>>>>And one of the many faults of capitalism is that those with a ton of money can do the stupidest shit and still come out okay.
This is a phenomenon that is unique to Capitalism? Seems like there are some state-run companies in Venezuela that don't follow best practices but still remain in existence.
Agreed, but also not all convicted sex offenders are convicted for crimes that imply all of the outrage associated with the title "convicted sex offenders". As many other posters have pointed out, things like two underage people having consensual sex, public urination, texting a naked picture, etc require registation as a sex offender and apparently being banned from popular social networks. The Economist had a great article about this very subject (cover article actually). They pointed our rightly that the situation is unlikely to get better because no politician wants to be branded as being against coming down tough on "sex offenders".
Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.
If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)
The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
Credit for Australia's own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence." Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.
The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promises to combat global warming, was attempting his own emissions-reduction scheme. His administration was forced to de
"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
-- President Obama, Feb. 4.
Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.
The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.
He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.
At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend.
And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.
It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.
The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.
Facing the political trends today often feels like confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square in China. The tank is powered by intellectual lethargy, moral turpitude and an uncontained malice for the freedom and independence that made the country possible and great. Its purpose is to crush anyone who refuses to get out of its way.
Hope? Change? A new direction? Suppose one doesn't want to go in a "new direction" or see the country go in it? Suppose the change one hopes for is the banishment of government and others from one's life, from the economy, from education? Suppose one knows that the only way one can be taken in a new direction is by deception, theft and force?
The Democratic convention in Denver last week presented the latest model tank which the collectivists plan to deploy in the country. Call it the Obliterator.
A succession of speakers, every one of them adopting the tone of an abrasive locker room pep talk instead of a political address, ranted a from a podium on what looked like the topside of a blue Klingon warship - blue, one supposes, for Blue States - incongruously grafted to the faÃade of a Roman temple, doubtless intended to evoke Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial forty-five years ago. The parade of blowhards, most of whom combined secular collectivist sentiments with religious altruist ones, complete with quotations from the Bible, was climaxed by the appearance of Barack Obama, who on the evening of August 28 gave his acceptance speech as the Democratic nominee for President to a mass of worshipping, weeping, belief-crazed Obama cultists.
From beginning to end, the Democratic convention that ended with his appearance was more like a vaudeville show - "a series of acts," as one admiring commentator told the PBS anchor - imbued with the hysterical spirit of an evangelical tent meeting, in which all the attendees were united in an unreasoning, emotional Gestalt to hail the Messiah (or the Mahdi, the "expected one," to put an Islamic twist on the event). One half expected the 80,000-plus audience to rise as one and do the "wave," the American equivalent of the Nazi salute. To assure themselves that Obama is truly the "people's choice," the Democrats filled Invesco Field with a mob of the faithful to create the illusion that Obama would address not merely a hall full of party hacks, state delegates and their whips, and vote manipulators, but the whole American electorate.
The New York Times, in an adulatory story on Obama's acceptance speech, "Obama Takes the Fight to McCain" (August 29) remarked with brazen insouciance that the speech
"...came on a night that offered - by the coincidence of scheduling - a reminder of the historic nature of the Obama candidacy: 45 years to the day after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech on the Mall in Washington."
A coincidence of scheduling? There was nothing coincidental about it. The anniversary was a planned part of the Obama extravaganza to lend it "historical" significance, and perhaps even substance.
Viewers on any of the news programs covering the Democratic convention in Denver were constantly and solemnly reminded by news anchors that "history" was being made because an African-American or an American black was for the first time a major presidential candidate. Well, history of a sort was made, but not the kind that will be much dwelt on.
Obama's race, however, is immaterial. One judges an individual by the contents of his mind, by his values, by the conduct of his life. But Obama from the beginning has angled for the "black vote" and the vote of guilt-ridden whites. Thus, the charade. This is worse than mere dishonesty. It is a fraud being perpetrated on an entire country in the guise of "racial justice."
Much has been made during the presidential campaign of the candidates' experience or lack of it, in both domestic and foreign affairs. This is a straw man. True, any one of the o
The Sad Case of the Spotted Owl by Tom DeWeese (June 20, 2007)
Environmentalists are quick to lecture the rest of us about the ways of nature. Don't clean the dead trees off the forest floor, it's natural. Cattle and horses on the range aren't native, so let the grizzles and wolves devour them, it's natural. Man isn't part of the ecology, lock him out of vast areas of land, it's natural. It's interesting to note how the "natural" argument only applies when it is used to impose the radical environmental agenda. Case in point, the Northern Spotted Owl.
Spotted owls, we were told a decade ago, were disappearing because big bad timber companies were cutting down "old growth" forests. So the environmental movement rushed to the forests, hugged the trees and issued news releases to decry the evils of the logging industry. Save the owl. Save the trees. Kill the timber industry.
Of course, that was exactly the point. Kill the timber industry. As a result of the hysteria to save the "endangered" owls, U.S. timber sales were reduced by 80-90%, forcing saw mills to close, loggers to go broke and whole towns which depended on the industry to literally disappear. The federal crackdown on the industry caused a shift in U.S. domestic lumber supplies to foreign soils. In short, American industry suffered in the name of protecting the spotted owl. Turns out it wasn't true.
A decade and thousands of broken dreams later, comes this report from the federal government on the real reasons for the spotted owl's endangerment: "Oops."
According to a new government draft plan to save the species, scientists are no longer saying the greatest threat to the Spotted Owl is logging activity. "The draft recovery plan recognizes the primary threat to northern spotted owls as competition with barred owls." According to the report, barred owls are less selective about the habitat they use and the prey they feed upon and are out competing northern spotted owls for habitat and food, causing its decline.
In fact, for the entire decade since the issue emerged on the political scene, the property rights and land use movements have been reporting the fact that the spotted owl is only a sub-species of Mexican spotted owls, which are not endangered at all. Some experts will say the only way to tell the difference between the two is by their accents. (OK, I'm kidding, but this ridiculous story needs some humor). It was no secret that the spotted owl didn't need "old growth forests" to survive, since spotted owls were found living under bridges and in McDonald signs. What it needed was a good food source like any other species. Now we know it was undercut by another owl - a completely natural occurrence.
What was accomplished during the ten-year fight besides the destruction of an entire industry? The establishment of a very radical and dangerous political agenda called the environmental movement. Its power is now so great that no politician dare oppose them. Yet, that power, we now know for certain, was built on a lie. Some in the movement have even candidly admitted that if they didn't have the spotted owl they would have invented something like it to drive their agenda. In fact they did invent it and the purpose was to destroy the timber industry and private property rights. They called it an environmental emergency.
Now the truth has come out. So, will the same federal government which rushed to impose harsh treatment of innocent property owners and industry now roll back those stifling regulations and let freedom breath? Of course not. Agendas are agendas, regardless of the facts.
So instead, after the nation spent millions of dollars to destroy an industry's private property rights, still, the government plans to spend $200 million more on a "barred owl removal plan" in order to save the spotted owl.
And as usual, when a new government debacle is rolled out, there is always an emergency to drive the policy. Now, according to Ren Loheofener, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
The Global Warming Debate by Tom DeWeese (May 7, 2007)
With great fanfare, in March, Al Gore took Capitol Hill like a conquering hero as he testified on Global Warming before both houses of Congress. Fresh from conquests at the Academy Awards where his adoring Hollywood elites showered him with coveted golden statues for spreading their favorite propaganda, Gore was determined to turn his personal conquest into draconian federal law and ultimate human misery.
Gore's words to Congress were predictable. The earth is warming. The polar ice caps are melting. Polar bears are on the run. And it's man's fault. Solution? Ban or control human activities. The mantra of the religion of Global Warming is getting a little boring. It's quite possible, however, that Gore's appearance on the Hill actually represents the beginning of the end of his influence on climate policy rather than the start of a legislative tsunami.
Why? Because even after the Global Warming storm troopers, armed with billions of dollars, the backing of the Hollywood elite, the news media and most of academia have done everything possible to threaten, bully and force their one-sided propaganda on us, the so-called global warming skeptics seem to be coming out of their hiding places in ever greater numbers. The debate is now taking a dramatic change. As the skeptic side is heard, more Americans are beginning to understand that there are legitimate reasons for skepticism. Here are just a few of the latest developments.
Item: Just days before Gore's charge up Capitol Hill, a high profile climate debate between prominent scientists ended with global warming skeptics being voted the clear winner. Before the start of the debate, held in New York City, the audience polled 57.3% to 29.9% in favor of believing that Global Warming was a crisis. But following the debate the numbers completely flipped to 46.2% to 42.2% in favor of the skeptical point of view. Conclusion - when people hear both sides they can easily judge for themselves what is truth.
Item: On March 13, The New York Times, one of the most adamant promoters of the Global Warming gospel, published a landmark article stating "scientists argue that some of (former Vice President Al) Gore's central points are exaggerated and erroneous."
Item: French scientist Claude Allegre, a prominent French Socialist and supporter of Global Warming dogma, recanted his belief in man-made catastrophic global warming and now says promotion of the idea is motivated by money.
Item: One of Israel's top young scientists, Nir Shaviv, recently reversed his opinion, declaring that the link between emissions and climate variability has nothing more that "circumstantial evidence."
Item: The United Kingdom's famed environmental activist David Bellamy also recently converted to skepticism, as did Meteorologist Reid Bryson, who has switched from the 1970's global cooling scare to a global warming skeptic. Item: A report by the Heartland Institute, entitled "What Climate Scientists Really Say About Global Warming," exposes the weakness of the "consensus" claims of Global Warming shock troops. To reach its findings the report examined two surveys conducted among climate scientists; the first in 1996, and the second in 2003. Both surveys confirm scientists are divided on the issue. Says the report -
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More climate scientist "strongly disagree" than "strongly agree" with the notion that climate change is caused by humans.
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Most climate scientists do not believe "the current state of knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climate variability" over 100-year periods.
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Only 2 percent of climate scientists surveyed "strongly agree" that modeling programs designed to predict climate changes are accurate, and
Global Warming Heresy by Walter Williams (March 27, 2007)
Most climatologists agree that the earth's temperature has increased about a degree over the last century. The debate is how much of it is due to mankind's activity. Britain's Channel 4 television has just produced "The Great Global Warming Swindle," a documentary that devastates most of the claims made by the environmentalist movement. The scientists interviewed include top climatologists from MIT and other prestigious universities around the world. The documentary hasn't aired in the U.S., but it's available on the Internet. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XttV2C6B8pU)
Among the many findings that dispute environmentalists' claims are: Manmade carbon dioxide emissions are roughly 5 percent of the total; the rest are from natural sources such as volcanoes, dying vegetation and animals. Annually, volcanoes alone produce more carbon dioxide than all of mankind's activities. Oceans are responsible for most greenhouse gases. Contrary to environmentalists' claims, the higher the Earth's temperature, the higher the carbon dioxide levels. In other words, carbon dioxide levels are a product of climate change. Some of the documentary's scientists argue that the greatest influence on the Earth's temperature is our sun's sunspot activity. The bottom line is, the bulk of scientific evidence shows that what we've been told by environmentalists is pure bunk.
Throughout the Earth's billions of years there have been countless periods of global warming and cooling. In fact, in the year 1,000 A.D., a time when there were no SUVs, the Earth's climate was much warmer than it is now. Most of this century's warming occurred before 1940. For several decades after WWII, when there was massive worldwide industrialization, there was cooling.
There's a much more important issue that poses an even greater danger to mankind. That's the effort by environmentalists to suppress disagreement with their view. According to a March 11 article in London's Sunday Telegraph, Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five death threats since he started questioning whether man was affecting climate change. Richard Lindzen, professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, said, "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labeled as industry stooges." Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, said, "Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system."
Suppressing dissent is nothing new. Italian cosmologist Giordano Bruno taught that stars were at different distances from each other surrounded by limitless territory. He was imprisoned in 1592, and eight years later he was tried as a heretic and burned at the stake. Because he disagreed that the Earth was the center of the universe, Galileo was ordered to stand trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633. Under the threat of torture, he recanted and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Today's version of yesteryear's inquisitors include people like the Weather Channel's Dr. Heidi Cullen, who advocates that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) strip their seal of approval from any TV weatherman expressing skepticism about the predictions of manmade global warming. Columnist Dave Roberts, in his Sept. 19, 2006, online publication, said, "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg."
There are literally billions of taxpayer dollars being handed out to global warming alarmists, not to mention their dream of controlling our lives. Their agenda is threatened by dissent. They have the politician's ear; not we, who will suffer if they have their way.
Florida has no income tax, so their sales tax (perhaps on non-food items) is actually quite high to compensate. Tourism drives its economic engine, so sales tax makes them a lot of money.
I have to agree with you on this one. I have a Honda with 105k miles on it, and I've not had to make one repair on it that wasn't routine maintenance or fixing something that I broke on it. The car still runs like brand new, and all electronics still work as they did before. And I haven't been doing oil changes every 3000 miles; it's more like every 5 or 6 k. I do mostly city driving that is pretty brutal on most cars, and I'd say this car has held up tremendously. I had to do some suspension work after driving over a curb, and I've had to change belts and fluids as prescribed by Honda. If the prior poster's honda died at 75k miles, I'm thinking there must have been absolutely abnormal wear and tear.
In any event, I do happen to doubt the Prius engine can be as reliable as other Japanese engines simply because it is such new technology and seems to have more points of failure.
America's war on terrorism is being undercut--by the administration's efforts to inject religion into politics.
Our enemy in that war is the ideology of Islamic totalitarianism--an ideology which holds that one's life is to be lived entirely in service to Allah, that the dictates of the mullahs must be unquestioningly obeyed and that jihad must be waged against all who refuse. Islamic totalitarianism, which pervades Muslim societies, is a sweeping repudiation of reason in favor of faith, and of freedom in favor of force. That is what makes it America's deadly enemy.
When reason is categorically abandoned, people can deal with one another only by force. People who accept reason as their sole means of knowledge can settle differences by persuasion; the one with facts and logic on his side will prevail. But if faith--i.e., the embrace of beliefs contrary to reason--is one's ruling principle, there is no peaceful way to resolve conflicts. There can be no appeal to facts, no logic, no rational arguments--there can be only the insistence that some non-provable belief be accepted. And what could back up that insistence other than fists or guns--or airplanes smashing into buildings?
Politically, if religious faith dominates, freedom will not be permitted. If the basic political goal is the secular one of defending individual rights, then each person has sovereignty over his life and is left free by the state to think for himself and to pursue his own values. But if the basic goal is to implement the will of some unfathomable deity, then the citizen cannot be allowed to exercise his own judgment and to challenge divine authority. The religionist believes there is no difference between the crime of, say, murder and the "crime" of uttering some religious heresy--both acts defy God's commandments and so must be punished. The demand for blind faith does not acknowledge the inviolability of man's rational mind.
This clash between faith and freedom is not confined to Islam. When medieval Christianity ruled the West, allowing no dissent from ecclesiastic doctrine, the Crusades and the Inquisition were part of the Church's "holy war" against its infidels. However, this despotism ended when the Enlightenment--which did not penetrate the Muslim world--demonstrated the power and the glory of the human mind, and entrenched reason over faith.
This philosophy led ultimately to the founding of the first free nation: America. At the time, religion had long been an integral part of government throughout the world, with monarchs reigning by "divine right." America's Founding Fathers, products and admirers of the Enlightenment, realized that a nation based on individual liberty had to remove religion's power. So they established the principle--the secular principle--of separation between church and state.
Obviously, there can be secular forms of unreason, which also lead to tyranny (such as Marxism, with its view that "tools of production" control the content of one's mind). Secularism is not a sufficient condition for freedom--but a necessary one. A proper, rational government is limited by the imperative not to violate individual rights. But the government envisioned by religionists--the one for which the Bush administration is laying the groundwork--has unlimited power, to be exercised whenever officials claim to be following divine orders.
Today's religionists want government to discourage research on embryonic stem cells, to promote the Biblical account of life's origins, to urge schoolchildren to pray. Why? Not because these are logically defensible, but because they supposedly represent God's will. The religionists want us to revert to a pre-Enlightenment age, when faith and force--the twin tools of Osama bin Laden and his fellow-jihadists--ruled.
In America, unlike most of the Muslim world, even the religious retain some respect for reason. They generally understand that religion should be a private matter and that church and state should be divorced. They w
An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged
When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months' time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.
The small print explains "very likely" as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain's top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.
Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.
Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter's billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.
So one awkward question you can ask, when you're forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is "Why is east Antarctica getting colder?" It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you're at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it's confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.
That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.
Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.
The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.
What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on
Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist. And I am not the only one trying to make people open up their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was the first Canadian Ph.D. in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition. Few listen, even though I have a Ph.D, (Doctor of Science) from the University of London, England and was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. For some reason (actually for many), the World is not listening. Here is why.
What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens? Why does no one acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes on?
Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.
No sensible person seeks conflict, especially with governments, but if we don't pursue the truth, we are lost as individuals and as a society. That is why I insist on saying that there is no evidence that we are, or could ever cause global climate change. And, recently, Yuri A. Izrael, Vice President of the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed this statement. So how has the world come to believe that something is wrong?
Maybe for the same reason we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. "It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.
I was as opposed to the threats of impending doom global cooling engendered as I am to the threats made about Global Warming. Let me stress I am not denying the phenomenon has occurred. The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.
Since I obtained my doctorate in climatology from the University of London, Queen Mary College, England my career has spanned two climate cycles. Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970's global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact. By the 1990's temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus. It appears I'll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling.
No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.
I once received a three page letter that my lawyer defined as libellous, from an academic colleague
Point of No Return? by Thomas Sowell (August 22, 2006)
It is hard to think of a time when a nation -- and a whole civilization -- has drifted more futilely toward a bigger catastrophe than that looming over the United States and western civilization today.
Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and North Korea mean that it is only a matter of time before there are nuclear weapons in the hands of international terrorist organizations. North Korea needs money and Iran has brazenly stated its aim as the destruction of Israel -- and both its actions and its rhetoric suggest aims that extend even beyond a second Holocaust.
Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
This is not just another in the long history of military threats. The Soviet Union, despite its massive nuclear arsenal, could be deterred by our own nuclear arsenal. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred.
Fanatics filled with hate cannot be either deterred or bought off, whether Hezbollah, Hamas or the government of Iran.
The endlessly futile efforts to bring peace to the Middle East with concessions fundamentally misconceive what forces are at work.
Hate and humiliation are key forces that cannot be bought off by "trading land for peace," by a "Palestinian homeland" or by other such concessions that might have worked in other times and places.
Humiliation and hate go together. Why humiliation? Because a once-proud, dynamic culture in the forefront of world civilizations, and still carrying a message of their own superiority to "infidels" today, is painfully visible to the whole world as a poverty-stricken and backward region, lagging far behind in virtually every field of human endeavor.
There is no way that they can catch up in a hundred years, even if the rest of the world stands still. And they are not going to wait a hundred years to vent their resentments and frustrations at the humiliating position in which they find themselves.
Israel's very existence as a modern, prosperous western nation in their midst is a daily slap across the face. Nothing is easier for demagogues than to blame Israel, the United States, or western civilization in general for their own lagging position.
Hitler was able to rouse similar resentments and fanaticism in Germany under conditions not nearly as dire as those in most Middle East countries today. The proof of similar demagogic success in the Middle East is all around.
What kind of people provide a market for videotaped beheadings of innocent hostages? What kind of people would throw an old man in a wheelchair off a cruise liner into the sea, simply because he was Jewish?
What kind of people would fly planes into buildings to vent their hate at the cost of their own lives?
These are the kinds of people we are talking about getting nuclear weapons. And what of ourselves?
Do we understand that the world will never be the same after hate-filled fanatics gain the ability to wipe whole American cities off the face of the earth? Do we still imagine that they can be bought off, as Israel was urged to buy them off with "land for peace" -- a peace that has proved to be wholly illusory?
Even ruthless conquerors of the past, from Genghis Khan to Adolf Hitler, wanted some tangible gains for themselves or their nations -- land, wealth, dominion. What Middle East fanatics want is the destruction and humiliation of the west.
Their treatment of hostages, some of whom have been humanitarians serving the people of the Middle East, shows that what the terrorists want is to inflict the maximum pain and psychic anguish on their victims before killing them.
Once these fanatics have nuclear weapons, those victims can include you, your children and your children's children.
The terrorists need not start out by wiping our cities off the map. Chances are they would first want to force us to humiliate ourselves in whatever ways their sadistic imaginations could conceive, out of fear of their nuclear weap
It never ceases to amaze me how patronizing whites become when an eloquent black comes on the scene. Good oratory skills have no correlation whatsoever to real leadership or decent ideals or intellectual honesty. The above article is a prime example. The senator asks people to do as he says, not as he does. Then his office lies about the issue (perhaps not out of malice). But who cares, "he speaks so well" to quote Chris Rock.
Illinois Senator Barack Obama warns citizens at his 50th Town Hall meeting about gas guzzling, WPSD-TV reports.
It was among many points made to the standing room only audience at the Metropolis Community Center. Obama spoke on everything from DC politics to global warming.
He says part of the blame for the world's higher temperatures rests on gas guzzling vehicles. Obama says consumers can make the difference by switching to higher mileage hybrids.
Today the Senator said, "It would save more energy, do more for the environment and create better world security than all the drilling we could do in Alaska."
"After the meeting... Obama left in a GMC Envoy after admitting to favoring SUV's himself," claimed local News Channel 6.
MORE
Tommy Vietor, Senator Obama's press secretary, explains: "What Senator Obama has long advocated is the use of vehicles that are more fuel efficient, including but not exclusively hybrids.
"The vehicle senator obama travels in while in illinois is a Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV), which can run on e85, a blended fuel made of 85 percent ethanol.
"So he in fact was practicing what he preached at the town hall meeting in Metropolis yesterday when he said we must drive fewer gas-guzzling vehicles."
But it does not appear that GMC's Envoy is E85 ready. One wonders why so many slashdot readers have such a boner for Obama.
Slashdot Mirror
>>>>And one of the many faults of capitalism is that those with a ton of money can do the stupidest shit and still come out okay.
This is a phenomenon that is unique to Capitalism? Seems like there are some state-run companies in Venezuela that don't follow best practices but still remain in existence.
Agreed, but also not all convicted sex offenders are convicted for crimes that imply all of the outrage associated with the title "convicted sex offenders". As many other posters have pointed out, things like two underage people having consensual sex, public urination, texting a naked picture, etc require registation as a sex offender and apparently being banned from popular social networks. The Economist had a great article about this very subject (cover article actually). They pointed our rightly that the situation is unlikely to get better because no politician wants to be branded as being against coming down tough on "sex offenders".
Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.
If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)
The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
Credit for Australia's own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence." Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.
The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promises to combat global warming, was attempting his own emissions-reduction scheme. His administration was forced to de
Gold sucks. and so do you.
"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
-- President Obama, Feb. 4.
Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.
The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.
He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.
At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend.
And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.
It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.
The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.
After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential ca
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-0/
mods, what the fuck? +1 insightful? Put the joint you're smoking down and reinsert the pole you were working on
Facing the political trends today often feels like confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square in China. The tank is powered by intellectual lethargy, moral turpitude and an uncontained malice for the freedom and independence that made the country possible and great. Its purpose is to crush anyone who refuses to get out of its way.
Hope? Change? A new direction? Suppose one doesn't want to go in a "new direction" or see the country go in it? Suppose the change one hopes for is the banishment of government and others from one's life, from the economy, from education? Suppose one knows that the only way one can be taken in a new direction is by deception, theft and force?
The Democratic convention in Denver last week presented the latest model tank which the collectivists plan to deploy in the country. Call it the Obliterator.
A succession of speakers, every one of them adopting the tone of an abrasive locker room pep talk instead of a political address, ranted a from a podium on what looked like the topside of a blue Klingon warship - blue, one supposes, for Blue States - incongruously grafted to the faÃade of a Roman temple, doubtless intended to evoke Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial forty-five years ago. The parade of blowhards, most of whom combined secular collectivist sentiments with religious altruist ones, complete with quotations from the Bible, was climaxed by the appearance of Barack Obama, who on the evening of August 28 gave his acceptance speech as the Democratic nominee for President to a mass of worshipping, weeping, belief-crazed Obama cultists.
From beginning to end, the Democratic convention that ended with his appearance was more like a vaudeville show - "a series of acts," as one admiring commentator told the PBS anchor - imbued with the hysterical spirit of an evangelical tent meeting, in which all the attendees were united in an unreasoning, emotional Gestalt to hail the Messiah (or the Mahdi, the "expected one," to put an Islamic twist on the event). One half expected the 80,000-plus audience to rise as one and do the "wave," the American equivalent of the Nazi salute. To assure themselves that Obama is truly the "people's choice," the Democrats filled Invesco Field with a mob of the faithful to create the illusion that Obama would address not merely a hall full of party hacks, state delegates and their whips, and vote manipulators, but the whole American electorate.
The New York Times, in an adulatory story on Obama's acceptance speech, "Obama Takes the Fight to McCain" (August 29) remarked with brazen insouciance that the speech
"...came on a night that offered - by the coincidence of scheduling - a reminder of the historic nature of the Obama candidacy: 45 years to the day after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech on the Mall in Washington."
A coincidence of scheduling? There was nothing coincidental about it. The anniversary was a planned part of the Obama extravaganza to lend it "historical" significance, and perhaps even substance.
Viewers on any of the news programs covering the Democratic convention in Denver were constantly and solemnly reminded by news anchors that "history" was being made because an African-American or an American black was for the first time a major presidential candidate. Well, history of a sort was made, but not the kind that will be much dwelt on.
Obama's race, however, is immaterial. One judges an individual by the contents of his mind, by his values, by the conduct of his life. But Obama from the beginning has angled for the "black vote" and the vote of guilt-ridden whites. Thus, the charade. This is worse than mere dishonesty. It is a fraud being perpetrated on an entire country in the guise of "racial justice."
Much has been made during the presidential campaign of the candidates' experience or lack of it, in both domestic and foreign affairs. This is a straw man. True, any one of the o
Canibus already contemplated this http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/2000-B-C-Before-Canibus-lyrics-Canibus/2EE34A3044402F8F482568A800134012
Ctrl-F iridium
Apparently it hasn't affected the global temperatures too much: http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Worldwide+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm
I'm so confused!
The Sad Case of the Spotted Owl
by Tom DeWeese (June 20, 2007)
Environmentalists are quick to lecture the rest of us about the ways of nature. Don't clean the dead trees off the forest floor, it's natural. Cattle and horses on the range aren't native, so let the grizzles and wolves devour them, it's natural. Man isn't part of the ecology, lock him out of vast areas of land, it's natural. It's interesting to note how the "natural" argument only applies when it is used to impose the radical environmental agenda. Case in point, the Northern Spotted Owl.
Spotted owls, we were told a decade ago, were disappearing because big bad timber companies were cutting down "old growth" forests. So the environmental movement rushed to the forests, hugged the trees and issued news releases to decry the evils of the logging industry. Save the owl. Save the trees. Kill the timber industry.
Of course, that was exactly the point. Kill the timber industry. As a result of the hysteria to save the "endangered" owls, U.S. timber sales were reduced by 80-90%, forcing saw mills to close, loggers to go broke and whole towns which depended on the industry to literally disappear. The federal crackdown on the industry caused a shift in U.S. domestic lumber supplies to foreign soils. In short, American industry suffered in the name of protecting the spotted owl. Turns out it wasn't true.
A decade and thousands of broken dreams later, comes this report from the federal government on the real reasons for the spotted owl's endangerment: "Oops."
According to a new government draft plan to save the species, scientists are no longer saying the greatest threat to the Spotted Owl is logging activity. "The draft recovery plan recognizes the primary threat to northern spotted owls as competition with barred owls." According to the report, barred owls are less selective about the habitat they use and the prey they feed upon and are out competing northern spotted owls for habitat and food, causing its decline.
In fact, for the entire decade since the issue emerged on the political scene, the property rights and land use movements have been reporting the fact that the spotted owl is only a sub-species of Mexican spotted owls, which are not endangered at all. Some experts will say the only way to tell the difference between the two is by their accents. (OK, I'm kidding, but this ridiculous story needs some humor). It was no secret that the spotted owl didn't need "old growth forests" to survive, since spotted owls were found living under bridges and in McDonald signs. What it needed was a good food source like any other species. Now we know it was undercut by another owl - a completely natural occurrence.
What was accomplished during the ten-year fight besides the destruction of an entire industry? The establishment of a very radical and dangerous political agenda called the environmental movement. Its power is now so great that no politician dare oppose them. Yet, that power, we now know for certain, was built on a lie. Some in the movement have even candidly admitted that if they didn't have the spotted owl they would have invented something like it to drive their agenda. In fact they did invent it and the purpose was to destroy the timber industry and private property rights. They called it an environmental emergency.
Now the truth has come out. So, will the same federal government which rushed to impose harsh treatment of innocent property owners and industry now roll back those stifling regulations and let freedom breath? Of course not. Agendas are agendas, regardless of the facts.
So instead, after the nation spent millions of dollars to destroy an industry's private property rights, still, the government plans to spend $200 million more on a "barred owl removal plan" in order to save the spotted owl.
And as usual, when a new government debacle is rolled out, there is always an emergency to drive the policy. Now, according to Ren Loheofener, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
The Global Warming Debate
by Tom DeWeese (May 7, 2007)
With great fanfare, in March, Al Gore took Capitol Hill like a conquering hero as he testified on Global Warming before both houses of Congress. Fresh from conquests at the Academy Awards where his adoring Hollywood elites showered him with coveted golden statues for spreading their favorite propaganda, Gore was determined to turn his personal conquest into draconian federal law and ultimate human misery.
Gore's words to Congress were predictable. The earth is warming. The polar ice caps are melting. Polar bears are on the run. And it's man's fault. Solution? Ban or control human activities. The mantra of the religion of Global Warming is getting a little boring. It's quite possible, however, that Gore's appearance on the Hill actually represents the beginning of the end of his influence on climate policy rather than the start of a legislative tsunami.
Why? Because even after the Global Warming storm troopers, armed with billions of dollars, the backing of the Hollywood elite, the news media and most of academia have done everything possible to threaten, bully and force their one-sided propaganda on us, the so-called global warming skeptics seem to be coming out of their hiding places in ever greater numbers. The debate is now taking a dramatic change. As the skeptic side is heard, more Americans are beginning to understand that there are legitimate reasons for skepticism. Here are just a few of the latest developments.
Item: Just days before Gore's charge up Capitol Hill, a high profile climate debate between prominent scientists ended with global warming skeptics being voted the clear winner. Before the start of the debate, held in New York City, the audience polled 57.3% to 29.9% in favor of believing that Global Warming was a crisis. But following the debate the numbers completely flipped to 46.2% to 42.2% in favor of the skeptical point of view. Conclusion - when people hear both sides they can easily judge for themselves what is truth.
Item: On March 13, The New York Times, one of the most adamant promoters of the Global Warming gospel, published a landmark article stating "scientists argue that some of (former Vice President Al) Gore's central points are exaggerated and erroneous."
Item: French scientist Claude Allegre, a prominent French Socialist and supporter of Global Warming dogma, recanted his belief in man-made catastrophic global warming and now says promotion of the idea is motivated by money.
Item: One of Israel's top young scientists, Nir Shaviv, recently reversed his opinion, declaring that the link between emissions and climate variability has nothing more that "circumstantial evidence."
Item: The United Kingdom's famed environmental activist David Bellamy also recently converted to skepticism, as did Meteorologist Reid Bryson, who has switched from the 1970's global cooling scare to a global warming skeptic.
Item: A report by the Heartland Institute, entitled "What Climate Scientists Really Say About Global Warming," exposes the weakness of the "consensus" claims of Global Warming shock troops. To reach its findings the report examined two surveys conducted among climate scientists; the first in 1996, and the second in 2003. Both surveys confirm scientists are divided on the issue. Says the report -
*
More climate scientist "strongly disagree" than "strongly agree" with the notion that climate change is caused by humans.
*
Most climate scientists do not believe "the current state of knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climate variability" over 100-year periods.
*
Only 2 percent of climate scientists surveyed "strongly agree" that modeling programs designed to predict climate changes are accurate, and
Yea genius, because Bill Gates needs the ~$500 million that sale raised. Look out Eliot Spitzer, we have a replacement.....
Global Warming Heresy
by Walter Williams (March 27, 2007)
Most climatologists agree that the earth's temperature has increased about a degree over the last century. The debate is how much of it is due to mankind's activity. Britain's Channel 4 television has just produced "The Great Global Warming Swindle," a documentary that devastates most of the claims made by the environmentalist movement. The scientists interviewed include top climatologists from MIT and other prestigious universities around the world. The documentary hasn't aired in the U.S., but it's available on the Internet. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XttV2C6B8pU)
Among the many findings that dispute environmentalists' claims are: Manmade carbon dioxide emissions are roughly 5 percent of the total; the rest are from natural sources such as volcanoes, dying vegetation and animals. Annually, volcanoes alone produce more carbon dioxide than all of mankind's activities. Oceans are responsible for most greenhouse gases. Contrary to environmentalists' claims, the higher the Earth's temperature, the higher the carbon dioxide levels. In other words, carbon dioxide levels are a product of climate change. Some of the documentary's scientists argue that the greatest influence on the Earth's temperature is our sun's sunspot activity. The bottom line is, the bulk of scientific evidence shows that what we've been told by environmentalists is pure bunk.
Throughout the Earth's billions of years there have been countless periods of global warming and cooling. In fact, in the year 1,000 A.D., a time when there were no SUVs, the Earth's climate was much warmer than it is now. Most of this century's warming occurred before 1940. For several decades after WWII, when there was massive worldwide industrialization, there was cooling.
There's a much more important issue that poses an even greater danger to mankind. That's the effort by environmentalists to suppress disagreement with their view. According to a March 11 article in London's Sunday Telegraph, Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five death threats since he started questioning whether man was affecting climate change. Richard Lindzen, professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, said, "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labeled as industry stooges." Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, said, "Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system."
Suppressing dissent is nothing new. Italian cosmologist Giordano Bruno taught that stars were at different distances from each other surrounded by limitless territory. He was imprisoned in 1592, and eight years later he was tried as a heretic and burned at the stake. Because he disagreed that the Earth was the center of the universe, Galileo was ordered to stand trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633. Under the threat of torture, he recanted and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Today's version of yesteryear's inquisitors include people like the Weather Channel's Dr. Heidi Cullen, who advocates that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) strip their seal of approval from any TV weatherman expressing skepticism about the predictions of manmade global warming. Columnist Dave Roberts, in his Sept. 19, 2006, online publication, said, "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg."
There are literally billions of taxpayer dollars being handed out to global warming alarmists, not to mention their dream of controlling our lives. Their agenda is threatened by dissent. They have the politician's ear; not we, who will suffer if they have their way.
cmdr taco knows a little bit about getting the gooey stuff right where it needs to be and in just the right amount....
Florida has no income tax, so their sales tax (perhaps on non-food items) is actually quite high to compensate. Tourism drives its economic engine, so sales tax makes them a lot of money.
I have to agree with you on this one. I have a Honda with 105k miles on it, and I've not had to make one repair on it that wasn't routine maintenance or fixing something that I broke on it. The car still runs like brand new, and all electronics still work as they did before. And I haven't been doing oil changes every 3000 miles; it's more like every 5 or 6 k. I do mostly city driving that is pretty brutal on most cars, and I'd say this car has held up tremendously. I had to do some suspension work after driving over a curb, and I've had to change belts and fluids as prescribed by Honda. If the prior poster's honda died at 75k miles, I'm thinking there must have been absolutely abnormal wear and tear.
In any event, I do happen to doubt the Prius engine can be as reliable as other Japanese engines simply because it is such new technology and seems to have more points of failure.
From Peter Schwartz:
America's war on terrorism is being undercut--by the administration's efforts to inject religion into politics.
Our enemy in that war is the ideology of Islamic totalitarianism--an ideology which holds that one's life is to be lived entirely in service to Allah, that the dictates of the mullahs must be unquestioningly obeyed and that jihad must be waged against all who refuse. Islamic totalitarianism, which pervades Muslim societies, is a sweeping repudiation of reason in favor of faith, and of freedom in favor of force. That is what makes it America's deadly enemy.
When reason is categorically abandoned, people can deal with one another only by force. People who accept reason as their sole means of knowledge can settle differences by persuasion; the one with facts and logic on his side will prevail. But if faith--i.e., the embrace of beliefs contrary to reason--is one's ruling principle, there is no peaceful way to resolve conflicts. There can be no appeal to facts, no logic, no rational arguments--there can be only the insistence that some non-provable belief be accepted. And what could back up that insistence other than fists or guns--or airplanes smashing into buildings?
Politically, if religious faith dominates, freedom will not be permitted. If the basic political goal is the secular one of defending individual rights, then each person has sovereignty over his life and is left free by the state to think for himself and to pursue his own values. But if the basic goal is to implement the will of some unfathomable deity, then the citizen cannot be allowed to exercise his own judgment and to challenge divine authority. The religionist believes there is no difference between the crime of, say, murder and the "crime" of uttering some religious heresy--both acts defy God's commandments and so must be punished. The demand for blind faith does not acknowledge the inviolability of man's rational mind.
This clash between faith and freedom is not confined to Islam. When medieval Christianity ruled the West, allowing no dissent from ecclesiastic doctrine, the Crusades and the Inquisition were part of the Church's "holy war" against its infidels. However, this despotism ended when the Enlightenment--which did not penetrate the Muslim world--demonstrated the power and the glory of the human mind, and entrenched reason over faith.
This philosophy led ultimately to the founding of the first free nation: America. At the time, religion had long been an integral part of government throughout the world, with monarchs reigning by "divine right." America's Founding Fathers, products and admirers of the Enlightenment, realized that a nation based on individual liberty had to remove religion's power. So they established the principle--the secular principle--of separation between church and state.
Obviously, there can be secular forms of unreason, which also lead to tyranny (such as Marxism, with its view that "tools of production" control the content of one's mind). Secularism is not a sufficient condition for freedom--but a necessary one. A proper, rational government is limited by the imperative not to violate individual rights. But the government envisioned by religionists--the one for which the Bush administration is laying the groundwork--has unlimited power, to be exercised whenever officials claim to be following divine orders.
Today's religionists want government to discourage research on embryonic stem cells, to promote the Biblical account of life's origins, to urge schoolchildren to pray. Why? Not because these are logically defensible, but because they supposedly represent God's will. The religionists want us to revert to a pre-Enlightenment age, when faith and force--the twin tools of Osama bin Laden and his fellow-jihadists--ruled.
In America, unlike most of the Muslim world, even the religious retain some respect for reason. They generally understand that religion should be a private matter and that church and state should be divorced. They w
An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change
Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged
When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months' time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.
The small print explains "very likely" as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain's top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.
Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.
Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter's billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.
So one awkward question you can ask, when you're forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is "Why is east Antarctica getting colder?" It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you're at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it's confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.
That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.
Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.
The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.
What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on
Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist. And I am not the only one trying to make people open up their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was the first Canadian Ph.D. in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition. Few listen, even though I have a Ph.D, (Doctor of Science) from the University of London, England and was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. For some reason (actually for many), the World is not listening. Here is why.
What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens? Why does no one acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes on?
Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.
No sensible person seeks conflict, especially with governments, but if we don't pursue the truth, we are lost as individuals and as a society. That is why I insist on saying that there is no evidence that we are, or could ever cause global climate change. And, recently, Yuri A. Izrael, Vice President of the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed this statement. So how has the world come to believe that something is wrong?
Maybe for the same reason we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. "It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.
I was as opposed to the threats of impending doom global cooling engendered as I am to the threats made about Global Warming. Let me stress I am not denying the phenomenon has occurred. The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.
Since I obtained my doctorate in climatology from the University of London, Queen Mary College, England my career has spanned two climate cycles. Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970's global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact. By the 1990's temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus. It appears I'll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling.
No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.
I once received a three page letter that my lawyer defined as libellous, from an academic colleague
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Point of No Return?
by Thomas Sowell (August 22, 2006)
It is hard to think of a time when a nation -- and a whole civilization -- has drifted more futilely toward a bigger catastrophe than that looming over the United States and western civilization today.
Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and North Korea mean that it is only a matter of time before there are nuclear weapons in the hands of international terrorist organizations. North Korea needs money and Iran has brazenly stated its aim as the destruction of Israel -- and both its actions and its rhetoric suggest aims that extend even beyond a second Holocaust.
Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
This is not just another in the long history of military threats. The Soviet Union, despite its massive nuclear arsenal, could be deterred by our own nuclear arsenal. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred.
Fanatics filled with hate cannot be either deterred or bought off, whether Hezbollah, Hamas or the government of Iran.
The endlessly futile efforts to bring peace to the Middle East with concessions fundamentally misconceive what forces are at work.
Hate and humiliation are key forces that cannot be bought off by "trading land for peace," by a "Palestinian homeland" or by other such concessions that might have worked in other times and places.
Humiliation and hate go together. Why humiliation? Because a once-proud, dynamic culture in the forefront of world civilizations, and still carrying a message of their own superiority to "infidels" today, is painfully visible to the whole world as a poverty-stricken and backward region, lagging far behind in virtually every field of human endeavor.
There is no way that they can catch up in a hundred years, even if the rest of the world stands still. And they are not going to wait a hundred years to vent their resentments and frustrations at the humiliating position in which they find themselves.
Israel's very existence as a modern, prosperous western nation in their midst is a daily slap across the face. Nothing is easier for demagogues than to blame Israel, the United States, or western civilization in general for their own lagging position.
Hitler was able to rouse similar resentments and fanaticism in Germany under conditions not nearly as dire as those in most Middle East countries today. The proof of similar demagogic success in the Middle East is all around.
What kind of people provide a market for videotaped beheadings of innocent hostages? What kind of people would throw an old man in a wheelchair off a cruise liner into the sea, simply because he was Jewish?
What kind of people would fly planes into buildings to vent their hate at the cost of their own lives?
These are the kinds of people we are talking about getting nuclear weapons. And what of ourselves?
Do we understand that the world will never be the same after hate-filled fanatics gain the ability to wipe whole American cities off the face of the earth? Do we still imagine that they can be bought off, as Israel was urged to buy them off with "land for peace" -- a peace that has proved to be wholly illusory?
Even ruthless conquerors of the past, from Genghis Khan to Adolf Hitler, wanted some tangible gains for themselves or their nations -- land, wealth, dominion. What Middle East fanatics want is the destruction and humiliation of the west.
Their treatment of hostages, some of whom have been humanitarians serving the people of the Middle East, shows that what the terrorists want is to inflict the maximum pain and psychic anguish on their victims before killing them.
Once these fanatics have nuclear weapons, those victims can include you, your children and your children's children.
The terrorists need not start out by wiping our cities off the map. Chances are they would first want to force us to humiliate ourselves in whatever ways their sadistic imaginations could conceive, out of fear of their nuclear weap
It never ceases to amaze me how patronizing whites become when an eloquent black comes on the scene. Good oratory skills have no correlation whatsoever to real leadership or decent ideals or intellectual honesty. The above article is a prime example. The senator asks people to do as he says, not as he does. Then his office lies about the issue (perhaps not out of malice). But who cares, "he speaks so well" to quote Chris Rock.
Illinois Senator Barack Obama warns citizens at his 50th Town Hall meeting about gas guzzling, WPSD-TV reports.
It was among many points made to the standing room only audience at the Metropolis Community Center. Obama spoke on everything from DC politics to global warming.
He says part of the blame for the world's higher temperatures rests on gas guzzling vehicles. Obama says consumers can make the difference by switching to higher mileage hybrids.
Today the Senator said, "It would save more energy, do more for the environment and create better world security than all the drilling we could do in Alaska."
"After the meeting... Obama left in a GMC Envoy after admitting to favoring SUV's himself," claimed local News Channel 6.
MORE
Tommy Vietor, Senator Obama's press secretary, explains: "What Senator Obama has long advocated is the use of vehicles that are more fuel efficient, including but not exclusively hybrids.
"The vehicle senator obama travels in while in illinois is a Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV), which can run on e85, a blended fuel made of 85 percent ethanol.
"So he in fact was practicing what he preached at the town hall meeting in Metropolis yesterday when he said we must drive fewer gas-guzzling vehicles."
But it does not appear that GMC's Envoy is E85 ready. One wonders why so many slashdot readers have such a boner for Obama.