Another Reason to End the EPA

Funny how articles on a topic seem to run in batches. Apropos of yesterday's post, Way Up North has a link to Borepatch's article on the Climategate 2.0 email dump. Go read the whole thing, including the embedded links.

Does Gringrich's and Romney's embrace of "man made global warming" make sense now? Unfortunately, there is no way to know who all may be involved. Some of the politicians may be running under the radar, while one may make a good guess about others. The EPA has been in the thick of it though, since before the original Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, with AlGore leading the charge in Kyoto.  Bush took a neutral position on the issue, so I don't think he was directly involved.  But the Massachusetts vs. EPA (2007) case "forcing" the EPA to regulate green house gases happened on his watch.  The point is, who can be trusted to do the right thing by the American people?

I recommend we all pray about who we should vote for in the coming elections.

Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

Sultan Knish, AKA Daniel Greenfield, has a piece on his website entitled 5 Biggest Lies about Liberalism. I wish I could have said it as well. After I read it, I was sorry I did not see it before, when it ran a year ago. One could take issue with which lies of the left are are top five, but certainly multiculturalism, feminism, being friends of the poor, being pro-peace, and being patriotic are in the top ten. I would add that the Left claims the mantle of science and rationality, while being irrational and fanatical.

On multiculturalism, Greenfield writes:

Multiculturalism is really only class warfare disguised as opposition to bigotry. Take away all the historical revisionism about the Democratic party's ugly civil rights history and the empty slogans about diversity, and what you have left is naked political opportunism. The Democratic party trafficked in racism when it suited them (and still does) and dons the halo of tolerance when it suits them now. The left was equally at home working both sides of the street, and the views of great socialists from Jack London to Karl Marx on race, differed little from those of the Nazi party.

and on feminism, he writes:

Like multiculturalism, owning the feminist brand has been convenient. And it was easy enough to manage once feminism became a wholly owned product of academia, funded by liberal groups like the Ford Foundation. This brand of feminism has as much to do with equal rights for women, as African Studies have to do with equal rights for African-Americans. They're basically little more than ways to repackage the agenda politics of the far left in identity colors. That way socialism can be dressed up as a civil rights agenda, and opposition to it becomes racism or sexism.

In exposing what the Left is really about with their multiculti, feminazi hatred of everything and everyone, their historical revisionism, their constant and pathological lies about their true motives, and their real goals, one would think that a open minded reader would at least begin to question just what their leaders have in mind. Recently, Senate Majority Leader Reid allowed a bit of truth spill out, buried in amongst the lies, that let us have a glimpse of what they were really trying to do. Harry Reid excoriated the Republicans for holding up the the FAA extension over a provision to cut subsidies to 13 small airports, when in fact it was the Democrats who wanted to add provisions to unionize flight attendants. In doing so, Reid had to know that most of the news media would back him up, or bury the true issue deep in the story. Even if John Boehner objects, his message will never get out. To make matters worse, the particular flight attendants they wanted to unionize, Delta, had voted not to be represented by a union. But the union can't seem to take "no" for an answer. So, who are the Democrats representing: the flight attendants or the union bosses? The union bosses may believe that Delta employees don't really know what's good for them, but should that be the concern of the Democrats? Indeed, should that be the concern of Government at all? 

The Left has consistently lied about Anthropogenic Global Warming (Goofball Wormening). They have everywhere claimed that the "science is settled," which then absolves them from debating the topic. But as any real scientist knows, the science is never settled. New findings must always be tested by proving or falsifying predictions made from the new theory. But whenever the so called "climate models" have been tested on a past climate, they have been found inaccurate. Satellite data has been routinely ignored because it didn't show a warming trend. Even land based temperatures have not shown any warming for 10 years. But the Left uses its strangle hold on the media to keep these messages under wraps. Timothy Birdnow has an article entitled Warmists Strike Back at the American Thinker which discusses the active role the climate "scientists" took in ensuring that skeptics would not have a forum to present their counter findings.  What he presents is a consistent series of lies, misdirections, and energy put into discrediting their critics that defies belief.  A sane person would have to ask himself why, when they could see the raw data, and working behind the curtains they had to know the tricks, would they have kept up the facade so long?

Then there are the lies being told about Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry. According to these liars, Perry and Bachmann would initiate a Christian Theocracy in the United States. Of course, especially in Bachmann's case, this line of reasoning ignores the the first 100 years of American history. If the Constitution permitted a theocracy, it would have already occurred. But the Founders did not intend to establish a religion, instead allowing each to worship as he pleased. Indeed, this freedom is enshrined in the First Amendment. But, to take these liars at their word, which mandate would a Bachmann Presidency be required to uphold? On the one hand, there is the mandate from her alleged god to force all people to bow down to Jesus, and on the other, God witnesses that she will uphold the Constitution? In point of fact, this is all much ado about nothing, as pointed out by David French at National Review Online here.  We are all dominionists now.

Paul Kengor has a piece at the American Thinker entitled The Democrats Invincible Ignorance. Dr. Kengor paints a bleak picture of trying to convince people with facts and statistics that they can go and look up for themselves. Kengor writes:

I've only recently come to realize the nature of the hurdle this country faces in trying to turn around a stalled economy and horrendous deficit. Here it is: liberal Democrat politicians have completely convinced huge numbers of their followers that our economic/fiscal mess is the result of two principal demons: 1) "the rich," and 2) the Tea Party. The former, of course, has been a longtime liberal scapegoat; the latter is a new one.
...
I've realized this painfully only in the last few weeks as a result of several commentaries I've done (USA Today, FoxNews, among others), viewed by a large portion of Americans from across the political spectrum. In these commentaries, I tried to stick to statistics and facts. I naïvely thought my approach would be convincing. It was not.

Upton Sinclair said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on him not understanding it!" And here, at last is the reason...the lesson. When people have lost all moral understanding, and when lying, cheating, propaganda, even murder, become acceptable means to an end, and that end is a payday in terms of money and power, then this is what you get.   The shriveled, ugly heart of the Left.

This will be the most ruthless campaign season that I can remember.  I hope you are up to it, because I don't see the Republicans helping us much.  Indeed, the Republicans just want to take us there slower.

The Ugly Heart of the Left

I recently had a chat with the pastor of our congregation. He made the statement that our church, meaning the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America was a "social justice" church. Now, "social" deals with the community. When costs are socialized, that means that they are spread throughout the community, usually in the form of taxes. "Justice" on the other hand is a very individual thing. Only individuals can sin, and only individuals can be judged. Can you imagine an entire community being charged with a crime and put in jail? Thus, social justice is a meaningless term which sounds very noble and high minded, but is actually used to shield a suite of Leftists notions from those who would force the Left to explain them.

Similarly, "sustainability" is such a code word. The article today in the American Thinker today entitled Sustainable Nonsense by Jeffrey Folks provides an good road map of where the Left wants to take us on this journey to "sustainable" energy.

When applied to energy, for example, sustainability has almost nothing to do with the ability of certain fuels to meet the nation's needs over an extended period of time. With the advent of hydraulic fracking, it is obvious to all, including experts at the U.S. Energy Information Administration, that America possesses enough reserves of natural gas to meet our energy needs for at least a century. Our reserves of coal are even greater. Yet neither of these fuels is deemed "truly clean" enough to be a sustainable fuel by environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, nor by Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, judging from his words and actions.

In line with the environmental lobby, the Obama administration has the odd notion that sustainability can be brought about by restricting consumption alone. Driving a full-size Cadillac with a 4.6L V-8 engine, 208" frame, and a cargo capacity of almost 19 cubic feet leaves one with a respectable fuel efficiency of 15 mpg city, 23 mpg highway. That must seem practically criminal, however, to the planet-saving fuel misers in the Obama EPA. A compact hybrid with a reported fuel economy of 51 mpg city, 48 highway may seem to some a better, more sustainable option. But why not a bicycle with no fuel consumption at all? Why not walk and avoid those harmful manufacturing practices necessary to produce a bicycle? Why not walk barefooted and avoid shoes? There is no limit to how far the left will go in stripping us of our liberties and reducing us to Gandhian poverty.

In the 1930s, before much of the South was electrified, and even after for quite a period, most poor farm families used wood stoves to cook their food, and wood or coal stoves to warm their homes. I am amazed that my grandmother was able to bake cakes and breads to perfection without knowing the temperature of the oven.  But, how does burning wood or for that matter, horse dung, fit in with the notion of "sustainability" since these fuels contribute to pollution and global warming?

The ultimate frontier, or "solution," is to legislate the removal of human beings from part or all of the earth's surface. More than a few environmentalist leaders, including our current national science and technology advisor John Holdren, have advocated the reduction of human population to what they consider a "sustainable" level. What the left intends in this regard varies from one policymaker to another (from current global population of nearly 7 billion to somewhere between two billion and a few hundred million, or even none), but in nearly every case the concept of a "sustainable" population involves reductions that cannot be achieved by voluntary means.

One thinks that the real problems of the Left are that they never learned the lessons taught in kindergarten. They never learned to share. Instead, they see the world being utilized by so many, and think how wonderful it would be for them if there were fewer people with whom to share the world's abundance. They are like spoiled children asking their parents why they had to have the other children, and not accepting the answer.  Of course, being adults, they are able to hide behind high minded notions, and noble sounding language, even from themselves.  But at the end of the day, deep in the core of their being, this is the ugly truth of the Left.

Meanwhile, the truth is becoming apparent to almost everyone who pays attention:

"Sustainability," like all pretentious verbiage, is not simply used to suggest a meaning that is not there -- it is also used to hide meanings that would be obvious if not obscured by an impenetrable abstraction. The reality that "sustainable" is meant to mask is simply this: that the earth possesses enough conventional energy resources to supply even an expanding global economy for decades if not centuries to come; that those resources may, over time, become more difficult to exploit, whether for geologic, political, or economic reasons; and that, in time, other sources of energy, some of them now unknown, will supplant fossil fuels, and that those sources will in turn be supplanted by yet other forms.

Of Nuclear Energy and Sidewalks

On March 16, 2011 Ann Coulter published an interesting article entitled A Glowing Report on Radiation at www.anncoulter.com. If you have to look it up later in the archive, that should give you enough to go on.

Earlier this week, Mrs. PolyKahr and I had a "discussion" concerning a woman who called into a radio station saying that she didn't want cancer and therefore she didn't want any nuclear reactors built within a thousand miles of her location. Mrs. PolyKahr kept saying that she had "valid" concerns while I noted that the risks may be valid, but her concerns were irrational. As it turns out, Mrs. PolyKahr was more right than I was. The validity of something has nothing to do with the truth of it, and more to do with what you can document. Perhaps this is why the alarmists are always emphasizing the validity of peoples concerns. If they can keep you focused on people's valid concerns, they can keep you from discussing the fact that valid or not, these people are crazy.

As for the rationality of these concerns, Ann Coulter does a wonderful service for us all by pointing out the many fallacies and myths associated with radiation, and nuclear power.  Early in my career as an environmental engineer, I was tasked with overseeing the radon program for the Navy.  While the Federal Government could not directly force everyone to test their homes (we were not far enough along on the progressive timescale yet) they could make the Department of Defense test all of its housing for both bachelors and married couples. Without getting into the details of the program, let me just say that some of the "reasoning" behind the EPA's "action level" caused me to begin to wonder about the motives of the EPA.  In any case, at one meeting involving all of the agencies working on the program, a man from the U. S. Geological Service pointed out that based on the EPA "action level," several counties in Iowa would have nobody left alive.  He reasoned that they would all be dead of lung cancer.  He must have seen Bernard L. Cohen's study:

Bernard L. Cohen, a physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, compared radon exposure and lung cancer rates in 1,729 counties covering 90 percent of the U.S. population. His study in the 1990s found far fewer cases of lung cancer in those counties with the highest amounts of radon -- a correlation that could not be explained by smoking rates.

Nor could it be explained by the EPA.  There is a general principle of toxicology that says "the dose makes the poison." Any substance taken in small enough doses is probably safe, and any substance taken in large enough doses will kill you. Water, if ingested in high enough amounts will kill, though I would not recommend it as a way to commit suicide.  Alcohol is the classic case. In small doses it does no harm, either short term, or long term, and it may even do some good. In bigger doses, the ingester loses coordination and judgement is inhibited. In massive doses, it can kill. Caffeine is another such substance, as is nicotine. Many trace minerals are necessary, but too large a dose will kill. Knowing this, I have always found EPA's warning that there is no safe level of radon to be misguided, if not downright deceptive.

Then there is this study:

A $10 million Department of Energy study from 1991 examined 10 years of epidemiological research by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health on 700,000 shipyard workers, some of whom had been exposed to 10 times more radiation than the others from their work on the ships' nuclear reactors. The workers exposed to excess radiation had a 24 percent lower death rate and a 25 percent lower cancer mortality than the non-irradiated workers.

Isn't that just incredible? I mean, that the Department of Energy spent $10 million doing something useful? Amazing, right?

That study was news to me, but it certainly fits in with the idea that some substances may be necessary, while too much is toxic. Keep in mind that correlation does not indicate causation, and there may be confounding reasons yet to be found that may explain the study.  But I still have to ask, why does EPA ignore these studies, and instead scares people out of their gourds? I don't say that these are the definitive studies, but as things stand, we can't even have a rational conversation. Which may be the point. If people are as frightened as the woman calling into the radio show at the beginning of this post, we are never going to have significant nuclear power in this country. It means continued reliance on burning fossil fuel, which if the goofball wormenists are to be believed, is even worse.

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, where every silver lining has a dark cloud, John Tierney has an opinion piece bemoaning the fact that many things are now done with greater energy efficiency. The net result is that the same amount of energy is used to produce more stuff. That in turn, tends to foil our betters, who wanted us using less energy. Cars, for example, get around twice the miles per gallon that they did in the 60s, but now we apparently drive twice as much. It's enough to make a member of the elite want to raise taxes.

Instead, they ought to seriously consider nuclear. I had a professor who taught transportation engineering. He was a commonsensical old coot. He was also the man responsible for sidewalks and parking lots at the University. He said one time to us students "You can put sidewalks where it is aesthetically pleasing, but if you wait, you will soon see paths through the grass. Put your sidewalk there. Works every time.

Anthropogenic Global Warming and the Gun Control Act of 1968: A Common Thread

An interesting article over at the American Thinker today posits that Anthropogenic Global Warming is actually born out of a novel by an Austrian Nazi. You will have to decide, but the author, Mark Musser makes an interesting case in The Nazi Origins of Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory. Here is how he opens the piece:

One of the primary pioneering theorists on apocalyptic global warming is Guenther Schwab (1902-2006), an Austrian Nazi.[i] In 1958, Schwab wrote a fictional novel built off of Goethe's (1749-1832) Faustian religious play entitled "Dance with the Devil." While a few scientists since the late 1800's had contemplated the possibility of minor global warming coming from industrial pollution, Schwab used Goethe's dramatic approach to convert the theory into an apocalyptic crisis. The book outlines many looming environmental emergencies, including anthropogenic global warming. Guenther Schwab's very popular novel was an apocalyptic game changer. By the early 1970's, it had been translated into several languages and had sold over a million copies.

Now, I am ready to believe anything bad that I read about the Nazis. This was a thoroughly wicked group of people lead by a thoroughly wicked man. But the connection here between this novel, and the later AGW theory is tenuous at best, made by inference and innuendo.  But it is an interesting theory.

The appeal of AWG to a Nazi is the control that the theory allows, if they can make you buy into it.  In order to protect the planet, you must give up driving long distances.  Before the invention of the automobile, the average person lived entirely in a 10 mile radius of where he was born.  Most people rarely traveled outside that 10 mile radius.  And that is just the way they would like it.  It controls the peasants, you see, and leaves more space for our betters, unencumbered by the little people coming around and making trouble.

Now, if you want to find an actual connection between the Nazis and 21st century America, let's take a look at the 1968 Gun Control Act. KalashnikovJosh has a good post (but long) linking the 1968 GCA to the 1938 German gun control law here. Or, you can read about it at the Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership here.  The Germans already had the 1928 law on the books, but strengthened the law in 1938.  Sen. Thomas Dodd, who probably spoke German, and who was a major player in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, imported many of the concepts from the German law into GCA 68.  Why?  Well, one can only speculate, so speculate I will.  I suspect that Sen. Dodd was a progressive, meaning some shade of marxist/socialist/fascist/communist.  We used to call them "Pinkos."  It is a collective idea.  The notion that men are free to do and think what they will scares the daylights out of some people.  Instead, they want people like themselves in charge and making decisions for everyone.  Oh, good decisions, to be sure.  But some people are not going to like these decisions, and hey, they don't want them shooting up the place.

Never mind the skin heads dressing up in Nazi uniforms and giving the Nazi salute. They are not the true Nazis. For the most part, they are pathetic racists who have glommed onto some of the Nazi ideology.  The Senator Thomas Dodds of the world and the folks who buy the AWG nonsense are the more dangerous. They are scared of what you and I might do if we had the means to do it.  They are afraid of free will.  The sad part is that we have let these people anywhere near the levers of power.  James Madison must be rolling over in his grave.

Corrupting Science for Fun and Profit

Fred Singer, noted physicist and Emeritus Professor in Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, has an article today in the American Thinker entitled Second Hand Smoke, Lung Cancer, and the Global Warming Debate. Now, Professor Singer is not a smoker, and would normally not have a dog in the fight, but is appalled at the corruption of science that has occurred in service to a political agenda. I will note that I am a pipe smoker, and am appalled at the political agenda that seeks to use the State as a kind of mother to make me and others like me cease an enjoyable hobby because others object.

Singer details the fraud that has occurred in the smoking debate:

So what is the truth about SHS and lung cancer? I am neither an oncologist nor a chemical toxicologist, but I do know some statistics, which allows me to examine the EPA study without bias. I can demonstrate that the EPA fudged their analysis to reach a predetermined conclusion -- using thoroughly dishonest procedures. EPA "scientists" made three major errors: 1) They ignored "publication bias." 2) They arbitrarily shifted the statistical "confidence intervals." 3) They drew unjustified conclusions from a risk ratio that was barely greater than 1.0.

o Since none of the epidemiological studies provided the clear answer they wanted, the EPA carried out a "meta-analysis," lumping together a selected group of studies. Unfortunately, this approach ignores publication bias -- i.e., the tendency for investigators not to publish their studies if they do not find a positive result.

o The EPA, in order to calculate a positive risk ratio, relaxed the confidence intervals from the generally accepted 95% standard to 90% -- and admitted this openly.

o Even so, their "Risk Ratio" was just a little above 1.0 -- whereas careful epidemiologists, because of the presence of confounding factors, generally ignore any result unless the RR exceeds 2.0.

To sum up this somewhat technical discussion, while I cannot give specific answers about lung cancer or other medical issues connected with SHS, I can state with some assurance that the EPA analysis -- to paraphrase my former teacher, Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli -- is "not only wrong, but worthless."

Now, smoking is not something that is easy to defend. Certainly smoking cigarettes decreases one's longevity and can be viewed as a selfish indulgence, as can drinking, riding motorcycles, sport parachuting, and any other risky activity. Interestingly, pipe smokers tend to live two years longer than non-smokers, but I doubt it has to do with smoking a pipe and more to do with the personality of pipe smokers.  Also, interestingly, even smokers are more likely to die of something other than lung cancer.  Meanwhile, only one study has reported anything at all, and that barely 600 deaths due to something that might have been secondhand smoke.  The war on tobacco has been acrimonious with opponents of smoking claiming their "right" to breathe fresh air, while smokers exerted their "right" to be left alone.  It has also resulted in an economic upheaval.  For many tobacco farmers, the replacement crops have not been as profitable as has tobacco was.  Meanwhile, laws that outlaw smoking undermine property rights, and obscured other causes of lung cancer such as welding and diesel smoke.  My Dad faces a $500 fine for smoking on his own property each time he goes to the office.  The government could have spent the time and money used to make war on tobacco by trying to cut down the roughly 30,000 fatal traffic crashes that occur each and every year.

Interestingly, just as following the money trail on the anti-gun issue leads back to the Joyce Foundation, so with tobacco it has been the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  Go ahead, look it up.

So, what does all this have to do with Goofball Wormening?  The same corruption of science that was used in the war on tobacco is being used to advance Goofball Wormening, and for the same reasons.  The war on tobacco resulted in a transfer of wealth from poor and lower middle class smokers to rich and powerful lawyers, and to State coffers to use as a slush fund in support of Democrat causes.  Goofball Wormening, if they get their way, will result in the transfer of wealth from average Americans to rich Democrats. It would be disastrous enough if it were true, but it is not in either case.

Goofball Wormening Schemers Keep Trying

Thanks to Tam, at the View From The Porch and the Liberty Sphere comes this news from Australia: Breaking: The Abdication of the West. This is one of Christopher Monckton's missives from the Cancun Climate summit. Monckton warns that the purpose of Cancun, far from being the last hurrah of goofball warmening, is to set up a world government, which will tax us and other "wealthy" nations and transfer those funds, not so much to the "undeveloped" nations as to themselves.  Oh, they intend to throw the "undeveloped" nations a bone or two, but this will really be about transferring national Sovereignty to the new government.  Why they would pursue this so tirelessly is not hard to imagine.  Why we would go along with it is not quite so obvious.  The lunacy of the entire enterprise can be seen here in another missive from Lord Monckton in which he calculates the absurd costs associated with reducing the so called carbon footprint of of England. In 100 years, the real weather you experience will not be noticeably different than it is today. Poor nations then will be the same ones as they are today. Nothing will really change, except we will be poorer, and have less freedom.  Go and read both.  They are long, but well worth reading in their entirety.

When our Founders were contemplating their next moves, after all that King George had done to the Colonies, they prayed to God.  The Declaration of Independence closes with the words "...with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence..." In contrast, this conference, which hopes to establish a world government opened with a prayer to Ixchel. These people are pagans, and I suspect their schemes will eventually be dashed upon the rocks of history, but history shows us that such schemes can produce huge amounts of misery, and much death and destruction before they are extinguished.  Let us pray they shall not succeed.

Update:  A more optimistic article on the topic may be found here.

The Next Thing After Climate Change

Van Helsing, over at Moonbattery has an interesting post up entitled Biodiversity, the Left's Next Big Hoax. A hat tip to Bubba of the blog What Bubba Knows for pointing to this site.

According to Van Helsing, Climate Change has now been so debunked, that it is likely to die, though like a snake, whose head remains lethal for several minutes after being lopped off, it still retains the power to kill. The next big thing? Biodiversity.

Climate change had the advantage that the climate never stops changing. Similarly, species never stop going extinct. Only a tiny percentage of the species that have existed are still around today. Meanwhile,

Despite the U.N.'s fear that biodiversity may be at risk, scientists over the past decade have identified new species at an unprecedented rate. The 2008 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) study First Contact in the Greater Mekong reported that 1,068 species were discovered or newly identified by science between 1997 and 2007 — averaging two new species a week. And the Census of Marine Life — an ambitious, 10-year project to catalog the diversity of the world's oceans — recently concluded, having identified more than 6,000 potentially new ocean-going species.

Information like this will soon become scarce, as biologists, like climate scientists, are compelled to become political hacks in exchange for lucrative government grants.

On thing not mentioned about biodiversity in the article is that, as with Climate Change, you must take it on faith that we are destroying species.  Nobody really knows how many species go extinct in a given year, or always what causes it.  They estimate the numbers based on people going out and seeing if they see them.  If they don't, they are assumed extinct, but nobody knows.  Even if the did, as the above indicates, nobody knows how many were here on any given date.  If evolution truly is working, one would have to postulate that some new species also show up to replace those that go extinct.  This is never done.  Finally, both concepts depend on the "fragile environment" theory, the notion that extremely small changes to the environment create a tipping point that will destroy all life.

Faith only works way.  Faith that God created the world for man to live in, with all his foibles, does not enter the picture.

The safety bicycle of the 1890s was a great invention, allowing the common man to travel extended distances to find work, rather than live in squalid ghettos close to his factory. He could shop, work, and enjoy leisure time in the countryside rather than staying within walking distance of home.  Progressives have been railing against this freedom ever since.  The elites naturally feel that letting us unwashed masses out is casting pearls before swine.  What the biodiversity movement will allow them to do is claim ever greater lands as protected habitat for "endangered species."  Once a parcel is named as officially protected habitat, your ability to use your land, land that you paid good money for, becomes very limited, yet you will retain the responsibility of paying taxes.  Of course, like everything else, the rules won't apply to them.  They can have their luxury estates wherever they want, and the price of land will be much cheaper when you can't make any money off of it.

Who They Are

Coming a little late to the party, but I had to, you know, actually earn money yesterday.

The American Thinker has an article up today, entitled Analyse This Sigmund, Your Great Granddaughter Digs Child Sacrifice by Stella Paul. If you haven't seen it yet, there is a copy of the video at the bottom of the page, which was working at the time this was posted.  Go read the article, then watch the disgusting video.  We'll have a little discussion when you are done.

If I was making something to show you a little bit of who these people are, I would make this video.  But I don't have to, because they have done it for me.  This is who they are, and it should shock, horrify, and disgust you if you didn't quite believe it before.  Glenn Beck asks if this is the "push."  What he is referring to is the book "Nudge" by Cass Sunstein.  Sunstein's idea of the human race is that we are a bunch of sheep, to be herded in one direction or another by subtle nudges-a nip at the heels, so to speak.  But if a nudge won't do it, our sheep dogs have to get more aggressive, say a push, or shove.  Of course, for those who are truly recalcitrant, there may be the need for the concentration camps, or to simply be "disappeared."  No pressure, of course, it's your choice.  This is who these people are:

As James Delingpole memorably puts it, "With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness."

This is also who these people are:

Are you shocked to learn that Emma Freud and Richard Curtis are brazen hypocrites with a corpulent carbon footprint that includes four kids and three homes? But of course, it's your kids they want to sacrifice, not theirs (though someone might want to call Child Services on these two and make sure). Rest assured, the human sacrifice of you and yours will not disturb the compassionate couple as they enjoy their elegant townhouse in London and country estates in Suffolk and Oxfordshire.

One here has to think about Lenin's useful idiots. Do they really believe that they will somehow be spared when the tyrant takes over? Do they really think these people want to share power, or do they just hope that they will be the last ones killed. Our society has been based on valuing people for who they are, not what they can do. But in the society the Left contemplates, the watch words will be "yes, but what have you done for me lately.

Yet despite the yearnings of the ruling class, regular people may not be willing to commit suicide just yet. "No Pressure" could prove to have been a watershed moment, when the mask of faux compassion dropped and the Left let us see their deepest dreams -- and irreversibly revealed the rot in their souls. Within hours of its release, the video was pulled after massive outraged protests. Now its makers are halfheartedly apologizing and making noises that they didn't mean it. But as Emma Freud's great-grandfather once said, "Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy."

We can only hope that this will serve to wake people out of their slumber.

But maybe you still don't believe. Here is a video of the various communist and socialists that were at the "One Nation Rally" held on the Washington DC Mall on 10/2/2010 here. Don't believe the Communists were really behind it? Check here or here.  Unless you actually lived through it, it is hard, sitting here well fed in our comfy homes, to understand the sheer terror of living under such a regime.  Imagine you and a trusted friend go into the bathroom so you can say something that you don't want the regime to hear, then you have to wonder if it will ever come back to haunt you, and this wondering keeps you up at nights.  Perhaps you can survive, but it warps your soul.

The Daily Bayonet Skewers Treehuggers

Theo Sparks, "the last of the few", points to The Daily Bayonet post entitled Treehugger Buys a Clue, or Two. The post is generally about how the Cancun Climate Summit is turning out to be a bust, after the blowup at Copenhagen last year. It is worth the read. An interesting quote:

This year’s Cancun climate talks are going nowhere fast after the Copenhagen Hopenchangen blowout of last year, in fact no political leaders are even expected to attend. In the US, the GOP has skewed skeptic and is thriving as the Democrat party hides the fact that their candidates are Democrats. In typical leftist fashion, now the battle is lost, Treehugger wants to change the terms of engagement and depoliticize global warming. Good luck with that.

The Daily Bayonet, in turn, points us to another posting, this time on Hot Air entitled Exclusive EPW Report Shows NEW EPA Rules Will Cost More Than 800,000 Jobs. The post was by Ed Morrissey. A quote:

Actually, it’s not just the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s minority contingent that fears the loss of nearly a million jobs from new EPA rules on greenhouse gases and other emissions issues. It’s also groups like the United Steel Workers, Unions for Jobs and the Environment, and experts like King’s College Professor Ragnar Lofstedt. Hot Air got an exclusive look at a report that the EPW minority staff will release later this morning detailing the economic damage that an activist EPA will do to the American economy, and which will come at perhaps the worst possible time, both economically and politically.

But don't let all the bad news for the warmistas fool you. They will do their best to get a Cap and Tax bill, or similar EPA Regulations in place. If the Democrats lose the majority in the House and possibly the Senate, look for it to be a bill in the lame duck session. This will be the final noose around the necks of Americans. The Government will then have taken all our rights without firing a shot, just as Jeff Snyder predicted in Walter Mitty's Second Amendment

Wind Power Costs More-A Lot More

Following on the heels of yesterday's post is David Derbyshire's article in the Daily Mail entitled Revealed: Wind Farm Power Twice as Costly as Gas, Coal. You will notice another trend.  This article is from another paper in the UK. We don't seem to be reporting these facts, because if we did, the public would see what a fraud the so called "green economy" really is.

Because wind is intermittent, the National Grid is forced to rely on a fleet of gas and coal power stations to back up the supply when the wind fails.

As the quote above indicates, you need to have standby generators for when the wind doesn't blow, or doesn't blow hard enough, and when the wind blows too hard.  Where I live, for example, there is very little wind for as much as 8 months out of the year.  Detecting when that is about to happen, and powering up those generators adds additional expense. Indeed, the windmills seemed to be idling when the picture used in the story was taken. Then there are the maintenance costs, which of course become much larger when the windmills are located off shore.

The enviro-whackos who brought you goofball wormening realized that in order to get the public off fossil fuel, they had to show you something.  Windmills are it.  But it doesn't work.  It has already been tried in Denmark, and now in UK.  What is needed is a steady supply of electricity to run factories, power houses, and even run your computer.  Wind gives you a very unsteady supply.  In the end, windmills are little more than very expensive toys.  We should not emulate another fail idea from the old country. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1315711/Wind-farm-power-twice-costly-gas-coal.html#ixzz10oP36Yrv

New World Order Fears Global Cooling

In the London Telegraph, we have Global Cooling and the New World Order by James Delingpole. Go read the whole thing. I don't think the Bilderbergers meeting is a particularly new story, as I remember it from some months ago.  What is new is the spin on the story in this article.

The next few years are going to be very interesting. Watch the global power elite squirming to reposition itself as it slowly distances itself from Anthropogenic Global Warming (”Who? Us? No. We never thought of it as more than a quaint theory…”), and tries to find new ways of justifying green taxation and control. (Ocean acidification; biodiversity; et al). You’ll notice sly shifts in policy spin. In Britain, for example, Chris “Chicken Little” Huhne’s suicidal “dash for wind” will be re-invented as a vital step towards “energy security.” There will be less talk of “combatting climate change” and more talk of “mitigation”. You’ll hear enviro-Nazis like Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren avoid reference to “global warming” like the plague, preferring the more reliably vague phrase “global climate disruption.”

And you know what the worst thing is? If we allow them to, they’re going to get away with it.

Our duty as free citizens over the next few years is to make sure that they don’t.

At the very end, Delingpole mentions a "Global Warming" Nuremberg. While I don't think a Nuremberg style trial of folks who have pushed the theory would be appropriate, certainly Congressional hearings are in order, and those who can be shown to have committed fraud should be prosecuted. Al Gore, are you listening?

Meanwhile, for those still watching, very soon we will see that the solutions to global cooling are, surprise, the same as the solutions to goofball wormening. 

Al Gore Should be Censured for Dishonesty, Not for Discovery Channel Seige

From the Drudge Report, this article by Matt Patterson appeared in the New Your Post for September 2, 2010: Meltdown of the Climate Consensus. The story discusses a report by the prestigious InterAcademy Council that thoroughly debunks and discredits the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The report comes one day after a man, crazed with global warming hysteria apparently strapped a bomb to himself and took hostages at the Discovery Channel building in Silver Springs, MD.  I say crazed because looking at his Manifesto I find that on the one hand he wants people to stop breeding, and a decrease in the population, and on the other hand, he wants to end war. Just thinking out loud here, but wouldn't a great big war help to solve his perceived problem with population? Here is a part of the manifesto to give you an idea of what was written there:

5. Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more
unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)

6. Find solutions for Global Warming, Automotive pollution, International Trade, factory pollution, and the whole blasted human economy. Find ways so that people don't build more housing pollution which destroys the environment to make way for more human filth! Find solutions so that people stop breeding as well as stopping using Oil in order to REVERSE Global warming and the destruction of the planet!

It goes on...but notice how it ends.  The familiar ring to it is the sound of someone who believes he has found the answers and has a calling to deliver them to the uninformed, unwashed masses; a prophet if you will.  He has drunk the koolaid, and now must go out and force everyone to obey, or Gaia will punish us all.

He seems to see people as a disease, like we do not belong here. While he has been to California, he seems not to have looked out of the window to note the huge expanses of land that are absent a single soul. He seems not to have asked himself just how many people are too many, and how to tell that it is true or not.  In the same manner, having taken in Al Gore's gloom and doom, he doesn't seem to have noticed that the whole scam is based on carefully constructed lies, bolstered by circular arguments.  He hasn't asked himself a single relevant question, such as what caused earlier periods of global warming when man did not yet drive automobiles or use fossil fuels.  Instead he's swallowed the whole malarkey sandwich.

So, should we blame Al Gore for the siege at Discovery Channel, and for this man's death?  Interestingly, I say no.  Al Gore will have his own sins to carry to his judgement day, as will we all.  He doesn't have to carry the burden for this crazy freak as well.  What Al Gore hopes to do is raise the cost of energy to exorbitantly high levels, and then rake off a share for doing nothing and adding no value whatsoever.  Frankly, this is despicable and dishonest.  A little more honesty, Mr. Gore, would be appreciated. 

The Volt is a Joke

I had a difficult time today deciding what to write about. The world seems at times to be spinning out of control and off its axis. Racism, both real and imaginary, the continuing tale of the JournoList 400, Climategate, and the incredible ability of Gaia worshipers to say, in essence that even if we got the facts wrong, goofball warmening is still true, all tug at me to make a comment. But then I stumbled upon an article by Doctor Zero entitled The Value of a Volt. I have noted before that the good Doctor has a way with words. It's a rare enough gift, and I appreciate how he says things as much as what he says. Here's a quote:

But wait, there’s more. Almost four hundred million dollars in federal subsidies were pumped directly into the design and production of the Volt. The initial production run consists of just ten thousand units, with 45,000 more planned for 2012 if sales are good. This would add just over $7200 more in taxpayer subsidies to each Volt produced over the next two years. Since 2012 production will be scaled back if early sales are disappointing, it might be more logical to add the subsidies to the first 10,000 units only, which would leave early adopters outside of California paying $33,500 for a car which actually costs $81,000 per unit, with taxpayers picking up the remainder. It’s actually even worse than that, because GM expects to lose money on every Volt sale. Those losses will be spread among other GM products, or perhaps wiped out with further taxpayer subsidies.

The Chevrolet Volt is, of course, a complete joke. And having the President of the United States hawking the product is down right embarrassing. I would imagine that many inside GM feel diminished realizing what has become of a once great company.

Besides the costs, which this article emphasizes, there are the environmental costs, which causes one to wonder what problem the Volt is supposed to solve? For instance, although the Volt runs on electricity stored in batteries, how is that electricity generated? A coal or natural gas fired plant perhaps? How much cleaner is the generating plant than your car? It must be substantially cleaner to overcome the losses in energy that occur that occur from converting one source of energy into another, only to have it reconverted back again. These losses are physical facts that can not be overcome. They are the price for utilizing any form of energy, including muscle power. For example, a potential energy source such as natural gas is burned to spin an engine (losses) which spins a generator (losses) to make electricity which goes out over the wires (losses) to a transformer to be stepped down to 120 volt AC (losses) to go to your home (losses) to charge a battery (losses) to spin a motor (losses) to power your car all of 40 miles. You can eliminate some of those losses by putting the potential energy source closer to the final conversion point, which is what gasoline powered vehicles do. But it gets worse. At some point, you will have to recycle the batteries. Modern batteries contain exotic heavy metals which are extremely toxic, and expensive, and can not be simply thrown out. So in the end, an electric car is no more environmentally friendly than a fossil fueled automobile.

The problem has been a confusion of goals. We have three potential goals, none of which are improved by the Volt. One goal is to become more eco-friendly. As shown above, the Volt is not really all that eco-friendly when to take into account the lifetime costs of the vehicle. Another is to achieve energy independence. To improve our energy independence, a simpler way would be to convert the truck fleet over to natural gas. We have an abundance of natural gas, and it is pretty clean relative to coal and petroleum. The third possible goal is to get us off fossil fuel altogether. That goal, unfortunately, is not possible, and only exists among people who hold to an ideology that believes people are a cancer on this planet: the Gaia worshipers. Is that who this administration is pandering to?

The Productives vs the Aristocracy

This is truly interesting, at least to me. S. T. Karnick has yet another piece analysing Angelo Codevilla's article "America's Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution" over at the American Thinker today entitled The Productive Class and the American Aristocracy. For sure, he comes up with better names for these two groups. For the "country class" he substitutes "productive class" and for the "ruling class" he substitutes "aristocracy." The new names for each group do seem to tell us more about each. Moreover, the number of articles analysing, and criticizing Codevilla's piece tends to indicate that Codevilla was on to something profound.

Karnick uses not only quotes from the original Codevilla article, but also quotes from Rush Limbaugh, who spent a good portion of his time on Tuesday analysing and commenting on the piece on his radio program. An example:

The real motive for progressive politics is by no means any sense of altruism, as the aristocracy would have us believe. It is all of the usual selfish stuff: money, power, and ego. Limbaugh observes:

When you get down to it, folks, it's all about money. Always follow the money. The left and the ruling class love to say that they do things out of altruism, out of compassion, big hearts, and these people are a bunch of lazy SOBs who have no business in the private sector 'cause they can't succeed there. The only way they can succeed is to be a bunch of brownnosers in the ruling class and try to move their way up that ladder and get whatever they can out of the public trough. The ruling class has gotten rich off of government.

As Dr. Ray Stantz (Dan Ackroyd) noted in Ghostbusters, "You don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector. They expect results!"

An excellent example of how the aristocracy rules the realm is the global warming issue. All the money, profit, power, and prestige are on the side of the alarmists, and they wield their power ruthlessly, blatantly throwing their weight around in silencing those who try to tell the truth about the science of climate change. Al Gore is a multimillionaire who knows nothing about science, whereas S. Fred Singer is a brilliant scientist who continually endures a firestorm of slanders and harassment for trying to uphold scientific standards. These two men encapsulate the opposing forces of the aristocracy and the productive class.

Thus at the same time they are taking away our liberties, they keep telling us it is for our own good. When we notice, and essentially call BS on some scheme or another, rather than confront the argument and show us why we are mistaken, they instead call us names. The whole thing is breathtaking in it arrogance.

Go read the whole thing. Karnick highlights some important points and furthers the analysis.

Goofball Warming Caused by Sun-Who Knew?

Marc Sheppard today in the American Thinker takes a comprehensive look at the state of climate science, as reported from Heartland's Fourth International Conference on Climate Change. Quite a few of the heavy hitters in climate science seem to have been there. They all seemed to be telling the same tale: that the global temperature rises and falls with changes to the Pacific Decadal Oscilation (PDO) and with the Total Solar Irradience (TSI).

So who knew that the Sun causes the earth to heat up. Huh.

However, the Democrats have decided that your having too much money is the cause of goofball warming, and have designed a scheme to relieve you of your excess, to their advantage, of course:

Obama would have learned much from CEI’s Chris Horner’s segment, in which he quoted a Center for Data Analysis (CDA) analysis that projects a nationwide renewable electricity standard would:

* Raise electricity prices by 36 percent for households and 60 percent for industry;
* Cut national income (GDP) by $5.2 trillion between 2012 and 2035;
* Cut household income by $2,400 per year for a family of four;
* Reduce employment by >1,000,000 jobs; and
* Add more than $10,000 to a family of four’s share of the national debt by 2035

Any bets on whether we will be able to stop them?

Cap and Tax Your Way to Prosperity

David Harsanyi has a piece entitled Cap and Scam that is worth reading at Townhall.com today. This in particular caught my eye:

And seeing as we never waste a crisis, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has given cap-and-trade supporters another hammer to add to the debate. Though, as Newsweek summed it up, "considering that the Kerry-Lieberman bill contains a little something for everyone, it's likely to pass."

Yes, I have been hearing that lately in the left ear. But follow the logic for a moment. Any time that something man built fails, that means we should never do it again. So, had that been the attitude at the time of the Titanic, men would never have sailed again. Had that been the attitude at the time the Tacoma Narrows Bridge failed (1940), we could never have built another suspension bridge. But then, who needs bridges, since Toyota failed, we shouldn't be riding in cars either. Clearly this is nonsense. Just as clearly, it doesn't justify saddling the American people with skyrocketing gasoline prices.

Interestingly, offshore drilling has been pretty safe. If BP (stands for British Petroleum) is shown to have been partly at fault, they should, of course, be made to pay. Certainly, the Regime is also at fault, but good luck in getting them to own up to their own faults.

Meanwhile, David Harsanyi has been getting angrier and angrier over the last year. Whether that is genuine, or is reflective of his readers coming to a boil is a question. But it certainly fits in with my own sense of frustration. We are heading into socialist hell, and there seems to be little we can do to stop any of it.

Cap and Tax Rises from the Swamp

So, if Lindsay Grahamnesty won't introduce his version of Cap and Tax, Kerry and Liberman will introduce their own. Brain Sussman has the story at the American Thinker entitled Cap and Trade is Back.

Apparently, the Senator feel that enough time has passed, that most people have forgotten about climategate, and the blow to the credibility of climate "scientists" that was delivered. So let me highlight a few points for them:

- The Hockey Stick was proven soundly to have been a complete hoax. Michael Mann is under investigation. Phil Jones of the CRU has been forced to resign, and has made a number of apologies (sort of) since.

- Without the Hockey Stick, anybody can see that it has been much warmer than today, as well as much colder. Within historical times, the Medieval Warm Period was significantly warmer than today, yet the world suffered no catastrophic rise in sea levels, or melting of the polar ice caps.

- I would argue that the Little Ice Age that followed the MWP was more devastating to civilization than the MWP. Populations grew during the MWP. Crops were plentiful, and spread as far as Greenland. When the LIA hit, huge numbers of people starved. I would also ask, what makes people feel that the world wide climate we have today is the ideal climate?

So, if the stated reason is not the real reason, what is the real reason?

The Senate version of Cap and Tax, like the already passed House version (no, David Price, NC 4, I have not forgotten that you voted for that monstrosity), transfers huge sums of money from the middle and lower classes to certain favored parties in the ruling class, such as Al Gore, those wonderful guys at Goldman-Sachs, Franklin Raines and others. Goldman Sachs owns a significant share of the Chicago Climate Exchange, as does Al Gore. So this is nothing more than another demonstration of Crime Inc.

This must be stopped. This bill will drive up energy costs, drive jobs overseas, and make absolutely no difference in "saving the climate." It will further impoverish the middle and lower classes, and send literally trillions of dollars to the moneyed elite.

The Progressive/Marxist left and Post Modernism

Dr. Paul Kengor has a depressing piece on Progressive Death in today's American Thinker. What Kengor is talking about is how the Progressives are always moving the goal posts, and what that means for what started out as simply an eugenics movement, but soon enough became a bloodlust for abortion. But where are they taking us now? Where does it end? They can not tell us. Some quotes from this wide ranging article:

Here is the essence of the problem with progressives and their movement, which is a gigantic problem for all of America: One of the only things we really know about progressives, and that they know about themselves and their ideology, is that they favor constant "change," "reform," an ever-shifting, ongoing "evolution," or, yes, progression. And therein is an inherent, significant difficulty: progressivism offers no clear, definable end. The goal-post is always moving, forever pushed further away. Ends are never ends; they always "progress," with culture and society -- all along relying on the ludicrous assumption that the changes are always (or largely) good.

And this:

Consider what else we know about progressives, evident from a track record of roughly 100 years: They consistently advocate more and more centralization of power, through collectivism and wealth redistribution. Inescapably, this leads to a progressively powerful state, one comprised of widening regulations and agencies and departments -- launched mainly under the presidencies of Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Carter, and now Obama -- fueled by a (literal) progressive federal income tax that in less than 30 years had skyrocketed from 1% (1913) to over 90% (1940s). It is a one-way expansion of power sliding almost entirely toward the national government.

Needless to say, this is, as a matter of plain fact, fundamentally antithetical to America itself, that is, our republic as conceived by its founders. The American system is based on limited government, on eschewing a single federal Leviathan, on limited taxation, and on circumscribed control over the citizenry. Of course, to the progressive, this means that the Constitution itself is unsuitable, as it, too, must always evolve; the Constitution is always a work-in-progress, never good enough, and certainly not etched in stone. (It's exasperating when progressive presidents like Obama and FDR wrap themselves in a publicly professed love for the Constitution. This is rhetorical pabulum -- mere cynical public relations.)

Or this:

As with nearly everything progressives do, where they started wasn't enough. Birth control and eugenics couldn't satiate the lust, which became a bloodlust for "abortion rights." Planned Parenthood's progressives blindly bowed to the next level, beckoned by what Pope Benedict XVI calls "the anonymous power of changing moods and current fashion." (Such power, notes Benedict, crucifies truth.)

In Europe, progressives have already moved on to euthanasia, and Progressives here have included the Death Panels in the new ObamaCare law. What's next? Progressives can't tell you that, but I suspect whatever it is, you won't like it.

So, what explains where all these whacky ideas come from? Many of them have no logic involved, yet become "common wisdom" among the pseudo intellectuals spouting their trash at us. One such that arose recently during the climate debate was the notion that we shouldn't eat red meat because cows fart greenhouse gases. But, with a little thought, it becomes clear that cows fart what they eat, and what they eat is grasses and grains that would, in any case break down into greenhouse gases. So, cows simply recycle existing carbon dioxide and methane back into the atmosphere, and in and of themselves create no new greenhouse gas. But such unscientific thinking is the subject of M. J. Braun's piece, also in today's American Thinker entitled Postmodernism: a unified theory of all the trouble in the world.

Except, it is not. What Braun is actually talking about is has been dubbed "post normal science." Whereas "science" is the search for truth, "post normal science" dispenses with all that clap trap and simply defends, using postmodernism, some politically correct agenda, such as the theory of anthropogenic global warming, what I call Goofball Wormening. Braun explains why this is happening best:

Science has succumbed to the same virus that beset literature, art, economics and the rest of the social sciences: postmodernism. Postmodernism is a progressive virus that negates reason, objectivity, and truth -- replacing them with relativism, subjectivism, and pragmatism. Having colonized every other branch of academics decades ago, postmodernism has now come for science.

There is no universally agreed upon definition of "postmodernism." Like the philosophy itself, it means whatever the person who espouses the position wants it to mean. Three general tenets are acknowledged: objective truth is unknowable, objectivity is fallacy, and modernity is a failure. By the later they mean that the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the Industrial Age are all malevolent failures of reason and objectivity, as they failed to solve the world's existing problems and created new ones. Stephen Hicks, PhD. explains in his book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault,

Postmodernism rejects the Enlightenment project in the most fundamental way possible... (it) rejects the reason and the individualism... And so it ends up attacking all of the consequences of the Enlightenment philosophy, from capitalism and liberal forms of government to science and technology.

That we can never know objective truth is a true statement in the cosmic scheme of things. The theory of gravity, for instance, has never been known to be disproved, but there might be an exception out there where a tiny apple is repelled away from the massive earth rather than to be attracted to it. It is in that sense, we can never know objective truth. But billions of people rely on the theory of gravity every day, none the less. However, the postmodernists will tell you that gravity may be simply a construct of our imagination. It is by abandoning the search for objective truth, that they can deny the existence of gravity itself.

Now, all this may be fine for criticism of art and literature. But when it comes to explaining reality, you need to have common agreed terms, that have fairly precise definitions, using words that don't mercurially change their meanings from one individual to another. If one person kills another, it won't do to have as his defense that the person killed isn't really objectively dead. But then, I suppose the postmodernist will realize that his jail cell isn't really objectively there either.

In this instance, they ignored the fact that Marx's economic philosophy was based on rational objectivity. Ironically, postmodernism's rejection of reason, logic, and objectivity provided that rationalization. Accepting the premise that facts and falsehoods are culturally or socially constructed allowed them to sidestep the issue. As Hicks noted: "Postmodernism gives you, in effect, a get-out-of-jail-free card against any rational attack on your system."

Which is why reasoned discourse with these people is a waste of time. It is why ad hominem attacks are seen on the left as ending the debate for their side, but hitting below the belt for you. It is why they can, with a straight face argue for abortion on the one hand, and the freeing of murderers on the other. It is why the truth of AGW doesn't matter. It is why... well there are too many discrepancies to list.

But life sure would have been easier for me if I could have simply hung my structures from sky hooks.

Climate Hucksters Trying to Revive a Dead Horse

Like shamans performing a ritual to raise the dead, the Climate Change hucksters are trying to revive belief in the Goofball Wormening religion. First up is this piece from AOL news yesterday, Proof of Man Made Global Warming Grows Stronger by Theunis Bates. The story is short on facts, and long on assertions, which tells us all we need to know about their opinions of our gullibility. There isn't much worth quoting, but note that this is coming out of the British Met offices in East Anglia.

More interesting is Methane Madness by Jeffrey Folks over at American Thinker today. Folks points to climate "scientists" who are changing the discussion altogether, and attempting to revive a somewhat discredited theory of a "tipping point" by claiming that it is actually methane that will drive the world into uncontrollable Goofball Wormening. A quote:

For decades now, alarmists have claimed that CO2 emissions are warming the earth past the "tipping point" and that only extreme reductions in the use of fossil fuels can avert catastrophe. Yet the earth today is less warm than it was in the middle ages, a period in which it cannot be claimed that human activity was contributing much, if anything, to global warming. Global temperatures in 2010 are colder than they were in 2000, despite a tripling of CO2 emissions in the last decade largely attributable to the mushrooming economies of developing nations such as China and India. Alarmists have been predicting catastrophe for over thirty years, yet the earth continues in natural cycles of warming and cooling, just as it has for eons.


Even before the exposure of factual errors and potential misconduct at the IPCC, the East Anglia Climate Centre, and other organizations, the public in America and elsewhere (Australia, New Zealand, and even Britain) had begun to doubt the claims of climate scientists. Now, with these disturbing revelations concerning the way climate science actually works, the public has become even more skeptical. Maybe that's why climate science has shifted its attention to methane.

I suppose it is a testament to the amount of money to be made by these charlatans and hucksters, but Goofball Wormening simply will not die, no matter how many mortal wounds it suffers. But I did have hopes that the issue would slink off the radar for 30 years or so, and we could be dealing with things that really matter. But no, as with all bad ideas, Goofball Wormening keeps coming back, hoping to ensnare a few more poor souls in its ugly grasp.