In 150 years the airborne fraction of CO2 has not changed significantly

SEE HERE So what does this mean? Well it means that the capacity of the atmosphere and the oceans to absorb and retain CO2 hasn't changed in 150 years, the same 150 years in which the largest change in human use of hydrocarbon based fuels has taken place. It looks like another piece of data that global warming (we're currently in a global cooling phase by the way) isn't caused by human activity, or at least human activity isn't changing the dynamics of the retention of CO2 by the earth/sea/atmosphere system. This is another small drop of rain on Al Gore's parade.

HERE'S A LINK to some of the global warming dissenters. The so-called consensus is anything but a consensus. 31,000 scientists signed a petition saying they didn't believe AGW was settled science. They must be all dupes right? This is politics not science.

SEE HERE for John Coleman's view. It's a scam! There is no crisis only the wailing of alarmists who are paid for their alarmism by big grants and recognition. What qualifies Al Gore, for example, to say anything about climate science? He's raking it in and his carbon footprint is about twenty times of any of the rest of us. SEE HERE How much he cherishes the environment should be obvious.

The World's Leaders Are Insane

SEE HERE I suppose this isn't that much of a surprise, when a world leader, well a numskull prince anyway, says when he dies, he wishes to return as a killer virus to "lower human population levels" you have to wonder at the sanity level of our leadership throughout the world.

This is the kind of thing that shows how out of touch with reality our leaders are. I don't want leaders whose idea of a fantasy is coming back as a lethal virus to kill off the people they are supposed to serve. There is way too much of thing kind of stuff and it's all poorly motivated in chicken little science and doomsdayism. My fantasy in the new year is that all the leaders of the world get a life.

Is Climate Alarmism the New Keynsianism?

SEE HERE Not my analogy but an interesting one. The idea is that Keynes' economic intervention which is supposed to stabilize the economy doesn't do a very good job, and that Climate interventions are cast from the same mold. Well I think the analogy limps, but if the idea is that government intervention is almost always a bad idea, then I think they are right on.

Are We Nuts or What? The Story of the Spartan Boy and the Fox Reminds Me of Western Societies and Islam

SEE HERE Well Newt Gingrich is pointing out the obvious, that we tend to treat terrorists better than our own citizens, giving them the benefit of the doubt which opens all Americans up to much greater threat of becoming victims. Perhaps it is time to recognize that Islam in not a religion of peace and that many mosques are simply dens of terrorists in the making. I'm not sure how you deal with a religion that has a record of religious intolerance and violence as a matter of principle. What I am quite sure of is that were Islam the majority my freedoms as a Christian would be sharply curtailed. I would be targeted for not only taxes but become vulnerable to abuse and even occasional pograms. That is the history of Islam. The latest issue of the Homiletic and Pastoral Review includes a review SEE HERE
by James V. Schall, S.J. a Jesuit I know better from his articles in Gilbert! the magazine of the American Chesterton Society. The review is of "111 Questions on Islam" by Samir Khalil Samir, S.J. who is billed as a leading expert on Islam.

The book was originally written in 2002 in Italian. This edition is a 2008 translation. The question for all Americans is whether or not there is a position for Islam within a secular Judeo-Christian society that does not put that society at risk? For if there is not, then we should be doing something to ensure our own safety and the safety of our children and our childrens' children. The night is far gone and the states of Europe should be watched to see how this evolution develops. They will be the first to experience the growth of Islam within.
SPARTAN BOY AND THE FOX

Is This True?: If So It's Chilling ...

SEE HERE This story claims that Obama is preparing for Civil War in the United States and turning the U.S. military against the civilian population. While I am no particular fan of Obama, this story is pretty chilling and if it is true it smacks of a manufactured crisis to seize total power. SEE HERE for Russian economics professor's speculation. SEE HERE for another supporting story. Back in March the Canada Free Press SEE HERE was suggesting the possibility that Obama and the Congress were intentionally working to foment a civil war. I thought that was over the top then and I still think it is over the top. I think they just drink their own koolaid. Still the result could be the same. What about the prospect of a civil war?

Is this true? Well I don't know. I find it bizarre to even have to make such a call. My own thought is that it's likely overdrawn. The United States military is sworn to uphold the constitution of the United States, so to get them to direct hostilities against the American people would take some doing. It seems unlikely that Barack Obama will have the support to accomplish anything like is suggested in these articles. But in the spirit of vigilance it is important to consider all the possibilities.

I read an interesting factual article by the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein who was a naval officer trained at the United States Naval Academy like my father which pointed out that the military makes plans for all kinds of unlikely eventualities based not on probability but on capability. For example, it is highly improbably that Canada would attack the United States, but what if it did? What would we do? It is the military's obligation to assess capabilities and to determine the proper response even on the unlikely scenarios. I thought that was an interesting and correct perspective then. It may well be that that sort of thinking underlies these stories. But of course I don't know. "Be prepared!" is always a good counsel, not just for boy scouts. Is this probable? I don't think so, but it does depend in part on the consequences of the administration's actions such as devaluing the currency and attempting to impose unconstitutional measures on the states which could lead to tenth amendment actions. I personally don't believe Barack Obama has the credibility to generate this kind of action. But one never knows.

While I was surfing around trying to do some research on this I came ACROSS THIS which is a website on the same kind of theme. Judging from the folks it cites I think it is well to the left of me which is interesting and yet it ran the theme picture I put on this article. Go figure?

Did You Ever Wonder Where Obamanomics Will Take Us?

This is a sad commentary on the results to be expected when liberals get in the driver's seat and drive political correctness down everyone's throats. The problem is simple enough. The liberal worldview is counterfactual. What that means is that it doesn't correspond to reality. When you do things that don't correspond to reality then what happens is usually something bad and liberals are so out of touch it is usually something that goes beyond bad to awful. We've already seen runaway governmental spending under Obama. It's anyone's guess how long it will take for the big inflation bubble to set it, but set in it will. We have to come to our senses and start making our policies correspond to realities.

What ClimateGate Reveals: Science Is Broken

SEE HERE The problem is evident enough. Not only is the U.N. an inappropriate venue for pushing for climate change, but science is broken and in denial. Science as propaganda is a deeply disturbing, broken, and morally bankrupt process. We see in the ClimateGate revelations the intentional distortion of data to serve a political agenda, we see the intentional attempt to destroy other scientists to prevent them from presenting alternatives, there is the suborning of the peer review process, there is the malicious manipulation of data to disguise and conceal actual findings that disagree with the agenda, we see them trying to avoid releasing their data (scientists always release their data so that it can be checked and confirmed except in cases of national security) and on and on.

The bottom line: Not only has ClimateGate revealed the extent of the dishonesty among the global warming alarmists, but it has revealed a fundamental debasement of the scientific process by political forces seeking to advance an agenda. The left has been claiming that it's big oil or big gas or some other greedy corporate organizations buying scientists, when all along the scientists that were for sale were for sale to governments. Something should be done to reduce the risk of this kind of thing, the buying of scientists to advance government agendas, in the future.

I don't trust anything but data myself. But what we've seen here is scientists intentionally distorting the data. In science that is a serious offense. These guys should all be drummed out of the corps.

Propaganda: Pure and Simple

Here is the kind of mindless propaganda that children are being exposed to. Not a whit of sense given the reality. Man could be wiped off the planet and the weather would go on warming or cooling depending on the phase we are in. One of the analyses that I gave in the last post estimated that when clouds are taken into account man's entire global warming footprint is about 0.28% That a little less than 3 parts in a thousand. This is global hysteria and for this we're being asked to beggar the industrialized nations and in the process starve the less affluent nations for they will be the greatest victims. This propaganda needs to stop. We have far bigger problems to deal with and spending trillions for a non-problem to enrich the alarmists not only doesn't make sense, but is criminal.

Ten Minutes on Global Warming

I agree with most of this video, although whoever did the text that overlays some of the points badly needs a spelling lesson. Some of the key points:
1) CO2 is an important, essential nutrient and not a pollutant SEE HERE
2) Global warming is not caused by CO2. This is convincingly shown by the ice core data. Comprehensive slide show on ice core data. SEE HERE
See this on erroneous preindustrial CO2 estimates. CLICK HERE
3) Even if CO2 were causing warming, the fact is that the amount contributed to the environment by human beings (all activities) is quite small compared to natural sources so if we eliminated all of our contribution you wouldn't be able to tell from the weather. SEE HERE and you'll see the worst case is about 3.2% not counting water vapor with is the most influential greenhouse gas so is generally left out of the picture. (Gee does that make sense? Only if you're trying to fabricate a case that otherwise wouldn't even be a starter.)
4) These are not surprising facts they are evident to anyone who really does their homework.
An old piece by Timothy Ball. SEE HERE
5) That means that those trying to panic us into doing something are doing it for motives different from those they claim. It looks like a big power and money grab by those who seek to rule us. SEE HERE for a piece from RedState on the global warming profiteers.

HERE's JOHN STOSSEL ON THE TOPIC

CHECK OUT THIS for a fun read. A quick read looked pretty accurate to me. So you can start here. Reading blogs in general for global warming information is quite entertaining. I've seen more blogs saying "authoritative" things which are totally without basis in any kind of science just the opinion of a blogger who obviously (from their arguments) know nothing or very little about science. So you have to be very careful. It's a big problem when "so-called" scientists become politicized, because then you can't easily tell which way is up. A very key parameter is: 1) do they show the data?, 2) do they explain the data or just expect you to swallow it whole?, 3) does the explanation hold water? (i.e. can it be shown that the explanation leads to the data both forward in time and backward in time?), 4) how much "fudging" do they have to do? and do that admit to the "fudge"?

My favorite physicist, Richard Feynman, would say that if the science is really understood well, then it can be explained in terms that anyone can understand. I think that's true if you're Feynman, but it's a lot more difficult if you're not. But it is important to try.

Digging Into ClimateGate ... Who Did the Leaking?

SEE HERE Fun and games! It appears as if the Chinese may be implicated in the hacked email from the University of East Anglia which got the ClimateGate controversy started. It will be interesting to see if this story develops further. The whole notion of InfoWar is a fascinating one. Network security is a topic important to everyone in this internet age.

The Magic Money Machine

SEE HERE Well here's how it works while the money holds out. It's simple really. You go into competition with the private sector by charging very low prices. You can do that because you're taxing people's money, you're printing money, you're seizing resources and you're telling those who are needy that they are being exploited while you cut them a better deal by stealing from those who have something. It doesn't work for long, but while it works you are a hero and when it starts not to work you blame it on those same "bad guys" you've been blaming everything on all along. Then, often enough, there is violence and a pogram and at the end everyone is poor and starving and the whole system is in a shambles. Part of the problem is that people who don't really know any better believe the authorities. They wouldn't lie to them would they? It all goes back to Maggie's (Margaret Thatcher) saying: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

We've made a good start. Watch Venezuela to see how well it works. Wouldn't you like a 50 cent Big Mac? Gee, doesn't this sound like the Obama health care plan?

Are You Broke Yet? Don't Worry the Government Will Fix That.

Are you ready? Things are probably going to get exciting as inflation ramps up. The best thing to own in an inflationary period is debt since you get to pay it back in inflated dollars. The high yield curve is one sign of future inflation. SEE HERE

The First Reading Introducing Midnight Mass on Christmas Day

• The twenty-fifth day of December.
  
• In the five thousand one hundred and ninety-ninth year of the creation of the world
  from the time when God in the beginning created the heavens and the earth;
  
• the two thousand nine hundred and fifty-seventh year after the flood;
  
• the two thousand and fifteenth year from the birth of Abraham;
  
• the one thousand five hundred and tenth year from Moses
  and the going forth of the people of Israel from Egypt;
  
• the one thousand and thirty-second year from David's being anointed king;
  
• in the sixty-fifth week according to the prophecy of Daniel;
  
• in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad;
  
• the seven hundred and fifty-second year from the foundation of the city of Rome;
  
• the forty second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus;
  
• the whole world being at peace,
  
• in the sixth age of the world,
  
• Jesus Christ the eternal God and Son of the eternal Father,
  desiring to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming,
  being conceived by the Holy Spirit,
  and nine months having passed since his conception,
  
• was born in Bethlehem of Judea of the Virgin Mary,
  being made flesh.
  
• The Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

You Want These Clowns Running Health Care?

SEE HERE It never ceases to astound me how people can be talked into letting the government run anything. There's no such thing as an efficient government program. In fact there's no such thing as an effective government program, only some that are less inept than others. When the government does something right it's actually an occasion for celebration and it's news. From Katrina to Stimulus government involvement is one massive ... well the word commonly used in the military is too crude for this blog. SNAFU is as close as I'll go. But there's a slightly more accurate and slightly more vulgar summary of government intervention in anything. The folks that can't even get water to Katrina victims are not people you want helping you with anything important like health care. SLEAZE IS THE NAME OF THE GAME

Coming Home to Roost: Health Care? Give Me a Break!

SEE HERE There is something distinctly rotten in the whole Health Care Arena. When money makes the kind of spiraling round trips that it does when it's taxed, goes through layer after layer of bureaucracy each layer taking a bite, it all starts reminding me of those great globes of herring on the Blue Planet and birds, tuna, sharks, and dolphins all take their runs on them until there are no herring left and only bits and crumbs settle to the bottom. (Think of yourself as a herring.)

This is not about health care, it's about keeping the food train running. We have to get the government out of the health care business altogether, at least that's the case if you want to have anything left to pass on to your children and still have any health at all. This is not about health care, it's about the feeding frenzies of our masters. They are running out of money. Money, try to remember, is just an indication of what you've created by your productive work. Every time a tax is imposed some of your life is being sapped. At some point the whole system just grinds to a halt. Government is like throwing sand in the works of a finely tuned machine. It doesn't make it run better, it makes it less efficient and ultimately is freezes. We're entering the late stages of this process, or so it seems.

Merry Christmas Everyone! May the Blessing of the Christ Child follow you all through the year to come.

A Fascinating Response: Out Organized By the True Believers

A HEADS UP The Community Organizer in Chief has loyal troops who are being instructed on how to administer the koolaid. It's easy once you have the formula. Make everyone a family and turn off the critical sense. There, we've gottcha! "We're all family and of course we have your best interests at heart." "Wait until they're comatose to administer the serum." Then when it's over you're a little true believer like all the rest. Never mind that the people in charge are really thugs and scoundrels. They're part of the family dontchaknow. We're not going fast enough with the agenda? "We must complete the enslavement before they notice the smoke and mirrors."
"Ignore the man behind the curtain." CLICK HERE FOR AN EXAMPLE
That was a Christmas and health care oriented message. HERE IS A MORE GENERAL ONE Drink the koolaid and join the party. You too can be part of a cult.

Tigers Changing Stripes: Still Tigers

SEE HERE When are we going to hold our politicians' feet to a fire made up of principles and not let them willie-nillie change party affiliations as if the party label has no particular foundation in principles and policies? At least Arlen Spector was returning to his real affiliation. This guy is more questionable. The party label doesn't mean much if you can just rebrand yourself in an instant. I guess that means the party label doesn't mean much.

I've been watching these antics for many years. I'm about as cynical as they come when it comes to politics. I got involved and politically active in Minnesota with the Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan campaigns. I'm what the power and control freaks would call a doctrinaire conservative. But of course what that means is that I care about principle more than power. It means I have some integrity and don't sell-out my friends for a campaign donation or a promise of dollars spent in my district. Of course I've never been elected to anything so I don't have to deal with any of these issues. The ground may look different from the other side. But isn't that part of the problem. There is something toxic about going to Washington. We send bright shiny new legislators to Washington full of ideals and principles and things to do and they rather quickly learn to "play the game" and then they look like all the rest of the duplicitous, I'm for sale, political hacks. Don't know the solution! It sure looks like principled people are few and far between.

The Ongoing Snow Job: Don't Be Conned

SEE HERE I've always been annoyed by the shifting sands of congressional voting. Things like votes for cloture and votes on the bill, and votes to table and votes to amend and votes to clarify or all the myriad of votes that are conducted in the course of business.

My first real experience of this was some years ago when Tom Hagedorn was running to be reelected to his seat in congress as one of the Minnesota congressmen. I don't remember who he was running against but I went to a couple of the meetings that were held where he and his opponent debated. Hagedorn tied his opponent, who was much less schooled in the art of politics, in knots over what he supported or didn't support. The problem was that Hagedorn had voted on both sides of everything at one stage or another. So when his opponent said he was against something Hagedorn had the ready answer that "No he had voted to release the bill from committee." I remember his opponent would get angrier and angrier and then would go into meltdown, which was of course the idea. Hagedorn was playing to the opponent's lack of experience and frustrating him until he got angry. At the time I thought this was in some deep sense an evasion of the issues. But if you're going to play in politics you have to realize that this is common. It's mostly about being reelected and only rarely about principles or advancing the good of the whole. I think that is tragic in some ways, but it is the reality.

RedState is just highlighting one more example of "politics as usual." The republic is ill-served, but so it has always been. To change this dimension may required the redemption of man, something largely above all or our job descriptions, although we need to strive always for the greater good.

Don't Sell Your Overcoat, You'll Be Needing It!

SEE HERE Fifty years of global cooling predicted and CO2 vindicated as a factor in global warming. Of course this guy could be wrong, but it does show that the supposed consensus is one formed by a good old boys club that doesn't listen to anyone who disagrees. That's not science, it's not even polite. (Image is of local snow cover after the storm a couple of days ago ... we got 20" biggest snow fall since I've lived in Virginia in the past 20 years.)

The Preamble: It Conveys No Powers

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Apparently the Congress is deluded. (Not too surprising really given the way they've been acting of late.) They seem to think that the preamble conveys powers when in fact the main body of the Constitution clearly says that only enumerated powers are conveyed. It's clearly time to hold the government to the fire. They all take an oath to uphold the Constitution. It's fairly clear that a large number of them think that is not a real obligation including the president and the majority of both houses of the congress.

Renewable Energy? At Any Price? Any? ....

SEE HERE I personally think that most of the renewable energy folks are using that same kool-ade that the rest of the global warming nut jobs are using. The idea appears to be that some forms of energy are better than others based on ideology and not common sense or any other kind of cents.

Here's the deal. Mother Nature gifted us with a whole lot of coal, natural gas, crude oil, shale oil, and other stuff. If you burn any of it you get what you always get when you burn hydrocarbons and that's water and CO2. In the case of some materials you also get some impurities like sulfur which may have some slightly deleterious effects since it combine with water to become sulfuric acid which is environmentally a slight problem if it gets concentrated causes acid rain or attacking and causing damage long term to thing that don't care for sulfuric acid. So you do have to be careful and sensitive to the environment and what you are doing. That being said, CO2 is not a pollutant even in very large quantities.

Now the myth goes that you can replace all of the energy used with such exciting things as wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, and any other thing that will turn a generator. And it's true, more or less. The problem is that you can't afford those alternatives because they are very very costly and generally can't scale all that well to do what everyone wants, which is live pretty much the way they want to. Now why should we use more expensive technology in deference to less expensive technology? Why? ... the answer isn't very convincing frankly. The answer is because a bunch of ideologues think it's a better idea. Okay, there are always differences of opinion. Why is it a better idea? They say that it's renewable. That's a bit of a buzz word. They ought to also ask if it is scalable? A lot of the renewable energy doesn't scale very well.

Now that is a problem because it means that no matter how much money you spend you can't necessarily get there from here. The only long term solution is energy that is truly abundant. Solar energy would have that characteristic if it were easy to convert to the kind of energy we routinely use like electricity, but it isn't, at least not very efficiently.

Conservation is another strategy which really boils down to use less energy and what we have will last longer. I think that's a good idea. You first! As long as you can afford to use the energy what business do other people have telling you that you can or can't. I don't buy expensive clothes for example. Is it OK if I use the money I didn't spend on expensive clothes to buy energy and use it any way I wish?

What all these totalitarians want to do is tell other people how to live their lives. I think we'd be much better off with a free market in energy as in everything else. Then if we start running out of some particular form of energy the pricing mechanism of the free market will get people going to find alternatives that are cheaper to replace the resource that is declining. That's a system that actually works. What these other things do is give disproportionate power to people who want to run your life and who, by the way, don't really have solutions, just ideologies.

Of Course They're Just Honest Scientists ... :P

SEE HERE The idea that all this ClimateGate stuff is just some sort of anti-global warming dis-information being peddled by the dupes and deniers is the standard sort of evasion practiced by the increasingly dishonest core of global warming alarmists. I'm not sure what brand of kool-ade these folks are drinking but it's powerful stuff.

The truth is that this so-called science is so agenda driven that the people holding these views have been doing massive rewrites of, what do they call it, settled climate science, like erasing the little ice age and the Medieval optimum. Now I've been reading about them for at least thirty years, and they are so famous that they are linked with Galileo's observation of the sunspot minimums and there are tree core proxies that depict the Medieval optimum ... but none of that keeps the global warming alarmists from exercising their agenda driven pseudo-science hype and editing over 5000 pages of Wikipedia material to erase settled science and put in their propaganda. After all, it's for your own good that they lie to you.

Now don't just tell me this is science. It's not. You don't change other people's stories and science because you have ideas that are different. What they did was simply out and out fraud and the correct word is lying. They lied over and over again and distorted the record. It's not science when you're lying. They have no credibility. The emperor has no clothes and global warming is a case of overblown hype in the service of big government with an agenda of generating power and revenue. Don't expect any confessions soon. These kind of snakes brazen it out forever.

Tyranny of Fear: Brought to You by the Teleprompter President

SEE HERE Have you had enough yet? We are on the fast track to a new form of government. No doubt the Romans thought Augustus Caesar was a savior and someone the republic could count on. They were right in one way. They gave away their democracy for the security of bread and circuses and the tyranny of a centrally managed military tyranny and for five hundred years the military chose Roman emperors and the house of the people, the Roman senate became the repository of old sycophants and total non-entities and Rome faded. We are on the fast track to fade more rapidly since now everything runs in internet time. 2010 will be either the year we saved the republic or the year that the republic died forever. You pick!

If You Wondered: Consider the Tyranny of This Provision

SEE HERE Frankly this is simply outrageous. It goes way beyond outrageous to whatever comes next, super outrageous. The sheer gall of this congress is beyond belief. They pass a health care takeover bill and include provisions to make it impossible or nearly so to remove. What is the spirit behind that besides tyranny. It is the tyranny of the majority of course, but that was exactly the kind of tyranny that the founders found unacceptable which is why we are not a democracy but a representative republic. The founders, unlike students today, were steeped in the history of the past and the Athenian democracy as well as the Roman republic had both suffered from the evils of the tyranny of the majority. Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. I think we are well on our way.

This kind of law is designed to install a clique in positions that even the Congress would find difficult to repeal. Do you want an unelected, unregulated, board of whoever deciding on your health care. Welcome to the "Death Panels" and don't give me any bull about that's not what they are. They're never called that, nevertheless they will pass regulations that will decide for you if you should be treated. Last time I looked that should be your decision not someone elses.
Tyranny Rising! WATCH THE SENATE GOBBLEDEGOOK
HERE IS REDSTATE ON ITand HERE's IBD ON IT

An Interesting Idea: Came In My email

Congressional Reform Act of 2010


1. Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the possible options below.

A. Two Six year Senate terms
B. Six Two year House terms
C. One Six year Senate term and three Two Year House terms

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.




2. No Tenure / No Pension:

A congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.




3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security:

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund moves to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, Congress participates with the American people.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, server your term(s), then go home and back to work.




4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan just as all Americans.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.




5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.





6. Congress looses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.




7. Congress must equally abide in all laws they impose on the American people.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.




8. All contracts with past and present congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.

The American people did not make this contract with congressmen, congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

If you agree with the above, pass it on to all in your address list. If not, just delete.

An Accumulation of Inconvenient Facts

SEE HERE Thomas Sowell calls it here.
"The recently revealed destruction of raw data at the bottom of the global warming hysteria, as well as revelations of attempts to prevent critics of this hysteria from being published in leading journals, suggests that the disinterested search for truth — the hallmark of real science — has taken a back seat to a political crusade."
There are just too many biased actions that have been revealed by the ClimateGate emails to avoid the conviction that "science" has been sacrificed on the altar of expediency. Thomas Sowell, one of my collection of clear thinkers calls it a "political crusade." If it is a political crusade then it is not science. If it is not real science than it is also not at all trustworthy. It's time to recognize that global warming is a political strategy and not a matter of settled science.

Bribery Congressional Style: Isn't This Immoral?

SEE HERE I suppose when you get elected to Congress the normal laws of morality are suspended. That's right isn't it? It certainly looks that way. The behavior of our elected officials is a graphic example of how the current state of morality and statesmanship in particular has fallen. Apparently the average politician is simply for sale. When public servants are for sale, regardless of whether or not the sale price will help their constituents, it's called corruption. We have a fundamentally corrupt system. It's just being made very very public and evident by recent events. It's time for a clean sweep.

The Culture of Entitlement: A Recipe for Cultural Decline

C.S. Lewis

Click on the image for an hour and a half with C.S. Lewis, or as close as you can get on this side of paradise. David Payne does an admirable job of putting on the Lewis persona.

What's This?

What's this? Well it's an image that was on a site that my wife likes to frequent. What was hysterical was the caption.

This is the money you would have saved if you hadn't elected Obama.

I think it likely understates the reality.

The Zen of Cookies: A Beginning ...

Well it's true. I've cooked seven different kinds of cookies in the past few days ever since I got "400 Sensational Cookies" for myself. There is no particular reason for this except that I'm in denial that I have to prepare for my Spring classes and making cookies seems like a welcome substitute. I've also picked up other books for making cookies: 1) Taste of Home Cookies is the second book, and 2) The Great Christmas Cookie Swap Cookbook with 60 large batch recipes.

The Christmas season seems like a nice time to get into cooking cookies. One thing I've noticed is that most of the cookies I've undertaken so far seem to operate to a pattern. I think when push comes to shove there are likely only a few ways to put together a good cookie and you can sort of reverse engineer the cookies by looking at the recipes. That makes it possible to create new cookies that are just minor variations on a theme.

I've started building a spreadsheet of the cookies I've cooked so far and the common elements will end up sorting the cookies into varieties because of the recipe similarities. Seems like fun, especially for a real cookie monster.

Giving Away the Store: Obama's Principle Accomplishment

SEE HERE The current government seems to have no slighted clue as to how wealth is created. They are all people who have never worked for anyone that created any. The result is a whole government filled with people who think wealth is created by theft. That of course makes them little more than thieves. Then because they only steal (tax) because they don't know how wealth is created and so can do little to create any of their own, they justify themselves by assuming that like themselves those that have wealth have stolen it from others.

Of course this is an infinite regress and since no wealth is created the assumption must be of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that those evil rich are hoarding, right? Of course the reality is quite different. Most of the innovation and new job creation comes from small businesses started by entrepreneurs who seek to make their fortune by creating something new.

Large government and large business tend to collude like Chesterton's "Hudge and Gudge" and squeeze the little businesses and the individual. The result is spreading poverty and a few that are well positioned to steal do, and the rest of us are the ones stolen from. It is always presented in glowing terms of the public interest. Follow the money is always good advice. It always goes from your pocket to their pocket with very few stops along the way.

We Have Forgotten ... Something We Can Ill Afford to Do!

SEE HERE The lessons of history are many. Victory is to the swift and the determined. Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I was looking at ancient sayings today and I looked at quite a few. An example is:

"Οι αιώνες αντιγράφουν αλλήλους." (αρχαιοελληνικό ρητό)

• "The centuries copy each other." (ancient Greek saying)
• Equivalent to "History repeats itself."

We're currently repeating a whole series of bad history starting with spending ourselves into poverty. The celebrated "New Deal" did that despite all the hoopla about how great Franklin Roosevelt was. We have forgotten the importance of virtue and we are teaching a generation of children to be venal and low and for that we can hardly not pay a price.

I rather love the great mottos which were on the temple of Apollo at Delphi such as "Know Thyself" and "Everything In Moderation", both concepts we seem not to be teaching our children. I think that all children should be steeped in the three old Greeks: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle for the thought that emerged from Greece is the father of Western Civilization.
SEE DELPHI TOUR DELPHI

When we forget the lessons of history, of virtue, dedication, of goodness, truth and beauty we forget that we are men and sink to the level of animals. Much of the discourse that I see in the media these days seems to turn on nothing but ease and pleasure and satiation. If we don't change that then we are finished as a civilization and our legacy will be ashes.

Environmentalism: The New Socialism

It's for your own good. Shut up and say "Yes master" and bow to your betters in Congress. They have your best interests at heart. Never mind the big planes, and big houses, and SUVs ... they're a more privileged form of life. They're saving the planet from you riff-raff. You should be grateful. Stop sobbing. Isn't this the hope and change you voted for?

Growing Tyranny ... One Step At A Time

SEE HERE Here's how it works, no lie. First government passes laws that require some sector of the economy to do something stupid for good sounding reasons, ex. give low interest loans to poor people so they can more easily buy housing. This leads to problems since of course merely mandating an unsound practice doesn't make it any less risky. A dislocation develops. Government postures and blames the resulting problems on the free market sector that they forced to engage in the risky practice in the first place. Greed, they shout. Irresponsible profiteering, they shout. Then in a Kabuki move they create political theater by passing regulations that give government previously unprecedented power to regulate the target industry, ex. banking, wall street brokerages, etc. It's all in the name of responsibility and stability they say. One little step at a time and the creeping monster of centralized government slowly absorbs the free market system and freedom with it. They might as well be the blob.

Cap and Trade

SEE HERE Cap and Trade is an incredibly bad idea. Basically it is a high cost tax with a huge bureaucratic administration load that accomplishes pretty much nothing even if carbon were a problem and not as it truly is an essential nutrient for plants across the whole planet. It's not all that different from taxing breathing. The idea that this is even being considered is a sign of how far from reality our illustrious leaders have strayed. The two plus decades of global warming propaganda have brought us to this place. Don't plan to continue to enjoy your current status if this insanity continues. It will increase the cost of everything appreciably for no discernible benefit. Welcome to feel good government!

A Conservative Program from Morton Blackwell

SEE HERE I detest the language which uses marketing terms to describe political parties. Things like "brand identification" or "we need to restore the Republican brand" and other language that implies that a political party is an assemblage of features of convenience to sell something.

The reality ought to be that a party embraces a consistent body of principles which are grounded in truth and embody a vision that free men and women can support. I think that is the true nature of a political party. We see in the actions of the Democratic party since they have achieved dominance that their principles are totalitarian in spirit. Freedom can not be long sustained when that spirit leads the republic. Morton Blackwell has long been a conservative voice and his message in today's link should be thoughtfully considered.

This Ought to Scare the Hell Out of You

SEE HERE Yup ... Ft. Hood was no accident. It was due to a sustained politically correct death wish that the United States has. We have terrorist apparatchiks in the pentagon in trusted advisor roles. The Ft. Hood affair is simply one protruding ulcer of a much more widespread plague. We seem to have been drinking the koolaid that says that we have to knuckle under to every diseased culture on the planet in deference while dissing our own. It's time to restore some sense of perspective. THE REALITY

Russians Say the Brits are Lying About Climate Data

SEE HERE and HERE Just when we have Climategate it appears that the Russians are taking a closer look at the data from their weather stations that the global warming alarmists have been using and they are not impressed. Perhaps more accurately they are impressed that the usual suspects are cherry picking the data again to get the result that their masters desire. This isn't science, it's manipulation to achieve control and power.

... experts at the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis say the British dossier used statistics from weather stations that fit its theory of global warming, while ignoring those that do not.

The retort?

... Critics of the Russian report also point out the huge vested interests of the Russian state, which is rich in oil, coal and gas, to avoid action needed to fight man-made climate change.

Sound familiar? If you question these climate warming alarmists who are pushing for the most draconian controls on CO2 emissions which will accomplish nothing but generate huge burdens on all in the form of taxes and bureaucracy, if you question them you're a tool of their favorite demon "big oil, coal, and gas". This long repeated mantra gets very old as it becomes more and more clear that these folks are cooking all the books and profiting in the process. It's not science, it's just plain old fashioned corruption. Cross my palm with silver and I'll say anything you want. That's what's going on. It probably didn't exactly start that way, but these things are progressive, one baby step at a time. As my mother used to say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." I'll just opt for honesty. CLIMATEGATE VIDEO

Turn-About Is Fair Play

SEE HERE It's fun to see Greenpeace get some of its own back. I thought these pranks were priceless.

Discernment? What discernment?

SEE HERE Mark Alexander begins his Patriot Post with a quote from Patrick Henry:
"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth -- and listen to the song of that syren, till she transforms us into beasts. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not?" —Patrick Henry

The painful truth is that Barack Obama is not qualified to be president of the United States either by experience, political philosophy or temperament. The process broke down all along the way. The nominating process failed in discernment. The popular press instead of fulfilling its traditional role became a cheer leading section of drooling sycophants. Finally the voters failed to distinguish between a genuine patriot and an empty suit. Now with an out of control congress that lacks any sign of being accountable, the people are left with the difficult question of how to cope, but the more important question of how to make the process more robust so that this kind of thing does not happen again.

What About Our Moslem Chaplains?

SEE HERE There are troubling issues surrounding Islam. We constantly hear how it is a religion of peace and yet whenever some group of monsters kills large numbers of Americans there is celebration from the community of this religion of peace. The events at Ft. Hood are a case in point and one doesn't have to range far to enlarge the population of examples. What is seriously difficult to do is to find examples in the other direction. A prudent person would take the view that "actions speak louder than words" and assume on the grounds of massive examples, that Islam is an intolerant religion which seeks to supplant using any means possible all the others. The embedding of chaplains of Islam from the very heart of Islamic radicalism in the military is troubling in the extreme. What should be done? I don't know, but I think that there is clearly a problem.

Unsustainable Debt As Far As The Eye Can See

SEE HERE The problem with debt is that it has to be paid back. The problem with government is that it pays its debts with other peoples' money and has almost no checks and balances to impose fiscal restraint. That made me think about Maggie Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. She was a wise lady and feisty, both characteristics I admire in both men and women. The quote I was thinking of was "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money" This seemed appropriate for the spending spree we're seeing since Obama came into office. Any excuse seems good enough to run up a tax, a fee, a bait and switch scheme like "Cap and Trade" and to spend trillions we don't have and if it doesn't do what was promised, spend trillions more. So when I ran into this second quote from Maggie Thatcher I thought, "spot on" — it applies to.

She said "Socialists cry "Power to the people", and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean—power over people, power to the State." That is what we are fighting today and if we lose the fight it may be generations before we are again free men and women. SEE HERE

Could Sanity Be Returning? — Possible If Unlikely

SEE HERE The latest Zogby poll says 49 percent of Americans say they are only slightly or not at all concerned about climate change, while 35 percent are somewhat or highly concerned. Well that's actually promising. Perhaps everyone is coming to their senses. I wouldn't hold my breath however.

I've been reading Lawrence Solomon's book "The Deniers." It's an easy to read book which on a popular level documents the positions of quite a number of respected scientists who deny global warming or more accurately deny the extremist positions on global warming supported by the UN's IPCC.

The book shows time and time again how the alarmists have exaggerated what begins as reasonable science. One example is the lifetime of CO2 in the environment which the alarmists have exaggerated from 5-12 years to decades and centuries to try to make their case. They also cherry pick their data to pick only data which can be twisted to support their agenda. That's not science. It isn't even honest. So the deniers should be put in contrast to the liars. When you deny a lie you are supporting the truth.

Governmentium (Oldie but Goodie)

Lawrence Livermore Laboratories has discovered the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv) , has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, but takes from 4 days to 4 years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 - 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of morons promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

Gotta Give Redstate their Due: A Triple!

I get the RedState email every day along with a zillion other things that float in either because I'm signed up or because someone decides I just have to see this (whatever it happens to be) ... from the latest "send this on or you'll go to hell" to "isn't this just too cute for words." I usually click on a few of RedState's stories to see what's coming around. Today they had some I really enjoyed.

SEE HERE The first I'll mention is the "Religion of Government" — just in case you wondered why the left is so hard over on government this explains a lot. They derive meaning from government, it's their religion. Wow! And I always thought it was a tyrant and a damn unforgiving one at that. But just in case you thought they might have a point or be connected to reality in some way there was another story.

SEE HERE which is on how they have been wrong on just about everything related to health care. So the picture painted is rather surreal. We have a whole bunch of folks totally disconnected from reality who are running the show down in Washington spending money like they print it (oh they do print it), it does grow on trees, it's made out of trees. Why didn't I think of that? This is clearly a bunch that badly needs a wake up call, maybe at 2 in the morning from angry constiutents.

SEE HERE Just to finish off the picture we get a quote from Robert Heinlein (one of my favorite science fiction writers of all time and a Naval Academy graduate like my father) and a non-quote by Chesterton (but nowhere found in Chesterton's writing but it deserves to actually be quoted:
"When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything." If Chesterton didn't say it he should have.

But the point of the story is that the loony liberals running the Democratic party believe in some pretty strange stuff. I'm not sure why anyone would trust these folks to do anything and get it right.

100 Reasons Not to Worry About Global Warming

SEE HERE I actually only follow one rule when I'm evaluating science claims. That rule is: "Show me the data!" Science is about observations and theories confirmed by observations and it is not about such things as concensus or agreement. It is also not about modeling. I've written my fair share of models in my time. Most of the models I've written have been performance models which compared human performance to machine performance. Models are always based on some data set and some theory, often the data is incomplete (this is especially true in the case of climate data) and often the theory contains large elements of guesswork and conjecture. There are two things you look for in a theory: 1) backward fit to the known data, and 2) forward prediction. Backward fit is actually fairly easy to achieve by weighting things so that the backward predictions "fit" the data. It's often called data fitting. Forward prediction is much more problematical because you don't know what is going to happen. You can't fake a forward fit. What the forward fits tend to show in the case of climate data is that they don't fit. That means that the predictive power of the models is not very good. This usually means that the fits contain a lot of "ad hoc" factor fudging to get the best fit possible.

I was pretty tickled today when I ran into a citation about Al Gore who had quoted some scientist about Arctic melting. There appears to be a lot of speculation about whether the Arctic ice cap will melt (BTW Gore accurately cited a climate scientist's claim that the Arctic ice would soon melt SEE HERE but this seems contradicted by records that show the Arctic warming hasn't changed since 1958 SEE HERE so once again — follow the data.) but the data doesn't seem to support all the hoopla. Back in October there was information published that the Arctic ice melt was the lowest on record. SEE HERE The bottom line is that there isn't much evidence that things have changed all that much. Any big piece of blue will get Chicken Littles running around saying that "The Sky is falling."

The Source of Our Problems: Gubment!

Yup, they're at it again. SEE HERE It isn't enough that meddling with the mortgage system to insist that banks make high risk loans to people who couldn't afford home loans led to one of the biggest housing bubbles in history and the near meltdown of the economy, but now the president wants to start the cycle up again. Politicians simply don't learn from their mistakes and that is partly because they make other people pay for them. It's time we made them pay for them by putting them out to pasture. The idea of term limits comes to mind. It's not a popular idea with politicians since they imagine themselves a better form of life and we ought to recognize how privileged we are to have them as our masters. I personally think we could do better with a telephone book and a roulette wheel, at least then we wouldn't get 80% or so lawyers.

Support the SEALS

GO HERE and sign the SEAL Petition. Brave men protect us and they deserve our full support. Please sign the petition to dismiss the charges (frivolous frankly) against these brave soldiers. MORE

Lack of Realism Starts At the Top

SEE HERE Obama thinks he deserves a B+ and if health care passes at least an A-. This kind of "realism" is testimony to his total disconnect with reality. He's a cheering section of one. Maybe he didn't notice the largest mass march on Washington in history, 1.2 million strong, who think he's about nothing less than tyranny. What exactly has he accomplished? He's gotten a Nobel prize for nothing. Bowed to everyone in sight. Apologized for America to everyone who would listen. Negotiated with our enemies without getting anything in return and dissing our friends. This is accomplishment for a man who has none. For the rest of us it is a tragic spectacle as the government prints money and more and more Americans are out of work. We'll spend our way to prosperity and beggar our grandchildren. The only solution an administration that has noone working in it that has ever worked is to spend other people's money. That solution has a guaranteed end and it's in sight. When the money runs out the party is over for everyone!