Freedom of Press is limited to those who own one - H.L. Mencken

Thursday, August 26, 2010

The usual Lame Stream Media propagandists must be desperate to try and defend the close to $1 trillion dollar stimulus patronage bill known as the “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” as this desperate and transparently vain attempt by Time tries to make this pig pretty proves.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus — has been marketed as a jobs bill, and that’s how it’s been judged. The White House says it has saved or created about 3 million jobs, helping avoid a depression and end a recession. Republicans mock it as a Big Government boondoggle that has failed to prevent rampant unemployment despite a massive expansion of the deficit. Liberals complain that it wasn’t massive enough.

Friday, July 30, 2010

When Obama, helped by the demcorat controlled congress, bought out GM for their Union buddies with tax payer money masquerading as stimulus funding or TARP bailouts - that line is blurry - I warned that the result of this would be disastrous. I warned that all that a government takeover of a car manufacturing company would lead to was the forced adoption of a car that would not be liked, used expensive green technology that was meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and in the end would cost orders of magnitude more to purchase than one was getting for it. Of course, the left pretended that wouldn’t be the case, and that now that government was in charge of GM’s strategy and direction, they would put out a dream car that would do the imposable and also save the environment and planet all in one swoop. GM would go into the business of making green transportation, and with the evil entities usually blamed by the combustion engine-haters unable to thwart GM’s efforts because of government protection, they would finally succeed! All the deniers and doubters were finally going to be shown how great that whole collectivist green stuff really was. It looks like I was right. Let me rub it in some.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Guess what? Remember all the talk about how the BP Gulf incident was going to destroy the entire ecosystem of the Gulf? Well, check this latest story out:

For 86 days, oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s damaged well, dumping some 200 million gallons of crude into sensitive ecosystems. BP and the federal government have amassed an army to clean the oil up, but there’s one problem—they’re having trouble finding it. Watch ‘World News’ for the latest coverage on the Gulf oil spill. At its peak last month, the oil slick was the size of Kansas, but it has been rapidly shrinking, now down to the size of New Hampshire. Today, ABC News surveyed a marsh area and found none, and even on a flight out to the rig site Sunday with the Coast Guard, there was no oil to be seen.

You read that right. There are some hints there though. Did you know that the there is a very active and thriving ecosystem in the Gulf that lives off of oil seepage in the Gulf? And while the story also points out the following:

Still, it doesn’t mean that all the oil that gushed for weeks is gone. Thousands of small oil patches remain below the surface, but experts say an astonishing amount has disappeared, reabsorbed into the environment.

It goes right on to point out the most important thing in this story:

“[It’s] mother nature doing her job,” said Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University.

I think the biggest lies we have had our political and agenda driven classes tell us recently is how vulnerable Mother Nature is when we constantly have examples, like this one, of nature reversing the effects of these catastrophes of every kind, and in record time.

The light crude began to deteriorate the moment it escaped at high pressure, and then it was zapped with dispersants to speed the process along. The oil that did make it to the ocean’s surface was broken up by 88-degree water, baked by 100-degree sun, eaten by microbes, and whipped apart by wind and waves.

And it is no coincidence that nature was prepared to deal with this stuff. It has had billions of years of practice. My guess is that man will be long gone before the planet ever goes barren and lifeless, and future generations will make fun of the hoaxsters that constantly predicted man’s demise and evil disregard for a natural order that could have cared less about any of the hoopla. At least Obama can now say the government did a bang up job by doing squat.

Monday, July 12, 2010

The AGW cultists have recently been up in arms about how an “independent review” of the Climategate scandal cleared the cultist, finding no evidence to question the “rigor and honesty” of scientists involved. Of course, as was obvious to anyone but the cultists, there wasn’t anything independent, and nothing much other than a political whitewash to continue to lend credibility to, and defend, the indefensible and incredible , as this WSJ article clearly points out.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Although most of the readers of this blog disagree with me on global warming, I think we can all agree that the new climate bill—propose by the losers of the the 2004 and 2000 elections—is a piece of garbage.

First, it’s a protectionist piece of garbage. As Lincicome points out, it is putting trade tariffs in place with a thin veneer of climate protection painted over it.  It’s no accident that one of the first groups to praise the bill was the United Steelworkers Union.  And, as Ronald Bailey points out, industry heavyweights are holding their fire because they are hoping that this 987-page behemoth throws enough money and protectionism their way to make it worthwhile.

Second, it’s not going to do a thing to save the environment (assuming it needs saving).  Pat Michaels used the leading climate models to project what difference the “American Power Act” would make.  The results?

As you can plainly see, APA does nothing, even if all the Kyoto-signatories meet its impossible mandates.  The amount of warming “saved” by 2100 is 7% of the total for Business-as-Usual, or two-tenths of a degree Celsius. That amount will be barely detectable above the year-to-year normal fluctuations.  Put another way, if we believe in MAGICC, APA — if adopted by us, Europe, Canada, and the rest of the Kyotos — will reduce the prospective temperature in 2100 to what it would be in 2093.

That’s a big if.  Of course, we could go it alone. In that case, the temperature reduction would in fact be too small to measure reliably.

To be fair, China and India are the big X-factors here.  And it takes about five decades for CO2 reductions (or increases) to show up in the climate. However, to be really fair, the bill mostly calls for changes to be made many years down the road when both of the bills sponsors will, in all likelihood, having reduced their carbon footprint to zero by dying.  It’s pretty clear, after only a cursory examination, that the ratio of “helping monied interests” to “helping the climate” in this bill is very very high.

I’ve gone over this before, but it’s worth mentioning again what a serious AGW policy might look like.  The policy I would favor, for example, would:

1) Put in a carbon tax to make carbon energy less attractive.  Offset the revenue by cutting corporate taxes to spur innovation and development.  The basic idea is that a cost of carbon energy—damage to the climate—is not being included in the price and should be.  In addition, high gas prices are far more effective in cutting gasoline use than all the taxpayer-subsidized electric cars ever built.

2) Pour money into alternative energy grants, said grants to be awarded by panels of scientists and engineers, NOT politicians.  Money for that can come out of ongoing energy boondoggles like ethanol.  This is the long-term solution.  If we develop a viable alternative to fossil fuels, we won’t need treaties and laws to make us use it.  We will stampede toward it and the problems of global warming (and energy dependence and declining fossil fuels) will be solved overnight.

3) Wait twenty years to see what the science tells us before doing anything else.

Now, I will grant you that this does not accomplish some objective.  It does not give unions the protectionist trade tariffs they want.  It does not shower money on politically powerful lobbies.  It does not pour billions into worse-than-useless technology because its supporters have the ear of our scientifically ignorant politicians.  It doesn’t create a massive corrupt cap and trade bureaucracy that can suck up money, peddle influence and create new hordes of well-remunerated public employees.  So it’s a work in progress.

But Kerry-Lieberman—and Waxman-Markey—and McCain-Lieberman—a perfect example of how unserious the Left is about Global warming.  Whatever the science may be, to the Democrats this is an opportunity for power, wealth and influence.  I will not waver from that belief until they put forward a serious proposal.  Kerry-Lieberman, for all the swooning on the left, is just this year’s iteration of the Annual Climate Joke.

I’ve heard that one before.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

The NYT highlights a new paradigm for the environment.  Using kids to indoctrinate their parents into the Way of the Green.  A little light fisking music maestro.

Thursday is the 40th anniversary of the original Earth Day. Over the years, the impact of this once seminal day has lessened.

The reason the impact has lessened, as I noted in an earlier post, is that things have gotten better over the last 40 years.  Our air and water are cleaner; our utilities and cars are cleaner and more efficient; our lives are healthier, happier and longer.  Earth Day was a lot more urgent when cities were drowning in smog and lakes were dying.  The remaining problems—resource shortages, overfishing, etc.—have solutions that are being worked on.  As for global warming, it’s not at all clear how big a problem that’s going to be.

Here’s a move in the right direction: launching this Earth Day is Green My Parents, a nationwide effort to inspire and organize kids to lead their families in measuring and reducing environmental impact at home. Not just on Earth Day, but every day. GMP’s initial goal is to have its first 100 youth advocates train and educate 100 peers (who will then turn to 100 of their respective peers and so on), with the aim of saving families $100 million between now and April 2011.

Am I the only one a little creeped out by this?  We’re one step away from using kids to inform on parents. 

(I’ll also note that what I call “The Hope of The Exponent”—that 100 will teach 100 will teach 100, etc.—is usually the sign of desperate movement.)

How? By washing in cold water, walking or biking to school/work and kicking the bottled-water habit, for example. GMP’s founders suggest that by taking simple steps like those, the average family could save over $1,000 each year.

I’m all in favor of getting rid of bottled water (voluntarily).  But washing in cold water?  Walking to work?  You don’t want to be anywhere on time and smelling good, do you?  All conservation is not equal.  You have to weigh how much money you are saving against how much inconvenience you’re creating.  Kids are notoriously bad at this, as anyone who has spent an hour arguing with a kid about socks can relate.

GMP recognizes that young people are inherently attuned to their environment and understand the importance of protecting it. Conversations I’ve had with kids of late reveal real worries about the future of the planet and concerns about their inability to act.

Bullshit.  As Don Boudreaux notes:

Kids aren’t inherently attuned to the environmental condition of even their own bedrooms, as a peek into a typical twelve-year-old’s room will instantly prove.  So it’s asinine to think that children “inherently” care about the condition of Siberia or of Brazilian rainforests.

Today’s prattling by young people about how awfully dirty the globe is reflects not kids’ “inherent” tuning-in to the global environment but, instead, their indoctrination – performed by teachers and popular media – into the Church of Gaia.

Children who express concern about the environment do so because they are impressionable and are, more often than not, being told doom and gloom stories by their teachers.  Sal 11000 Beta is not old enough for this, but all of my friends with older children have had the experience of their children coming home from school, filled with despair that the planet is being destroyed.  Even in my kid’s day care, she had to bring a list of three things she was doing to save the planet.

Children believe the planet is dying, not because they are inherently attuned to the Earth, but because their teachers tell them the planet is dying.  Even problems that have long been on the upswing—deforestation, acid rain and overpopulation—are still trotted out as the End of the World in our nation’s classrooms.  I once spent part of an afternoon deprogramming a nephew about the deforestation of North America.

The NYT story gets even worse from what I’ve quoted above.  It praises kids for “not thinking about limitations, but about good ideas”.  But our world is defined by limitations.  And the problem with green policy being implemented is not that people don’t care or are unaware of environmental concerns.  It’s that there are always tradeoffs involved and not everyone agrees on the relative weights of the important concerns.

Honestly, Earth Day brings out the worst ideas.  This article is literally praising the indoctrination of impressionable kids so that they can be used to emotionally blackmail their parents into engaging in “green” activities (which are often not green at all).

Sigh. At least there’s always George Carlin to set us right.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Our military knows how important our satellites are to their operations. Any country that goes to war with the formidable US military would be in a world of hurt. That is, unless they can cripple the technological advantages we have. And the quickest way to do so is to destroy enough of our satellites to fail both the GPS and the communications capabilities that our military hardware relies on to do its job well. The Chinese know they can not take the US head on. Let’s not kid around. China has ambitions to global domination, and they know the road to that requires them to eventually deal with the US military. They might choose to simply wait it out and hope 5 decades from now their economic advantages, the rapid decline of the US as the collectivists destroy anything and everything that made it exceptional, and their program to steal any and all military or industrial secrets without even the slightest bother to conceal that’s their agenda, to come together and deliver onto them that superior military capability, but my bet is that the fight will come sooner than later. The Chinese seem to feel the same way because for a while now their strategy has been to explore and build ways to come at us by asymmetrical means. From bringing down the internet to using ballistic missiles as carrier killers, they are looking at ways to overcome the technological advantage of our military, and score a David vs. Goliath kind of kill. And they are relying heavily on a strategy that attacks our space based infrastructure and destroy our technological advantage in the quickest and most effective way. So it is good to see that our military, despite the pap from the usual idiots that think the way to keep the hungry wolf at bay is to bare your throat to it in a gesture of submission, are taking the space threat seriously and acting upon it.

The military is fast moving to the use of UAVs. It should come as no surprise that an UAV would be just as good an option to have in space. The ability to quickly replace satellites or even protect ones in space while destroying enemy satellites or enemy kill vehicles, in order to provide continuity on the modern battlefield are key to deterring aggressive opponents. If you know your strategy to deny your enemy space and technology isn’t going to work, even a lunatic is going to think twice about starting a conflict that hinges on an asymmetrical attack reducing your enemy’s ability to take your forces out and give you a chance to win a fight you otherwise would not. If anything, this stuff will deter adventurism.

Monday, April 19, 2010

If you still doubt that the collectivists in government invented AGW to screw us over and take more of our money, check out the State Department’sredolent report blaming man unequivocally for this piece of collectivist fiction.

WASHINGTON, April 19 (Reuters) - The United States released a new draft report on climate change on Monday, one week before the expected unveiling of a compromise U.S. Senate bill that aims to curb heat-trapping greenhouse emissions.

The report, a draft of the Fifth U.S. Climate Action Report that will be sent to the United Nations, says bluntly: “Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced ... Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.”

Without action to stop them, climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions will rise over 8,000 megatonnes by mid-century, the draft said. By adopting measures detailed in a bill passed last year by the U.S. House of Representatives, these emissions will drop beneath 2,000 megatonnes. They’re now about 6,500 megatonnes. The United Nations measures greenhouse gas emissions in megatonnes, or million metric tons.

The effects of climate change are already evident, the draft said: warming air and oceans, vanishing mountain glaciers, thawing permafrost, signs of instability in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica and rising sea levels.

This bull isn’t accidental. The left, despite the obvious unmasking of this scam and the fact practically every sane person now knows this was just kleptokratic leftist predictions of doom & gloom in order to help them force their fantasies on an unwilling public, our own government continues to pretend like this stuff is real and settled.

These crooks are shameless. And guess which masters they are serving? No, don’t the proof is right in the report’s purpose:

The State Department report will ultimately go to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; previous U.S. reports to this body were in 1994, 1997, 2002 and 2007.

Screw the lot of them. A plague on them all. The agenda is to control our lives by controlling our access to resources as well as curtailing our mobility. If you are too worried about staying warm or cold and can’t afford your own transportation, government can control you better. Be afraid of these bastards.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Mt. Eyjafjallajökull (pronounced, “What?") erupted this week, spewing ash for thousands of miles and grounding airline flights all over Europe.  The Boston Globe has a stunning set of pictures of the eruption.  It’s amazing what Mother Nature can do when she’s in a bad mood.  If Yellowstone ever goes up, we’re doomed.

(Yellowstone Eruption Survival Tip:  Since the internet travels faster than seismic activity, your first hint of trouble will be all your friends in Wyoming posting, “Burning to death!  AIEEE!” on Facebook.  The more you know...)

I don’t think this eruption will affect climate measures, as PInatubo did.  Pinatubo was the most massive explosion in a millennium and dropped global temperatures by half a degree.  We actually had to correct ground-based astronomy measures because of the crud that mountain put in the atmosphere.  But this eruption is impressive enough.

Joke of the day from some British friends:  “Dear Iceland, we told you to send us cash.”

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Earth Hour is tonight.  I can’t even begin to convey how unexcited I am about it.  It represents everything that is wrong about the feel-good, celebrity-driven pile of nonsense that is most of the environmental movement.  You can drive a gas guzzler, live in a drafty mansion and fly private planes.  But as long as you turn the lights out and fumble around in the dark for an hour, you’re a good person.  If environmentalism is a religion, Earth Hour is the equivalent of making up for your sins by saying three “Hail Mary"s.

David Boaz notes

Folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute suggest that “this sends the wrong message — to plunge us all into darkness as a rejection of technology and human achievement.” In fact, they point out that it’s Earth Hour every night in North Korea, where people lack basic freedoms, as well as affordable, reliable access to many human achievements, such as electricity. Check out this famous photo of environmentally conscious North Koreans observing Earth Hour all night, every night.

When you get down to it, Earth Hour is a smirking luddite middle finger to the progress that has made us so heathy, so rich and so drenched with free time that we can afford to worry about the side effects of our progress.  It’s actually celebrating barbarism.  It turns its back on the tradition of innovation and invention that is the most likely cure for our environmental ills.

Global warming isn’t going to be fixed by bashing your shins on the barcalounger, but by industry and technology.  To hell with Earth Hour.

(As an aside, Earth Hour is a typical left wing sham.  Most people burn candles to provide light, which is actually worse for the environment.)

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Scientists recently discovered that they could awaken previously unthought-of of regenerative abilities in mammals by removing a single gene. Soon we will all be able to regenerate tissue just like we were lizards that lost their tails! Well maybe not, but the findings are incredible.

A quest that began over a decade ago with a chance observation has reached a milestone: the identification of a gene that may regulate regeneration in mammals. The absence of this single gene, called p21, confers a healing potential in mice long thought to have been lost through evolution and reserved for creatures like flatworms, sponges, and some species of salamander. In a report published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from The Wistar Institute demonstrate that mice that lack the p21 gene gain the ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue.

Now if they could only find the stupid gene that makes people believe collectivism at anything other than the micro level can work despite over a century of proof to the contrary and remove it, then the human race would stand a chance. On the other hand, if they extend our lives and it becomes reasonable to live to the ripe old age of 200 then we are going to have to work for 180+ years of that life. Me, I think I will be glad to just go sooner. That’s some serious taxes you would end up paying during that span. They would take a bite out of ya and you would just regenerate right back to be eaten again. Maybe there is money to be made with this. Insta-bacon factory and all that. And I bet some people like John Bobbitt would have liked to be able to have the ability to regenerate appendages, if you know what I mean.

Monday, February 22, 2010

So now it looks like the drastically rising oceans, the apocalyptic end game the AGW church has warned us would happen if we refused to accept the collectivist government takeover of our freedoms and cash, was also, erm, exaggerated?

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings. The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study ”strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results”. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in Decemberthat projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.

OK, so now we are told that they are unsure of the rise. That’s bull of course because what was likely found is that they have no science to prove this idiotic claim. So now even the threat of Waterworld is gone? No melting glaciers, no disappearing North Pole or ice in the Himalayas, no oceans rising… WTF? What’s left? What’s the impending catstrophe that should scare us all into letting them take away our freedoms and cash in return for, well nothing but an overarching government that has control of every aspects of our lives by limiting our access to energy and controlling our purchase power?

All the fear mongering we used to say was bunk and based on bunk science, is now proven as bunk. That’s why it was retracted. Asked to prove with science their claims, one by one, they are being retracted, or drastically revised, to a point that the end result is a statistical insignificance. And yet, the defenders of the AGW cult are still hard at work trying to make not only like they still have the science behind them, but that the onus is on the “deniers” to disprove the AGW claims, even though now it is a given that the underlying data, methodology, and the projected damage all are outright falsehoods or exaggerations. Even worse, people are starting to see that the real big money influences were not from the people that the AGW cultists demonized, but by the very priests of the AGW cult, which have all made millions, and stood to make billions more, scamming us all.

If the AGW watermelon cultists had any sense, they would drop this lost cause and go invent the next big lie they are going to glom on to try and convince us to let them create their global wealth redistributing collectivist government for the elites by. Of course they will not. They will continue to try and lie & bluff their way through this – after all, they have a complacent and willing media that has so far ignored the scandalous behavior by them – and in the process make sure we all know this is a fanatical cult based more on faith than any kind of science.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

While I do not want to belittle the fact that Obama is pushing for nuclear energy, I find the much touted news that he is pushing for 2 new nuke plants is just a token - one that they can easily take away later when they have gotten what they want: more massive and horribly destructive taxes on all of us - and meaningless in the grand scheme of things. It’s a joke. And insult. The Chinese are building over 120 new reactors in the next decade. That’s commitment to nuclear energy. 2 Plants are not going to add any significant power to the already desperate energy situation we face. Especially since my bet is that they will pull the plug on them anyway later, just like they did with Yucca Mountain. I hope the republicans see through this slight of hand and do not buck on their stance to kill that “Cap and Tax” bill. Remember that when government controls energy through prices they can control the peasants…

Friday, February 12, 2010

But it looks like science, the real kind that is not immune to peer review and also isn’t based on concensus, has now allowed an airborn laser to shoot down a ballistic missile. It is quite funny to me that we achieve this technology feat when we have a president in the WH whose party called the idea crazy when introduced and still believes the best thing to do is to not have the capability to avoid being seen as antagonistic. Let’s hope we get this stuff out in the field for real sooner than later.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

No, I don’t mean our budget situation, I literally mean a black hole simulator that shows what it would look like if you passed near a black hole or, God forbid, fell into one.  Enjoy.