thin air. Shearson Lehman can do only one thing with the check: deposit it in its checking account at a commercial bank, say Chase Manhattan. The "money supply" of the country has already increased by $10,000,000; no one else's checking account has decreased at all. There has been a net increase of $10,000,000.

But this is only the beginning of the inflationary counterfeiting process. For Chase Manhattan is delighted to get a check on the Fed, and rushes down to deposit it in its own checking account at the Fed, which now increases by $10,000,000. But this checking account constitutes the "reserves" of the banks, which have now increased across the nation by $10,000,000. But this means that Chase Manhattan can create deposits based on these reserves, and that, as checks and reserves seep out to other banks (much as the Rothbard Bank deposits did), each one can add its inflationary mite, until the banking system as a whole has increased its demand deposits by $100,000,000, ten times the original purchase of assets by the Fed. The banking system is allowed to keep reserves amounting to 10 percent of its deposits, which means that the "money multiplier" – the amount of deposits the banks can expand on top of reserves – is 10. A purchase of assets of $10 million by the Fed has generated very quickly a tenfold ($100,000,000) increase in the money supply of the banking system as a whole.

All economists agree on how this process works. They might disagree on the effects of this process (they do), but all agree on the above process as described.

The US Dollar is worth about 2% of what is was in 1913 when the FED was established. This comes about because the FED continually produces more "money" and the law of supply and demand will mean that each dollar is worth less that it was before.

The 1974 Nobel Prize in Economic Science went to the great Austrian free-market economist Dr. Friedrich A. von Hayek. It was for the Hayek theory of the business cycle that puts the blame for the boom-bust cycle squarely on the shoulders of the government and its controlled banking system and it completely absolves the free-enterprise economy from the blame.

When a government's central bank causes the expansion of bank credit by inflating the money supple it causes price inflation. But that is not all it does; it causes malinvestments, unsound investments in capital goods, underproduction of consumer goods and many other errors in economic judgment which are caused by all the "easy money" coming into the economy. Then, when that "easy money" stops as it always does --- depression. By the way, in the '20s the economist von Mises warned of the coming depression which was being caused by the intervention of the government. His call was on target, was it not?

Next up; who benefits from inflation. (hint, it is not the poor!)

Econ 101 part 4 (paper and runaway inflation)

2011-09-04T07:10:00.008-04:00

Last time we looked at how governments could debase the currency and steal money even if the currency were gold or silver coins. This was a time honored way for the government to steal money to pay for wars and welfare, without high taxes which can lead to unwanted unrest. Ah, but paper money, now there is a concept that turns out to be a wonderful concept for governments to loot the public.

If a government prints more money, then the money already in circulation is worth less. With paper money not tied to any redeemable amount of precious metal, the government may print as much as it deems it needs to do. Heck, sometimes it prints too much money even if it has "promised" to redeem the paper currency for solid precious metal. Governments sometimes don't tell the truth, perhaps you have noticed this. Glenn Greenwald has made a new carrier of documenting government lies.

Inflation is an increase in the money supply. Inflation leads to rises in price because the increase in the amount of money in circulation has made all the old money worth less than it did before. As an example, if I were selling apples for a dollar a piece today (less than they are at Publix), and the rate of inflation were 10% then I would have to rise my price to $1.10 by the end of the year just to keep at the same level I was before. I have not raised my price in real terms, only kept up with inflation.

So, how high can prices go? How fast can it happen? Has it ever happened in real countries on the planet earth before? Let us look to history for answers. Wikipedia has an excellent list of countries that have experienced hyper-inflation. See it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation

In Germany in 1914 the cost of a pound of butter was a little over one Mark. By 1918 the cost had risen to 3 Marks. By 1922 a pound of butter was 2,400 Marks, and the next year it went to 6,000,000,000,000 Marks. Yes, one pound of butter went from a Mark to six Trillion Marks in 9 years. One egg in 1914 was under a Mark and 9 years later it was 80 Billion Marks. This level of inflation is such a society killer that governments have tried to cause runaway inflation in the economy of their enemies during wartime.

The German government bragged about its efficiency at printing money. They had twelve printing operations running 24 hours a day pumping out new currency! How could anyone set a fair price for something? If I sold a farm for 3,000 marks to you one year, it might cost 3 Trillion to buy one like it a couple of years later! How can society run in this sort of chaos?

I believe that most humans can understand the evils of runaway inflation. The only people who would want such a thing (mistakenly) are those so deeply in debt that forcing even a large debt to become mere pocket change is a "good thing to them personally". (assuming they give up eating food that is)

Next time we will look at a much more modern way for the government to inflate the currency. We are "blessed" with modern technology which allows for efficiency that the Germans could only dream of. After that, we will look at inflation as a government policy (not runaway inflation) and who benefits from the policy.

Econ 101 part 3 ( paper money and inflation)

2011-09-03T12:31:00.007-04:00

Last time we looked at coins and government counterfeiting by debasing the precious metal content of the coins when the government took in coins via taxation. Now we will look at "paper money".

Once upon a time when real gold and real silver were the coin of the realm, it was difficult to keep all of your money with you. Gold and silver are heavy! It is also dangerous to haul around all of your money due to the robber that might take it from you. There were money warehouses where one could store his gold and silver, and these became known as banks. There was a fee for the storage and you got a receipt for the metal that you deposited in the bank. These receipts became known as "bank notes".

Sometimes two men would arrive at a fair price on a trade and one would just give the other the correct amount in bank notes rather than go to the trouble of going to get the actual gold or silver. With reputable banks this worked out very well indeed. Thus was born the idea of "paper money", which was just trading receipts (which were just claim tickets or IOUs).

In the USA the government issued a one dollar bank note called a Silver Certificate up until the 1960s. The government promised to redeem the paper bill with once ounce of silver upon demand. Until the 60's the US Dollar was valued throughout the world as very good money and the phrase "sound as a dollar" meant that one was in good shape. In the 60s the US government started issuing fake coins (token in the technical term) that you can see in your own pocket today. The government also started issuing Federal Reserve Notes which were not backed by anything and could not be traded for Silver or anything else.

Now you may wonder how this came to be. It was not just some experiment, the US government had been engaged in massive fraud and had issued more Silver Certificates that it had silver to redeem the paper with. So, they changed the rules of the game by issuing paper backed by nothing. So what gave these pieces of paper any value at all? The "legal tender law" is what.

The idea of "legal tender" goes back to Kublai Khan who issued pieces of paper that said they were 20 ounces of gold! He passed a law that said if you refused to accept such a piece of paper you would forfeit your life. (the Khan's were not warm and fuzzy at all!) Other governments after that time tried other versions of "legal tender" and the USA settled upon the idea that one accepts the unbacked paper for a debt or the debt is cancelled. In other words, if I owe you $100 and offer US money for the debt you have to accept it or the debt is legally cancelled! Neat, eh? This allows the US government to print up all the money they dare to print up. The only thing holding back the government from printing up Billion Dollar Notes by the truck load is the law of supply and demand.

FDR stopped gold coins in the 30s, silver coins and paper Silver Certificates were done away with in the 60s, and the constitution says that this is illegal. The document says the the government can not "make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts". But we don't follow the constitution any more so few care about this small problem.

Next time: what happens when governments print tons of paper money.

Econ 101 part 2 ( Money, inflation, and coins,)

2011-09-03T07:05:00.006-04:00

The common man often struggles to understand the rise in prices.

Consider How Much things cost in 1974

Year End Close Dow Jones Industrial Average 616
Average Cost of new house $34,900.00
Average Income per year $13,900.00
Average Monthly Rent $185.00
Cost of a gallon of Gas 55 cents
Average cost new car$3,750.00
Samsonite Case $62.00

It would be very difficult to talk the new car dealership out of a new car for only $3,750 today in 2011! (without a gun) Why do prices rise? The progressive often says it is simply "corporate greed". That answer is wrong of course, but what does cause prices to rise? To answer that we need to look at "money" more closely. As we saw last time, we need some "medium of exchange" to help us trade goods and services with one another.

If you take a look at the "coins" in your pocket change you will see that the dime, quarter, and the half dollar all have little groves on them. That was to prevent anyone (the government often) from clipping off a bit of the edge and passing it along. No one would do such a thing today of course since the "coin" in not really a "coin", rather it is a token. The US government stopped issuing "coins" in 1965. They issue tokens instead.

The "coin" was invented by the ancients to overcome the problem of how to trade conveniently in gold or silver. The real coin is a disk of precious metal, usually gold or silver. This coin has three things stamped on it; the weight of the coin, the fineness of the metal, and the name of the mint where it was manufactured. The name of the mint is called the "hallmark" and it became the "brand name" some were trusted more than others just like today. Notice that the object did not need any government backing as the object itself was of a certain value regardless.

The middle ages saw a mint in Czechoslovakia produce a coin called a Joachimthaler that was popularly called a "thaler" because who can pronounce those Czech names. It was a one ounce silver coin and became so popular, trusted, and demanded that the very name "thaler" came to mean the same thing as once ounce of silver. As language changes the name "thaler" became "daler" and later "dollar". The "Dollar" was defined in the mind of the people of Europe as one ounce of fine silver.

The Romans (going backwards in history now) had a silver coin called the Denarius. It was a 940 fine silver coin, which means it was 94% silver and 6% base metal for strength. The Romans had a welfare program as well as a warfare program and continually needed money, so when they collected taxes they started clipping off a bit of metal from each coin and minting new coins. The groves on a coin called "reeding" is there to prevent this sort of theft of metal.

That was not enough so they started counterfeiting by melting the coins and adding base metal to reduce the silver content which allowed them to mint new coins from the stolen silver. This is called "debasing" the money. The Denarius went from 94% silver in 54 AD to under 50% by 200 AD and then to 1% silver by 250 AD and therefor became nearly worthless. I would have to take 94 coins to equal the silver content of one non-counterfeited coin.

Next up; legal tender and inflation ...

Econ 101 part 1

2011-08-27T08:09:00.004-04:00

Economics is sometimes called "the dismal science". It is not dismal nor is it hard to understand. Economics can be made to look hard or boring but that is the job of government paid school teachers.

We are in a depression at present in the USA. It is called a "recession" because the word "depression" which was used for most of our history is so scary to the modern man given "the great depression" that we are afraid to use the word anymore. We are also seeing prices rise and that hurts everyone, but it hurts the poor the most --- and I have experience with that. We wonder what causes these things. Before answering that large question one must first start with some basics and the first one is --- “money”. So, what in the world is this thing called money? Why do we even need it? Have not many people called money the “root of all evil”?

People, once upon a time, would barter to obtain the goods and services they needed. That is, two individuals each possessing a good or service the other needed would enter into an agreement to trade their goods. It was not always simple even with just two people, consider if you had a horse and I had a dozen eggs --- that does not seem to be a fair trade most of the time. This form of barter does not provide the transferability and divisibility that makes for efficient trading. Another example is the one if you have cows but need apples. Then you need to find someone who has apples and the desire for your beef. What if you find someone who has the need for beef but no apples and can only offer you used shoes? To make the trade now the two of you need to go find a third party, or more people, who want to trade to see if something can be worked out. This is very confusing and inefficient.

What if people wanted salt and you had extra salt? You could barter for needed goods by offering some of your salt for whatever you needed. If you want to get just enough beef the week from the farmer in town, the two of you could decided on a fair exchange rate between salt and pounds of beef. This works if the farmer thinks that many other people (who have things he needs) also value the salt and will also take it in trade.

In the “new world” colonialists used beaver pelts, tobacco, whiskey, dried corn, and other items as currency for transactions. These commodities were chosen for many reasons. These commodities were widely desired and easy to trade with, but just as importantly they were also durable, portable and easily stored. Tomatoes are the fruit of the gods, but they go bad so fast that one could not use the delicious tomato as a trading commodity.

Since these commodities were used to trade for goods and services, one could say that these commodities formed the basis for exchanges. Heck, one could even say that they were a "medium of exchange"! That, by the way, is how most experts define the word “money”. What would be the best commodity to be used as money? One needs to look for the most tradeable good. It needs to not deteriorate for long time periods. The commodity chosen needs to be easy to carry around and store.

What did the ancient world decide to use for money? Gold and silver. Both metals last a long, long time and don't rust away like iron. Both metals have value in the arts and in the jewelry trade. Both items are in a fairly sort supply so that the law of supply and demand does not diminish the value of either for the most part. (see Spain for a historical exception)

Gold and silver do have problems. How much do you have in your sack? How to weigh it? How pure is that “gold” anyway? Gold dust is easy to divide up and that helps a bit, but it is still a pain to have to weigh out gold every time you buy a darned happy meal at the fast-food joint. (did they have those in the ancient world?)

Next time, we will look to see what the ancient world did to work around the problems of gold and silver.

Econ 101 part 0 (preface)

2011-08-27T06:30:00.001-04:00

The economic ignorance exhibited here at Unclaimed Territory exceeds all bounds. This was highlighted recently on a thread were our resident lawyer R. R. Heard declared he "hated" gold. (I have never worn any of the stuff, nor has the wife, but we don't "hate" it) The real topic was "what is money" even when that was not explicitly stated in that long exchange of views on economics. Many letters did explicitly talk about "money".

Since "money", "gold", "the FED", how we pay for wars, and other such topics infuse almost all of Glenn's posts to one degree or another, even if you don't notice it right off, I intend to run an economics 101 class for progressives or beginners. In 101 we are mainly going to talk about money and inflation, as this is not about the views of the various schools of economics. (we might do that later if I live long enough and Glenn does not make economics off limits at UT) This is intended to be understandable to even young people (and hence useful for more than just yelling on UT) and not a series of papers suitable for post-grad work.

I had hoped to do exactly 10 posts, each building on the last one without any comment to others in whatever tread is was posted in and I might still make it 10 but I might also have to go one or two more. The reason is that some here don't seem to even understand the real function of money and so that will need to be addressed also I guess.

Please note that one need not have any of a thing to be able to recognize it. People who sell jet airplanes often don't own one themselves. Also, I really don't expect all that many to read this since I intend to post everything well after Glenn posts on a topic and many comments have been made. Say after page 15 or so.

Note: I consider this to be very "on theme" and will stop if Glenn disagrees with that assessment. (but not, of course, if he simply disagrees with my material)

links

2011-08-14T12:43:00.001-04:00

It’s Not About Feedback

2011-08-14T07:26:00.001-04:00

Instead, I am a climate heretic.

Story here.

Seen on the net

2011-08-14T06:59:00.002-04:00

charles nelson says:

August 14, 2011 at 1:18 am

Absolutely excellent…an in-depth ‘exploded diagram’ of an argument I have used to hush Warmists for many years now; I ask them if they’ve ever flown long haul and if they have ever looked at the in-flight display…the one that has a route map, arrival times etc…sometimes these have a temperature read out.

For those who haven’t…I explain that the temperature at 300hPa/10,000m ranges from minus 30 degrees C at the equator to minus 65 at the Poles…(I even ask the suspicious ones if they’d like to google it!)

I then ask them if they’ve ever experienced turbulence on such a flight. I ask them what they think might be happening? The smarter ones get ‘that look’, like beasts at an abbatoir they sense where the path leads… but by now there’s no turning back!

Eventually we settle on an explanation…the explanation…high altitude turblulence can only be caused by one thing…air rising, cooling and falling!
I then ask them if they can think of anything that would or could stop air freely circulating between ground level and 6 miles high… to where the temperature is eternally below -30 degrees C AT ITS WARMEST!

Eventually even the most ardent Believer can be brought back to Newton’s Universe. A place where the laws of thermodynamics still rule, where up is up, down is down, and convection and radiation continue unabated and unabolished.

I detest the term “Greenhouse Theory” with its implicit and impossible lid on the atmosphere. The very word Greenhouse is redolent of trapped, un-natural and stifling heat. Perfect for scaring the scientifically illiterate who make up such a high proportion of Believers.

polls

2011-08-08T17:51:00.000-04:00

“97 percent of scientists say man-made climate change is real ……… woops”

Try to get some facts straight. A master’s thesis by a student at the University of Illinois, Chicago did a poll that tortured the data until it came up with a value of 97%. This did NOT represent the the views of 97% of scientists or even 97% of those polled.

It disgusts me that UIC is giving away MS degrees for doing a poll.

death by 1000 scratches

2011-08-08T08:06:00.000-04:00

1) Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accord.
2) The Chicago Carbon exchange has closed (CCX) with carbon trading at $0.05.
3) The globe stopped warming in 1998 even though CO2 continues to increase.
4) The USA has ceased funding foreign CO2 emission projects.
5) The USA congress has ended Cap and Trade
6) 69% of the public believe that global warming was exaggerated to get money into the field.
7) the EPA is not enforcing CO2 emissions compliance.
8) China ignores emissions limits completely.
9) Climategate
10) The failure of Copenhagen
11) The IPCC’s admission that they have to “revisit” the science of Climate.
12) etc

US Budget numbers

2011-07-30T08:53:00.003-04:00

Click on image to enlarge.

I wonder what would happen if we decided to just cut income to 1.5 Trillion and then adjust spending to match that figure?

A question for the warmists ...

2011-07-29T09:11:00.001-04:00

A fellow at WUWT said the following:

I’ve got one that always stumps Warmists…they don’t like it because they simply cannot dispute the ‘facts’ upon which my argument is based. It goes like this….

The temperature at 300hPa ranges from around minus 60C at the poles to minus 30C over the equator. This is around 30,000 feet; the cruising altitude of long haul passenger planes and you can see it on the flight info display along with maps and arrival times.

I ask if they have been on a long haul flight and if they experienced turbulence.
The ones which say yes, I ask what they think turbulence is?
Gently I get them to admit that turbulence is air rising, cooling and falling…in short water vapour convection and radiation.

I then ask them to explain at what point in their scientific model, warm air will cease to rise into the vast frigid reservoir of cold that is our atmosphere – lose its heat (easily across the big Delta T) and fall again.

I then sit back and listen to them wriggle!

Ice

2011-07-16T14:20:00.001-04:00

Here’s a newspaper article from 1926. The North Pole was pretty much ice free in 1926, as reported by the crew of the first dirigible flight across the N. Pole:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=5louAAAAIBAJ&sjid=oNkFAAAAIBAJ&pg=6377,694076&dq=north-pole+water&hl=en

Today’s North Pole ice cover is huge by comparison. And then there’s John Daly’s report of open water at the formerly solid ice covered, impenetrable Polar region back in 1817:

“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.”

http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm

No warming

2011-07-07T19:56:00.000-04:00

There is no warming since 1997. Despite all the alarming predictions about a continuous and steep temperature increase, the globe has failed to warm for 15 years (and counting…). The latest GCM-based IPCC estimate was about +0.24°C per decade, with a 95% confidence range of +0.15-0.34°C. Where is Trenberth’s ‘missing heat’?

Our most recent, up-to-date observations say:

1. Zero or negligible surface and troposheric warming since 1997 (HadCRUT3, RSS MSU, UAH MSU)
2. SSTs have been steady since 1997 (HadSST2), global ocean heat content remains unchanged since the deployment of the ARGO network
3. AGW theory predicts stratospheric cooling. No cooling has occured in the stratosphere since the early 1990s (HadAT2 and other datasets)

HadCRUT3 data with a 15-year trendline: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997/trend

RSS TLT data has no trend since 1997: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/plot/rss/from:1997/trend

UAH currently shows a modest, statistically not significant increase: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1997/plot/uah/from:1997/trend

HadSST2 – the very same picture: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997/trend

HadAT2 – lack of any cooling in the stratosphere since 1994: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadat/images/update_images/global_upper_air.png

seen in a thread ...

2011-07-07T17:30:00.001-04:00

Crispin in Waterloo says:

July 7, 2011 at 12:23 pm

John B says:
Can anyone here look at that chart and say, seriously, “no warming since 1998″?
++++++++

There has been no warming since 1998. Given that 1998 was an El Nino year, most serious commenters bother to look to when the warming stopped and it was about 1995 (or even 1995). Since the temperatures in the past 10 years are slightly higher than in 1995, why do they say that? Because in order to capture a global temperature value, many edits of actual measurements must be made, some subjective, some arbitrary, some rational. This results in a value with an attendant error bar. If the error bar (which is not shown above) were seen and understood, the temperature change would have to be ‘significant’ before being delcared to be different (up or down). The use of the term ‘significant’ is not arbitrary nor subjective. It has a technical meaning to do with variation based not on the actual temperature, whatever it is, but with the methods and known error bars. For example temperatures read to plus or minus 0.25 degrees cannot give a result that is plus or minus 0.2 degrees and certainly not 0.211 degrees. A calculation method may provide an answer, but it is not able to reduce the intrinsic errors of each input or conversion or projection over surface area (etc). That is why they are called intrinsic errors. They are part of the source number or calculation method.

Presuming that the measurement resolution in 1998 is the same as in 2011, there has, seriously, been no global temperature rise in 13 years.

According to IPCC projections, we are already as much as 0.78 degrees behind – a rise approximately equal to that of the past century. This failure of reality to match prediction is held by some (skeptics) to be further proof that the modelled heating from AG CO2 is erroneous. Others, AGW proponents, hold that there is an on-going, steep natural variation (cooling) that brought the rise to a halt, that this halt is temporary, and when the cooling phase reverses, temperatures will rise very rapidly to ‘catch up’. Critics of this view hold that if natural variation is so powerful, over-riding the AG CO2 as it is claimed to have done, then perhaps the calculated forcing for CO2 is in error (high) and recent 1975-1995 warming was also largely cause by natural variation. Pro-AGW commenters such as at RealClimate have, in most cases, responded to these critics by saying, “Your mother wears Army boots!” or words with similar gravitas and relevance.

Also, John, you will not find people seriously claiming, “The global average temperature has risen since 1998.” because no credible data supports such a contention.

Temperature and CO2

2011-06-27T09:00:00.003-04:00

Look at this chart.

Look at about 330 thousand years ago. First notice the period when temperature is rising while CO2 is falling. Then look where temperature completes it’s up surge while CO2 is only half way to it’s peak around 320 thousand years ago.

How did temperature get turned around like that? Obviously it was not caused by the normal explanation of CO2 causing temperature rises because CO2 was still climbing like gangbusters. It looks very much like the temperature didn’t care about what CO2 was doing. It went where it wanted to go and it let CO2 follow or not follow.

Understanding Engineers

2011-06-27T06:19:00.000-04:00

Understanding Engineers #1

Two engineering students were biking across a university campus when one said, “Where did you get such a great bike?” The second engineer replied, “Well, I was walking along yesterday, minding my own business, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike, threw it to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, “Take what you want.” The first engineer nodded approvingly and said, “Good choice: The clothes probably wouldn’t have fit you anyway.”

Understanding Engineers #2

To the optimist, the glass is half-full. To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Understanding Engineers #3

A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers. The engineer fumed, “What’s with those guys? We must have been waiting for fifteen minutes!” The doctor chimed in, “I don’t know, but I’ve never seen such inept golf!” The priest said, “Here comes the green-keeper. Let’s have a word with him.” He said, “Hello, George. What’s wrong with that group ahead of us? They’re rather slow, aren’t they?” The green-keeper replied, “Oh, yes. That’s a group of blind firemen. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime.” The group fell silent for a moment. The priest said, “That’s so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight.” The doctor said, “Good idea. I’m going to contact my ophthalmologist colleague and see if there’s anything he can do for them.” The engineer said, “Why can’t they play at night?”

Understanding Engineers #4

What is the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers? Mechanical engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.

Understanding Engineers #5

The graduate with a science degree asks, “Why does it work?” The graduate with an engineering degree asks, “How does it work?” The graduate with an accounting degree asks, “How much will it cost?” The graduate with an arts degree asks, “Do you want fries with that?”

Understanding Engineers #6

Three engineering students were gathered together discussing who must have designed the human body. One said, “It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints.” Another said, “No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections.” The last one said, “No, actually it had to have been an environmental engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?”

Understanding Engineers #7

Normal people believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.

Understanding Engineers #8

An engineer was crossing a road one day, when a frog called out to him and said, “If you kiss me, I’ll turn into a beautiful princess.” He bent over, picked up the frog, and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, “If you kiss me, I’ll turn back into a beautiful princess and stay with you for one week.” The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I’ll stay with you for one week and do anything you want.” Again, the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket. Finally, the frog asked, “What is the matter? I’ve told you I’m a beautiful princess and that I’ll stay with you for one week and do anything you want. Why won’t you kiss me?” The engineer said, “Look, I’m an engineer. I don’t have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog – now that’s cool.”

data

2011-06-27T06:14:00.000-04:00

Seen on WUWT, for what it’s worth:

Data are. They are measurements taken from instruments. Good data are taken from properly sited, properly installed, properly calibrated instruments. All other data are bad data. Missing data are simply missing. Bad data cannot be massaged into good data. Missing data cannot replaced. Anything not measured by proper instruments is of uncertain value. Anything not measured at all is merely uncertain; and, of no value. Once data is adjusted, in any way, it ceases to be data; arguably, it becomes undata.

All of the data collected to form the global temperature record (good, bad and missing) is converted into undata before it is used, thus destroying its provenance and its value. AGW rests uncertainly on this “foundation”.

So evolves “settled science”, unsettling as that may be.

Geological Society statement about climate change

2011-06-26T18:11:00.002-04:00

I saw the following at a WUWT post

See UK Geological Society Statement: Full statement here

We see from the statement:

During warmings from glacial to interglacial, temperature and CO2 rose together for several thousand years, although the best estimate from the end of the last glacial is that the temperature probably started to rise a few centuries before the CO2 showed any reaction. Palaeoclimatologists think that initial warming driven by changes in the Earth’s orbit and axial tilt eventually caused CO2 to be released from the warming ocean and thus, via positive feedback, to reinforce the temperature rise already in train28. Additional positive feedback reinforcing the temperature rise would have come from increased water vapour evaporated from the warmer ocean, water being another greenhouse gas, along with a decrease in sea ice, and eventually in the size of the northern hemisphere ice sheets, resulting in less reflection of solar energy back into space.

Thank you Dr. Capell Aris for restating the historical facts about the timed delayed relationship with the planet warming first, and then causing the CO2 to increase due to the temperature raise.

This has been the bone of contention between the warmist and the skeptical scientist.

First – The warming planet
Second – Warmth causing the CO2 to be released.

Al Gore and the IPPC pushers have systematically tried to destroy these facts stating the CO2 causes the planet to warm, this was done by stating the warming was caused by the rise in CO2, in order to demonize CO2 as the major cause of planetary heating, therefore allowing them to create a tax system that would permit them to control every aspect of life!

Ann Coulter Declares War on Ron Paul

2011-06-17T06:23:00.003-04:00

Ann Coulter, that warmongering demagogue of Conservatism, has declared war on Ron Paul. Naturally, she hates Paul because he stands for peace, free markets and the rule of law. Coulter hates of all of these things since she loves war, the police state, and the destruction of the constitution in pursuit of untrammeled political power for Conservative nationalists. In other words, like most Conservatives, she loves socialism, although she prefers to cloak her socialism in words like "national greatness," "secure borders" and "family values."

In a recent column, Coulter attacks Paul for a variety of his pro-freedom positions. In this column, however, I’ll focus only on her wildly inaccurate claims about how marriage is a "legal construct" and how every good American should insist that government maintain its death grip on the institution. She denounces Ron Paul for his insistence that marriage should not be controlled by government and that people should be free to contract with whomever they choose. Coulter of course insists that marriage should be socialized, regulated and controlled by government.

Coulter counters Paul with a claim that "there are reasons we have laws governing important institutions, such as marriage." Well she’s right there. There is a reason that governments regulate marriage: Governments couldn’t resist the urge to seize control of marriage which was a traditionally religious and non-governmental institution.

Let’s briefly examine the history and nature of marriage in the West and see just why we have laws. By "laws" of course, Coulter means secular civil laws. She’s not talking about Canon Law or Church Law, which is what governed marriage throughout most of the history of Christendom.

... more ...

Having Ann "the big bitch" Coulter as your enemy says very good things about your character. Another good thing about Ron Paul is that he believes that government should be contained to as small a sphere of influence as is possible and bound by an agreement with the people. (the constitution in our case)

I used to think that not letting government have a say in marriage came from my own reading of history and my own logic, but since I have been reading Ron Paul's stuff for decades perhaps I got it from him; but no matter, I see that the whole homosexual marriage issue vanishes as a hot-button issue as soon as marriage is no longer a government privilege. It is much like the drug problem in our country; don't let government tell people what they may ingest or smoke and the problem of SWAT team raids and all the rest goes away.

The nation has one final chance to say that it wants a small government that lets people live their lives freely as long as they don't use force or fraud against their fellow citizens. You may support Ron Paul. Don't get hopeful if you do, the odds of him winning is not very good at all. But even if he wins, the one man, the one old man, will not usher in "the city on the hill". All you can get out of supporting Ron Paul is a plea to return government to the ideal of the pact between rulers and the people that existed in the beginning. Little more than that.

a plan to save America ...

2011-06-16T06:30:00.009-04:00

By "America" I mean the people of North America and not the government called the USA. It could be that the people of America will not respond well without rulers and will demand government much like the Biblical story of Israel demanding a king.

What problems does the nation-state and her people face at present? I list a few of them:

1) We have a crushing debt burden of unprecedented proportions that will have to be acknowledged and dealt with.

2) We have a government-military-industrial-security-bureaucratic complex that feeds on war and uses fear to get its meal. It is central to many of our woes and it will be difficult to erase. The alliance will not go gently into the night.

3) We have a militarized, out-of-control police state that is increasingly brutal. It looks to be copying the methods of the USSR for some reason.

4) The continual wars both foreign and domestic (i.e. "war" on drugs) has made the country insane. There may be many other reasons, but the insanity is all around us.

5) We have become a fascist economy (or use "corporatist" if you prefer) and the elite have shipped the industrial jobs overseas which has crushed the "middle class".

6) The country is hated around the globe by the majority of the humans on the planet. It is generally a bad idea to make enemies of everyone.

7) We face massive inflation. This is a civilization killer; see numerous historical examples.

So, what to do? Wait for some leader to be elected president who will recognize our problems and fix them all? Any betting men here willing to lay down odds on that one occurring?

The hardest thing might be just to get Americans to recognize the problems. I hear far too often that "America is number one!". I was even attacked once by a cabal of government worshipers one time for pointing out our massive debt meant that the governemnt would never meet its obligations to the elderly and that it would go bankrupt if it tried. Just print more money was the cry. Hard to believe now that so many were that ignorant of the real situation.

Perhaps a strong Ron Paul run in the Republican primaries will air some of our problems and lead a portion of the "conservatives" toward understanding our problems. Glenn Greenwald and others on the left are trying to impress the Democrats of our peril. Perhaps the time is ripe to have a real national conversation on where we really are.

But, let us suppose for a moment that we got the people to drop their ideological differences for a period of time and got them to face the issued. What can be done?

1) We have to withdraw the military from the world and cut its size by at least 95%. Perhaps we could sell aircraft carriers to the Chinese.

2) The CIA (and other spook agencies) would have to go. We can not afford them starting more wars and destabilizing entire regions based on their internal logic. The CIA looks like some agency designed by Joe Stalin.

3) We cut the budget drastically. The cut of the military portion goes a long, long way but is not enough. If we honor the SS commitment to our elderly population we will need to cut out any other areas that we can live without.

4) We repudiate the national debt. That is federal, state, and local debt. Total repudiation. We declare bankruptcy and start anew.

5) We repeal almost all federal laws and regulations. Let the 50 states regulate as they will: and we honor the 10th amendment in the bill of rights. The power to regulate is what draws the businessman into the political realm seeking to control the government. We can not back away from a fascist economy until the government gets out of the business area. Many will scream at this because they are so unread in real economics --- but honestly folks, could it get any worse than it is now? Could it?

6) We hold a constitutional convention. If we are to be a nation governed "by the people" then it is time to let "the people" have a chance to set the rules. 230+ years of "interpretation" by nine people in black ropes has destroyed the constitution. To hell with "original intent"; let us re-write the damn thing in modern English and have youtubes of delegates telling us what they mean by the words they use in the document.

7) We seriously consider if mob-rule is the best way to govern. Does no one look at the "tyranny of the majority" in college anymore?

Do I hold out any hope of this happening? Of course not.

Evils both great and small

2011-06-11T06:37:00.027-04:00

Butler Shaffer wrote a post called, "Why TSA, Wars, State Defined Diets, Seat-Belt Laws, the War On Drugs, Police Brutality, and Efforts to Control the Internet, Are Essential to the State" the other day. I find it very enlightening. Butler Shaffer is a favorite of mine, I think I have mentioned that before. He has just written a post that almost seems to have been lifted right out of my mind. The rascal!

He started by quoting one my favorite modern gnostics, Carl Jung.

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest accumulation of depotentiated social units. ~ Carl Jung

Jung knew that the human is oriented towards voluntary cooperation and will find ways to come into agreement with others if given the chance. I once watched a small church that never did anything unless there was near unanimous agreement; and one would have thought that they would never get anything done, but they did all sorts of social projects to help others. They were amazing.

Butler Shaffer starts his essay with:

The title of this article encompasses topics that arouse attention and criticism among persons of libertarian persuasion. The discussion of such matters usually treats each issue as though it were sui generis, independent of one another. Most of us respond as though the woman who is groped at the airport has no connection with the man who is tasered by a police officer; that the person serving time in prison for selling marijuana is unrelated to the men being held at Guantanamo. The belief that one person’s maltreatment is isolated from the rest of us, is essential to the maintenance of state power.

What we have in common is the need to protect one another’s inviolability from governmental force. When we understand that the woman being groped by a TSA agent stands in the same shoes as our wife, mother, or grandmother; when the man being beaten by a sadist cop is seen, by us, as our father or grandfather, we become less willing to evade the nature of the wrongdoing by invoking the coward’s plea: "better him than me." The state owes its very existence to the success it has had in fostering division among us, a topic I explored in my Calculated Chaos book. Divide-and-conquer has long been the mainstay in political strategy. If blacks and whites; or Christians and Muslims; or employees and employers; or "straights" and "gays"; or men and women; or any of seemingly endless abstractions, learn to identify and separate themselves from one another, the state has established its base of power. From such mutually-exclusive categories do we draw the endless "enemies" (e.g., communists, drug-dealers, terrorists, tobacco companies) we are to fear, and against whom the state promises its protection. By becoming fearful, we become existentially disabled, and readily accept whatever safeguards the institutional fear-mongers impose, . . . all for our "benefit," of course!

Look at the title of this article: do you find any governmental program or practice therein that is not grounded in state-generated fear? Each one – and the numerous others not mentioned – presumes a threat to your well-being against which the state must take restrictive and intrusive action. Terrorists might threaten the flight you are about to take; terrorist nations might have "weapons of mass destruction" and the intention to use them against you; your children might be at risk from drug dealers or from sex perverts using the Internet; driving without a seat-belt, or eating "junk" foods might endanger you: the list goes on and on, changing as the fear-peddlers dream up another dreaded condition in life.

We will continue to see illegal wars like the present one on Libya out of the evil American Empire as long as the people allow their government to continue to dominate the people in small ways as well as large ones. It is all connected. Shaffer makes a great point here.

Michael: My father is no different from any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.

Kay Adams: Do you know how naïve you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don’t have men killed.

Michael: Oh, who’s being naïve, Kay?

~ The Godfather (1972)

The idea is an old one, and a simple one: power corrupts and dehumanizes. We must give up the drug of government to again be able to enjoy the bliss of freedom and liberty. More importantly, the very survival of humanity itself calls out for us to abandon the military adventures that governments always bring forth. How can we do this? Stop being a coward and embrace the idea of anarchy.

We must realize the the small evils that happen to others are just as important as the larger evils as these small evils feed the larger ones. We must also be aware that what happens to one in our society happens to all of us. When the government tramples on the rights of the least of us; it tramples on the rights of us all. Remember that in all you do.

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik

2011-06-05T05:50:00.002-04:00

William L. Anderson wrote:

When a mentally unstable man murdered six people and severely wounded Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, last January, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was quick to blame Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle for the shootings, and others like Paul Krugman also claimed that it was a political shooting orchestrated by the Right. Not surprisingly, Dupnik was the darling of the Left, as he claimed that the "lack of civility" from non-leftists.

Four months later, Dupnik’s SWAT charges gunned down Jose Guerena as they barged into his house. Guerena allegedly was holding an AR 15 (with the safety still on), and as the video in this article shows, Dupnik’s employees wasted no ammunition, firing more than 60 shots in a few seconds. Guerena was still alive when paramedics arrived, but Dupnik’s ambassadors for "civility" would not let them tend the wounded man until he was dead.

The reaction of the sheriff is most instructive. In the January incident, he openly blamed people who were not responsible for the killings; in May he denied that his office shared any blame at all in the killing of Guerena even though they fired the bullets. Guerena, according to Mr. "Civility," totally was at fault, as Pima County SWAT officers did nothing wrong.

Furthermore, Dupnik has helped lead an avalanche of bad publicity (much of it likely untrue) toward the dead man and his family, engaging in the kind of character assassination that he would have condemned in January. In other words, if Sarah Palin campaigns against another Democrat, that is near-murderous behavior; however, when Dupnik and his lackeys gun down a man in his home, and then falsely claim that he must have been a drug kingpin, that is just being "responsible." (As Will Grigg has noted, Dupnik blames the press for the bad publicity in the aftermath of this killing.)

While Dupnik has turned out to be as despicable as some of Fox News might have wanted to claim in January, he only is a small part of a larger tragedy. American political culture, which to me Dupnik represents in part, has become so hypocritical and so dishonest and so destructive that I believe it is impossible for decent people to survive it. ...

I think professor Anderson is on to something here. There exists two kinds of Americans under our law -- the average citizen and the elite. Obviously the police are part of the elite in a police state. Sheriff Dupnik has given us a clear view of the problem.

The Real Story of ‘Free Market’ Iceland

2011-02-27T06:13:00.002-05:00

Thomas Woods

The financial meltdown in Iceland was supposed to be the definitive argument against free markets, which were said to have caused that country’s terrible ordeal. Why, only a laissez-faire ideologue could cling to a belief in markets after this experience, etc. Now come Philipp Bagus and David Howden, two very young (and very bright — I think they’re both geniuses) Austrian economists, with the real story — which, it turns out, has plenty to do with central banking, moral hazard, and Austrian business cycle theory. Check out, in pdf, Deep Freeze: Iceland’s Economic Collapse.

Very interesting look.

seen on the net

2011-02-23T18:29:00.000-05:00

Having read Judith Curry’s article, it is difficult to find much to disagree with. Unless, of course, you have another agenda and something to hide.

The only other point I wish to make is that there is one group of people who have a deep insight into climate history – they are called geologists.

And by geologists I mean those scientists working in the private sector, not the bureaucrats who ‘work’ in government. Finding a private sector geologist who believes in AGW is as rare as finding rocking horse poo.

observation on climate science

2011-02-19T08:47:00.000-05:00

At WUWT it see this by Ian W:

Can anyone give one area where climate science can be said to be really ‘quality science’?

It seems here that peer review is continually being ‘used’ to block dissent.

As the subject of this paper showed and as shown repeatedly against others, climate ‘scientists’ are poor to undergraduate level at statistics.

The use of botanical proxies seems to show a lack of knowledge in botany – taking width of tree rings to equate to only temperature for example.

The loss of original data and unwillingness to publish data and methods.

Continual alteration of original data without any record keeping or publication of _why_ records decades old need to be altered and no authoritative sign off of the changes.

Fudge factors often repeatedly added to observations without any record or reasoning why and why that amount of change.

Climate historical monitoring carried out at weather observation sites that are laughably poor quality with no record keeping of the status of the site.

Invention of data based on the laughably poor quality to sites 1500km distant in a way that even amateur meteorologists would balk at.

Is there not one area of science or scientific method where climate science exhibits professionalism and quality standards? One area where people can say I am proud of the quality of climate science?

And yet the world economy is being driven into the ground by the prognostications of these ungifted amateurs?

Criticisms of the IPCC Process

2011-02-13T07:37:00.001-05:00

Ron Cram:

Criticisms of the IPCC Process

After Climategate, many people have put forward criticisms and ideas to improve the IPCC process. Ryan Maue wrote a fine piece for ClimateAudit titled “What to do with the IPCC?” which describes some of the thoughts by different climate researchers. There are a number of criticisms we should consider more closely.

Roger Pielke is an ISI highly cited climatologist. He has criticized IPCC for a number of biases, including ignoring articles on problems with the surface temperature record (UHI and poorly sited stations) and ignoring or downplaying papers showing the climate change effect of land use/land cover changes (which he calls a first order climate forcing). Pielke has also criticized the IPCC for cherry-picking papers to “promote a particular conclusion on climate change.”

Judith Curry has criticized the IPCC for a number of reasons also. She claim the IPCC broke its own rules to accept papers prior to peer-review and assigned high-status positions to untested researchers who happen to make claims which support the IPCC narrative of impending doom. Curry is still worried about global warming but says she no longer feels the need to substitute the IPCC for her own personal judgment.

Eduardo Zorita is also very concerned about future warming, but he is concerned that uncertainty is being hidden from policymakers. He has criticized Climategate researchers and called on the IPCC to ban them from any participation in future IPCC assessment reports, a worthy proposal but one the IPCC is almost certain to ignore. Zorita has also written about the pressure put on climate scientists to toe the line. He thinks policy makers should be made aware of “the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture.”

Patrick Michaels claims the IPCC ignores the conclusions of peer-reviewed papers they find disagreeable. As evidence for this criticism, he points to Climategate emails.

Steve McIntyre’s experience as an IPCC reviewer has not convinced him the process is fair or unbiased. As a reviewer, McIntyre advised the IPCC not to truncate data but to show and fully discuss the Divergence Problem, but McIntyre’s recommendations were rejected out of hand. McIntyre seems to feel reviewer’s comments are routinely ignored by Coordinating Lead Authors.

Richard Lindzen, professor at MIT and member of the National Academy of Sciences, has served as a lead author for IPCC. He says the “most egregious” problem is the IPCC represents its reports as the consensus findings of thousands of scientists when none were asked if they approved of the final version of the report.

John Christy has also served as a Lead Author and has been critical of the IPCC’s selection process of Lead Authors because of the reliance on nominations by national governments. Christy says, “Indeed, the selections for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report represented a disturbing homogeneity of thought regarding humans and climate.” Christy has proposed a living ‘Wikipedia-IPCC.’ While this is an interesting idea, anyone who has ever been involved in an edit war on Wikipedia knows how frustrating it can be.

Ross McKitrick has written about his frustrations in getting simple IPCC errors corrected. He is convinced IPCC data is contaminated with industrialization effects and he has called for the IPCC to be disbanded.

Disbanding the UN IPCC is the only solution to this madness.

abortion ...

2011-02-11T06:37:00.002-05:00

seen on a comment:

What always kills me about this argument is why people cannot agree to very well-established facts:

1) Biologically, “If a sperm penetrates the egg, fertilization results. Tiny hairlike cilia lining the fallopian tube propel the fertilized egg (zygote) through the tube toward the uterus. The cells of the zygote divide repeatedly as the zygote moves down the fallopian tube. The zygote enters the uterus in 3 to 5 days. In the uterus, the cells continue to divide, becoming a hollow ball of cells called a blastocyst.” “Between 5 and 8 days after fertilization, the blastocyst attaches to the lining of the uterus, usually near the top. This process, called implantation, is completed by day 9 or 10. The wall of the blastocyst is one cell thick except in one area, where it is three to four cells thick. The inner cells in the thickened area develop into the embryo, and the outer cells burrow into the wall of the uterus and develop into the placenta.” If we discovered a single living cell, let alone this process (spontaneous division of cells) on Mars, everyone would agree that this is unquestionably life. But only if it implants is it pregnancy.

2) Genetically, from the moment of conception onwards through all of the subsequent stages and even after life has ended, each cell carries a fully-developed, expressly human unique DNA. If we found such a cell on an axe handle in some murder mystery, we’d know it was a human cell – no other creature. And that genetic signature is distinct from both his/her parents – this is a separate life form.

3) Legally, in the several States, and at the Federal level, it’s been all over the map, from English common law through various states banning abortion of any kind, to no restrictions of any kind, to limited circumstances being allowed, to determinants like “quickening,” to the trimester analysis of Roe v Wade and all of the up, down and sideways decisions that have followed, to notification requirements, to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, with more decisions and laws to come, we can be sure. Several states also allow prosecution for homicide in the event of killing an unborn child. Fathers have no legal rights in the United States either to be informed of their fatherhood, nor to require the pregnancy to be ended, nor to require it to continue. They are, however, legally liable for child support should the pregnancy be brought to term. "Reproductive rights" in the United States is a concept expressly reserved for women.

4) Medically, in addition to seeing better how development actually occurs, improved techniques have moved the line of “viability” earlier and earlier in the pregnancy.

5) Practically, there is no question that – even if a mother decides to abandon a child at birth – the process of pregnancy and birth is physically, emotionally, psychologically and in practical every day terms a significant event that can materially influence her health and circumstances. It basically takes over her body and the way in which she lives – at a minimum for a year (including recovery). If she raises the child, the practical impact is forever. If she aborts or gives up the child for adoption, the psychological effects can be indefinite.

6) Philosophically, it therefore seems the only honest course is to admit that an unborn child is in fact alive, a separate individual, and human. Therefore, it is a human life. It is also wholly dependent upon the woman carrying him or her to term, at least until the point of viability, and to tell a woman who does not want to carry the pregnancy to term that she must, is a very significant constraint on her liberty. That’s why there’s no compromise possible: either one holds the value of the child’s life above the value of the woman’s liberty, or the reverse. But one cannot have it both ways. But we can be honest in our discourse.

more from comments sections

2011-02-06T18:56:00.000-05:00

latitude wrote:

Now that we know Irritable Climate Syndrome is responsible for everything…

…warmcold, coldwarm, wetdry, drywet, rainsnow, snowrain, droughtflood, flooddrought, highice, lowice………..

Forget the null hypothesis…

disproving Irritable Climate Syndrome is the equivalent of disproving God……….

ICS --- I love it.

amen

2011-02-05T17:37:00.000-05:00

bulldust:

Having played with models somewhat I can take a simple series of data with a fairly recognisable trend… say consumption of aluminum (as they would call it over there) in the USA and generate forecasts that vary by orders of magnitude. This is very easy to do. The more complex the model, the more sensitivity the model will have to the various parameters. Much like the butterfly effect, small tweakings of the initial conditions yield dramatically different end results.

Only people unfamiliar with statistical modelling put faith in these black boxes that can generate any result you please. As my brother used to say (after he did his MBA in Geneva a few decades ago), there was a guy there with a model that predicted the oil crisis price scenario… he also predicted oil prices staying the same, dropping, and a number of other outcomes. Anything is possible with such beasts.

To think that the climate models are somehow omniscient and not subject to such frailties almost makes me giggle. Not saying anyone here thinks this, with the possible exception of a few CAGWers we get from time to time.

Trust me… I am a modeller /nod ROFL

seen on the net

2011-02-05T17:21:00.001-05:00

Just a year ago, a scientist at NCAR published a study that proclaimed that “the decade of the 2000′s had the largest ratio of high temperature records to low temperature records ever! (In the US.)

Yep, that was true. Check out this graph, however, and you’ll see that it was also a deliberate deception. Sure enough, the ratio is the highest of all decades since the 1880s — but the 1930s had 6 times as many high temperature records as the 2000s. (These, BTY, are unbroken records.)

So (as of 2009) the 1930s had 6 times as many unbroken high temperature records as the 2000s — but the NCAR author tried to fool the unwary into believing that the 2000s somehow beat the 1930s for high temperature records, by only talking about ratios.

When unbroken, all-time temperature extremes were compiled by Univ. of Colo Climatologist Dr. Richard Keen, he found that 50% of the all-time temperature records (per state) were set in the 1930s alone. Only 29% of the all-time high records have been set since 1950, and a trivial number in the 2000s.

Responding to the NCAR study’s deceptive analysis, Keen concludes: “The bottom line is that if one wishes to express climate change by the varying number of temperature extremes, there has been no climate change for over 100 years.

GoreZilla

2011-02-05T13:32:00.005-05:00

Charles Krauthammer: 'If Godzilla Appeared on National Mall Gore Would Say It’s Global Warming'

a quote

2011-02-01T04:11:00.001-05:00

What A Socialist Once Thought of Government ...

To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (French socialist),
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century [1923]

US Agencies Still Fiddling Temperature Record

2011-01-19T04:32:00.002-05:00

NASA and NOAA, which each receive close to half a billion dollars a year in taxpayer funding, have been systematically fiddling the worldwide temperature record for years, making “global warming” look worse than it is, according to a new paper by the Science and Public Policy Institute. The findings are reported by Joe D’Aleo, a leading meteorologist.

Robert Ferguson, President of SPPI, said: “Despite billions spent on official claims about the supposed threat of catastrophic man-made ‘global warming’, opinion polls show the public are no longer fooled. A main reason why the voters buy don’t climate alarmism any more is that the tiny but well-connected, lavishly-funded Climategate clique keeps on being caught out bending the scientific evidence.

The problem of data integrity has recently been commented on by MIT’s Dr. Richard Lindzen, “Inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data...That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community.” Mr. D’Aleo’s paper is a damning exposé of the inner workings of two agencies of the US Government –

* The global temperature data from surface stations is “seriously compromised: the data suffer significant contamination by urbanization and other local factors such as changes in land cover and land use”. Numerous peer review papers suggest contamination of 30%, 50% or more.
* The state of the temperature database, in the words of one of its operators, is “hopeless”, with “hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy and duplicate stations”.
* The NASA warming is achieved in part by inventing data in arctic areas where no stations exist.
* In the US, the warmest decade of the 20th century was the 1930s, and the warmest year was 1934, NASA’s chief climate scientist announced after the last super El Nino.
* NOAA tampered with temperature data in 2000, 2007 and 2009 to create an artificial increase of 0.3 F° in the warming trend since the 1930s.
* NASA admits even today on their website, there is no generally-accepted standard for surface air temperatures.
* Temperatures for the 1930s to 1950s have been readjusted downward to make the warming since then seem greater than it is.
* Temperatures for recent decades have been readjusted upward to make the warming of the 20th century seem greater than it is.
* Over time in the NASA database, the warming trend has been steadily increasing – not because the weather is getting warmer but because NASA keeps tampering with the data.
* The data tampering became more serious and more frequent in 2007, when a strong la Niña caused widespread and profound global cooling.
* Adjustments by NOAA and NASA, rather than real-world temperature changes, account for virtually all the apparent warming trend in the global data.
* NASA and NOAA have repeatedly resisted Freedom of Information Act requests for release of the unadjusted data and documentation of adjustments made, probably because they fear independent analysis will demonstrate the adjustments are unwarranted and warming insignificant
* Global temperature databases are “seriously flawed” and “can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or rankings or validate model forecasts”.

In a lengthy paper updated in August 2010, Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? , Watts and D’Aleo catalogued numerous case studies of temperature data tampering around the world. This issue is of critical importance because these very data sets are used as justification of advocacy for formulating and implementing unprecedented policy decisions seeking radical transformations of our society and institutions.

The full paper can be found at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/noaa_2010_report.pdf

time scale ...

2011-01-16T15:42:00.000-05:00

One of the prime difficulties I have is that we generally use too short a timescale when we consider climate.

Typically that equates to the ‘life time’ viewpoint; “its warmer than when I was a child,”

The scientific viewpoint; “The warmest since satellite records began” (in 1979)

The quasi historical; “the warmest in the global instrumental record”, generally taken by Brits to be 1850 (CRU) and Americans to be 1880 (Giss)

I think we can all agree that the first two time measurements are MUCH to short to be at all meaningful.

As for the longer records, firstly we must stop being believng we know what a global temperature is, let alone that we have accurately captured it to tenths of a degree (do you actually know how instrumental land and sea records were taken?)

We must then recognise that our instrumental records actually go back to 1659 in Britain, and a few decades later in other countries. Our extensive weather records enable us to go back much further with some accuracy.

This shows us that we have been warming since probably 1601, and certainly since 1659-when our instrumental records began. So temperatures had ALREADY been rising for some 250 years before Dr Hansen came along-he and Phil Jones merely plugged into the end stages of a long warming trend-they didn’t capture the start of it. This is an important point which often gets overlooked.

Temperatures have been warming in fits and starts of course, with numerous reverses and advances, but the general trend can be followed and such people as Lamb and Manley (Cru and Met office respectively) both agree that glaciers have been in retreat since before 1750.

(the above seen by anonymous in a comment on the web)
It is striking that the oldest temperature data set in the world has being turning down sharply for at least 8 years, and that the Mean average in 1659 was exactly the same as in 2010 at 8.83 Degrees C.

Many other INDIVIDUAL records also show this downturn. GLOBAL warming is by no means GLOBAL.

So the interesting question is why have we been generally warming for 350 years? Why do so many locations appear to have been bucking a generally global trend? Why do some people still believe the rate of change in recent years is unprecedented when its clearly not?

The most sensational rise, by a comfortable margin, remains during the period 1698-1740, there have also been many smaller rises similar to the last few decades as I have enumerated here many times.

Willis Eschenbach says ...

2011-01-16T09:40:00.002-05:00

The following seen in comments at WUWT:

R. Gates, you always raise interesting issues. But egads, sir, take a deep breath, your attempts to flog that straw man must be tiring. Read what I said again. I did not say they did not consider a host of forcings. I am saying that they believe all of the other forcings average out, and thus that the future state of the climate can be considered by solely considering the GHGs. See Kiehl or Andreae Box 1 as two of many examples.

Much to the dismay of many AGW skeptics, the scientists who create the various GCM’s actually are dedicated scientists, and really do want to get the science right and understand what is actually happening with the climate. Not one of them would purposely ignore any known and proven climate forcing and simply focus on the primary and secondary effects of the build-up in anthropogenic GHG’s. Hence, as new information about climate dynamics are brought to light, they are, one by one, included in the GCM’s and, in that way, the science advances and the models get better and better. For example, the much talked about urban heat island effect was recently incorporated into a most current global climate model: …

I’m sorry, but that is assuming facts not in evidence. The models are getting more and more detailed. Whether that makes them “better and better” is not known. However, the small advances in things like the range of climate sensitivities despite 25 years of amazing advances in the details and the speed of the models argues that the performance improvements are small at best.

And my recent demonstration that the GISSE model results can be duplicated within a few percent by a one-line linear equation indicates to me that adding more details to the models is not resulting in true complexity or deeper understanding.

Finally, yes, most climate modelers are just like me, fools whose intentions are good. However, like me, they are susceptible to “noble cause corruption”, and nowhere is this more lethal than in climate modeling. The problem is that we are not really modeling the climate. We are twisting the dials on the various parameters until the output matches the historical record. The models are NOT based on physical principles. Or as Gavin Schmidt et al. of the NASA GISS modeling team put it in 2006:

3. Model physics

The model physics are predominantly based on the physics of the GISS Model II (SI2000 version) described in previous publications (Hansen et al. 2002, and references therein). However, many details have changed, and some physics has been completely reworked. We therefore provide a brief description of the current physics along with a summary of the major changes over the last few years. In all the subsequent text we are referring to the February 2004, ModelE1 public release version of the code.

In common with most other models, we make some basic assumptions at the outset, which though minor, have consequences throughout the model: namely, that

• water vapor does not add to atmospheric mass (i.e., globally integrated surface pressure is constant)

• the latent heat of atmospheric water vapor does not depend on temperature (i.e., all atmosphere–surface freshwater fluxes are assumed to be at 0°C)

• the potential energy of water vapor/condensate is neglected

• condensate is not advected

• the pressure gradient calculation does not include humidity effects.

We hope to be able to relax these constraints in future versions.

So since they are missing they adjust the dials on the mockup until (given the forcings they are using) the outcome matches the historical record. Of course, different models use different forcings … and yet they all get the same answer, they can all hindcast the historical record. Amazing coincidence, huh? How do they do that? Lots of dials to twist, here’s another one from Gavin Schmidt, op. cit. You know how they go on about how their model shows a radiative imbalance of 0.85 W/m2 ± 0.15 W/m2 and the like? Here’s the solidity of their “physics based” model regarding the radiation balance (emphasis mine):

The model is tuned (using the threshold relative humidity U00 for the initiation of ice and water clouds) to be in global radiative balance (i.e., net radiation at TOA within 0.5 W m 2 of zero) and a reasonable planetary albedo (between 29% and 31%)

They twist the knob that sets the threshold at which clouds form until they get the radiation to kinda balance? That’s their “physics based” approach?

R. Gates, do you truly think that adding more and more forcings and UHI calcs to a model in which “the potential energy of water vapor/condensate is neglected”, a model that doesn’t stay in balance by itself but has to be “tuned” to stay in balance, will give us better and better answers?

Because I’ve been programming computers for forty-eight years now, I’m very fluent in half a dozen computer languages and literate in another half dozen. In my experience, until the basics of the climate (or any other) model are right, adding more forcings and UHI effects is just like nickel-plating a squirt-gun. It looks solid and real, and you can certainly use it to terrorize the citizenry … but that doesn’t make it into a real pistol.

Unequivocal Equivocation – an open letter to Dr. Trenberth

2011-01-15T12:47:00.002-05:00

This essay appeared on WUWT and I loved it because it says everything that needs to be said about the current state of affairs in climate science and the skeptic position. It may be the best one of the last several years.

To read it: Click here.

The Warmest Year Antidotes

2011-01-15T07:09:00.002-05:00

I love JoNova and her climate reporting. I have taken a bit of stuff from her latest:

What do you say when the Big PR bell is rung? You know the litany: “2010 was the warmest since measuring began, and the previous decade was also the warmest decade on record.” (eg The AGE)

1. Sure, and the world has been warming for 300 years, long before the industrial revolution. The trend hasn’t changed as our emissions rose. No one knows exactly why it started rising back then, but it wasn’t CO2.

2. Sure and 150 years of “records” is not long. It was warmer 1000 years ago, 2000 years ago, 5000 years ago and 130,000 years ago. In fact its been warmer for most of the last 10,000 years than it is today, and it’s been warmer for most of the last 500 million years. Only people who think CO2 matters keep repeating that it’s warmed from 1850 to now without pointing out the bigger perspective.

3. Sure, and the records have been set with thermometers like this one (next to concrete and exhaust vents — see below). There probably weren’t too many car parks or air conditioners in 1880 either. Not to mention the non-random adjustments, and that mystery about how 75% of thermometers are ignored.

Nothing about the “hottest year ever” is meaningful or significant on a big scale. Nor is anything even certain about it on the 150 year scale. After all, most of the original raw data records are missing aren’t they?

Here are some graphs:

This is just a cycling warming on a long term trend that started before CO2 became an issue:

Discussed in the post: Global warming: a classic case of alarmism

The trend hasn’t changed:

The trend figures come from Phil Jones’ interview with the BBC. Graph discussed here.

The holocene optimum

Don’t forget to allow for another century of warming at the end (be generous) assume its 0.7C more than the last dot on this line and mentally draw a line from -31 across. A lot of the last 10,000 years was warmer.

It was warmer 130,000 years ago:

It was 2 degrees warmer 130,000 years ago. Somehow corals survived, so did the Great Apes.

The Vostok Graphs (and all the posts tagged “Vostok”)

The last 65 million years:

Image created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art

Discussed in the post: The big picture: 65 million years of temperature swings

CO2 Emission Sources

2011-01-15T06:10:00.003-05:00

97% from nature, 3% from humans.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggccebro/chapter1.html
Even better, the source of the pic is the IPCC itself.

Of that 3%, one tiny sliver of IR frequency is uniquely absorbed by CO2. So, what percentage is that? Of that absorption, less than half gets re-emitted back towards earth. Let us see that quantified.

“Infrared (IR) light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 0.7 and 300 micrometres,” from Wiki. But let’s use 4-100.

CO2 with widen spectrum is 14,15,16 micro or 3 of 96. Or 3.125% of all IR.

People are 3% of CO2 per above per year.

So we are 3% of 3%. With no H2O figured in.

Or put another way: 33 C is what is said we are above a no GHG situation.

Water is said to be 90% of this. Pick your own and do the math.

33 x .9= 29.7

3.3 left for all other GHG.

CO2 is 75% of this or 2.475

97% is natural or 2.4.

So we could be .075 C of total 33 C.

Climate comment seen

2010-12-29T07:51:00.002-05:00

Don´t Miss Climate´s Big Picture!!!

1. “Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age,” by Gregory F. Fegel, January 14, 2010, at http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/fegel1.1.1.html .

2. “Burt Rutan´s comprehensive new report on Global Warming science fraud: Version 4.0 dated 3 July 2010,” at http://rps3.com/Pages/Burt_Rutan_on_Climate_Change.htm .

3. “Science bulletin: ´Sun heats Earth!´, Russian research forecasts global cooling,” by Jerome R. Corsi, October 27, 2009, at http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=114261 .

4. “´Hottest Year On Record´Myth Based On Fabricated Temperature Data,” by Christopher Booker, London Telegraph, Sunday, December 19, 2010, at http://www.prisonplanet.com/hottest-year-on-record-myth-based-on-fabricated-temperature-data.html .

5. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory has produced zero reproducible scientific data since its inscription, and should therefore be rejected. (The AGW theory is not science, it is an anti-science ideology, driven foremost of anti-human population control, manipulation, and socialism.)

Say no to Climategate, Junk Science, and Cap and Trade.

============

E.M.Smith says:
December 29, 2010 at 1:54 am

Chris says: I’m a bit flummoxed. With a La Nina now, and also very weak period of solar activity for a few years, I expected global temperatures to be much cooler. But even if you just use uncontaminated satellite data (UAH MSU) and ignore Hansen, we’ve had a pretty warm year. I know that air temperature is a bad metric, and ocean heat content would be much better measure of global temperature, but still…

What gives?

The problem is that we can’t really measure the “Average temperature” of the planet very well for several rather well understood but consistently ignored fundamental reasons.

The first, and most basic, involves some math that most folks don’t know. The math of fractals. Fractals are all around us and involved in a huge number of common things, but most folks just think they are pretty pictures like Mandelbrots. But mountains are fractile as are coastlines.

How long is the coastline of Britain?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

The only correct answer is “It depends on the length ruler you use when measuring”.

Mountains are fractal as well. As are many (most all?) natural surfaces. So it ought to come as no surprise that temperatures of those surfaces have fractal properties as well. I’ve measured a 30 F or so difference between my back porch and fence on a rainy day. Where you measure determins the answer you get.

Then GISS and UEA and others spend loads of hours turning all this into homogenized data cheese food product. That does NOT improve it.

OK, the land data are sucky. So go with the sats…

Except the surface is still fractal, the IR emissions are widely variable, and now you are measuring different stuff. IMHO, the reason they are still reading high while land has gone low is heat flow

Heat is leaving the planet. Fast.

The uv level has dropped, the air thickness has shrunk, we’ve not had sats watching during this kind of thing, and it’s flummoxed THEM. They are seeing the cloud TOPS and those are warm as that’s where the heat is being DUMPED as it leaves the planet. This will take about a decade to get the oceans cold and during that time the oceans will continue to drop while the tops of the clouds keep announcing “more heat to leave the planet today, nice and warm”. The basic problem here is that HEAT is not TEMPERATURE but everyone measures temperature and pretends it’s heat. Just wrong.

So, what’s a person to do?

In my opinion there are two things you can reasonably do. Find long lived thermometers that have not changed and are still being recorded. Look at them. Now you are not changing the size of your ruler as you measure the fractal. When they are looked at, they show cooling. Slight, but present. The other thing you can do is watch the snows and rains. Clouds convect heat to their tops, then dump it to space when the water condenses (or hail and snow freeze) and it falls back to earth. As the rains fall and snow accumulates, you can count every drop has “HEAT left the planet”. If that count goes up, we’re cooling. Over the last 30 years we heard a lot about AGW induced droughts. I think that properly causality runs the other way. Something (probably high solar UV output or few clouds ala Svensmark) caused lower precipitation, that then meant less heat left, that results (eventually) in higher temperatures. Now we’ve got less solar output (less UV and thinner atmosphere, and / or more clouds) and we’re getting more precipitation. That’s heat leaving (makeing warm cloud TOPS in the process). Eventually the land will show lower temps everywhere, but for now it’s mostly just under the precipitation areas (i.e. the N.H. snows and Australian rains) and some years after that, the sats will catch up as heat transport reduces and clouds cool off.

This GEOS sat picture has a nice color indication of a warm cloud top. The green splotch over N. America:

http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/ir-28dec2010-na_goes20152010362jp2qbd.jpg

I’m under the rain from that cloud and it’s cold down here underneath. Rain and cloud radar from below here:

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/storm-coming-you-say/

so you can see what it’s like from below where I can personally tell you it has been cold and wet all day. That article also includes a very cold sea surface chart / graph as seen from space. It is cold UNDER that “warm cloud top” (thats how that color is described in the legend to that picture in this article):

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/ignore-the-day-at-your-peril/

which also covers a bit about the daily nature of heat flow off the planet and into warm cloud tops on the way to space.

Yes, this description is somewhat ‘speculative’ in that I can’t cite a reference for each bit of it. I’ve not “done the foot notes”. But all the parts are there for you to see. The GEOS sat seeing a “warm cloud top”. The cold rain below. The patterns of heat flow off planet via convection and condensation releasing heat. The basic physics of the whole thing.

So yes, it’s a bit speculative to say that the temperature reporting would do things the same way GEOS does and be fooled by cloud tops. Then again, they do measure higher in the air than “land surface” …

Hope that helps.

Market anarchists

2010-11-14T08:21:00.003-05:00

An interesting quote:

“Market anarchists envision a world without poverty or war, where individuals are not forced to subsidize the domination of one another, nor have our own lives paternalistically guided by bureaucrats, politicians, or generals, irrelevant of how they were placed in a position of political power.

This world is possible, and it isn’t really all that complex of an idea: there should be no arbitrary political boundaries and thus no forced collectivization. Political relationships should be based upon consent and problems resolved through decentralized common law negotiation amongst the affected parties, not non-refusable legislative representation based upon geographical lines.” ~ Ross Kenyon

It is interesting how most people can not even imaging a world where the people are not enslaved by a government.

cats

2010-09-12T07:18:00.002-04:00

The below was seen on the net:

Cats are perhaps the ultimate Taoists, and they teach us many of the philosophy's lessons. Here are a few of the lessons that my cat, Mews, reminds me of every day:

* Balance:
Taoists believe in balance. What could be more balanced than a cat? They are physically balanced, but also mentally balanced. They know when to sleep and when to be awake, when to be social and when to spend time alone. Humans would do well to learn this sense of balance.
* Patience:
The cat is the most patient of creatures. She plans for hours, even days, how to catch a mouse or tease the dog. She waits, she sleeps, she dreams, and then she pounces.
* Quiet Voices:
Cats speak in quiet voices, but they always manage to get themselves heard. Cats show us how much we can accomplish without yelling, shouting and screaming.
* The Art of Doing Nothing:
Cats never seem to be in a hurry. They sleep about eighteen hours a day. Yet nothing is left undone. They hunt so effectively that an outdoor cat can decimate the local bird population. If a female cat has kittens, she is a doting mother who teaches her offspring many lessons. Anyone who has cats and dogs in the house knows that the cats rule. Yet this is all done with no apparent effort from the cat. How much better to be like a cat than to scurry around, inefficiently trying to be two places at once, yet never finishing anything we set out to do!

the use of violence

2010-08-21T04:33:00.002-04:00

The non-aggression axiom is central to libertarianism. The essence of libertarianism is that it is wrong to threaten or initiate violence against a person or his property. Force is justified only in self-defense. Murray Rothbard explained:

[Libertarianism] is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life. Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of organized violence. Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should he free to do as he sees fit except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism.

Killing someone is the ultimate form of aggression. Especially a helpless, defenseless baby that is only guilty of suddenly waking up in a womb. The fetus certainly had no control over being a parasite, aggressing against a woman, invading a woman’s body, or adding unwanted pounds to his host – but its mother certainly did. The mother may not want the child, but a person's "wants" does not justify murder.

Utopia

2010-08-14T20:44:00.002-04:00

Let your community be small, with only a few people;
Keep tools in abundance, but do not depend upon them;

Appreciate your life and be content with your home;
Sail boats and ride horses, but don't go too far;
Keep weapons and armour, but do not employ them;
Let everyone read and write,
Eat well and make beautiful things.

Live peacefully and delight in your own society;
Dwell within cock-crow of your neighbours,
But maintain your independence from them.

---
from the Tao Te Ching of course. #80

Paco333, Spinoza, asides, and thoughts ...

2010-08-13T05:45:00.004-04:00

At the end of an exchange on various matters I wrote to Pacco:

In Spinoza we see a man who advocates the perennial philosophy as we see in Gnosticism, Sufism, Kabola, Hinduism, Kabbalah, Zen, Daoism, and many other paths. All of which will lead to the concept that we are all one with the universal consciousness and there is no separation among us. Like waves on the surface of the waters, we are all part of the same thing. We are the ineffable one playing roles in a life-dream. This is no contradiction to my statement that morality is not a set of rules but is very simple. Another way of saying it: "as you harm no one, do as you wilt".

That was an example of why the ancients had "outer mysteries" and "inner mysteries". The gnostics believed that Truth had to wear the clothes of myth and not come into the world naked. Regardless, I wrote what I wrote. So, Paco had a few questions for me in return to my position. He was so very kind and numbered them for easy response. I like this dude! My time is very limited these days so I had to wait a bit to answer back, and that is probably a good thing. I mulled over the response as I went through other activities.

Paco wrote to me:

The concept of being one with the universal consciousness is appealing, but...:

1. Why do we harm one another?

2. Why is mankind universally unaware of its connectedness?

3. Am I dreaming you, or are you dreaming me? Did you know that there is a branch of Christendom that believes we are all the product of Adam's dream?

4. If we are one with the whole, then it follows that our current state of self ignorance is merely an aspect of the greater whole - as is every impulse. This being the case, why should we endeavor to change? Why should we deny the impulse to gratify ourselves - even if it is at the expense of others? Why not revel in the madness and do what we want without worry of consequence? After all, we are only manifesting as an element of the whole and, therefore, doing what was intended. In fact, it could be argued that, by denying one's impulses, an individual is acting out of accord with the design of the greater whole.

5. Who decides what is harmful? The Zionist argues that the Palestinians are a threat to their very existence therefore.... The US argues that the Taliban is a threat to America therefore.... If a tribe has exclusive access to a scarce water resource and another does not, then do they all share the water and die of thirst? Or, does a minority horde that resource with the understanding that, by doing so, the survival of their clan is assured?

1) "Why do we harm one another?" Very often we see life only from the perspective of our role in this great game as an isolated individual. We look at reality from a viewpoint that ignores our true nature. We are asleep to the reality. We need to wake to the truth: to become enlightened.

2) "Why is mankind universally unaware of its connectedness?" Mankind is not universally unaware; we have had great sages and enlightened beings in all cultures throughout all of history. But you mean that the overwhelming, vast percentage of humankind is unaware of their true nature and that is obviously the case. Why is that, indeed.

The reason is that the ineffable one is playing these roles to such an extent that it does not remember its true nature. It is evolving in consciousness and continues to change. From an individual perspective, we just need to see that we are both roles in the great dream and the dreamer at the same time. You and I may interact as isolated individuals or we may see that we are really the same actor playing out different roles in the dream that we call the cosmos. We need to be able to keep a dual perspective; that we are the individual role that we play and that we are the great dreamer who dreams the role. Not one or the other; but both at once.

The hard part is to realize that the universal consciousness in not the "god" of the Abrahamic religions. The universal consciousness is not in possession of omnipotence. The One is awakening and evolving all the time. It perceives this universe through each individual role it plays.

3) "Am I dreaming you, or are you dreaming me?" If you mean from the individual persecutive, neither one of us is dreaming the other. From the universal concessional perspective we are both roles dreamed by the One. If the one were to be thought of like a lake; we are waves on that lake. I see myself as a wave, but I should also see myself as water and hence the entire lake. Books have been written on all this and 1,000 words is not enough to share all, but that might be close enough. (I hope)

4) "If we are one with the whole, then it follows that our current state of self ignorance is merely an aspect of the greater whole - as is every impulse." This is true. We are in the process of awakening to the nature of our polarity. The main reason we exist at all is to have fun. To enjoy this great mystery of life. As we see that we are all part of a great consciousness we become much more interested in the happiness of all. We love the other as ourself for the reason that the other is ourself.

As long as we see ourselves as isolated individuals lost in a vast uncaring universe, we remain self-centered and full of fear. Fear breeds the hatred you see all around you. The closest I can come to an example is to use that of a mother. She knows her child came from herself and will love that child with a love that passes the understanding of men and childless women. As we humans come to see all of the universe as part of ourself; then we may truly enjoy this great mystery called life. By the way, all life is part of this great game. My cat is a Daoist sage; he teaches me many important lessons.

5) "Who decides what is harmful?" I do; did you not get the memo?

This is a hard question, but once you see all other life as part of you the way a mother sees her child as part of herself the question almost becomes irrelevant. We will make mistakes, but if we truly love all other life, then we will do our best to help and not hurt --- out of love.

Afghan War Diaries

2010-08-02T08:06:00.001-04:00

To read more about the “Afghan War Diaries,” please see:

* Why We Need WikiLeaks, by Justin Raimondo
* State of Denial, by Norman Solomon
* Leaked Reports Make Afghan War Policy More Vulnerable, by Gareth Porter
* Obama’s Afghanistan Strategy Increasingly Under Siege, by Jim Lobe
* Leaky Vessels, by Chris FloydHouse Ignores Leak, Approves War Funding

economy and freedom

2010-07-25T06:21:00.003-04:00

David Z over at no third solution on wrote:

Quoth the Faux Capitalist, on libertarianism and “Austrian” economists:

For me, a libertarian is someone who believes that limited government is the most likely to protect the liberties of the people whom it governs, and that shouldn’t necessitate an economic system based on a scarce resource such as gold.

Any economy (I do not prefer the term “economic system”) is not “based” on currency. It’s based on the exchange (often consisting in currency) of scarce resources. Some resources happen to be more scarce than others. Historically it is those resources, in particular the precious metals, that have been chosen as monetary commodities. This is so for a number of reasons I need not explain at present.

So it’s a gross misunderstanding, I think, to characterize the Austrians as gold-fetishists (although there are certainly some worthy of that). In fact, it’s not advocacy of an “economic system”, but rather a belief that in the absence of any coerced “system”, a free market settles upon a common medium (or perhaps, media) of exchange.

Anyone who advocates an “economic system” based on anything other than freedom and exchange is not a libertarian.

We have many fake "libertarians" just like the classic liberals had many non-liberals claiming their banner back in their day. Any "economic system" is by necessity based on force since "a system" that is not free-will, voluntary cooperation must use force to make people do what they would not choose to do if left to their own choices. Any violation of the non-aggression axiom is not libertarianism.

a sufi story

2010-07-13T05:17:00.002-04:00

It was autumn and the weather was getting colder as winter was drawing in. A little sparrow had observed all these other birds flying off to warmer climes and decided to try it himself. But he didn't really have a handle on migration and flew off to the North rather than to the South. As a consequence the harder and further he flew the colder and wetter he became.

Eventually dog tired, his wings iced up and unable to flap them anymore, the little sparrow dropped like a stone from the sky and landed in a field in Norway. As he lay there freezing to death a cow came by. The cow then shat all over the little bird. Buried completely in shit the shit began to warm up the little bird and it began to feel better. Thinking that spring had suddenly come the little sparrow began to chirp with joy. As it was chiping with joy a cat came by. Hearing the birds chirping the cat scrapped away the cow shit, grabbed the little bird and then ate it.

Not everyone who drops you in the shit is necessarily your enemy. Not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend. If you are in the shit you should keep your mouth shut.

God-King’s half-time pep talk

2010-06-16T05:42:00.002-04:00

Law Professor and author Butler Shaffer on Obama's speech:

I didn’t watch very much of the God-King’s half-time pep talk to Americans tonight concerning the continuing Gulf oil fiasco. His empty efforts to channel Winston Churchill’s “we shall fight them on the beaches” talk did not impress. I almost felt a sense of embarrassment for this man who, as much as anyone else, is the embodiment of the fundamental truth that most of us are not prepared to acknowledge: as our civilization continues its collapse, there is nothing that anyone in authority can do to alter the course. I don’t know how, or if, the oil flow will be stemmed, but I doubt that any exercise of governmental force will accomplish such ends. What I fear is that the state will do what it always does when faced with an insurmountable problem, namely, deflect attention to a realm in which its capacities for violence can serve its appetites for power: perhaps another contrived war against another innocent and harmless nation.

Of course many Americans will disagree mightily with Dr. Shaffer because they just know that all blessing flow from the cup of government --- just as long as their side is in charge. (more and better politicians from my side!)

The tale of modern history is that government will always make it worse but spread propaganda that conditions are better than they would have been otherwise. So, after letting many oil companies drill in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and passing legislation to limit any liability they may incur due to this highly dangerous practice, government will offer itself as the solution to its own violent intervention into the situation. After offering irresistible incentives to business to coax them into drilling in deep water; government will now offer itself as the savior of the people.

The original "liberals" had a healthy skepticism of all government power. The modern mislabeled "liberal" is the opposite: he is the anti-liberal. Wikipedia says, "Classical liberalism is a political ideology that developed in the 19th century in England, Western Europe, and the Americas. It is committed to the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets."

"Limited government". That ideal of the men and women who built modern society in the 19th century has nowadays been relegated to the fringe of political thought. Classical liberals can not even use the label "liberal" anymore since it now means adherence to collectivism.

On question though; how is this new "liberalism" working out for the people? How has the worlds largest and most powerful government in all of history done in delivering "the good life"? I say it has failed. What do you say?

On stupidity

2010-06-15T05:33:00.003-04:00

From the "now what" category by Thomas Sowell:

A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.

She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide – a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times.

This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov's dog when we hear a certain sound – in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.

People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.

Sowell goes on to blame the public schools from Kindergarten all the way to University.

Educational institutions created to pass on to the next generation the knowledge, experience and culture of the generations that went before them have instead been turned into indoctrination centers to promote whatever notions, fashions or ideologies happen to be in vogue among today's intelligentsia.

another one

2010-06-08T04:22:00.001-04:00

It has been a while but now on to bloging on a more regular basis. But where to do it? Ah, that is the question.

There is no such thing as "collateral damage", only murder.

2010-05-30T06:18:00.002-04:00

"It is not simply that our national discourse rests on a foundation of evasions, complicated by equivocations, twisted by avoidance, and rendered into meaningless insignificance by an uncountable series of lies. All of that is true, but it fails to capture the quality that is most striking to the perceptive observer. That quality is one of overwhelming, oppressive and suffocating unreality. It is as if everyone knows, but will never acknowledge, that we may speak only in code, and that we may only utilize the safe, empty phrases that we have agreed are "acceptable" -- phrases and language that are safe precisely because they have been drained of all correspondence to facts."
- Arthur Silber

It is hard to beat Silber when he is on the top of his game as he was with this quote.

Food Myths

2010-05-22T05:30:00.003-04:00

FIVE FOOD MYTHS:

1. STARCHES MAKE ME FAT: This is False. Potatoes, pasta, beans, rice, and corn are low in fat and are very filling. They are the main sources of energy for healthy populations all around the world. They can, however, be made unhealthy by frying in oil and by adding high fat toppings.

2. I NEED MEAT FOR PROTEIN: This is False. We only need 5% of our calories to be from protein. Rice is 8% protein, potatoes 11%, corn 12%, pasta 14%, oatmeal 15%, bread 16%, and beans 26%. All foods, including fruit and vegetables, have plenty of protein.

3. MILK BUILDS STRONG BONES: This is False. Research does NOT consistently show that calcium intake leads to stronger bones. We need to look at ALL the ingredients in cow milk, because we are not just eating the calcium: Milk has cholesterol and saturated fat, hormones, bacteria, and pesticides. And the protein in dairy (casein) is linked to cancer, allergies, asthma, eczema, bedwetting, type I (childhood) diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and heart disease. It is healthier to get calcium from beans and green, leafy vegetables.

4. CHICKEN IS LOW CHOLESTEROL: This is False. 3.5 ounces of beef has 85 mg of cholesterol, chicken also has 85 mg. Turkey has 83mg, Pork 90 mg, Salmon 86 mg, and Lamb 82 mg. All kinds of meat have large amounts of fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol. There is no fiber or vitamin C. Meats have pesticides and bacteria, and cancer-causing chemicals are formed when meat is cooked.

5. VEGETABLE OIL IS HEALTH FOOD: This is False. All oils, even olive oil and canola oil, are unhealthy, because they are highly processed and contain saturated fat. All the fiber, anti-oxidants, vitamins, and minerals have been removed. The fat you eat is the fat you wear. Body fat makes hormones that increase the risk of cancer of the colon, breast, and prostate. Researchers estimate that 60% of cancers are due to diet, (30% are due to tobacco), and
only 2 to 3% due to genes.

The above information is from a lecture by Dr. John McDougall www.drmcdougall.com

A place to be ...

2010-05-18T18:47:00.004-04:00

I was dreaming of a place to be, not a place to live, but a place to experience life and to just exist in the way that Zen masters teach. I have decided that Daytona Beach is that place. I was surprised at first that I would find Daytona beach to be a place where I could find peace and harmony, but I saw that Daytona has many qualities that would help one find tranquility.

The first quality of Daytona Beach that interests me is that it has the Atlantic ocean. I sometimes sit on the beach and contemplate the ocean for a long time. This is meditation; unusual perhaps, but much about Zen is unusual to the western mind. I find that the sunrise at Daytona Beach will fill one with wonder and awe. This feeling is beyond the feeling one gets from a great work of art or from the great music. Daytona Beach has one of the best beaches in Florida and it has been a favorite of millions for as long as I can remember.

Besides the beautiful ocean, Daytona Beach has wonderful people. The natives seem to be some of the most generous and friendly folks in Central Florida. I have had many dealings with shop owners, church members, and government officials that were delightful. Perhaps it is the wonderful weather that makes the people so friendly, or perhaps it is the beautiful scenery but it is a fact that the people of Daytona Beach are a credit to humanity. It is important to me to have wonderful people around me so I can remain centered and maintain the Zen of living life in the correct way. There are many delightful memories, some funny and some not, of relationships that help maintain the connection with life that I desire.

Daytona Beach also has great foods that helps me maintain my Zen. Many would guess the great seafood of the city but they would be in error as I am a Vegan and don't eat animal products. Daytona Beach has several Vegan restaurants that are always so welcoming that I feel I am back home with all my family around me. Plus the food is great, and that is not something one always finds at a "healthy" restaurant. It was a total surprise to me to find these little gems hidden away in Daytona Beach and I am thankful that I found them.

Daytona Beach has given me a renewed outlook on life and that is saying a lot considering I am getting much nearer the end of life that the beginning. It has the beach, the ocean, great food, and wonderful people. Daytona Beach is the place for me.

Reagan, the national debt, and now Obama ...

2010-05-03T05:54:00.006-04:00

In 1992, Murray Rothbard wrote:

In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being asked by the White House and their own leadership to vote for an increase in the statutory limit on the federal public debt, which was then scraping the legal ceiling of one trillion dollars. They cried because all of their lives they had voted against an increase in public debt, and now they were being asked, by their own party and their own movement, to violate their lifelong principles. The White House and its leadership assured them that this breach in principle would be their last: that it was necessary for one last increase in the debt limit to give President Reagan a chance to bring about a balanced budget and to begin to reduce the debt. Many of these Republicans tearfully announced that they were taking this fateful step because they deeply trusted their President, who would not let them down.

Famous last words. In a sense, the Reagan handlers were right: there were no more tears, no more complaints, because the principles themselves were quickly forgotten, swept into the dustbin of history. Deficits and the public debt have piled up mountainously since then, and few people care, least of all conservative Republicans. ...

We are come down the road of time another couple of decades and we find that the one trillion dollar debt ceiling is quaint and it would be just great if all the nation owed was one trillion dollars! In the age of Obama we can give a mere Trillion dollars to Wall Street in a year. Some organizations claim that the total debt plus future obligations exceeds 100 trillion dollars. Who knows for sure?

What can we possibly do to correct the problem of massive debt and interest on the debt? Can the problem be corrected? Can the USA even pay off its debts? How would that happen and what effects would that medicine bring with it?

The route of turning on the printing presses (this is metaphor as we create new money electronically these days) has been followed by many nations down through history and one can judge the outcomes by reading about the conditions in those countries. The most famous is the Wiemar Republic, one should read the economic history of the republic that gave us Hitler and WWII. Hyper-inflation is usually judged by most men as a very, very undesirable path to follow. I tend to agree with that historical judgment.

If hyper-inflation is rejected, then that leaves debt repudiation. Under this scenario the nation would just repudiate the debt and pay for budgets as it collected taxes. The nation would not, most likely, be able to borrow money for decades to come but that may not be such a bad thing at all. It would necessitate making some hard choices on what to pay for --- the military killing machine would need to be scaled back first, in my view, but others might say that killing innocent foreigners is a basic national need. No matter the answer on that, repudiation of the debt would necessitate a debate on the issue.

Debt repudiation would save approximately 400 billion dollars a year in interest payments. That sum along with a greatly reduced "world policeman" role for the nation would go a long way toward curring the nation's ills, but one may ask why not just tax the nation and pay off the debt? Can that be done? (not inflation, but taxation) Well, it would mean taxing the nation approximately 14 Trillion dollars or more, depending on the year it was done, to pay off the debt. That would be only be an additional 50 thousand approximately for every man, woman, and child in the country. For the family of four, that would be 200 thousand extra in taxes one year to the IRS. I submit that this route would never work and debt repudiation is the only answer.

This is hard ...

2010-04-24T08:22:00.001-04:00

Well, it is not really all that hard, it is just that life gets in the way of trying to say anything on this blog. I'll redouble my efforts to say something here. (what is 2 times nothing?)

Socialized Medicine Horror Stories: Ripped from Britian and Canadian Papers Filed Under Conservative Side of the Story, Socialized Medicine

2010-03-22T11:34:00.000-04:00

The Statists are really getting nervous. They went home over the 4th of July, and got an earful from their constituents. Let’s make sure we keep up the pressure, and kill this massive government take over of your health.

Here is an excellent site that tracks horror stories straight from the newspapers of socialist countries with socialized medicine systems. Hat tip to Mark Levin on the link.

I’ll list some of the big countries below, but they go country by country all over the world… see the full list here:

England

Great Britain’s National Health Service (NHS)was created on July 5, 1948. As with all government programs, bureaucrats underestimated initial cost projections. First-year operating costs of NHS were 52 million pounds higher than original estimates¹ as Britons saturated the so-called free system.

Many decades of shortages, misery and suffering followed until 1989, when some market-based health care competition was reintroduced to the British citizens².

Unfortunately for those requiring care, a mostly socialist health care system has problems. The articles and commentaries in this section identify some disasters caused by government intervention in the British health care system.

Kidney cancer patients denied life-saving drugs by NHS rationing body NICE
- April 29, 2009 [Daily Mail (UK)]
Girl, 3, has heart operation cancelled three times because of bed shortage
- David Rose, April 23, 2009 [Times Online]
Number of children going to hospital to have teeth pulled soars by 66% since 1997
- Daniel Martin and Cher Thornhill, April 12, 2009 [Daily Mail (UK)]
NHS ‘failings’ over elderly falls
- March 25, 2009 [BBC]
Learning disabled ‘failed by NHS’
- Nick Triggle, March 24, 2009 [BBC]
Cancer survivor confronts the health secretary on 62-day wait
- Lyndsay Moss, March 21, 2009 [The Scotsman]
Culture of targets prevents nurses from tending to patients
- Claire Rayner, President of the Patients Association, March 21, 2009 [Telegraph UK]
Children being failed by health system, says head of watchdog
- Sarah Boseley, March 21, 2009 [Guardian Unlimited]
Our cancer shame: Survival rates still lag behind EU despite spending billions
- Jenny Hope, March 20, 2009 [Daily Mail(UK)]
Failing hospital ’caused deaths’
- March 17, 2009 [BBC]
Health gap drive ‘wasted money’
- Nick Triggle, March 14, 2009 [BBC]
Longer GP opening hours branded wasteful ‘PR exercise’ by doctors
- Lyndsay Moss, March 13, 2009 [The Scotsman]
“Political meddling” threatens general practice, warns GP leader
- March 13, 2009 [Management in Practice (UK)]
Children at risk through lack of training for doctors and nurses, report warns
- Rebecca Smith, March 13, 2009 [Telegraph UK]
Chocolate should be taxed to control obesity epidemic, doctors are told
- Simon Johnson, March 13, 2009 [Telegraph UK]
1,000 villagers wait for a dentist after just one NHS practice opens
- March 10, 2009 [Daily Mail(UK)]
Study that proves the folly of NHS Alzheimer’s drug ban
- Jenny Hope, March 7, 2009 [Daily Mail(UK)]
NHS charges to rise in England
- March 5, 2009 [BBC]
Disabled children wait up to two years for wheelchairs
- March 4, 2009 [Guardian Unlimited]
NHS under fire over waiting times
- February 25, 2009 [The Scotsman]
Government procrastination blamed for HIV-contaminated blood tragedy
- February 23, 2009 [Guardian Unlimited]
Specialist nurses ‘vastly overworked’
- February 20, 2009 [Harwich & Manningtree Standard]
Hundreds of operations cancelled at Lothian hospitals
- Adam Morris, February 19, 2009 [The Scotsman]
Stop asking for antibiotics to cure coughs and colds, Government tells patients
- Daniel Martin, February 17, 2009 [Daily Mail(UK)]
Stroke services are ‘UK’s worst’
- February 17, 2009 [BBC]
Hospitals curb caesarean births
- Sarah-Kate Templeton, February 15, 2009 [The Times]
Only five out of 51 hospital trusts pass hygiene test, say inspectors
- Sarah Boseley, November 24, 2008 [Guardian Unlimited]
Top doctors slam NHS drug rationing
- Sarah-Kate Templeton, August 24, 2008 [The Times]
Heart patients dying due to poor hospital care, says report
- Sarah Boseley, June 8, 2008 [Guardian Unlimited]
NHS dentistry loses almost a million patients after new dentists’ contract
- David Rose, June 6, 2008 [The Times]
Private healthcare managers could be sent to turn round failing NHS hospitals
- Philip Webster, Political Editor, and David Rose, June 4, 2008 [The Times]
Cancer patients ‘betrayed’ by NHS
- Sarah-Kate Templeton, June 1, 2008 [The Times]
NHS scandal: dying cancer victim was forced to pay
- Sarah-Kate Templeton, June 1, 2008 [The Times]
Pensioner, 76, forced to pull out own teeth after 12 NHS dentists refuse to treat her
- Olinka Koster, March 26, 2008 [Daily Mail(UK)]
Dental patients face care lottery
- March 26, 2008 [Metro(UK)]
Lung patients ‘condemned to death as NHS withdraws their too expensive drugs’
- Jenny Hope, March 24, 2008 [Daily Mail(UK)]
Women in labour turned away by maternity units
- John Carvel, March 21, 2008 [Guardian Unlimited]
Health inequality has got worse under Labour, says government report
- Andrew Sparrow, March 13, 2008 [Guardian Unlimited]
Angry GPs reluctantly accept plan for weekend and evening surgeries
- John Carvel, March 7, 2008 [Guardian Unlimited]
NHS chiefs tell grandmother, 61, she’s ‘too old’ for £5,000 life-saving heart surgery
- Chris Brooke, February 28, 2008 [Daily Mail(UK)]
Patient ‘removed’ from waiting list to meet target
- January 31, 2008 [The Scotsman]
NHS patients told to treat themselves
- James Kirkup, January 4, 2008 [Telegraph UK]
NHS is ‘failing patients’ despite record funding
- Rebecca Smith, October 4, 2007 [Telegraph UK]
NHS rationing rife, say doctors
- September 24, 2007 [BBC]
One in eight patients waiting over a year for treatment, admits minister
- John Carvel, June 8, 2007 [Guardian Unlimited]
Audit Office asked to investigate record £500m NHS underspend
- John Carvel, May 30, 2007 [Guardian Unlimited]
The drugs the NHS won’t give you
- May 11, 2007 [Telegraph UK]
UK lagging behind on cancer drug access, study finds
- May 10, 2007 [Guardian Unlimited]
One in six trusts is still putting patients on mixed-sex wards
- Daniel Martin, May 10, 2007 [Daily Mail(UK)]
Specialist stroke care ‘lottery’
- May 9, 2007 [BBC News]
Smokers and the obese banned from UK hospitals
- May 2, 2007 [Healthcare News]
Cancer patients told life-prolonging treatment is too expensive for NHS
- Lyndsay Moss, February 13, 2007 [The Scotsman]
UK health service “harms 10 percent of patients”
- Kate Kelland, July 7, 2006 [Reuters]
5,000 elderly ‘killed each year’ by lack of care beds
- June 26, 2006 [Telegraph UK]
Dental Socialism in Britain
- Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., May 9, 2006 [LewRockwell.com]
Pay for nurses and surgeons doubles NHS overspend
- Beezy Marsh, Patrick Hennessy and Nina Goswami, April 23, 2006 [Telegraph UK]
The money addicts: it’s your cash they are gambling with
- Patience Wheatcroft, April 23, 2006 [Telegraph UK]
NHS chiefs get luxury car deals
- Daniel Foggo and Steven Swinford, April 9, 2006 [The Times]
Secret NHS plan to ration patient care
- Nigel Hawkes, April 7, 2006 [The Times]
British Healthcare To Be Rationed
- April 7, 2006 [United Press International]
British body rejects EPO drugs for cancer patients
- March 17, 2006 [Reuters]
National Health Service – Grappling with Deficits
- March 9, 2006 [Economist.com]
Hundreds wait to register as another dentist quits the NHS
- Martin Williams, September 23, 2005 [The Herald (Scotland)]
Life-saving cancer drugs ‘kept from NHS patients by red tape’
- Sam Lister, September 20, 2005 [The Times]
NHS slides into the red despite record increases in health care spending
- September 20, 2005 [Telegraph UK]
Alzheimer’s sufferers hit by further delay in NHS approval for vital drugs
- Michael Day, September 18, 2005 [Telegraph UK]
We all pay a price for our ‘free’ NHS
- John Smith, August 19, 2005 [The Scotsman]
2,000 British doctors out of work
- August 14, 2005 [The Washington Times]
UK health ‘unsustainable’
- August 14, 2005 [Finance24]
NHS faces rising bill for negligence claims
- Ben Hall, August 8, 2005 [Financial Times]
British boy to go to India for operation
- August 5, 2005 [United Press International]
NHS failed to stop doctor raping scores of women
- Lois Rogers and Jonathon Carr-Brown, July 31, 2005 [The Times]
Top crimewriter funds drugs for cancer victim refused by NHS
- Martyn Halle, July 8, 2005 [Telegraph UK]
Report says NHS is mired in huge debts
- David Simms, June 25, 2005 [ABC Money (UK)]
U.K. set to restrict smoking
- June 21, 2005 [The Associated Press]
NHS ‘fund bias’ against men may cost 2,500 lives a year
- Sarah-Kate Templeton, June 19, 2005 [The Times]
Doubts on funding NHS ‘monuments’
- Nicholas Timmins, June 10, 2005 [Financial Times]
17 million reasons why we must improve hospital meals
- June 7, 2005 [Cambridge Evening News]
Figures show more patients waiting for operations
- June 3, 2005 [Guardian UK]
Scarcity of NHS dental treatment is revealed
- Celia Hall, May 19, 2005 [telegraph.co.uk]
Why NHS Opposes ‘Treatment by Demand’ for the Dying
- Stephen Howard and Jan Colley, PA, May 18, 2005 [Scotsman]
800 queue for NHS dentists
- May 5, 2005 [telegraph.co.uk]
Hundreds more heroin addicts to be given a fix on the NHS
- Nic Fleming, April 25, 2005 [telegraph.co.uk]
British health service facing nurse exodus
- April 25, 2005 [United Press International]
About 400 patients a year in Scotland succumb to MRSA
- April 25, 2005 [Scotsman]
NHS debts soar to over £1bn
- Karyn Miller, April 24, 2005 [telegraph.co.uk]
British taxpayers foot $26.5 million bill for abortion tourists
- April 18, 2005 [Catholic World News]
U.K. Liberal Democrats Would Raise Taxes to Pay for Health Care
- Reed Landberg, April 14, 2005 [Bloomberg]
Number of NHS Bureaucrats ‘Rising Faster Than Health Staff’
- Joe Churcher, March 22, 2005 [Scotsman]
‘£500m hole’ in hospital budgets
- Celia Hall, March 21, 2005 [telegraph.co.uk]
1,000 Scots desert NHS every week
- Murdo Macleod, March 5, 2005 [Scotsman]
British NHS facing financial crisis
- March 3, 2005 [Washington Times]
NHS drugs regulator to withdraw approval of Alzheimer’s treatment
- Nicholas Timmins, March 2, 2005 [FT.com - Financial Times]
NHS waiting list rises
- February 11, 2005 [Guardian UK]
Tumour patients hit by NHS shortages
- Jo Revill, February 6, 2005 [Guardian UK]
NHS financial crises set to outlast winter
- Mike Waites, February 4, 2005 [Yorkshire Post]
NHS 24 ‘priority’ callers wait four hours for advice
- Caroline Wilson, January 14, 2005 [Evening Times (UK)]
‘No strategy’ on NHS waiting time
- January 14, 2005 [BBC]
Output figures show NHS decline
- John Carvel, October 19, 2004 [Guardian UK]
Heart patients die on waiting lists
- Peter Sharples, October 18, 2004 [Manchester Online]
£25bn overspend feared for NHS computer network
- Karen Attwood, October 12, 2004 [telegraph.co.uk]
Gaps in care cost £7bn, says charity
- John Carvel, October 4, 2004 [Guardian UK]
NHS excluding poor people, UK
- September 15, 2004 [Medical News Today]
Smokers ’should not get NHS care’
- September 6, 2004 [BBC News]
Waiting list row blights Brighton
- John Carvel, September 4, 2004 [Guardian UK]
Patients are denied the last rites under data protection law
- Elizabeth Day, July 25, 2004 [telegraph.co.uk]
Shortage of dentists to double by 2011
- John Carvel, July 24, 2004 [Guardian UK]
Britain’s stiff upper lip gives way to a snarl
- Sarah Lyall, July 18, 2004 [The New York Times]
Hospital Overcrowding A Cause of Superbug Infections
- John von Radowitz, July 1, 2004 [Scotsman.com]
Hospital Crisis: Fallen Angels
- Lindsay Mcgarvie, May 23, 2004 [Glasgow Sunday Mail]
Study finds British hospitals are still austere, cold, smelly and poorly maintained
- May 6, 2004 [News-Medical.net]
Hospital bathrooms and showers: a continuing saga of inadequacy
- Andy Monro, MRCP & Graham P Mulley, DM, FRCP, May 2004 [Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine]
Majority back public smoking ban
- March 24, 2004 [BBC]
Discrimination Rampant In British Health Care
- Peter Moore, November 17, 2003 [365gay.com]
PERIPATETICS—To the Medical Socialists of All Parties
- Sheldon Richman, September 2003 [FEE.org]
Creeping Privatization?
Shortages of skilled workers, low morale, long queues for services, crumbling facilities and corrupt practises. - Roland Watson, August 6, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]
The World’s Worst HMO
- Stephen D. Moore, November 24, 1999 [Random Thoughts]
Socialized Medicine in Great Britain: Lessons for the Oregon Health Plan
- Professor John Spiers, March 18, 1999 [Cascade Policy Institute]
The Sickbed Which is Socialized British Medicine
- December 23, 1997 [NCPA]
The British Way of Withholding Care
- Harry Schwarz, March 1989 [FEE.org]

Canada

Parliament unanimously passed the Canada Health Act in 1984 and established a single-payer, publicly-financed health care system. To ensure a true government monopoly (is there any other kind?) Canadian provinces outlawed private health insurance.

Surgery postponed indefinitely for 1,000 Kelowna patients
- Cathryn Atkinson, April 8, 2008 [Globe and Mail]

Majority of Que. dentists quit health-care system
- March 27, 2008 [CTV.ca]

Why Ontario keeps sending patients south
- Lisa Priest, February 22, 2008 [Globe and Mail]

Will Socialized Health Care in the US Kill Canadians?
- Don Surber, March 3, 2008 [Acton Institute]

Wait times for surgery, medical treatments at all-time high: report
- October 15, 2007 [CBC News (Canada)]

The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care
- David Gratzer, Summer 2007 [City Journal]

Cancer patients question why PET scan not covered
- May 28, 2007 [CBC News]

BC Medical Association: Waiting Too Long for Hip and Knee Surgery Costs $10,000 Per Patient-Maximum Wait Times Should Be No Longer Than 6 Months
- June 28, 2006 [CCN Matthews]

Ont. physician turns away patient for being 55+
- March 17, 2006 [CTV.ca]

Canada inches toward private medicine
- Rebecca Cook Dube, August 8, 2005 [CS Monitor]

Doctor defends private cancer clinic
- Gillian Livingston, July 15, 2005 [Canadian Press]

Dogma trumps truth in health-care issues
- D’Arcy Jenish, July 7, 2005 [Ontario Business News]

Why Canadians Purchase Private Health Insurance
- Walter Williams, June 20, 2005 [Capitalism Magazine]

Doctor welcomes health ruling
- June 9, 2005 [CBC Montreal]

Patients shouldn’t wait more than 8 weeks for cardiac defibrillator: experts
- May 24, 2005 [Canadian Press]

Grads fail to slow doctor shortage
- Jennifer O’Brien, May 21, 2005 [London Free Press]

Free Canadian health care comes at cost
- April 10, 2005 [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette]

Canada’s drug tab reaches $22 billion, report suggests
- Sheryl Ubelacker, CP, April 6, 2005 [London Free Press]

Canadian health care is free and first-class — if you can wait
- Beth Duff-Brown, March 19, 2005 [The Associated Press]

Pediatricians, parents warn of shortage of community-based care for children
- Colin Perkel, March 4, 2005 [The Canadian Press]

Access to specialists difficult: study
- February 16, 2005 [CBC Calgary]

Doctor shortages, frustrations vary from region to region, survey shows
- February 15, 2005 [Canada.com]

Montreal leads the country in offering private health care
- Aaron Derfel, February 12, 2005 [Montreal Gazette]

Canada falling short on medical imaging
- February 9, 2005 [Macleans.ca]

Creative incentives required to retain older doctors
- Dr. Charles Shaver, January 20, 2005 [Toronto Star]

MRI gap defies cash fix
- Mark Kennedy, January 14, 2005 [National Post (Canada)]

A boy’s plight, a nation’s problem
- Lisa Priest, January 13, 2005 [The Globe and Mail]

Where’s proof private clinics cost more?
- Tom Brodbeck, December 4, 2004 [The Winnipeg Sun]

Surgery backlog tops 5,500 at kids’ hospitals; One-year waits common
- Aaron Derfel, December 3, 2004 [The Gazette (Montreal)]

Hospital wait lists to get worse, Carriere says
- Chris Traber, November 14, 2004 [Yorkregion.com]

Frustrated patients can’t handle ER waits
- Jennifer Stewart and Jeffrey Simpson, October 28, 2004 [The Halifax Herald Limited]

Private medical clinic opens in Montreal
…it answers, “an ever-increasing demand from the public for greater accessibility and quality of health services.” - October 13, 2004 [CTV.ca]

Canadians have higher death risk than Americans after heart attack: study
- Sheryl Ubelacker, September 20, 2004 [Canada.com]

Canadian medical tourists in India
- Jeremy Copeland, September 20, 2004 [CBC News]

Doctor shortage cripples Canada’s free health care
- Clifford Krauss, September 18, 2004 [Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune]

Canada’s Once-Proud Public Health System in Crisis
- David Ljunggren, September 14, 2004 [Reuters (Ottawa)]

Hospitals to cut, again
- September 5, 2004 [Toronto Star]

Canada’s Medical Nightmare
- Robert J. Cihak, M.D., September 1, 2004 [Health Care News]

Canada faces shortage of doctors
- August 19, 2004 [MSNBC]

Canadians losing faith in health system: poll
- August 16, 2004 [CTV.ca]

Ontario hospitals a health risk
- Michael Hurley, August 8, 2004 [Toronto Star]

Need surgery? Here’s how long you’ll wait
“It’s inhuman. The quality of my life is horrible and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.” - Jason Fekete, July 28, 2004 [Calgary Herald]

Docs, nurses fed up
Canadian doctors and nurses are fed up with inter-governmental “bickering” that is dragging out wait times and causing more pain and suffering for patients. - July 28, 2004 [Winnipeg Sun]

Free Health Care?
…in some cases, patients die on the waiting list because they become too sick to tolerate a procedure. - Walter E. Williams, July 24, 2004 [CATO]

The truth about Canada’s ailing health-care system
All the major candidates in Canada’s recent national election acknowledged that the country’s health-care system is failing Canadians. - Robert J. Cihak, July 13, 2004 [The Seattle Times]

Health-care crisis looms, even with new money
Canada’s health-care system is “five to 10 years” from the breaking point — even with cash injections from government, says the new president of the B.C. Medical Association. - Doug Alexander, July 5, 2004 [Vancouver Sun]

Emergency room delays a strong campaign factor
“Go into the emergency room — it is the most pitiful piece of work you ever seen in your life.” - David Bruser, June 22, 2004 [Toronto Star]

Canadian Health Care in Crisis
Analyst visits NC to describe how single-payer health care really works in practice. - Donna Martinez, June 17, 2004 [Carolina Journal]

Quebec cancer patients sue over wait
Women waited months for radiation; lawsuit could cost system $50-million. - Ingrid Peritz, March 11, 2004 [The Globe and Mail]

Health care: no waiting lists
‘You get knee surgery within two days … try and get that in human hospitals.’ Canada’s [private] pet health-insurance industry is projected to grow at roughly 50 per cent a year… - Robert Scalia, November 30, 2003 [Montreal Gazette]

For some, surgery abroad a welcome answer
- Daniel Girard, November 29, 2003 [Toronto Star]

Canadian Doctors Eyeing United States
- Clifford Krauss, October 17, 2003 [The New York Times]

The Top Ten Things People Believe About Canadian Health Care, But Shouldn’t
- Brian Lee Crowley, October 9, 2003 [Mackinac Center for Public Policy]

Canadians’ health at risk, CMA says
- Valerie Lawton, September 26, 2003 [Toronto Star]

Burnout is now doctors’ ailment
Almost half of Canadian doctors say they’re burned out, emotionally exhausted and blame medicine for putting a drain on their family life. - Karen Palmer, August 20, 2003 [Toronto Star]

New MRI clinic in row over poaching
While she insists she’s not making any money off the venture, she says it provides an income allowance for her and her husband, the other principal in the company. - Theresa Boyle and Robert Benzie, July 28, 2003 [Toronto Star]

Price Controls and Overall Drug Spending
The Canadian system, however, tends to push up overall spending on prescription drugs, despite the low prices for some brand name ones. - John Melby, July 2, 2003 [Buckeye Institute]

Gore Endorses Canada’s Medical System
- William L. Anderson, November 29, 2002 [Mises]

How Good is Canadian Health Care?
- August 2002 [Fraser Institute]

Canadian Health-Care System Is No Model for Prescription Drug Reform
- May 1, 2001 [Mackinac Center for Public Policy]

The Ghost of America’s Health Care Future Lives in Canada Today
- James Frogue and Robert Moffit, December 25, 2000 [Capitalism Magazine]

Socialized Medicine: The Canadian Experience
Explores several lessons that can be drawn from the Canadian experience with socialized medicine:

Socialized medicine, although of poor quality, is very expensive;
Political compromise is the result;
Socialized medicine is both a consequence and a great contributor to the idea that economic conditions should be equalized by coercion. - Pierre Lemieux [The Freeman]

Canadian Health Care
…if Canadians knew as much as they think they do about the economic and moral workings of Medicare, they might not be as enthusiastic as they are about their cherished right to ‘free’ health care. - Andrei Kreptul, August 30, 2000 [Mises]

When Patients Become Victims – The Crime of Government-Run Health Care
- Merrill Matthews Jr., Ph.D. and Kerri Houston, May 1, 2000 (PDF format)

Socialized Medicine Leaves a Bad Taste in Patients’ Mouths
- Lawrence W. Reed, February 23, 2000 [Mackinac Center for Public Policy]

Canadians Dissatisfied With Socialized Medicine
- January 26, 2000 [NCPA]

Memo to Al Gore: Canadian Medicine Isn’t Cheap or Effective
- William McArthur, former chief coroner for British Columbia, January 28, 2000

Loved to Death: America’s Unresolved Health-Care Crisis
As Canada’s national government slashes spending on medical care in order to reduce the deficit, local provinces are reducing medical staff. In Ontario, pregnant women are being sent to Detroit because no obstetricians are available. Specialists of all kinds are in short supply. Patients have to wait eight weeks for an MRI, ten weeks for referral to a specialist, and four months for heart bypass surgery. - Michael J. Hurd, November 1997 [Liberty Haven]

Is Canadian Health care a Good Model for the U.S. to Follow?
- Michael Walker, August 1994 [Liberty Haven]

Health of the State (commentary by a cancer survivor)
I tell you this not to alarm you, to elicit sympathy, or to bore you. I tell you because the episode has been, for me, a salutary lesson (just in case I needed one) in why the government should not be allowed anywhere near a syringe, a dressing, a scalpel, an oxygen mask, a tissue sample — anything to do with health.

Michigan Shouldn’t Copy Canada’s Health System

The above is from THE CONSERVATIVE POST.

Climategate score card ...

2010-03-13T15:39:00.000-05:00

Mark Landsbaum: What to say to a global warming alarmist

By MARK LANDSBAUM at the Orange County Register

2010-02-12 13:30:12

It has been tough to keep up with all the bad news for global warming alarmists. We're on the edge of our chair, waiting for the next shoe to drop. This has been an Imelda Marcos kind of season for shoe-dropping about global warming.

At your next dinner party, here are some of the latest talking points to bring up when someone reminds you that Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won Nobel prizes for their work on global warming.

ClimateGate – This scandal began the latest round of revelations when thousands of leaked documents from Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit showed systematic suppression and discrediting of climate skeptics' views and discarding of temperature data, suggesting a bias for making the case for warming. Why do such a thing if, as global warming defenders contend, the "science is settled?"

FOIGate – The British government has since determined someone at East Anglia committed a crime by refusing to release global warming documents sought in 95 Freedom of Information Act requests. The CRU is one of three international agencies compiling global temperature data. If their stuff's so solid, why the secrecy?

ChinaGate – An investigation by the U.K.'s left-leaning Guardian newspaper found evidence that Chinese weather station measurements not only were seriously flawed, but couldn't be located. "Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China?" the paper asked. The paper's investigation also couldn't find corroboration of what Chinese scientists turned over to American scientists, leaving unanswered, "how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?" The Guardian contends that researchers covered up the missing data for years.

HimalayaGate – An Indian climate official admitted in January that, as lead author of the IPCC's Asian report, he intentionally exaggerated when claiming Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 in order to prod governments into action. This fraudulent claim was not based on scientific research or peer-reviewed. Instead it was originally advanced by a researcher, since hired by a global warming research organization, who later admitted it was "speculation" lifted from a popular magazine. This political, not scientific, motivation at least got some researcher funded.

PachauriGate – Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman who accepted with Al Gore the Nobel Prize for scaring people witless, at first defended the Himalaya melting scenario. Critics, he said, practiced "voodoo science." After the melting-scam perpetrator 'fessed up, Pachauri admitted to making a mistake. But, he insisted, we still should trust him.

PachauriGate II – Pachauri also claimed he didn't know before the 192-nation climate summit meeting in Copenhagen in December that the bogus Himalayan glacier claim was sheer speculation. But the London Times reported that a prominent science journalist said he had pointed out those errors in several e-mails and discussions to Pachauri, who "decided to overlook it." Stonewalling? Cover up? Pachauri says he was "preoccupied." Well, no sense spoiling the Copenhagen party, where countries like Pachauri's India hoped to wrench billions from countries like the United States to combat global warming's melting glaciers. Now there are calls for Pachauri's resignation.

SternGate – One excuse for imposing worldwide climate crackdown has been the U.K.'s 2006 Stern Report, an economic doomsday prediction commissioned by the government. Now the U.K. Telegraph reports that quietly after publication "some of these predictions had been watered down because the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified." Among original claims now deleted were that northwest Australia has had stronger typhoons in recent decades, and that southern Australia lost rainfall because of rising ocean temperatures. Exaggerated claims get headlines. Later, news reporters disclose the truth. Why is that?

SternGate II – A researcher now claims the Stern Report misquoted his work to suggest a firm link between global warming and more-frequent and severe floods and hurricanes. Robert Muir-Wood said his original research showed no such link. He accused Stern of "going far beyond what was an acceptable extrapolation of the evidence." We're shocked.

AmazonGate – The London Times exposed another shocker: the IPCC claim that global warming will wipe out rain forests was fraudulent, yet advanced as "peer-reveiwed" science. The Times said the assertion actually "was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise," "authored by two green activists" and lifted from a report from the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group. The "research" was based on a popular science magazine report that didn't bother to assess rainfall. Instead, it looked at the impact of logging and burning. The original report suggested "up to 40 percent" of Brazilian rain forest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall, but the IPCC expanded that to cover the entire Amazon, the Times reported.

PeerReviewGate – The U.K. Sunday Telegraph has documented at least 16 nonpeer-reviewed reports (so far) from the advocacy group World Wildlife Fund that were used in the IPCC's climate change bible, which calls for capping manmade greenhouse gases.

RussiaGate – Even when global warming alarmists base claims on scientific measurements, they've often had their finger on the scale. Russian think tank investigators evaluated thousands of documents and e-mails leaked from the East Anglia research center and concluded readings from the coldest regions of their nation had been omitted, driving average temperatures up about half a degree.

Russia-Gate II – Speaking of Russia, a presentation last October to the Geological Society of America showed how tree-ring data from Russia indicated cooling after 1961, but was deceptively truncated and only artfully discussed in IPCC publications. Well, at least the tree-ring data made it into the IPCC report, albeit disguised and misrepresented.

U.S.Gate – If Brits can't be trusted, are Yanks more reliable? The U.S. National Climate Data Center has been manipulating weather data too, say computer expert E. Michael Smith and meteorologist Joesph D'Aleo. Forty years ago there were 6,000 surface-temperature measuring stations, but only 1,500 by 1990, which coincides with what global warming alarmists say was a record temperature increase. Most of the deleted stations were in colder regions, just as in the Russian case, resulting in misleading higher average temperatures.

IceGate – Hardly a continent has escaped global warming skewing. The IPCC based its findings of reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and in Africa on a feature story of climbers' anecdotes in a popular mountaineering magazine, and a dissertation by a Switzerland university student, quoting mountain guides. Peer-reviewed? Hype? Worse?

ResearchGate – The global warming camp is reeling so much lately it must have seemed like a major victory when a Penn State University inquiry into climate scientist Michael Mann found no misconduct regarding three accusations of climate research impropriety. But the university did find "further investigation is warranted" to determine whether Mann engaged in actions that "seriously deviated from accepted practices for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities." Being investigated for only one fraud is a global warming victory these days.

ReefGate – Let's not forget the alleged link between climate change and coral reef degradation. The IPCC cited not peer-reviewed literature, but advocacy articles by Greenpeace, the publicity-hungry advocacy group, as its sole source for this claim.

AfricaGate – The IPCC claim that rising temperatures could cut in half agricultural yields in African countries turns out to have come from a 2003 paper published by a Canadian environmental think tank – not a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

DutchGate – The IPCC also claimed rising sea levels endanger the 55 percent of the Netherlands it says is below sea level. The portion of the Netherlands below sea level actually is 20 percent. The Dutch environment minister said she will no longer tolerate climate researchers' errors.

AlaskaGate – Geologists for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography and their U.S. and Canadian colleagues say previous studies largely overestimated by 40 percent Alaskan glacier loss for 40 years. This flawed data are fed into those computers to predict future warming.

Fold this column up and lay it next to your napkin the next time you have Al Gore or his ilk to dine. It should make interesting after-dinner conversation.

Contact the writer: mlandsbaum@ocregister.comor 714-796-5025

Medieval Warm Period is Back!

2010-03-11T05:05:00.004-05:00

From Nature we have a new climate reconstruction:

Full story here.

Story at Bishop Hill, which is ironic since the study is coming from the US.

And the feature of this reconstruction to surely stick in the craw of many who think we are living in unprecedented times of warmth is the “Roman Warm Period”. Have a look:

click for larger image

From Nature: Shellfish could supplant tree-ring climate data

Temperature records gleaned from clamshells reveal accuracy of Norse sagas.

From the full PDF (PDF, 378K, 5pp.)

"The interval from ∼230 B:C: to A.D. 40 was one of exceptional warmth in Iceland, coinciding with a period of general warmth and dryness in Europe known as the Roman Warm Period, from ∼200 B:C: to A.D. 400 (23). On the basis of δ18O data, reconstructed water temperatures for the Roman Warm Period in Iceland are higher than any temperatures recorded in modern times."

Finally we get some real science from the climatologist boys.

The McDougall MWL plan ...

2010-03-07T18:20:00.000-05:00

Here is a reminder of the MWL plan:

Program outlined in the MWL book, page 60.
1. Eliminate All Animal Foods
2. Eliminate All Oils
3. Eliminate All High Fat Plant Foods: Nuts, Nut Butters, Seeds, Seed Butters, Avocados, Coconut, & Olives.
4. Eliminate All Flour Products
5. Eat Whole Grains and Potatoes
6. Eat Legumes
7. Make Green & Yellow Vegetables One-Half to One-Third of your meal
8. Eat Uncooked Foods
9. Restrict Fresh Fruit to No More Than Two Servings a Day, and Avoid Dried Fruit, Fruit Puree, and Fruit Juice
10. Use Simple Sugar Sparingly

Guidelines for Healthy Eating in MWL book, page 67.
1. Eat until you’re satisfied
2. Graze
3. Allow time for digestion
4. Chew foods thoroughly
5. Restrict variety

Weight-Losing Reasons To Exercise. MWL book, page 100.
1. Exercise burns calories
2. Calories continue to burn after exercise
3. Exercise counteracts plateaus
4. Exercise suppresses appetite
5. Exercise reduces insulin
6. Exercise protects and increases muscle mass

Exercise you can live with. MWL book, page 106-107
Aerobics: The best kind of exercise. Walking, running, cycling, & swimming are not only enjoyable but highly efficient ways to lose weight.

Benefits of weight training:
Build a stronger body
Build a shapelier body
Strengthen ligaments
Improve bone density
Help prevent musculoskeletal injury
Elevate metabolism
Increase stamina
Elevate blood levels of HDL cholesterol

Your New Daily Exercise Plan: MWL Book Page 109
1. Get up half an hour earlier each day, or skip a TV program to do a specific exercise.
2. Make exercise a part of each day.
3. Choose an activity that you have always enjoyed and do it at least four times per week
4. Sometimes purchasing equipment helps to motivate…
5. Invest in a membership in a YMCA, YWCA, or health and fitness club
6. Ask a friend to become your exercise partner
7. Go dancing, a great aerobic (and romantic) exercise
8. Join a walking or hiking club.
9. Check with your local adult-education program for exercise programs.
10. Keep an exercise journal.

Establishing a healthy way of life from page 127 of the MWL book.

Step 1. Be Goal-Oriented
Step 2. Acknowledge Your Willingness to Pay the Price
Step 3. Educate Yourself, Become an Expert
Step 4. Visualize Yourself as Healthy
Step 5. Make a Commitment: It’s Magic
Step 6. Ensure That Your Environment Supports Your Goals
Step 7. Alter Your Coping Mechanisms
Step 8. Join A Support Group
Step 9. Reward Yourself
Step 10. Keep It Simple

How Do You Prevent, Stop & Reverse Heart Disease?

2010-03-06T08:01:00.003-05:00

What Dr. Esselstyn says about curing heart disease straight & simple.
Meat, cheese, milk, butter, ice cream, eggs, fried foods, oils and margarine are the lethal atherosclerotic lynchpins.

No chicken, no fish, no meat, no eggs
No oils of any kind - including olive oil
No dairy products of any kind - even fat-free
Generally no nuts or avocados (small amounts of walnuts are OK if you don't have diagnosed heart disease-but watch out-it's hard to control the amount)

What Can You Eat?

Vegetables-lots of greeny leafy ones to restore & heal the endothelial lining of your blood vessels. Kale, Swiss Chard, Cilantro, Collards, Bok Choy, Parsley, Spinach, Broccoli, Brussel Sprouts, Cauliflower
Whole fruit
Whole grains
Beans/Legumes; "light" tofu--cautious use of low-fat soy meat substitutes. Many are highly processed, high-fat junk food.

Or as the Doctor himself writes at his web site:

I don’t want my patients to pour a single thimbleful of gasoline on the fire. Stopping the gasoline puts out the fire. Reforming the way you eat will end the heart disease.

Here are the rules of my program in their simplest form:

• You may not eat anything with a mother or a face (no meat, poultry, or fish).

• You cannot eat dairy products.

• You must not consume oil of any kind—not a drop. (Yes, you devotees of the Mediterranean Diet, that includes olive oil, as I’ll explain in Chapter 10.)

• Generally, you cannot eat nuts or avocados.

You can eat a wonderful variety of delicious, nutrient-dense foods:

• All vegetables except avocado. Leafy green vegetables, root vegetables, veggies that are red, green, purple, orange, and yellowand everything in between

• All legumes—beans, peas, and lentils of all varieties.

• All whole grains and products, such as bread and pasta, that are made from them—as long as they do not contain added fats.

• All fruits.

It works. In the first continuous twelve-year study of the effects of nutrition in severely ill patients, which I will describe in this book, those who complied with my program achieved total arrest of clinical progression and significant selective reversal of coronary artery disease. In fully compliant patients, we have seen angina disappear in a few weeks and abnormal stress test results return to normal.

Vegan diet plan

2010-03-04T11:36:00.003-05:00

The McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss:

The McDougall diet program is a vegan diet with an emphasis on low-fat, whole foods. The basic rules are that you eat all the vegetables, beans, and whole, unprocessed grains that you need to satisfy your hunger, but it is recommended that green and yellow veggies make up at least a third of your diet. Processed foods of all kinds are out. You are to eat no flour products, avoid all free oils, and fatty plant foods like nuts. Sugar and salt are allowed in small amounts on the surface of your foods, but you are to refrain from cooking with them. For more information, visit www.drmcdougall.com

One advantage of the plan is that you will cure or avoid most chronic degenerative diseases of the Western World. Another is that you will do far more for the health of the planet than most anything else you could possibly do.

Revisionism and the Historical Blackout by Harry Elmer Barnes

2010-03-01T04:10:00.001-05:00

Chapter 1 of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 1953

The First World War and American intervention therein marked an ominous turning point in the history of the United States and of the world. Those who can remember "the good old days" before 1914 inevitably look back to those times with a very definite and justifiable feeling of nostalgia. There was no income tax before 1913, and that levied in the early days after the amendment was adopted was little more than nominal. All kinds of taxes were relatively low. We had only a token national debt of around a billion dollars, which could have been paid off in a year without causing even a ripple in national finance. The total federal budget in 1913 was $724,512,000, just about 1 percent of the present astronomical budget.

Ours was a libertarian country in which there was little or no witch-hunting and few of the symptoms and operations of the police state which have been developing here so drastically during the last decade. Not until our intervention in the First World War had there been sufficient invasions of individual liberties to call forth the formation of special groups and organizations to protect our civil rights. The Supreme Court could still be relied on to uphold the Constitution and safeguard the civil liberties of individual citizens.

Libertarianism was also dominant in Western Europe. The Liberal Party governed England from 1905 to 1914. France had risen above the reactionary coup of the Dreyfus affair, had separated church and state, and had seemingly established the Third Republic with reasonable permanence on a democratic and liberal basis. Even Hohenzollern Germany enjoyed the usual civil liberties, had strong constitutional restraints on executive tyranny, and had established a workable system of parliamentary government. Experts on the history of Austria-Hungary have recently been proclaiming that life in the Dual Monarchy after the turn of the century marked the happiest period in the experience of the peoples encompassed therein.

Enlightened citizens of the Western world were then filled with buoyant hope for a bright future for humanity. It was believed that the theory of progress had been thoroughly vindicated by historical events. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1888, was the prophetic bible of that era. People were confident that the amazing developments in technology would soon produce abundance, security, and leisure for the multitude.

In this optimism in regard to the future no item was more evident and potent than the assumption that war was an outmoded nightmare. Not only did idealism and humanity repudiate war but Norman Angell and others were assuring us that war could not be justified, even on the basis of the most sordid material interest.

In our own country, the traditional American foreign policy of benign neutrality and the wise exhortations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay to avoid entangling alliances and to shun foreign quarrels were still accorded respect in the highest councils of state.

Unfortunately, there are relatively few persons today who can recall those happy times. In his devastatingly prophetic book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell points out that one reason why it is possible for those in authority to maintain the barbarities of the police state is that nobody is able to recall the many blessings of the period which preceded that type of society.

A significant and illuminating report on this situation came to me recently in a letter from one of the most distinguished social scientists in the country, a resolute revisionist. He wrote,

I am devoting my seminar this quarter to the subject of American foreign policy since 1933. The effect upon a Roosevelt-bred generation is startling, indeed. Even able and mature students react to the elementary facts like children who have just been told that there is (or was) no Santa Claus.

While the First World War headed the United States and the world toward international disaster, the Second World War was an even more calamitous turning point in the history of mankind. It may, indeed, have brought us – and the whole world – into the terminal episode of human experience.

It certainly marked the transition from social optimism and technological rationalism into the Nineteen Eighty-Four pattern of life, in which aggressive international policies and war scares have become the guiding factor, not only in world affairs but also in the domestic, political, and economic strategy of every leading country of the world. The police state has emerged as the dominant political pattern of our times, and military state capitalism is engulfing both democracy and liberty in countries which have not succumbed to Communism.

The manner and extent to which American culture has been impaired and our well-being undermined by our entry into two world wars has been brilliantly and succinctly stated by Professor Mario A. Pei, of Columbia University, in an article on "The America We Lost" in the Saturday Evening Post, May 3, 1952, and has been developed more at length by Caret Garrett in his trenchant book, The People's Pottage.

Perhaps, by the mid-century, all this is now water under the bridge and little can be done about it. But we can surely learn how we got into this unhappy condition of life and society – at least until the police-state system continues its current rapid development sufficiently to obliterate all that remains of integrity and accuracy in historical writing and political reporting.

The readjustment of historical writing to historical facts relative to the background and causes of the First World War – what is popularly known in the historical craft as "revisionism" – was the most important development in historiography during the decade of the 1920s. While those historians at all receptive to the facts admitted that revisionism readily won out in the conflict with the previously accepted wartime lore, many of the traditionalists in the profession remained true to the mythology of the war decade. In any event, the revisionist controversy was the outstanding intellectual adventure in the historical field in the 20th century down to Pearl Harbor.

Revisionism, when applied to the First World War, showed that the actual causes and merits of that conflict were very close to the reverse of the picture presented in the political propaganda and historical writings of the war decade. Revisionism would also produce similar results with respect to the Second World War if it were allowed to develop unimpeded. But a determined effort is being made to stifle or silence revelations which would establish the truth with regard to the causes and issues of the late world conflict.

While the wartime mythology endured for years after 1918, nevertheless leading editors and publishers soon began to crave contributions which set forth the facts with respect to the responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914, our entry into the war, and the basic issues involved in this great conflict.

Sidney B. Fay began to publish his revolutionary articles on the background of the First World War in the American Historical Review in July, 1920. My own efforts along the same line began in the New Republic, the Nation, the New York Times Current History Magazine, and the Christian Century in 1924 and 1925. Without exception, the requests for my contributions came from the editors of these periodicals, and these requests were ardent and urgent. I had no difficulty whatever in securing the publication of my Genesis of the World War in 1926, and the publisher thereof subsequently brought forth a veritable library of illuminating revisionist literature.

By 1928, when Fay's Origins of the World War was published, almost everyone except the die-hards and bitter-enders in the historical profession had come to accept revisionism, and even the general public had begun to think straight in the premises.

Read the rest of the article

Harry Elmer Barnes (1889–1968) was a pioneer of historical revisionism, meaning the use of historical scholarship to challenge and refute the narratives of history promulgated by the state and the political class, or as Barnes himself termed it, "court history." Long regarded as a progressive intellectual leader of the American Left, Barnes became associated with the Old Right for his opposition to the New Deal and to American entry into World War II. His work has had a profound influence on New Left historians such as William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko, as well as on the historical writings of Murray Rothbard and other libertarians. See Murray Rothbard's editorial in Left & Right, "Harry Elmer Barnes, RIP." See Harry Elmer Barnes's article archives.

Many leading scientists tell the EPA to think again

2010-02-28T17:42:00.001-05:00

February 26th, 2010

From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

This letter from numerous leading scientists in climate and related fields to Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is worthy of wider circulation.

The Honorable Lisa P. Jackson, Administrator
Environmental Protection Agency
1200 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20460

Dear Administrator Jackson:

We congratulate you on your appointment to EPA Administrator and commend you for your commitment to “science-based policies and programs, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency.” We write today because the United States finds itself at a crossroads where these values are sure to be tested.

Recently, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce submitted a petition for an on-the-record hearing under the Clean Air Act before the EPA proceeds with its proposed rulemaking on the regulation of greenhouse gases, Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act, Proposed Rule, 74 Fed. Reg. 18,886 (Apr. 24, 2009) (hereinafter “Endangerment Finding”).

The Chamber requested a hearing based on 5 U.S.C. §§ 556-57 where: all proceedings would be conducted on the record; the decision-maker would be the Administrator, Deputy Administrator, or an Administrative Law Judge; the decision-maker would have the benefit of the full Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee; parties could submit supporting documents, data, and presentations; and agencies other than the EPA designated in Executive Order No. 13,432 could designate a single official to observe and participate in the proceedings.

In light of the monumental importance of the EPA’s proposed rulemaking, we urge the adoption of the Chamber’s request. Additionally, we urge the EPA to address four critical questions, which, in addition to the issues enumerated in the Chamber’s Petition, are central to the EPA’s proposed rulemaking. Indeed, these questions require careful analysis before intelligent public policy can be promulgated. They are:

1. Is the Earth’s climate changing in an unusual or anomalous fashion?

2. Does the science permit rejection of the hypothesis that CO2 is only a minor player in the Earth’s climate system?

3. Can climate models that assume CO2 is a key determinant of climate change provide forecasts of future conditions that are adequate for policy analysis?

4. Can we reject the hypothesis that the primary drivers of the Earth’s climate system will continue to be natural (non-anthropogenic) forces and internal climate variability?

The fundamental issue facing the EPA is whether or not human-caused CO2 emissions have already led to, or can be expected in the future, to lead to significant adverse changes in the Earth’s climate system. That is, in order to justify the current proposed Endangerment Finding, a very critical theory or assumption that must stand up to rigorous scientific analysis is that highervatmospheric CO2 levels will, with some appropriate level of confidence, lead to measurably higher surface temperatures.

This theory can only be tested or validated by testing the so-called null hypothesis that CO2 is a minor player in the Earth’s climate system. If this null hypothesis cannot be rejected, there is no basis for regulating CO2, particularly given the enormously negative implications of such regulation on the Nation’s Energy, Economic and National Security.

Is the Earth’s climate changing in an unusual or anomalous fashion?

Atmospheric CO2 levels have increased by more than 20% over the last 50 years. If atmospheric CO2 levels, in fact, have more than a minor impact on the Earth’s climate system, one would expect to see the impact in the relevant climate data. So, to answer the question, “Is the Earth’s climate changing in an unusual or anomalous fashion?” it is necessary to rigorously seek answers to at least the following five questions:

• Is the Earth’s air temperature change unusual?
• Are droughts becoming longer and more intense due to increasing CO2?
• Are floods and heavy rainfall events increasing due to increasing CO2?
• Are hurricanes and tropical storms becoming stronger and more intense?
• Are sea levels rising dramatically due to increasing CO2?

The scientific evidence and empirical data strongly suggest there are respected scientists who would answer “no” to each of these five questions. Thus, despite the over 20% rise in CO2 over the last 50 years, there is little credible evidence that any of these dimensions of the Earth’s climate system have shown anomalous behavior.
Does the science permit rejection of the hypothesis that CO2 is only a minor player in the Earth’s climate system?

Whether or not the EPA, at this point, concurs with “no” answers to all of these questions, correlation does not imply causation. For example, the fact that CO2 concentration and surface temperature both rose over the period 1975 to, say, 1998 does not imply that rising CO2 was the primary cause, which is clearly indicated by the fact that while CO2 concentration continued to rise, temperatures have recently been falling. Therefore, we feel that it is critical that the EPA utilize a rigorous process to address the question: “Does the science permit rejection of the hypothesis that CO2 is a minor player in the Earth’s climate system?” To properly answer this question, one must address each of the following issues:

• Is carbon dioxide (CO2) the most important of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?
• Does a “tipping point” exist where more CO2 will ultimately lead to “run away” warming?
• In the past, did increases in CO2 cause increases in the Earth’s temperature?
• Since CO2 concentrations have recently risen dramatically, is the warming consistent with a “Greenhouse Gas fingerprint”?
• Is there evidence that rising CO2 levels are leading to acidification of the oceans which threatens calcium carbonate-based marine life?

An unbiased, critical review of the literature by respected scientists would have many of them answering “no” to each of these five questions.

Thus, if the EPA would come to believe that the answers to the questions spelled out above were all “no”, it would imply that the scientific evidence and experimental data to date suggest that the Earth’s climate system has not been behaving in an anomalous fashion; and, as of today, there is no known credible reason why further increasing CO2 levels will cause harm in the future.

Can climate models that assume CO2 is a key determinant of climate change provide forecasts of future conditions that are adequate for policy analysis?

In our view, particularly with temperatures now falling, the argument for CO2 regulation rests solely on the “validity” of the climate models relied upon by the IPCC and the EPA. Thus it is crucial to answer the questions, “Can climate models that assume CO2 is a key determinant of climate change, provide a forecast quality sufficient for such critical regulatory policy decisions?” To properly address this issue, it is necessary to seek rigorously developed answers to the following questions:

• Do global climate models properly handle “feedbacks” in the Earth’s climate system?
• Do global climate models perform well in simulating the climate and compare well when forecasting the impact of increased levels of CO2?
• Have modelers followed the well-documented and validated rules set forth by academic forecasting professionals?
• Did these models forecast the recent decline in temperatures?

Evidence in the literature would strongly suggest that many respected scientists would answer “no” to each of these four questions, which may well eliminate any possible rationale for regulating CO2. It should be noted that it should not be surprising that models that assume CO2 is a critical player in the Earth’s climate system cannot be validated for policy analysis when we can demonstrate that rising CO2 levels have had little impact on the Earth’s climate so far, and at this point, there is little theoretical reason to believe they will ever have a significant impact.
Can we reject the hypothesis that the primary drivers of the Earth’s climate system will continue to be natural (non-anthropogenic) forces and internal climate variability?

Finally, since atmospheric CO2 levels are not demonstrably relevant determinants of the Earth’s climate, it is highly relevant to ask, what is really driving changes in the Earth’s climate? To address this issue, climate science literature would suggest that the following question be answered: “Can we reject the hypothesis that the primary drivers of the Earth’s climate system will continue to be natural (non-anthropogenic) forces and internal climate variability? More specifically, one must at least ask:

• Does the sun play a significant role in climate variations on short (multi-decadal or shorter) time scales?
• Can volcanic activity and changes in stratospheric aerosols affect climate on short (multi-decadal or shorter) time scales?
• Do oscillations in ocean temperatures and the oceanic conveyor belt have a significant effect on the Earth’s climate?
• Do cloud/water vapor feedback mechanisms significantly affect the climate system on short (multi-decadal or shorter) time scales?

It is clear from the literature that many respected scientists would answer each of these four questions independently with a resounding “yes”.

Recommendation

We feel strongly that the EPA must not only rigorously address all four of the additional questions outlined at the outset, but also deal with at least the 18 supporting issues. As can be clearly seen by an analysis of the different fields of knowledge and academic skills required to answer the 18 detailed questions listed above, no one scientist should feel comfortable answering each and every question. And yet, without thoughtful, fully-informed judgments on all of the questions by the scientists who are expert in the particular issue area, the EPA should not feel comfortable issuing an Endangerment Finding in support of CO2 regulation.

Because of the need to have only those highly qualified to provide answers to each of the questions outlined above, we strongly suggest that the EPA grant the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Petitions, and in particular, adopt its recommendation regarding the use of the an on-the-record hearing conducted pursuant to 5 U.S.C. §§ 556-57.

While following such an analysis process may well be more arduous than planned, the implications of ill-founded CO2 regulation could be truly catastrophic. Hardly a day goes by without another prominent scientist joining the ranks of those who reject the conclusion of the IPCC that the primary driver of the Earth’s climate system is CO2 emissions from human use of fossil fuels rather than other natural forces.

The EPA has the authority to hold on-the-record hearings under the Clean Air Act using procedures based on 5 U.S.C. §§ 556-57. As the Administrative Conference of the United States said, such authority should be exercised whenever (a) the scientific, technical, or other data relevant to the proposed rule are complex, (b) the problem posed is so open-ended that diverse views should be heard, and (c) the costs that errors may impose are significant. See 1 C.F.R. § 305.76-3(1) (1993). The Chamber noted in its petition that “it is hard to imagine a situation where each part of this test is more easily met.” We concur and urge the EPA to hold a formal, on-the-record hearing before proceeding with any proposed Endangerment Finding.

Thank you for your consideration.

Dr. J. Scott Armstrong
Professor at The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Robert H. Austin
Professor of Physics
Princeton University

Dr. Robert M. Carter
Professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory
James Cook University (Australia)

Dr. Ian Clark
Professor of Earth Sciences
University of Ottawa (Canada)

Dr. Roger W. Cohen (Retired)
Manager, Strategic Planning and Programs
ExxonMobil Corporation

Dr. Susan J. Crockford
Adjunct Professor of Anthropology
University of Victoria (Canada)

Dr. Chris de Freitas
Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Science
The University of Auckland (New Zealand)

Dr. David Deming
Associate Professor of Arts & Sciences
University of Oklahoma

Dr. Donald Easterbrook (Emeritus)
Professor of Geology
Western Washington University

Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh
E.G. Bailey Emeritus Professor of Energy Conversion
The Ohio State University

Dr. Patrick Frank
SLAC National Accelerator Center
Stanford University

Dr. Stewart W. Franks
Associate Professor of Engineering
University of Newcastle (Australia)

Dr. William M. Gray (Emeritus)
Professor of Atmospheric Science
Colorado State University

Dr. Laurence I. Gould
Professor of Physics
University of Hartford

Dr. Kesten C. Green
Business & Economic Forecasting Unit
Monash University (Australia)

Dr. Sultan Hameed
Professor of Atmospheric Science
Stony Brook University

Dr. William Happer
Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics
Princeton University

Dr. Craig D. Idso, Chairman
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
Tempe, Arizona

Mr. William Kininmonth
Australasian Climate Research
Kew, Victoria (Australia)

Dr. George Kukla
Special Research Scientist
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Dr. David R. Legates, C.C.M.
Associate Professor of Climatology
University of Delaware

Dr. Richard S. Lindzen
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Anthony R. Lupo
Professor of Soil, Environmental, and Atmospheric Sciences
University of Missouri

Dr. Ross R. McKitrick
Professor of Economics
University of Guelph (Canada)

Dr. Patrick J. Michaels
School of Public Policy
George Mason University

Dr. Paul B. Queneau Metallurgical Engineer and Educator
Golden, Colorado

Dr. Tim R. Patterson
Professor of Earth Sciences
Carleton University (Canada)

Dr. Nicola Scafetta
Department of Physics
Duke University

Dr. Harrison Schmitt
Adjunct Professor of Engineering
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dr. S. Fred Singer (Emeritus)
Professor of Environmental Sciences
University of Virginia

Dr. Willie Soon
Astrophysicist and Geoscientist
Salem, Massachusetts

Mr. George H. Taylor, C.C.M. Applied Climate Services, LLC
Corvallis, Oregon

Dr. Mitchell Taylor
Lecturer in Geography
Lakehead University (Canada)

Dr. Brian G. Valentine, PE
US Department of Energy
Washington, DC

Dr. George T. Wolff
Air Improvement Resource, Inc.
Novi, Michigan

Temps and time ...

2010-02-28T17:29:00.003-05:00

David Lappi made this graphic of temperatures taken from the Greenland GISP2 Ice Cores for the last 10,000 years. Details here.

It is obvious that we have a long way to go to warm back up to the historical average of just the between ice age periods.

a thought

2010-02-28T06:22:00.002-05:00

Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations. Of necessity, they observe with a preconceived idea, and when they devise an experiment, they can see, in its results, only a confirmation of their theory. In this way they distort observation and often neglect very important facts because they do not further their aim….

Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

Fasting and Healing

2010-02-23T06:17:00.003-05:00

As I research diet and blood pressure, I see articles like the one quoted here:

Fasting has been found to help a number of disease conditions, often
permanently. There have been a number of intriguing clinical trials and studies treating numerous disease conditions with fasting. Here are some of those findings.
* In one clinical trial of hypertension and fasting, 174 people with hypertension were prefasted for 2-3 days by eating only fruits and vegetables. They then participated in a 10-11 day water only fast, followed by a 6-7 day post fast in which they ate only a low-fat, low- sodium vegan diet. Initial blood pressure in the participants was either in excess of 140 millimeters of mercury (mm HG) systolic or 90 diastolic or both. Ninety percent of the participants achieved blood pressure less than 140/90 by the end of the trial. The higher their initial blood pressure the more their readings dropped. The average drop for all participants was 37/13. Those with stage 3 hypertension (over 180/110) had an average reduction of 60/17. All those taking blood pressure medication prior to fasting were able to discontinue it. Fasting has been shown in a number of trials like this one to be one of the most effective methods for lowering blood pressure and normalizing cardiovascular function. Blood pressure tends to remain low in all those using fasting for cardiovascular disease once fasting is completed.

It would have been nice to have know this 7 months ago when I had stage 3 hypertension. After using a slower process of diet to control the blood pressure, I am now in the "pre-hypertension" range without any medication. I had to stop taking the meds when the blood pressure readings when too low. I am thinking that a small 10 day fast might still be beneficial.

econ 101 for UT

2010-02-21T08:25:00.010-05:00

In this little exercise, I will do a few posts on economics because our violent lawyer boy asked me to do so. Well, begged really, but why quibble? I assume I have time to finish before he drives to Orlando and kills me with his bare hands. =:-)

This would be part 1 of approximately 10 parts; and so this is an introduction to the following 9 parts. The limitations of Salon prevent doing a longer post; plus few here want to read a lot at one time on such a topic. If asked by Glenn to stop this, I will comply but I would like to point out that this is in no way off topic. Glenn has a political blog and praxeology includes both politics and economics as we moderns understand these terms. Besides, many of the letter writers here toss off economic errors on a daily basis as if these errors were Horace's own truth.

So to begin, let us hear a word from Lew Rockwell on economics and modern Americans:

The most common misunderstanding about economics is that it is only about money and commerce. The next step is easy: I care about more than money, and so should everyone, so let’s leave economics to stock jobbers and money managers and otherwise dispense with its teachings. This is a fateful error, because, as Mises says, economics concerns everyone and everything. It is the very pith of civilization

This is a confusion sown by economists themselves, who postulate something called “economic man” who possesses a psychological propensity to always behave in ways that maximize wealth. Their mathematical models, predictions, and analysis of policy are based on this idea.

In the real world, however, we know this not to be the case. The world as we know involves profit seeking but also extraordinary acts of charity, sacrifice, non-pecuniary giving, and voluntarism (though I dislike that term since all commercial exchanges are voluntary too!).

How to account for these? The Austrian approach to economics dispenses with the idea of “economic man,” or rather broadens the meaning of economics to include all action, which takes place in a framework of scarcity. Scarcity requires that we economize on something in all that we do, even when wealth is not the motivation. For this reason, Austrians analyze acting individuals, not maximizing prototypes.

Yes, it is acting individuals that we must analyze and we must analyze what they really do rather than what they say they are going to do.

Professor of economics Walter Block started a speech (dedicated to the tragic death of one of his students) with the following words:

For zillions of years, the human race lived in small groups of 25–50 people or so. We became hard wired to appreciate explicit cooperation: I scratch your back, you scratch mine; I'll feed you when you're hungry and/or sick; you reciprocate. Those who wouldn’t or couldn't do this didn't tend to leave their genes to the next generation. That is one of the reasons why the family is even today such a powerful institution.

However, in an economy of 6 billion, we can't all cooperate this way. Rather, we can only cooperate through markets. That is, implicitly, not explicitly.

To illustrate this point, take the recent history of New Orleans. When Katrina struck, prices of oil, gas, milk, water, orange juice, batteries, candles and other such items catapulted. This was implicit cooperation in action. How so? Higher prices means that those first in line at the grocery don't get everything on the shelves. Elevated prices have a rationing function; at normal costs, people would tend to stock up; if the prices are very much higher, they will in effect if not by benevolent intention leave something for others. This is part and parcel of Adam Smith’s "Invisible Hand" at work. Also, higher prices in post Katrina New Orleans would encourage, through greater profit margins, businessmen from outside of the struck area to bring these goods to those here who needed them the most. This embodies yet another aspect of Adam Smith’s "Invisible Hand."

It comes as a shock, no doubt, to our progressive friends that rising prices in a time of great shortage is actually a good thing. They would have the merchant give away all his stock and go out of business; or at the very least sell all the stock at the normal price to the first customer so that man could hoard it all. The economically uneducated would wonder why tomatoes cost so much more in the dead of winter than in the summer time when the local crop comes in; and they will wonder about that without seeing the answer all their lives I guess.

The great economist Rothbard once wrote a short essay for the masses on what the "free market" really was; and no it is not as our uneducated communist friend Che Pasa claims.

Rothbard wrote:

The Free market is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society. Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or nontangible services. Thus, when I buy a newspaper from a news dealer for fifty cents, the news dealer and I exchange two commodities: I give up fifty cents, and the news dealer gives up the newspaper. Or if I work for a corporation, I exchange my labor services, in a mutually agreed way, for a monetary salary; here the corporation is represented by a manager (an agent) with the authority to hire.

Both parties undertake the exchange because each expects to gain from it. Also, each will repeat the exchange next time (or refuse to) because his expectation has proved correct (or incorrect) in the recent past. Trade, or exchange, is engaged in precisely because both parties benefit; if they did not expect to gain, they would not agree to the exchange.

This simple reasoning refutes the argument against free trade typical of the "mercantilist" period of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe, and classically expounded by the famed sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne. The mercantilists argued that in any trade, one party can benefit only at the expense of the other, that in every transaction there is a winner and a loser, an "exploiter" and an "exploited." We can immediately see the fallacy in this still-popular viewpoint: the willingness and even eagerness to trade means that both parties benefit. In modern game-theory jargon, trade is a win-win situation, a "positive-sum" rather than a "zero-sum" or "negative-sum" game.

How can both parties benefit from an exchange? Each one values the two goods or services differently, and these differences set the scene for an exchange. I, for example, am walking along with money in my pocket but no newspaper; the news dealer, on the other hand, has plenty of newspapers but is anxious to acquire money. And so, finding each other, we strike a deal.

Notice that Rothbard is talking about a free and voluntary exchange. If I am walking down the street and a rude lawyer pulls a gun (rr heard no doubt) and forces me to buy his services then that is surely not a free exchange that benefits both parties. I am coerced into dealing with the last individual in the world that I would freely choose to deal with. It is the same when one side of the "deal" uses fraud to have me participate: that is not the free market in action. The free market is simple the free and voluntary exchange of goods or services among groups or individuals.

I think this is enough for an introduction. The next post in this highly irregular series will come in a day or two. (one hopes)

Natural Hygiene Diet

2010-02-18T14:01:00.001-05:00

The Natural Hygiene Diet is as easy to understand and to adopt as it is beautiful to see and delicious to eat. The NHA recommends a plant-based diet derived almost exclusively from whole natural plant foods with minimal use (or exclusion) of animal products such as meat, fish, fowl, eggs and dairy products, as well as added oil, salt, sugar, and most processed foods.

These recommendations alone would not make the Natural Hygiene Diet special. Natural Hygiene stands apart from other vegetarian, flexitarian, vegan, and natural food diets in that it recommends that you eat a large portion of your diet uncooked, use a minimum of spices, salt, and other stimulants, and center your diet around fruits and vegetables, seeds and nuts. The dietary recommendations emphasize foods in their natural state to maximize the full symphony of nature's fragile micronutrients and phytochemicals.

A diet created by Dr. Ian K. Smith

2010-02-18T11:45:00.000-05:00

The Fat Smash Diet

1. Phase I - Detox - This phase lasts 9 days. In this phase you will eat mostly fruits and vegetables. The idea is to cleanse your body of junk and you eliminate things like alcohol and caffeine. By increasing fruits and vegetables you increase the body's ability to cleanse itself on the cellular level. You can eat all the fruits & veggies you want except white potatoes and avocados. You also can have the following: legumes/beans & tofu, 1 cup of oatmeal, 2 cups of brown rice, 2 cups low fat or 1% milk, 2 6oz yogurts and 4 egg whites (eggbeaters) only water & 2 cups of herbal tea to drink. You also get a very limited amount of olive oil dressing to use. This Phase lasts for 9 days.

How PEERtrainer Helps You Lose Weight with Online Support Groups

2. Phase II - Foundation - This phase lasts 3 weeks. In this phase you eat the same foods as phase I, except you will reintroduce lean meats. Phase 2 is for 3 weeks and you keep everything you are eating in phase I & add in most protein meat chicken turkey fish (except pork), 1 whole egg add unsweetend ceral, 1 oz of cheese, coffee 1 10 oz cup & 2 diet pops a day come back.

3. Phase III - Construction - This phase lasts 4 weeks. In this phase you eat the same foods as phase I & II except you will reintroduce whole wheat pasta and bread. Phase 3 4 weeks: increase the amounts of protein, adds ff mayo & peanut butter, 2 whole eggs, 3 cups of lf milk now & 1.3 oz of lf/ff cheese, 2 cups of freshly squeezed juice & whole grains bread 4 slices a day, 1 cup of pasta and 1 desert serving per day.

4. Phase IV - The Temple - This phase is for life. In this phase you eat the same foods as phase I,II, & III. In addition to those foods, you can eat some white starches (ie. white rice, potatoes) as well as have a couple of glasses of wine or beer each week. Phase 4 for life every food you want come back including alcohol & all sweets/chips everything. the idea is your able to now handle a snack or high fat meal & go back to your regular good habits you have learned to retrain your body with.

The big picture: 65 million years of temperature swings

2010-02-18T05:46:00.003-05:00

As seen at JoNova:

Greenland Temperatures - last 10,000 years. Are we headed for an ice age? (See below for more detail.)

David Lappi is a geologist from Alaska who has sent in a set of beautiful graphs–including an especially prosaic one of the last 10,000 years in Greenland–that he put together himself (and which I’ve copied here at the top).

If you wonder where today’s temperature fits in with the grand scheme of time on Earth since the dinosaurs were wiped out, here’s the history. We start with the whole 65 million years, then zoom in, and zoom in again to the last 12,000 from both ends of the world. What’s obvious is that in terms of homo sapiens history, things are warm now (because we’re not in an ice age). But, in terms of homo sapiens civilization, things are cooler than usual, and appear to be cooling.

Then again, since T-rex & Co. vanished, it’s been one long slide down the thermometer, and our current “record heatwave” is far cooler than normal. The dinosaurs would have scoffed at us: “What? You think this is warm?”

With so much volatility in the graphs, anyone could play “pick a trend” and depending on which dot you start from, you can get any trend you want. — Jo

GUEST POST by David Lappi

65 million years of cooling

The following two graphs (images created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art) are climate records based on oxygen isotope thermometry of deep-ocean sediment cores from many parts of the world [1]). On both graphs, colder temperatures are toward the bottom, and warmer temperatures toward the top. Significant temperature events on the first graph show the start and end of Antarctic glaciation 34 and 25 million years ago, and the resumption of glaciation about 13 million years ago. It is obvious from the graph that we are now living in the coldest period of Earth’s history for the last 65 million years. Despite recent rumors of global warming, we are actually in a deep freeze.

65 million years of global temperatures Image created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art

Image created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art

5 million years of cooling

The last five million years of climate change is shown in the next graph based on work by Lisiecki and Raymo in 2005 [2] . It shows our planet has a dynamic temperature history, and over the last three million years, we have had a continuous series of ice ages (now about 90,000 years each) and interglacial warm periods (about 10,000 years each). There are 13 (count ‘em) ice ages on a 100,000 year cycle (from 1.25 million years ago to the present, and 33 ice ages on a 41,000 year cycle (between 2.6 million and 1.25 million years ago). Since Earth is on a multi-million-year cooling trend, we are currently lucky to be living during an interglacial warm period, but we are at the end of our normal 10,000 year warm interglacial period.

65 million years of global temperatures

The last 10 millenia

To detail the more recent prehistoric temperature changes, scientists have drilled a number of ice cores in ancient glacial ice. Paleotemperature data from ice cores is considered to be our best continuous record of temperatures on the planet for time-spans up to about 420,000 years ago. Annual layering in undisturbed glacial ice allows us to precisely date the layers, and gives us a very accurate time and temperature sequence. The US government drilled the GISP 2 ice core in central Greenland over a five-year period, and the data is available here. This data set is useful because it reports temperatures (measured by oxygen isotopes) every 10 to 60 years — a good resolution. I sometimes see graphs of ice-core temperatures or greenhouse gasses that are based on measurements every 1,000 or 2,000 years: not nearly of close enough together for comparisons that are useful today. I downloaded and graphed these data in Exel myself. The following graphs have a time scale in years Before Present (BP).

The next graph of temperature from the ice core for the last 10,000 years (the current interglacial period) shows that Greenland is now colder than for most of that period (vertical scale in degrees C below zero). We can see the Medieval Warm Period 800 to 1,000 years ago was not particularly warm, and the Little Ice Age 150 to 650 years ago was one of the longest sustained cold periods during this interglacial. We are now recovering from this abnormal cold period, and the recovery started long before anthropogenic greenhouse gases were produced in any quantity. The curved trend line in green shows that we have been experiencing declining temperatures for the past 3,000 years, and are likely to be heading down toward the next ice age. Temperatures are only considered to be increasing if viewed for the last 150 years, from 1850 onward, which is roughly when thermometers began collecting global data, and is also the period of time the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has chosen for its review. The temperature shift the panel is so concerned about is shown in red. Our current warming is well within natural variation, and in view of the general decline in temperatures during the last half of this interglacial, is probably beneficial for mankind and most plants and animals. The graph clearly shows the Minoan Warming (about 3200 years ago), the Roman Warming (about 2000 years ago), and the Medieval Warm Period (about 900 years ago). Great advances in government, art, architecture, and science were made during these warmer times.

Greenland Temperatures - last 10,000 years

Long-term, temperatures are now declining (for the last 3,000 years), and we appear to be headed for the next 90,000 year ice age, right on schedule at the end of our current 10,000 year warm period. We have repeated this cycle 46 times in succession over the last 2.6 million years. And in case you are wondering, the previous Antarctic ice cores tell a broadly similar story. The following graph of ice core data from Vostok (vertical scale in degrees C variation from present) shows that Antarctica is also experiencing a long-term (4,000 year) cooling trend mirroring the Greenland GISP2 cooling trend. Though the individual temperature spikes and dips are different than in Greenland, the long-term temperature trend on the planet appears to be down, not up. And since it is so late in our current interglacial period, we could be concerned about global cooling.

The philosophy of liberty (from V for Voluntary)

2010-02-17T07:05:00.000-05:00

The philosophy of liberty is based on the principle of self-ownership.

You own your life.

To deny this is to imply that someone else has a higher claim on your life than you do.

No other person, or group of persons, owns your life.

Nor do you own the lives of others.

You exist in time: future, present and past.

This is manifest in [respectively]: your life, your liberty and the product of your life and liberty.

To lose your life is to lose your future.

To lose your liberty is to lose your present.

And to lose the product of your life and liberty is to lose the portion of your past that produced it.

A product of your life and your liberty is your property.

Property is the fruit of your labour: the product of your time, energy and talents.

Property is that part of nature that you turn to valuable use.

Property is the property of others that is given to you by voluntary exchange and mutual consent.

Two people who exchange property voluntarily are both better off, or they wouldn't do it.

Only they may rightfully make that decision for themselves.

At times, some people make use of force or fraud to take from others without voluntary consent.

The initiation of force or fraud to take life is murder.

The initiation of force or fraud to take liberty is slavery.

The initiation of force or fraud to take property is theft.

It is the same whether these things are done by one person acting alone, by the many acting against the few, or even by officials in fine hats.

You have the right to protect your life, liberty and justly acquired property from the forceful aggression of others; and you may ask others to help defend you.

But you do not have the right to initiate force against the life, liberty and property of others.

Thus you have no right to designate some other person to initiate force against others on your behalf.

You have the right to seek leaders for yourself, but you have no right to impose rulers onto others.

No matter how officials are selected, they are only human beings and they have no rights or claims that are higher than other human beings.

Regardless of the imaginative labels for their behaviour, or the number of people encouraging them, officials have no right to murder, to enslave or to steal.

You cannot give them any rights that you do not have yourself.

Since you own your life, you are responsible for your life.

You do not rent your life from others who demand your obedience.

Nor are you a slave to others who demand your sacrifice.

You choose your own goals based on your own values.

Success and failure are both the necessary incentives to learn and grow.

Your action on behalf of others, or their action on behalf of you, is virtuous only when it is derived from voluntary mutual consent.

For virtue can only exist where there is free choice.

This is the basis of a truly free society.

It is not only the most practical and humanitarian foundation for human action, it is the most ethical.

Problems in the world that arise from the initiation of force by government have a solution.

The solution is for the people of the earth to stop asking government official to initiate force on their behalf.

Evil does not arise solely from evil people, but also from good people who tolerate the initiation of force as a means to their own ends.

In this manner, good people have empowered evil people throughout history.

Having confidence in a free society is to focus on the process of discovery in the marketplace of values, rather than to focus on some imposed vision or goal.

Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth, and typically results in unintended, perverse consequences.

Achieving a free society requires courage—to think, to talk and to act—especially when it is easier to do nothing.

Only 35% now believe in man-made global warming

2010-02-17T06:39:00.003-05:00

Robert Moon writes in the Examiner:

According to a new Rasmussen poll, only the Democrat base (35%) now thinks climate change is man-made, rather than a naturally-occurring, cyclical phenomenon. Those who disagree now make up nearly half of the electorate (47%).
This comes on the heels of multiple scandals involving the doctoring of evidence at the highest levels (as I noted here and here) and the utter decimation of this already bogus "consensus" of experts (as I noted here). Even leading Green Scare peddlers are now admitting that there are huge discrepancies in their own theory (as I noted here).
As I have said since the beginning, these alarmist frauds and their war on science will eventually be exposed as their absurd climate scaremongering digs them further and further into a hole.

The Democratic base will believe anything that furthers enslavement to all powerful government, so this is not much of a surprise.

2010-02-17T06:24:00.002-05:00

Some "gates" courtesy of Mark Landsbaum of the Register:

Fold this column up and lay it next to your napkin the next time you have Al Gore or his ilk to dine. It should make interesting after-dinner conversation.

climate gates ...

2010-02-17T05:27:00.002-05:00

The following is from our friends at Strata-Sphere:

Mark Landbaum of the Orange County Register lays out a very comprehensive list of problems found to date with the IPCC report. He identifies 19 big problems that have culminated in the dawning public realization that this whole man-made global warming thing is a farce.

I can only add a few more items to his extensive list:

Pachaurigate III: It has been well established that Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, serves on the board of numerous green companies and organizations and is slated to become as rich as Bill Gates on the CO2 schemes being proposed under the guise of global warming. The green is all about greed it seems.

GISSgate: In response to a freedom of information request NASA’s GISS was required to produce a series of emails, which in turn revealed that (a) NASA admits the current warm period is not historically different from the period around 1921-1950, and (b) that there has been no sign of global warming in North America or the US. How is global warming possible when it is not ‘global’?

Coolergate: The real killer is the global temperature itself, which has been cooling since 2000, and not showing any warming since 1995 – according to Dr Phil Jones, previous head of CRU. In addition, Jones admitted there is no data to overturn the long held scientific theory that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was as warm or warmer than today. Jones admits lack of data in other regions was used by Mann and others to make up the idea the MWP was cooler, but lack of data is not the same thing as proxies showing cooler temps!

It is a great list to clobber the few die-hard Al Gore groupies with.

Update: I guess we can now add Hurricanegate to the list.

End of Empire

2010-02-11T06:58:00.003-05:00

The US National Debt Clock tells that today the official US National Debt breaks down to around $40,000 per individual. If you then consider the total unfunded liabilities of Washington, the liability for each American citizen is over $177,000.

This massive debt, piled on top to the plummeting property values, joblessness, forclosers, and tight or no credit tells me that the USA is done. This is good news for the rest of the world; as long as we do not start a world war to end it all. (a real possibility)

Michael S. Rozeff shows his hospital bill for his own birth ...

2010-01-25T07:55:00.001-05:00

Now, here’s what this hospital bill says on it. I will surrender some privacy, but it’s worth it. It’s written to my father For Wife. After the name of the hospital, the city, and the hospital administrator’s name come the financial details. These I vouch for because otherwise you will not believe me:

To Room and Service from 6/5/41 to 6/16/41
1 week 4 days at $31.50 a week	$49.50
Delivery Room	10.00
Drugs	1.75
Laboratory Work	1.00
Anæsthetist	5.00
Formula for Baby from 6/5 on	1.50
Use of Delivery Room for Circumcision	5.00
Total	73.75

All right, the cost of living has changed. The CPI (Consumer Price Index) was 14.7 in June, 1941, and it is 203.9 today. That’s up by a factor of 13.87 (=203.9/14.7) So we can adjust the $73.75 cost by multiplying it by 13.87. That gives $1,023.

Freedom

2010-01-25T07:10:00.003-05:00

Lew Rockwell:

What seems to have escaped the current generation is the notion that was once called freedom. Let me be clear on what I mean by freedom. I mean a social or political condition in which people exercise their own choices concerning what they do with their lives and property. People are permitted to trade and exchange goods and services without impediment or violent interference. They can associate or not associate with anyone of their own choosing. They can arrange their own lives and businesses. They can build, move, innovate, save, invest, and consume on terms that they themselves define.

In this he is exactly right. Modern Americans have decided to trade small comforts for their very freedom in letting the nanny state control their very lives. It is sad to see a free people trade their freedom for a few "happy meals".

Eat More, Weigh Less: What It Is

2010-01-19T14:13:00.002-05:00

From an article on the Ornish book:

Eat More, Weigh Less: What You Can Eat

Ornish counsels that we will find success not by restricting calories, but by watching the ones we eat. He breaks this down into foods that should be eaten all of the time, some of the time, and none of the time.

The following foods can be eaten whenever you are hungry, until you are full:

Beans and legumes
Fruits -- anything from apples to watermelon, from raspberries to pineapples
Grains
Vegetables

These foods should be eaten in moderation:

Nonfat dairy products -- skim milk, nonfat yogurt, nonfat cheeses, nonfat sour cream, and egg whites
Nonfat or very low-fat commercially available products --from Life Choice frozen dinners to Haagen-Dazs frozen yogurt bars and Entenmann's fat-free desserts (but if sugar is among the first few ingredients listed, put it back on the shelf)

These foods should be avoided:

Meat of all kinds -- red and white, fish and fowl (if we can't give up meat, we should at least eat as little as possible)
Oils and oil-containing products, such as margarine and most salad dressings
Avocados
Olives
Nuts and seeds
Dairy products (other than the nonfat ones above)
Sugar and simple sugar derivatives -- honey, molasses, corn syrup, and high-fructose syrup
Alcohol
Anything commercially prepared that has more than two grams of fat per serving

That's it. If you stick to this plan, you will meet Ornish's recommendation of less than 10% of your calories from fat, without the need to count fat grams or calories. Ornish suggests eating a lot of little meals because this diet makes you feel hungry more often. You will feel full faster, and you'll eat more food without increasing the number of calories.

From WUWT

2010-01-19T13:51:00.002-05:00

What Does it Take to Be a Science Expert?

19 01 2010

Source : Daily Mail

Parents, please encourage your children to become “science experts.” The perks are excellent – prestige, travel, publicity, conferences – your fifteen minutes of fame. And all you have to do is make bigger claims than the last expert.

Here are a few favorite gems :

March 10, 2006: It’s official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.
This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10mar_stormwarning.htm

Dec. 21, 2006: Evidence is mounting: the next solar cycle is going to be a big one.
see captionSolar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011 “looks like its going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. He and colleague Robert Wilson presented this conclusion last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/21dec_cycle24.htm

OSLO, Feb. 29, 2008 (Xinhua) — The polar cap in the Arctic may well disappear this summer due to the global warming, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, said on Friday.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-03/01/content_7696460.htm

27-Aug-2007
Will oceans surge 59 centimetres this century – or 25 metres?
When Al Gore predicted that climate change could lead to a 20-foot rise in sea levels, critics called him alarmist. After all, the International Panel on Climate Change, which receives input from top scientists, estimates surges of only 18 to 59 centimetres in the next century. But a study led by James Hansen, the head of the climate science program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and a professor at Columbia University, suggests that current estimates for how high the seas could rise are way off the mark – and that in the next 100 years melting ice could sink cities in the United States to Bangladesh
http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/news_repository/will-oceans-surge-59-centimetres-this-century-or-25-metres

Glaciers on Snowdon’ warning by climate expert
Jan 12 2010 by Rhodri Clark, Western Mail
THIS winter’s prolonged cold spell could be a taste of things to come for Wales – with glaciers a possibility within 40 years. That’s the chilly message from a leading Welsh climate expert who has warned that global warming could paradoxically trigger a collapse in temperatures in western Europe.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2010/01/12/glaciers-on-snowdon-warning-by-climate-expert-91466-25576951/
The Cooling World
Newsweek, April 28, 1975
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm
Proof of life on Mars by year-end, says NASA expert
Washington, Jan 16, 2010 (PTI) Is there life on Mars? The most intriguing question for everyone on the Earth would be answered by American space scientists by the end of this year, a NASA expert has claimed.
According to David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, the fact that Mars has bred life will be confirmed this year and the historic discovery will not be made on the Mars, but here on Earth using the chunks of the red planet.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/471015_Proof-of-life-on-Mars-by-year-end–says-NASA-expert

4 January 2007
2007 – forecast to be the warmest year yet
2007 is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998, say climate-change experts at the Met Office. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2007/pr20070104.html
Hot summer on the way, predicts Met
Sunday 8 April 2007
Britain set to enjoy another sizzling summer after new evidence from the Met Office suggested above average temperatures for the season. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/apr/08/weather.theobserver
Climate could warm to record levels in 2010
10 December 2009
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20091210b.html

From The Sunday Times January 10, 2010
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6982310.ece

Jan, 2008
Under my plan of a cap and trade system electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, even, you know, regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqg7ThZB04

November, 2009 GORE: It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy – when they think about it at all – in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/11/18/al-gore-earths-interior-extremely-hot-several-million-degrees

Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past Monday, 20 March 2000 According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. ”Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html

1998 Was Warmest Year Of Millenium, Climate Researchers Report ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 1999) — WASHINGTON, D.C. — Researchers at the Universities of Massachusetts and Arizona who study global warming have released a report strongly suggesting that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium, with 1998 the warmest year so far. Researchers have also found that the warming in the 20th century counters a 1,000-year-long cooling trend. The study, by Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm Hughes of the University of Arizona, appears in the March 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union. The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/03/990304052546.htm

December 14, 2008 “The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over,” Obama said on Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. “We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now that this is a matter of urgency and national security and it has to be dealt with in a serious way.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/14/obamas-global-warming-cha_n_150947.html

March 24, 2006 London ‘under water by 2100′ as Antarctica crumbles into the sea http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article694819.ece

February 20th, 1969
NYT: Expert Says Arctic Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/07/24/nyt-expert-says-arctic-ocean-will-soon-be-an-open-sea/

Arctic Ice Cap to Become an Open Sea in 10 years Oct 14, 2009 http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/280517

Senate race ...

2010-01-19T04:31:00.003-05:00

"Martha Coakley, the Democrat candidate for US Senate for "Teddy Kennedy's seat" in Massachusetts, as Middlesex County DA kept in prison a victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice during the witchhunts of the 1990s against supposed Satanic child abusers, based on pressured testimony by very young (and therefore unreliable) children. The case against the Admiraults was admirably exposed by the Wall Street Journal, who made it overwhelmingly clear that they were the innocent victims of a radical feminist delusional assault. But thanks to Martha Coakley's efforts, Gerald Amirault was left to rot in jail long after it was clear he was innocent." (James Lewis)

The vote is today with the Republican challenger in the lead. It will be an interesting outcome.