Political Angst In America

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Location: Pantego, Texas, United States

Friday, July 31, 2009

I agree with Wolla Dalbo's assessment of Barack Obama that was posted in the Neo Neocon blog. I think Obama is something we have not seem before, and that he is bad for America. I am torn between Obama being best represented as The Manchurian Candidate, or as Chance the Gardner from the novel and movie Being There. The first would be a case in which he is evil, deliberately damaging America, while the second would be a case where he is a smooth talking know nothing who does damage inadvertently. Part of the reason for my having this feeling is that he is a manufactured man. His past is not revealed. It is beginning to come out that he was quite radical as a young man. He really had no actual achievements in his background. He was sponsored early in his life by dedicated enemies of the United States; both Muslims and communists. His advance in politics was also aided by Chicago thugs and thuggish political dirty tricks to eliminate his rivals. Like Neo Neocon, I think that we have only one chance, and that is to vote Democrats out of office in 2010. If I am wrong about Obama, there is really no loss if Democrats lose control of Congress. But, if I am right, then liberty in America could be lost forever. Throughout history Republics have eventually devolved into dictatorships after civil war. So, that will most likely happen here at some time. I think we should try to forestall it as long as possible.

Under the evil George Bush the income tax system because the most progressive in the world. The top one percent of earners pay more of the total tax than the bottom 95%, with the bottom half of earners paying almost nothing. All earners pay the payroll tax, but that is progressive when you consider that lower wage earners receive a larger percentage of their income from social security when they retire, and medicare benefits are the same for, but, again, the premium payments are higher for those with more income.

Most trial lawyers are Democrats. Trial lawyers give a lot of money to Democrats. So, Democrats reward trial lawyers.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

One of the aspects of the global warming/climate change debate that should have raised a red flag for journalists is the reluctance of the promoters of the hypothesis to share their raw data that they say proves their case. After Congressman Joe Barton forced Michael Mann to release his data, independent researchers who were not in the pay of the government or industry, quickly showed that the work was deficient. Dr. Phil Jones in England, who claims there is not much urban heat island effect, was refusing to release his data the last I heard. These people do not want to share their raw data, nor the methods they use to massage the data to "correct" it. Here is a story about the British MET office complaining about unauthorized possession of their data.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Back in 2007 the US published a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that said that Iran has stopped their nuclear weapon program in 2003. It seemed likely at the time that this NIE was bogus, and was intended to thwart President Bush's attempts to stop the Iranian nuclear weapon program. Leftists, of course, applauded the report as further proof that Bush was a deranged war-monger. The leftists were aware of the CIAs animosity toward the Bush Administration, and the attempts by the CIA to prevent Bush's reelection in 2004. Most people are unaware that the CIA and the State Department are bastions of the left wing. Now there is a German case involving a supplier to the Iranian Nuclear program (we have long known that the Germans as well as the Russians were helping the Iranians). The German supplier cited the 2007 NIE report as proof that there was no Iranian nuclear weapon program. Now the German intelligence service has intervened saying that there is indeed an Iranian Nuclear Weapon Program. Will Congress now investigate to determine why the NIE came out with an obviously wrong conclusion? Probably not. They want to investigate Cheney regarding an idea for a program to kill or capture al Qaeda leaders. They have no interest in finding out why the CIA tried to subvert the Bush Administration. After all, they did that themselves, even at some risk to the security of the nation.

It is hard to tell where the Obama Administration stands on the issue of an Iranian nuclear weapon. Obama himself said every nation had a right to have a nuclear weapon if they want one. But, Hilliary Clinton recently said that we would not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

Monday, July 27, 2009

The Democrats have done an outstanding job of convincing people that big corporations and very rich people are fat cat Republicans. The reality is that the majority are Democrats, and while they contribute money to both political parties, most of the money goes to Democrats. Obama and the Democrats also reward their supporters and punish those who oppose them. Here is something that I got from American Thinker.

Of the top 35 corporate contributors in the 2008 election cycle, the number who leaned Democrat: 21. The number who leaned Republican: 1. (That single one leaning Republican was the National Auto Dealers Association.)


Number of auto dealerships being closed by Chrysler in 2009: 789, or 25%. Being closed by GM: 42%.


I saw Democrat spinners on TV say this was just a coincidence. I recall from Machiavelli's The Prince that when several adverse coincidences happen, it is not a coincidence, but rather is a plan of your adversary.

Here is an article on global warming by Richard Lindzen. He presents the argument that the Earth's sensitivity to changes in greenhouse gas concentration is much less than predicted by the IPCC. He also points out that there is a significant interest in frightening people into action by rent-seekers. Here is some more about climate sensitivity.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

I read a lot about the disparity of income in America; how corporate CEOs make 100 or 200 times the earnings of the average employees. Here is a story from China where the the manager made over 2000 times what the workers make. The workers were not pleased, so they killed the manager.

I think we can expect that Acorn is going to become more active at protests about Obama policies, and will become increasingly violent. Acorn is fundamentally a criminal enterprise that supports and has support of the President of the United States and his Attorney General. President Obama is now revealing his animosity to whites, something that was obvious in his first autobiography, but was never explored by the MSM. From his book, Obama appears to think, like most leftists, that life is a zero-sum game, and his mission is to level the playing field between blacks and whites. Here is an example of what we can expect from Acorn.

The US government has spent $79 billion on global warming research, most of that a total waste of money. Carbon trading has now reached an annual level of over $100 billion, again a total waste of money, with trading expected to reach as much as $10 trillion per year. This represents a transfer of money that accomplishes nothing except making traders like Goldman Sachs and Al Gore rich. Here is an article discussing this injustice being perpetrated on the people of the world by the UN and various national governments.

According to this article Obama is continuing his work as a community organizer in the office of the Presidency. Obama's policies seem irrational to many of us, but he is following the plan of turning the US into a collectivist society.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The left has been working on the feminization of men for some time. They are having some success; at least it seems to me that there are a lot more "metrosexuals" around than when I was young. I view this as another evil plot of the left. Here is a discussion by a former leftist.

Obama has bought Chicago-style government to Washington. There are a lot of Chicago Democratic Machine politicians not many Southerners in the Obama Administration. Obama has paid off his supporters Chicago-style with his enormous stimulus package that has little stimulus but lot of payoff for Wall Street, such as Goldman Sachs, and the unions. He has also favored feminists, rather than workingmen. Here is an analysis of what he is doing.

The Waxman-Markey energy bill passed by the House of Representatives is over 1000 pages long, and wasn't read by most Congressmen before they voted on it. It doesn't do much in regard to its stated objective of reducing climate change. In the age of Obama it would be expected that the bill mostly increases government control over people's lives, and rewards Obama's supporters. Here is a list of some of the onerous features of the bill. The bill is over 1000 pages long, so this is just a partial list. All citizens need to contact their Senators to keep this bill from being passed by the Senate, which would be signed into law by Obama.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Sonia Sotomayor said many times that a wise Latina will reach a better decision than a white man. She has had to backpedal on that in her Supreme Coourt hearings. Now CNN deplores that she is equivocating and they say that any Latina will reach a better decision than any white man. Is that racism or sexism?

Here is an article about how hard it is for Maureen Dowd to be white in a black culture like the United States.

A lot of people have doubted that the threat of lawsuits could have actually driven Sarah Palin out of office. But it turns out that Alaska doesn't allow legal defense funds. Therefore supporters could not provide money for her to hire lawyers to fight the frivolous lawsuits, as, for example, Bill Clinton did to handle bimbo eruptions. (Of course Clinton had the problem that the female harassment lawsuits had merit.)

Leftists (I have decided to call the collectivists leftists instead of liberals because there is no part of individual liberty in their thinking) like to extol the virtues of socialized (single payer) healthcare. They also condemn healthcare in America citing studies by socialists that show American healthcare is poor. A lot of the criticism of socialized medicine is anecdotal. Here are some examples. Actually, there are a lot of examples.

I am amazed at the descriptions of Obama that I see on TV. Recently I saw a program with a guy who said that Obama is "sort of a god." Another one I saw last week gushed that "Obama is a Prophet." He meant a prophet like Isaiah or Daniel, not like Nostradamus. Today I read that Kathleen Kennedy Townsend thinks that Obama is closer in philosophy to American Catholics than the Pope is. I don't know much about Catholic dogma, but I really doubt that she is correct. This sort of talk does frighten me though. Obama appears to me to be a wanna be fascist dictator. And, fascist dictators are usually backed up by supporters who see them as being godlike.

Here is Obama pontificating about health care for the elderly; his advice is take a pain killer. I don't think that would have worked for me. Prior to having coronary artery bypass surgery I didn't have any pain. But, the cath test indicated that I was about to die from a blood clot at the entrance to my left circumflex. I suspect that there would have been some pain just before I died. I suppose Obama is correct that just dying would have saved a lot of money.

Obama is trying to implement energy policies in the US that will destroy the economy. He seems to pay no attention to the European nations that bought into the global warming scam before the US. Here is a discussion on how well carbon cap and trade has worked in Germany. Germany has also attempted to get a lot of "green" energy with wind turbines. But, they have found that the wind doesn't blow when they really need power, so they have had to maintain their conventional fossil fuel power plants.

Great Britain has attempted to implement "renewable" energy, which is mostly supplied by wind turbines. They have foolishly allowed their fossil fuel and nuclear power plants to be scheduled to go out of service, apparently unaware of Germany's experience. But the wind turbines are not coming along as planned, so they are beginning to experience brownouts, and face blackouts before they can get new conventional power plants on line. Here is an article detailing Great Britain's sad story.

There is no indication that Obama or the Democrats in Congress are learning anything from Europe's experience with "green" energy.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Here is a Frenchwoman urging Obama not to adopt French socialism. I don't think he agrees with her.

Obama wants to create a publicly owned health insurance company. He thinks the government can run a business better than private citizens can. He smugly invites private health insurance companies to compete with his government run company. He is correct that the government run company can put the privately owned companies out of business. There are many ways that can be done, but the most likely is that the government run company can run a deficit forever. The government can also put onerous regulations on their competitors. The government is inherently a monopoly that cannot tolerate competition. Obama's belief is naive in the extreme: the government can destroy privately owned competitive companies, but cannot operate at a profit. Here is an article explaining why this is so.

The moral equivalence philosophy of various liberals, Marxists, and Democrats insists that it is OK for Muslims to call for the destruction of America, but criticism of Islam is not acceptable. Here is a discussion about the recent Muslim conference on "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam." Public speech against Islam in public forums is often squashed because of the threat of violence by Muslims against those who criticize them. Part of the remedy to this situation is for Americans to hold peaceful demonstrations outside the Muslim's anti-American meetings. The government wasn't of much help in resisting Islam attempts to impose Sharia inside the US when Bush was President, and will actively support Sharia with Obama as President. The government bends over backwards to ignore honor killings, forced marriage, polygamy, and female genital mutilation by Muslims in America.

Obama's college records have finally been located. It is no surprise to me that he enrolled as a foreign student. In my mind that doesn't prove that he was actually a citizen of Indonesia, just that he was willing to lie about it to get a scholarship. The school was probably complicit in helping him. For a lot of people the end justifies the means. I suspect the college was looking for bright black students, and aggressively sought to obtain aid for them.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

There are efforts to keep the Obama long form birth certificate lawsuit alive. It seems like he would just kill this by producing his birth certificate. Maybe he is playing some sort of "rope-a-dope" game. The whole thing is curious.

I remember reading about a 14-year old girl being hanged in Iran because she sassed the judge. According to this story, it is illegal to execute a virgin girl in Iran, so they sometimes have to rape the girls before they hang them. That no doubt makes sense to Muslims. And to liberals, who believe in moral equivalence. Somehow liberals seem to think that waterboarding KSM to obtain information to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks is worse than raping and hanging a teen-aged girl for sassing a judge.

Regarding treatment of KSM, the prominent liberal Sonia Sotomayor told the Senate that we don't have the right to self-defense. I recall that during the 2004 election John Kerry said, regarding terrorist attacks, that we should just take the hits. At the time I couldn't understand where Kerry was coming from; Sotomayor has explained it for me.

Here is another person who has the same view of Cronkite that I have. I am willing to accept that, like most liberals, Cronkite didn't love America the way it is, but rather as he hoped it could be in his collectivist vision. I think Obama also has that view.

Here is more from neo neocon on Walter Cronkite, the Vietnam War, and the decline of American journalism. Cronkrite was regarded as "the most trusted man in America." He somehow took that high regard as a reason to change from just reporting the news to injecting his opinions into the news. Other's followed his lead, to the extent that hardly anyone believes journalists any more. And why should they? All of the major TV networks are firmly behind liberal initiatives and Democrats. They have no credibility because their reporting is so obviously slanted. Brit Hume was the last anchor that was objective; he was conservative, but he usually noted his bias.

From Rasmussen Reports here is an intersting comment by Supreme Court candidate Sonia Sotomayor:

The most interesting exchange thus far occurred when Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., asked Sotomayor about a 2004 opinion, which she signed, that found that "the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right."

Coburn wondered how courts cannot see the explicitly stated Second Amendment "right to keep and bear arms" as fundamental, yet can hold as fundamental the unexpressed right to privacy. Sotomayor answered: "Is there a constitutional right to self-defense? And I can't think of one. I could be wrong, but I can't think of one."

For eight years, Democrats attacked the Bush administration for giving short shrift to personal liberties. As Obama wrote in "Audacity," the Bush picks "showed a pattern of hostility toward civil rights, privacy and checks on executive power."

Now the Obama pick for the Supreme Court can't think of a right to defend yourself. That is arguably extraordinary
.

The idea that people do not have a fundamental right to self defense may sound strange to most Americans, but it is a fundamental part of liberal dogma. In Great Britain, people do not have the right to defend themselves now. Citizens are sent to prison there for resisting burglars.

The governments of the developed nations have decided to implement draconian measures to stop burning of fossil fuels that will reduce the standard of living of their citizens. They base the need for these actions on general circulation models that are thought to accurately represent the climate of the world. Many think that the politicians do not necessarily believe that the models are accurate, but rather that they have a hidden agenda of creating a socialistic world government. The reason for this suspicion is the comments to that effect made by supporters of the global warming hypothesis such as Al Gore and Maurice Strong. Dr. Roy Spencer has written a piece describing the challenges associated with modeling the earth's climate. I have written about these challenges before about this issue, but this article does a better job of describing the models used and points out the difficulty in modeling the hydrological cycle which is a major factor in the earth's climate. Dr. Spencer is regarded as a global warming skeptic. Recently he was savaged with an ad hominem attack by Senator Boxer when he was testifying before the Senate. Senator Boxer is well known for her brilliant intellect and pleasant demeanor.

One disappointment for me has been the decline of science in prestigious organizations such as the National Academy of Science. It is to be expected that a political organization such as the UN IPCC would not rely on a rigorous scientific method. But the decline of other scientific organizations as they fall under the influence of politics and lobbyists is sad to see. Environmental groups have been especially effective in undermining prestigious scientific organizations. Despite what people think, corporate lobbyists never had much influence in scientific organizations; it was assumed that they had a profit motive. For some reason environmentalists are not perceived to have a hidden agenda. Here is a comment on this deplorable state of affairs by someone who is an environmentalist.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Walter Cronkite died last night. He was considered to be "the most trusted man in America." I didn't like or trust him. He was another example of a rich liberal who tended toward socialism. President Obama said today that Cronkite "told us what we needed to know." That was the problem. I can decide for myself what I need to know. I don't need a New York liberal to recite the liberal democrat talking points to me. (I know, Cronkite went to San Jacinto High School in Houston, and to the University of Texas, but he became a typical New York elite spending time sailing his yacht in Martha's Vineyard or some such high tone place.)

After writing the above, I read some blogs to see what other people thought about Walter Cronkite. Some of them didn't like him much either. Here are Ann Althouse's comments. Like Ann, I mostly watched the Huntley-Brinkley report. Maybe that was because, after he retired, it became obvious that Brinkley was a conservative.

The world encountered significant warming about 14,000 to 15,000 years ago that melted the glaciers that covered most of North America. That seems to have been a good thing from the standpoint of humans. The event was not unprecedented; there had been about 20 cycles of 100,000 years of ice followed by a shorter interglacial interval. Man does not appear to have been a factor in these cooling and heating cycles, and the natural mechanism that caused the changes is uncertain. The earth underwent a "little ice age" from around 1300 AD to 1800 AD. Temperature started increasing at 1 to 1.2 degree F per century around 1800, a trend that initially was assumed to be due to natural causes. In the early 1900's man started burning a lot of fossil fuels that added CO2 to the atmosphere. At present the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is about 40% higher than it was in pre-industrial times. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that absorbs infrared radiation at wavelengths of 2.7, 4.3, and 15 microns. Around 1970 or so, some scientists became concerned that the increased level of CO2 would cause a high degree of warming of earth because the slight air temperature increase due to the increased CO2 concentration would allow an increase in the amount of water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, in the air. This would lead to furter warming resulting in melting of polar ice caps, resulting in more temperature increase as less sunlight is reflected. General circulation models were constructed which were calibrated with the assumption that increased CO2 rather than the unknown natural effects that previously must have been causing warming were now the cause. With this assumption, projected future increases in the CO2 concentration would necessarily lead to higher temperature projections. The GCMs became the proof that man-made global warming was happening. But, there are some logical fallacies in using the GCM computer output as proof. I have written about some of these issues before. Here is an article discussing this issue.

Friday, July 17, 2009

It didn't take long for Obama to strike back at the soldier who sued the government claiming that Obama wasn't born in the US. I recall that President Bush was criticized and accused of all sorts of crimes by citizens, but I don't recall any time when Bush struck back. President Clinton did attack private citizens who criticized him. Liberals always claim that it is the Republicans who engage in the politics of personal destruction, but that is just another example of projection by the liberals.

Here is an article by a person who has suffered under totalitarian governments, and who sees the beginnings of totalitarianism in America now. I have never lived under a totalitarian government, but it appears to me that Obama and the Democrats are planning on establishing one in America.

Now that Obama is President, Islamic groups are becoming more openly active recruiting inside the US. They think Obama is one of them, and whether or not he is, he supports them. So expect one of these "Fall of Capitalism, Rise of Islam" conferences to soon be coming to a site near you.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Democracies can only endure as long as a majority of the citizens do not vote themselves the money of the minority. The United States under Obama is rapidly approaching the tipping point. California appears to be tipping over now, and New York is already gone, as discussed here. New York has been on the path to destruction for 80 years and California for about 30 years. There may still be time for the rest of the country to avoid Richard Henry Lee's perceived danger of "elective despotism."

The Democrats economic plans are not working out, and then there is Nancy Pelosi and her claims that the CIA lied to her, which appear to be untrue. So they fall back to their blame Bush policy. They are a "one-trick pony" in that whatever goes wrong, they blame Bush-Cheney. Now they are claiming that they weren't told about a program to send out CIA teams to track down and capture or kill al_Queda leaders. The program was never actually put into operation, and former CIA Director Tenant claims he killed the program five years ago. Now Obama's political hack Director Leon Panetta says he has killed the program. That should really put a stake through the heart of the program. Apparently the decision was made some time ago that a better approach was to use Predator drones carrying Hellfire missiles to eliminate the bad guys. I don't see much difference in sending out teams to kill those we don't like, and killing them with missiles fired from drones. One difference is that our guys are not at risk of being captured or killed. (We worry more about them being captured than killed.) On the other hand, it seems more likely that some innocent bystanders will be injured in the missile attack even though we make serious efforts to limit collateral damage. It appears that Obama has actually increased the number of such drone attacks compared to what was happening under Bush. This is another manufactured complaint. People unfamiliar with how defense agencies work may be unaware that studies of all sorts of contingency plans are worked all of the time. There are probably hundreds of such plans now being made for all sorts of contingencies. It would be very unwieldy to keep Congress current and up to date on all contingency plans. Until a decision is made to execute a plan, or Congress asks what is being done about a specific issue, Congress does not need to be informed.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

A. J. Strata has determined the cause of man-made global warming. It is not CO2 emissions. It is rather the people who collect raw temperature data from a few spots around the world, extrapolate to fill in the vast regions with no temperature data, massage that data and declare that the the end of the world is near. They then get some scientifically ignorant, and maybe just generally ignorant, folks like Al Gore and Prince Charles to announce to the world that the end is near. Al Gore gave the world 10 years over 10 years ago, and Prince Charles who has even finer calibration gives the Earth 96 months. I reached the same conclusion Strata has now reached about 15 years ago, but didn't have as much corroborating data at that time.

Australian Senator Fielding asked Australian Climate Change Minister Penny Wong three simple questions:

"since temperatures have been dropping, can CO2 be blamed for them rising? What, if CO2 was the cause of recent warming, was the cause of temperatures rising higher in the past? Why, since the official computer models have been proved wrong, should we rely on them for future projections?"

Her answers weren't persuasive. Here's the story.

Obama is trying to decree that the United States will get 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Great Britain has been on a similar path for several years now with a more ambitious goal of 35% of electricity from renewables by 2020. Great Britain is not doing very well in meeting the goal, and since they are letting many of their existing plants go out of service, they can look forward to an increasing number of brownouts and even blackouts as the years go by. Here is a discussion of the British dilemma. The United States faces a similar future of much higher costs for less electricity if Obama gets his way.

The Obama birth certificate situation gets weirder all of the time. The military changed the deployment orders of the guy who sued because he said Obama couldn't order him into combat because Obama isn't a citizen. That ended the suit. This will no doubt add fuel to the fire.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

I haven't paid much attention to the Obama long form birth certificate issue. I know his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya. (I wonder if she has now changed her story.) I thought that surely the Democrats would have vetted Obama well enough to verify that he was actually born in the US. But, it is curious that when the lawsuits started being filed that Obama didn't just produce the long form birth certificate identifying the doctor who delivered him and the hospital he was born in as opposed to the short form version that doesn't definitively prove that he was born in Hawaii. For one thing, I couldn't think of any reason why his Mother and American grandparents would have bothered to get a short form birth certificate for him if he was actually born in Kenya; surely they wouldn't have been thinking that he might run for President some day. Here is an article about one of the lawsuits I had not previously heard about that gives a plausible reason: they may have been concerned about child custody in a divorce case that I can imagine they were likely expecting. The reason I have never thought about this much is that I have confidence that an organization with the ballot-box stuffing abilities of the Democrats would be able to forge a long form birth certificate if necessary.

Today the temperature in Arlington was 104 degrees F, but it was faily dry, so the heat didn't bother me. I played golf and shot my age (72, going 73 later this week) on an easy executive length golf course (par 66). It is unusual for all aspects of my golf game to be working well. I only had 12 putts on the last nine holes. I made one 20-foot putt; that was the only putt of over 4 feet that I made all day. Yesterday I played Putt-Putt with my 8-year old granddaughter. I made six aces (she made two). It really seems unlikely that playing Putt-Putt helped my golf, but maybe I'll try it again.

The drug laws have resulted in parts of police forces that have become increasingly lawless themselves. It is now routine for SWAT teams to knock down doors and aggressively attack people who are suspected of being just minor drug users, not necessarily drug dealers. There have been a few tragedies when police make a mistake and break into the wrong house. And, often the police get a warrant on the basis on informant accusations that are often unreliable, and may constitute an act of revenge. Here in Arlington a man was actually sent to jail for murder after he set up his victim, who was killed by a policeman. Here is an article about official abuse in Maryland.

Obama and the Democrats have a carbon cap and trade bill through the House of Representatives that is supposed to address "climate change," but, as is typical for Obama, actually is a wealth re-distribution tax that does nothing much to deal with the purported climate crisis. Again, as is typical with Obama era bills that are over 1000 pages long and Representatives don't read them before voting on them, there are a lot of surprises in them. And, typically, they reward Obama's supporters. David Limbaugh has an article discussing some of the odd provisions of the bill. My guess is that there are a lot of surprises included that no one has deciphered yet.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Obama says his stimulus package is working as planned. That makes a few things clear to us. First, the Democrats lied when they said the stimulus bill had to be passed immediately, before anyone had time to read it because the economy was in such dire straits. Obviously, since the bill wasn't intended to spend much immediately, they didn't think the economy was in such bad shape, or, if they did, they didn't care if the economy got worse. Second, the bill was intended to pay back political supporters, and most of the money begins to be spent in 2010, in time to help Democrats in the 2010 Congressional elections.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Obama and the Democrats have elimination of free speech as one of their goals. They would like to reinstitute the misnamed "fairness doctrine" to stop Conservative talk radio. Then their desire for "hate crime" laws are clearly intended to control speech, even speech of preachers in religious services. Now Cass Sunstein, one of Obama's czars, has an idea for controlling speech in the internet. It is difficult to understand why Democrats are referred to as "liberals," given their sepotic cravings and opposition to individual liberty.

Prince Charles is the poster boy example of why hereditary kings are a bad idea. He has somehow divined that the world has 96 months left before extinction due to global warming/climate change. Mark Steyn has a nice article on the mental giant that is Prince Charles.

Victor Davis Hanson has written an article explaining how Obama and the Democrats are waging war on economic producers. These are the middle class entrepreneurs. The enormously rich people like Soros, Buffett and Gates are not really affected by the increased taxes the Democrats want. And, they actually like the fascist controls and regulations that hamper upstart disruptive technology; they are happy with the status quo that restricts future GDP growth but insures their dominant position. Obama represents the realization of Ayn Rand's vision in Atlas Shrugged in which the looters and the moochers are in control of the nation. The question then is will the middle-class producers go "John Galt?" I saw a Democrat "spinner" on TV say that liberal "think tank" studies show that the personal marginal tax rate has to exceed 70% before initiative is affected. I am not so sure about that. Recently a plumber did some work at my house. He had recently bought a new truck, and said his intention had been to hire another employee to work out of his old truck. But, because of economic uncertainty and questions about future taxes, mandated healthcare, etc. he had parked the old truck and would probably just sell it. It may be that he was simply paralyzed by uncertainty about what the President and Congress would do in the future. But, he seemed pretty well convinced that he wasn't going to like what they were going to do with regard to taxes, regulations, etc. According to what I have read, the reason the 1929 recession turned into the Great Depression was largely the result of uncertainty about government intervention that caused people to not make new investments. The government action of the Hoover Administration made the situation worse. After FDR took over in 1933 he put Hoover's government action on steroids, and the the economy declined further. (The Democrats recall that things got better, but I was there, and people I knew thought things continued to deteriorate.)

Obama is great speaking with a teleprompter, and effectively uses strawman arguments and false choices in his speeches. He also distorts and misrepresents history. Given that we know little about him, and historically never made his position known by actually voting on issues, it is logical to wonder if he is not just a puppet, a sort of Wizard of Oz. That leaves us wondering, who is behind the curtain? Here is an analysis of his recent editorial on the nation's economy. As usual, his understanding of history is flawed, and he talks about legislative initiatives that have not yet been revealed to the public, and might never materialize.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Al Gore is now saying that policies to control "climate change" will lead to a global government. We already knew that the whole thing is a socialist plot, as Canadian Prime Minister Harper is quoted as saying. As Democrat Tim Wirth is quoted as saying, even if the global warming theory is wrong, we'll be doing the right thing. The goal of Democrats is a socialistic world government (probably of the fascist variety), and global warming is a justification for implementing their agenda.

Obama made his usual speech in Ghana today. He asked the politicians in Africa to give up their corrupt and dictatorial ways. I'm sure they were impressed, and will immediately change their behavior. He said Africa has a great future in the 21st century. Personally I have doubts. Given the over-population of the region coupled with an average IQ below 80, it seems unlikely to me that the Sub-Saharan Africans will ever be self sufficient. Obama, being a liberal, probably doesn't believe IQ has any significance.

Our leaders have a lot of difficulty understanding that the Koran requires Muslims to convert, subjugate, or kill us. That is the only choices given Muslims, so there is no way we can co-exist with devout Muslims. Obama recently made a speech in Egypt in which he acknowledged our transgressions against Muslims, and offered the hand of friendship. Al Qaeda was not impressed.

A lot of people are noticing the difference between Obama the Candidate and Obama the President. It appears to me that Obama is following the Cloward-Pivens Strategy. The idea of that strategy is to manufacture a series of crises that can be used as justification for immediate draconian actions intended to destroy capitalism. Here is another view of Obama that is critical but less harsh than my view. My view is that his stimulus package was intended primarily as a payoff for his constituents. It was not intended to slow the economic decline of the country, but rather to deepen the crisis so that even more draconian action could be taken such as a complete takeover of the financial system. I think that Obama, like Putin, would like to have a crisis with Iran. This would dramatically increase the price of oil, something both Putin and Obama would like to have happen.

Electric cars don't reduce release of CO2 unless the electricity used to recharge them is generated by hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, solar, or nuclear power plants. At present only a fraction of power in the US is from those sources, so electric cars don't reduce CO2 emissions much. To be practical at all electric cars must have lithium ion batteries. Widespread use of electric cars will put a strain on the supply of lithium. It is possible that we would run out of lithium before we run out of fossil fuel. Here is an article about electric cars.

Last year I thought Obama was in effect the Manchurian Candidate, representing Arab Muslims who want to destroy America. I could be wrong about that, but watching his performance for six months in office has reinforced that view. He has gone around the world dissing the leaders of our allies like Britain, France, Italy, and Germany, and embracing our enemies. He bows to the King of Saudi Arabia and kisses up to Latin American dictators. He apologizes to the world for everything America has ever done while distorting history, and says he is a new sheriff in town who is going to put America in its proper place while helping our enemies. His policies are clearly wrecking the economy of the United States. He is bringing Palestinians to the United States, and appointing Muslims with terrorist ties to Homeland Security posts. His Administration is attempting to designate as terrorists those who disagree with him on issues such as gun control, abortion, states rights, and same sex marriage. It really doesn't matter much whether or not he is the Manchurian Candidate because his policies are those of the Muslims who desire the destruction of America.

You can tell that Democrats are now in control. They are pushing initiatives to control all aspects of people's lives. The Department of Defense is now considering banning smoking cigarettes by military personnel (and I presume the millions of civilian DOD employees). Personally I have never smoked, and think people would be better off economically and healthwise if they didn't smoke cigarettes. But, I don't think the government should be deciding how people should live.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Obama's science czar, John Holdren, is a real kook. He has been wrong about every prediction that I have read about him making over the last 30 years or so. He is as wrong as his good buddy Paul Ehrlich, and as I recalled agreed that we would all starve to death in the 1980s. He also predicted that the world would run out of everything before the end of the 20th century. Naturally he is on board with catastrophic global warming. Here is one of Holdren's gems.

Those who support the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis are in a full court press to get action immediately. (Perhaps they realize that if the earth continues to cool as it has recently, currently being back down to the same temperature as in 1979, that the public will begin to ignore them, after which the politicians will lose courage.) Here is a humorous report about how the warmer temperatures are causing heavy rainfall, since warmer air can contain more water according to the Clausius-Clapyron relationship. The funny thing is that it is actually unseasonally cold where there is a lot of rain. Do they think that the air holds more water because the IPCCs computer models say the air is warmer? I wonder why newspapers publish this nonsense. I suppose it is because they support the collectivist policies of Obama and the Democrats, and the idea of a one world government lead by the UN.

Do-gooder environmentalists often wreak havoc for no good reason in areas that the general public never hears about. One example is the banning of DDT even though there has never been any evidence that it causes cancer in humans, or damages bird eggs as was alleged in Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring." Studies show that banning DDT has resulted in the deaths of millions of people from Malaria. Another example is banning lead in solder. This causes problems in electrical circuits, as discussed here. Banning lead in solder caused significant problems in the defense industry, where reliability is essential. The amount of lead used in solder would not create any health hazard, but environmentalists are absolutists who are not interested in cost-benefit analyses. There are a lot of other examples.

When I was young, the lawyers in East Texas typically wore light brown or light blue striped seersucker suits (which were inexpensive then) that often looked like they had slept in them. They also wore white shoes and white "plantation" style straw hats. All of them had an "aw shucks, I'm just a poor boy" demeanor. Trial lawyers have always engaged in a certain amount of stagecraft. Here is a case of a modern lawyer who is still using that "I'm just an ordinary guy" approach, and getting some criticism from his opponents. I wonder if the judge will order him to wear shoes with no holes in the soles?

Back when George Bush was President Democrats were upset because terrorists captured on the battlefield were not being read Miranda rights, and were being incarcerated at Gitmo. Now that Obama is in the White House Democrats want unelected officials to be able to imprison their political opponents. That would be people who oppose official government (that is, Democrat) positions on gun control, abortion, states rights or gay marriage. Democrats want to be able to designate these people as domestic terrorists, and lock them up. Thug Democrat Representative Alcee Hastings thought this up. This is illustrates that criticism of Bush's policies was physcological projection where the Democrats accused the Republicans of doing what they would do if and when they were in power. Democrats would like to label as a "hate crime" such things as support for states rights, opposition to gun control, opposition to abortion, and opposition to same sex marriages.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

I've written a lot before about the threat to America that Carol Browner represents. As she left as head of EPA at the end of the Clinton era, she destroyed all emails and other documents in violation of the law. Bush, ever the gentleman, choose to ignore the situation as a sign of good will. The Democrats attacked him anyway. In her new czar job Browner continues her old ways, in spite of the transparency laws the Democrats recently passed to harass Bush. I guess they forgot to specify that those transparency laws only apply to Republicans.

Here is an article with data showing that the IPCC's General Circulation Models have been unsuccessful at predicting future temperature. Everyone knows this, but the politicians charge ahead with their plans to reduce fossil fuel use to "save the world." The fact that the GCMs are not competent to predict temperature does not prove that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is not valid, but it certainly does not prove that it is valid. I would still like to know what proof of the validity the scientists and politicians are using. So far I have only seen them cite the GCMs, which have clearly failed. I think the models have failed for a simple reason that a lot of us pointed out years ago, before it became obvious that the models would fail. That reason was that the modelers assumed that the temperature would increase monotonically with increasing CO2 levels and used fudge factors to make the models match the temperature increase from about 1975 to 1995. Thus it has been built into the models that increasing CO2 levels will increase predicted temperature. The modelers appear to have been so certain that the hypothesis was correct that they didn't even consider the possibility that it is not correct.

Here is a discussion on the fact that most of the stimulus money goes to areas that voted for Obama. I'm not certain that this is unusual for two reasons: first because the areas of the country that have the people who are dependent on the government overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, and second, the money that has been spent so far has overwhelmingly been for social programs rather then the mythical "shovel ready" projects.

Here is Obama checking out a 16-year old. I can't tell if Sarkozy is looking at the girl or at Obama watching the girl.

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Here is some more discussion about the Obama Administration mistakes with the economy. This reflects the same sort of things I discussed earlier today, but expressed better with more detail.

At the G8 meeting it appears that those pretending to fight "climate change" (which used to be called anthropogenic global warming) say they are going to limit average global temperature increase since the start of industrialization to 2C. They plan to do that by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Apparently these folks do not believe that temperature changes due to natural causes. They seem to have forgotten that 7000 years ago average global temperature was more than 2C more than it is now. They appear to have no plan for dealing with a naturally occurring increase of more than 2C, something that obviously could happen since it has happened before. They also do not seem to realize that life would be better for humans if the average temperature was 2C warmer than it is now. As far as I know they also have no plan for the eventuality of another ice age; even a drop of average temperature by 2C would harm humans far more than an increase of 2C. They talk a lot about scientists predictions of what will happen. The scientist's models have been shown to have no predictive value. So why are they basing public policy on something known to be inaccurate?

My thought is that the Democrats never had any intent to provide a stimulus to the economy until late this year. They rushed through a so-called stimulus bill that was primary a payoff for their financial supporters, resorting to pushing it through before anyone could read it. They lied about their intentions, claiming that there would be a lot of money spent immediately on "shovel-ready" projects, something was was obviously untrue, but which their spinners, including major TV anchors spun as being true. Now they claim that about $100 billion of the almost $800 billion stimulus has been spent. There are doubts that this is true either.

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Here is a good description of the recent global financial crisis by Steve Sailer. The article talks about the man at AIG who is given credit for creating the problem. Sailer points out that it was indeed subprime mortgages that caused the problem regardless of what Democrats say, and that Goldman Sachs knew the system was going to blow up. They weren't worried because of how well connected they are politically. Paulson was one of them. And the donated heavily to Obama and the Democrats last year so are still politically connected. The other investment houses like Lehman Brothers were dupes.

Not stated in the article, but the investment houses needed home prices to go up. Population increase was needed for that to happen. Thus there was obvious incentive to bring in more immigrants. They seemed to not realize that illegal immigrants from Latin America could not earn enough money to actually pay for the houses they were buying.

In case anyone is interested here is a comment that has links to the two most widely used General Circulation Models, NASA/GISS model E and NASA GISTEMP. These two models are the ones most commonly cited as proving that the the global warming hypothesis is correct. The makers of these models admit that the software is poorly written. I read a comment by GCM modeler Gavin Schmidt the other day in which he said that the chaotic nature of climate makes it theoretically impossible to predict climate events more than two weeks into the future. He also pointed out, as I have discussed before, that two models do not produce the same results, and in fact are often widely dissimilar. One model will predict future long term drought in the Southwestern US, while another model will predict excessive rainfall and flooding for that area. Kevin Trenberth, a leader of modeling at NASA/GISS has said that the GCMs do not make predictions, but rather make projections. I take that to mean that they are good for doing what I call parametric analysis; that is where you vary certain inputs to see what will happen. Here is a question that I have: since the experts do not believe predictions the models that they use to convince politicians and the public that catastrophic manmade global warming is real, why do they think catastrophic man-made global warming is real? Since they are alleged to be scientists, they must have some reason other than a religious-like belief. So, what is their real reason for their belief? Recently Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT, said regarding man-made climate change fears, that ordinary people see through it, but educated people are vulnerable to it.

If anyone who is familiar with software is interested, take a look at NASA/GISS model E, which is written in Fortran, and let me know what you think of it. Reports are that it is very poorly written, and is hard to make run at all. I used to deal with Fortran programs that were like that.

Megan McArdle has interesting comments about healthcare and socialised medicine. It looks good on paper, but doesn't turn out well in practice.

Al Gore has proclaimed that fighting global warming skeptics (he calls us "deniers") is necessary to save the world similar to the way fighting Nazi's was. Al has some major conflicts of interest that are little reported by the media. The global warmists like to say, incorrectly, that all skeptics are in the pay of "big oil," and they get that repeated endlessly in the media. The media don't seem to grasp that Shell Oil and BP are rent seekers firmly on board with the warmists.

The Obama Administration now says that they knew the Stimulus Bill passed earlier this year was not going to have much effect until late this year and in 2010. Joe Biden and several Democrat spinners are saying that on TV. Biden says that the problem is that the economy was in much worse shape than they realized. Two thoughts come to my mind. First, has it ever occurred to the Obama Administration that they may have made the economy worse with their actions. (I am cynical enough to think that they knew that their actions would make things worse, but they planned to blame Bush.) The second thing is, do they think people will not recall what was being said as they passed their fake Stimulus Bill? Those comments included the Administration saying that it was imperative that the Bill be passed immediately before anyone had time to read it because the economy was in such bad shape and would collapse if the bill was not immediately passed. (Obviously they were lying then since they now say that they thought the economy wasn't in bad enough shape to need a real stimulus then.) Then there were the Republicans pointing out that the money would not be spent immediately, but Democrats said that there were lots of "shovel ready" projects. It turns out that the Democrats were lying about the whole thing. The Stimulus Bill truly was a payoff to Democrat supporters and never was truly a "Stimulus Bill." The Democrats planned to have the money kick in to stimulate things in time to help them in the 2010 elections. They're assumption is that the people won't remember their distortions and lies, and will accept their argument that everything bad is the fault of Bush.

Monday, July 06, 2009

Liberals frequently accused George Bush of violating the Constitution. In Bush's case there was at least a legal argument that Bush was properly exercising legal authority, and it was up to the courts to decide who was correct. (In fact, there is a strong legal argument that given the separation of powers, the courts are not empowered to decide what executive powers are.) And, Bush usually went to Congress to get their approval, even though the Democrats would often later claim they were misled, or didn't understand what they were doing (entirely plausible). Obama, on the other hand, appears to simply ignore the Constitution (which he has said he doesn't agree with) and laws he doesn't like (such as bankruptcy laws).

It is a bit late in the proceedings, but some scientists are beginning to realize how bad the climate change bill recently passed by the House, and are beginning to speak out against the catastrophic global warming hypothesis. They risk a lot of action against them by the government and by the politically driven scientific community.

Most people in America like their current healthcare situation. Democrats say that there are 45 million people who are uninsured (a figure that includes 10 or 12 million illegal aliens, many people who can afford health insurance but don't want to buy it, many people who are temporarily without insurance because of job change, and some people who either can't afford it or have pre-existing conditions that prevent them getting insurance). Democrats say that the cost of health insurance is increasing at an unsustainable rate, and is the cause the the current financial crisis. They propose to cure this problem with some sort of law, as yet not defined, that will bring insurance to most people, and will bring healthcare costs under control. Doing this will cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years (an average of $160 billion per year). It is not clear how spending an additional $1.6 trillion gets costs under control. As the details emerge, it appears that they are offering Americans who are satisfied with their healthcare poorer care because of rationing and less choice at higher cost. One would think that most people would not think it is a good deal. One thought I had on reading about this: why not just use the $160 billion per year to buy insurance for the 45 million uninsured people. That sum would provide $3500 per uninsured person, which is enough to get them a good group policy. The Democrats also are saying that one way to get costs under control is to just let old people die instead of treating them. It will be interesting to see if they can sell that, or if they can just have a cram down.

Sunday, July 05, 2009

The carbon cap and trade bill recently passed by the House is downright silly. The bill is purported to address the danger of the highly uncertain proposition that greenhouse gases are causing dangerous warming of the planet Earth, but actually, as admitted by its sponsors, does nothing useful in that regard. The bill does reward supporters of the Obama Administration. It provides a new trading vehicle to Wall Street to replace the CDOs that contributed to the recent financial collapse. Goldman Sachs is obviously on board. Here is an article that identifies some of the beneficiaries of the House Bill. There is still hope that the Senate will not go along with this travesty of a law, one that will impoverish middle class Americans, while enriching fat cat supporters of Obama. There is still time, but most Americans seem to be unaware of the mischief the fascist politicians and their corporate cronies are planning.

Saturday, July 04, 2009

It is no surprise that Obama has come down on the side of the President of Honduras who attempted to do away with the Constitution of that country. Obama and the Democrats generally favor the rule of man over the rule of law. They often don't like the law because it lacks "empathy." Obama has stated that he doesn't like the US Constitution, and he probably would like to change it before he has to wait to get more liberals on the Supreme Court. He may want to do away with the 22nd Amendment, as well as the First, Second, and Fourth.

Most people have probably never heard of the Cloward-Piven Strategy for destroying capitalism. The strategy is similar to the sort of thing advocated by Saul Alinsky. These tactics originated with socialist/anarchists, and have now been adopted by the Democrats. The attempt to criminalize policy differences as has been done by Democrats is another example of this type of tactic; they want to get all issues into court. They will no doubt be able to achieve some successes such as bringing down Sarah Palin, but eventually their opponents will respond. When that happens things will get nasty. Obama, supported by the very rich and the poor (defined by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged as the looters and the moochers), has effectively staged a coup that has changed American government. The question is whether or not his target, the middle class, will recognize what is happening before it is too late to mount a successful counter-revolution.

Friday, July 03, 2009

Robert Gibbs is by far the worst Press Secretary in history. He smirks, he laughs, he is condescending, he obfuscates, but he doesn't tell us anything. When underlings are little Hitlers, usually the chief is a big Hitler. Others who many probably regard as more reasonable than me are coming around to this view.

Like Neo Neocon I tried to tell people what Obama really was, but most didn't agree with me. They liked his smooth talk, and didn't mind his evasiveness, false choices, etc. Here are the rest of Neo Neocon's thoughts about how Obama is now revealing what he really is through his actions

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Here is some more from Neo Neocon. She gave Obama more slack than I did. I decided he was a dangerous threat to America when I watched his speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. No American official should have mostly Marxist, socialist, and thuggish friends as he does.

A long time ago I pointed out that Obama appeared to think he should be President for life. A lot of people are picking up on that now based on his actions and the actions of his cultish supporters. Neo Neocon has now picked up on the vibes. After some thought it seems to me that when Obama sends his private Acorn supporters out to quell protesters as Ahmadinejad sent his private army out in Iran recently, that they will wear greenshirts rather than brown or black shirts. Green fits in better with the environmental movement.

Flopping Aces has an approach to ending a discussion with a global warming cult member. I don't think it will work.

A lot of people think that Wal Mart represents a capitalist success story. But to a large extent the Wal Mart success is a story of Corporatism. It is no suprise that Wal Mart joins companies such as GE, Shell Oil, BP, Duke Power, etc. in hopping on the Obama bandwagon. They know Obama is a fascist, and they are willing to cede control to him for the regulatory and other advantages that working with him will gain for them over their competitors. This is an example of the danger of fascism to free market capitalism. Here is a discussion of why Wal Mart has signed onto Obama's public option health care plan.

There is currently considerable debate about carbon cap and trade as a remedy to the purported climate change due to emissions of greenhouse gases. It is curious that in this debate there has been no attention paid by the media to the predictive failure of the general circulation models (GCMs) on which the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis is based. Given the draconian energy policy initiatives that are justified by the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis, it is difficult to understand the lack of journalistic curiosity regarding the merits of the GCMs (rather than hard science) that form the basis for the AGW hypothesis.

The AGW hypothesis starts with the well-known fact that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation in narrow bandwidths around wavelengths of 2.7, 4.3, and 15 microns. Simple analysis shows that doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere considered alone would increase the temperature of the atmosphere by perhaps 2F due to increased absorption of infrared radiation from Earth. The AGW hypothesis holds that this atmospheric temperature increase would lead to an increase in the amount of water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, in the air. (The amount of water vapor that can be carried in the air increases exponentially with temperature according to the Clausius-Clapyron equation.) The increase in the amount of water vapor in the air would cause a further increase in the temperature of the air. This is called a “positive feedback.” Something that reduced air temperature as carbon dioxide increased would be termed a “negative feedback.” Increased cloudiness that reflects sunlight as a result of the increase in water vapor in the atmosphere would be an example of a negative feedback. (The GCMs assume that the increased cloudiness is in high altitude cirrus clouds that absorb radiation from the ground rather than the clouds below about 10,000 feet altitude that reflect sunlight.) The amount of water vapor that can be contained in the air depends on temperature, and at the equator the amount of water vapor is about 20,000 ppm(v) compared to about 380 ppm(v) for carbon dioxide. So, at the equator carbon dioxide is not very significant compared to water vapor, so the temperature increase there would be expected to be small. But, at the poles there is little water vapor in the air because of the low temperature, so larger temperature increases would be expected. This temperature increase could lead to polar ice melting. Ice reflects sunlight while water absorbs it, at least at high incidence angles. Thus the air temperature increase at the poles would be expected to result in less reflected solar energy, a positive feedback that further increases air temperature. This reasoning seems logical and indicates that a slight increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would eventually cause the air temperature to increase at an accelerating rate. The GCMs used by the United Nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) have many positive feedback loops, and no negative feedback loops. These models show temperature steadily increasing in the future. The supporters of the AGW hypothesis initially predicted that temperature would increase monotonically with increasing carbon dioxide levels regardless of natural effects.

When atmospheric scientists stopped being concerned about an impending ice age, and became concerned about global warming around 30 years ago, many people pointed out that history does not support the idea that all feedbacks are positive. The world has gone through many cycles of glaciations followed by meltdowns, and though the cause of these dramatic climate changes is unknown, they obviously occurred before man had any impact. There was also indication that carbon dioxide level had been at least an order of magnitude higher than in modern times, and the temperature did not accelerate upwards. Then there was the inconvenient warm period of 7000 years ago when temperature was much higher than today, the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period, and Little Ice Age starting about 600 years ago. Since the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago there have been nine cycles of lower to higher temperatures, and back. There is an embarrassing email trail of global warming enthusiasts discussing the need to “get rid of the MWP and the LIA,” and researchers set out to do just that. The result was the infamous Mann “hockeystick” which showed that temperatures were higher at present than at any time in the last 1000 years. But after Congressman Joe Barton forced release of the data behind the Mann hockeystick (one feature of the global warming debate is the curious reluctance of the supporters to share their data in contra variance to normal scientific practice), Canadian independent researchers Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick showed that the work was irreparably flawed. This should have settled the issue of whether or not the MWP and the LIA actually happened, but the global warming enthusiasts more or less ignored the facts. But most people now accept that there have been many cycles of ice ages followed by thaws, and that temperatures have been both higher and lower during the current interglacial than they are now. And there is no accepted explanation as to what the natural mechanisms are that caused the glaciations and thaws.

It is important to consider the politics behind the formation of the UN IPCC. Maurice Strong, the Canadian socialist billionaire, was the primary mover in the formation of the IPCC. He has clearly stated that his intent was to save the world, and that to do that it was necessary to destroy Western Civilization. His focus was on energy production by fossil fuel. The charter of the IPCC was to determine how man was affecting climate, not to determine what natural forces affect climate. The IPCC concentrated on greenhouse gases as the primary forcing mechanism in climate, and paid scant attention to other activities of man that clearly influence climate on a local level, such as land use. The reason appears to be that the goal was to advance public policies that reduced energy consumption. It is revealing that the IPCC produces two reports, one a report for policy makers, and another report by scientists. Many have commented on the IPCC procedure in which bureaucrat politicians write the report for policy makers before the scientist’s report is completed, and that the bureaucrats then coerce the scientists to conform to what the public policy report says, or simply ignore the scientist’s review comments.

Since 1998 the average temperature has not increased, and in fact, has declined so that at present the temperature is about the same as it was in 1979. The four major agencies that measure global temperature anomalies are NASA/GISS, NCDC/NOAA, HAD/CRU, and RSS/MSU. NASA/GISS (James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt) continually massages the raw data with the effect that past temperatures are continually revised downward, while current temperatures are revised upwards. It would be expected that if the errors in the raw data were random, that some corrections would go one way and some the other. But, with NASA/GISS the past always is revised down and current up. NASA/GISS is an outlier compared to the data of the other three agencies, and so should be disregarded. The GCMs, of course have projected temperatures continuing upward even as actual temperature has gone down. Recently, the modelers have said that “natural effects” are the reason for the discrepancy. Ten years ago the position was that natural effects were overwhelmed by increases in carbon dioxide, so temperature would continually go up uninterrupted. The GCMs not only have been wrong with regard to average global temperature, but also in the minute details. The troposphere temperature at mid-latitudes has gone down rather than up as required by the AGW hypothesis. The South Pole has gotten colder with time. Greenland has warmed, but is still colder than in 1930. The Antarctic ice mass has been increasing. Sea level stopped rising around 2003. Arctic sea ice has recovered to normal levels recently. The ocean temperature, according to over 3000 Argos sea buoys is not increasing, and appears to be falling, with the change within the accuracy of the measurements. It appears that cirrus cloud cover has declined rather than increasing. (Cloud formation is not predicted by the GCMs based on first principles of physics, and is basically an input parameter in the GCMs.) The supporters of AGW have explained that the cooling of the southern United States over the past 70 years as the result of increased release of natural aerosols from plants caused by the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that accelerated plant growth. This, of course, would be a negative feedback due to the increase in carbon dioxide that was not included in the GCMs. (This increased growth phenomena is present around the world in places like the Gobi desert where plants are now growing where there were none a few decades ago. It appears that increased carbon dioxide permits plant growth where there is limited water availability.)

Given the demonstrated failure of the GCMs to predict future climate, and given that the AGW hypothesis is built on projections of the GCMs, it seems ill advised to embark on draconian public policy initiatives that will negatively affect most people in the United States. This is particularly true since the GCM projections are that the policies, if implemented, will have little or no effect in any case, but are rather just “feel good” gestures. It would be better to expand research to improve the GCMs by determining as best we can all of the feedbacks, negative as well as, and to better understand the natural phenomena that clearly are more important to climate than assumed in the GCMs.

Obama has revealed that, in the manner of Democrats, he rather likes Marxist dictators. Thus he supports the would-be dictator of Honduras after the people threw him out of office after he attempted a coup to illegally overthrow the Constitution. The people of Honduras do not understand Obama's position.

Those who support the global warming hypothesis are wont to claim a lot of scary "facts" to support their position. Often the claims are gross exaggerations or are not true at all. Recently, as temperature has been declining, they have become more strident with claims that global warming is accelerating. Here is an example of claims recently made that are not true.

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

The world wide embrace of the global warming hysteria accompanied by politicians adoption of ill-conceived draconian measures reminds me of something Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote:

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

A lot of our politicians have joined the ranks of the insane. They need to read the 19th century book, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds." Scotland has joined the insanity, as described here.

Here is a bit of satire on the carbon cap and trade bill that just passed by the House of Representatives. Aside from the companies mentioned in the article, Duke Power, Shell Oil, British Petroleum, GM, Ford, PG&E and Exelon were also major rent seekers financially supporting Obama's candidacy, and involved in lobbying for the bill.

Here is a discussion of how the tax on carbon dioxide will affect the economy. I have a quibble with the author's use of the number of pounds of carbon dioxide used per pound of fuel burned. Natural gas (NG)produces more carbon dioxide per pound burned than gasoline or coal. But NG has more energy per pound, so produces less carbon dioxide per unit of output than coal. I agree with the author's point that carbon cap and trade will have serious negative impacts on the nation's economy and our way of life.