http://writewingpolitics.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/9-11-01-remember-lt-kevin-pfeifer/
RIP Lt. Kevin Pfeifer
Reply
Middle-class tax cuts? Not under ObamaCare.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ recently opined “it’s not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” This astute political observation supports the proposition that elections have consequences.
The high court’s recent ruling on ObamaCare leaves in place 21 tax increases in the health care law costing more than $675 billion over the next 10 years. $675 billion is a mind-boggling amount. To better understand just this one monumental tax increase, let us assume you make $50,000 per year and don’t spend a single penny. It would take you 20,000 YEARS to save just $1 billion. To reach $675 billion, you would ‘only’ need 13,500,000 YEARS.
If you think your health care is expensive now, just wait until it is “free.”
Mitt Romney’s “Victory” in NH?
As a constitutional conservative, I have an issue with nominating a candidate who was the forefather of government mandated ObamaCare. But, we are now seeing the lame-stream media toss Mitt-for-Brains Romney out to the masses as the “presumptive Republican front-runner” after his “VICTORY” in New Hampshire.
Last time I checked, there are 50 (not 57!) states in the Union. Some fuzzy math calculations courtesy of my public school education indicates that winning 2 states out of 50 equates to a whopping 4%. ABC news estimated that only 25% of the eligible NH voting population actually voted in last evening’s primary. So, 75% of eligible electorate sat at home while ABC declared that Mitt won “decisively”. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/hampshire-primary-mitt-romney-win-hampshire-primary-abc/story?id=15334016#.Tw2ohYGcySo
In case you were not aware, here are some facts about New Hampshire to show why this so-called “victory” should have been classified as politically irrelevant:
• 9th least populous of the 50 states;
• 44th in size among the 50 states;
• Proudly boasting to be the 5th state to bring you same-sex marriage;
• Provided “Jon Hunstsman” with a third place finish in the 2012 primary!
Yes, this is the same Jon Huntsman who worked for the Obama administration as the Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China.
-Milan G. Marinkovich
Shortlink: http://wp.me/pjWTB-VP
Rick Perry Poll Results
Rick Perry Poll Results
August 26, 2011: Gallup: Perry Leads Bachmann and Romney and Romney by 21 Points Among Tea Party Supporters.
August 26, 2011: Perry Up By Double Digits in South Carolina.
Army reprimands 9 officers in Fort Hood shooting – USATODAY.com
Army reprimands 9 officers in Fort Hood shooting http://usat.me/44759826
The Barry Soetoro a/k/a B. Hussein Obama Funhouse Mirror
Barack Obama
Obama Responds to Question: Does it Bother You that People Hate You?
”Critics don’t hate me, they hate fun house mirror image of me.”
What is the “Muslim Brotherhood”?
So B. Hussein Obama sees a role for the “Muslim Brotherhood” in Egypt. Who or what exactly is the “Muslim Brotherhood”? The organization’s motto is succinct:
“Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
The Muslim Brotherhood’s (“MB”) Official English Website proclaims they were founded in Dhul Hijjah 1347 AH / June, 1928 AD. Its headquarters is in Cairo and may only be transferred under exceptional circumstances by the Shura Council’s decision if the Guidance Office is unable to do so.
Their founder, Hassan Al Banna was an admirer of both Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Regime.
Born into a poor family in southern Egypt on October 14, 1906, Hasan al-Banna was a schoolteacher who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood, considered to be the first of the modern Islamic fundamentalist movements.
As a child, al-Banna was attracted to the extremist and xenophobic aspects of Islam which were hostile to Western secularism and to its system of rights, particularly women’s rights. While still in his teens, the young al-Banna and friends (they referred to each other as “brethren”) met frequently to discuss the situation in the Middle East, to argue about the ills of Arab society, and to lament the decline of Islam. Their angst was in large part a reaction to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the end of the Muslim Caliphate, the British occupation of Egypt, and the resulting exposure of Arab society to Western values.
For al-Banna, as for many other Muslims worldwide, the end of the Caliphate, although brought about by secular Muslim Turks, was a sacrilege against Islam for which they blamed the non-Muslim West. It was to strike back against these evils that al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood, which began as a kind of youth club where the members preached, to anyone who would listen, about the need for moral reform in the Arab world.
But al-Banna’s antipathy towards Western modernity soon moved him to shape the Brotherhood into an organization seeking to check the secularist tendencies in Muslim society by asserting a return to ancient and traditional Islamic values. Al-Banna recruited followers from a vast cross-section of Egyptian society by addressing issues such as colonialism, public health, educational policy, natural resources management, social inequalities, Arab nationalism, the weakness of the Islamic world and the growing conflict in Palestine. Among the perspectives he drew on to address these issues were the anti-capitalist doctrines of European Marxism and especially fascism.
As the Brotherhood expanded during the 1930s and extended its activities well beyond its original religious revivalism, al-Banna began dreaming a greater Muslim dream: the restoration of the Caliphate. And it was this dream, which he believed could only become a reality by means of the sword, that won the hearts and minds of a growing legion of followers. Al-Banna would describe, in inflammatory speeches, the horrors of hell expected for heretics, and consequently, the need for Muslims to return to their purest religious roots, re-establish the Caliphate, and resume the great and final holy war, or jihad, against the non-Muslim world. Al-Banna spelled out his ideas in a major document titled “The Way of Jihad.”
The first big step on the path to the international jihad that al-Banna envisioned came in the form of trans-national terrorism during “The Great Arab Revolt” of 1936-1939, when one of the most famous of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders, the Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti (Supreme Muslim religious leader) of Jerusalem, incited his followers to a three-year war against the Jews in Palestine and against the British who administered the Mandate.
In 1936 the Brotherhood had about 800 members, but by 1938, just two years into the “Revolt,” its membership had grown to almost 200,000, with fifty branches in Egypt alone. The organization established mosques, schools, sport clubs, factories and a welfare service network. By the end of the 1930s there were more than a half million active members registered, in more than two thousand branches across the Arab world.
Under al-Banna’s stewardship, the Brotherhood developed a network of underground cells, stole weapons, trained fighters, formed secret assassination squads, founded sleeper cells of subversive supporters in the ranks of the army and police, and waited for the order to go public with terrorism, assassinations, and suicide missions.
It was during this time that the Brotherhood found a soulmate in Nazi Germany. The Reich offered great power connections to the movement, but the relationship brokered by the Brotherhood was more than a marriage of convenience. Long before the war, al-Banna had developed an Islamic religious ideology that foreshadowed Hitler’s Nazism. Both movements sought world conquest and domination. Both were triumphalist and supremacist: in Nazism the Aryan must rule, while in al-Banna’s Islam, the Muslim religion must hold dominion. Both advocated subordination of the individual to a folkish central power. Both were explicitly anti-nationalist in the sense that they believed in the liquidation of the nation-state in favor of a trans-national unifying community: in Islam the umma (community of all believers); and in Nazism the herrenvolk (master race). Both worshipped the unifying totalitarian figure of the Caliph or Führer. And both rabidly hated the Jews and sought their destruction.
As the Brotherhood’s political and military alliance with Nazi Germany developed, these parallels facilitated practical interactions that created a full-blown alliance, with all the pomp and panoply of formal state visits, de facto ambassadors, and overt as well as sub rosa joint ventures. Al-Banna’s followers easily transplanted into the Arab world a newly Nazified form of traditional Muslim Jew-hatred, with Arab translations of Mein Kampf (translated into Arabic as “My Jihad”) and other Nazi anti-Semitic works, including Der Sturmer hate-cartoons, adapted to portray the Jew as the demonic enemy of Allah.
When World War II broke out, al-Banna worked to firm up a formal alliance with Hitler and Mussolini. He sent them letters and emissaries, and urged them to assist him in his struggle against the British and the westernized regime of Egypt’s King Farouk. The Intelligence Service of the Muslim Brotherhood vigorously collected information on the heads of the regime in Cairo and on the movements of the British army, offering this and more to the Germans in return for closer relations.
When the question of Palestine came before the United Nations, al-Banna and Amin al-Husseini jointly urged the Arab world to unite in opposition to the creation of Israel. The two men saw in the UN resolution for the partition of Palestine an example of the “Jewish world conspiracy,” even though the plan provided for an Arab state in Palestine alongside the Jewish one. But in al-Banna’s estimation, the creation of a state for the Arabs of Palestine was less vital than the eradication of Zionism and the annihilation of the region’s Jews.
Troubled by the Brotherhood’s rising influence and popularity, as well as by rumors that the organization was plotting a coup against the Egyptian government, Prime Minister Mahmoud an-Nukrashi Pasha disbanded the group in December 1948 — seizing its assets and incarcerating many of its members. Less than three weeks later, Pasha was assassinated by a member of the Brotherhood.
Then on February 12, 1949, al-Banna was shot dead by an assassin — most likely an Egyptian government agent — in a crowded Cairo market. SOURCE: DiscoverTheNetworks.org
The MB’s posted “guidelines” reveal that after serving a one (1) year period of probation he [notice not she] becomes a “regular member for three (3) years. In this three year period, if “he proves to be an active member” he is entitled to pledge allegiance to the Brotherhood’s Chairman:
I pledge allegiance to the Almighty Allah to constantly uphold and safeguard the principles of Islam, to fight in the cause of Allah, to adhere to the terms and duties of the Brotherhood’s membership, showing as much as possible obedience to the just leaders in sorrow and in joy as long as it does not involve disobedience to Allah, I pay allegiance and may Allah be my witness . !
Obama’s support of the MB is Carteresque. But then again, Islam is the “Religion of Peace”!
Al’s Journal: Blame it on Global Warming
As much of the country is buried beneath a record amount of ice and snow, Al Gore continues to cling to the notion that man-made global “warming” is responsible for the heavy snowfalls throughout the U.S. In jest, Bill O’Reilly told his viewers that he was going to call Al Gore to find out why “southern New York turned into a tundra”. Apparently taking the bait, Al responded:
In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.
A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.
As a failed presidential candidate, Al is certainly entitled to his own opinion, but he is not entitled to his own facts:
Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.
1. BASED ON PRELIMINARY DATA TO NOVEMBER 30, SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES AROUND AUSTRALIA WERE THE WARMEST ON RECORD LAST YEAR, AS WERE THOSE FOR THE PAST DECADE.
The record only began ten decades ago. As for sea temperatures, they are less significant for analyzing “global warming” than estimated total ocean heat content. A recent paper by Professors David Douglass and Robert Knox of Rochester University, New York, has established that – contrary to various climate-extremist assertions – there has been no net accumulation of “missing energy” in the form of heat in the oceans worldwide in the six years since ocean heat content was first reliably measured by the 3000 automated ARGO bathythermographs in 2003. This finding implies that the amount of warming we can expect from even quite a large increase in CO2 concentration is far less than the IPCC and other climate-extremist groups maintain.
2. THE WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANISATION SAYS THE YEAR TO THE END OF OCTOBER WAS THE WARMEST SINCE INSTRUMENTAL CLIMATE RECORDS STARTED IN 1850 – 0.55 C° ABOVE THE 1961-90 AVERAGE OF 14 C°.
It is easy to cherry-pick periods of less than a calendar year and say they establish a new record. The cherry-picking of the first nine months of 2010 is particularly unacceptable, since that period was dominated by a substantial El Niño Southern Oscillation, a sudden alteration in the pattern of ocean currents worldwide that leads to warmer weather for several months all round the world. The last few months of the year, carefully excluded from Mr. Steketee’s statement, showed the beginnings of a La Niña event, which tends largely to reverse the effect of its preceding El Niño and make the world cooler. Indeed, the calendar year from January to December 2010, according to the reliable RSS and UAH satellite records, was not the warmest on record. Besides, what is important is how fast the world is warming. In fact, the rate of warming from 1975-2001, at 0.16 C° per decade, was the fastest rate to be sustained for more than a decade in the 160-year record, but exactly the same rate occurred from 1860-1880 and again from 1910-1940, when we could not possibly have had anything to do with it. Since late 2001 there has been virtually no “global warming” at all.
3. THE LAST DECADE ALSO WAS THE WARMEST ON RECORD.
After 300 years of global warming, during nearly all of which we could not on any view have influenced the climate to a measurable degree, it is scarcely surprising that recent decades will be warmer than earlier decades. That is what one would expect. If one has been climbing up a steep hill for a long time, one should not be surprised to find oneself higher up at the end of the climb than at the beginning.
4. THE WORLD IS NOT COOLER COMPARED TO 1998.
Actually, it is cooler. There was a remarkable spike in global temperatures in 1998, caused not by manmade “global warming” but by a Great El Niño event – an alteration in the pattern of ocean currents that begins in the equatorial eastern Pacific and spreads around the globe, lasting a few months. In the first nine months of 2010 there was another substantial El Niño, but even at its peak it did not match the Great El Niño of 1998.
5. THE TRENDS HAPPEN TO FOLLOW CLOSELY THE PREDICTIONS OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS OF TEMPERATURE RISES RESULTING FROM INCREASED GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS.
In the 40 years since 1970, global temperatures have risen at a linear rate equivalent to around 1.3 C°/century. CO2 concentration is rising in a straight line at just 2 ppmv/year at present and, even if it were to accelerate to an exponential rate of increase, the corresponding temperature increase would be expected to rise merely in a straight line. On any view, 1.3 C° of further “global warming” this century would be harmless. The IPCC is predicting 3.4 C°, but since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001 global temperature has risen (taking the average of the two satellite datasets) at a rate equivalent to just 0.6 C°/century, rather less than the warming rate of the entire 20th century. In these numbers, there is nothing whatever to worry about – except the tendency of some journalists to conceal them.
6. MOST SCIENTISTS AGREE THAT DOUBLING THE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE IS LIKELY TO LEAD TO WARMING OF 2-3 C°.
It is doubtful whether Mr. Steketee had consulted “most scientists”. Most scientists, not being climate scientists, rightly take no view on the climate debate. Most climate scientists have not studied the question of how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will cause: therefore, whatever opinion they may have is not much more valuable than that of a layman. Most of the few dozen scientists worldwide whom Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT estimates have actually studied climate sensitivity to the point of publication in a learned journal have reached their results not by measurement and observation but by mere modeling. The models predict warming in the range mentioned by Mr. Steketee, but at numerous crucial points the models are known to reflect the climate inaccurately. In particular, the models predict that if and only if Man is the cause of warming, the tropical upper air, six miles above the ground, should warm up to thrice as fast as the surface, but this tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” has not been observed in 50 years of measurement by balloon-mounted radiosondes, sondes dropped from high-flying aircraft, or satellites. Also, the models predict that every Celsius degree of warming should increase evaporation from the Earth’s surface by 1-3%, but the observed increase is more like 6%. From this it is simple to calculate that the IPCC has overestimated fourfold the amount of warming we can expect from adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Take away that prodigious exaggeration, demonstrated repeatedly in scientific papers but never reported by the likes of Mr. Steketee, and the climate “crisis” vanishes.
7. WARMING OF 2-3 C° RISKS SIGNIFICANT ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC DAMAGE.
Actually, the IPCC’s current thinking is that up to 2° of warming compared with the present would be harmless and even beneficial. Since far greater temperatures than this have been the rule on Earth for most of the past 600 million years, there is no sound scientific basis for the assumption that “significant environmental and economic damage” would result from so small an additional warming. However, significant economic damage is already resulting from the costly but pointlessly Canute-like attempts governments to try to make “global warming” go away.
8. GREENHOUSE GAS CONCENTRATIONS ROSE BY 27.5% FROM 1990-2009.
Since anthropogenic effects on the climate are net-zero except for CO2, we need only consider CO2 concentration, which was 353 parts per million by volume in 1990 and is 390 ppmv now, an increase not of 27.5% but of just 10.5%.
9. ARCTIC SEA ICE SHRANK TO ITS THIRD-LOWEST AREA IN THE SATELLITE RECORDS, OFFSET ONLY SLIGHTLY BY GROWTH IN ANTARCTIC SEA ICE.
In fact, the global sea-ice record shows virtually no change throughout the past 30 years, because the quite rapid loss of Arctic sea ice since the satellites were watching has been matched by a near-equally rapid gain of Antarctic sea ice. Indeed, when the summer extent of Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point in the 30-year record in mid-September 2007, just three weeks later the Antarctic sea extent reached a 30-year record high. The record low was widely reported; the corresponding record high was almost entirely unreported.
10. GLOBAL SNOW COVER IS FALLING, INFERENTIALLY BECAUSE OF MAN’S INFLUENCE.
In fact, a new record high for snow cover was set in the winter of 2008/2009, and there is some chance that a further record high will be set this year.
11. GLOBAL SEA LEVELS ARE RISING, INFERENTIALLY BECAUSE OF MAN’S INFLUENCE.
In fact, the rate of increase in sea level has not changed since satellites first began measuring it reliably in 1993. It is a dizzying 1 ft/century – not vastly greater than the 8 inches/century that had previously been inferred from tide-gauges. A recent paper has confirmed what marine biologists had long suspected: coral atolls simply grow to meet the light as the sea rises, and some of them have even gained land mass recently according to a just-published scientific paper. Professor Niklas Mörner, who has been studying sea level for a third of a century, says it is physically impossible for sea level to rise at much above its present rate, and he expects 4-8 inches of sea level rise this century, if anything rather below the rate of increase in the last century. In the 11,400 years since the end of the last Ice Age, sea level has risen at an average of 4 feet/century, though it is now rising much more slowly because very nearly all of the land-based ice that is at low enough latitudes and altitudes to melt has long since gone.
12. MUNICH RE SAYS 2010 SAW THE SECOND-HIGHEST NUMBER OF NATURAL CATASTROPHES SINCE 1980, 90% OF THEM WEATHER-RELATED.
There are really only three categories of insurable natural catastrophe – meteorological, epidemiological, and seismic (volcanism, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.). Except during years when major seismic disasters occur (such as the tsunami caused by an earthquake in 2000), or when major pandemics kill large numbers at an unexpected rate (and that did not happen in 2010), weather-related natural disasters always account for getting on for 90% of all such disasters. Because the climate is a mathematically-chaotic object, the incidence of weather-related disasters is highly variable from year to year, and there is no good reason to attribute the major events of 2010 to manmade “global warming”.
13. THE TEMPERATURE OF 46.4 C° IN MELBOURNE ONE SATURDAY IN 2010 WAS MORE THAN 3 C° ABOVE THE PREVIOUS HIGHEST FOR FEBRUARY.
February is the height of summer in Melbourne. Since the planet has been warming for 300 years, it is not surprising to find high-temperature records being broken from time to time. However, some very spectacular cold-weather records were also broken both in early 2010, when all 49 contiguous United States were covered in snow for the first time since satellite monitoring began 30 years ago, and in December, which was the coldest final month of the year in central England since records began 352 years ago. However, neither the hot-weather nor the cold-weather extremes of 2010 have much to do with manmade “global warming”; like the heatwave of 2003 in Europe that is said to have killed 35,000 people, they are known to have been caused by an unusual pattern of what meteorologists call “blocking highs” – comparatively rare areas of stable high pressure that dislodge the jet-streams from their usual path and lock weather systems in place for days or sometimes even months at a time. No link has been established between the frequency, intensity, or duration of blocking highs and manmade “global warming”.
14. IN MOSCOW, JULY 2010 WAS MORE THAN 2 C° ABOVE THE PREVIOUS TEMPERATURE RECORD, AND TEMPERATURE ON 29 JULY WAS 38.2 C°.
And the lowest-ever temperatures have been measured in several British and US locations in the past 12 months. Cherry-picking individual extreme-weather events that point in one direction only, when there are thousands of such events that also point in another direction, is neither sound science nor sound journalism.
15. THE HEATWAVE AND FOREST FIRES IN CENTRAL RUSSIA KILLED AT LEAST 56,000, MAKING IT THE WORST NATURAL DISASTER IN RUSSIA’S HISTORY.
More cherry-picking, and the notion that the forest fires were the worst natural disaster in Russia’s history is questionable. Intense cold – such as when General January and General February defeated Corporal Hitler at the gates of Stalingrad in 1941 – has many times killed hundreds of thousands in Russia.
16. IN PAKISTAN, 1769 WERE KILLED IN THE COUNTRY’S WORST-EVER FLOODS.
In fact, the floods were not the worst ever: merely the worst since 1980. The region has long been prone to flooding, and has flooded catastrophically at infrequent intervals when a blocking high combined with unusually strong runoff of snow from the Himalayas swells the numerous rivers of the region (Punjab, or panj-aub, means “five rivers”). The flooding was not caused by manmade “global warming” but by a blocking high.
17. THE HURRICANE SEASON IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC WAS ONE OF THE MOST SEVERE IN THE LAST CENTURY.
In fact, Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University, who maintains the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index, a 24-month running sum of the frequency, intensity and duration of all tropical cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes round the world, says that the index is at its least value in the past 30 years, and close to its least value in 50 years. For 150 years the number of landfalling Atlantic hurricanes has shown no trend at all: this is a long and reliable record, because one does not require complex instrumentation to know that one has been struck by a hurricane.
18. EVEN CAUTIOUS SCIENTISTS TEND TO SAY WE CAN BLAME MANMADE CLIMATE CHANGE.
Cautious scientists say no such thing. Even the excitable and exaggeration-prone IPCC has repeatedly stated that individual extreme-weather events cannot be attributed to manmade “global warming”, and it would be particularly incautious of any scientist to blame the blocking highs that caused nearly all of the weather-related damage in 2010 on us when these are long-established, naturally-occurring phenomena.
19. CLIMATE CHANGE HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THE 20% DECLINE IN RAINFALL IN PARTS OF SOUTHERN AUSTRALIA OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS.
Climate change began 4,567 million years ago, on that Thursday when the Earth first formed (as Prof. Plimer puts it). The question is whether manmade climate change has contributed to the drought. Interestingly, there has been very heavy rainfall in previously drought-ridden parts of southern Australia in each of the last two years. Australia has a desert climate: it is no surprise, therefore, that periods of drought – sometimes prolonged – will occur. One of the longest records of drought and flood we have is the Nilometer, dating back 5000 years. Periods of drought far more savage than anything seen in modern times were frequent occurrences, and entire regions of Egypt became uninhabitable as a result. A 20% decline in rainfall in a single region, therefore, cannot be safely attributed to anything other than the natural variability of the climate.
20. THERE IS STRONG EVIDENCE THAT “GLOBAL WARMING” MADE THE BUSH-FIRES AROUND MELBOURNE WORSE.
There is no such evidence. As the IPCC has repeatedly said, ascribing individual, local extreme-weather events to “global warming” is impermissible.
21. THERE HAS BEEN A SUCCESSION OF EXTRAORDINARY HEATWAVES, WITH BIG JUMPS IN RECORD TEMPERATURES, STARTING IN EUROPE IN 2003 AND CONTINUING ALL AROUND THE WORLD, CULMINATING IN RUSSIA LAST YEAR. MORE THAN 17 COUNTRIES BROKE THEIR MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE RECORDS IN 2010, AND “YOU REALLY HAVE TO STRAIN CREDIBILITY TO SAY IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE.”
The heatwave in Europe in 2003 is known to have been caused by a blocking high similar to those which gave Russia its record high temperatures in 2010 and kept the monsoon fixed over Pakistan for long enough to cause catastrophic flooding. You really have to stretch credibility to say it has anything to do with manmade “global warming”. Though that heatwave may have killed 35,000 right across Europe, a three-day cold snap in Britain the previous year had killed 21,000 just in one country. The net effect of warmer worldwide weather, therefore, is to reduce deaths, not to increase them. That is why periods such as the Holocene Climate Optimum, when temperatures were 3 C° warmer than the present for most of the time between 6000 and 8000 years ago, are called “optima”: warmer weather is better for most Earth species – including Man – than colder weather.
22. FOR 20 YEARS MORE HOT-WEATHER THAN COLD-WEATHER TEMPERATURE RECORDS HAVE BEEN SET.
This is merely another way of saying that temperatures today are generally higher than they were 20 years ago. Since there has been some warming, more hot-weather than cold-weather records have been set. Not exactly surprising, and not exactly alarming either: for the mere fact of warming tells us nothing about the cause of the warming, particularly when the rate of warming in recent decades has been no greater than what has been seen in two previous quarter-century periods over the past 160 years.
23. EVEN IF GREENHOUSE-GAS EMISSIONS WERE TO STABILIZE AT LITTLE MORE THAN TODAY’S LEVELS, 2 C° OF FURTHER WARMING WILL OCCUR – FOUR TIMES THE INCREASE OVER THE PAST 30 YEARS.
This value of 2 C° – like too many others in this regrettably fictitious article – appears to have been plucked out of thin air. Let us do the math. We can ignore all Man’s influences on the climate except CO2 because, up to now, they have been self-canceling, as the table of “radiative forcings” in the IPCC’s most recent quinquennial Assessment Report shows. In 1750, before the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of CO2 was 278 ppmv. Now it is 390 ppmv. Taking the multi-model mean central estimate from Box 10.2 on p.798 of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, plus or minus one standard deviation, we can derive the following simple equation for the total amount of warming to be expected in 1000 years’ time, when the climate has fully settled to equilibrium after the perturbation that our carbon emissions to date are thought to have caused:
ΔTequ = (4.7 ± 1) ln(390/278) F°
Let us generously go one standard deviation above the central estimate: thus, a high-end estimate of the total equilibrium warming the IPCC would expect as a result of our CO2 emissions since 1750 is 5.7 times the natural logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration in the 260-year period: i.e. 1.9 C°. Even this total since 1750 to the present is below the 2 C° Mr. Setekee says is lurking in the pipeline.
Now, to pretend that manmade “global warming” is a problem as big as the IPCC says it is, and that there will be more warming in the pipeline even if we freeze our emissions at today’s levels, we have to pretend that all of the observed warming since 1750 – i.e. about 1.2 C° – was our fault. So we deduct that 1.2 C° from the 1.9 C° equilibrium warming. Just 0.7 C° of warmer weather is still to come, at equilibrium.
However, various climate extremists have published papers saying that equilibrium warming will not occur for 1000 years (or even, in a particularly fatuous recent paper, 3000 years). The IPCC itself only expects about 57% of equilibrium warming to occur by 2100: the rest will take so long to arrive that even our children’s children will not be around to notice, and the residual warming will happen so gradually that everyone and everything will have plenty of time to adjust.
Bottom line, then: by 2100 we can expect not 2 C° of further “global warming” as a result of our emissions so far, but 0.4 C° at most. The truth, as ever in the climate debate, is a great deal less thrilling than the lie.
24. ADAPTATION TO THE CONSEQUENCES OF “GLOBAL WARMING” WILL GET MORE DIFFICULT THE LONGER WE DELAY.
This assertion, too, has no scientific basis whatsoever. The costs of adaptation are chiefly an economic rather than a climatological question. Every serious economic analysis (I exclude the discredited propaganda exercise of Stern, with its absurd near-zero discount rate and its rate of “global warming” well in excess of the IPCC’s most extreme projections) has demonstrated that the costs of waiting and adapting to any adverse consequences that may arise from “global warming”, even if per impossibile that warming were to occur at the rapid rate imagined by the IPCC but not yet seen in the instrumental temperature record, would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective than any Canute-like attempt to prevent any further “global warming” by taxing and regulating CO2 emissions. It follows that adaptation to the consequences of “global warming” will get easier and cheaper the longer we wait: for then we will only have to adapt to the probably few and minor consequences that will eventually occur, and not until they occur, and only where and to the extent that they occur.
More “global-warming” news Al forgot to mention:
Midwest blizzard could break snowfall records
9/11 Health Care Bill Signed
Obama Signs the 9/11 Health Care Bill, http://fxn.ws/fuU6de –
Welcome to ObamaCare 2011 – Goodbye FSA, HRA, HSA, MSA
As of January 1, 2011, your flexible spending account (essentially tax free funds for medical costs) can no longer be utilized to pay for over-the-counter items such as aspirin.
From the IRS.gov:
IR-2010-95, Sept. 3, 2010
WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today issued guidance reflecting statutory changes regarding the use of certain tax-favored arrangements, such as flexible spending arrangements (FSAs), to pay for over-the-counter medicines and drugs.
The Affordable Care Act, enacted in March, established a new uniform standard that, effective Jan. 1, 2011, applies to FSAs and health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs). [emphasis added] Under the new standard, the cost of an over-the-counter medicine or drug cannot be reimbursed from the account unless a prescription is obtained. [emphasis added] The change does not affect insulin, even if purchased without a prescription, or other health care expenses such as medical devices, eye glasses, contact lenses, co-pays and deductibles. The new standard applies only to purchases made on or after Jan. 1, 2011, so claims for medicines or drugs purchased without a prescription in 2010 can still be reimbursed in 2011, if allowed by the employer’s plan.
A similar rule goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2011 for Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), and Archer Medical Savings Accounts (Archer MSAs). [emphasis added]
Employers and employees should take these changes into account as they make health benefit decisions for 2011.
For details on current rules, see Publication 969 , Health Savings Accounts and Other Tax-Favored Health Plans.
Updates on this and other health care reform provisions can be found on the Affordable Care Act page on IRS.gov. Notice 2010-59 and Revenue Ruling 2010-23, posted today, further explains this change.
While the dumbocRATS in Congress entitled the bill the “Affordable Care Act”, there is nothing “affordable” about changing the tax-favored arrangements previously provided by your FSA, HRA, HSA or MSA.
Obama Family Vacation Costing Taxpayers at Least $1.47 Million
The Vacationer-in-Chief, B. Hussein Obama, is costing taxpayers at least $1.47 million for his family’s Christmas trip to Hawaii. The Washington Examiner reports the following expenditures:
* Mrs. Obama’s early flight to Hawaii: $63,000 (White House Dossier)
* Obama’s round trip flight to Hawaii: $1 million (GAO estimates)
* Housing in beachfront homes for Secret Service and Seals in Kailua ($1,200 a day for 14 days): $16,800
* Costs for White House staff staying at Moana Hotel: $134,400 ($400 per day for 24 staff) – excluding meals and other room costs
* Police overtime: $250,000 (2009 costs reported by Honolulu Police Department)
* Ambulance: $10,000 (City Spokesperson)
TOTAL COST: $1,474,200
After decimating the United States economy with his economic policies over the past two (2) years, another vacation is just what Hussein Obama needs.
The Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL) is Not So Green
The delusional masses of the “green” movement have led their kool-aid drinking followers to believe that the compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) is good for the environment. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) has been kind enough to update its guide on how to clean up a broken CFL. Their entire three (3) page guide can be found HERE. The following suggestions are from the EPA on how to prevent broken CFL’s (and possibly contaminating your residence with Mercury vapor):
Actions You Can Take to Prevent Broken Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs
Fluorescent bulbs are made of glass and can break if dropped or roughly handled. To avoid breaking a bulb, follow these general practices:
Always switch off and allow a working CFL bulb to cool before handling.
Always handle CFL bulbs carefully to avoid breakage.
If possible, screw/unscrew the CFL by holding the plastic or ceramic base, not the glass tubing.Gently screw in the CFL until snug. Do not over‐tighten. Never forcefully twist the glass tubing.
Consider not using CFLs in lamps that can be easily knocked over, in unprotected light fixtures, or inlamps that are incompatible with the spiral or folded shape of many CFLs.
Do not use CFL bulbs in locations where they can easily be broken, such as play spaces.
Use CFL bulbs that have a glass or plastic cover over the spiral or folded glass tube, if available. These types of bulbs look more like incandescent bulbs and may be more durable if dropped.Consider using a drop cloth (e.g., plastic sheet or beach towel) when changing a fluorescent light bulb in case a breakage should occur. The drop cloth will help prevent mercury contamination of nearby surfaces and can be bundled with the bulb debris for disposal.
After reading their guide, I am going to miss Edison’s filament bulb.
Happy Birthday USMC – Adios MSM, NBC, CBS, ABC
November 10, 2010
As I prepared for my day this morning, the early morning workout, the breakfast smoothie, getting dressed, etc., I had the opportunity to see a subtle yet obvious example of the rift between the mainstream media and its perception of its own audience, and that of Fox News. I generally have no idea what goes on over at NBC, CBS, ABC or any form of their progeny, yet this morning, thanks to my wife allowing one of the MSM channels to linger on the bedroom television, I had a few minutes glimpse of the NBC Today Show with Matt Lauer and whoever the sidekick is over there.
Earlier in the morning, before I stumbled across the NBC offering, I had been informed by Fox and Friends that today marked the 235th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. In fact, in studio today the Fox crew had a number of Marines, in their formal Blue Dress uniforms and closer to the end of the program they exhibited the tradition of their cake-cutting ceremony. They use a sword, the oldest Marine served first, who in turn serves the youngest. It was nice to start the day with that sense of pride, patriotism, service and duty that comes from honoring the history of a branch of our Armed Forces. Although not totally insidious, and no one disputes that the Julie Andrews movie is a classic and favorite of many, by contrast NBC Today Show was touting today to be the 45th anniversary of The Sound of Music. In fact, they had all seven members of the cast who played the Von Trapp family in studio.
I do not know whether the NBC Today show ever acknowledged the USMC birthday. Doesn’t matter really, they likely would not have put any group of Marines in their studio anyway, unless they were confessing to some network-perceived war crime. While there is nothing wrong with a classic and inspiring family musical being presented as the “interesting anniversary of the day” by NBC, it made it clear in its own subtle way, the difference between what goes on at Fox News and what goes on in the MSM. In general, the MSM continues to feed tainted cake and recycled fluff and platitudes. . . easy to swallow bland niceties, unless they are dogging a political rival of the current President. On the other hand, yes, Fox News tends towards red meat. The difference in the nature and content of the broadcast topics and news choices makes clear to me that there are entirely divergent sets of thinking about what is, or should be, important to the viewer. Again, while I have nothing against The Sound of Music, reflecting on its importance and contribution to American life as compared to the recognition of the USMC’s birthday, I find it to be no contest. USMC wins, hands down. Sadly, I honestly believe that the precise opposite view is taken by many in the MSM, at NBC and even some of their viewership. They despise the military, patriotism, and anything that generally involves acknowledging any greatness in our country. They are entitled to their opinion it is still America. Thanks to the USMC.
The folks out there in the MSM (and this includes Comedy Central and HBO twit-wonks disguised as comedians) and their followers, that do not get it, well they do not get me or most of America for that matter. They do not realize that you survive much longer on red meat than cake and fluff. Which is why long, long ago I bid them all . . .“So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu” . . .
Ross Bennett, Patriot
Democrat Pete Stark: Denying Illegals Jobs Could Be Unconstitutional
There is a reason they call it the “Left” coast. In true dumbocRAT form, Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) believes denying “ILLEGALS” a job could be unconstitutional.
Maxine Waters (Another Democrat) to Face Ethics Charges
It appears the “swamp” Shrieker Nancy Pelosi promised to drain is still producing ethically challenged democrats. Maxine (a/k/a MARXine for wanting to socialize the oil industry)Waters, a democrat from California, is the latest to face charges of ethics violations.
The House Ethics Committee is expected to announce today or tomorrow that it has formed an “adjudicatory subcommittee” to try Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters on charges of ethics violations.
The committee’s announcement will make Waters the second Democrat to face an ethics trial this fall, creating a distraction for the Democratic Party as it heads into the midterm elections.
The 10-term lawmaker from Los Angeles has been under investigation since 2009 for assisting a bank to which she had personal connections in getting federal bailout money.
In 2008, Waters organized a meeting between Treasury officials and executives from OneUnited Bank, where her husband was once a board member and had large investments. The bank received $12 million from the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program. Waters, who serves on the House Financial Services Committee, has defended her request for the meeting as part of her efforts to advocate on behalf of minority-owned businesses. SOURCE.
Charlie Rangel’s Unlucky 13 Ethics Violations Released
COUNT 1: Conduct in Violation of the Solicitation and Gift Ban (page 26)
COUNT 2: Conduct in Violation of Code of Ethics for Government Service, cl.5 (page 29)
COUNT 3: Conduct in Violation of the House Gift Rule (page 30)
COUNT 4: Conduct in Violation of Postal Service Laws and Franking Commission Regulations (page 30)
COUNT 5: Conduct in Violation of Franking Statute (page 31)
COUNT 6: Conduct in Violation of House Office Building Commission’s Regulations (page 32)
COUNT 7: Conduct in Violation of the Purpose and Law and the Member’s Congressional Handbook (page 32)
COUNT 8: Conduct in Violation of the Letterhead Rule (page 33)
COUNT 9: Conduct in Violation of the Ethics in Government Act and House Rule XXVI (page 34)
COUNT 10: Conduct in Violation of Code of Ethics for Government Service, cl. 5 (page 36)
COUNT 11: Conduct in Violation of Code of Ethics for Government Service, cl. 2 (page 37)
COUNT 12: Conduct in Violation of the Code of Conduct: Letter and Spirit of House Rules (page 38)
COUNT 13: Conduct in Violation of the Code of Conduct: Conduct Reflecting Discreditably on the House (page 38)
Read the entire 40 page document HERE.
DEMOCRAT Charlie Rangel Charged with Multiple Ethics Violations
- Charlie Rangel (D-NY)
The Democrats Culture of Corruption
Former House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) was charged with multiple ethics violations on Thursday. In an election year, the democrat from New York who spent the last 40 years in Congress representing the 15th District said he looks forward to fighting the charges.
The ethics committee won’t reveal the specific charges until next Thursday at a public meeting. However, several persons familiar with the allegations, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly, said some of the charges…were related to:
- Rangel’s use of official stationery to raise money for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York.
- His use of four rent-subsidized apartment units in New York City. The city’s rent stabilization program is supposed to apply to one’s primary residence. One had been used as a campaign office, raising a separate question of whether the rent break was an improper gift.
- Rangel’s failure to report income as required on his annual financial disclosure forms. The committee had investigated his failure to report income from the lawmaker’s rental unit at the Punta Cana Yacht Club in the Dominican Republic. Rangel also belatedly disclosed hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment assets.
Sanctions can range from a damaging committee report to censure by the House and even expulsion, a punishment reserved for only the most egregious violations. SOURCE
In 2009, it was reported that the Congressman from New York failed to report as much as $1.3 million dollars in outside income, including $1 million dollars from the sale of a building in Harlem. After amending financial disclosure forms for the period of 2000-2006, it was determined that Rangel also conveniently failed to reveal an additional $3 million dollars of other business related income during the same period.
More information on the embattled Charlie Rangel:
The Audacity of Jihad
Kill the Ground Zero Mosque TV Ad the LSM doesn’t want you to see:
NBC and CBS refused to broadcast the 60-second ad, which is sponsored by the National Republican Trust, a conservative organization that promotes “American values” and supports candidates running for office. Source
Confidence in B. Hussein Obama Reaches New Low
A Washington Post-ABC News Poll found that 6 in 10 voters:
lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country, and a clear majority once again disapproves of how he is dealing with the economy.
Just 43 percent of all Americans now say they approve of the job Obama is doing on the economy, while 54 percent disapprove. Both are the worst, marginally, of his presidency. Even a third of Democrats give him negative marks here.
