iPandora

Elena Kagan in concert with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists fudges the facts regarding partial birth abortion to support her employer, then President Clinton.

Climatologists fear those with differing viewpoints so much they nudge numbers and massage facts, not substantially, but just enough, and very carefully control who gets access to their data.

A study finds children raised by adults living in homosexual relationships turn out OK, and then it turns out the study was run by a militant lesbian and contained unrepresentative samples that could not be construed in any way to represent a reasonable portrait of the general population.

I think it’s about time we set the 19th century idea of scientific infallibility to rest. It’s been dead a long time and the corpse is starting to stink.

Fourteen years ago, to protect President Clinton’s position on partial-birth abortions, Elena Kagan doctored a statement by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Conservatives think this should disqualify her from the Supreme Court. They understate the scandal. It isn’t Kagan we should worry about. It’s the whole judiciary.Kagan, who was then an associate White House counsel, was doing her job: advancing the president’s interests. The real culprit was ACOG, which adopted Kagan’s spin without acknowledgment. But the larger problem is the credence subsequently given to ACOG’s statement by courts, including the Supreme Court. Judges have put too much faith in statements from scientific organizations. This credulity must stop.

The problem with science is the problem with religion is the problem with corporations is the problem with the poor: we’re all merely human. We’re incapable of unbiased action or thought, no matter how carefully we try.

As conservative talk show host Michael Medved says, he admits he’s biased and is up front about it. No one can talk with him and not be aware of where he is coming from. And it is precisely this honesty, this up-frontness about his perspective that means you can learn the truth from him. It’s not that conservatives always tell the truth and liberals always don’t, it’s that when you know someone’s perspective and know they are not trying to obfuscate, you can see how their story fits into the bigger picture of Truth.

Compare the unabashedly conservative hosts on the Fox News channel. No one expects them not to be conservative (and even the liberals there trumpet the fact) and therefore, because there is no guise of infallibility or ruse of absolute even-handedness, they are the most watched news network, and the fastest growing too.

CNN pretends to be totally unbiased, and thus tip their hand. MSNBC proves everything.

I don’t care where you come from nearly as much as I care that you’re up front about it.

Being up front about your opinion shows that you respect others to be capable of informed decisions, and it shows you’re not so conceitedly ignorant you’ve convinced yourself you’re the only one right.

Science is made of human observation.The existence of biases in each and every human being means all observations and perceptions are biased as well. To deny the bias it to enhance the bias and the resulting skew in all your resulting data. You may be able to claim the scale cannot lie but you’re still going to interpret the data the way you want.

Science is not the holy pursuit of the epitome of truth, it is the headlong search for rationalization, for proving we’re not wrong.

The sooner we accept that science is just another human endeavor and therefore subject to all the faults and failures and stunning triumphs of all other human endeavors, the sooner we can get on with this crazy little thing called life.

Speecy Spiicy, Hotsy Totsy

American parents tend to feed their children bland foods to avoid potential allergies or just because that’s what Dr Spock or the latest parenting magazine told them. Easy on the stomach, and the poop ain’t so bad.

Parents in other countries tend to feed their infants whatever they are having, and their children experience the full gamut of cultural flavors from very early ages.

And yes, I’m advocating for American parents to be more like foreign parents. Look out the windows, there be pigs in the air!

First, bland doesn’t necessary mean easier for the stomach. Take ginger, for instance. A very sharp and strong flavor, nobody would call it bland. But is the natural and effective remedy for upset stomachs? Ginger. No citations here, just try this: Purchase a bottle of Reed’s Ginger Brew. If you can handle the Extra Strength, get that. Then fast, and when your stomach is most uncomfortable, usually just after the normal time for the next meal, drink the Reed’s. Instant stomach relief.

Second, you’re limiting your child’s future ability to eat and enjoy wide varieties of food, including many foods you and I take for granted.

This article chronicles the embarrassment, the worries, the challenges of being an adult picky eater. One telling comment?

Amber Scott, of Enon, Ohio, has eaten only about 10 different foods since she was 3 years old.

Not that exposing your children, when young, to significant varieties of food will totally preclude such problems, but they would take a significant bite out of them.

The Office

Empty office space keeps rising. This is not a good sign for the economy that is on the mend, according to certain people whose grand plans are fully in swing here. Corporations are using less and less office space, which means they aren’t hiring.

The really scary part?

Job growth and office-space use are closely intertwined. While some major users of offices, such as federal regulatory agencies, have been expanding, big banks and corporations have lagged behind in increasing their real-estate footprint, according to some analysts. That is a sign that these larger companies have been slow to return to their pre-recession staffing levels, a contributing factor to the persistently high U.S. unemployment rate.

Yea, that’s a sure sign of a growing and recovering economy. Regulators are gearing up for more business. Only one problem, regulators business is to keep real businesses out of business.

My Buddy Hugo

The ones really benefiting from the drilling moratorium? National oil companies. That means President Obama’s marxist buddy Hugo Chavez is loving us right now. Was this a quid pro quo? Or was it yet another unintended consequence of a short sighted and dishonestly supported policy? I’d say the latter, but wouldn’t be too surprised at the former.

Oh, and this would be the same Venezuela that just stole oil rigs from US corporations and we heard nary a peep in protest for this thuggish thievery from the government that is supposed to be supporting US interests abroad.

Muhammed In Space

Perhaps a new round of “Let’s Draw Muhammed” is in order. It would probably improve our chances of NASA actually being less irrelevant than it already is going forward.

NASA has apparently been ordered to reach out to Muslim nations in an effort to improve goodwill. And NASA is the right agency for this why?

Former NASA director Michael Griffin says sympathetic nations will be drawn to us when NASA succeeds at great things, not when they’re given an inflatable space shuttle and commemorative plaque.

Griffin said Tuesday that collaboration with other countries, including Muslim nations, is welcome and should be encouraged — but that it would be a mistake to prioritize that over NASA’s “fundamental mission” of space exploration.

“If by doing great things, people are inspired, well then that’s wonderful,” Griffin said. “If you get it in the wrong order … it becomes an empty shell.”

Griffin added: “That is exactly what is in danger of happening.”

And the coup de’ etat?

He also said that while welcome, Muslim-nation cooperation is not vital for U.S. advancements in space exploration.

“There is no technology they have that we need,” Griffin said.

Once again, why is it NASA’s job to reach out to any nation?

I’d draw Muhammed in space alongside the Muppets.

Just A Reminder

Some people still claim that Liberals are the bigger and better givers, both of time and money. They’re wrong. Badly wrong.

People who said they were “very conservative” gave 4.5% of their income to charity, on average; “conservatives” gave 3.6%; “moderates” gave 3%; “liberals” gave 1.5%; and “very liberal” folks gave 1.2%.

And this cannot be explained by religious versus secular giving:

The 2008 data tell us that secular conservatives are now outperforming their secular liberal counterparts. Compare two people who attend religious services less than once per year (or never) and who are also identical in terms of income, education, sex, age and family status — but one is on the political right while the other is on the left. The secular liberal will give, on average, $1,100 less to charity per year than the secular conservative. The conservative charity edge cannot be explained away by gifts to churches.

Or by giving of time versus giving of money:

Q. Monetary giving doesn’t tell us much about total charity, does it? People who don’t give money probably tend to give in other ways instead, right?
A. Wrong. First of all, there is a bright line between people who give and people who don’t give. People who do give time and money tend to give a lot of it. According to the Center on Philanthropy, the percentage of givers donating less than $50 to charity in 2000 was the same as the percentage giving more than $5,000. Similarly, the same percentage of people who only volunteered once volunteered on 36 or more occasions in 2000.

Second, people who give away their time and money to established charities are far more likely than non-givers to act generously in informal ways as well. For example, one nationwide survey from 2002 tells us that monetary donors are nearly three times as likely as non-donors to give money informally to friends and strangers. People who give to charity at least once per year are twice as likely to donate blood as people who don’t give money. They are also significantly more likely to give food or money to a homeless person, or to give up their seat to someone on a bus.

And it is not offset by political giving either:

Perhaps you suspect that the vast political contributions given to the Obama campaign — $742 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, versus $367 million for the McCain campaign — were crowding out charitable giving by the left. But political donations, impressive as they were this year by historical standards, were still miniscule compared to the approximately $300 billion Americans gave charitably in 2008. Adding political and charitable gifts together would not change the overall giving patterns.

Conservatives continue giving more in economically difficult times, decreasing their giving by less than their liberal counterparts:

Economists measure the “income elasticity of giving” to predict how much people change their giving in response to a particular percentage change in their income. It turns out the response in 2008 was dramatically different for left and right. For instance, a 10% decrease in family income for a conservative was associated with a 10% decrease in giving. The same income decrease for a liberal family led to a 16% giving drop. In other words, if this relationship continues to hold, the recession will almost certainly exacerbate the giving differences between left and right.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding: Modern liberal ideas are selfish ideas.

Rajendra K. Pachauri

Or was it “I lie to get paid”?

The U.N. climate chief presided over a report which has been used to justify huge increases in U.N. spending on certain pet projects of the climate lobby which has been found to be, um, faulty.

The factual inaccuracies were found prior to the climate change conferences which were full of attempts to globalize governments, spend more money on pet projects, and various other things, and yet they were not corrected or retracted before the conference.

So now, understandably, there are calls for this scientist-cum-bad liar/opportunist (hey, sounds like the majority of people calling for more government control in the name of global cooling, or was that warming?) to step down, and he won’t.

Because there are no external moral forces compelling him to act morally, his own power and desires are his only guiding light.

So we strip his power and/or shame him.

Oh, did I mention the climate panel Rajendra heads won a Nobel Prize for that lie report?

This polar bear doesn't give a hoot about Al Gore

Gary Sutton, writing on Forbes.com, reminds us it wasn’t too long ago the official government position on the environment was that we were in the beginnings of the next great ice age.

More than the reminder of the untrustworthy nature of such pronouncements and official positions is the why behind such windy terrors. For the government it is control of the populace through fear.

It’s the job of elected officials to whip up panic. They then get re-elected. Their supporters fall in line.

Al Gore thought he might ride his global warming crusade back toward the White House. If you saw his movie, which opened showing cattle on his farm, you start to understand how shallow this is. The United Nations says that cattle, farting and belching methane, create more global warming than all the SUVs in the world. Even more laughably, Al and his camera crew flew first class for that film, consuming 50% more jet fuel per seat-mile than coach fliers, while his Tennessee mansion sucks as much carbon as 20 average homes.

For the researchers, scientists, and academics going along, it is money, support for their own strains of research.

You can’t blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed’s mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today’s scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.

Gary wraps up his arguments with a reminder that the climate is not the only weapon of FUD employed by those seeking power and control:

I can ask “outrageous” questions like that because I’m not dependent upon government money for my livelihood. From the witch doctors of old to the elected officials today, scaring the bejesus out of the populace maintains their status.

Sadly, the public just learned that our scientific community hid data and censored critics. Maybe the feds should drop this crusade and focus on our health care crisis. They should, of course, ignore the life insurance statistics that show every class of American and both genders are living longer than ever. That’s another inconvenient fact.

Read The Fiction Of Climate Science.

Where’re the headlines?

Interesting

Reason.org reports on a study published in October 2008 in the Journal of the American Medical Association which busts the balloon of “common knowledge” regarding who clogs emergency rooms and doesn’t pay.

Show of hands: who believes it is the uninsured who use a disproportionately high amount of medical care in US emergency rooms while paying a disproportionately low amount of their bills?

I did. In the face of a lack of public evidence to the contrary and because it sounds plausible. It passed the “stink” test.

Well, it’s deodorant is wearing out and the reek of the rotted corpse is becoming harder and harder to conceal.

(R)esearchers at the University of Michigan … concluded that “available data do not support assumptions that uninsured patients are a primary cause of overcrowding, present with less acute conditions than insured patients, or seek [emergency room] care primarily for convenience.”

(P)atients with public insurance, such as Medicaid and Medicare, are more likely to crowd into emergency rooms for minor complaints than are the uninsured. Only about 17 percent of E.R. visits in the United States in the last year studied were by uninsured patients, about the same as their share of the population.

Additionally:

A 2007 study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine looked at charges and payments for 43,128 emergency department visits between 1996 and 2004. “What surprised us was that uninsured patients actually pay a higher proportion of their emergency department charges than Medicaid does,” reported co-author Reneé Hsia, a specialist in emergency medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. “In fact, 35 percent of charges for uninsured visits were paid in 2004, compared with 33 percent for Medicaid visits.”

Read the whole story here.

In other words, it’s the people already on that paradigm of balanced care, the public option, that are the dead weight on the system. They are leeches. They suck eagerly at the public teat like so many thirty-year-old, basement dwelling, XBox playing nerds living off their own mother’s inability to to force their children to grow up.

In nature the parent birds push their own children out of their nest in a fly or fall choice.

We humans have compassion and a sign of a healthy society is more likely found in their care for their poor rather than the lack of the poor. But to forcibly take from the productive members of society and play the enabler to the myriad sponges found around every willing and leaky faucet is not to help but to kill.

“Where are the headlines?”  a friend asked.

With the wonder of the internet and the example of Big Government and the slaying of the beast ACORN in recent weeks, we must embrace this truth about a fundamental change in our society: we are the 4th estate.

Each and every one of us have the power, through viral spreading of messages through the networks of facebook and youtube and twitter, myspace and orkut, blogs and the wider web, to build a story, however under-reported in the mainstream media, into a tsunami which cannot be ignored by those we’ve sent to do our bidding in DC and statehouses across this nation.

Are you doing your part in this brave new world?

Government Is Big

Bringing home the glory in the Duh! category today, the Washington Post, reporting on Obama’s Executive Order mandating federal agencies monitor and decrease their greenhouse emissions and environmental footprint, noted the government is big.

Administration officials said they could not estimate the federal government’s carbon footprint, since it has never been measured before, but the government ranks as the nation’s largest energy consumer. It occupies nearly 500,000 buildings, operates more than 600,000 vehicles and employs more than 1.8 million civilian workers.

Read the whole story here.

Very big.

500,000 buildings?

Five Hundred-Thousand buildings?

What in heaven’s name have we allowed the government to do in order to meet our needs for an accountable system of government?

I feel like Frankenstein’s creator: “It’s ALIIIIVE!”.

And well I should. After all, as an involved member of this greatest nation on God’s green earth I’m one who votes and talks, exercising the rights guaranteed by a Constitution won with the blood of thousands and defended by the blood of millions. And therefore I’m responsible, maybe not for the problem directly, but for the solution certainly.

I’m not one to get into the whole green thing. The clerk at Bed, Bath & Beyond said she wanted to use the bamboo kitchen utensils I was checking out because she’d heard they were more environmentally friendly. I told her I used them because they work better than regular wood utensils, nothing green about it.

But here’s something real greens and conservatives and concerned citizens across the country can all get behind: cut back on the footprint of the government by cutting back on the government.

In a galaxy far, far away…

…where President Obama lives. He was joined recently by the members of the Nobel Prize Committee.  It’s probably more true to say they’ve been there all along, considering who they like to reward.

But breaking information regarding the nature of that world has come to light courtesy of a small, fuzzy friend”

The Real Winner

Ironic Surrealism has the lowdown on the real winner of the Nobel Peace Prize:

The real Peace Prize winner.

The fawning over Obama has not yet ceased in the mainstream media.

BBC headlines a story this morning with the appallingly thoughtless “Obama to curb vehicle emissions“.

First off, grammar police here to say: didn’t your mother tell you that every word in a headline or title is capitalized?

Now, to address the fallacy here: The President is not tasked with invention, nor with development. His expect forte is not to spearhead industrial progress, nor is his path laid alongside that of Carver, Watt, or Fermi.

The purpose of the President is to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. And nowhere within that auspicious document, envied and imitated by many and equaled by none yet, does it state the role of the Government of the United States or the President thereof have either the responsibility, prerogative, or power to direct industrial invention.

The Times of London leads with the much less misleading but no less grammatically faulty  “Obama to introduce emissions curbs on gas guzzlers“.

It is true I parts of me would prefer the no less true but much more provocative headline “Obama Corks US Industry, Innovation”.

The BBC article begins by quoting the talking points of the White House Press Release:

The plan will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil by 2016 and be the equivalent of taking 177 million cars off the road, White House officials said.

Words sure to bring warm fuzzies to everybody with fuzz between their ears, for sure.

I’m completely for innovation making things more efficient and development making things more clean.

I’m all for using the incredible wealth and depth of technology to preserve the environment. I love clean air, camping, tree climbing, fishing, and all the good things tha come with living in a clean place.

But arbitrary requirements which have only shown in history to destroy and hobble and prevent and impoverish have no place here.

A dirty little secret about gas mileage and lower emissions is that, with current technology, there is a bit of a trade off.

My current car qualifies in the state of California as PZEV: Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle. It is a small SUV, crossover-type from Mitsubishi. It is in the same emissions category as the Hybrid Toyota Camry. But it would fail Obama’s new “standards”. I only get 20-25MPG. Good for this car, but much less than the 35MPG proscribed by our Inventor In Chief.

One thing consistently noted in the reviews of this vehicle was that Mitsubishi decided to go with lower fuel economy to achieve the lower emissions.

On it’s face this trade-off doesn’t make much sense: burning less gas should mean less emissions, right?

But when you take into account all the various factors that affect emissions, compression in the engine, efficiency of the catalytic converter, richness of gas mixture, you will find that the cleanest burning calibration of the various elements is not the most energy efficient.

And, according to the Times of London article, these regulations and constraints will cost us more:

New vehicles at present average 25mpg, with most cars required to reach 27.5mpg and light trucks 23.1mpg. New Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules passed by Congress are already expected to add an extra $700 to the price of a new vehicle, and today’s announcement will add about another $600.

So in this economically difficult time the Savior of the Earth is costing each family who needs a car an extra 5-10% of the normal cost. So those claims about how these changes will make it as though there are 177 million cars aren’t lying, except for the “as though” bit.

It won’t be an “as though”, it will be fewer cars. It will be reality.

This is a slight commentary on Chipotle (the restaurant chain) and how it symbolizes the significant superiority of the free market economy and accompanying extreme wealth and their many benefits to the world at large.

Have you eaten at Chipotle? If not, you should.

It’s not really Mexican food, per se.

It’s more like Starbucks does Mexican food. We all know Starbucks isn’t really coffee, but it’s still really good and we’re willing to pay a lot for it.

Chipotle uses fresh ingredients and a limited number of choices in an efficient and modern atmosphere to serve quality food at reasonable prices.

Kinda like Henry Ford: You can get anything you want at Chipotle, so long as it’s a burrito (not completely true, but I’m suffering under a plethora of metaphors and similes today. Sorry).

Anyway, it’s good. I like it. My wife does too. And lots of other people too.

Chipotle uses it’s efficiency structure, derived from it’s owner, McDonalds Corp’s,  excellent experience at high-volume, low-cost supply-chain infrastructure management to maintain significant profits while maintaining reasonable prices.

Unless they were making tons of money from us eager eaters, Chipotle would not be able to be such a force for good so far as the environment is concerned.

Chipotle uses it’s leverage with it’s sour cream supplier, Daisy, to make sure the cows that give their milk to the Chipotle sour cream cause are not fed any hormones of any type. A non-hormone injected cow will not produce anywhere near the same amount of milk as one who is kept hormone-high. Which means that the “cleaner” milk costs more. If Chipotle were not making tons of money, it could not afford to reqire this better milk.

I probably couldn’t taste the difference between hormonal sour cream and non-hormonal sour cream, but I’m happy to be enjoying stuff that doesn’t  cause so much trouble to the cow.

Chipotle’s beef, pork, and chicken likewise come from free-range animals not injected or force-fed. This means the amount of usable meat from each animal is much less than ones that are artificially “enhanced”, lowering the profit and raising the cost of each animal.

All because I pay 5.35 for my loaded steak burrito, all these animals are able to enjoy better lives and provide me with my enjoyment in a more natural, healthful way.

Could an eatery in a poor nation support the same level of “sustainable” resource management?

It’s not that we can compel them to behave in a certain way. If the way they raise their cows raises the costs beyond what their economy can support, they’ll starve.

In a hierarchy of needs, basic human needs come before animal comfort. If feeding the cows in destitute South American and African nations means the people will be able to afford beneficial red meat while saving more money so their sons and daughters can attend school, that’s a trade worthwhile.

As their education level rises, their production will speed, efficiency will rise, and the average wealth of their economy will increase until they can afford places like Chipotle and the less efficient, but more friendly methods of production.

So don’t hate the economy, your wealth and ease, or the rampant consumerism that drives much of our lives these days. It’s not all good, but it’s far from all bad. Americans give and give and give more, by orders of magnitude, than anywhere else on the planet. We produce more per unit of labor, and we own more per person than anywhere else, and it leads to a continued cycle of growth and giving.

By working hard and excercising a responsible or even an irresponsible level of gratitude to God for His beneficence to us in giving to those without, we cause more good.

God did not punish the men who used their business acumen to double His granted funds, neither will He begrudge you trying hard, with ethics and moral behavior, to maximize your economic potential.

Now go and sin no more. And eat at Chipotle.

“(U)nless you’re a character on “Heroes,” genes don’t mutate fast enough to have caused an 18% increase in childhood food allergies between 1997 and 2007. And genes certainly don’t cause 25% of parents to believe that their kids have food allergies, when 4% do. Yuppiedom does.”

Joel Stein in the LA Times points out the psychosomatic aspects of the significant majority of food allergies.

I don’t have an answer to this: How did the fearless and free generations who so enjoyed their hyper-sexual and hypo-responsible ’60′s and ’70′s fall into so much fear and fearmongering?

Brain cells fried by drugs perhaps?

Global warming? Bring it on. Warming trends have more often than not accompanied times of incredible growth and wealth and social development and health and general prosperity. Besides, the science is not ‘in’ in the way many claim.

Nuclear energy? Your children will not grow two heads or three arms. Trust me.

Lead poisoning? From clothes? You’ve got to be kidding me!

When did we get so far into this culture of fear that we’re requiring lead testing of second-hand clothes? I wore hand-me-downs and second-hand clothes for most of my youth… wait, maybe that’s part of my problem.

The people who are affected by such broad-reaching policies are those who most need access to inexpensive resources. Not those who are up to their necks in consumer debt and buying $50 shirts for their kids sporting the latest tawdry ‘popular’ entertainers name or likeness, but those who are making ends meet by shopping at consignment shops and second-hand stores. Instead, many such stores are being forced out of business after February 10th.

Fear and extremism go hand in hand. Extremist ideas are born from fear and breed fear.

I choose not to live in fear and instead act with reasonable consideration for real threat and no consideration for imagined ones.

Words to truly live by: “Hakuna Matata”

Yes, I’m really off my rocker this time: words to live by courtesy of a Disney movie? Of course!

I’ll take my wisdom where I can find it.

In the news today there is a mea culpa without the “mea culpa” bit.

The media can make or break a story: report a sensational bit of blood however far-fetched it is and the Evening Alphabet Soup can lend credence to the slimest of fabrications.

Take HPV and the vaccines released recently: overnight there was a frenzy about how every young girl needs to get these vaccines. Especially the part about government knowing best: parents who did not want to have their little girls inoculated against sexually transmitted diseases (because every father who loves his daughter is a pervert) were considered worse than priests in the ‘dark ages’.

I don’t have daughters (yet) and I would be against inoculating for any sexually transmitted disease. It’s not that I want them to contract them, it’s that odds are heavily against their needing such a vaccine. Your children may be animals without self-control, but that’s no reason mine should be too.

Well, the media loudly proclaimed that every little girl needs a lollipop and Gardasil, and now they can eat it: the efficacy of the drugs are being questioned, seriously.

I’m not too concerned about one little dust up over some popular (and cash-cow if it were mandated) drug. I’m concerned about the idea that anything good must be rushed.

From the innocuous: Anybody watch “The New World” and like it? (raises hand) I loved the fact that this movie takes it’s time to tell a rich and moving story. Sit down and watch it. Turn off your clock and turn the DVD player around so you can’t see the time. Forget your appointments. You’ll have to. And you’ll find yourself enjoying it almost like you’d enjoy a good book. No instant gratification here.

To the important: The environment. Important? Yes! Jump to seeding the entire sky with silver oxide to force moisture accumulation to jump-start carbon dioxide processing? Not on your life. It will not be over today or tomorrow (despite what the Evening Alphabet Soup’s favorite movie says. We have time to work together to increase our energy efficiency and continue our amazing work managing this amazing planets incredible resources better than we have. That is one thing this nation has done better than anyone else.

To the political: Change for change’s sake. Heh. Have I got some excellent ocean-front property in Kansas to sell you.

So, while all y’all are running about like chickens with your heads cut off screaming about how the sky is falling while rubbing the lump the tennis ball left you. I’ll be over here getting things accomplished.

Quiet please! I’m enjoying this thunderstorm.

Also on StopTheACLU.

As most of you know, I wrote a note about global warming not too long ago. A friend of mine wrote a note himself with a different focus than mine, arguing that global warming is well documented and those who oppose it are sticking their heads in the sand. I’m sure he knows more than I do, but in the interest of discussion, clarity, and knowledge, I thought I would share these articles I found and see what you all think of them.

Apparently there was a big UN report that 2500 scientists from around the world signed off on claiming that global warming is in fact occurring, it is caused by greenhouse gases, humans are most definitely the cause, and it has a detrimental impact on the environment. I don’t know if this is one of the consensus studies commonly studied but the articles I read lead me to believe that, as is so often the case, the real story is far more complicated and nuanced (or just different). So with that I have two links, one to a blog, the other to an article. The blog I found helpful because it was written by a scientist who worked on some NASA reports a while ago. He gives a good background explanation of how these large reports tend to work. If you have time I would read him. The other article talks about how the actual IPCC report was put together and why the claims can be misleading. Let me know what you think and without further bloviating (yep, I do watch O’reilly from time to time):

Blog:
http://thecoloradoindex.typepad.com/the_colorado_index/2008/07/the-ipcc-is-lyi.html

Article:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7553&page=1