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?
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.
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.”
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
“(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.
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.
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):
It’s been a while since I’ve posted but recently I’ve been writing a fair amount about a variety of issues. So hopefully these next several posts are thought provoking. I would greatly appreciate any feedback or thoughts you may have about the arguments and/or writing style of my posts. That being said, here are my thoughts on global warming:
I see four issues that need to be addressed before we can adequately approach the problem:
1. The first point we must establish is: Is the Earth really warming at a significant pace? I’m skeptical but open to convincing that this is the case.
2. The second point: Is this warming caused by humans or is it natural? I know less about this point, but there are many intelligent people who think this is a natural phenomena — a cycle the earth goes through.
3. The third point: Are the effects of global warming harmful? Now I want to clarify here. I’m referring to the temperature increase alone. Obviously smog, carbon monoxide, wanton destruction of forests, etc. are bad. But is the temperature of the earth rising a bad thing? I’m not sure, no one really knows. Maybe it will be a good thing. Growing seasons might be longer, and right now many more people die of cold every year than of heat. Again, just some thoughts, I don’t think a compelling case has been made for either side.
4. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is it worth spending trillions of dollars to try and fix? People talk about market solutions like a carbon tax and so forth. Those are NOT market solutions. They are government solutions that allow for better individualized actions that are like a market. But how does a government know what the right level to set the tax at is? Who is deciding the carbon tax but politicians who are more beholden to special interests than voters. Furthermore, carbon taxes will create huge inefficiencies in the market. It will make everything that needs energy to be produced (which, by the way, is everything) more expensive. I think one commentator put it well when he said we are sacrificing the poor of the world on the altar of radical environmentalism. Sure we are wealthy here in the US and can afford some of these inefficient policies. But as we have seen with ethanol subsidies, our domestic policies affect the rest of the world, especially poorer countries.
Our best approach to solving this problem is to better define property rights and environmental regulations at a local, rather than national or global level. Cities and states should work to clean up rivers and emissions, based on clear demonstration of harm caused by the pollution to individuals, not some abstract and highly questionable global warming effects. As human beings one thing is certain, that no matter what happens, we will learn to adapt and improve our environment, whatever it is. Wealth is a key tool by which we will be able to face rising global temperatures, hurricanes, tornadoes, war, famine, etc.
There are several things which caught my eye today, so consider this another installment of I, Pandora’s “Around The World”.
First, from the pen of Thomas Sowell comes an essay on race politics: “Mascot Politics“:
Years ago, when Jack Greenberg left the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to become a professor at Columbia University, he announced that he was going to make it a point to hire a black secretary at Columbia.
This would of course make whomever he hired be seen as a token black, rather than as someone selected on the basis of competence.
Would not it be so much better to just hire the best secretary? And if they were black, all the better. Even looking at that one individual from the ubiquitous perspective of identity politics, that one black secretary, having achieved their high success through their own hard work and having overcome all comers would have done provided a better and stronger role-model for thousands and millions of other than one hundred secretaries preferentially promoted due not to their ability, but to the color of their skin. Something, incidentally, they had nothing whatsoever to do with and therefore can claim no honor for.
So it would seem that this (primarily) liberal fixation with promoting based on immutable characteristics will only continue to cheapen people.
It is a wonder the liberal in need of a secretary can get anything accomplished if they are willing to write-off potentially qualified candidates in favor of one conforming to an arbitrary stricture predetermined.
So then conservatives take of the world of bureaucracy by employing qualified secretaries regardless of their race and get so much more accomplished we’ll rule by fiat.
Next, the Czech President Klaus is ready to debate Gore on Global Warming.
Klaus, an economist, said he opposed the “climate alarmism” perpetuated by environmentalism trying to impose their ideals, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.
“Like their (communist) predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality,” he said.
“In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat – this time, in the name of the planet,” he added.
Klaus said a free market should be used to address environmental concerns and said he opposed as unrealistic regulations or greenhouse gas capping systems designed to reduce the impact of climate change.
McCain the hot air maverick should take note. The Global Warming issue is yet another attempt by Marxist/Communists to enslave the world in thrall to their totalitarian dystopia.
Memories of his old friends in Hanoi should be sufficient to change his mind, or else he is no man.
Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit, who is openly gay, hailed the grey, concrete memorial as a long overdue acknowledgment of the repression of homosexuals, 50,000 of whom were convicted by Nazi courts during Adolf Hitler’s 12-year dictatorship.
“The monument consecrated today is a reminder to us of the horrors of the past and draws our attention to the degree of discrimination that currently exists,” Wowereit said.
“Great efforts will still need to be undertaken before the sight of two men or women kissing here or in Moscow or elsewhere on the planet is accepted by society in general.”
How easy it is to overlook the insignificant fact that the Nazi party was started in gay bars and by pedophiles.
The brown shirts and the Nazi youth grew out of a German young-mens group known for rampant homosexuality, and many of the leaders of the Nazi party were known for their preference for young boys.
So then, who were all these homosexuals killed in the Holocaust?
They were the effeminate “girly-men” homosexuals. Butch’s and pedophiles were the leaders, worshiping an enhanced manhood and ushering an era of super-maleness and domination. They could not brook weakness, either racially or sexually.
All this and more in “The Pink Swastika” (you can read the book in it’s entirety at that link). It is well researched and documented and a necessary read in today’s culture.
