Thomas Sowell Update: It Doesn't Sound Like America Anymore

SEE HERE When you look at what has been going on, you can only say that it doesn't sound like America anymore. Instead it sounds like the fastest rush to tyranny in history. It's time to stop and look around and say that this isn't the change that anyone except a few far left radicals were signing up for. Stop all this outrageous stuff.

Honduran Travesty

SEE HERE Tyranny is the real name of this travesty, U.S. Tyranny imposed on a small country that was enforcing their constitution. The U.S. should be ashamed of itself, but it isn't because the people in charge of our country right now are themselves tyrants. If you wondered whether the constitution matters this should give you pause. If someone else's constitution doesn't matter to these folks, then why would you expect ours to? Tyranny Rising!

Media Spin Despun with Facts

This is hysterically funny since it points out how phony the whole torture thing is. We have spin and phony baloney from the left. This video shows how phony it is. There is something ridiculous about so-called torture which doesn't leave any marks or actually injure anyone. So when the left calls things that are not torture, torture, then the rhetoric has degenerated to lying, disinformation and anti-American Kabuki run by our own media. Pretty outrageous. Liz Cheney is as courageous as her father.

Your Superiors In Congress Know What You Need: NOT

Now that the health care Obamanation has grown to almost 2000 pages of legislation that you're not particularly welcome to read because you get ornery and complain. Keep in your place and submit to your masters, you know, those "representatives" in congress who keep voting perks for themselves as they farm out the writing of bills that they don't read. Must be nice to have a sinecure where you don't really have to work because you have an army of sycophants at your beck and call. SEE HERE for the announcement of a bill where ordinary people who will only have to pay and pay weren't welcome.

Health care costs as much as it does because of government and not because of greedy physicians or greedy insurance companies. The reality is that government meddling always (that's right ALWAYS) increases the costs of goods and services. That's because the government meddling carries with it compliance costs and usually imposes added layers of bureaucracy and layers of rules and regulations, all in the name of fairness or equity or some darn thing that your 'masters' have determined that you need.

Is some oversight appropriate? No doubt it is, but it certainly isn't clear that government is a good source of oversight. For one thing government can't even keep its own house in order, why would anyone think it can keep anything else in order? No demonstrated competence entitles government to be trusted. Then there's the question of what is the biggest driver of growth in health care costs? I'm not sure because certainly technology costs something. The growing success of health care so that people live longer costs something. But probably the greatest cost is the fact that there is no restraint on legal suits and awards so that the cost of malpractice insurance is through the roof.

My doctor's aide nurse just a few days ago said that her malpractice insurance costs $400,000 a year and she's not a doctor. I hope she was exaggerating. What's behind those kind of costs is out of control suing for every less than perfect result. Sorry, perfection eludes all but God. Malpractice should not be about unfortunate results, but about incompetence and negligence. It's nice that juries feel sorry for people who have unfortunate outcomes, but bad things happen and unless they are due to incompetence, misrepresentation, or negligence or something like that, it's just the hand you were dealt, not a license to rape the medical establishment. Medical reform without tort reform is like a cake with only icing and no cake. It's nonsense. The government, made up mostly of lawyers, doesn't seem to want to stem the tide of nuisance legislation that penalizes the medical industry. That should tell you something about how much they really care about the receivers of medical goods and services. It's all about power. It certainly isn't about improving health care.

The Harsh Light of Reality

A devastating critique of President Obama was delivered today by Ron Kessler. SEE HERE
The point ultimately turns I think on both President Obama's inexperience and his ideological commitments. He is form over substance and plays the blame game while shirking personal responsibility. It's not any more complicated than that. Early on in the campaign he was tagged as a narcissist. CHECK THIS OUT from last year. With one foot in lala land and the other firmly planted on his inflated view of himself, it isn't too surprising that instead of reaction on substance he is flailing like a moth against the harsh light beating his wings against the only news organization with the moxie to call him out.

The Unseen Face of Lindsey Graham

If you ever wondered, Lindsey Graham is a loser. He needs to be replaced by a real Republican or anything resembling one. SEE HERE

He's certainly not the only senator who can't manage to make his committee commitments. The country club they call the congress of the United States (House of Representatives and the Senate) is full of folks who can't be bothered to write bills or read bills. In fact they do so little real work that we should probably reduce their salary to something like an honorarium so that have to find real jobs. They're certainly not doing the people's work. So Lindsey Graham isn't really a stand out.

Keep Puffing, the Bubble Will Never Break ...

In case you wondered about the great housing bubble, take a gander at this devastation. SEE HERE This is what happens when politicians decide to meddle in matters that they know little of and spread their false compassion around by forcing banks to make bad loans to help the people have houses who can't afford to pay for the houses. Part of the argument was based on the bubble mentality that you could not lose money in California real estate.

Do you think that the reality will cure the politicians of their tax and spend and mandate unrealistic programs mentality? What world do you live in? This will go on until we return to principles as the first order of business and stop playing mind games with ourselves. Believing six impossible things before breakfast may be possible for the White Queen in Alice (reference to Lewis Carroll for those who grew up later than I did), but for real people who live in a real world and not through the looking glass, the impossible things that politicians believe have consequences that real people have to endure and pay for. It's time to clean up the political system in the United States and return to first principles before there are no principles to return to at all.

The Tyrant In Chief "outted" by Thomas Sowell

Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to "change the United States of America," the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country. SEE HERE

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Thomas Sowell is on my short list of "clear thinkers" along with a few super thinkers like Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and among more modern minds, G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. Thomas Sowell was a Marxist when he was younger so he knows a young marxist when he sees one and Barack Obama is an America hater, ur "transformer" probably the bad kind of transformer, what do they call the leader of the bad ones? Megatron!! Whose motto on his own world was "Peace through Tyranny." Sound familiar? Wake up America, these guys are not good for us! Thomas Sowell is right. Tyranny Rising!

Environmentalists? or Merely Insane? ...

One has to wonder where the lunatics of Greenpeace think they get their charter to perform the various irrational acts of violence and personal property destruction that they do? What makes someone get that way? SEE HERE I suppose they imagine they are doing good, working for some higher purpose ... do you think that is why they do it? Or is it merely a rush that they get when they commit acts against their fellow citizens, destroying their property while chanting slogans?

I'm inclined to think it's actually a form of insanity. Insanity is when someone commits irrational acts for reasons that are of doubtful validity. That fits with most of the things Greenpeace is up to. Generally my impression is that these are just social radicals who are using environmentalism for a "cover."

Joseph Sobran calls the Republicans: "The Stupid Party"

SEE HERE It's not without cause that Joseph Sobran used to call the Republicans the stupid party. I've been active in Republican Party politics since the late 1970s when I got involved in Minnesota. My universal experience of the Republican Party is of conservative grass roots activists partnered in an uncomfortable truce with what we called "Country Club Republicans" — these were relatively wealthy, unprincipled folks who tended to want to run things but whose only real interest was winning. Their commitment to principles were generally fairly lukewarm and the older the wealth that underlay their positions the more lukewarm they were. The result has always been that the Republican Party has schizophrenia. I think it is time that we cut that umbilical cord and start being the party of principle and if we lose on our principles then so be it — it is dishonorable to win power and then betray your supporters. That's what Obama is doing and that is what many of our elected officials have done. Let's wise up and start insisting that principles need to be practiced and not just talked about.

The Right to Keep and Bear Arms shall NOT be Enfringed.

An armed citizen is a free citizen. An unarmed citizen is a slave to the state. The government that does not trust its citizens to be armed is a government that can not be trusted by the citizens.

"Birds of a Feather Flock Together"

Anyway that's what my mom used to say whenever she was warning me off some associations that she thought would be bad for me. She'd start by complaining about some aspect of their character and say she was concerned about me and then repeat that adage. I kind of liked it because it showed how much she cared about me and it was also good advice.

Now I'm inclined to offer it in light of the kind of folks that President Obama surrounds himself with. SEE HERE It's troubling if you believe that a man's friends tell you a lot about the man. I'm inclined to think that Obama was a really bad idea. He may well be a very intelligent man. You can't get a law degree without that check in the box. But he's also a dedicated leftist with a simply horrendous list of fellow travelers. Generally I'd not be all that concerned, after all what can one man do? It would appear that with the true colors showing of a whole lot of other leftists, the answer is quite a lot, quite fast, and with devastating results.

The End of the Republic: Tyranny Rising!

Tyranny Rising! This popped up in my Facebook account today posted by one of my friends. It's long (2 hours and 25 minutes) and scary. Is it valid? Take a look and make up your own mind.

Well I've watched it all now and I'm inclined to think it is pretty extreme. Is it possible, well maybe, and that's scary enough. The problem is that to believe it you have to imagine a global conspiracy and that's a bit too much like all the other global conspiracy theories that have been floated in my life.

But shy of that, on the less than total global conspiracy side, the idea that a bunch of oligarchs are trying to accomplish something like this isn't all that far-fetched. So where to draw the line? Also what to do about it?

We need to make sure that we act in a fiscally responsible way and stress distributed power and not centralized power. HERE's a review. HERE's another review. HERE's a Wikipedia piece on Alex Jones.

Palin Stands for Principle, Gingrich for Party Loyalty

I am so sick of suck-up politics I can't stand it. Newt Gingrich is supporting super loser Dede Scozzafava in New York race SEE HERE just because she was nominated by the RINO Republicans that hang out in New York. Meanwhile Palin supports the guy who didn't get the nomination, Doug Hoffman, because, wow, he's a real Republican and stands for all those things the Republican Party pretends to stand for when it is appealing to the grass roots. SEE HERE

Intellectually I like Newt Gingrich. When he analyzes an issue he's usually "right on" but he's also old school suck-up politics, just follow the party independent of principles and issues. It is that philosophy of abandoning principle and supporting individuals because they were nominated by RINO power brokers that has made the Republican Party so unreliable and untrustworthy. The Democrat Party is trustworthy. You can trust it to make all the wrong decisions and support all sorts of immoral positions. The certainty of Democrat unprincipled powergrubbing leftism is what has given the Republicans the sense that they can say one thing and do another. Well it's time to call them on that. We need to start sending a message that principles trump personalities, that principles trump party, and if we're not heard we need to start a revolution at the polls.

Sorry Newt — You're wrong and Palin is right! And unless Newt starts to get that I won't be supporting him for anything but emeritus Republican philosopher.

Just Drop It Why Dontcha!!

This whole climate nonsense is crazy, just plain nuts. It distracts hugely from issues that are really important like world hunger and poverty and the lack of human freedom around the world. Instead of focusing on real problems we concoct Chicken Little nonsense that has no factual basis in reality like global warming or DDT panic or all the other little crisis mongering that have marked my life. It's almost as if there is a regular industry in crisis manufacture. Some come and go rather quickly, but I've become pretty jaded after about the tenth or so crisis that fails to materialize but is used to muster panic and taxes. Obama was giving a speech and saying we can unite to fight whatever, and I thought "just more rah-rah hurry up and do something stupid." SEE HERE

Let's take a quick look ... hmmm... fossil fuels ... as long as you burn them cleanly they produce water and CO2. CO2 is not a pollutant nor is water. All the panic is sheer balderdash. So except that we're going to run out sometime in the next thousand years or so (counting coal) the only fundamental problem is that as they become more scarce they become more expensive. Enter nuclear ... we should be investing in nuclear to find better designs and easier ways to contain or even eliminate nuclear waste. It's a stupid idea that nuclear is not clean and that the waste can't be eliminated. I'd much rather live next to a shielded nuclear source that's passivated than a container of potassium cyanide gas that isn't maintained. Solar may work out ... after all the sun runs the whole show. It's a good deal that it comes up each morning because if it didn't we'd be history in short order. The other thing to think about is how much energy you really need?

If we take advantage of all the communication technology we have we can reduce the consumption of many energy sources so that they last a lot longer. Everything is a trade off, but creating crises, especially phony ones is just a way to eliminated thinking so you can get people to do otherwise dumb things. Stop just reacting and start critically examining the claims before reacting. You're being manipulated.

HERE's AN INTERESTING YOUTUBE
I don't necessarily endorse the views in the video, but I think the skepticism about crises in general is healthy. All crises should receive serious debate and not be used as an excuse for rushing to judgment. AN EARLIER BRAMBLE

What Does It Take to Be a Successful President?

Failed presidencies are a dime a dozen, but the American Thinker back at the end of August identified the Barack Obama presidency as on a track for spectacular failure. SEE HERE The question that pops into my mind however, is why success or failure is attributed to presidents at all? What do I mean? Well the president is simply one man. For a president to fail there has to be spectacular failures all around him. Like any man, the president can only do so much, only comprehend so much, only initiate so much and so the most significant thing a president does is pick those who will help him or her do the job. It also matters what their management style is.

Some examples: LBJ was a noted wheeler dealer and surrounded himself with wheeler dealers as a senator and log rolled a lot of legislation through congress and had a very big reputation for that. He inherited the Kennedy team and the Kennedy biases built into that team when he took over the presidency. He proceeded to bog down the nation is a war that the Kennedy team was unwilling to win. Jimmy Carter was a detail man who tried to run a one man show and put people inexperienced with Washington into power. Ronald Reagan by contrast was a manage on a loose leash kind of manager who picked good people and gave them their heads. The problem was that many of the good people were not from the Reagan wing of the party and diluted the message. But it was still a very successful presidency by contrast with many of his predecessors.

Barack Obama has put extreme left wing people into every job in sight and seems to have no idea whatsoever about management, which might not be a surprise since he's never managed anything nor does he have a public record of ever having achieved anything. If you do what you've always done you'll get what you've always got! Obama is trying to run the country like a community organizer, but that's a recipe for failure because of the inherent extreme polarization of the whole community organizer shtick. If Obama is as smart as everyone says, a proposition that I'm distinctly on the fence about, then he's show signs of "getting it" and start looking to broaden his base and get a wider spectrum of support. I'm betting that his world view trumps his common sense and that he goes down with the ship, he's certainly on track for a less than stellar presidency.

Leadership? What Leadership?

Red State this morning ran a piece titled "Shut Up" SEE HERE and it focused on commentary that the Republican party needs more voices speaking up and not just the voices of conservative talk radio. The article goes on to suggest that the real problem is lack of leadership. The current party leaders are playing cozy with the very forces that the conservative grassroots find so disturbing.

Lindsay Graham is the posterboy for this kind of collaboration on cap and trade which is the dumbest and most frankly totalitarian legislation to come down the pike in a long time. It's a huge energy tax flying false colors as some kind of environmentally responsible legislation about an environmental issue whose science isn't just suspect but is just plain wrong, a cover for the political action that it is being used to motivate.

We need leadership, but no leaders worth talking about seem to be on the horizon. All the usual suspects are too concerned to maintain their power. The result is a leadership vacuum that makes the Republican party largely impotent. The electorate in general doesn't know who to believe so they are currently believing no-one. We need principled leadership and not liberal-leftie-light which is what the so-called moderates offer. If you're going to hell in a handbasket, going more slowly isn't the answer. It's time to change course. Failing a change of course we might as well just run up the white flag or is it red flag? and declare "game over." Then the United States can fade into history as just one more failed experiment with liberty and freedom and the darkness of tyranny will once more descend upon us all.

It's Only Your Money: Why Worry! What's a Little Corruption Among Friends

Red State is sounding the alarm about the TARP money ... you know the money that was supposed to bolster the economy, shore up failing banks and the auto industry, but we'd get it back and all would be well NOT. SEE HERE

Increasingly Washington is looking like a funnel of our tax dollars to special interests of the party in power. You might as well call it bribery and corruption since the stench arising from the swarmy mass of folks with their hands out certainly smells that way. In my whole life I've never seen corruption so blatant. At least earlier corrupt folks had the good sense to keep their corruption under wraps. Lyndon Johnson had others take the fall for him. There's quite a long history of this sort of thing on both sides of the aisle. What is new I think is the scale and the breadth.

My fundamental concern is that the scale in the face of our already unstable financial health is such as to trigger a serious depression. I don't say that particularly lightly. I've never been more concerned and I'm following a number of serious financial analysts that are currently in cash and trying to find investment vehicles that won't tank with the economy. Following a recommendation from Peter Navarro, an excellent financial analyst, I went into foreign stocks and Australian currency with what was left of my meager savings after the market tanked. If I'd paid a bit more attention to some of these smart folks I'd have gone into cash a lot earlier. Since then I've seen a nice rise in my holdings and that would be nice if it were not for the fact that it is mostly an advanced that measures the decline of the dollar. Watch what they do and not what they say. In particular keep an eye on the price of gold and oil which are both tangible goods whose price represents the cost in dollars of a real good. As the price rises it means at least in part that the value of the dollar is falling. Obama's administration looks like one of the most corrupt in history and it is tanking the U.S. economy faster than even Jimmy Carter managed to do. Be watchful!

Myths Created by Liberals Are Always Lies

Well Ann Coulter, one of my favorite people, has done it again. She has a way of sharpening the point of her stick and then skewering her target convincingly. Today's column captured the liberals once more creating a myth about real life and consciously lying in the process, at least someone had to have consciously lied. SEE HERE

The topic was accusing the Republicans of inventing negative advertising and being racist because of the Willie Horton ad. That is a lie on two levels which I suppose makes liberals really deep liars. Negative advertising has been around for a long time. You could ask the ghost of Barry Goldwater for example. He'd have quite a lot to say on the subject, but then so would Richard Nixon just to pick two obvious examples. But the deeper level is calling the Republican ad racist because Willie Horton was black. The problem with that is that Willie Horton's race never appeared in the ad. A phony version of the ad was used on MSNBC which showed Horton in the ad, but that was a fabrication. Intentionally fabricating false data to slam someone about something that wasn't even true in the first place (that it was the start of negative campaigning) is not stupid, it's blatant lying. Oh ... Yeah ... but they're liberals and their heart is in the right place so that's all right ... right. The usual double standard is in play. Liberal lying is just par for the course. We impeach Republican liars. Not sure when the American people in general are going to get it, maybe never. Too bad.

Figures Don't Lie, But Liars Figure

SEE HERE When the Washington Post "outs" a liberal for lying about spending it has to be really bad. But that's pretty much all that has been happening in Washington these days, politicians lying about the effect and cost of the bills that are being proposed. It's all slight of hand. Off-budget, on-budget, cost savings by shifting things around from one empty pocket to another. The bottom line is really simple: We're broke and can't fund all this nonsense. The only question is how do we exit the situation, on our feet or in a box six feet under.

Somebody Remind Lindsay Graham He's a Republican! Turn On the Other Neuron.

Lindsay Graham suffers from an advanced case of terminal stupidity. He wants to move the ball forward on energy independence by compromising with the Democrats on Cap and Trade. SEE HERE This is just massively stupid. It ignores the entire history of compromising with Democrats. No deal holds, period! The litany of failed compromises with Democrats is a never ending one. Remember the deal with the first president Bush. It cost Bush reelection and the Democrats welshed on the deal like they always do. Compromise with those who view compromise as a temporary ploy is futile.

Energy independence is not going to emerge from a massive new energy tax that cripples the American taxpayer at a time when government spending is already totally out of control. Lindsay Graham needs to be replaced by someone with more than two neurons.

The Sun Setting On The West: Copenhagen Realities

Watching the death of the West. What began in Athens will die at Copenhagen, unless you stop it. Freedom isn't free. WATCH THE WHOLE THING

Hypocrisy on the Left: No Way! They're So ... Sane HAHAHAHAHA

Red State nailed it today. SEE HERE and I notice that I missed this the other day so SEE HERE TOO. If it were not so weird, the sheer hypocrisy of the left loonies would be very very funny. They must all live in a world about the size of their pea brains. They are all up in arms about a poll about whether the president should be killed that was pulled by FaceBook and their mantra (as usual) is something like "If this had happened to Bush they'd of had FBI at their doors." As usual the left wackjobs go off without ever checking the facts.

The sign of an empty mind is that it engages its mouth routinely without doing any fact checking. Probably due to a neuron dearth. If you can only run brain or mouth a leftie will run their mouth any day. So they said this about Bush without ever checking whether any of their own loony-bin groups had ever done it. Red State looked and, wow! Not only had it been done, but several times. Did you hear about it? Apparently not or they might have noticed although it does take some of those extra neurons that are in short supply. Not only had Bush's life been threatened by the nitwits, but three times at least. Strange nobody got up in arms about that isn't it.

The double standard on the liberal left is just amazing. It makes anything they say eminently ignorable.

ACORN: The Hooligans in Washington Are Liars

Here again we see the schlemiels in action. Funding for ACORN returns after Halloween. What a charade!

The Utilitarian Character of Evil

SEE HERE The idea that human beings are just an assembly of parts that can be harvested when a more "valuable" human being needs them is the growing character of the medical discourse. This is straight up evil, nothing more or less.

Some People Think Change Is Always Positive: Good Luck On That!

By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them ...

SEE HERE RedState has been making me roll on the floor laughing out loud, or for internet officianados ROTFLOL. This particular treat is about heroes. I'm a real big fan of heroes. We all need role models and I remember my mom always counseling me to choose my friends wisely. She was always saying "Birds of a feather flock together." So if my friends were of the wrong sort, she just figured I was probably on the track to perdition and needed a wake up call.

Lately looking at the friends that President Obama has been surrounding himself with I've been thinking a lot of my mom lately. She'd be pretty outraged by these "friends" and associates of the president. Now we have one whose favorite philosopher is Mao, yeah that Moa, the one responsible for killing millions of his fellow citizens. Maybe my favorite totalitarian dictator murderous extremist would be more appropriate ... first in line for a particular circle of hell reserved for that kind of cozy friendly folks. Maybe Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Lenin, and a few others share the same circle. If so I wish them a toasty time. If I were President Obama I think I'd chose my friends more wisely. But that's just me, what do I know. My mom knew everything and I learned it all from her.

Are We There Yet?

Human Events popped this up at me this morning, as if I need an adreniline rush at 9 a.m. SEE HERE for the web-page version of this. I suppose it does raise an interesting question: "Has Barack Obama done anything that would rise to the status of an impeachable offense?" He is the elected president with a good majority and has a two house majority in congress after all. That being said, his "vision" (more a nightmare I think) of transforming America is distinctly frightening. He has surround himself with agents of the far left. He has placed numerous "persons of interest" (far left, overt communists, people with deep animosity to many of the provisions of the constitution, etc.) into positions of power and influence. He is a fellow traveler of many who hate America and is an actual agent, at least in the past, of ACORN which is about as corrupt as they get. I'm not sure we've risen to impeachable yet, but we certainly have passed troubling.

The legislation he's been supporting is certainly transformative. It transforms the federal government into our master and shrinks personal wealth to a staggering degree if it all passes. I have not added it all up. But each and every bill seems to come with personal family income hits on average of several thousand dollars. Some of the estimated hits, such as that from the cap and trade legislation, double or triple the cost of energy. The health care legislation is framed to take over 1/7th of the economy as it crushes the medical insurance industry.

We can have intersting dialogues about how health care should be delivered, or how the environment should be protected, or about any of a number of other things that are the claimed motives for these pieces of legislation. Under cover of darkness, however, each of these seem mostly focused on taking over something and extending federal power. Don't know if that is impeachable, but maybe it should be.

Extortion, Sure Sounds Like It!

Did I hear that right? Michele Bachmann the Minnesota Congresswoman absolutely blew my mind today when she revealed that ACORN was essentially involved in a confidence game with the banks in the life of the legislation that insisted that banks make bad loans. The banks had to be rated as acceptable to get under the federal radar and making bad loans was a surefire recipe for disaster. So what they did was payoff ACORN to get the good rating and evade the requirement to make bad loans. Sound like a confidence game, a protection racket? I might add that it could only work with the connivance of the government. Sounds like extortion. Sounds like corruption. This is simply outrageous. CHECK IT OUT HERE

This is more than bad, it's deep seated corruption that cuts to the core of the system. It's the same MO that's being entrenched in all the legislation that the Obama administration is pushing.

Truth Endures When Reality Trumps Alarmism

The headline caught my eye. The whole notion of slamming serious climate scientists who didn't buy into the nonsense about global warming as "deniers" was pretty hard to stomach. SEE HERE Those who have persisted to demand evidence in the face of the growth in mindless rhetoric are heroes in my eyes too.

Now that science has been so thoroughly politicized it's very difficult to stand up and be counted. You put your reputation on the line against those whose idea of discourse is to ridicule you for your principled stand. The whole notion of "consensus" in science is itself nonsense. Science doesn't depend on consensus. It depend on evidence. It depends on observations. It depends on experiments. None of these could be brought seriously to bear on global warming because the evidence was seriously lacking. The observations were seriously flawed. There were no experiments that supported the claims. Now we know that the data that was advanced was largely fraudulent.

The global warming mantra is a political hoax to accomplish political ends. Al Gore deserves the Nobel prize about as much as Barack Obama does, which is to say that they received it for the same flawed reason, political expediency. When the history is written the heroes will be those who stood up for science and against the politically powerful "consensus" of bought and paid for "scientists." We should get politics out of science, it's a bad mix and probably lethal in the long run.

The Importance of Character: Those Who Lie about others Don't Have Any!

Generally I don't pay a whole lot of attention to what Rush Limbaugh is doing. I like Rush and I think he's a very intelligent commentator on the passing scene. Still, I can't let this go by without comment. SEE HERE When I did listen to Rush because I was driving while his show was on, I often enjoyed his blend of commentary and satire. He was alert and funny and incisive. I don't recall ever hearing him make a racist comment in hours and hours of listening. So the idea that Limbaugh is a racist simply startled me when I ran across it in RedState today.

I'd be tempted to go on a major rant on the tendency of the liberal mind to prefer slander to logical discourse. Name calling and just plain lying is a standard arrow in the liberal quiver. They do it seemingly as a genetic imperative. Their favorite "N-word" is "Nazi" and they apply it liberally to everyone who is right of Joseph Stalin. In political campaigns they complain about negative advertising when a conservative calls them on policy issues and they retort by accusing the conservative of lying and fail to address the actual issues raised. This is currently going on in Virginia's gubernatorial race in the political ads of Deeds against McDonnell. I'm hoping the electorate is starting to get it. "The guy who is lying is the one accusing others of lying all the time ... " Listen to what they say, but watch what they do.

Is Congress a Bozo Factory?

You have to wonder what they teach congressmen these days. Most of them are lawyers and so see the world through a lens of litigation. What none of them seem to get is the slightest whit of knowledge about economics. They strive to pass laws and then are amazed it seems that the laws they have passed often have deleterious effects almost the opposite of what they said they intended. SEE HERE

This tends to leave the observer mystified. What is going on? Are they really that stupid? The conspiracy theorists among us immediate say "No it must be a nefarious plot." However this quickly leads to too many plots all of which are way too stupid. So the most obvious explanation is they are really the bozos they appear to be.

We need smarter and more economically savvy politicians.

How Good Are Models that Don't Model Accurately?

SEE HERE and HERE The point is that we have been in a period of global cooling for 12 years. The highest temperature year globally on record was 1998 (do you remember anything terrible about that by the way?) and since then we've been trending down. Now the whole time the vaunted global climate models have been trending up. In short, they are wrong! It's pretty much that simple. Models that predict an upward trend in a period when the reality is a downward trend are wrong.

We don't really know why they are wrong. If we did, doubtless we'd plug in the necessary factors to the model and we'd be back on track. Models work that way. You model the effects you think you understand and compare your results to the data. Usually there are some undetermined factors, calling them "fudge factors" would not be too far off. Adjusting the factors one seeks to get the smallest variation from the actual data and then run the model forward to see what it predicts.

This process can continue for a long time. A model is good if the data matches and bad if the data doesn't match. Read that sentence again. A model is good if the data matches and bad if the data doesn't match.
Sorry climate modelers ... your models are seriously deficient. So why should be believe them at all? Tell me that story again.

The Future Awaits the Bold

"Exit stage right" which is the left side of the stage from the audience's point of view. I think that is McCain's problem. From his point of view he thinks he's a maverick conservative, but from anyone else's point of view he's a limp wristed proto-liberal RINO with military credentials. Ho Hum! That being said there is a war on for the soul of the Republican Party, the remnants of Bush and McCain's helpful ministrations in reinventing the party to look like Democrat-light. I'm sorry. That's not what we need. We need a return to principle. SEE HERE

You know, "principles" — those rules by which we live grounded in our experience and knowledge of the Good! Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would know what I'm talking about, but damn few of our modern day politicians seem to know. The Republican Party sends me surveys to tell them how to think. I don't want a party guided by surveys ... besides it's hogwash anyway. Every one of those supposed surveys ends with a plea for money. So it's just a fund raising ploy.

We need a party that stands for principles and actually acts on the principles it stands for. Right now what we have is a big hog feeding contest and the pigs have pretty much emptied the trough.

What! Nobel Prize for What? ...

Well I have to say that the Nobel Prize isn't what it used to be. It's become a trophy for liberal nonsense and wishful thinking. SEE HERE I don't have anything against President Obama getting the prize. He can use the money for the future when he has to actually work for a living and can't jet around the world on Air Force 1 or fly in pizza chef's or go to New York for a date or any of the other relatively innocent but expensive past times he and his wife have indulged in the past few months.

It's nice to be the leader of the free world, although "leader" might not be the word that I think fits best. I think "poseur" or "posturer" would be closer to the reality. He's apologized for the U.S., dissed our allies and friends, elevated and given comfort to our most implacable enemies who in response have picked up the persecution of their own people.

In the some ten months he's been president he's mainly succeeded in spending money at an inordinate rate to pay off his friends, political contributors, union bosses, labor figures, ACORN com-padres and various political organizations that have written all the bills that congress doesn't have time to read. It takes even the APOLLO group a while to turn out these thousand page plus bills that conceal all kinds of pork for all the far lefties to feast on.

The Nobel committee is becoming a laughing stock I think though. Carter got a Nobel prize for something similar when he got Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to the peace table. Of course that got Sadat assassinated and shortly thereafter the Shah of Iran was deposed with help from Carter (yeah that helped bring on international jihadist terrorism, thanks Jimmy) and we had the Iran hostage crisis which went on until Ronald Reagan was elected. Did I mention the inflation rate ... pushing 20%. Earlier we had the Kissinger Nobel Prize (what a joke) SEE HERE

Mr Obama’s prize is more likely, however, to be compared with the most contentious prize of all: the 1973 prize to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for their negotiations to end the Vietnam war. Dr Kissinger was branded a warmonger for his support for the bombing campaign in Cambodia; and the Vietnamese negotiator was subsequently seen as a liar whose government never intended to honour a peace deal but was waiting for the moment to attack South Vietnam.

The long and short of it is that the Nobel committee has a long history of awarding the Nobel Prize, especially the Peace Prize, to folks who had little to do with peace and often enough were directly implicated in destabilizing and conflict producing situations. Hopefully Obama's ridiculous prize won't be a replay of some of these past debacles.

Oh did I mention Al Gore? Why add insult to injury. This month the fiasco of global warming was finally shown to be a fraud. I don't think Al will give back his Nobel Prize for propaganda though. Interesting world we live in.

Insight on ObamaCare

This is a hoot! It's enough to make you cry though, because it's so..ooo true.

Obama Shtick

Sometimes you just gotta wonder what is going on in the minds of the folks that put together political shtick. Obama had doctors (well not all doctors, only doctors who are big Democrat donors ) to the White House for a sort of rally behind ObamaCare. SEE HERE What blew my mind is the sheer gall of handing out lab coats to create political theater. I couldn't have made this up.

Meanwhile Delancey Place (SEE www.delanceyplace.com) ran a piece on the problems Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein had in getting up the money to finance the musical Oklahoma. (Delancey Place specializes in sending out interesting tidbits every day. If your life needs a little ray of sunshine every morning, not always upbeat sunshine, then subscribe.) I thought that this whole bit about the president dressing up the doctors who are really donors in lab coats to make political theater just begged for a musical rendition only they should be snake oil salesmen trying to legitimize their product. Doesn't that strike close to the truth? Just remember, if this White House does it, then it's unlikely to be true and more likely to be manipulative.

The Democratic Way Of War — Quit!

Well after all President Obama's talk about how important Afghanistan is we seem to be in the run up to another example of the failure of the Democrats to conduct a war in a fashion designed to actually win. They are a spineless group of craven cowards who are always ready to accept American casualties but seemingly never willing to actually seek victory. Here is the latest example of the prep work for the bolt from Afghanistan which is no doubt coming. SEE HERE

I wouldn't mind so much except that if we're not prepared to win, perhaps we ought not to start to fight in the first place. The Monroe Doctrine could be put back in place and we could cozy down to a non-interventionist posture and stop pretending we're a world power. A world power with no guts isn't!

Academic Freedom? Give Me A Break

Apparently Stanford thinks that interviews with its professors should be off limits if they might be embarrassing. I guess that's a new definition of "academic freedom." Professor Stephen Schneider (no relation to this Schneider as far as I know) was interviewed on the fact that he was once a global cooling alarmist and now has shifted to being a global warming alarmist.

Check out the video and you might also be interested in the DVD of the whole documentary which can be ordered HERE

More on Hockey Stick Hokum

SEE HERE

... Thus the key ingredient in most of the studies that have been invoked to support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series, depends on the influence of a woefully thin subsample of trees and the exclusion of readily-available data for the same area. Whatever is going on here, it is not science.

Obama Muzzling the Military

SEE HERE and HERE The president is apparently unhappy with his pick of military commanders. No doubt after he signals his displeasure they will henceforth give him only their candid advice in private. Or perhaps the best and the brightest among them will see the handwriting on the wall and resign. Serving a commander and chief who puts subordinate and trivial priorities ahead of the nation's security is hardly one to inspire confidence. The military lost a lot of fine officers when President Clinton entered the oval office, a man on record as "loathing the military." President Obama has not said as much, but his actions speak rather loudly. He praises our enemies, apologises for the United States and disses our friends.

Democrats Are Really Good At Recessions: Causing Them I Mean!

This blogger points out that the current recession started when the Democrats took over congress in 2007. It always fascinates me how the news media tends to point the finger at presidents when they want to talk about economic matters when the president doesn't do more than propose economic policy. The congress passes all appropriations and actually sets the economic policy. So when Clinton is given credit for balancing the budget it is conveniently forgotten that it was a Republican congress. When George Bush is blamed for the current economic mess it is conveniently forgotten that it was a Democratic congress. SEE HERE for the thoughts of Steve at motorcitytimes.com.

Three Government Reports Spell Out Economic Doomsday

And you thought there would be a secure retirement in your future? — think again. SEE HERE Nero is said to have fiddled while Rome burned. We have a Congress and a government that is doing much the same. Insanity is probably too mild a word for this bunch.

Two Rules

In a world increasingly dominated by people who are "on the make" and who only use words to manipulate others and not essentially to convey meaning, it becomes important to figure out how to make judgments. I was thinking about that this morning and concluded that two rules would help to clarify things:

The First Rule is one that scientists accept (at least in what are called the 'hard' sciences) and that is the rule that: Data trumps all arguments. If you want to deal meaningfully with reality you have to know what reality is and that isn't a matter of clever words, but of actual facts. This is in my mind today because of the information on the cooked hockey stick data in the global warming dialogue that I've been observing the past few days. If it stands up, global warming looks like history and rather sordid history at that.

The Second Rule is listen to what people say but pay particular attention to what they do. If their actions do not correspond to their words then add them to the list of probable manipulators. What people do tells us more about what they are then what they say. I had a boss who used to go around saying "perceptions are reality" — I don't happen to agree with that sentiment, but I understand it and understand that for a lot of people it amounts to "gospel." They spin stories and create illusions, while in fact they are doing very different things. Most of them are not good enough at it to go undetected. Remember that to be an effective liar you have to have an incredibly good memory, especially if you are spinning different lies for different folks. Pretty soon it gets too complicated and you mess up.

Gloom and Doom ... and all that ...

I'm an optimist or perhaps more accurately just a cheerful person. Writing this blog can be a downer since all the news seems a bit on the gloomy and doomy side. The economic front doesn't look too positive as we grow the debt madly and the rest of the world talks about dumping the dollar as the international reserve currency of choice. The current option on the table is some sort of basket of currencies. One problem it would seem with all of that is that none of the currencies are backed with anything but good will and good will is increasingly suspect as a unit of value.

When it comes to the United States, we seem to be everyone's favorite whipping boy, even our president and first lady seem a bit cool towards the United States, jetting around the world apologizing for us at every stop. You usually don't reward the folks you don't like with good will.

But another factor would seem to be that a reserve currency has to be based on large global economies. Hmmm... that's a rather limiting requirement. We are the largest economy on the globe so in one sense it is hard to find a way to escape from the U.S. dollar. But in the meanwhile we've been intrinsically devaluing it as we print more and more, create larger deficits, unlimited future entitlements, and sell treasury bonds (unbacked except for our "good will") to everyone who will belly up to the bar. I think the string on those strategies is about run out.

Then we're doing other really dumb things, like pretending we can simultaneously provide health care to everyone and cut costs at the same time. Is there anyone with an ounce of sense up there in Washington? I'm beginning to doubt it.

Meanwhile the cap and trade bill is being touted as part of the solution of the awful global warming crisis which has so far given one non-entity the Nobel Prize and lots of others government grants to study what is increasingly likely to be a non-issue as we found out a couple of days ago that the hockey was cooked, i.e. an artifact of inappropriate science gone slightly mad. So instead of taxing ourselves to death we ought to get out there and say "Stop this nonsense."

So what's to be cheerful about? Well, as I always say, the sun came up today and that's a very optimistic sign. If it didn't we'd be in very deep doodoo very quickly. I was driving home from the college yesterday evening and the sun was setting and the moon was rising. Just for a moment I was driving directly towards the rising moon about 15 degrees above the horizon and in my rear view mirror the sun was setting also about 15 degress above the horizon. I felt a little tingle at these two juxtaposed celestial signs both in my visual range at the same time. We are always occupied with ourselves and our business while all around us the universe revolves, majestic in the dark silence of space. Psalm 8:4-5 "4 What is man that thou art art mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? ⁵ You made him a little less than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor."

AGW Is Dead

"He's dead Jim" is something my young son Christopher would say when he was a little boy quoting Bones on Star Trek. Well that could well be said of Anthropogenic Global Warming which has been the conventional wisdom for something like a decade due as we now know to selective use of the available data. Cherry picking the data appears to be what was done and now that the entire data set has been used the result is that the hockey stick has indeed disappeared and with it the primary evidence, seeded into data sets driving many climate projections, on which the claim of AGW was based. SEE HERE and HERE. It is probably all over but the shouting unless there is a plausible reason, unlikly, for specifically cherry picking the 12 series used, the only 12 which showed the "desired" effect.

When all the data was used the effect disappears. Here is what the second reference above cites:

McIntyre therefore prepared a revised dataset, replacing Briffa’s selected 12 cores with the 34 from Khadyta River. The revised chronology was simply staggering. The sharp uptick in the series at the end of the twentieth century had vanished, leaving a twentieth century apparently without a significant trend.

The Price of Liberty Is Eternal Vigilance

The Lunatics Are Running the Asylum

When major news media figures can characterize Barack Obama as Burkean then the lunatics are truly in charge. SEE HERE Saul Alinsky'ites like Barack Obama have a good deal more in common with Lenin than with Edmund Burke. We live in times of entitlements. So many government programs have been created with the thought that somehow the government is going to save you from yourself that it is not surprising that the nanny-state is growing out of control.

The problem is that government is just the collective action of the people usually with a particular group elevated to positions of power, the oligarchs as it were. The government produces exactly nothing but commands: "Do this. Do that. Do this other thing." and by the way, pay for it yourself. The wealth that the government disperses must first be extorted from the people. But increasingly the people who command the oligarchs are people that themselves do not pay the taxes for in a Democracy it is only necessary to have a majority or even a plurality to maintain power. When sixty percent of the people are only paying about 3% of all the taxes, then those oligarchs who pretend that the people have entitlements that they don't pay for can continue to exist while everyone parties on except those upon whose backs the party is erected. Over time these weary and fall back into the growing pool of the entitled and then to maintain the party the burden becomes more onerous on the rest. When the tipping point comes the system collapses. The night is far advanced.

If we fail to recover the American spirit of independence and personal responsibility then we go into the night of economic collapse and universal poverty. Watch and be astute. Either we reverse the current trends or we go over the top and down following all the great nations of the past into the dustbin of history.

The Global Warming Fabricators

So exactly what is the deal with global warming? Is it something to really be worried about or not? I'm a physicist but not a climate scientist. I have a friend who has done a lot of work on climate science (he says that all the folks he knows think it is bunk) then I have a former professor who is a distinguished statistician Dr. Edward J. Wegman whose Wegman Report showed statistical deficiencies in the work of Michael E. Mann.

More recent work suggests that the data was cooked by selecting for data that made the case and rejecting other equally reasonable data. That's basically called fudging the result or cooking the data, cherry picking the data, or if you want to really be blunt: being dishonest.

SEE HERE and HERE for some treatment of this issue. The interesting thing is that if you use all the data the hockey stick effect goes away and the data actually goes down. So the whole global warming argument based on this fallacious bit of data starts to look like it is falling apart. Maybe that accounts for the fact that this Summer has been markedly cooler than usual here in the Shenandoah Valley.

Striking Contrast between February and September

The previous post is using a February 2009 YouTube to illustrate the Tea Party movement. The crowd was relatively small. But it was much larger at the Tea Party's around the nation that occurred in April and the movement continued to build and the 912 turn out in Washington was estimated at 1.7 million by reliable sources. SEE HERE
The reports varied wildly from 60 to 70 thousand to two million or more. How does one discover the truth and does it matter? Well I think to answer the second question first, it certainly matters when we're lied to by the media. It is clear that the turn out was vastly larger than "tens of thousands" as some media reports claimed. Whether it was the largest turn out ever is Washington I don't know, but some Park Service personnel were quoted as saying that. There is also supposed to be a study by people at the University of Illinois which claims 1.7 million but I have not seen the study. Moreover there are plenty of people debunking all the figures, here's an amusing example. SEE HERE So go figure. It was big. So the Tea Party Movement is not done. The obvious question is "What next?" If our masters (ur leaders ... hmmm... ) think we can just be rolled over and taken over, maybe we need a lot more moxy. My own opinion used to be summed up in the quip: "Aren't you glad you don't get as much government as you pay for?" But lately the government seems to be trying to catch up and that is scary.

Some Tea Party Coverage As The Beat Goes On

I don't know if you've gotten involved in the Tea Party movement. I first made note of it back in April when I went down to Court Square in Harrisonburg to see what was going on with these T.E.A. (Taxed Enough Already) people. I found a eclectic group of people who were just tired of being the butt of government. Every time you turn around there are more taxes for more unconstitutional stuff that government has dreamed up to make itself bigger, "Enough Already."

With the election of the current White House incumbent we got a whole lot more than we bargained for. We have government intrusion in monumental proportions into the auto industry, the banking industry, the health care industry and the energy industry. This isn't the change anyone voted for except for a few far left marxists. But it is the change that is going to be rammed down your throat if you don't do something about it.

America is about individual freedom and opportunity. It is not about collectivism and socialism. But if you don't do something you will shortly discover a whole new America and you won't like it. Tyranny Rising!

Koolaid Drinkers Out In Force

Whatever is happening in national politics it is going to shake things up. Here we have a video of the usual suspects arranging a circular firing squad for the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement in general. The problem of course is that the Democrats are the party of namecalling and big government and the Republicans are the Party that hasn't really got a focus except occasionally because it is a loose coelition of semi-liberals, fiscal conservatives, and people who really care about moral values. They can only make a partical common cause because they are all more principled than the name calling power grabbers.

The fact that our government and political arena is reduced to this is tragic. Glenn Beck and Mark Levin are principled people who are blowing the horn on this fiasco, so they have to be marginalized and turned into proto-racists, nutjobs ... and who to do that job better than the card-carrying name callers and power grubbers of the liberal koolaid drinking media. The night is far advanced and we do not know what tomorrow brings. Hopefully some of these folks are going to wake up and start acting like statesmen. I wouldn't hold my breath though. That's a recipe for turning purple and passing out. Instead you should start planning to vote them all out. We need a new start. This pile of dung is pathetic.

The First Narcissists Continue Their Sacrifices for the Little People

SEE HERE It is rather hard to imagine a more self-absorbed pair that Barack and Michelle Obama. So far we've seen then jetting off on fabulous dates to New York, the UK, Europe, and now we find them in Copenhagen touting the Chicago bid for the Olympics. Frankly this hardly seems to be presidential business. One can only imagine the outrage the media would have expressed if President Bush had been using his office in this manner, especially as the Afghanistan conflict enters sensitive times and the commander on the ground is appealing for more commitment. You have to wonder at the priorities of the White House occupants that send out of pizza chefs and wine and dine themselves in luxury while saying what a great sacrifice it is. I think I'll go sacrifice myself and have filet mignon at my local steak house and maybe a glass of wine. I know it's not up the standards the first family are setting, but then I don't have Air Force One to jet myself around the world on a whim.